Certainly there was more writing after that last Chronicle, dated 1 October 04: on the way from Wyoming back to Ashland I compiled the list of
Poems from Steven Mitchell’s The Enlightened Heart that now appears on FOOW.org (it was intended as an Introduction to Part Three); later that
month I wrote an early draft for what is now “What Is Christotheism?” and what more or less still exists intact as “The FOOW Manifesto” (which
finally does explain the rationale for calling this the Fish Out Of Water Project).  I then spent much of the winter working on extensive notes that
are slowly germinating into more post-Chronicular ideas.

But these writings show a different nature than the Chronicles; they are the calm after the storm, glimpses of the clear blue sky I dwelt in at the
time.  They were less hurried, and also less focused; the pure drive to get everything down on paper is not present in them.  I think I am still
working in that kind of space now –which is probably a good thing, although sometimes I long for the experience of sweating out words at the
wheel while the road leads forward through the everpresent Now.  There is an immediacy of being that Camerado brought to the writing that I find
hard to resurrect in my “motionless” studio. (Only a fish who thinks himself out of water could say such a thing….)

*                *                 *                  *

October 2004 was a very exciting time for reasons beyond the scope of writing, reasons that beckoned my attention.
Any baseball fan, and particularly a fan of the Red Sox, needs no further explanation.  For this was the month when
the Greatest Comeback/Collapse in Professional Sports History played itself out in the epic American League Champ-
ionship Series between Boston and their arch-nemesis, the New York Yankees.  I vividly recall being stuck in Syra-
cuse for a few days (mechanical issues and slow freight) that coincided with Games 3, 4 and 5.  First came the tele-
vised despair of the 19-run shellacking I saw on the TV by the Pilot fuel desk that put the Sox down 3 games to 0;
then the next night, when they were down by a run in the 9th with Mariano Rivera on the mound for New York, I
turned the radio off and went to bed, thinking the bitter thoughts of an ugly end to a promising season and Wait Til
Next Year all over again.  I didn’t know about the Dave Roberts stolen base and tying run, or “Big Papi” Ortiz’
winning homer in the umpteenth inning, until morning, and I thought to myself, “Hmmmm…….”

Most of Game 5 was witnessed from the lobby of the Freightliner repair shop, the extra inning heroics on the radio
en route to Buffalo.  Curt Schilling’s famous “blood red sock” Game 6 I caught in static-ridden spurts while crossing
West Virginia, but I heard loud-n-clear when Keith Foulke notched the clinching strikeout.  And as supreme luck-
serendipity would have it, I finally got that long-awaited visit with my friend Ben Werner –a lifelong Yankee fan—in
Columbia, S.C.  

We’d made a wager on the Series, loser buys dinner next time we got together; after Game 3 I had written an email asking him where he wanted me
to take him; he suggested we wait until we could rendezvous in Washington, DC, where a nice Adams Morgan bistro would suit him fine.  So
imagine the sense of pure, unadulterated poetic justice when I was able to sit with him in his apartment and watch the team he derides as perennial
choke-artists finish the job of an unprecedented down-3-games-to-zero-then-come-back-and-win Series victory over the Evil Empire.  And you
know what?  He still owes me dinner as of this writing…. 

*              *                 *                  *

honoring my requests to be sent back East for family visits, mostly because they needed more trucks in the eastern half of the country, but they
balked at getting me the freight I needed to return to the West.  Cross-country freight was no longer being carried by solo drivers –either a team
hauled it (two drivers can go 3000 miles in 2 ½ days) or we put it on a train.  

I visited my dispatcher at the Oklahoma City terminal when I was stuck there in late October, hoping to find a solution; he told me the writing was
on the wall –I would either have to go regional, become a team driver, or quit.  My “bi-coastal disorder” was going to be cured, one way or another.  
I couldn’t fathom the choice I was being asked to make: keep working out west where I no longer had a sense of home, and never see my family and
most of my friends; or go join the East Coast regional fleet and be closer to where I want to rebuild my sense of home….and never see Aubray.

The decision grew even more eminent when I contacted an internal recruiter to
ask about openings at U.S. Xpress within specific “dedicated” fleets.  I inquired
about Boston, Philadelphia and Seattle, the three places I considered most likely
for me to want to settle down.  The recruiter set me up to speak with a fellow
who was starting a new dedicated account at a Formica warehouse in the Dela-
ware Water Gap area of Pennsylvania (one of the nicest stretches of freeway
you’ll find in the eastern states is Interstate 80 as it snakes along the Delaware
River through the Gap).  They were very interesting in signing me on, but the
catch was I had to be available for the second week of November back in Penna.
That gave me about nine days to get there if I left Ashland as scheduled.

I told Aubray I wanted to take the Formica position –a little more directly than
I did six months prior when discussing the return to U.S. Xpress.  Again, she
was all in favor of it, said it sounded like a great opportunity (paid much better
than Western regional for one thing), that she knew my heart was back in the
East.  So it was settled; this was my last visit to Ashland.

The art show preparation went well.  We mounted and framed 24 new pastel drawings in two days and hung them on the coffee house walls; she
even made a few sales before it was time for me to leave.  I will never forget the last night I spent there.  Our visits had been strictly platonic since
June; it was understood and accepted as best for us both.  I even slept in Camerado’s sleeper most of the time so she would be more comfortable.  
There were no outward signs that either of us thought much about rekindling any passion in our relationship.  Inwardly, though, I was finding it
harder and harder to be around Aubray and  not want her –especially after I wrote “The Continuing Story of Ananias and Sapphira.”  For those
who read that rather elongated chapter of the Chronicles (Part Two, Chap. 18), perhaps no explanation is necessary when I say this: I believe I
have spent my whole life feeling that one day I was destined to have Sapphira as a wife, and to be her Ananias.  (And yet, the most important
character turns out to be the unattached guru/judo master Gideon, to whom I also seem to aspire.)  That story was as personal as any of the
egocentric first-person narratives I labored over in my twenties, perhaps even more as I was able to use the disguise of the characters to plumb
deeper into my psyche than I allow myself when conscious of it (the unheralded power of pure fiction to often be more true than the “truth”).   
The early period of our marriage gave me every reason to think I had found my Sapphira in Aubray, and letting go of that turned out to be a long
and tedious process leading up to and culminating in the separation in June –and now that I was finally made conscious of this, it all came back
again.  I think I was convinced that I would never love anyone like I loved her.


So I told her that.  It was about 8:30 PM; I was due to be in Portland again in the morning.  The plan was going forward and there was no stopping
it –I was Pennsylvania-bound.  But for whatever reason --call it the passion of the moment, realizing that this was the One Last Chance we all
know we’d regret if we never took it—I told her everything.  The characters, what they meant to me, what she meant to me.  EVERYTHING.  I
don’t think I’ve shared this with anyone who knew us both until now.  I wanted to be her Ananias again.  There were tears, and then were hugs,
and then there were kisses –passionate ones like we hadn’t shared in years.  There might have been more if I had allowed more time, but I dutifully
went out the door without regret, for I was certain that the universe was aligning in the proper way to assure my triumphant return.  We even
talked about it the next night when I called her from Idaho –I was going to take about six months back East among family and friends, spend my
driving time contemplating and reflecting upon what I needed to learn and do and how I would need to grow to be the husband I wanted to be.  

I had one more blissful day, spent mostly in the Salt Lake area, imagining this future return to the West to reclaim my bride and set my roots down
in Oregon.  At some point in these reveries I decided the thing to do was to put on my wedding ring again.  I had taken it off back in July, but I
hung it over the top of a Celtic cross pendant on a necklace I rigged to hang from Camerado’s visors –a constant reminder as I drove of what I had
lost, and everything I had gained through the surrender of myself in this loss.  Putting the ring back on my finger, it seems to me now, was in a way
trying to reclaim the spoils of that surrender for myself –as pointless and fruitless as seeking to possess salvation as an individual.  We gain
salvation by the giving up of our separate existence to the eternal omnipresence of God, not by wrapping God around our finger.  I’d spent five
months trying to digest this lesson and interpret it with words in the Chronicles, and there I was about to choke on my own ambitions all over
again.

The next morning I called Aubray from the middle of Wyoming and told her about the ring.   She was not happy.  Something about the scenario we
were creating seemed extremely wrong all of a sudden; something made it take a 180-degree turn in her mind overnight –I never found out what.  I
was struck with that old familiar feeling where the world has been yanked out from under your feet and all you can do is FALL.  And that is what I
did for most of the day of November 7, 2004.  I had an awful lot of driving to do –scheduled to deliver in Aurora, Illinois in the morning.  In the
meantime I wrote a couple desperate emails to some mutual friends in Ashland –which enraged Aubray—and we had at least three more
conversations, each one getting uglier and uglier.  For the final one I called her from a rest area in central Iowa.  It was one of our all-time worst;
things were said that should never come to pass between two people. I hung up the phone and returned to the road, and before I got too far and had
too much time to think about it, I took off the ring and heaved it out the window.  It probably still rests somewhere in the spaghetti bowl of
overpasses at the junction of I-80 and I-35 on the west side of Des Moines.  

In some ways, I wish I had not done that –the ring deserved a proper and peaceful burial.   But I cannot argue with the results.  If the hope that
Aubray and I would salvage our marriage could be likened to the resurrection of Lazarus, then the violence of our conversation, and the catharsis of
casting away the ring, was like the subsequent murder of the resurrected and the Resurrector.  My dreams of living my life with Aubray were
nailed to a cross that night, and the body certainly died….but the spirit was lifted, set free of my restrictive dreams.  I suddenly knew that I would
love again, and with much more abandon, if I trusted myself to be led.  


Massachusetts, both with stops leading me through the heart of New England.  My schedule also afforded me the choice of spending my weekends
up there with my family or down in the Philadelphia area with Jeff Bonfield, a close friend/travel partner of many good miles and many years.  I
wrote, but slowly; I considered this a time to reacquaint myself with the people I had neglected through my devout attention to Aubray.  I
remember at least a week passing, if not more, before she and I communicated with each other, and I forget who called whom first, but the first
conversation we had was something very much like Oh-my-God-what-were-we-thinking?-let’s-never-do-that-to-each-other-again!  And we didn’t.  
This began a period of very genuine friendly relations for Aubray and me, something I thought we would enjoy for a long, long time.

At the suggestion of Jeff, I had put up a shingle for myself on an online personals service through
The Onion website (a hilarious satirical newspaper that I wholeheartedly endorse).  A couple
contacts were made, emails were going back and forth; I even had a date to go to a minor league
hockey game in Philadelphia.  I was getting ready to commit to a lack of commitment, settle
down with the idea of not settling down, and do the Dating Game like the rest of the world does
it: step by step.  

One of the women who contacted me was from California, but was originally a South Jersey
girl and was thinking about moving home to be closer to family.  Her initial email to me had
a cute little schtick about seeking subjects for a scientific experiment to determine the
relative quality of men in the Bay Area to those in the Delaware Valley; in exchange for our
labor she offered payment in “green apple Jolly Ranchers and Yoohoos.”  I wrote back
accepting her offer, and inviting her to take part in my similar experiment with the
populations of the Philadelphia and Boston metro areas. (My offer for compensation was
“Woodstock hard apple cider” and “mock meat” Chinese food from Harmony, my favorite
Chinatown restaurant .)  This led to some fun email exchanges about the rigors of scien-
tific study, what it means to be “Ashkenazi Jewish” (her self-description under “Religion”
in her ad; I thought it made her sound like a “tribal Middle Eastern goddess-type; she said
no, her family is from Long Island and Florida like everyone else) and the merits of life
in California versus New Jersey.  I must admit, at that point I didn’t think there was much chance she would choose me over a California guy; her
life out there seemed pretty damn cool.  But I was having a good time and she seemed to be too, so I let it roll as they say.

As it turned out, she was about to come home for a two-week stay with her folks in Cherry Hill, about 15 minutes from where I spent my
weekends with Jeff.  So we arranged a mock meat lunch date for Saturday the 18th.  I kept my expectations as low as I could –not a natural act for
me at all.  But it must have helped; I will always remember the amazing, unprecedented calm I felt as I drove up to her parents house (Walt
Whitman Boulevard!) in Jeff’s car, walked up the path to the front door and knocked.  The door opened, and……


If every death is a rebirth, then every rebirth also implies a death.  This cannot be a story of one without the other.  

Jodi flew back to California on January 3, ready to pack up 11 years worth of independent life in the Bay Area and bring it on home to live with
me.  I had told Aubray about her not long after our first date.  There was the briefest reflex of jealousy at first, but overall Aubray really handled it
well, considering the fact that we were still legally married.  She treated me as the friend that we promised each other to be, finding joy in my joy;
no one could ask for more from a lost love.  

Just after Christmas, Aubray had called me from the hospital in Ashland, where she being treated  for pneumonia. Hospital stays in December
were almost an annual rite for Aubray; the last time it had been diagnosed as pneumonia, however, was 2000, when a very serious case had her bed-
ridden for at least two weeks and made even her doctors nervous.  But a hospital stay for Aubray was commonplace enough that her family kept
only one eye on her condition, and I learned to do the same.  When she was released at her request three days later, it seemed that our old warrior
was past another battle for her health.

But she got worse, and on New Years Eve she was taken to a Medford hospital by a friend.  I was at Jeff’s apartment just after Jodi left when I
called her cell phone and got the news.  Her doctors were very concerned by some congestive heart failure, which had never been an issue before
with her.  This concerned her mother enough to fly out from Pennsylvania, she told me.  Aubray was in pretty good spirits though.  We talked for
quite a while that night. I even remember her making an “off-color” sexual joke at my expense, which made us both laugh uncontrollably for
minutes.  I could tell that this hospital stay was going to last a while though, so the next day while passing through Connecticut I stopped and had
some of her favorite flowers wired to the hospital –yellow roses.   I was told by several people later that she was really touched by that, that she
wasn’t sure if I really cared enough go out of my way to cheer her up anymore.  

On January 9, we had another long talk.  She was showing her classic signs of “hospital fatigue” now, that overwhelming urge to get out and get
home at all costs. It was spilling into little frustrations with her family and friends as well.  I remember talking her down a bit, helping calm her
impatience with the hospital process.  Her mood improved greatly, and we talked about what she was going to do when she eventually got out.  I
had mentioned at some point that I was shopping for cell phones, and near the end Aubray suggested I sign up for service with Sprint, because that
was her carrier and we could talk as much as we want.  What a goddamn sweetheart she could be!  We parted by saying, “I love you.”  And we
did.  We really really did….

That was a Sunday.  On Tuesday, I was passing through Massachusetts while making my Formica rounds, and I stopped in at my mother’s house
for dinner.  I think we were going out, because I remember thinking I’d make a quick email check first.  There was a very tense-looking message
from one of our Ashland friends: “If you haven’t heard from Aubray’s family yet, please call at once.”

I was on a plane to Oregon the next morning.  Her two sisters, father and stepmother had all arrived there the day before.  Aubray had been
discharged Monday afternoon at her insistence.  Everyone who saw her told me she did not look well at all, and I could picture the scene at the
hospital with the doctors emphatically telling her she should stay –there was no getting Aubray to change her mind when it was made up.  And I’m
certain her mind was made up –one way or another, she was going Home.

Shortly after getting back to Ashland that evening, Aubray climbed the stairs in her apartment, and collapsed.  By the time paramedics had arrived
and resumed her heart function, it was later estimated, it had been stopped for about a half-hour.  The amount of time which that implies she was
without oxygen coming to her brain was enough to trigger a vegetative coma, and that was the state she was in when we all arrived in Oregon.

We were unanimous in sensing that Aubray had no desire to survive on a respirator, and I was the one who had anecdotal evidence of many
conversations to prove it, so it was a big relief to all involved when I agreed.  (There was also the sobering double-bind revelation from her kidney
specialist that Aubray had refused dialysis for the past six months, and now would no longer survive without it, yet was also too fragile in her
lapsed state to receive the treatments.)  The respirator was removed on Thursday the 13th, after everyone had the chance to say goodbye
individually, and at 8:03 PM Aubray, my wife and best friend, breathed her last.  

I will always maintain that saying goodbye to Aubray at that time was not a difficult thing for
me to do, because I had been slowly saying goodbye to her for years.  Living with a brittle
diabetic brings a person almost face-to-face with mortality many times before the final
acquaintance is made.  That in itself is the most difficult thing I’ve ever experienced, so that
the last goodbye is almost just an echo of all the others.  But also –and I tend to stress this far
more, because it means much more to me personally—there is the fact that Aubray was not
afraid.  She was a person who experienced fear, sometimes quite acutely and in severe pangs,
but it never defined her.  Her truest self was not afraid.  She taught me more about what it is
like to live richly in the shadow of death than any book or scripture ever could.  That is because
Aubray’s faith in Life Eternal was experiential, not theoretical.  Before I knew her, I read and
read and read, and I still lay down each night with the Fear, the numbing anxiety that if I should
die before I wake, there was neither Lord nor soul for Him to take, for both had been bound up
in intellectual concepts.  It was through Aubray that I learned to experience the Lord and the
soul, and catch glimpses of the Truth that –please forgive this blasphemy if you see it as such—
they are one and the same.  Nobody was better at combining “Thou Art That” with “I Am
The Way, the Truth and the Life,” and living within the peace they created together, than
Aubray.


There are two things I have been wanting to put down in writing for a while regarding Aubray and her passing.  The first comes from a collection of
writings attributed to the ancient Taoist luminary Chuang-tzu (translated, amusingly, by our old friend, the Trappist monk and author Thomas
Merton).

THREE FRIENDS

There were three friends discussing life.
One said:
“Can men live together and know nothing of it?
Work together and produce nothing?
Can they fly around in space and forget to exist
World without end?”
The three friends looked at each other and burst out laughing.
They had no explanation.
Thus they were better friends than before.

Then one friend died.
Confucius sent a disciple to help the other two chant his obsequies.
The disciple found that one friend had composed a song.
While the other played a lute,
They sang:

“Hey, Sung Hu!
Where’d you go?
Hey, Sung Hu!
Where’d you go?
You have gone
Where you really were.
And we are here—
Damn it!  We are here!”

Then the disciple of Confucius burst in on them and exclaimed:
“May I inquire where you found this in the rubrics for obsequies,
This frivolous carolling in the presence of the departed?”

The two friends looked at each other and laughed:
“Poor fellow,” they said, “he doesn’t know the new liturgy!”


The second was written much more recently –a couple weeks ago.  It is a Hermit Crab original, and more a direct product of the Taoist school of
thought than most of them.  I didn’t know at the time that I was writing it about Aubray, but the transition from male to female pronouns, it now
seems, is no accident.


WHEN A GREAT PERSON DIES

When a righteous person dies,
Grown men sob like frightened babies.

When a virtuous person dies,
Great mobs of mourners crowd around the casket,
As if they wish to be buried with him.

When a great person dies,
Eloquent eulogies are delivered
While entire nations watch and weep;
Things are said like,
“He was an example for us all” and
“This man’s name will live forever”
(or until the weathered stone yields its noble engraving,
whichever comes first).

When a person dies
Who has surrendered every aspect of herself
To the Divine One,

The world takes note
As much as we notice
The air we breathe.

They whose lives she touched bow their heads,
and say to themselves,
“This continent is the less,
But the ocean has gained.”

Her closest friends and loved ones say nothing,
And smile,
As someone who watches the sun set,
For what goes down, they know,
Must come up.

I don’t remember Aubray as a righteous person, or a virtuous person, or a great person.  I remember her as a friend who taught me to smile in the
face of everything; who forgot to exist in the most beautiful ways; and of whom I can truthfully sing,

“Hey, Aubray!
Where’d you go?
Hey, Aubray!
Where’d you go?
You have gone
Where you really were.
And we are here—
Damn it!  We are here!”

*                    *                   *                    *

I am so glad you are here with me too, damn it!  Thank you for spending some of your time with the Chronicles.  I hope that you have forgotten
everything written in them, but are left with the strange, overwhelming sense that there is nothing to fear, and no one to fear it anyway.  Here we
find the beginning of Life.

May the open road rise up to meet you, and may you follow it far beyond its end…..

Allons! and adieu,

Hieromonk Crustacean
30 January 2006
Collingswood, New Jersey  
www.nasa.gov
Ashland, Oregon