December 10, 2005
Saturday

At left you see a picture I took in New York City on February 25, 2005. I’d gone almost on the spur of the moment with some friends who organized a busload of people to see The Gates, the series of orange flags mounted in Central Park by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. I took this from inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which we’d entered after taking a bus ride through the park and then walking among the gates for an hour or so. I was attracted by the juxtaposition of the gates beside the child with her orange jacket and orange sled.

If my notebooks for January reveal someone fretting about loss and change, the pages for February indicate that I had become overwhelmed almost to the breaking point. I didn’t post a single piece to The Silken Tent, and my paper journal is page after page (although only eight of them) of random thoughts and sighing. More revealing is my calendar, and what I remember about the events and appointments I kept.

On February 21 I had lunch with a friend. We live an hour and a half away from each other, and often meet somewhere in between. On this day we agreed on a small restaurant in the town of Lenhartsville in Berks County. But when we arrived we found that that place isn’t open on Mondays.

Unlike me, my friend is a working person, and his lunch hour was ticking away. Lenhartsville isn’t much of a town, but we walked up a hill onto the main street looking for someplace to get at least a hot drink and a quiet table.

The walk was hard for me, but I tried not to let him know that. My hips felt like they were made of wood and I found it hard to talk and walk uphill at the same time, my breath coming harder and harder. We found a convenience store that had two tiny tables, wrought iron ice cream sets probably hauled in from the porch. I had the worst BLT ever made and pretty much sulked through the whole lunch. I’m fond of this person and usually listen sympathetically when he talks about problems at work, problems with his kids, his self-doubts, his fears. But this day I kept thinking, those are problems? What about rewriting the same damn paragraph in the same damn draft of the same damn story I’ve been writing for five years? And it never gets any better? Huh?

What I didn’t say was that I was carrying around a pretty serious fear of my own. I’d experienced a health scare, a set of symptoms that could indicate any of some very serious conditions or be nothing at all, just one of those mysterious manifestations of a system correcting itself.

And then I got the invitation to go along to New York to see The Gates.

Orange is my daughter’s favorite color, although it’s never been mine. Orange has always seemed so loud and so aggressive. I prefer muted pastels, colonial blues and mauves, quiet colors, mousey even.

Lynn is perhaps the strongest, most socially confident 20-year-old you’ll ever meet. She makes friends easily, treats those she loves with care and attention, is loyal, trustworthy, dependable, and thrifty, clean, and brave as well. I looked at those flags that day and saw her smile in them, saw her spirit in their flutter, in their dance with the wind. Something in me lifted. Something in me said, you can rise above whatever darkness is holding you back.

I was in New York on a Friday. On Monday I made appointments to address the health problems and bought plane tickets to Wyoming. I just picked a date and said, June 15. That’s when I’m going. I’ll be OK by June 15.

And I was.

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