“Hang on, there’s just a minute left.”

The salon assistant is worried that I’m getting impatient with my neck resting in the hard ceramic U of the sink while the conditioning treatment sits on my hair for 5 minutes.  She has no idea how apt her words are today.

I know all too well that there’s only a minute left.  It’s been a long week of death, from famous people to four police officers in my city to (most painfully) the death of a close friend’s partner.  C called me Monday night to tell me that Z had died suddenly of a heart attack that day.  We’d spoken only briefly, with promises made to be there when she needed me and to “hug K close tonight.”  She didn’t need to say it – I would have done it anyway, but after telling him the news, I hugged him hard and long, grateful that he is living and breathing beside me.

In truth, I only saw Z sporadically during the 20+ years of their complicated but deep partnership, making each encounter feel as if I were meeting him for the first time.  But I felt I knew him well because of the countless talks that C and I have had about her relationship with him, talks counter-balanced with my own dating and relationship agonies, before we both settled into deeper commitment with our men, a phase that we also shared – the midlife glory of contented love after all the frustrations that had come before.

She was lucky to have been with him when the heart attack came, she told me, and I felt a rush of gratitude for this small mercy – that Z wasn’t alone when he died, but with her, and that she won’t have to torment herself with “what if’s”.  She was there, the paramedics came, everything possible was done, but as is often the case, death could not be turned back.  He could so easily have been alone, and she would have always wondered if she might have saved him, just as she’d wondered last year if she’d done enough for her dying mother. (We good girls -- ex-Catholics both -- always worry we haven’t done enough, no matter how dutiful we are.)

“OK, you’re ready,” says the assistant, turning on the warm water and rinsing the conditioner out of my hair with long caresses that in another’s hands would mean something far different, not a service I was paying for, but one that we offer to love.  Afterward she blow-dries my hair into extravagant curves that I can never manage to conjure at home, and I watch my image change in the mirror from the tired, sad, 50-year-old woman with gray roots who walked in an hour ago to a 40-something chick with red and blond streaks designed to fool any prospective employer that I am in fact still young enough to hire.   

And at that thought, the phrase “hip and vibrant” pops into my head – it’s how a real estate ad describes a house that’s been for sale in our neighborhood for months, even though all we can see is a ridiculously overpriced mid-century house that doesn’t even offer a garage, but only a carport to those who are willing to shell out $850,000.

I’m a mid-century model, too, back on the market as well, and hoping no one will notice that I don’t have a garage, either, but only a carport, where things go in and out easily but sometimes all too much so.  Memories, thoughts, ideas and ambitions slip in and out of me these days, stolen not by car thieves but time and a laissez-faire attitude that says my life just isn’t so important anymore that I need to remember every last frickin’ detail.  

More precious, yes, but less important in its execution, in the minutiae of the day, and so too is the world – less compelling to me in its urgencies that drive others, causing them to fret and fear and work long hours in order to buy all the things someone has told them that they can’t live without.

Leaving the salon, I enter the intense blue beauty of spring and I immediately think of the crystalline fall weather on 9/11.  Why is it always so beautiful when terrible things are happening?  Is it to remind us that this is the way life is  -- tragedy and pleasure all mixed together, or is it designed to shake us out of our despair, reminding us that without the bitter, we couldn’t taste the sweet?  But today is just the opposite:  the sweet in stunning abundance, nearly drowning me in beauty that speaks to every sense, from the liquid call of songbirds to the cascades of floral scents to the sharp greens of trees set like stones against an azure sky.

I stroll the adjacent neighborhood where the front yards present a particularly Berkeley phenomenon:  a seemingly careless and overgrown profusion of plants and flowers that is nonetheless lovingly tended and generously offered up in the front yard for the neighborhood to enjoy rather than being hidden away in back.  I silently thank the owners as I stroll past garden after garden full of explosive color and form, tucked into tiny square plots that can’t quite contain the bursting arc of life.

I end up in a nearby park, small but nearly choked with redwood trees, and divided by a stream that starts somewhere underneath the Berkeley hills and appears and disappears again here in this park, ending up who knows where after its further journey underground.

A skateboarder sits atop the stone wall straddling the creek, smoking contentedly while staring at the rushing water, just as I stop to do the same, and in the closeness, I realize with a rueful smile that it’s not a cigarette he’s puffing, and as I glance to check it glowing between his teenage lips, I see how little is left, stopping me from the startling impulse to ask him for a hit (me who has smoked only a few dozen times in my life) and the subsequent idea to ask whether he has a joint to sell.  

Quickly I realize that making my first ever drug deal in broad daylight in a public park probably isn’t a good idea, and that I could be accused of contributing to the delinquency of a minor on top of everything else were I to be caught, and the thought makes my inner good girl shake with laughter.

Besides, I know that as tempting as it is for a moment, such a clouded feeling isn’t what I long for. I’m already too awake and alive to mask the sadness that has been hanging over me like a blanket since C called me.  Adding weight is not what I want or need, but instead embracing what is here, digging for the meat of it, just like the fat squirrels who race around me in a spring frenzy are doing, digging in the grass and leaves, searching perhaps for nuts they buried last fall, or perhaps for unknown treasure that spring is even now pushing up through the earth towards their eager paws.

______________


The title is taken from my favorite poem about mortality.  I’d remembered the words, but strangely, not its title until I looked it up again after having written about both spring and fall in this piece.


Spring and Fall
to a young child

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.