Bearable Lightness

It’s not yet light.  Which is not to say it’s dark.  5:00 a.m. getting on the 101 in Salinas.  Up to San Jose for the first of two fast tubular things that’ll end with a shudder, bump and a few seconds of (I’ve had worse) deceleration in Des Moines.  I’m on my way to the best job I’ve ever had; dad.  Amanda's graduating.  

The white school buses tow two porta-potties on trailers.  It’s not yet light, but the buses are on the move in Salinas.  They are filled with moms and dads – mostly dads at this hour - on their way to the fields.  The planting-weeding-tending-harvesting never ends in this valley.  There’s no season to it, like there is back home.  No scurry of work at the beginning and end, with baseball and Christmas respites in between.  It’s all work, all scurry, all hard, all the time.  The next time you take a bite of a strawberry or enjoy just about anything else in a salad, know that these buses are on the move at five in the morning.

Dad’s advice was simple; work with your head, not your back.  Your back will give out was the unstated corollary.  The corollary was unstated because back was a metaphor for his TB-devastated lungs, ruined while working with his back in defense of the nation.  It was good and standard advice for a first-generation American to their children, and I imagine the ag workers on the white school buses tell their children something similar.  What I don’t have to imagine – what I’m quite certain of – is their children both hear the advice, and internalize the decency, determination and blue-collar dignity of their parents striving to provide a better life for them.

Stitching together pictures rather than words, I’ve spent the better part of a week trying not to burst into tears.  Which is where this chapter began. 

Baseball is religion in the Malin household and Colin and me were sharing our last year in a dugout together perhaps forever (or at least, for years to come) when Amanda’s Iowa State University orientation was scheduled.  Marcia had taken her to the campus visit, so it was my turn to spend a few days with her at the campus they kept referring to as “the place for the smart kids” (ISU joke that's not really a joke).  We had hit, run and pitched our way into first place and there were just a few games left to keep us there in record-setting fashion in a baseball crazy town in a national pastime is religion household.  So it wasn’t out of the question that I’d stay put to keep the Pony League juggernaught juggernaughting.

But of course it was out of the question.  I wouldn’t miss spending time with Amanda at the college she’d attend for the world.  As we walked from “trust us, your daughter will be safe here” session to “really, trust us, your daughter will be safe here” session, I never checked the Blackberry for a score once.  I don’t know if she noticed, but there were times I’d hang back to imagine her walking across the beautiful campus on her own, just to picture it.  And she never said a word so I don’t think she noticed a couple times I had to hang back a few moments before turning a corner just to compose myself.  This beautiful, awful place was taking my daughter.

I returned to a team in second place and when Chris, sitting on the bucket of balls next to me asked how it went, I told him it was two days of heartbreaking torture, just trying not to cry.  And, by the way, how the heck did we lose two games?    

She’s the first of only two people I’ve ever known from the start.  So while I appreciate there are billions out there and they’re all special in some way … one of two.  You can rearrange the twenty six letters you have to work with all day, every day, until your last day, and it’s not going to be distilled down to anything more precise and transformative than … one, of two.  The light of my days on this mortal plane is the closest I’ve otherwise come.

I see the light everywhere.  Certainly, in the smile that awaits at the end of the fast tubular things.  Of course, in the pictures I carry with me and stitch together as I go.  But more than that.  So much more.  Every Girl Scout I ever see.  Every mother, clutching a newborn in pink.  Every little toddler, stumbling towards her daddy.  Every granddaughter, tugging on Papa’s hand to come play.  Every gaggle of high school girls or young, collegiate women.  Every sax blowing some jazz.  Every flute wafting through a composition.  Every teacher, doing her best.  Every act of kindness and love. 

My advice has been do what you love, work with your heart.  She’s expanded mine and only filled it with light.  So much light, that no darkness ever stands a chance.  

Heading toward the light, at 500 miles per hour ...