Los Indios who live high in the Sierras of Mexico tell a story about a contest between deer and frog. When deer insisted his eyesight was the sharpest, frog suggested a test. The first to see the sun’s rays in the morning would be the winner. “And the wager?” asked the deer. “Twenty heel flies,” said the frog. The proud deer snorted agreement. In the pre-dawn the deer faced the Eastern horizon, but the frog turned toward the distant Western peaks. Long before the deer saw a glimmer of light the frog cried out that he had spied the first rays of the sun on the mountain’s top. To this day the heel flies persecute the deer.
The red clay was baked hard and my brother-in-law swung the pick in a great overhead arc. When he had an area loosened, I stepped in with the shovel to clear it away. Someone had driven a stake to show us where to dig between the low mounds in the overgrown country cemetery. The shovel blade gritted as though I had struck glass. I examined the soil and found countless glittering crystals embedded in the clay—each a perfectly formed prism terminating with a six-sided pyramid at each end, jewels of clear quartz ranging in size from microscopic to an inch long. I imagined these as tiny glinting stars smeared in a milky way of light across the roof of a silent dark hollow earth.
“I don’t think we have to go the full six feet deep, she is such a tiny thing,” he said from inside the grave. “The hospital said they would dispose of the body if we wanted, but I thought we should bury her.” The air around us was filled with the sounds of cardinals and blue jays and the buzzing of insects. I wondered why he showed so little emotion, making little jokes while we dug the grave for his still-born child. We sat in the scant shade of an elm tree and drank ice tea while we waited for the hearse to arrive. I realized I was 16 and this was the first funeral I would have attended.
Several years before, I had stood in my parent’s yard—which adjoined the community cemetery—and watched as a group gathered by an open grave and buried my uncle. My uncle was well loved and respected, but when he took his life no one from my immediate family attended. I didn’t question this choice; I never knew my parents to go to a funeral. I didn’t hear any discussion about his passing or regrets expressed. It would be years before I learned about his suicide, how he never got over surviving the auto accident that took the life of his wife. Death was not a part of the life we led.
I was an adult with a family of my own before death touched me in a personal way. I was atop a ladder deep in a phone connection box when my beeper told me to call home ASAP. I balanced there while water dripped down my collar and called home. My wife told me that my father had died back in Texas. My boss told me I could go home. I said I would work out the day. I didn’t know what to do. No one encouraged me to make the trip back home. I weighed the expense and decided not to go back for the service. I discussed his death a little with my wife but left dealing with it for another day. My inheritance from my father included an ungoverned anger and an abiding shame, but no instruction in mourning.
It’s that magic time when the sun is low across the sea of Cortez and it catches the top of the waves illuminating the whitecaps against the blue serge water. I drag my chair to the edge of the bluff and settle myself with an unopened book just as a graceful turkey vulture floats up right in front of me on the rising air. It drifts up the beach lightly on delicate charcoal feathers. In just a week I have received the news of the passing of two of my closest friends. My old music buddy, Nowell, passed away at his home 2,500 miles away. Two years ago he sat right here with his banjo and we played crusty old mountain tunes while the tides rolled in and the gulls provided counterpoint. Dr. Henry Poore has been failing for a year, so his death is not a surprise, but it hits me oh so hard. The light fades behind the desert rocky range behind me to a golden glow, and the distant sky over the darkening water is the color of a bruised plum that bleeds into Neapolitan layers of embarrassed pink and robin’s egg blue. How do I say goodbye to my friends?
I find my racing spirit syncing with the pulse of the waves against the shore and the lift of the breeze beneath the osprey’s wing. I breathe deeper as the flock of pelicanos comes high over El Moro in formation, and flashes their zinc-white bellies in the last oblique rays of el sol, and dip and pump their way North.
One moment I’m sobbing in concert with the tide, the salt gulf zephyr on my face, and in an instant the wind has switched to the desert and it swells through the cactus thorns and rabbit bush. I hear in it a tune my friend used to play, his lazy boy fiddle bow shuffling along, and the sighing surf becomes Dr. Poore’s soft drawling tones singing sweet and low. I watch the inky black sea merge with the sky and the lights of the shrimp boats mix with the handle of the Big Dipper, and realize there is no longer separation between heaven and earth.
