The Joy Menu #69: Unknowability

“It is forgetfulness that is the fundamental problem, not memory.” — Patrick Modiano

Dear Creators,

A few months ago I stood on a pier in San Diego and looked into the dull eye of a seagull.

I’d taken the morning to wander from the hotel where I was staying down along the coast. It wasn’t a beach I knew, but all the Southern California beaches are, in essence, the same. So I walked alone, but also not alone – a thousand echoes of my childhood, a thousand mornings, middays, afternoons, a thousand hours on foot, on bicycle, by car, by bus, gathered inside me and like marrow moved through my limbs as I went.

It felt good to be there. The breeze was strong, and I watched people move down the pier hand-in-hand, saw surfers in the distance fall from their boards and disappear in the waves, heard the clicks and kicks of kids at play in the sand.

I’d driven in the night before from Vegas, and slept well in the bare hotel room I’d rented. In town for a baby shower, I’d forgotten the visceral feeling of being in Southern California. The beauty that you feel on your skin as much as you see with your eyes. And I’d enjoyed my walk incredibly, wanted to keep on walking, and walking, and walking.  

But the seagull. The seagull stood on the ledge of the old, wooden pier, and waited. It was if, in his stillness, he pulled me toward him. 

I’d just made my way to the end of the pier – where a sign told me that a Ruby’s restaurant, which had been there for most of my life (like the one at the end of a similar pier closer to home), was now closed for good: “Something new coming soon.” I’d smelled the sour pinch of dead fish and bait, seen a few grizzled men casting lines into the ocean, stood with my face toward the flat expanse of the Pacific horizon, and felt the heavy push of coastal air in my face, and then against my side, and now at my back. I’d nearly returned to the start of the pier when the seagull looked my way.

There were other seagulls swooping around – behind us, into the ocean. And others still making their way on foot across the pier, bent in search of scraps. But this seagull was still. So still, that I thought I might come close to him and take a photo.

I neared: his single eye, a black marble. His feathers, matted, ruffled slightly in the wind. And though I couldn’t comprehend a single thing he might be thinking, couldn’t (still can’t) think even of how to think in the unknowable language of his thoughts, I felt him. I felt his unnamable desire and his inexpressible life. And we stood there, for a time, together.

I could have been there for an hour, maybe. Though it was probably ten minutes. Yet there was a peacefulness in the position that I borrowed. Around me, people, going somewhere, stopping here, going again; beside me: the seagull. Beneath us, the neutral bustle of the waves.

For a time, the seagull and I were brothers – standing on a pier together, with no reason to fear each other, no worries about what was next, as near to home as we’d ever be.

Then, for no explicable reason, I remembered a brunch my aunt took us to in Berkeley. It wasn’t the food (who knows what I ordered; I don’t even remember the name of the restaurant), but the steadiness of seeing a person who’s built a life in a place say: this is a restaurant I like, and when people visit, I take them here. 

I remembered riding in the mini-van (we took a number of cars). I remembered the crowded parking lot. I remembered the feeling of still being one of the ‘kids,’ but not exactly young anymore. I remembered the sun: always, the sun, warm overhead. And I remembered that I’d been hungry. And then I knew (no great revelation, but I’d never known such a thing with certitude before) that the seagull was hungry, too. 

And I felt an aching sadness for whatever that was – that moment in time, that brunch among family, that hunger sated, that youth, now, like my walk, lived. All of it, like the Ruby’s restaurant at the end of the pier, sealed off. Closed for good. Finished. 

Strange, Seagull. Don’t you think?

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Today I read the obituary of a man – a poet, a Yogi, a stepfather, a teacher. His books with awards and his 50 years dotted with fellowships, positions, celebrations, and travel stipends. His circle, in mourning, themselves feted and renowned. Even the article, filled with in and outbound links, held pride of place in a well-known publication. 

They say comparison is the thief of joy. Can it also be the patron of grief?

Reading, you can’t help but think of how when your father dies, you have no funeral for him. He was private; he didn’t want one. He’d just moved, his friends, few, his family, far away. 

And yet the feeling that invades with the speed of a bite, the velocity of venom: it’s envy. For this man’s public death? The literary bellyaches of his friends and colleagues and students and readers?

Or, is it this: in ten years, you’ll be as old as the poet (assuming you live that long). And how many of your dreams are represented in the romance of his obituary? How many of those dreams have you projected back onto your father?

Is it this: the life you imagined versus the one you are living.

Is it that we can live the past as a kind of death, and can spend the present in a kind of mourning. Or is it that we can choose to feel the sun on our face and still look out into the sea breeze?

All those years, it was my mother’s family that gathered around the Bay. A childhood spent driving up and down the coast – for Thanksgivings, for Spring Breaks, for Bar Mitzvahs and reunions. My childhood in the backseat; father at the wheel. I never once recognized the way such actions extended the net of home. 

How home was not place, so much as connection; how it held you, even after you were gone. 

So is this not really about your father? Has it ever been?

Tell me, seagull.

A private death, quiet. Surrounded by those who lived with you. 

The ones who smelled your shirts and looked through your underwear drawer to find the wad of cash you kept there to pay for incidental things – school fees, or movie tickets, or gas. 

The ones you sent home with tubes of toothpaste in nasty flavors or packs of dental floss you’d bought in bulk. 

The ones who tickled your mole-covered back while you laid on your side in bed, and scratched at your caked and crusted heels, hardly human, more mollusk stuck to the wooden leg of a pier.

Seagull: your marble eye is a mirror. A crystal ball. 

It says: something new is coming.

It says: just live.

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Onward,

Joey

Seagull, San Diego, March 4, 2022.