I thought this would be longer than it is, but that just means I’m taking it in chunks.

I keep being surprised by finding, in unexpected places, the right words.

I just finished reading another Hillerman book, The Fallen Man. As always, a good read.

Caught up in the story, I didn’t expect to find a passage which spoke directly to me.

Page 270, Jim Chee speaking:

“I grew up knowing it’s wrong to have more than you need. It means you’re not taking care of your people.” …poverty…”Depends on how you define poverty.”

“It’s defined in the law books,” Janet [Pete] said. “A family of x members with an annual income of under y.”

Chee: “I met a middle-aged man…a few years ago…I said something about it looking like he was doing very well. And he said, ’No, I will be a poor man all my life.’ And I asked him what he meant, and he said, ‘Nobody ever taught me any songs.’ ”

…”I know having a Navajo dad didn’t make me a Navajo,” [Janet] said. “My culture is Stanford sorority girl, Maryland cocktail circuit, Mozart, and tickets to the Met. So maybe I have to learn not to think that being ragged, and not having indoor plumbing, and walking miles to see the dentist means poverty. I’m working on it…But I’m not there yet.”

Hillerman deals with the same things that bother me, sees the same relationships between cause and effect. And the choices. The young beautiful Janet Pete with the carefully curated beauty, comfortable in the inner circle, and then the young naturally beautiful Bernadette Manuelito, strong and competent with her everyday feet on the ground.

And I had the best of both. Shirley, my beloved Shirley, the wife of my life, who could enter the inner circle and did, but lived with me in the real world, where we shared life with all its fullness. And she had lovely feet, on the ground or in the ballet air, and warming the cold out of them in bed at night against always warm me, “like a furnace,” she said.

We were two peas in a pod. We thought almost the same on almost everything. We fit together perfectly. We were both raised with just enough, developed independently an aversion to too much. We knew right from wrong and chose right. We knew the beautiful words, believed them, fought for them. We were politically liberal in the sense that we knew things could be better and should be.

I see I’m veering farther afield from Hillerman and The Fallen Man. But all things are connected, all roads lead to Rome, anywhere can lead to anywhere else, anything to anything, and eventually I’ll get back to Hillerman. I do recommend the book, highly. Beyond the intricate plotting and the identifiable characters, there are the beautiful descriptions of the landscape, the extraordinary southwest which I love by frequent experience, beyond the range of most readers but far short of Hillerman’s infusion.

Back to Shirley. The southwest welcomed us and in many ways we never left. History revealed itself, waves of exploitation, waves of progress, crashing and receding. People scratching a living from the dirt, hoarding water, in the shadow of The Big House.

I used to say: Everyone can live happy, there’s enough to go around. The joy of life is in the living of it. Current events make me realize that it’s not as easy as I thought, that

people will die in pain and despair
because inertia is stronger than I was aware.

That there’s a tipping point, and we’re tipping. That the doomsday clock is seconds from midnight.

But where there is life, there’s hope. Shirley was life. She vitalized me. Living is a force of nature that wants to keep on living. Inertia pulls us down to moveless death. But while anything moves in any way anywhere in the universe, life exists, persists, welcomes us as part of it.

I’m still alive, for now, happy about it, living in the present and in memory. Shirley and I early on discovered the secrets, love is all and all is love, a state of mind made by active choice. Freedom is good as long as you “do no harm.” People can learn. I can teach.

When I read a book, like The Fallen Man, I can tell you about it, teach you what I learned, share the joy.

Alas, alas, Hillerman is dead and will write no more. But his daughter has taken up the mantle and the torch, writes the characters into new stories which satisfy my appetite. And there are more books in existence to read than I will ever be able to read. And Shirley will always be with me. People can learn and I can teach. Bad people don’t have to remain bad, but if they do, they can be constrained. There’s more to life than money. When we share, there is enough.

I’m ready to read another Hillerman.

Stay tuned.