Mother and The Lama: Part I

Loneliness is a location beside life. It is a flower of the sewer. All efforts are exhausted to avoid the arrival, yet everyone enters. So many live there, yet barrenness abounds, the phone’s ringer lacks a striker, the pipeline is burst. In this crowded void, knives develop new purposes, perspectives fall away like windswept snow squalls blown directionless yet correct. No one likes the lonely, it is true. We are afraid of contagious diseases. Like fear, we forget loneliness, pretending instead not to recognize the signs. We are good forgetters. In the haphazardness of life, we sometimes even envy the lonely, but this is a mistake. We do not envy leprosy. Yet, as the other side is not our side, we well know that green is green. Strange that clichés are remarkably unable to teach. Loneliness is a cliché. No one wants it around, it is old and worn like the old man who sits at the shopping mall in front of Sears and

watches the children’s attention to trends and facades. He is their foreshadow, their future, but clichés cannot teach, and children can not understand. 

Loneliness, like heart disease, liver failure, and hip replacement is aged territory, a disease of adulthood. Its symptoms are as numerous as the butterflies, yet as transparent as windows in a senior home, windows from which a woman is protected from the elements, or from which the elements are protected from her. Yet she has a telephone and a name, and it is loneliness which causes her to sit beside the phone from morning till night and speak to children who call her Mother. She does not always speak, mostly she only listens. Teens typically call. Finding her number in high 

school hallways and stapled to telephone polls here and there. Her message, Mother is always home. They tell her about their friends, their parents, their lives, and she tells them that all will pass, that life is up and down, that people change, that love is hard, that the world is not hopeless, that she is there, and they go away then, feeling better, but 

not knowing exactly why. Mother’s symptoms are quite, her loneliness is sublimated, and, like the landfill, if she leaves soon enough, they will never to be excavated. 

Life in a cabin is lonely. Nature is not enough. Nothing is real which is not perceived. With only his eyes, Drummer has no perspective. Heat comes from wood and flame. Food can be hauled in a car and stored. Water is sucked from the ground. People are not so easy to access. There are no phone lines to Drummer’s cabin, as if the lines themselves would ease the angst through the potential. He could move into town, or drink at the tavern, or even smoke cigarettes on a park bench, but that would not provide difference. Had he a phone, maybe he would call Mother, but she most likely would refuse to talk to a lonely old man. Such is not her affair.

Alexander Graham Bell, you know not what you have done, yet, strangely, I do not hold you accountable. You too were lonely. 

Time is irrelevant to the lonely. Past, present and future jumble together like ingredients for breads, after kneaded and molded, are inseparable. Beth clutched the handset and counted the rings. When she reached fifteen, she replaced the handset on the base and waited one half hour before re-dialing. She wanted to talk to Drummer, but Drummer had passed in sixty-eight and before that he lived four years without a phone.

Love precedes loneliness. The unconnected are not lonely. They are the solitary trees in overgrown fields. Only the trees of the forest understand loneliness as they drop leaves onto the small flowers that are too naive to comprehend how the sun deceives. I have had leaves fall on me; I know.

Suicide is for the lonely, it is for those who lack hope, who despair. Mother could have despaired, but she found a straw and clutched to it. Drummer died naturally. Passive suicide. 

He felt the wind and knew no blanket was enough, he saw the storm and knew the cabin would fall, he understood the force of Nature. He must have. One does not live that long and not know things. Beth passed in seventy-six, the bicentennial, and left me here.