Just once no more, p.2
Just Once, No More, page 2
Only in the hospital parking lot did I realize I hadn’t examined my personal claim to the items on the list. I opened the document back up. For sure, numbers Two and Three resonated in general, along with an anxious nod toward number Four. Number Nine was goofy and made no sense (although I did over-spice my own food and used too much salt). As for the remaining six concerns, they were not my own. Or not much mine. Or not yet.
I climbed out of the car, groaning after the long drive and testing my bad knee on the asphalt before committing the weight. Already I was checking my watch to see how long I could visit before needing to return home; already I was telling myself to leave irritation and impatience outside my father’s room. Why irritated? Why impatient? Maybe I had kept something off the list, and the missing item was nagging at me? I couldn’t think what that might be.
Still, I had laid out ten reasons older people get sad as fast as I could key them into the phone. How to explain such ease in producing such uneasy thoughts? I couldn’t. Enough self-examination for today, I decided. Better go see my sick dad.
3
Inside the enclosure, it is hushed. Sounds and sensations that assailed you for the past hour—the whorl of wind and slap of rain, the crash of waves against rock—have receded, as though the earth has drawn a breath and is holding it. Yes, you are cold and wet, hands purple and lips, you imagine, blue. And yes, part of you wishes to be back in the village guesthouse, by the turf fire, the flames leaping up.
But you are here instead, in a place where the earth holds its breath.
You are inside a Neolithic fort called Dún Aengus. The inner sanctum is protected by stone ramparts. Ten feet high and four feet across, the ramparts block the force of most of the elements. The floor is of granite, striated with tufts of grass, reminding you of an abandoned church—another hushed, reverent space. Didn’t churches once shelter terrified villagers threatened with pillage and murder? And didn’t those structures generally fail to arrest the violence? History, you decide, is human-on-human mayhem, while nature looks on in puzzlement.
But something else is happening at Dún Aengus. You are nineteen years old, and, having no clue what it might be, resolve to find out. The far wall of the enclosure, half a football field away, is especially alluring. It is composed partly of ocean that has ascended some improbable slope to meet land. The far wall is made up of sky as well, doming the island and touching down along this seam. Curious. Beautiful too, offering variances of blue: powdery and luminous higher up, darker with shadows below.
Off you go, seeking the spot where the hues join. Ten paces you cover, then twenty, the blues further clarifying, alongside the return of sound. You detect a watery roar, loud and in surround. You feel a breeze pushing and pulling at your torso. And you can’t miss the squawk of birds—seagulls in the distance, except that you spot several of them just ahead, hovering over the ground.
The seagulls are airborne, wings wide and calls piercing, but not in the sky above. They idle in the sky below, poised within the now-dissolved blue. Very strange, you admit. Lucky that the ground remains beneath your feet.
You put your hands out—to join, to touch the seam. In so doing, you step off a cliff, a drop of four hundred feet.
Or, you almost do.
Your body registers extreme danger with a second to spare. Collapsing onto your knees will not be enough; the momentum will carry you over. You must rear up and windmill your arms. Feeling earth, but only under your heels, you will need to crumble sideways and then onto your back, not your stomach. Your back will be met by granite, your stomach by air.
The direction you choose is the correct one. You crack your left cheek on stone; your vision jumps and rolls vertically, a TV screen that has lost its sync. And you lie there, gaze now occluded by pain. Your left arm actually dangles over the ledge, an anchor pulling into the deep. Using your heels, you shimmy an inch to the right, and then another. Finally, that stray arm is also on land. Only then do you raise it to your forehead. Fingertips come back bloody, and you taste salt.
Your first cogent thought, beyond disbelief at your stupidity? Lines from a poem you learned in your final term of high school. “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Emily Dickinson wrote. “Are you—Nobody—Too?”
Then you shimmy some more, also in the correct direction, and the danger passes. A voice calls out. Not God or your archangel: a couple further along the ledge, on their bellies, heads over the drop. How did you not notice them before? The woman asks if you are okay. “Watch,” the man says. He crawls backwards, draws up to his knees, stands. “Easy,” he adds.
You try explaining your mistake. “The two blues…The sea and sky. The way they came together…”
“You’re bleeding,” the woman says.
After that, you do as the man suggests. Chin over the ledge, spray across your face, Atlantic swells churning your stomach. Those seagulls too, floating not so far away, calling ha ha ha ha. You hear told you so, told you so.
The bliss lasts maybe a minute. Then another thought—an image, sprung from behind the eyes—jolts you. On either side of you villagers hurl themselves off the ledge. Women with children held to their chests, children together, opting to be swallowed by ocean rather than violated by men. Eyes alarmed. Mouths screaming, no sound coming out. Once again, your visual field is disrupted, and begins to flicker and roll. Also, there is a clanging sound, as though cliff and coastline are cymbals being struck together within your head. It is almost unbearable. Likewise awful is how you can suddenly feel, if not hear, the terror of the villagers as they brush by, along with—admit it—a pull to join them. Their bodies plummeting through the cool, wet air. Their minds, about to be set free. They are hurtling into the seam, and the seam—you sense, on their behalf; telling, you suppose, their forgotten tales—is opening. For them. For you. For Nobody.
So, what is Dún Aengus? You have the barest inkling, being young and fit and destined not to die that afternoon. Returning to the guesthouse and the fire, you think of a line from an anthology of Irish poetry you have been carrying in your rucksack. “I am the wind on the sea,” a poet wrote in the tenth century. “I am the wave of the sea.”
Is that what the poet truly wanted—to become the wind, the wave? Is that what you briefly wished for along that precipice?
Days later, on the flight home, you think: your father will love this story. He will get Dún Aengus, get the wild, reckless thrill of it. By extension, he will get you better too, both who you already are, and who you are still becoming. Soon after landing, you tell him a barebones version of what happened. Sheepish and unsure, you wait for him to ask more, to offer to puzzle it out with you—all those crazy ideas and intimations. He does not.
4
My father shed sixty pounds during his initial hospital stay. He was there a total of almost three months, sometimes in a room with other patients, but often in isolation, due to a string of infections. He claimed never to be hungry, blaming the medications and lack of activity. He also claimed he could only eat the food prepared by my mother, his wife-of-sixty-years, in their home, at their kitchen table. He survived on cookies and sweetened coffees smuggled by visitors, and the pounds came off. The day I finally registered his diminished size, my first impulse was to ask the nurses if they had switched him to a larger bed. My second was to force-feed him the fatty foods he once loved—shepherd’s pie, liver and onions.
I did neither. I reminded myself that he was alive, that this was a happy surprise. Earlier in the fall, he’d had an emergency operation on his kidneys. Family was summoned bedside. Doctors warned us he might not survive. I found him on a gurney in a corridor, waiting for the surgery, and held his hand. Anguish altered his face and a pulse bounced in his wrist. “Why aren’t they letting me go?” he said. “I want to go.” Hearing that, I tried saying good-bye with my eyes. But later, the doctor told us how hard Dave Foran had fought on the operating table. “One tough hombre,” he said.
Tough hombres, especially those confined to hospitals, kept fighting trim. The next visit, I sat beside his bed watching him drawbridge the pajama bottoms he wore beneath the gown, snapping the fabric against his deflated tummy.
“I feel so much better,” my father said. “Look better too.”
“You do,” I said.
“You don’t.”
“Okay.”
“You look tired. Pissed off. Could lose a few pounds,” he said, snapping the pajama bottoms again. “Maybe more than a few…”
He was right, in his usual cutting way. “The older I get,” I said, “the more I look like you.”
“You and Mike are definitely brothers,” he said of my younger sibling.
“So I’m told.”
“He could also drop some weight.”
“I’ll let him know.”
“And Debbie…” he began to say of our older sister.
I redirected the conversation. “Everyone says Debbie looks like Ruthie,” I said of our grandmother, his mother. Only there was no “everyone,” and although there had been a Ruthie Foran, I knew her mostly from photos, not memories.
My father frowned. We both paused in this doorway, the room beyond it dark and windowless. “Your hair,” I said, stepping back, “it’s like it was twenty years ago. The freckles as well,” I added, touching his arm.
“How about that,” he said.
It was true. Rust-colored hairs had recently reappeared on his head, after a decade of gray and white. I had noted as well the return of pigment to his skin, especially along his forearms. That was a private and near-forgotten thrill. My father’s forearms were maps that his eldest son, in childhood, had loved to study. Like the front and rear flaps of a picture book, the maps depicted a dense archipelago of islands with narrow passageways in between. Adventures abounded in these waters. There were false tributaries and dead-end creeks, stiletto rocks and shoals, rapids and waterfalls that showed on no charts. Strewn throughout the archipelago were the wrecks of ships that had failed to navigate safe passage. Few made it, and for every shipwreck visible, another dozen lay at the bottom of the sea.
As a boy I had sat in my father’s lap or next to him, outlining routes with my fingers. I told myself stories of heroic captains and crews, nasty pirates and octopuses, waves cresting into water walls and masts snapping under the strain. Launching from his elbow, I passed through the same gateway of freckles and proceeded south toward his wrist. He had not minded, except to occasionally complain that it tickled and pull away with a “ha ha,” making me kick my feet and laugh. Nor, as best I can recall, did he wonder what I was doing. This, despite my sometimes asking for a nautical term and, I imagine, muttering bits of that day’s adventure aloud.
The freckles eventually receded, along with my interest in, or even memory of, mapping his arms. Now the archipelagos had re-emerged, emitting the low, dense glow of a fire brought back from ash with a bellows.
His eyes had not staged a similar rebound. Once an intense, oceanic blue, Dave Foran’s stare had functioned in two modes. One bore a hole into the other person, sure as a bullet, and made men, in particular, alert and wary, ready to duck. The other was sparkle-mode, rendering his often-awkward mischief—tilts into goofiness, a breathtaking lack of tact—harmless and endearing. Many women had liked the sparkle, reading vulnerability not far below.
But now the blue too had washed out, paint poured into a rushing stream, and the irises had clouded over. He ceased holding eye contact with other people for more than a glance, preferring to look past, or look right through, as though one of you wasn’t there. Not really. Not any longer.
Registering that faraway gaze partway into his first prolonged stay in hospital, and finding it incongruent with the trimmer waistline and blazing freckles, I started driving the two hours north from the city as often as I could, uncertain of how much time we—he, more precisely—had left. I also began using those barns along the route to prepare for our conversations. These would be meaningful exchanges. We would get somewhere, finally, before it was too late. Only one subject truly interested me: his family and childhood. By my count, four ruined barns required our excavation. They had names and narratives—Charlie Foran, Ruthie Foran, Shirley Foran, Barb Norton—but, equally, they were archetypes. The imperious father. The fragile mother. The intruder second wife. The co-damaged sibling. Complexity, sorrow and regret as certain as sunrise and sunset. Misunderstandings and miscommunications, questions never asked and words never spoken, as predictable as the seasons.
Still, the stories my father needed to tell—and the ones I apparently needed to hear—did not feel archetypal to me. Why would they have? Lives unfold inside bodies that expire, but stories are retold outside those bodies, and have no time constraints, no end. As well, decades of halting conversations between us had made one thing clear: he’d never ceased thinking about those four names and narratives either. They were his sunrise and sunset, his winter spring summer fall.
He just didn’t care to talk much about it.
Now he did care to talk. During another hospital visit that first winter, my father greeted my arrival with no fewer than four curt, prismatic utterances—as though he had been a passenger in my car, counting off the barns. He sat upright in the bed, headphones around his neck, intravenous drip and monitor positioned on either flank, like the bodyguards of a military leader whose enemies are vengeful. I was still fumbling with the gown and gloves that visitors had to don in the isolation ward.
My father said: “My mother was a drunk. My father didn’t love me or my sister, Barb. For sure, not me.”
And this: “My parents never came to anything Barb or I did. Not a school celebration. Not a parent-teacher meeting. They didn’t care about us. Maybe that’s why I never got involved in anything with you kids.”
And this: “I don’t have friends. Never have. Don’t like people very much. You can’t trust them.”
And this: “Not sure why I’m still here. Don’t see the point of it. Staying around for your mother, I guess.”
I answered each remark with a bland “okay,” mentally assigning them their excavation sites. Though they didn’t quite align to the barns in my mind, it was a promising start. Sliding into the chair beside his bed, I was once again proximate to his right forearm, the freckles irradiated by hospital lighting. This also seemed fortuitous. While at least one of his comments made no sense—my father had attended hundreds of my hockey practices and games all those decades ago, driving us long distances at odd hours—I was distracted by the freckles, and then by what he said next.
“I dreamed about my dad last night.”
“Really?”
“Charlie Foran. The Colonel,” he said.
I had my grandfather’s name.
“I never dream about him,” my father continued. “Never think about him that much. Why would I?”
“Because he was your dad?”
“He was a bastard.”
“But you dreamed about him…? Was he in Ottawa? Was it during the war?”
“It was here.”
My puzzlement must have showed.
“He was right there, standing at the foot of the bed,” he explained. He indicated the spot.
“Had you seen him before?”
“In the hospital?”
“In your dreams.”
“Almost never. Didn’t want to see him last night either. In his uniform, hat on his head. Know what he said?”
“He spoke?”
“Pay attention,” my father said. “I thought this stuff interested you.”
“Sorry.”
“ ‘Wake up! Wake up! Don’t sleep so much!’ ”
“I was just distracted,” I said.
“Not you. Him. My dad.”
“He said that?”
“ ‘Wake up! Wake up! Don’t sleep so much!’ Clear as the hospital intercom when there’s a real emergency. Someone checking out, most likely,” he said with grim satisfaction.
“Charlie Foran, the Colonel, was there, at the foot of the bed…”
“And now you’re here beside the bed,” he said. “Staring at my arm, for some reason.”
I kept my expression neutral, but secretly, I was thrilled.
5
David Bierk was a painter. He produced thousands of pieces over four decades. A few were as large as billboards, others as small as paperback books. His canvases could be epic, public engagements with art history and the environment, or private landscapes he alone could stake with his brush. That was his practice. How David lived his life varied less in scale. His thinking was only big, his plans only bigger. Appetites, ambitions, capacities, including for friendship, were uniformly supersized, and when an idea, a project, a person, excited him, he began the adventure by opening his arms wide for a hug. David fathered eight children with three women, the four youngest, all boys, with the love of his life, Liz. He was six foot three and had an athlete’s physical grace. He also had velvet-blue eyes amplified by glasses, a warm, welcoming smile, a booming voice. An inveterate whistler and singer of pop songs, especially while he painted, he rarely stayed on key for long. Hard to fathom how Liz, who managed their business from the same studio, abided it.
I adored David. He spent every day and, I suspect, every night in a dialogue with the BIG world. He was determined to tap into its energies for his art. But he wished as much to serve as spokesperson for the universe’s countless delights, freely available—if you knew to harness them. Between him and pretty much everything, it was love at first sight.
