Epiphany, 2015.

Sweeping the living room in the aftermath of de-decorating the Christmas tree and then hurling it into the backyard from the balcony, I collected literally several dustpanfuls of fir needles – never have I had a tree shed like this one. I found myself gradually absorbed into the oddly slow, almost Zen-like removal of all these fragrant green slivers, time protracted as well by the fact that my son was sick, could only lie around with his aching head and occasional hacking cough; this somehow threw this, the last sunny but cold day before school and work would begin again tomorrow after the holidays – and thus the last hope for any possible preparation or cleaning – into a completely different feeling. Calmer than I'd been for days, resigned to the unplanned escape of this perceived time-bubble, I swept up the biggest piles of needles from the wooden floor, then the balcony, and as my son finally took my advice to take his whining from the couch to his bedroom for a proper nap, I worked on the quiet removal of the stray ones from behind the television table and in and around the small collection of glass vases and baskets of shells next to it, things that had been more or less standing there with only minimal repositioning since my ex-wife moved out nearly four years ago. You know these nooks or corners of our dwellings, these time/space pockets that are just somehow there and have been seemingly forever and may go unnoticed for almost forever, until something (perhaps) randomly draws our attention to them. The last of these things I came to was a big, bucket-sized glass vase with a correspondingly massive glass stem and base, sort of a foot-and-a-half high wine glass, filled a third of the way with sand. It holds a shell or conch fragment or two (like so many half-forgotten things here, holding these mute, dust-collecting reminders of my/our life near the sea) and a very valuable bit of artwork that our son constructed on his own early one morning when he was quite small: a mandala-like circle of four crayoned and carefully torn green paper Christmas trees arrayed around the end of a long stick, with similar yellow triangular shapes taped between the trees. He was always an early riser, and as an only child would often spend the hour or two till we got up looking through craft books or coming up with his own ideas for these things, and this is one of his finest creations. I often notice and take care of this sunflower-like "tree art", but had not thought consciously for years why its vase was filled with sand, except to nicely prop the stick. But now it was filled with needles (probably a few from trees of Christmas past, to be honest), and in my slowed state, bathed in the sun through the cold balcony window, I began fishing the needles out with curved fingers, then with a small metal sieve. This also took some time and continued to slow my focused mental state, and yielded not only the needles but the occasional shell and small stone as well. This was bird cage sand, I was then reminded, and the extremely regular and fine texture of the cleansed sand piles that my sifting produced subconsciously prodded my thoughts toward something like those of a miniature Zen gardener... aha. I had never really experienced the peace those tiny sandboxes were supposed to elicit until apparently, accidentally, this afternoon. But there was something else: I was already aware there were a few burned-down incense stick ends left from what I imagined were the few times at some point way back that we had actually burned incense. But as I slowly sifted with the sieve and my fingers, getting the last few needles, I found more stick ends... and more... and more: dozens and dozens and dozens of collected, fragile stick-like artifacts, latticed down into the sand to the bottom of the glass vase, sedimentary layers I was working through, revealing clues of a lost history.

But this was a part of my history. And I had no conscious recollection, really, of ever burning these incense sticks. True, she liked incense, had always had some before and at the beginning of our marriage, but how could I not be aware of the sheer amount of time and action and presence these old sticks represented? Where had my attention been in those myriad moments, perhaps moments of shared intimacy, or at least supposed peaceful relaxation with each other, almost surely all during the four or so years we lived here together as a couple before the baby was born (who then would have started exploring everything at floor level)? This realization echoed the ironic awareness that had seized me one evening a few months after she had moved out, as I returned home from work, climbed the last step to my apartment door, inserted the key, turned it and entered my empty home, and suddenly wondered: how many times had I done this in the past, when our son would have been a toddler or young schoolchild, playing or reading or singing somewhere in the warm, safe family abode while his mother likely prepared something for dinner, theoretically clear mental snapshots of the hackneyed “Honey, I’m home” moment – and I, at that post-separation flash of insight, frozen with my keys in my hand, could not consciously recall any such single scene. My thoughts then, at the incense burning, or at the end of an exhausted, distracted work day at the advertising agency, must have been flitting darkly and fretting about me, me, ME, how I felt, deeply conscious more of that vicious internal cycle than of the people closest and dearest to me, dwelling on how insecure and unfulfilled I was in my position in life despite the good things I knew I had around me. And now those memories were for all practical purposes gone, only incompletely stored in my nerve cells, gray matter, psyche, whatever. And as this now dawned on me, as soon as I had the sand all sifted into pure, Zen-like, west-coast-Florida powdered-sugar consistency, without really thinking about what I was doing, all the butt-ends of the incense sticks went into the same garbage bin as the piles of green Christmas needles from what must have been the eighteenth tree to stand precisely on this spot, the spot where our son has spent almost every Christmas of his fourteen-year-old life.

But:
What if, unlike the spent incense and dried needles, the old memories I recorded are not somewhere discarded, irretrievable? What if they are stored in their (albeit subjective) entirety somewhere in my neuro-spiritual net? I was there for at least some of the incense burning and obviously present every time I entered the apartment around dinner time, all my vegetative senses in working order. Perhaps (and quite likely) the memory “data” are there, somewhere, in me, regardless of where my attention was at the moment of “storage” or under how many layers of distraction, regret, abandoned or forgotten hope, or wishful projection (even there in the past) they may lie. I have sometimes thought it must be possible to look back at periods in our lives that seem unpleasant, and then re-tweak the tone of that time for their later (as in present day) “retrieval” – because almost surely during that particular span other certainly good things were going on, being “stored” parallel in memory. So why not employ a trick of perspective, as in editing a film retrospective, to emphasize these happier bits of one’s old “media” history?

I have been reading Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier. In one sequence the characters debate whether it is difficult for most of us to see our lives as a whole, and thus accordingly live from day to day relatively unencumbered by the past and at the same time with hope for the future, without the perceived feeling of an unmeasured quantity of time and possibility left before us. And why not claim as well the clarification, or at best the best possible imagining of our past, as part of this (admittedly) perceived completeness? This is one of the strongest hopes I have for staving off depression: not only are things most probably not nearly as bad as they seem to me in my momentary state of awareness, I try to realize, but they weren’t in the past either. Not that we should gloss over, forget or deny truly unpleasant or even tragic things in our past, of course, or to block out or avoid the lessons of past disappointment; but I can safely say, in my own Western, white middle-class existence up to now, there has certainly been much more good than bad. And if I can gradually, occasionally somehow remove – however piecemeal or temporarily, realization by realization – this shadowy veil of past discouragement, of figuratively not being present even as things were happening when I actually physically was – if I can let myself past that, be present now, then the memories or at least the contented echoes of so many quiet, fragrant evenings or the release of the daily family reunions at the end of a hard, well-worked day will find their afterglow in my present perception of complete being. And even now, as I begin to attempt this feat, dimly-remembered outlines of furniture where it must have been fifteen years ago begin to emerge, and from whom we must have received the vase as a wedding gift, and where it first would have stood…

EPILOGUE

The next day when my son was feeling better, I asked him: “Does your mom burn incense in her apartment now?”

“Yeah,” he distractedly replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.