16) Darkness, Dying, and Being

Innesfree I shall arise and go now. We go to see Simon. We arrived Wednesday. Spent Thursday seeing some of Sydney. Spent Friday seeing Glenorie countryside, an hour plus drive north of Sidney, and now that it is Saturday, the 2nd of June, we at last are soon to be on our way. Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, almost three hours from here, is where Tony and Simon await our visit. Rob will drive up independently from Sydney. Mike will drive up later from here. We all hope to get even half an hour with Simon. Four men, old boys all, paying our respect to an old comrade. Tonight we will have dinner with Tony and Aisha, and with luck, Simon too. Tomorrow, Sunday, mayhap Justin and I will see Simon again. Old friends, for the last time. On Monday we drive back here, from where I write (even as Onika, Mike's 22 year old daughter, comes in at 6:30 from the Simple Plan concert she attended with friends). I ask her what's her favorite song. "This song saved my life," she answers with a croaky voice, and goes off to bed. The morning mists are beginning to rub up against the windows of this dark great room. Karl, at 17, is yet again asleep on the couch with the TV at volume 8 out of 10. The house has not yet stirred. I await Mike or Justin. I cannot reach my one fallen sock. The other is just over my right toes. I cannot get my leg up high enough. Onika, in the semi-dark, does not notice. A life saved, another about to die; it all is one. Is there really any one beginning or end, or is it all a series of sentences interspersed by commas, halted by periods. And then we move on in a stream of consciousness, or not. Interruptions can break the flow. Perhaps Mike or Justin might stop this typing, come and get breakfast ready. We planned to leave by 8:30, after I've phoned Linda, but perhaps not. To go with the flow as the days and the nights unfold into a tapestry of the meaning of our making, or is it, like the mist outside, a giant blur interrupted by the dim recognition of the usually known, the trunks of trees, the contravelations one becomes used to at my height in this chair, breast-high barricades all. But still there is no stir. The tv blares. I type with a sense of urgency. How much longer does Simon really have? Has Rob (who visited last night from Sydney and then drove back) by now gone for his morning run? Will he get the missive I wrote earlier this morning for him, for us? Will he receive the letter I just sent along with it? It'd be good to hug him again. We all worried for him late last night, as he was very tired and overworked and had yet to drive back well over an hour on narrow and twisting roads. The house remains undisturbed. Or rather, remains in the vein of the blaring tv, the mist or fog getting less dense in the outside light, and people perhaps still asleep. Does Mike or Justin tap away in their rooms, as involved in this e-format world of ours as I am? Even Nancy is about to purchase an iPad. Nancy at 90, but determined to keep apace. Even across the oceans. And yes, it is the voice of the Canadian actors in Whose Line is it Anyway that I hear on the tv. I thought I heard them say Calgary! This song saved my life, a simple plan indeed. Would that it would save Simon's, but reality intruded. We humans can be easily deluded about so very many things. Perhaps that's why Mike's joke about the cheque being in the male (sic.) is so effective. Meaning-making of everything, yet victims of our own construct. But we can not sit still. No, I shall arise and go now, and go to Innesfree, and there a hut of clay and wattle make, and live by the sound of the honey bee. Seems sweetness is often thought of somewhere beyond, like a cat licking at the milky fog on the other side of the window pane. Difficult just to be in the present, to sit here in the comparative dark, and accept.