Origins of the Universe and What It All Means (5 page)

After days of rifling his files, it began to appear to me that he has been documenting his life. Perhaps he anticipated his future value to the academic world would merit the preservation of his every printed word, both personal and professional. Poised for fame. Or posthumous recognition. I know that Thomas Jefferson copied everything he wrote, too; he used a cumbersome duplicating machine that produced a copy of a piece of writing simultaneously via a set of parallel pens attached to an elaborate configuration of wooden boxes. As a prolific letter writer and timely archivist, Jefferson managed to document his viewpoints and insights so that we could study his ideas long after his death. Perhaps my father was creating a body of work to be studied after his death, too. Or maybe the archive I retrieved from his office is a manifestation of his narrow yet multi-branched intensity. His groping on the edge of a neurological spectrum.

It had been several days since my father called with his list. Technically, I had everything he'd requested, but still I holed up in my father's office. I scrutinized the files for hours, reading under a dim lamp while the sky outside turned black. I randomly pulled letters, one after another. When I look back on those hours now, I see myself as if through the wide-angle lens of an old camera mounted near the ceiling, a grainy image I have contrived in my mind: In the photo's frame, I straddle the open sliding-glass door that separates the house from the backyard; I stand, papers in hand, with one foot on each side of the threshold; in the light, I will deliver—fulfill the request made of me by gathering items on a list; in the dark, I scavenge—search for meaning. I traversed the line between intimacy and emotional distance, empathy and resentment, self-serving voyeurism and objective observation. Good daughter or bad? More to the point, does the motivation justify the behavior?

As I kneeled before an open drawer my eyes rested on a file name:
Rolf Lyon
. I remember Rolf from my childhood—a pre-med biology student who became a good friend of my father. He often camped with us in Las Estacas, patiently threading marshmallows on a wire for me, then blowing out the flames when they would inevitably catch fire. The letters in the folder span 1964 to 1999.

April 4, 1977

Dear Rolf,

...I've been sort of depressed lately because it seems to me that I haven't accomplished anything important in my career as a professor. When I was your age I thought that by the time I was my age I would either be dead or else a world-famous zoologist. Well, I'm 48 and still alive and nobody.

So my father, too, struggled to find meaning and purpose in his work. And to think, all these years I'd assumed him to be so self-certain. At the time he wrote this letter he was close to my age now. I understand his angst. The question gnaws at me, too. I've often wondered if and when I'll make it, and if the value of my life's work will appreciate or depreciate over time. For those of us who don't have children, how do we contribute to mankind's evolution if not through the passage of our genetic material? It seems so obvious to me that my father's academic accomplishments were indeed worthy, that asking about the natural world may not result in definitive answers, much less fame—but the value is in the asking, the search that leads from one question to the next, like a ripple on the ocean's surface that swells toward the quaking continental shelf, then crashes on the sand before pulling into itself again. All intellectual thought, all humanistic notions of education are based on the act of questioning. Socrates asked questions; his form of inquiry rippled debate between individuals with opposing viewpoints; it was the asking and responding that stimulated critical thinking, illuminated ideas. Plato asked. Aristotle asked. Ideas swelled, evolved into sub-ideas of related origin, answered or not. Modern scholars, giants in their fields of expertise, joined the collective discourse as it stretched upward, arched and curled with too many voices to distinguish one from another—scientists and spiritual leaders and laypersons and your next-door neighbor. My father. Me. My third-grade students. My current students at the university. Our ideas, our wonderings rush toward the shore and crash in on one another. Temporary chaos ensues. A beautiful cacophony of seaweed and salt that splays, then draws back to rejoin the huge body of water that pulls into itself again and again.

In a 1989 letter to Dr. Gould, my father says of his own research and discovery:

This supports the macro-evolutionary aspects of punctuated equilibrium theory. It is my current belief that all macro-evolutionary novelties arise from the mutations of regulatory genes that cause changes in developmental timing. These allometric changes in body proportions can either be localized or else generalized. The mutations occur randomly, of course, but they do not need to be immediately advantageous; they only need to be viable. They can be carried in the gene pool until such time as they are favored fortuitously by environmental selection pressures, at which time their frequencies will be increased in the gene pool because of differential reproduction rates.

In other words, the reason certain anatomical features of modern scorpions matter is because this evidence supports the theory of evolution—especially aspects of Darwin's theory that have been the focus of dispute by evolution-oppositionists. So by providing evidence of scorpion evolution, my father aimed to fill in one small blank spot in Darwin's argument.

Today's discourse on evolution teeters betwixt and between the known and the unknown; consideration of either side of the debate, either creationist or evolutionist, invites you to temporarily occupy an intermediate position, a liminal space—linger on the damp Mexican shore that bisects land and sea. This gives me pause: If research yields no immediate answer to humankind's inquiry of nature (or of God, for that matter), does that mean a particular person's life's work is for naught? Perhaps, then, his or her work has no value; or maybe the point, if not to solve an equation, is to take inventory of possibilities. Or better yet, speculate how today's actions might influence a yet unviewed documentary—what if we could anticipate the fast forward? You're still on the couch with your red, swollen ankle elevated on a tower of throw pillows; if you knew the convulsions would lead to paralysis, would you still hesitate to reach for the phone?

I imagine myself in this situation, pondering, hesitating. Who would I call? My father, perhaps.

When we returned from each desert trip, my father meticulously labeled each jar, either by placing a handwritten note inside or by taping a typewritten note to the outside.

Paruroctonus silvestrii: Las Estacas, Mexico—1971

Family Vejovidae—it stings but is not fatal. B. Firstman

At the height of his career he'd amassed at least a thousand jars, each containing from one to a dozen arachnid specimens. Inside transparent, circular tombs, each creature drifted in a sort of limbo—neither alive nor allowed to begin the process of decomposition that would make them part of the soil, contributing to the next cycle of life. Upon retirement, my father gave most of them to colleagues. Today only a few jars remain.

When he calls again to add more things to his list, I do not tell him I've taken his scorpion, the one that, for reasons unknown to me, he deemed worthy of saving. It floats in suspended animation just an arm's reach from my desk.

“And my electric typewriter,” he says. “And ribbon cartridges. All of them.”

“Yes, I already packed those.”

“You'll find them in my bottom desk drawer.”

“Already got 'em.”

“Pull the drawer fully open and look behind the metal divider.”

“Uh-huh,” I say, because I know he cannot stop. I reach for the scorpion and hold it eye level. Much of the formaldehyde has either leaked or evaporated.

“Are you writing all this down?”

“Yes, of course,” I say, and I wonder if the amount of liquid affects the preservation of the dead animal, if I should remove the cap and add more liquid. It would be a shame, after all these years, to let this particular scorpion dry up and crumble.

 

PART II

Scorpions, Snakes

 

Twelve

 

Visalia, California (2013)—

I recall a certain photo.

When I was a young child, maybe three or four years old, I pulled my mother's bra from a basket of clean laundry and put it on. I remember standing in my underpants with the bra straps hanging from my bare shoulders, then calling out for someone to come see what I'd done. My mother ran into the room, told me not to move a muscle, and disappeared down the hall again. In a few seconds she returned, with my father this time. And a camera.

I just stumbled across that photo the other day. I hardly recognize myself as the potbellied little girl in that picture; it's hard to believe that the twenty-two-ish young woman with shoulder-length hair and cat-eye glasses is my mother. Yes, I recognize our faces, but it's hard to believe how quickly time has passed.

This evening I will visit my elderly mother in the assisted living place I just moved her to. I will tuck a pillow beneath her feeble legs, adjust her mechanized recliner so she can see the small table at her side, and we will resume our current project of transferring old photographs from a disintegrating album into a new, acid-free album. My mother's neurologist says the photo album project is good cognitive therapy—it prompts her to speak, which helps with the aphasia, and it exercises her memory as well. Even if she can't recall an event right away, perhaps a photo will tickle some remote crevice in her brain, stimulate a whisper of curiosity, motivate her to search for and pry open the sealed file folders in her prefrontal lobes. She can't remember what she had for lunch an hour ago, but she can tell me all about what happened on a particular day forty-four years ago, when she and my father found me next to the laundry bin with a bra draped across my naked chest.

I was talking to a friend recently about the declining health of our parents and our increasing and ever-shifting responsibilities as adult children. As we reverse roles with our elderly parents, each party must inhabit a liminal space, the transitional terrain between past and future. For the aged parent, it's a step toward the threshold separating life and death; for the middle-aged child, it's a time for reconciliation, to settle on new terms of engagement—
You raised me, now I'll take care of you.

I keep telling myself that if I had been raised by June and Ward Cleaver my transition would be less difficult. Obviously, my father was no Ward Cleaver, but my mother was no June, either. I imagine that if I'd had a Beaver Cleaver childhood (if I'd been Beaver's unrealized twin sister, Betty) I'd be so indebted to both my doting parents—for their constant love and support, for the fatherly advice over home-cooked meals, for their concern over my general well-being and their occasional intervention in regard to my grades, my friends, my social faux pas—that I'd happily accept my new responsibilities. I'd never complain about taking my mother to physical therapy or the fact that she resists all my attempts to help her regain bits of her independence. And as for Old Man Ward, I'd embrace him with every grateful fiber of my being, tend every aspect of his growing needs. With a smile on my face I'd drive him to every doctor's appointment, nurse him back to health after every surgery, manage his finances, buy his groceries, shuttle him to astronomy night at the senior center every Tuesday, walk five doors down the street each afternoon for a glass of iced tea. That's how I imagine it. But I'm not Beaver (or Betty). I wasn't raised by June and Ward. The Cleaver family does not exist, never did—not for you, not for me, not ever.

What is real, though, for real people grappling with real lives, is a spectrum of emotional reconciliation. This spectrum doesn't measure
what
the adult child does or how thoroughly the child cares for the aged parent in terms of tasks carried out; rather, it indicates the degree of enthusiasm or resentment the adult child feels about the situation. At one end of the spectrum, the adult child eagerly cares for the aged parent, and at the other end, bitterness, perhaps grief.
You didn't raise me one iota, dear father, so why must I take care of you now?
I'm not sure where on the spectrum I stand.

But I am certain of this: things are shifting. A few years ago my once-estranged father moved across the state and into my neighborhood so I could look after him; although he's living in Mexico for the time being, he still owns his home down the street from me—and if he were to return (and he very well might), he would again become my responsibility. After he moved to Mexico, my mother suffered a massive stroke. Her illness triggered a series of other catastrophic health complications, all unexpected, all life-engulfing; she's now an invalid who resists rehabilitation, and I'm her caregiver, responsible for practically every aspect of her life—all things logistical, medical, financial and social. Over the last year my mother has been my full-time job, and even though she no longer lives with me, since I moved her into the assisted living facility a month ago, I am overwhelmed with responsibilities I had never before fathomed.

(There's a cruel sort of irony in my mom's involuntary absence now and my father's choice to be absent for most of my life. I need you to know that although my mother and I often didn't get along while I was growing up, at least she was there, if not emotionally, at least physically. She didn't seem to enjoy being a parent, but at least she provided the basics. I want you to know that even though this book is mostly about my relationship with my father, my mother did raise my brother and me—she put in her time, worked pretty damn hard to provide a stable life for us. My point is this: I recognize the literary injustice here, how the absent parent—my father—gets the most page time.)

But here I am, middle-aged and steeped in the newfound responsibilities that come with having elderly parents. As I try to reconcile my resentment with my sense of duty, I find myself examining the nature of my relationship with each parent.
Why is this so difficult?
I ask myself over and over, and,
If I were a better person, if I weren't such a self-centered ingrate, would this transition be easier?
I wonder if there is an intellectual or psychological shift I can make, a way I can enlighten my own thinking process so that I can consciously shape and settle into my evolving role more gracefully. If I change the lens through which I view my parents, myself, our respective situations, our collective situation, will I be better able to cope with these changes? And by extension, could I then help them with their transitions, too?