John, my beloved
When I was younger, elementary school age, I had a series of ear infections that came back with enough regularity that I remember them now as a part of my childhood personality. I remember two things about these infections: one, a fear that I would have to get hearing aids, which in my childhood brain got confused with 'AIDS', something I was hearing on the radio news and which sounded like it would kill you. Second, at one point, the doctor suggested having my ears drained and my mother took me to the chiropractor who adjusted my neck and my mother swore that this fixed my problem as she said my nose immediately started running and I didn't have the problem anymore. I don't remember my nose running or the ear infections stopping, but I do remember this story, the way things in your childhood are told to you and you believe them to have happened, even if you can't say for certain if you had the experience, like asking Jesus into your heart, or cutting your hand on broken glass.
I've not thought about my ears much over the years, except to think that they are a kind of ticking time bomb, because although I regret much of my youth spent trying to be as pure as possible, I spent a lot of time in all ages rock shows, all of them very loud, and all of which I left with my ears ringing. So far I've not had any noticeable problems, but in two conversations a few weeks ago, I found myself straining to hear my conversation partner in a coffee shop and becoming annoyed, the way old men get annoyed with mumbling. When it happened the second time, I decided I needed to book a hearing test and then as I sat in bed later, I thought better of it and resolved to go to the GP first because, as I thought about it, I had that sense I had as a child, that something wasn't quite right in my ears.
The next morning, I went to the GP, having sent a request online and gotten a call back in a matter of minutes, I had the smug feeling you do as an American using the NHS when it’s working, and made my way up to the surgery. The man who saw me listened to me talk about rock music and then, checking both ears, said it was clear there was some fluid in particularly my right ear and I should do a round of antibiotics to clear it up. This was some relief and I said, so my misspent youth has not caught up with me yet, and he said, not yet, and I picked up the antibiotics and showed Yoko with relief: see, I'm not mad, at least about this one thing.
I've been going to church a lot more this year than I would naturally do because an elderly member of our congregation, John, has been needing someone to push him from his home to the church in a wheelchair, and I have both liked feeling useful and needed, and also savoured the opportunity to do good works without faith, like I'm pulling one over on the whole religious establishment, like I'm Ben to the Anglican church's Tom Sawyer, happily whitewashing the fence, living a wholly fulfilled religious life, without any faith. In July, John's wife fell badly and went into hospital, and when I picked him up that weekend, his demeanour was different. He said several times that day how tiring it all was, and the next week, as he told me about his wife coming home, and the army of carers they would have, I didn't realise as I shut the door that was the last time I would see him. He went into hospital again — we got a card for him, with a painting of a white lotus on a pond, that we all signed and he passed before we could give it to him.
On Saturday, before setting out as a family to Bath to see Mei perform at the end of a weeklong choir residential, we had John's funeral, and I put on my grey suit and sunglasses and boots, and sat further forward in the church than I probably should have for someone who knew him briefly at the very end of what was an incredible life. John wrote about his own death in the church magazine, some seven years before he died, and I sat in church reading the article they reprinted and which his son read. John wrote, 'I hadn’t been in the habit of thinking about death' and I wondered how he had managed that, given my own inability to not think about death at least several times a day, and without any impending health issues. At the end of the funeral, I greeted a man whom I had met with John, when after church one day, we went to this man’s house which was just across from John’s, to console him as his wife had died several days earlier. The man had come out, crying and John had spoken to him and I had stood their awkwardly, trying to exude a sense of sympathy, until the neighbour finally noticed me and I did my best to explain who I was. In the pews of the church, we hugged and he was crying and said, You were like a son to him, and I immediately said, No, I just pushed him to church when I could, and he said, No, no, I can tell, and we exchanged details on our phones.
After the funeral, the family piled into the car and headed to Bath, although I had a very slight nagging suspicion that our car, which has continually struggled for the last year with an apparently unfixable issue with a misfire in one of the pistons but had been fine for almost six months, had returned to its former ways as I felt a very slight stutter just as we were coming home from IKEA earlier in the week. I put this out of my mind, and we set out down the M5. The car was fine and I relaxed until just north of Gloucester when the problem came back suddenly and intensely, and after a few minutes, we pulled into the services. The car could barely park, shaking and starting to cut out. We went inside, Yoko and the girls to the toilet and me, crossly on my phone in Costa, looking at the map, frightened and then angry to overcome the fear and then angry at everyone else to overcome the anger with myself, 'What are we going to do?', well, I'm going to have to sort it out aren't I, I'm going to have to come up with some plan, aren't I, the sarcastic, cutting things that take the place of, I don't know, or I need some help, or there is no clear solution.
We got back into the Picasso, and as it has in the past, it reset and drove normally again, although I resolved with Yoko on her phone looking at the map to pull on to the A roads and see if we could perhaps take the train or limp on to Bath, still an hour away. The car has done this before, I'd been told it wasn't unsafe, and this seemed generally true until we got to Stroud and the car became particularly jumpy again and we stopped at what turned out to be a tyre and service station and when I flagged down the guy working on the car, he was annoyed, gesturing around, of course they don't do repairs, and of course nothing was open, it was 3pm on a Saturday and tomorrow is Sunday and then the Bank Holiday weekend, you'll not get anyone until Tuesday — the certain kind of British person that seems to enjoy giving bad news to flustered middle-class people, this one surprisingly with an American accent for some reason. I went into the petrol station, not sure what to do, and they told me there was no public toilet, and I left without any better idea what to do.
Yoko and I once had a situation like this, returning from Karuizawa in Japan, in my little Alto. This car I had bought for just about fifty thousand yen, and was only meant to get me to and from the school I worked at. One of the first gifts Yoko got me was a replacement cassette player for that car, so I could plug in my CD player. It was fine going down to Karuizawa, although I initially took us to the wrong city of Kashiwazaki, some two hours out of the way, but I was still in love enough, and Yoko still patient enough, that this resulted in us having a laugh and just being late. On the way back, Yoko was driving on the Expressway and I didn't have the courage at the time to suggest that she needed to slow down because the car was probably going to struggle to go that speed for more than a few minutes.
It was the time in our relationship before we had married, when I was beginning to realise I needed to support a family soon, and I was making stupid decisions to save money, like taking my car, which was old and had a small engine, rather than Yoko's newer, much stronger car, because I didn't know if I could afford the petrol. The car started making a very loud knocking noise about an hour from Niigata and pulling off the Expressway into the rice fields, I had the same experience I would have these twenty years later, though with a polite Japanese man, telling us nothing was open and we would have to leave it somewhere. That night, we had limped home in that car, the engine so loud we couldn't talk, and made it the final hour, through the rice fields. The car was totalled in the end, but it didn't matter at that point: we married and I got my mini-cub and we used Yoko's Micra until we left for the UK.
Realising there was no solution to our problems at 3:30 on Saturday afternoon in Stroud, and knowing we absolutely needed to be in Bath by 7 to see Mei sing, I returned to the car to absorb everyone's anxiety and to make a case to press on. We left on the A road, the car had reset again, stuttering a bit at the light and I calmed a bit and feeling optimistic that we might make it to Bath in one piece. We went slowly and the car did remain fine, and as we crested the hills into Somerset, I had the sense I had made the right decision, that my instinct was actually right. We made our way down into Bath and then up again to the University accommodation where we were staying.
The car was passable the rest of the weekend, although it smelled of burning oil a bit, but we were busy running back and forth to different performances of the choir, in Bath Abbey and then the Topping and Company Booksellers, and I decided I would drive the car home myself and the girls would take the train, something that relieved a bulk of the stress. We picked up Mei in a beautiful residential college on the edge of the city, like summer camp ending and I dropped them off at the station. The car held up on the way back, more or less. It got very bad, at one point south of Evesham, and I was full of dread in the rain and the sun setting, but I stopped at a petrol station, and sat in the car for fifteen minutes and again, like magic, it was fine and only became unsustainable again at the very end of the trip when I made it to Cotteridge, then Bourneville, then Selly Oak, and finally up the hill to Harborne. I beat the girls home in the end, emptying the car and putting out the bins and thinking to myself that I didn't want to do this anymore, whatever this was.
To be British and Anglican or Catholic, it seems you need to love Julian of Norwich. John quoted her in his article about death, saying, 'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.' This was quoted to me once by a Catholic VC who was telling me my visa might be cancelled and I was in danger of being deported. It seems like a tautology. I returned to the GP after making it back from Bath and taking my bad attitude on the Bank Holiday to look at newer cars I couldn’t afford, and the GP asked, 'Where in America are you from' before asking about my ears and I was immediately cross. He didn't take the hint and after looking at my ears and assuring me the infection had cleared asked me, 'What is it like in the US?' What do you mean? 'This sort of appointment, what is it like in the US?' He looked at me like he was genuinely curious, so I gave up and started to talk about clinics and doctors and insurance and being in and out of network and he looked at me as though I wasn't answering his question in any meaningful way. I didn't manage to come to a proper conclusion, so I got up as I was talking and ended with something like, 'Anyway, it's complicated, so I'm fine I guess, I just wait for my hearing to come back and if it doesn't come see you again in a week or two' and he said, 'Two weeks' and I thanked him and left.
John described his life as varied and rewarding, and didn't seem tired until the end. I miss him. I miss having a reason to go to church. There is something for me to still unlock, to move past this same story about failing cars that barely limp along but you hold on to because of a fear of losing money, of an investment not paying off. In what world are you a person who leases a new car, who gets a job where you could afford to do that and where you don't have to think about the cost of things constantly. The well is poisoned all the way down, of course it is, it was there from the very beginning, from the very first time I got in a car with Yoko, I was this terrible person who wanted to save three thousand yen on petrol because he was afraid he couldn't chew all he had bitten off. There are teenage girls now, eighteen years of marriage, the sort of deep grooves of relationships: you can list the times you've had gone through the same thing like they were episodes in a bad sitcom that's run for twenty seasons. The first time the story was told, it became a myth: we made it through the rice fields and married later that year. I was in love. Now, what. What do I do now. John writes, lastly, May each of us have a good journey forward. Why do I cry when I read that. Why do I want it, so badly, to be true.