My husband and I were going east on Interstate 8 on our way home from San Diego.

In the near distance there appeared the other-worldly sand dunes outside of Yuma, Arizona when he asked me if I would mind stopping.

“I want to put my footprints in the sand,” he commented.

Anybody else might have said that they wanted to walk up the hills. But Geoff had been a published poet back in the day and he had told me when we first met that just because he had stopped writing his poems, didn’t mean he was going to stop speaking them.

I pulled the car over.

It was a bright blue morning and the tawny dunes were resting themselves up against the sky. I watched from the car while Geoff made his way to the top of one of the knolls, his condition causing his left foot to drag in its typical fashion. Nearby, three boys on dirt buggies wrinkled the smooth sand with tire tracks as they raced back and forth. I looked at the pink fluorescent flags flapping wildly on the long poles hooked to the handlebars of each buggy and thought of the boys’ fathers resting in their campers, comfortable in the illusions that their sons were safe from collision under the protection of those ridiculous flags.

Too bad there aren’t any pink fluorescent flags to keep you safe from colliding into Parkinson’s disease, I thought derisively.

The vista in front of me burned and already the breezes had begun to erase the boys’ tire marks. Small scarves of sand fluttered across the indentations left by my husband’s footsteps, following him up the hill. Before my eyes, the eternal dunes were shifting and changing.

Geoff reached his destination and stood for a long moment looking out at the scene before him. As he began his trek back down the hill toward the car, he stumbled, regained his balance, and continued on. He arrived at the car elated. From his face, it was clear that Parkinson’s didn’t decide everything in his life. He hadn’t climbed up the dunes to overcome his disease. He climbed up the dunes to feel them, to wonder about them, and yes, even to thank God for them.

He got into the passenger’s seat and I started the engine, sitting there a minute while he caught his breath and gave the scene one last look.

Waving his hand gently over the horizon he said,

“Look at those curves,” and, glancing over at me. “Remind you of anybody you know?”

His words pleased me.

“What are you smiling at?” he teased.

I asked him to please just look out his side of the window and tell me if there was any traffic coming. I thought of what he told me on the way back from the neurologist’s office, the first time the “P” word was used.

“Don’t cry for me,” he said. “I was a happy man before Parkinson’s came into my life. Nothing can take that away from me. I’m the same man today as I was yesterday.”

I leaned around and looked out to see if there were any cars coming.

“Before we go,” he said, “I want to tell you a poem I wrote in my head while was up there.”

Hope is the horse whose pounding hooves carry me
Headlong into the future
Where it will be well
Health to the point of eternal life,
The earth restored to its Edenic beauty,
The community of good hearts begun with a handshake
A hopeful meeting
No matter where it went last time
Or will this time
The picture of what could finally be
Is vision enough and fills my starry eyes.

“Edenic beauty?” I said. “I don’t know what that means?”

“Eden,” he said. “Like the Garden of Eden,” and pointing ahead towards Tucson added, “It’s that way, it’s home.”

 

Author’s Note: Geoffrey Bowman would ultimately find another home in Port Townsend, Washington, where, for the first time in over 40 years, a book of his poems would be published under the title The Octopus Nursery. The poem in this story does not appear in that book and is printed here with his permission.

 

Author: Carmelene Siani 

Editor: Renée Picard 

Photo: via the author