ALL THAT IS HOLY

Yesterday I began teaching English to a handful of twenty-something students in Huaraz. We sang "You've Got a Friend" and "Imagine," practicing pronunciation. 

They are shy, but eager to learn. We discussed media and I gave homework. For today, they should find a Spanish article or program and describe it in English in a few sentences. 

There are no movie theaters in Huaraz. But the festival of el Señor de la Soledad continues all week, massive, explosive, dancing, drinking, and celebration, fireworks.

Neighborhoods and civic groups prepare for years to perform in elaborate regalia with complex choreography, sometimes in competition, with drumming and shakers and whistles, continuing some nights until dawn. 

"It is impossible not to dance" is printed on the back of one group's brightly colored costumes, with feathered headdress and masks that blur facial features and gender. 

Dogs and children enter the church, where the crowds light candles and pray and the priests say ritual mass, with singing, all at the same time. It is dizzying, exhilarating.

In the pulsing crowd of people watching and participating, I appear to be the only tourist.

While it doesn't seem like a drug culture in Peru, there are daily reminders of the historic religious use of psychedelic substances. In several areas, there are ayahuasca ceremonies and shamans. School children can be seen poking at the mescaline laden San Pedro cactus growing in the yard. Coca leaves are sold at the market, a full bag for 30 cents. 

With the religious activities here outside the church of el Señor de la Soledad, adding additional substances seems entirely unnecessary. 

I like the appropriateness of honoring "soledad," or solitude, at this church. I am alone on this trip, but I have not felt alone even for a minute.

Maybe it's because I just finished reading George Saunders' "Lincoln in the Bardo," where the dead live on, speaking and passing through the bodies of the living.  But it has never seemed so real to me that Lee is here. Everything I see and hear and do, I feel she is experiencing as well, her vision restored. The children, the colors, the scenery, the tradition, the majesty, all are hers, fully, finally.

This is the afterlife. 

https://goo.gl/photos/rvKTynWjVpgSkncN7

LOVING THE TOURIST

Into wide mouths they risk all kind of strange

Sour sacraments of such they never dreamed,

Channel the tribes extinct and rituals gleaned,

And both let blood their savior. Naught will change.

Blond trekkers come, ascend and gape and soar

By tracks once worn by pilgrims then aglow.

Two worlds, two dreams, and yet it is as though

Each traveller trod in search of heaven's door.

Instead of votives, selfies light their claim,

Instead of lambs their currency is bills,

The chatter, thrill, enlightenment and ills...

The centuries though pass remain the same.

My pensive path leads slowly. Let them be.

My stuff destructs with separate bliss and free.

– Emily Dickinson

5/14/2017

SOLITARY REFINEMENT

After teaching English to seven beaming and recalcitrant students in the morning:

Up the hill to the edge of town, 

to the cemetery vaults, 

the maze of familiar names, Robles Sanchez Mejia Ochoa, 

children are playing sliding down slanted burial vaults, 

visiting the park with ancestors to greet you, 

high above Huaraz, looking down, 

what color is Huaraz, this red brown corrugated canvas of houses,

sprawling below, seemingly contented 

explosions and piercing flutes of those practicing for tonight, 

yet another evening in the Señor de la Soledad celebration, the drums, 

and in the distance, the snow-covered Cordillera Blanca, impassive, 

daring you not to gasp in awe at their majesty, day after day

the likely rain of the afternoon en route 

as augured by the darkened clouds approaching

the christ of loneliness

this festival welcomes me

the lone traveler, widowed, 

walking with ghosts in the graveyard, on the streets, in life

to be solitary and never alone

holding hands with those passed away

the placid Bodhisattva amid the excited tourists, 

blotting their noise and letting the rays of centuries 

of power and mind swoop past them, 

over and around their Teflon pre-packaged vacations,

the daytripping noisemakers 

and, thunk! sink like perfectly aimed arrows into my heart, 

my lonely heart, my empty heart

taking each piercing, blinding truth with a gulp

saint sebastian of the quotidian banalities

the day, the month, the season 

disappearing from consciousness

from the need to know

with the clocks mostly stopped

my hiking shoes washed 

by Miguel in the Plaza de Armas 

with his box of brushes and polishes

the mud removed 

the dung streams of 16000 feet of altitude

where one survives by

practicing falling, calling it sitting

knowing how to collapse on these rocks, 

alone and free to fall, fall,

far from the old new world abandoned 

to its sins and quarrels,

testing the resiliency of knees 

denying their age

with perfect wonderment

HISTORY LESSON

With only 24 hours, I forgave myself for being a tourist for one day, hopping a Uber to Miraflores Parque Kennedy, hiking over to the Huaca Pucllana ruins, and then boarding a Miratour bus to circle the highlights of Lima, the capital city.

Freaking yummy street food, I heard myself thinking. Maybe I simply got caught up in the Peruvian foodie mystique. 

In the park, actors were performing (or rehearsing) a dramatic play and drawing a small crowd. The park is known for the cats living there, sleeping under bushes. Signs warn against dropping off more cats and urge people to "adopt, don't buy" the feline creatures.

The pre-Incan Huaca Pucllana ruins from about 400AD were a center for sacred congregation and human sacrifice. But covered with mounds of dirt, they were used as a motocross racing hills up until 36 years ago, when the ruins were discovered and excavated. 

They were built with vertical bricks -- resembling arrays of bookshelves -- to withstand tremors of earthquakes, something the Quechua speaking people apparently understood well.

So far, the Peruvian people strike me as very neat or orderly, in speech as well as city planning and care. The places I've been are cleaner than the ticking of a Swiss watch. 

Riding al fresco on the top of the double decker bus, I manage to take in more sun than was good for me. My face is red. 

A young Australian guy tells me of his six month plan in the country, a trip he intends to culminate with an ayahuasca ceremony in Iquitos.

"I'm ready for it now," he said.

Apart from chewing coca leaves for the altitude, and sampling various cervezas and pisco, I probably won't take the psychedelic trip this round. 

Our three-hour tour passes the parks and buildings, with a stop at the Iglesia de San Francisco and Convent. 

This could be the most impressive Catholic structure I've seen. Every inch is a work of meticulously crafted art, with ancient library, winding staircases, a pipe organ, and a room where the friars gathered to sing. A few dozen monks  live nearby and continue the traditions. 

And underneath the church itself are the catacombs, where some 25,000 bodies have been buried, their bones visible to visitors who must crouch to walk through the labyrinth beneath the church.  No pictures are allowed, supposedly, although everything about the place cries out to be photographed. 

Somehow a photo of the mass grave managed to turn up on my phone!

I wanted to go to Peru since I was 22 years old. In fact, in 1972 Kevin Casey and I embarked on a hitchhiking trip with that destination in mind.  We had set out from Denver on the ramp to the interstate with a cardboard sign that read simply, "LIMA".

Lee had planned to go with us, but the veterinarian at the animal hospital where she worked talked her out of it. He thought I was a bad influence on her.  So she baked us Logan Bread, a protein rich molasses concoction, that Kevin and I lugged all the way to Guatemala in a black garbage bag when we finally ate the last of it.  

Of course, the veterinarian was right.  I'm glad Lee ultimately didn't listen to him. 

When she and I decided to get married and Lee told her parents she was getting married, her father Clyde looked at her and said, "Not to Greg, I hope."  

Pastors turned down our request to be married. No one believed it could work. Then, a wise Mennonite preacher counseled us and agreed to perform the ceremony. We didn't lie about our steep differences. But he must have seen something that convinced him it would work. I always believed that the strength of his faith in us was a factor in the longevity of our times shared.

A New York Times headline just popped up in my phone notifications, "DJT prepares to sign new executive order..." 

I'd rather puke ayahuasca than dwell even a moment on such news. I deleted it, unread.

SWITCH CONTINENT, HEMISPHERE, WORLD

I am in Lima in an apartment. A dog is barking. It's an unusual apartment complex. Every window faces another apartment. It's very clean and a woman just showed up to prepare me breakfast and coffee. Could be worse.

In the hours before I left Urbana, I sensed Lee more than I had in a very long time.

A sort of vision occurred. She was downstairs in the hammock, as real as always. Those flashes of her presence have been happening with more regularity. I welcome them.

Somewhere in my papers, there is a poem I wrote about her in 1973, when we were living together in a trailer in the country. She could be so exasperating. It was part of her charm. Our whole 46-year relationship was like that, a wonderful wrestling match. 

In spite of our disagreements, I could be sitting in the trailer, tinkering with record albums and recording experimental soundtracks on a Dolby-enhanced cassette tape deck, and my heart would jump up, excited, to hear her coming home, tromping through the pasture, likely with horse shit on her shoes, whistling.

Joan Didion wrote about the year of magical thinking following the death of her husband, and sometimes it just doesn't seem that Lee is gone. 

I may never have another partner. Building a relationship is much work. I don't have 46 more years. I might be content to sort through the past and fill my days with recollection.

Our last months together were in one sense the best. We had no other agenda, nothing to accomplish but to love each other.

Amtrak arrived two hours late and I arrived in Chicago around midnight, walking the few blocks from Union Station to the CTA.

I sidestepped the throw-up on the floor of the Blue Line car, where a bizarrely burly cop watched three homeless men trying to sleep; They had asked me for money. I only had a quarter.

I knew I'd be spending the night in the airport. Minutes before I left home,  I checked what the Internet knew about places to crash. Someone recommended the Hilton Lobby, which was quiet and relatively comfortable, despite the three millennial girls across the way laughing and talking loudly and sleeping on the floor. Still , they gave me cover. I didn't look homeless, just another traveler.

Spirit Airlines are the chicken buses of the air. While others were complaining about no-show pilots, missed flights, thwarted vacations, I remained unperturbed. The screaming children – and there were many – didn't seem to be fazing me. I was in some kind of zone.

With zero amenities to distract us, my traveling companions were very pleasant, a young man with tattooed fingers by the window, a young Vanity Fair reading women in the middle and me, juggling to cram my cold weather hoodie, down jacket, stocking cap and the like – in preparation for the snow-capped mountains of Peru – into my pack while everyone else was dressed for disco night in sweltering Miami.

In the Ft. Lauderdale airport, I caught up on New Yorkers, reading profiles of Steve Bannon and Rod Dreher. Dreher has posited the Benedict Option, espousing withdrawing from engagement from the world by forming religious communities. Fleeing is a form of resistence. But I know enough about the Bruderhof and Amish communities, which he seems to revere, to know that all is not well in in those intentional paradises, either. 

At the last minute before the flight, I downloaded the ebook of Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities, the Herman Melville novel I've never even tried to crack. 

Charging my phone in the Cuban restaurant, I down a large beer and eat very dry chicken chunks covered with chicharones with rice and plantains. But lime cures all ills.

The Spanish/English spoken universally here in Florida is so Caribbean as to be slang and sometimes nigh onto indecipherable. I just use both simultaneously without thinking. No one seems to notice how tenuous my Spanish is, in this manner.

The 5 hour flight to Lima could have been excruciating, but I sat next to a 6 year old and his father, an "adult babysitter," his description of someone who owns and manages 31 properties in Detroit. Not exactly a slum landlord, but fascinating, with Asian wife and three sons, the 18 year old also on flight. The older son is also buying properties with money he earned in summer jobs.  

They fly all over the world, also using Spirit cut rate fares, escaping what they see as the inevitable coming of the end of the world. They home school.

The arrival is smooth. Customs a breeze. The money exchange convenient and the Spanish spoken here is rapid, clean, and easy to understand.  No one even tries to speak English to me.

I grab an Uber to my AirBnb, make myself at home, plug in the WiFi, and start chatting and video chatting with Peruvians on line. 

Just like home. 

I pour myself a Pisco from the cabinet. 

ONE YEAR AGO AND TOMORROW

New baby ducklings finally showed up this year in the Boneyard by our house. There are nine of them, swimming excitedly alongside their placid parents. They are late. 

 

Tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. I leave for Peru. 

 

Yesterday, I wrote a school in Huaraz to see about work. They wrote back. I'll be teaching English to young people while I'm there.  

Machu Picchu may have to wait. It has patiently done so for the past 40 years I've wanted to go, so I'm not worried. 

Last year, there were seven ducklings already swimming by the end of March. I always reported to Lee about the ducklings.  

Lee and I were taking walks together in March last year.  She couldn't see the ducks swimming below, so I described them to her.  

By May, she was in and out of the hospital, taking chemotherapy, having surgeries. There are gaps in my journal. We listened at her bedside to the new Radiohead album with the song "True Love Waits" and the lyrics, "Just don't  leave, don't leave..."  

We had listened to the audiobook of Jonathan Franzen's "Purity," something we argued about as we walked Honey in the park. We watched television series – Bosch, Justified, The Good Wife, The Closer – in their entirety. I described the action. 

There was so much purpose in every day, so much.  

I feel Lee more with me when I'm traveling than when I'm here in our house, where her absence is constantly present.  

In Peru, as in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras earlier this year, she will be constantly sprinkling her spirit over me.

I'm grateful and I'm gone.