Facing the Light
In 1978, when I worked for the National Park Service in Washington DC, the National Portrait Gallery organized an exhibit and a catalog comprised of mid-nineteenth century daguerreotype images of famous Americans. The first publicly available photographic process (1839), these “sun pictures” beguiled the world. Taken as their subjects faced straight into natural light, daguerreotypes recorded not just human features, but, to an uncommon degree, the sensibilities and souls of their subjects. There was no hiding. Here’s Albert Gallatin around 1840 and his 80th birthday. By then the brilliant early Secretary of the Treasury was memorialized in the naming of a Montana river, still invested in public service “tenacious, good-natured, and firm-minded.”
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This year, luck and longing wheeled me around, time and again, to face into the sun, to stand in the our star’s fierce light where I couldn’t flee: beauty; complexity; contemplation; the salty, honeyed comfort of friendship; evil; the garden-variety maladies of age; and always the curative strength of love and laughter.
Tonight I remember moments when life laid me bare to its realities:
- The malevolent light of last winter’s wicked ice, implacable snow.
- The sun and the silver scales it threw across the Mediterranean as I stood on Spain’s Costa Blanca.
- La Vila Joiosa, the City of Joy, and the old man on his kitchen chair– surrounded by a rainbow of skinny houses and healing heat.
- Mr. Noodle, precious and patient, as he died in my arms.
- His 10-year-old, 10-pound muscled successor, Simon the Phantom, who loped into my life needing safe harbor and, if his nighttime cuddles are any indication, has found comfort here.
- The July arrival of my Patmos friends who longed themselves to Montana to celebrate our unshakeable kinship and love, our writing, this landscape.
- The whirlwinds of vertigo that threw me to the ground, rearranged my stomach and delivered me into the care of incredible friends.
- Margaret, my hospice client, who, at 95, after an hour of savoring old-fashioned words (brood, wares, for instance), wished that I could have grown old with her.
- A quiet day and a blank page here at the computer, waiting for memories that still ask to be heard.
- Each night, the news–of cruelty and hate.
- And to offset that news, the sweet and practical fellowship of family and friends: courage as they faced illnesses; warmth and a teal sunset around a fire pit; lingering conversation at lunch, on the porch, over breakfast; movies that sent me home to think, “A Star is Born” for example; shared grief; a final Brewers baseball game; hubbub in the North Fork, framed by that unimaginable march of mountains; Ivan Doig’s birthday celebration in Dupuyer and its amazing organizers; the skill and wisdom of the historians who write National Register nominations; the ability of artists to spot illusive connections between images and ideas; notes and calls zinging around the globe.
Books, always books. Every single Ken Follett I never read before; all things by British Jan Morris; Lily Brooks-Dalton, Good Morning, Midnight; Francisco Cantu, The Line Becomes a River; Tara Westover, Educated; Ursula Le Guin, No Time to Spare; Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing; Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes; Stephen Kiernan, The Hummingbird; Jodi Picoult, Small Great Things; Catherine Banner, The House at the Edge of Night; Zak McDermott, Gorilla and the Bird; and the best here at the end of the year, Mary Clearman Blew, Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin and Michelle Obama, Becoming.
The daily mystery of this season of life, for me, is how to understand and live in it. For sure, not with denial; not with false bravery; not as cute and perky; not as a race to win in years; not as a fight to the finish. More as an offering of lovely unanticipated time, however limed with cranky knees and faulty senses; to remember; to fall in love again with words and kindness and young people and big ideas and writing so glorious that I shiver. And my distant reach of sky and mountains and the universe that stretches, with order and beauty, so far beyond even my familiar eastern horizon that I can only stand amazed. And to let those gifts simmer as I wake up and fall asleep.
I think now of Albert Gallatin and the kind, wise eyes that his daguerreotype caught. In Gallatin’s eightieth decade, Washington Irving had dinner with him and reported: “How delightful it is to see such intellectual and joyous old age; to see life running out clear and sparkling to the last drop!”
Whatever your age, however the year has come to you, may you face the returning light and find joy.
