brandon williamscraig

Surreal, or the Outskirts of the Real?

It's a beautiful day outside in Medford, OR.

Mom (Paula Craig) and I drove half an hour north to Grant's Pass (Grant's Pants) to see beloved cousins (only neice to my Grandfather Paul) Gene and Betty (Ann) Meier. She is struggling with bronchitis and he has new (two weeks) hearing aids, and both are rather surprised to discover themselves in their early eighties. We haven't seen each other since the Christmas of Paula and David's divorce when my grandparents, Paul and Martha Craig, shipped Paula, Meghan, and me off to spend the holidays with the Craigs and Meiers in the latter's home in Huntington Beach (L.A.). Meghan remembers us as 12 and 6 years old. She's probably right. Since then, Betty and Gene moved to Prescott AZ, and then built in a gated community in Grant's Pass "across the river" from their current residence, a lovely but smaller (than 1.5 acres) beautifully furnished home.

I found myself sitting at her bedside, hearing him worry about his sister (nine years older) whom he has just moved from California to a nearby locked facility that can deal with wander- risk dementia cases. She keeps falling but hasn't broken anything yet, which we agree is often the beginning of the end. "That's gotta be the worst way to go," says he. I casually mention, while going through my mother's pictures with them, that "this is our little boy, the one we just lost." On the way home Mom asks if I'm integrating well or just an excellent actor. I'm sure I claimed both, as well as reasonable psychological health. Whatever.

Last night the horizon was issued a citation, with penalties in excess of several million Canadian dollars, for impersonating the best of both Texas' and arctic sunsets. How is beauty of this magnitude still possible?

I gave my Mom a Christmas gift of an mp3 player, so she can carry music with her and control the volume, thereby becoming able to listen to beautiful sounds again. While packing it with some best-of-the-best and inescapable rhythms the "how is this beauty possible" question kept coming up in my heart.

Wise body. Resentful. Holding until the hand cramps and makes hurting impossible to deny or delay (waiting to be entirely alone) entirely.

My mind has no trouble with appreciating how beautiful fragments of life can be, especially on reflection, but my body feels them embedded as shards for all their glistening.

Our last images of Aidan include several from December 4th when he fell against a cabinet door and the pull struck the corner of his mouth which bled and swelled.

The bleeding stopped in almost no time, as usual, but the feeling of having to deal with some profound offense stayed in his body and showed on his face for some time. What to do with pain? Can't make it go away. It insists on itself, and on time. It insists and imposes and grates away some soft, innocent parts to which the body was attached.

In profound discomfort he is a toddler, a "big boy", and no longer a baby here. He looks so much older to me than when he was so small in my arms, looking up into my face, falling into sleep slung in my pouch, walking with the dog under the moon, staff in hand through the cooling night.

That same moon and night deputized me in no uncertain terms with its pouch, dog, and baby. I asked and was asked to be a Shepherd. Asked to bear on my shoulders and go into nights of all kinds in search of the lost. Where should I begin?

This is our little boy, the one we just lost.