Falling

Descibing autumn for my Father

"Imagination is always considered to be the faculty of *forming* images. But it is rather the faculty of deforming the images offered by perception, of freeing ourselves from the immediate images: it is especially the faculty of changing images."
—Gaston Bachelard Air and Dreams: An Essay on Imagination and Movement, 2002

I was supposed to be writing you about pink and grey and I still will, but then a couple of days ago up north it was kind of the perfect Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. After making a slow braised tofu roast with carrots potatoes and parsnips, and what was a very butter-forward bowl of mashed potatoes, and orangey cranberry sauce, and then helping to eat it all and clean up, I went outside to the porch where it was dark and starry to talk to my Papa. He was calling from the west coast where fall seems to be more about the beginning of the rainy season and the mostly-evergreens mostly don’t change. So he was missing the particular crunch of leaves in this part of the country. My Papa has been coming out of a dark time and he asked, so I promised to send him a picture of the perfect fall day I’d just had. He is staring down an old folks home with a sense of humour and optimism that is sort of infectious. How did I get old, he keeps asking the mirror, and I can’t help but agree that it’s hard to picture Papa, who has the spirit of an 8-year old on Christmas morning doing old-people things or confined to any sort of institution unless he is leading some sort of Randle McMurphy-like rebellion.

This is the same Papa who biked across every state in the US as a teenager, taught himself to paint with his left hand after putting his right hand through a window while sleepwalking. This is the Papa that tried to sign up for the army but was saved from going to Vietnam because of his asma puffer, then fell in love with the heiress to a beer fortune, sought his own fortune salmon fishing in Alaska, but ended up broke and hitchhiking down the coast to meet his love in the summer of love at a San Francisco hotel only to find she was not alone in the hotel room and he ended up sleeping in the hallway that night. This is the same Papa who once camped with me under a solar blanket and a Walmart-brand Carebears blanket somewhere in Northern California. We made golden crumbly cornmeal pancakes with fresh wild blackberries ripened with sea air and the spirit of those Sequoia redwoods big enough to drive a car through.

This would be the same Papa who was a fire fighter, a gardener, a mountain climber, and who played Bob Dylan songs and Irish Rover songs and Gordon Lightfoot songs, and his own songs down in the living room in wool socks with holes, like lullabies to his children except that he kept going until way after everyone had fallen asleep. He brought his guitar, harmonica, and real palm fronds into his services as a small-town minister—a calling he discovered during an acid trip just before I was born. It was this Papa, too, who never showed up that boxing day, the snow all chaos in the sky and he was just walking out past the furthest mall while his kids ate carrot sticks waiting. The Papa who the psych doctors said would never recover from brain damage and never hold down a job but who did over years rewire his synapses as a driver for the community foodbank with the map of city, slowly redrawing his own brain map. The Papa that showed up at my sister’s house with a dufflebag full of dirty socks and stained t-shirts mixed with sand from when he was renovating the Wild West post office with our craziest uncle and a big black dog that ended up shot by a neighbour. The same Papa who ended up meeting Patrick Swayze in a bar in New Mexico after moving out of the chickencoop where the love triangle with the follower of Ram Daas had gone haywire. The Papa that read my brother the complete works of Carlos Costenada while I was trying to become a normal teenager in Arizona. The Papa who jigsawed the alphabet out of blocks of wood nearly cutting off his finger and then rubbed each letter with beeswax and tung oil and then built a box for all the letters and sent it to me after my first child was born. That Papa made the fall colours request.

So then why can’t I seem to make a picture of fall for him? Something on the edge between the seasons. Something alive and dying at the same time. Something with bite. And consolation. Something that might ride the melancholy of change. I will keep trying to draw it but in the meantime I send you some scraps and this letter.

Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry c. October 1927 featured in "Diaries,"

Dear Papa,

You asked for a picture of fall. And it must be the suddenness. A sudden fire brought on by cold brushing the tree overnight. And not just colour but the way the air holds the crunch of walking on gravel and then the crispy papery sound of footfalls scuffing through the leaves in hiking boots kicking up a munching becoming of the dead leaves into dirt. I found the word Herbstduft meaning autumn scent, and 상쾌하다 meaning cool and fresh at the same time, and Rummescent with its hint of both rum colour and the warm chewing of rumination. I tried to find my own words like golden leafed rustling, a resiny scent breaking down into smaller and smaller components uncovering colour while falling apart. But it’s no good. You’d need the blue blue sky and the edge of wind and the brassy battle of sun cascading down through the leaves to still-green dewy grass. You’d need the dead-end gravel road from your dream, and the ditch, and the wild grapes that grow there. The returning to a place and feeling crossing over and back from memory.

You would need it in a letter reopened years later. And then you would remember that the seed of the wild grape made your mouth numb, the ziplock bag wouldn’t close the woman who drove down from the mansion on the hill in an ATV to leave a note on your car in green marker on faded orange construction paper all in capital letters, DONT LEAVE YOUR CAR HERE. EVER AGAIN. The way at the bottom of ditch there was soft spot and it was full of muck and you were alone and lonely and it was beautiful surrounded by all the tattered flags of the day.

Love from Jason

Ursula K. Le Guin...