The following 10 posts flow from reflections, events and travels between the end of the Camino in Santiago and my January return to Methow, WA, where our journey toward, on and beyond the pilgrim road began.
Parallel City
Between the two of us
Lies a long list of near misses
A parallel city of almosts and could haves
Some are stories we tell:
The bearded man in a forest chasing me as a child
Your accident on a sled in Central Park
The train that crossed the bridge at 9 am instead of noon as I sat fishing with my grandpa
Jew-hating teens on a snowy mountain pass
My starving adolescence and broken knees
Your two back surgeries and spinal meningitis
Our many broken hearts
The overdose I took to be dramatic
HIV that missed us both despite the '80s
The cancer that later didn’t
The neck you broke surfing
The skull I fractured on hard-packed snow
Childbirth and malaria and dysentery
The poison I inhaled in hopes of hearing God
Some stories we never will tell. How could we?
The motorcycle brushing too near your bike that you didn't feel or even notice
Rat-bitten wiring in the walls of my first studio
The bridge railing I just missed while driving in a rage
A dozen snow blind moments
Airplanes we rode that were not attacked and did not crash
Viruses and bacterias and flus that never found us
that havent't killed us
One step left off the edge of a cliff on a mountain hike
The rabid dog that bit but didn't break skin
The tree felled by a crazy harsh wind
A jar of aging jam with a broken seal we almost served with toast
The tainted Tylenol that didn't make it to the drugstores we used
The drugs we didn't take even though we were curious
The victim I didn't become when the Green River was floating bodies
A series, these lives of ours,
And this, our life together,
Of near misses;
Of almosts and could have beens
This is the miracle, you see:
That we are here today;
That we are still here;
That we are here at all.
I particularly like this drawing. I don't usually spark to crosses but the festoons of yours tell a different story. To me it seems the crucifix of suffering is over-shadowed by the hopes, dreams and anticipations of the pilgrims who shed their pain on this path.