A Pasttime Story – The Terem 

    We have lunch. Often now, he comes over. Barely eats a thing and then expresses guilt at eating my food. It's nice just to be here in my kitchen with my father thumbing through the papers of whatever he's brought.  He always brings something. It's not just the old teacher in him. The exchange of energy that passes back and forth between us via ideas is life to him.  

    Today he's got a slim, hardbound volume from his library, long out of print.  An historical study of Peter the Great and his determination to open his empire of wild boar and bear to the West; of the founding of St. Petersburg and Peter's edict to end the Orthodox practice of confining all the women of the household into the Terem. My father's annoyed at the writer because he's used the word Terem several times before translating it in a footnote. "Why not with the original use? This writer has a habit of this, showing off to the reader he knows old Russian. Entirely beside the point." "What's it mean?" "Terem?"  

    "Yes."  

    "It's rooms at the top of the main house of nobles, an apartment sealed off, dark with few windows where the women lived, their quarters. They weren't allowed down, to mix with the activities of the main house."

    I think of Rapunzel. "Kind of like an architectural burka?"  

    "I suppose.  And Peter said, enough of this.  Let the women come down, interact with the living swirl and besides, we need them to help us get this work of enlightenment done!" 

    Or that's the words, living swirl, I put to it later. Like what I have with my father, now. So thankful for it a year after mom's death. He could have left with her and maybe he almost did. He's so light now he's practically dust. But he came back to life. I compliment him on his fearlessness, encouraging the flow of energy between us. I tell him I think this is what love is.  This being open to the energetic flow, letting it move, not trying to capture or contain it. 

    Even though I embarrass him with all my naming, he understands. We know this will end, his sitting there, talking of Peter the Great while I make him lunch. But I refuse to let my heart close in protection against my fear of his end. I'm following his lead in this, of course. His fearlessness. Encouraging this new growth, this later chapter between us. Not letting the knowledge of our inevitable loss of one another keep us from this late intensity of friendship and ideas.  Why deny, lock up in a Terem, this chance for tender being between, this mixing of energies that gives new thought, new life? That would be against all we believe and practice. He and I. 

    So it is falling in love. Caring for a parent. Having a baby, making a friend these are all acts of fearlessness in the face of eventual loss. No way around it. So why do we act?  Is it simple repression, willful forgetting? Maybe. And maybe too because this letting in gives as much, maybe more but who can measure, than the loss at the end, takes. In the swirling entire.   return