Fifty Times Around the Sun

Fifty Times Around the Sun
It’s just after seven in the morning, and I’m writing this in a spare room in my mother’s house. I’ve been up since five. A few minutes ago, as I was passing down the hall, I noticed her light was on. I looked in on her: she was wearing her old blue robe and standing beside the bed. Gently so I wouldn’t startle her, I asked if she was getting up. She said no, she wanted to sleep some more, or at least to try. I’d been wondering if she’d remember I’d spent the night in the room across the hall, and was glad when she wasn’t surprised to see me or hear my voice. Sunday morning, gray and still. The day after my fiftieth birthday. Fifty times around the sun: imagine. Those who boast of their worldly travels would be wise to remember the great distance we all travel in a year — as well as in a moment or in a thought. In truth, we are celestial travelers through untamed space. It feels strange to be working at a different table, in a different room, in a different house. At a little more than arm’s length, two of my father’s old hats are hanging on the hat rack that was in our house near the back door when I was growing up. One is a sweat-stained straw work hat in the round Italian style, the other is a small rain hat that never looked right on him. His head was too large and his features too rugged to be framed by such a mundane article. But now that I think of it, the hat was something he bought later in life, and he didn’t wear it very often. More than anything, it was something handy to put on if it happened to be raining when he went out to get the morning paper or the mail. It kept his scalp dry — not that he was bald, but his scalp did show through what little was left of his soft gray hair. I just checked on my mother. She is sound asleep, and it is the best sleep she has had in several days. While I was standing by her door, I could hear the birds in the bushes by her window. The sound reminded me of a poem I started the other day but didn’t have time to finish, and the lines of which I discarded when the day was done. I can’t remember just how it went, and of course it isn’t really important that I do. But it was something of a wish: I wished that she could sleep by her old bedroom window back home instead of the one she has now. I made the wish because, to feel safe, she usually keeps her window closed, whereas she and my father liked to sleep with the old one open, to the sounds of the night and of water running in the vineyard, gurgling up from the valves nearby at the ends of the rows. It didn’t matter how tired my parents were at the end of the day, because they were sure to be healed by the magic drifting in through the window. There is magic here, too, but try as it might, it can’t come in. I suppose that’s why, last night, I slept with my window open — one way or the other, to let the magic in. *May 21, 2006* Previous Entry Next Entry Return to Songs and Letters About the Author	Main Page Author’s Note Background Notebook A Listening Thing Among the Living No Time to Cut My Hair One Hand Clapping Songs and Letters Collected Poems Early Short Stories Armenian Translations Interviews News and Reviews Highly Recommended Let’s Eat Favorite Books & Authors Useless Information Conversation E-mail & Parting Thoughts Flippantly Answered Questions
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