Single Wink Kindness

Direct & inevitable, some words are hard to say & hear

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“I always thought I’d have more time to say goodbye” —Charles Bowden

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I doubt I’m alone.

I think of the word Goodbye, and my heart sinks.

A single wink of kindness. Something. Not. Quite. Enough.

I stumble, turn somber, and wish time would stand still. Often, I keep whispering goodbye after the moment has come and gone. Wishing impossibly for the churning of time to rewind—just once.

Goodbye is a kin to love—elusive—trying to hold sand or water in a clenched fist. As Neil Young sang, “Love is a rose, but you better not pick it...”

Love and goodbye are neither too taut nor too loose; rather, some balance of the four seasons, fact and fiction, dervish subatomic whirls of quantum physics, the wild emergence of a luna moth.

One of my talents is missing what’s happening as it’s happening. Sensing goodbye ahead of time.

It’s not what you think. I am not morose or in need of a therapist. Rather, I sense goodbye and feel a Kerouac lyric descend, “the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in.” The lengthening of a word.

I enjoy plain pleasures¹: a freshly baked slice of warm buttered bread, an Oriole dipping grape jelly, a morel amidst bark chunks. Details aligned just so. I don’t understand loud noises at two in the morning or any time; I don’t enjoy forgettable decisions made upon the delusions of Italian wine. I’ll take calm, plain coffee to settle my senses. Dawn’s early light served bitter and hot, a better version of aft-midnight madness. The slightest prayer invoked: To everything there is a season.

Plain doesn’t require much clarification. Needs no swindle of excuses to explain what happened, or hasn’t happened. Ineffective seems to need polishing along the edges to ever become justified.

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Backstepping some. I’m exploring writing and words, and Goodbye remains strong. I wish every word I wrote were so full and vivid, so intimately symbiotic. Sympathetic. Laid hard as summer sun on blacktop. To cast just the right words at every turn—each phrase as much for a reader as the writer. Fireflies casting necessary glows; each flare concise, useful, beautiful. Sentences in the tense of rapture: What do you mean something moved during the night…

I gaze at the eddies of a trout stream, bewildered with a grin on my face. Five-four jazz makes my forehead ruffle, and I’m content but not ecstatic, parts inquisitive and appreciative. Contrast and compare in step with spirals, because nothing goes precisely full circle. Writing is learning to take two things and determine how they work together (Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis.) Frowning and enjoyment at the same time. I once heard a lady in rural Kansas implore perfect sense out loud: “Where was it ever written we have to be so happy all the time?”

A child staring at the blue sky hears a lullaby and feels all calm and chummy. By and by, we all discover the world is giant and floating in and out of sense. We begin to retreat and turn an eye—the locally known is a comfort and then a trap. We devise whitewashes. In Iowa, one of our favorite whitewashes is field after field of corn and beans scented with compacted rows of animals being drained in one too many ways. Eating our tails. Ouroboros. Good gone bye. Nary a wink is left.

Unfair knows no limits. I miss the sound of children playing, of watching my daughter grow up. A plain pleasure. I hear a song, or smell a smell and instantly recall how we used to invent animals and the noise they’d make—a bluejay cat Me-raouw-ch; a wolf ant, a crane dog, a llama toad—inventions and giggles as we settled into the day.

Wisdom and regret. I have read somewhere that you should ask a parent questions before it’s too late: What’s your favorite memory of me/us? What did you think when you first saw me? What was the boldest hope or dream you ever had….? I never did this. The moment never seemed right. Again and again, as though a refrain, why can’t there be just a little more time before we say goodbye?

We are led to believe there is such a thing as paradise, Eden, Shangri-La: a concoction of was-were-will-be, of nowhere and everywhere—sleight of hand inventions. A great blue heron’s silence is simply stalking for survival. No more no less. I aim for that immersion. And for the calm of Barred owl hoots, brook trout tickling the top edge of a river, a clipper wind that cleanses. I am not religious, so to speak, but I do believe in paradise—a fleeting thing I seem to keep missing while it’s happening.

What didn’t I see coming? Some of the things I worry about in my 60s. Never in my teens or twenties did I imagine I’d still be thinking some of the same irritating thoughts I have, be incapable of difficult decisions because of mind-reading & imaginary delusions. Many lessons I’ve learned haven’t been the ones I needed. Honesty and greed still confound me.

People leave at just the wrong times. In the wrong ways. I battle this. I’m not good at an eye for an eye.

So, I return to where I began, “I always thought I’d have more time to say goodbye.” This thought scares me more than I care to admit.

A final solace?

I want a two-wink kindness. I want to discover a way to say goodbye and at the same time say hello.

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So much to read and such little time. Substack is a platform on a geometric pattern of growth and I am not sure what’s out there yet to find. A few I currently like are

Chris Jones

Swine Republic;

John Gonter

on wilder things,

Tara

for relatable memories, and

Wini Moranville

on food and dining.

1. “‘Do you like plain pleasures?’ She finally asked him gravely” — Jane Bowles