A Different Angle

My new year began with an orange. It’s my favorite way to start a morning: standing over the kitchen sink, looking out beyond the orchard, hills, and winding canyon road to the Santa Barbara Channel, our little v of sea, and slurping an orange I picked from the tree and cut in half. I even take my glasses off to avoid the splatter, so everything is in soft focus but the flavor of the orange, and this one, its juice dripping down my chin, was that perfect balance of sweet and tart. To live where oranges and lemons grow is self-actualization for me, proof that despite my numerous mistakes and regrets, I have achieved a kind of success. I live a life I could have barely imagined.

There was a plan for a walk a little later with Dave and Ming. We call it a tradition because we’ve now done this New Year’s Day walk together for three years in a row and have every intention of doing it next year and for many nexts to come, even if we don’t see much of each other the rest of the time, which is likely. Ming, now newly thirty, was long ago a student of mine at the little school in Gaviota where I used to teach. Dave is a veterinarian by profession and an enthusiast by temperament. I’ve known him and his wife Karen since I first came to this part of the world, and we are all interconnected in a hundred different ways through parents and kids and community gatherings and very few degrees of separation. There’s a sense of continuity and familiarity around here that I think is unusual in modern life.

It’s part of the reason Ming has returned. She is an award-winning writer who has lived and traveled in parts of the world as remote as Mongolia, where she was a Luce Scholar, and Kenya, where she founded a theater group, the Survival Girls, for six young Congolese refugee women living in a Nairobi slum, and that’s only a fragment of her résumé. But this is her home, the village that raised her. A position in a program at the University of California in Santa Barbara provided a way for her to return.

“My village is still here,” she says, with gratitude. “I’ve seen lots of situations where that isn’t true, where people have no village to come home to. But I needed to come back here for a while, and I could, because it’s here. And it isn’t really the place, but the people. Temples and shrines last forever, but people don’t, and the people of the village that raised me are still around.”

It’s that unusual continuity I mentioned earlier. Many of the people of Ming’s village are still here, among them Dave and me, because this is generally the kind of place people choose to come to rather than leave. Ming says that in Native American culture when someone is having a hard time they might be advised to go back to the res and talk to the elders, listen to their wisdom.

“So I’m kinda doing that,” she says.

“We may be elders,” says Dave, “but I don’t know how much wisdom we can give you.”

“Yeah, we’ve just been making mistakes a lot longer than you have,” I add.

But maybe there’s value in that too. We’re living evidence that you can keep slogging on, adjusting, learning, surviving. Not that we’ve been through the kinds of trauma the Survival Girls experienced, but we all go through hard times, and knowing that someone else has suffered worse doesn’t necessarily make it easier. Life’s a tricky business.

And we talk about life, the three of us, as we amble up the canyon on these annual New Year’s walks. Ming wonders what makes an adult, for example, what definitive qualities one must possess, what achievements one must have reached to claim the title. Dave and I, despite our decidedly adult-ish appearances, have only murky ideas about that, but we venture a few murky answers. The word responsibility comes up more than once.

“You have to remember we’re all just doing the best we can,” I tell Ming, “and most of it is improv.”

We set down our packs and sit on the rocks by a pool of rainwater. Dave serves up an unexpected feast of olives and almonds, oily mushrooms and tiny purple potatoes, salmon and strips of fresh bread. For dessert there are lemon bars and oatmeal cookies. We pour cups of hot tea from the striped and paint-splattered thermos that my father used to take to work with him decades ago. I have carried it here so his memory will be a part of the day for me.

We talk about memories, come to think of it, and how the more we examine a memory, the more we change it. With every retelling, a story is imbued with new feelings and details. With every recollection, it is altered. But we continue to fondle the memories, tweak them, stare at them, write about them, try to find the meaning and tease out the truths. Or invent them.

And we talk about the importance of making peace with parents, and techniques for not reacting with anger to the things that set us off, for changing the patterns and the usual outcomes. How not to react? Just don’t, somehow. I am certain of the necessity of this, but not clear on the strategies. It has to do with discipline, meditation, visualization, or, as Dave put it, flipping your brain.

As every writer knows, all these abstract words are empty. It’s the concrete image that will adhere and illuminate. And as we walked back, a concrete image presented itself in the form of a bleached out skeleton of a cow. I’ve been seeing remnants of that cow for a couple of years now, a study in decomposition. Heck, I remember that cow when it was a carcass with hide. I remember when it smelled really bad and you hurried by and held your nose.

But Dave is a veterinarian. He stopped and stepped up close to it.

“It isn’t often you see a skeleton intact like this, and positioned for such good viewing,” he said. Using his hiking pole as a pointer, he highlighted a few aspects of the cow’s anatomy.

“Look at this,” he said. “This is the uterine opening. Imagine? This narrow opening is the passage through which a calf has to fit in order to be born.”

“And now,” he continued, “I am going to tell you a trick that could save a life someday if you’re ever on a desert island and have to deliver a baby, or a calf. The widest dimensions of the calf are at the hip. If the calf gets stuck, you have to get the hip out of the way. So what you do is you reach in and twist it, just forty-five degrees, and get that wide part out of the way. It’s just a small repositioning, and you can ease it through the opening.”

How is this relevant? Maybe a metaphor here?

“Oh, I totally get it,” said Ming. “It’s a metaphor for when you’re feeling super stuck. You don’t need to change everything. One little adjustment might do it.”

Sometimes all it takes is a little tweak and a different angle.

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