Dia de los Muertos

Every year the Symphony does an art exhibit in the lobbies to commemorate the Mexican Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos. I’ve been peripherally involved in past years. This year I happened to be on the crew that helped the artists bring their works into the building. Without exception, they were lovely people, very respectful of the building. We in our turn did our best to help them realize their artistic vision in our house.

All the exhibits are thought-provoking but one in particular has held my attention. It’s called ‘The Tear’ by Indira Urrutia. I took an artsy picture of it one day. The idea was that you could see the piece in the mirror. You can, but only if you know what to look for. I guess I’ll have to take a better picture.

I’ll quote from the placard since it’s hard to read here: ‘A Tear has been hand woven on wire with crochet wire baskets techniques originating in Mexico. A tear is our first reaction when we lose a loved one. No matter where we are from or what our rituals are in connection with death, a tear is one common thing we all express.

‘This work was created to honor those that have gone ahead of us.’

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After weeks of looking at this nearly every day, and seeing many additions to it, I finally gathered my courage tonight and placed my tribute to Zach on the tear. It says simply ‘My Z.’

anniversaries

I originally wrote this topic thinking it would be about the 6th anniversary of my moving to my apartment in Pacifica. I think that date passed a couple of weeks ago. Now I’m starting to think about the one year anniversary of Zach’s death. Originally I was thinking I was going to do a sort of exposé – publish the statements of the drivers and the passengers and possibly those of Micah and Julie as well. It remains to be seen if I have the strength for that.

I did discuss the whole idea with my therapist. She didn’t address the specifics, but commented that the one year anniversary of a death has special meaning in many cultures. She said I would likely be surprised at the return of some feelings and not to be concerned about them. They are ‘normal’. As usual, only about 1% of what goes through my brain for putting on this blog actually gets here so we’ll see what actually transpires. It may be that the best thing for me would be to get in the habit of writing brief little bits every day instead of trying to find the time and the brain space to write on bigger issues.

legacy

It seems odd that I do not find this word in the list of tags on the front page. Is it a comprehensive list? Or just the most used? I don’t know, but I thought I had written on the idea at least once before.

This blog is part of my legacy, that which I am remembered by. My legacy also includes other writing in my computer, in my spiral notebooks, and in my letters to others if they have saved them. My photographs, my books, my recorded voice will all contribute to the legacy I bequeath to my children and their children and hopefully beyond that.

Most of what I just enumerated is private. This blog is emphatically not private so I approach what I write here differently from other places. This is part of my public legacy: my relationships with people outside of my family, both personal and working. The content is similar, though, in the respect that it is all me.

Zach on my mind

Seemingly out of nowhere, Zach has been back at the front of my attention. I think it’s because I’ve been on the roads a lot in the last couple of days. Actually, everything has been pretty nominal except for yesterday.

Yesterday was Tom Kent‘s CD release party in Roseville. I was going to go anyway – I had arranged for the day off – but he called me in the morning and said he wanted me to play on two of his tunes from the CD and to please bring a guitar and bass. I had played on those tunes for the CD but had missed the rehearsals for the live show. When that happened I told Tom I would just show up to the party to support him but wouldn’t play.

Anyway, that’s another story. What is germane is that I drove 280 miles yesterday including a significant portion on two lane roads. Today I just drove to work at Davies and coming home a few minutes ago I got to witness several drivers driving faster than they needed to: quick lane changes, tailgating etc.

How do I know they were going faster than they needed to? In almost every case I caught up to them at the next light and they were sitting calmly waiting for the light. All I could think of was, why are you risking the life of an innocent pedestrian or bicyclist for that 10% of the time when you get through the next light. And then what? You’re 30 seconds ahead of where you would otherwise be.

With the anniversary of Zach’s death coming up I have been thinking about some posts I want to do. One will be titled ‘that awful night’ and describe my experiences that night. Some others will be the statements made to the police by the drivers and witnesses. The last several months I have let the whole thing go but I am not finished with the legal system. I am gathering my strength to read those statements again and analyze them carefully. I have an idea what they will show but I will not say now. It may be that it will be different from what I expect. There is a 4 year statute of limitations on criminal charges.

update on the guy downstairs

He doesn’t play his TV loud any more but he must be watching it because I hear him laugh at it all the time. He has this moronic-sounding ‘ah-HUH’ that leaks through the floor seemingly whenever he’s home. I still hear him bashing and crashing in (presumably) his kitchen but he’s been able to restrict that to reasonable hours.

I have noticed that my cabinets and drawers are old and pretty noisy so I try to be careful with them in the dark hours.

Ursula K. LeGuin and history

I went to the Salvation Army store the other day hoping to find a replacement for the jacket I left on the plane in Denver. No luck, but I did find a book that has proved to be worthwhile. (There was a jacket that might have served but it had Frontier Airlines stitched on the front. I don’t think so!)

I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy years ago and liked it enough to keep it in my library. I’ve read it once or twice more since then. She wrote a fourth book in the same story line that I read but did not care for as much.

Regardless, when I saw her name on a book titled Tales from Earthsea, I picked it up immediately. For a dollar how can you go wrong?

The book has a foreword that explains LeGuin’s take on the ‘nonexistent history’ of the fictional Earthsea. There’s a paragraph that hit me between the eyes this morning when I read it. She writes:

Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it – can we even remember it – until we can tell it as a story? And for events in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. Past events exist , after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it’s then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty. If we let it drop from memory, only imagination can restore the least glimmer of it. If we lie about the past, forcing it to tell a story we want it to tell, to mean what we want it to mean, it loses its reality, becomes a fake. To bring our past along with us through time in the hold-alls of myth and history is a heavy undertaking; but as Lao Tzu says, wise people march along with the baggage wagons.

The philosophy of Lao Tzu is similar to that of Chuang Tzu, who I referenced in an earlier post involving LeGuin’s work: http://thezachproject.us/index.php/2016/09/01/loss/

LeGuin has a larger, world history in mind but her words resonate with me for the events of last November. Humankind is just a tiny blip in the context of the universe, but for us it is all we have. We must hold our memories true and pass them on. There is nothing more.

the guy downstairs

Ah, apartment living! No lawn to mow, no leaks to fix. Just jerks downstairs that bash and crash in the kitchen then turn their TV up loud in the middle of the night.

Rather than get in an altercation that could result in ugliness, my usual M. O. is to turn over and remain calm so I can get back to sleep. Tonight was worse than usual so now I’m up with my blog after I wrote the landlady an email about it. Three hours from now I have to be leaving for work. I’m going to try again to get to sleep.

Hair

I got a haircut yesterday.

Why is this news? Because it’s only the second haircut I’ve gotten since Zach was killed. That’s seven months for those of you scoring at home. And in the 25 or 30 years previous to this one, every two months was the rule for haircuts. A flexible rule, to be sure, but the common assumption was that short hair was easier to care for and I just didn’t want to be bothered.

True enough but things are different now. Indeed, it was in talking to Sarah just last week that I finally was able to articulate why I wanted my hair longer now. Sarah seemed particularly scandalized when she first saw me with it long. It took me a while before I realized that she had never seen me with long hair. She’s 31 years old.

Anyway, it seemed weird to me that I would commemorate Zach by growing my hair long. Zach always had his hair neatly trimmed – what’s the deal?

I told Sarah that I wanted people to know that I was different now. And that made sense to me. So that’s what it is.

Are people looking at me and thinking about that? Maybe, but most likely not, although a few who read this might start to. Whatever. It’s just for me. Several people have commented that I look nicer with longer hair. OK, but that’s not why I started to let it go. It was to mark the discontinuity in my life.

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Category Archives: Life as we know it