The Faraway Nearby Read Online Free PDF Page A

father gave me a broken travel clock that he said was worth repairing and I kept for years before I found that it was not. These were the gifts they sent me into the world with, which might be why the apricots from my mother’s tree registered so strongly.
    Like lawyers, writers seek consistency; they make a case for their point of view; they do so by leaving out some evidence; but let me mention the hundreds of sandwiches my mother made during my elementary school years, the peanut butter sandwiches I ate alone on school benches in the open, throwing the crusts into the air where the seagulls would swoop to catch them before they hit the ground. When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing.
    It was in honor of that unremembered past that I took care of her, that and principle and compassion and solidarity with my brothers. How could I not? If my mother had been my arctic expedition, I was going to finish the journey. But after the peanut butter sandwiches, before the brain disease, it was hard to respond to her occasional generosities when the other side of her might show up at any moment, so she complained I was distant.
    I was distant. I studied her, I pondered her. My survival depended on mapping her landscape and finding my routes out of it. We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another’s story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather than be told by them.
    Perhaps another kind of daughter would have fought her to a truce or been utterly destroyed, and yet another thick-skinned enough to laugh it off or hardly notice rather than be caught up in the currents of emotion, though I can’t imagine anyone emerging from those circumstances with the wisdom to negotiate a real peace early on. I coped by retreating and maybe I did become a mirror, a polished surface that shows nothing of what lies beneath.
    We were in a looking-glass world where I knew more about her childhood than she did about mine. When I was an adult, we didn’t talk about me. If I told her something went wrong in my life, she was likely to focus on my mistakes or get upset and demand I reassure her fears. For a long time, when I mentioned something eventful in my own life, she would change the subject in the very opening words of her reply. So we talked about her, mostly about fears and grievances. When I’m most aggrieved, I feel most like her, with her sense of having been shorted, of being the victim, and not being her was always my goal. In this sense I saw, late in the game, I too was seeking to annihilate.
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    The autumn after the apricots, when everything was at its worst, I was asked to talk to a roomful of undergraduates in a university in a beautiful coastal valley. I talked about places, about the ways that we often talk about love of place, by which we mean our love for places, but seldom of how the places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our own lives to remain connected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble, and ugliness. And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren’t so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other