Joyas Valadores by Brian Doyle

Beautiful!

An excerpt from "Joyas Valadores" by Brian Doyle.



Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.
So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a
woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

Aging

Last night I had the privilege of seeing a ninety-three year old man. While visiting our family friends, his son and daughter-in-law, he was out of sight, in his room watching TV and reading. At one point, he appeared at the living room doorway holding onto the edges with his weak, bony fingers. Ontop of his pajamas he wore a navy suit jacket. It must have fit him in his earlier days. Now the seams of his shoulders rested on his arm, halfway down to his elbows. He lowered his head and said hello as we rushed over to him. His son held his hand and lead him to the table.

In a trembling voice he began to tell us of aging. Rather than tell us of pains in the joints or trouble with his sight he spoke of his memory. He told us, how during his youth, he was able to say a classical poem from memory using any word you would provide him. "They would say any word like 'cow' I and would read them a verse from Hafez that was about a cow. But I no longer have a memory that can wrap the world around its finger."

He brought out scrolls of glossy paper and unrolled them. They were covered in Arabic calligraphy. "My hand trembles too much now," he said. Each page looked as if it was covered beautiful, black strands of hair waving over and under each other, some braided, some unraveling.

After several minutes, he stood up to say goodbye and retire to his room.
Just as he held on the edge of the living room doorway, we asked, "So what was the verse with cow."
He turned around, cast his eyes to the ground and began to laugh. Then lifted his head and recited several full verses of Hafez that spoke of a cow.
Brought his hand to his heart, lowered his head and said goodbye.