Suspended animation

It was the perfect nap.

A weekday. Late morning. Vacation. I was pretending to read while nestled in a lounge chair, enjoying a soft breeze beneath a large umbrella. A large body of water was visible but I was not seaside, stationed instead on the balcony of an airBnB facing south. My family had gone exploring the locale; I had conjured some excuse to remain immobile. The air was thick with summer humidity. Reclining to a near horizontal attitude, pillows beneath head, back, and knees, I set the book on the ground and let myself sink into the chair’s plastic arms and the layers of structure and strata separating my form from the gravitational center of our planet.

There are rests we take during our daily routine, most, such as sleep, done with scheduled regularity. There are also breaks imposed by situation or circumstances, often a result of sickness or injury. And then there is the occasional, unplanned, spontaneous siesta. The snooze. We don’t need to be anywhere or do anything. We aren’t worried about missing meetings or moments of waking consciousness. We relax into emptiness, an experience enveloped by the fullness of simply being. Time stops. We hover within that pause, empty of thought or intention or guilt or memory or remorse or joy.

When my father was twenty-three, he didn’t know where his life was going. Fresh from military service, he was searching for work, hoping to support his pregnant wife and their young son. College was a dream, or perhaps more a general consideration; his father had enrolled in university only to leave as a result of the Great Depression. But the year was now 1958, the city of Philadelphia was growing, and possibilities were different. Optimism hung in the air like morning dew. A bright person with ambition could accomplish things. A family without means or inheritance could advance. Employment, education, happiness, and self-sufficiency seemed ripe for the taking. Then a stranger sneezed in Dad’s face.

“I was waiting to use a phone booth,” he once told me. “A guy was in the booth. He hung up the phone, opened the door to leave, and sneezed. I didn’t have time to react.”

The 1950s had benefited from science. New gadgets were possible for the home. Government agencies were building rockets for space. Medical researchers had even developed a vaccine against the scourge of polio. Dad had tried to get that shot, only to be told by three doctor offices that they were either out of vaccine or were prioritizing what they had for children.

“Who knows if that was how I got it – polio. It’s something I remember though. Just like it was yesterday. A direct hit.”

A week or so after the phone booth encounter, my father lay in a hospital, struggling to breath, unable to move his legs, desperate to stay off a respirator. “I thought that if I got put on that iron lung I would never get off it. So I just decided I wasn’t going to let them put me on it. That was a long couple of days. One night seemed endless. Each breath felt like it required every ounce of my strength.”

It’s strange what we remember in life, what we forget, how some things happen, how other things never come to pass. We carry our pasts like packs stuffed with unique assortments of experiences, fears, insecurities, and memories. Those packs are attached to us, welded, it seems, to the frames of our years. When do we ever take them off? How?

“I remember you trying to walk,” I told Dad years later, shortly before he died. “You had those old steel arm braces. You used to lean forward on them and rise up from your wheel chair, your legs dangling beneath your waist. Or at least you did it once, while I watched.”

Dad just looked at me, the decades of our days stretching limply behind the gentle hold of his sky blue eyes.

“That’s interesting,” he exhaled, pursing his lips.

“Why?”

“Well – ” he gulped a series of shallow breaths, working air into his lungs through chest and neck muscles weakened by a condition known as post-polio syndrome, “I – never – was able to – uh, do that.”

I held my own breath. “You never stood up using braces?”

Slowly, his gaze never leaving mine, Dad shook his head. His Irish heritage danced playfully across his brow. “I like – that you remember – it though.”

No remembrances of times past clouded my nap one June day this summer. The universe cupped me silently in its gentle hands, asking nothing, offering everything. I felt accepted by the rhythm of life’s unlabored respirations. All ego, all worry, all sense of identity were suspended within the tidal flow of my own shallow breathing. The fullness of here balanced effortlessly on the tip of time’s scales. I might have been a cloud, or a blade of grass, or a dust mote floating in a beam of sunlight. I could have been a paralyzed father leaning against rickety arm braces or a son watching something that same paralyzed father never did. I could have been any or all such moments of cosmic reflection. I could have been none of them.

It didn’t matter. My lack of measurable matter was meaningless. Because the buoyancy of life’s bounty is boundless. Moments of pure being are perfection embodied. And perfection, once embodied, always loses its form.