October 27, 2010

Jay Klein’s Birthday

Jay came today. Helen and I picked him up at the airport just before 5pm Toronto time.

It was a beautiful bright cool and windy day. In every way today the colours have been bright, warm and inviting. I picked an old tee-shirt that Jay gave me more than 20 years ago and a pink cardigan to wear along with nearly pink corduroy pants. Bright. Helen and I did the laundry for three beds, and I put my brightest sheets back on. The colours of the faded leaves on our drive to and from the airport still hold intense brightness underneath the fadedness – a last sense of summer heat contained to aid survival over the winter and bring about a new batch of leaves in the spring.

I am enjoying the long moments of lying in my bed. I have recovered sufficiently to not be intensely engaged in my own discomforts. My Etobicoke apartment is a rich soundscape, from seagulls to teenage basketball to buses to midnight airplanes to screaming toddlers, to early morning garbage cans, and much, much more. Added to this is a colour scape made up mainly of objects I have held onto after years of many many, moves, especially the honing down time of living in the trailer. There is colour everywhere, some of it quite clashing, but playful and full of memories.

I have come very much to understand and appreciate why my mother in her early years of Alzheimer’s held a great deal of pleasure at simply looking out a window at construction workers fixing a roof or running a crane to build a new building. Each of these views is a bubble in itself – calling forth a stream of memories, a cascade of long forgotten faces, remembrance of fulfillment and regret. Past and present are intricately linked by colour and sound. Perhaps it is the task of the old simply to appreciate richness of experience.

Jay has come for two days, stepping back into an intimate relationship that had seemed to be lost. So much intimacy seems to be rebounding in my life after years of struggle and loss – or so it seemed at the time. We drove along from the airport to the hospital to my apartment reminiscing of other times and places we have met in Toronto. Long walks, breakfasts at dawn, moments of sorrow in a park as we realized would drift apart, fulfilment and non fulfilment both. But he is here now and it is his birthday and we have shared a beer. (No damn laxative tonight – cause I’m not mixing that many chemicals)

How much I have second guessed my future at every moment of my present. At age 30 I could never, never, never have imagined the richness of my 60s. I’m sure this is simply human to live in such constant doubt. But just the same it is truly amazing how I have underestimated my friends, my God and myself when it has been about imagining a possible future.

Perhaps at this early stage of cycle three I can trust that whatever is ahead of me is a million times worth whatever struggle it might take to make myself available.

I am willing.

Happy Birthday Jay.