Antipode

Was texting with my son Phil about the upcoming February trip to Palm Springs. The excitement and anticipation of the trip is somehow coupled with a sense of foreboding. The sun, the warmth, the opportunity to actually ride our bikes outside are all very desirable, obviously, but at the same time I feel a kind of yuck factor, and a sense of impending danger.  My fear of flying is part of this second set of feelings. The yuck factor  arises out of my general disgust over the American tinsel-extravagance typified by places like Palm Springs, a playground for the rich, the aged, the mindless, the lazy and the lucky.  The Bermuda-shorted herd exhibits an exclusionary clubbiness, and a futile communal grasping after ephemeral unearned hedonic rewards. Life apparently has little meaning for these people other than to breathe and consume, and yet they are in a desperate struggle to get as much of life as they can, as quickly as they can.  I do not look forward to my immersion into this culture and yet I thrill thinking about the riding, the sipping of beers in the shade, the comfort, without mitts, jackets, scarves and boots.  I love the idea of this environment.

So the idea of antipodes, of opposite qualities within a single thing, struck me.  Palm Springs is a good example of an antipode.  Originally a get-away for the LA crowd looking for some privacy, the names of celebrities litter the roads, the parks, the golf courses.  A secret hide-away becomes a public museum.

Palm Springs, a week later.  A strange and beautiful experience - a desert, barren and waterless - no reason for a city to exist here.  No vegetable, mineral, or animal to draw speculators or inhabitants, except for the winter warmth.  And it is this warmth, dry and soothing to the winter-damaged souls from the north, that is worth gold, glory, and three hours of flight.  It is the warmth and the winds that shape this area.  Endless expanses of sand and scrub, and eroded hills and denuded mountains and palm trees and salt lakes and Joshua Trees.  Palm Spring and the Valley are like diamonds within a wasteland, a fountainhead - the source of life flowing out of death.  An antipode.

Another more heart-centered, more visceral example, visited me while sitting around the pool at Di and Phil's new house in Palm Springs.  Idyllic, comfortable, and so convenient.  It occurred to me that Pat would have loved being here, in the warmth, with the kids and grandkids, surrounded by the sounds of love and happiness.  She would have felt as if she had arrived at perfection.  Nothing could be better.  A dream fulfilled.  Pat would have loved this.  But she never had the chance, never had her dreams fulfilled, never tasted the rewards of a life lived for others, especially for those closest to her.  What a moment of profound and painful sadness resting at the center of a moment of contentment.  An antipode.

I read recently somewhere that the reason we cry when we experience beauty or excellence is that these moments are so rare and so fleeting. Some element inside of us weeps underneath the moment of joy - a recognition of the transience and the rarity of these most significant and treasured moments.  Joy wrapped around sorrow.  An antipode.

(My dearest friend, my wife Pat, died a month before Christmas this year, losing her year-long battle with cancer.)