The holiday doesn\u2019t start until we pull out of the garage. But living with Bernie has led, among other things, to an incremental but continuous inflation in my packing. Once upon a time, as with so many things in my life, less was more. Now, loading the truck for our trip to Colorado, I\u2019m stowing a blender, my special pillow, a backup raincoat, a picnic blanket; never mind I\u2019m going to have to carry it all up the stairs to the condo we rented in Snowmass, what else can we bring? Bernie hands me this black box of CDs, which friends gave us to listen to.<\/p>\n
What does concern me is Bernie\u2019s apparent intention to conduct a last-minute spring cleaning though it\u2019s summer in Scottsdale, Arizona and 100 degrees in the shade\u2013it\u2019s so hot the birds just sit on the ground\u2013and we\u2019ve got an 8-hour drive to Durango ahead of us. Cleaning transcends time in her mind, happens out of time entirely, in some other dimension, where there is no movie or plane to catch; only when she emerges from that fugue state, do the wheels of time start turning again apparently.<\/p>\n
I love the ordered calm and even elegance of our home that emanates directly from her hands, her touch. The truth is she casts a kind of spell over the house. Some of it is mechanics, putting things away, insisting I do the same. But beyond that, she tunes the energy to a pitch of quiet vibrancy that is nourishing in itself.<\/p>\n
People comment when they come over, how good everything looks, but really they are feeling this frequency, the frequency of Bernie. Still, time is the true currency of life and there is a domino effect to this straightening, as she calls it, in which one act of straightening leads to another and another, which must be addressed as surely as fires must be put out. I\u2019m encouraged that after about an hour of straightening, she arrives at the plant-care phase, where she waters the plants and sort of says goodbye to them. And it is with deep relief that we pull out of the garage, and head off, Bernie at the wheel.<\/p>\n
The box of CD\u2019s sits within reach. It\u2019s supposed to be inspirational or something, and it\u2019s connected to some multi-level marketing thing. Bernie says we have to listen to it, so she can tell the friends she did. We figure we have fifteen hours on the road, so we put on Willie Nelson instead.<\/p>\n
We pull in at the truck stop in Flagstaff a couple hours later, next to Little America, to buy pumpkin seeds and use the facilities. We take a look at that black box of CDs and put on Stevie Ray Vaughn.<\/p>\n
The high meadows and ponderosa pine give way to the dry wind and water carved mesas of the Navajo reservation. When it\u2019s my turn to drive, Bernie reads, which I cannot do in a moving car. So she is poor company, in my opinion, compared to me. When I ask her what she\u2019s reading, she\u2019s too busy reading to answer. I put on Patsy Kline in protest, but she keeps reading, as we drive through the arid plateau country.<\/p>\n
For desert dwellers in the summer seeking green, there\u2019s a moment of joy when the pinyon pines and junipers of Cortez Colorado come into view. We\u2019re not in aspen country yet, but we\u2019re getting there. Not sure what we listen to, but it\u2019s not those CDs.<\/p>\n
We continue on an hour east to Durango where we spend the night. In the morning, leaving town, heading toward Wolf Creek Pass, I spot deer in a corn field, still as statues. At first I think they are statues. Then my brain jolts out of the distracted routine it\u2019s been running; what exactly would deer statues be doing in a corn field? Tears well in my eyes at the mere hint of awakening.<\/p>\n
Rain spatters the windshield as we drive the long switchbacks up and over Wolf Creek Pass and the lush meadows and farms beyond are like a balm to our nervous systems. But if we\u2019re going to listen to anything while we drive these two-lane roads it\u2019s Tony Bennet.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re approaching Leadville, just a couple hours from Aspen then Snowmass, and we still haven\u2019t listened to those CDs. If we don\u2019t listen to them before we get there, we never will. Then what will we say to these friends?<\/p>\n
Bernie is driving again, so I put on the first CD, in which the speaker introduces himself and drops some names of some famous people he knows and speaks in extremely remedial terms about if you don\u2019t try, you can\u2019t succeed. Stuff like that.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t listen to this,\u201d I say, ejecting the CD.<\/p>\n
\u201cTry the next one,\u201d Bernie says,<\/p>\n
\u201cReally?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHow can I say I listened to them if I didn\u2019t listen to them?\u201d<\/p>\n
I pop in CD number 2. The speaker says something about are you doing what you want in your life, or are you believing in yourself, or something along those lines, and I may as well have been struck by lightning, because the answer, I realize, in no uncertain terms is no, I\u2019m not.<\/p>\n
Maybe it\u2019s the altitude. Leadville, situated between the Mosquito Range and the Sawatch Range, at 10,000 feet elevation, is the highest incorporated city in the US. It\u2019s an old mining town, stony rather than green, bare and over-exposed, like the sun-damaged skin of some people who live at these elevations.<\/p>\n
We park and stretch our legs in the flinty brightness. I\u2019ve published next to nothing, yet I\u2019m always writing, writing and stopping, and writing something else; writing without belief, without patience, without finishing.<\/p>\n
Leadville\u2019s main street is wide and slow paced. Bernie loves to \u201clook around\u201d, which is what she calls shopping, so we browse a few shops. I need to be searching for something\u2013a jacket, a pair of shoes\u2013in order to see anything. Otherwise, stores too me are mostly a mass of undifferentiated stuff.<\/p>\n
Bernie is a far more poetic shopper, open to inspiration, to discovery. She can be looking for nothing and spot treasure. Consequently, I am constantly running out of things to look at, while she is finding them. I end up following her around, like a restless dog, waiting for the next more interesting part of the walk. (I\u2019m not great in museums either.)<\/p>\n
After college I thought, rather dreamily, I\u2019d be a poet. I was accepted to Columbia\u2019s graduate writing program in poetry. But I hadn\u2019t been happy in college and balked at the tuition. The director of the program, the poet Kenneth Koch, was kind enough to offer me a modest scholarship, but I turned it down. He said \u201ckeep in touch, don\u2019t just disappear\u201d but that\u2019s exactly what I did, moving away from New York, away from any literary scene, and I\u2019d never reconnected.<\/p>\n
Time had cooked on such a low boil I didn\u2019t notice its evaporation. I\u2019m 48. It\u2019s suddenly been fourteen years since a scholarship to a writing conference in Squaw Valley, from which I took optimism. Thirteen years since a workshop with a luminary editor, a lover of Aristotelian rules and categories, which left me more ignorant than when I\u2019d started. Ten years since a novel, too rushed to be good, written always in a losing race against rising internal doubt and dismissal. Eight years since an agent had taken an interest in the novel, then ignored me for months before rejecting it.<\/p>\n
We enter a curio shop selling generic Colorado t-shirts, crystals and knives. I\u2019m interested in the knives for about a minute \u2013 I mean, they\u2019re sharp and vary in size and shape, like creatures of cutting evolved for different purposes. But I\u2019m not looking for a knife and soon I\u2019m looking for something else to look at, and there isn\u2019t anything, but Bernie is just getting started.<\/p>\n
Bernie needs this time away. At home, Chuck is dying. Chuck, among other things, is Bernie\u2019s ex. He made life hell for us, in his own way, but she still loves him, and I do too. He was once a great inspiration, but now, mired in self-absorbed regret and depression, he\u2019s been diagnosed with Parkinson\u2019s. We\u2019re stuck with his suffering; we can\u2019t change him and he has nowhere else to go.<\/p>\n
She finds this collection of dolls, with funny pointy heads made of painted china with elaborate, often hilarious head dresses, consisting of things like birdcages or flowerpots, and little beanbag bodies that can be positioned in poses. She already has several of these kind of dolls in a glass chest at home, now she decides on a new addition \u2013 the one with the birdcage head.<\/p>\n
To call Bernie ageless is to gloss a subject of sublime depth. Born decades before me, she moves with enviable lightness of being and energy of purpose, as though her relationship to time is more personal than the rest of ours.<\/p>\n
She likes driving, and after hours of driving, she wants to keep driving, but as we approach Independence Pass she starts to tense up. The road twists into switchbacks with barely enough room to avoid oncoming traffic, and no guard rails.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you OK?\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t talk to me!\u201d<\/p>\n
I knew she was afraid of heights but I\u2019ve never seen her like this, hands gripping the wheel, neck and arms stiff with panic.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet me drive,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo!\u201d she just about screams. There\u2019s nowhere to pull over anyway.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re fine,\u201d I try coaching her through the next switchback and the next one. But she\u2019s scaring the shit out of me.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not fine!\u201d\u00a0 Oh my god, she wants to fight with me about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust drive, we\u2019re fine. We\u2019re fine.\u201d What else can I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t what?\u201d<\/p>\n
Somehow we white knuckle it to the summit of the Continental Divide at 12,000 feet where there is plenty of parking to take in the spectacular view, and I can drive us the rest of the way.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s my disbelief that suddenly comes clearly into viewthe opposite of seeing the light. My revelation involves no glory, only the clarity that I\u2019ve been swaddled in doubt, crippling doubt, so familiar to me, like the passage of time, I couldn\u2019t see it, until now.<\/p>\n
My mother was a failed writer. She wouldn\u2019t agree with that characterization and should not. A woman with four children, and no substantial encouragement, who writes and then stops writing before publishing her work should hardly consider herself a failure. I\u2019d inherited from her the identity of writer. But I\u2019d also inherited the struggle of it, more than struggle, the elsewhere-ness of it, that if art came to anyone, anywhere, it wasn\u2019t to me, where I was. Wherever that might be.<\/p>\n
I remember being six sitting at a discarded typewriter in an attic room of our house in Trenton, NJ, mimicking I suppose what my mother was doing downstairs behind the closed door of her study, feeling utterly empty doing it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I start believing in myself as a writer the way one might start Thai Chi, stiffly, with mechanical effort and little grace. I push away rationalizations like, if that writers conference gave me a scholarship, there must be something to believe in. Because the other rationalizations will sink me. I\u2019m 48. Friends from that conference have published novels. I\u2019ve published like nothing.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t want to believe in my rationalizations anyway, I want to believe in myself. But I have to banish wanting too. I\u2019ve been wanting for years. Wanting is exhausting, and frankly, boring, which is a sign of progress, that I am bored with my own struggle. There is, after all, no new struggle, just the same replay over and over.<\/p>\n
Rationalizing isn\u2019t believing anyway; it\u2019s what we do instead of believing. Nor do I care to believe in a particular thing I\u2019m writing. When the novel died, I was left with a kind of grief, but even worse, the irrelevance of the whole enterprise. I\u2019d hoped the novel\u2019s success would bring me belief, which was backwards. I needed to believe to make the novel viable. Instead, I\u2019d just attached myself to a disappointment that dragged me down.<\/p>\n
So I\u2019m rooting my belief in me, in my gut, literally. I really don\u2019t trust my head at this point, too much programming. I\u2019m locating belief in the middle of me, inscribing it there, by a sheer act of intention. I\u2019m not believing in anything or any reason, just myself, my person actually. This seems audacious, but I might as well be audacious; what\u2019s the point in believing in the probable? Belief is the bridge to the improbable.<\/p>\n
We walk around Aspen and rent bicycles and ride the charming bike paths through wooded glens and over lovely brooks. Bernie asks me what I\u2019m thinking about, and I tell her I\u2019m not thinking, I\u2019m believing, and she just gives me a funny look.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve complained to her and cried to her. I\u2019ve gone silent and acted out my end as a writer, the drama of failure, more than once. But like a staged death, it wasn\u2019t real; I\u2019d eventually just start writing again. After a while she realized this, and then she gave me the best advice anyone ever has: just keep writing. The just is genius here, because I really did need to leave out the rest of it.<\/p>\n
All this new believing takes a lot of talking to myself. I\u2019m not sure if I\u2019m doing it or not, believing, unless I\u2019m saying it to myself: I\u2019m a writer. So in the interest of discipline and of achieving something specific, I do it a lot. I\u2019m a writer, I\u2019m a writer, I\u2019m a writer.<\/p>\n
Believing, it turns out, can also be distracting. Bernie is more into shopping than hiking, but she\u2019s become a decent enough hiker. What she won\u2019t abide is any question as to the propriety of our direction as we walk. If she detects any uncertainty at all about being on the right path, she simply stops in her tracks. Unwilling to take even a single step more in what might be a wasted effort. Never mind that the whole purpose of hiking is, well, to hike.<\/p>\n
I find this frustrating since usually the only way to know you\u2019re going in the right direction is to keep going. In fact, stopping dead still on a trail is a very ineffective way to navigate to anything. The obvious parallels between hiking and writing are only now hitting me.<\/p>\n
As we hike up a slope away from Snowmass Village and into the trees, I may have exaggerated the degree to which I know where we\u2019re going. We\u2019re wandering an extremely civilized patch of spectacular wilderness in which trails inevitably intersect, and you can always loop your way around; the only question is how far along a given trail you need to go to catch the cut through.<\/p>\n
The first uphill leg is the most demanding and I know Bernie won\u2019t put up with an unlimited amount of huffing and puffing. So I\u2019m eager to come to a turn off that would take us across the face of the slope, and maybe too busy believing in myself as a writer, to notice the horses-only symbol on the trail.<\/p>\n
Otherwise, the trail is perfect, a triumph of my navigating process, leading straight across the slope, where we\u2019ll meet the downward trail on the other side. And the views down-valley are magical. There\u2019s just a lot of horseshit. It\u2019s everywhere, until in certain places we can\u2019t walk without walking on horseshit.<\/p>\n
I celebrate the directness of the trail, and the lovely vistas, including stands of Aspens trembling golden with sunlight, but Bernie stops.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m like \u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n
Stopping on a trail is never a sound solution, but stopping on a trail while surrounded by horseshit, it seems to me, is especially ineffectual. What can I do to unstop her? I reluctantly pull out the hiking map. A closer look reveals that this type of trail is in fact for horseback riding only.<\/p>\n
\u201cFortunately we haven\u2019t seen a single horse,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut they\u2019ve definitely been here,\u201d Bernie says.<\/p>\n
She wants to go back the way we came. Backtracking offends me morally, but even more so since we\u2019ll be backtracking over heaps of horseshit.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut if we go forward we\u2019ll be walking through horseshit the whole way,\u201d Bernie points out.<\/p>\n
I show her on the map that we\u2019re past halfway on this trail, which I think may be correct. Bernie eyes me with suspicion, but we walk on.<\/p>\n
I write in the mornings while Bernie works on a crossword puzzle of geckos in some grass. She groans about how impossible it is, there being too much undifferentiated green of the grass. \u201cI may not be able to do this.\u201d She does this at some point with every puzzle.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m writing, again. But not again. About Bernie, what else? About our coming together, made difficult by our age difference, and Chuck, and other elements that are hard to make sense of. I don\u2019t know how much to say or not say about all of it. I don\u2019t know how to address our predicament for people who wouldn\u2019t understand. There\u2019s a swirl inside me of ideas and events, but no clarity.<\/p>\n
I do what I could never do before\u2014I wait for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The speaker says something about are you doing what you want in your life, or are you believing in yourself, or something along those lines, and I may as well have been struck by lightning, because the answer, I realize, in no uncertain terms is no, I\u2019m not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18255,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[760],"tags":[2858,2857,81,342],"class_list":["post-17917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-nonfiction","tag-awakening","tag-belief","tag-travel","tag-writing","writer-joseph-bardin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17917"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18280,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17917\/revisions\/18280"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}