Mon Savoir

I feel a level of panic. None of this feels psychotic but what I am going to write may sound psychotic. I just feel shaken, but I feel safe. The panic I think, just hear me out, is that I am dying. That I am preparing to go. Stay with me on this...

Back in the late 70's I met a man in New York City whom I shall refer to here as, C. He was visiting from Denmark. We met on a subway platform headed downtown. He approached me to ask for directions and it just so happened that where he wanted to go, I was going too. I was on my way to a party on the Lower East Side but I did not tell him this as I didn't want him to think I was inviting him. I took him to Phoebe’s, a restaurant/bar around the corner from the party to talk with him further. During the conversation, he drew a picture of me and we continued to enjoy one another just spending time talking. At one point I excused myself from the table and went to call the hosts of the party, The McKenna’s, to ask if I might invite him which they readily agreed to. So off we went to the party. 

Over the next short time one could say I developed strong feelings for him. But I was very young and he was nine years older than me and at that time I had no apartment of my own. I slept on other people’s couches and stayed in other people’s homes, (at the time with The Swenson’s), and even though sometimes people felt free to be intimate around me I never felt comfortable doing so myself, so C and I were never intimate. Yet the feelings of intimacy, love and attraction were tangible between us. Too, at that time I had no money and probably couldn't have found Denmark on a map and I didn't want to love someone I never saw again. He ended up staying longer with my friends, even venturing up to their property in Vermont. While still in NYC he made numerous attempts to woo me, visiting often. 

When he returned to Denmark he wrote letters asking after me. But he always wrote the letters to the home in Vermont and always they were handed to me already opened and read which made me think they were never for me and that I was just an afterthought. Then one day a letter came and again it was handed to me already opened and read. In that letter was a picture of him sitting on a beach somewhere with his arm around his new girlfriend, or perhaps it was his wife by then, I do not recall. But I remember searing that picture into my brain. I memorized his hairline and that he had a neck that was long like a flamingo. I saw, because he was topless in the photo, the way in which his shoulder joint left his chest reminding me of The Foothills near Palo Alto where my father lived and that his arms were slender but strong. I noticed how full his lips were. But mostly I noticed that he was healthy in a way in which I wasn't yet. He had met someone that he would share his life with and I knew I was not emotionally there at the time. I felt a tremendous sense of sadness that someone I loved had to go on without me because I wasn't ready. I was too young but more importantly that then I was an emotional thunderstorm in the making. But I tucked him away in my heart and over the years I made small attempts to contact him to no avail.

In the mid 1980's I began working as a volunteer at Bellevue Hospital in the virology clinic when AZT was still in placebo trials. Once AZT was approved I was hired to work at this clinic, and one of the functions of my job was to call men up, (at this time in history it was only men), and inform them that their name had reached the top of the list to receive AZT as they only had limited supplies of this drug at that time. I was the very, very first voice these men heard and sometimes when they arrived at the clinic they would break down in tears sobbing to have finally met the person whose voice they had heard over the phone inviting them to come for a chance to prolong their life. At this time in history, some of these guys never even lived long enough to make the appointment but the ones who did, and because the whole industry was new and unknown, I played parts that no worker’s union would allow today. I went to homes, I allowed those that were homeless to shower in my home. It wasn't just me, but all of us. Every week someone died. There was one patient, Oliver, who I could not wait to see when he was scheduled because he was an exceptionally wonderful mensch. I worked in an outpatient clinic but when one of our patients became ill I would visit them on the ward. One day while visiting in-patients I needed to leave for some reason as I had somewhere to go after work. 

As I left the ward Oliver saw me and called out for me to come see him but I was in such a hurry, I called back over my shoulder that I couldn't but promised to come see him the following day. I went wherever I had to go, went home, and at 4.30 AM I woke up with a start that something had happened to Oliver. I also woke up to see I was covered with the chicken pox. Oliver had died at 3.30 AM.

Oliver was the first of my dreams that I acknowledged as significant and which held meaning. I have had many, but the ones that stand out I shall tell you about. When I had to leave Blanche Honegger Moyse, I left when she was 96 and I had completed my graduate studies in Brattleboro, VT. On the morning that I left, I went to her in the wee hours, got into bed with her and spooned her as we stayed close. I knew I would never see her again. As we held one another I asked her to come to me when she got ready to leave. I told her wherever I was I would know, but to just come to me to say goodbye. I had finished my studies in Vermont and was moving to Buffalo, NY. At the age of 101, on the morning of my 52nd birthday, I woke up weeping and knew she had gone. Hours later Donna, the woman who had replaced me, called to say she had died that morning. Blanche had come to me to say goodbye.

Five years ago when I was in Europe I began to be awakened over and over again by another dream. A hugely disturbing dream which never altered from night to night. In the dream I have gone to visit The Swenson's, the same family I had stayed with years ago when I met C.

The Swenson’s had moved out of the Dyckman Street housing projects sometime in the late 60's or early 70's where once we all had lived, (my family, The Mckenna’s and The Swenson’s), purchasing a home in The Bronx on Grand Avenue. They were hoarders back then and they remained hoarders. Hoarding so much so that Roy, the father moved out because there was no longer any room for him to sit down. When I stayed with The Swenson’s back then I had a small bed in the living room surrounded by piles of the New York Times that reached well over my head and I fell to sleep at night listening to mice scurry through the tunnels they had burrowed in the outskirts of the towered paper closest to the wall. So there I was in Europe and suddenly, out of nowhere, I have the following dream: I have gone to Grand Avenue to visit The Swenson's. I am in the kitchen talking to Christine, the eldest child, only daughter, and the last family member I have ever seen alive. At the time of this dream I had not seen Christine for perhaps ten years, the last time being on a subway platform. I had watched her from a distance at first because something about her seemed ethereal and she was waiting on a subway line that went nowhere near her home in The Bronx. I waited until all possible trains one could have been waiting for had come and gone before approaching her and when I did, she jumped up, before being asked, to tell me that she was on her way to the dentist. When she stood from the bench I could see her teeth were beyond a dentist and that her clothes had been washed to the point of having rendered them transparent. She chatted at me cheerfully never allowing me a word in to ask anything. I could tell she needed to avoid scrutiny and I let it be. I hugged her hard and long and never saw her again.

So in the dream I am in the kitchen talking to Chrissy and suddenly the floor caves in from the weight of the junk stored all around. I fall to the basement but I am not harmed because I fall onto more boxes of junk. I can see the basement steps and a light at the top leading the way out. As I wade through the debris towards the stairs and light I realize that I am not struggling against boxes of junk but rather dead bodies. That is the dream. It began in Düsseldorf, followed me to Oxford, chased me in Belfast and when I returned to Mexico it began to stalk my thoughts. I would be doing the dishes and Christine would pop into my head. I'd be in the shower and I would have a flash of this dream. 

That dream stalked my sleep and my waking hours. It was so insistent that I finally said: Stop, Moira. Call and find out what the problem is. I no longer had any contact information for them so I got on my computer as I knew where they lived and where Roy lived as well. So I type in her name and up comes all of this news footage and newspaper articles about a hoarder, Christine Swenson, whose home had to have a HAZMAT team come in because the neighbors had complained of the smell and various health violations. After digging through the crap in the house the HAZMAT team finds a mummified body that appeared to have been dead from 3-8 years. It was her father Roy. No one mentions that she had a brother, Jimmy, that was mentally ill and never left his room. I learn much later that she claims he went south. I know he is buried somewhere on one of their properties. When she lost that home she moved to their country home in Palenville, and I am told she piled it high with trash and that eventually it burned straight down to the ground.

The next important dream I had was about James H Case, lll. Jim Case was the former dean of Empire State College, Hartsdale, where I did my undergraduate work and who was a second reader for my graduate work in Vermont. As an undergraduate student he taught early American literature and at one point he had the class read, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I’d never read before. When we gathered together as a class to discuss the book I sat there convinced that I had read a different book by accident because every single thing that was said on that day was like I had wasted my time reading Playboy. I was so sure that I had read the wrong book that I even asked to see the book of the women sat next to me to learn what mistake I had made. I was too embarrassed to speak up and say what I thought I had read because it was so dissimilar that I felt wrong. But when it came time to write our finals I wrote about what I had read, what I had experienced. When we gathered at the end of the semester to say goodbye, Jim singled me out as the one person that had been most helpful to him. That he had taught Huck Finn for 40 years and had never seen it as I had seen it. I was in love with that man's intellectual brain and how he thought about literature. Madly in love with the way he read. I never saw him again except to bring him lobsters upon a return from a visit to Prince Edward Island. Two years ago I received a message from Linked-In saying someone had viewed my profile. I have never gotten an email from Linked-in and I can't even say I have a profile on there, but when I went to see who had viewed my profile I saw that it was Jim Case. I simply wrote back that yes, it was me, and that I was alive and well. He never wrote back.

Last year I began to have dreams about him, the same one over and over again and by now I recognize these dreams as messages. In this dream I have gone to a school where he is teaching, to say hello. I go to wait for him in a room opposite the classroom door. Eventually I see students file out of the room indicating that class is over. I go to speak with him and I can see he is surrounded by students talking to him. All I can see is the top of his head surrounded by a flock of students. I head towards the gathering and when I reach the group he is gone but I can see him walking away. He gets on a bus which I miss, and I get on another bus to follow him. I see him exit his bus and I exit my bus, but behind him. He then gets on a boat, and I miss that boat, and I get on another boat to follow him. All I can ever see is the back of him and I can never catch up. I wake up, go to the computer and see that he has died the month before asking that in lieu of flowers any money sent should be directed to The Southern Poverty Law Center which in my imagination I saw as a nod to me and Huckleberry Finn.

Four months ago I began to have thoughts about C. I have always had thoughts about C so I did not think much of it. But then they became insistent. Then the thoughts became nighttime dreams. They were not unsettling dreams but rather simply a feeling of: Talk to him. He needs something. I put aside these dreams and feelings for two months and then it became: Talk to him now. So once again I get on the internet and no matter what I do I can not find him. He has no footprint on the internet that I can find. I scroll through pages of pictures looking at people named CT, and they are either too young or not him. Then I begin using VPN going into different countries to find him and suddenly there he is, but the picture was taken in the 90's and the information is old. I stare at the picture so long I think I am just crazy and have willed myself to imagine it is him. I am looking at a picture of a man that is older. I do math on paper to see if I could possibly be in my right mind as the picture is already almost twenty years old. I dismiss the picture as too impossible to rely on. Then one day I notice words in Danish written underneath and I translate the words, noticing the organization that represents him and again feel certain it is him. And suddenly I notice the long neck like a flamingo, and the full lips. That underneath the hat he is wearing in the photo he is balding. Suddenly I can smell him. So I find a Danish phone book online and record the telephone number for every C I can find in Denmark while simultaneously looking at a map of Denmark that places a dot where that particular C lives. I look at the terrain and look at satellite pictures of homes and circle one number and one home that seem the most likely to be him. A farmhouse, near water, but in the country. A home that I had always imagined he lived in and a home I had fantasized I would have lived in had I run off with him years ago. But I call every number anyway. But I put asterisks near this particular number.

I move the numbers from my desk to the phone area in the kitchen preparing to call and suddenly I am terrified. I can't call. So I decide to look up people on the Couchsurfing network instead who live in Denmark. I have decided that, like Prince Edward Island, Denmark was a small place, an island, where the odds were good that six degrees of separation were still intact. I also did not want to learn of his death, if it came to that, over the phone. I wanted to hear of his death from a stranger that had written those words so that I could read the message again and again rather than hear these heavy words, have to hang up the phone, and never be able to call again. I wrote to six individuals on the network. I learned after I eventually spoke with C, that three never responded, but one found his address, and another actually called and spoke to him to relay my message that I was searching for him and had known who he was from the link I had sent which included C’s picture. But before learning all of that I simply stood terrified to place those calls.

I steeled myself, placing those calls one after the other. I had to finish this job I felt compelled to do, and then let it go; let it be. Once I had done all that I could I knew it would never bother me again.

Early the next morning, just a few days ago, I received a call from C, and almost the first thing he says to me is: I have been waiting for this call for ten years. When he called, and because no one had called me back immediately the day before, I was convinced that he didn't even exist and that the picture I had seen was simply the fantasy of an old woman wishing. I was so upset and nervous that I really can't remember a word he said. I was a chatter-box, acting like it was simply a long-time-no-see conversation that was not particularly important to me. That is was all casual and normal. I hung up the phone, -we had talked for three hours,- and I burst into tears. I cried practically all day. This is not my habit, and even though I had finally found him, learned he was OK, something was still bugging me. So I called again the next day with the intention of listening instead. This time I hear the sound of his shoes as he walks across the floor. I tell him it sounds like he is wearing slippers that sound like clogs, he doesn’t know this word, clog, and instead tells me that he is wearing klompen, (a Danish word for clog). He describes a fire in his stove that I can see and smell before he informs me of its existence. I hear a radio in the background. I listen as he describes his life and what I hear is that although he is divorced his family is intact. That he has turned his ex-wife into his best friend. I hear him tell me that he often buys a newspaper and then sits on a bench so that he can have small talks with various members of his community as they pass by. 

I then hear another conversation in my head that I had with the husband of my best friend, Freda, twenty years earlier and the feelings I had when I listened to his words. Her husband had told me that he wasn't religious but that he went to church so that he could see the members of his community and simply say hello. When my friend's husband said this it was something that I told myself to not forget as it somehow seemed important then. I hear C tell me that he has always been getting ready to die. I heard him say he had had a good and rich life. I clung to his words as he described how I had been special to him. I discerned that his life was there with his family. I listened to all of the beauty of my own existence expressed by another about their own life. I hung up the phone and cried for the rest of the day. Uncontrollably and all I wanted to do, the only place I wanted to be was outside his door. And in the middle of my mayhem, I look at the mailing address he has given me over the phone and see that it is the address of the home I imagined he lived in - the house I had imagined I would have lived in had I run off with him years earlier.

So this morning when I opened my eyes, two things happened that rattled me. One, my cat, Arlo, the cat that I’d brought from NYC to live with me here in Mexico, sat three inches from my face staring at me. Staring at me with his eyes so dilated that I froze on the spot. He didn't move for what seemed like two or three minutes; he stared at me with an expression of: I know everything that you are thinking. I will write now and tell you that I know I was staring at a soul. Not one soul because I now understand that a soul contains all things that live since the beginning of time. I stared back unable to move. I saw the entire universe from the beginning of time and our complete and entire collective consciousness. Two, what woke me suddenly was that I had the sensation that death was slowly seeping into my body. That I was dying. I couldn't feel my feet or lower legs from the knee down, they were numb and the sensation was moving towards my heart. The expression on Arlo’s face never wavered. I felt him convey: It is not time yet, and while still looking at Arlo I was able to will this strange leg and foot sensation right back out of my body. I could feel it receding. And then Arlo walked away. But the experience left me shaken to my core. It was then that I realized that my insistence to contact C was not a dream about him but rather I was the one that needed to say goodbye. He is the only person in my life that I wanted one last time with. One last moment.

I couldn’t possibly catch up on forty years with him over the phone, an instrument that I detest. I had listened to him tell me of his wife's depression and I knew I didn't need to tell him of mine or how I had struggled. I listened to him tell me of the way his wife smiles when he, over the years, has talked to her of me and I don't need to explain that I like this woman, that I have never met, deeply. I can't explain how I felt listening to him talk about his daughter except to say for the first time in my life I felt maternal.

It hurts deeply to hear how content he is without me. How he went on and created a beautiful life and that he created it with someone that I love dearly because she gave him what he deserved and which he did well by. I can go now because the last person has been spoken to. The last person I wanted to say goodbye to. There is no one else.

And so, as I finish this I see that this dream was for me. C needs nothing from me except to say he was loved and that he mattered to me.

And now that this has been said, I feel calm. I am at peace as I know I am going, but not just yet.