I sometimes go to the diner closest to home on the weekends for a late breakfast. I usually go alone and don't speak to anyone except the waitress. Tito's in a Bloody Mary, which is really a liquid salad, if you think about it, smooths my edges after awhile. But when I look around and listen I cannot help but always ask the same question. What the hell am I doing here? Not in this restaurant but the larger here. Not in this life or this world - smaller than that. I mean this particular geographical locality. I am within 25 miles of where I was born and raised. These should be my people. But I so often experience them as ugly, foreign and antagonistic to my being. Maybe that's why my favorite movies as a kid had to do with prisoners and prisoners of war - The Great Escape, Papillion, Cool Hand Luke, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Escape From Alcatraz. Or tormented, homicidal loners - Death Wish, Taxi Driver. Suicide was something I got to know up close and early. At first, I was intimidated - horrified. It's scary looking to say the least. Awesome, in the true sense of the word. We had all kinds of debates, she and I. Especially about the morality of such a choice. It's my life, I said. If it sucks and I can't fix it and I know it's not going to get any better, then it's my right to end it. True, Suicide said, but your life is more than simply your own life. You are connected, whether you can feel those connections or not. I couldn't argue with that after thinking it over. Suicide - such a clinical term - finally showed me a face that neither horrified me, wanted to push me off the cliff or tried to seduce me. Let's call her Vanessa. She showed me an image of a lighted emergency exit sign in a darkened theater when I was barely a teenager. I've thought about her every time I've seen a movie since. She appeared to me looking like Our Lady of Guadalupe, even though my brand of Catholicism was the Irish and French-Canadian kind. I understood her to mean that she is always there, that there is always a way out. And knowing this, I haven't had to use that door. She became mercy, no longer horror. And knowing there was mercy, I stopped debating and had her name tattooed upon me. Later, her point about being connected was proven to me by people I loved making that decision. I guess Vanessa didn't show them the sign. Part of me died with them. Part of all of us does when this choice is made, I believe. But, I digress. I was thinking about living here and why I do. Well, I own a house here (I should say, I carry a mortgage on my back). I am within a reasonable distance of what's left of the family I was born to, later transplanted into and, even later, assisted in creating. That's the main reason. And I like the four distinct seasons. Even the episodes of brutality Winter brings which make you appreciate and long for being warm, comfortable, and safe. I need contrast. I need to appreciate presence by suffering absence. Finally, I like the woods here. Every day they change. And every day that I'm out there in them I become a little more aware, however dimly, of how everything is truly related.
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