My Neighbor Across the Road

The road between us is one less traveled, with grass growing between cracks in the asphalt and deep neglected water ruts. It is a road with an incline reaching higher and beyond to some place through darkness tunneling toward light. Whatever we believe is divine is at a fictitious cul-de-sac of a never-ending avenue in a space that is neither rural nor urban, suburban nor wild. What it is we cannot say though we lie about it almost daily and dream of it every night. It’s not a destination but we long to rest there in a place cleft for us as if it were a stone: a permanent rock of ages where we may hide for eternity.

As long as we have something to believe we can justify all the hell we endure on Earth. Some of us fanaticize about a benevolent father figure who waits to call us his own like before when we had nothing to worry about. A cool cloudy cline that saves us from the real hell beneath where we could work, sweat and suffer for eternity. What else is happening while we wait for butter to melt and ice to freeze? The world goes on though we are busy doing mundane things or we’re just hanging out with ourselves; contemplating what this thing is, called life? We read its music with our eyes closed.

No wonder we find ourselves as characters in a rambling rigmarole, sometimes spreading us thinner than we want, detained from footprints we intended to leave. Instead we linger in melancholia accompanied by a deep cultural malaise, sucking in like too much gut; holding on like cats slipping from a ledge. All this keeps us from appointed rounds of meditation on meaning and devotion to truth and abstract news. We stop to catch our breath along the way because walking often feels like swimming and endurance is no longer our strong suit of clothing.

Which brings me to my neighbor across the road, a larger divide than I realized; maybe a gulf would describe it better and render more truth. Across the road from me is the mystery of her life except a few precious details gathered from her stories, family recollections and eves dropping at a memorial. Time takes on a retrospective dimension when I think of her in my present tense of grasping for straws and wishing I’d initiated more conversations. I’m clear about what happens on my side of the road from day to day, some things like awkward walking, constant pain and the aggravation of losing control and needing relief from being overwhelmed by paper and bureaucracy. Had I known she was leaving soon I might have shared what I was doing across the road: listening to Nina Simone sing Ne Me Quitte Pas in impeccable French while reading the English translation. We might have constructed a bridge across our narrow road and repaired gaps and cracks in the asphalt between us.

We often pine for pillow shaped clouds with silver linings, rivers like Jordan and envy the “lucky ol’ Sun,” who rolls around heaven all day, when we’re alone across the road from each other. Talking about such things can sometimes take them off our heart and fly them across a room harmlessly. “Ne me quitte pas,” I might have said, your smile lights up the hallway. I could have asked: Do you know, "If You Go Away" is an adaptation of a 1959 Jacques Brel song "Ne Me Quitte Pas" with English lyrics by Rod McKuen. In English I could have read from a translation,

“We’ve often seen

The fire erupt again

From the extinct volcano

That was thought too old

There are, it seems,

Scorched lands

Yielding more wheat

Than the best April

And when the evening comes,

The sky is ablaze,

Don’t the black and the red

Blend together

Don't leave me

Don't leave me

Don't leave me

Ne me quitte pas.”

But of course now it's too late, I’ve missed her everyday, I hope her daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter don’t grow tired of my investigation and curiosity. The sky was purple the night she was found and that was a perfect shade of blue.

It’s sad to realize that mathematics became limited to an exercise in subtraction and improvisations on themes of what one can do without. We arrive to greet mornings without good reasons to get up except to urinate and then to face the day without Brenda, Rose, Zuzie, Thomas and Bena Jean, for they have already made their transitions to another realm. George is hanging on by the hair of his "chinni-chin-chin" and you can’t bear to go see him for fear you might crawl into bed with him and beg him not to go away, too. “Ne me quitte pas,” you would whisper to him as you have to all the people, talents and skills that went away. You said that to a stride that announced your confidence way before your voice was audible. You’re now minus pain free days and plus restless nights for more time than you care to calculate; you don’t remember what it’s like to feel good anymore. You lie when people ask how you’re doing because telling truth has become far too complicated to bore them with in passing. 

“Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?” asked the book of Jeremiah. Apparently the physicians had all gone to Egypt for the embalmment of the dead. What an apt metaphor of our time and a poor reason we keep losing the ones we love to incompetent medical care and a profit system that does better without old people who drain the coffers. My neighbor and me across the road would be better with a balm, the resinous gums of Gilead, than prescriptions designed to bilk and entrap the public on a bridge that leads to nowhere.