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A full moon shines over a cloud bank above the Van Nuys Airport where Cessnas and Pipers make night landings like carefree grackles.

The TV is loud in the living room where Aunt Margie sits in her pink zip-front bathrobe playing Solitaire on the couch, unhearing; hearing-aidless, but devoted to the TV people who became her life after Uncle Bill died.

I am squatting in her baby blue back bedroom outfitted with a multi-hued green afghan, a garage sale Dutch oil miniature and white bubble-glass lamps. A radio, a guitar and music stand; a humidifier, two hats and a small map of Iraq possibly rendered in lead; a prop plane calendar and W. Somerset Maugham's “Of Human Bondage,” signify that I am here.

Six weeks shy of 47 years after arriving at the Immanuel Deaconess Institute School of Nursing, Orphanage and Home for the Aged in the depths of a Midwestern winter, I can finally sit comfortably outside after dark in January and watch airplanes fly under the moon.

I am as happy and heartbroken as I always have been.

Here lies my escape from the cold and the umbilicaled men through whom I apparently believed I would win the love of my similarly childlike father, who now in visceral fear of incapacitation at last admires and believes in me unshakably if not 40 years too late. Our mutual offenses now so utterly immaterial, we walk as kindred souls who know well the profound loneliness of a continually questioning mind.

This, of course being the source of my restlessness, and not his withheld love.

For us, the generationally accumulated observations and interpretations that comprise religion, philosophy and science are reasonably intriguing yet lacking the depth of self-perception. Not that either of us was academically privileged nor even diligently inclined, but we both studied enough to know that the answers we needed were experiential and quite often ephemerally or painfully so.

My mother would say to me, “No one can tell you anything,” and she was right. When someone's behaviors, mannerisms and gesticulations suggested an unsaid, I wanted the unsaid. I was raised with animals, after all.

The irony that our inner evolution should be so lonely is that so many people experience it. People in marriages, people without; youngsters, the old, the mad and the perfectly organized. A Sri Lankan priest assigned to a tiny parish in the Sierra Nevada who once confessed to me his doubt in Catholicism. A military officer so frail that a request for self-examination provoked hysteria. Ever our need to be recognized as who we are, all the while either not knowing, picking ourselves apart for whatever we perceive it to be, or superficially pronouncing ourselves perfect and driving away anyone who doesn't roll likewise.

What we really need is just a simple safe place to be occasionally uncertain, always exposed, and beheld without judgment. Our culture calls it “therapy,” and we build access to it for an hour every week or two.

I want to call it “marriage” and go home to it every night after standing fast in the face of rampant ridiculousness and grumble, laugh, love, hear, recognize, collapse.

Yet even a good marriage is not the answer, but rather a respite from its pursuit, for Aunt Margie's love divine is long gone and today I used a broom and old towels to clean cobwebs from the ceiling of its shrine.

My father sleeps on a heated blanket in the deep freeze of the Great Plains; my old loves with their new, and me here with my magic words, the airplanes and the moon.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.