spotlight

We had a breeze and one firefly as “My Fair Lady” wrapped up. We didn’t need it, but we liked it. One firefly lingered over the crowd, doubtless confused by the goliath light that poured toward Eliza and Henry Higgens, a powerful light too diffused to become a lover.

I love the strange ending of this show. The two men presented for Eliza are both lame: one treats her like dirt, but isn’t as fun as a bad boy, and the other just has a giant crush on her and doesn’t get her at all.

I feel seen.

No one knows how to end it (except George Bernard Shaw). It just ends. Why should Eliza live with this asshole who agreed to train her? As a young woman of her time, being alone, or living with someone she’s not married to, is all suspect, and I imagine threatens her reputation. She has one now.

She sings “I Could Have Danced All Night,” but I forgot: this isn’t after the ball, where she did dance, this is after she danced with her captor/trainer and his buddy, celebrating her progress.

When I got home, the yahrtzeit candle I had lit was only half gone. I’m not Jewish, but I had been at a grocery store with a reasonable Jewish merch section, and I grabbed one. I thought I would light it for my former brother-in-law who died. Later I decided to light it for someone who was dying, instead.

A friend of the family had his brain cells make the very nonsensical decision to reproduce like crazy until they destroy their own home. He was a fire fighter, and learned detail of our local map that would make London cabbies raise their eyebrows. A great buddy to some of my uncles, the only person without marriage or blood credentials invited at our enormous family gatherings.

It’s not that we don’t like people.

It’s that there are too many of us already.

I walked to the friend’s house with my uncle. He is unnecessarily tall, and we both like to rant about city planning, the joys of walking, politics, history, geography. I had chosen shoes with a bit of cuteness, but a reasonable amount of walkability as well. I knew what I was getting into.

Which was good because I ended up walking five miles.

I really believe in walking with someone when shit hits the fan.

It is our family’s go-to. The walk was a bit sweaty, but also encompassed dozens of trees and flowers strong enough for the heat, and notes about what was where, and what had changed.

When I visited the family friend, now being cared for at home, I also met his cheerful fuzzy dog, and his amazing black cat with necktie white splotch. This amazing cat lay on the hospital bed in the living room and allowed me to pet the tummy, while his sick dad sat in a recliner and occasionally tried to grab the cat’s flipping tail.

The friend’s wife was beautiful. People in crisis have a clarity and a cloudiness at the same time. They are preternaturally sensitive, and also supernaturally capable of anything. She probably thought she looked tired and worn. But I didn’t. Someone sensitive and caring engaged in the enormous work of caregiving is beautiful.

She got me a glass of water, and I happily drank it, I was terribly thirsty, and we found things to talk about because I imagine just having something sort of normal happen can be a welcome reprieve.

Her husband ate some yogurt. I was like, hey, that’s good, being able to eat yogurt.

I’ve spent some time with the sick and the dying. Being able to feed yourself, even messily, is good. Being able to talk with your people, even a little bit, is good.

My uncle told a story about stealing concrete lawn deer and secretly putting them on another friend’s lawn.

Everyone is on a timer, everyone will have an exit, and yet of course it’s so different to be with people where someone has been pretty much guaranteed death in days or weeks.

Why this guy? You always have to do that, stop and say, why this guy, who rode his bike miles and miles and ate well and made his city a better place and was a good influence on my rambunctious uncles?

Last week, I learned my former brother-in-law had died via text, and immediately caught my mom and sister before we completely parted. We were all wearing wet swimsuits. I sat in my car, and they stood in a parking lot, and we all said, “Oh, man.” “Whew.”

The man had children, and we ruminated a while on how his death would rank in the list of ways he had hurt them.

One of the ways we deal with overwhelming pain is to bring rankings and qualifiers to it.

We are so helpless.

People are checking out all the time, I thought the next day, as I started my car in the ponderous heat. Is this a deep thought? No, that’s “Hotel California.”

In our culture, we are, of course, protected from a lot of the checking out. Our dying are frequently centralized and cared for by specialists.

I had a party, and stayed up until 5 am talking with friends. To be honest, for the last two hours, I was thinking, oh my God I need to go to bed. But my greater wisdom thought, time you sit talking with friends is the best time. You never want to cut that short.

So many candles! In our last configuration, we circled around my candleabra, which went from three candles to two to one, and then extinguished himself as we kept dissecting what was happening and what had happened and making each other laugh.

At my ballet class this week, all the expected people were there. No one had been killed in a car accident, or had a sudden stroke, or been shot. Many people live expecting this, including me. Not everyone lives that way, though. Plenty of my students do not. Death visits them.

To see “My Fair Lady,” I sat in a lawn chair as local actors sang some of the great songs of our culture, and kids who hadn’t heard them before heard them, and my cousin and I sat and mouthed the words. (I was satisfied that I knew almost all of them.)

Also that firefly, and the Big Dipper beyond him. Also the candle I lit, to mourn a good man who was unraveling, at least in body and mind, who would leave a jagged hole in the fabric of my family.

I got home from the play, and I saw the candle had burned totally down. The glass was cool. It had been gone a while.

I had used the candle wrong. You light a yahrtzeit candle on the anniversary of someone’s death. You have 24ish hours of light to remember them. My culture has dropped out many death rituals, so I had to steal one.

But anyway, it was out. I wished it was still burning, burning with my anger and grief. It wasn’t, though, and it didn’t belong on the mantle anymore. I put it in my china cabinet. It looks like nothing, like a cheap used-up votive candle.

I know what it is.