Connections

 17 years later, you are still here on your birthday (and any other day). This October you are sharing this space with a small but special bunch.

Connections

Gile, 1.

November 2012

The day Gile arrives to the house from SPCA, he is so tiny he can fit into the stretched palm of my hand. The first encounter between the two older feline residents and the baby newcomer is predictably awkward and standoffish. A minuscule fluff of brownish down-like fur, he needs to stand his ground however improbable that seems. I’m close, ready to intervene; these are the critical first moments. When the other cats approach a little too much, Gile clambers onto my crouching right leg, huddles up, and from this safe platform begins to take in the coordinates of his new world. His small paws are gently pressed into my leg, just enough to make us both stable and aware of each other’s presence.

February 2023

The vet oncologist is young, soft-spoken and permanently smiling. After she and her assistant spent half an hour with Gile, going through all the reports and examining him once more, they come get me in the waiting area and I join them inside the exam room. Gile is standing on a wide metallic table, big-eyed and a little cowed down but alert and bright. I sit down, and the vet begins to explain carefully and slowly, the tonality of the voice unmistakably colored by the sad register. I have already seen the reports and half-way through her speech, I stop listening, noticing Gile’s elegant and silent leap from the table to the floor. He goes around my chair, jumps lightly and easily straight into my lap, and then huddles up on my right leg positioning himself comfortably and safely. His paws are softly pressing into my leg, like a stamp of our synchronized presence and quiet love, and as we sit there not listening, we might as well be anywhere and everywhere, for all we care, forever.

 

Gile, 2.

Piggy-backing, from the beginning to the end.

December 2012

Spring 2023

Scissors

 I open the cutlery drawer in my father’s kitchenette and the first thing I see is the scissors, looking up at me. They have their designated place in the front of the drawer, wedged inside a plastic spoon. Once I mistakenly placed them elsewhere, which caused a mini crisis, as my father believes that the frequently used objects should always be kept in the same spot so they can be readily accessible. These scissors didn’t always live in this particular drawer; I first got to know them in another kitchen drawer in another apartment in another city, where we lived when I was a child, and when my mother was alive. Being the only scissors in the house (not counting the small nail scissors which dwelled in the bathroom), they were often needed and used: in the kitchen, in the children’s room, in the pantry. To cut thread, string, scotch-tape, paper, hair. When an object is an integral part of your household and your personal universe and you share it with other members of that universe, you get to know it extremely well; its very shape, its contour, its lines become something you’re familiar with, something you know intimately well, something that could even be said – granted, with a slight touch of exaggeration – to be one of the foundation blocks of your identity. You look at that object, and you see yourself and your life as you know it or remember it, since it was intricated in many moments, each one containing an array of circumstances, emotional landscapes, mental dispositions, efforts, goals, dreams (many of which get coated with a sweet blanket of nostalgia in later years). The soft ovals where the fingers go, the blackened screw joining the two blades in the middle, the chipped glaze on the side and at the tip, all give these scissors a face and a body, which I recognize instantly. And it’s summer with all the windows in our drafty apartment open, my mother is busy at the kitchen counter, her hair short, her mind drifting with the music coming from the long-antenna radio; there’s a smell of cooking from our stove and from the neighbours’ also, and small sounds of errands, doors opening and closing and someone, my brother perhaps, walking carefreely through the hallway, and children’s voices from the bright, wide outside beyond and below the balcony where the laundry is drying. A whole intimate world well preserved and alive in the shape of the scissors. 

St. John’s Wort Oil

It has changed about four fridges, and in each one, it had its place in one of the drawers in the door. A small glass bottle that once held juice (the side of the lid says “Cappy”) has a tag saying, in my mother’s clear all caps handwriting, “ST. JOHN’S WORT OIL FROM 1996.” The piece of transparent scotch tape over it is so old that parts of it are yellow or cracked, and the paper from the original bottle label on the side is so worn out that it has turned into a fuzz of fine fibers and threads. It has become a permanent fixture of the fridge and if one day it isn’t there, there will be something very odd about it. My father uses it whenever he has a burn or a blister. 27 years after my mother made it and 17 years after she died, I open the little bottle and pour a few drops onto my left thumb which has been sore for a few days. I don’t know that this oil is good for such things, but I rub it in anyway. The liquid, which was originally yellowish-brown, has turned a vibrant ruby red and has a silkiness of a most delicate handkerchief. As I let it permeate my skin, I wonder where my mother picked the herb, where she left it to dry out, how long it was there… Which olive oil she used, and how she drained it. I’d love to retrace the steps, all the way to that walk she must have made and the moment – probably in late summer – when she stopped and picked the yellow flowers, deciding she’ll use them to make the remedy. Did she know that that moment would then permeate three decades, and possibly more, even after she was gone? That it was a kind of legacy and an instant of magic, an alchemy of love reaching far beyond her fingers and into other lives? Healing, connecting, perpetuating. Loving, and not needing anything else to be said.

Lines

“Hey,” I say, “let’s try something.” She comes over quickly, with a bouncing gait of a 5-year-old girl. “What?” her voice is curious and cooperative. I stretch out my left arm and kneel down so we’re on the same level. “See this line, just below the inside of my elbow?” I point to it. “Ha,” she says and looks intrigued, “what’s that?” “Well,” I say, “your dad’s mom, who was also my mom, had one just like that on her arm too.” She thinks a little and says, half-stating, half-asking, “my grandmother.” She is still learning family relations and trees, and placing correctly those she’s never met and never will is somewhat difficult. “Yes. So your dad and I have it because she did, and I think you have it too. Let’s see your arm.” She stretches out her arm and when she sees the same line in the same place, she’s fascinated. “Look, it’s the same, I have it too!” Her voice is excited and also serious, as if she felt honored and proud to be admitted to some kind of an adult club. Nearly 45 years separates us – and most of the year, a whole ocean – but right here and now, we couldn’t be more connected, and we both feel it in our different ways: I with my half-century, she with her half-decade. We put our arms side by side with our lines continuing each other, and there it is. The continuum, the long line of those who lived before us and continue to live in us, even if we’ve never met. The long line of lives full of aspirations, tribulations, histories, loves and griefs, which weren’t ours but which inform our own and expand our inner space to galactic and cosmic dimensions, linking us through all the generations to something far, far back when existence was measured in particles and pulses. And at the other end of it: Zozi’s arm and mine, side by side only for a few minutes before something else calls our immediate attention and we run off to it, but unmistakably marked by lines of connection, criss-crossing, reinforcing, hemming, securing the fabric of our days.