chair slats, and the spaces between

It’s a beautiful early fall Sunday morning, just a hint of chilly – a good day for digging up my favorite flannel shirt – and as per my new weekend ritual, I’m back at 1369 (at a table today, rather than my usual stool in the window), reading Harper’s. I’ve finished most of the essays in this month’s magazine and was considering picking up a copy of The New Yorker to add to my weekend reading, but there weren’t any newsstands on the way to the café. So I’m reading a piece of short fiction by John Updike called “Spanish Prelude to a Second Marriage.”

As Brad and Leonora traipse semi-aimlessly down the narrow cobbled alleys and corridors of Granada, Madrid and Toledo, I’m reminded of my own wanderings through southern Spain a few years back. I remember late one spring evening laying on my stomach in a park in Seville, writing an impassioned letter to a “romantic friend” in the dark. I happily scribbled away for over an hour, with my fountain pen and onionskin airmail stationary, detailing the soft Spanish spring air, the slightly damp grass, the pink azaleas that lay scattered on the ground around me, the fresh strawberries with yogurt and honey and walnuts that I’d had in a tiny little café a short while before as a late night snack… Before getting up to return to my pensione, I picked up one of the azaleas from the ground and pressed it into my journal along with the letter. I’m sure if I were able to find that journal, I’d find both the dried flower and the unsent letter still pressed between the pages.

From there I begin to reminisce on some of my other aimless wanderings through Europe that same spring. I had an Interrail pass, and in between visits with friends scattered throughout the continent, I hopped on trains and went wherever my current inclination took me. Berlin was cold and rainy and felt hostile to me, so two hours after arriving, I jumped on the next train to Copenhagen. One memory leads to the next, bumping up against each other like a traffic jam in my head – incidental artifacts of times in my life when I was simply a “traveler,” nothing more and nothing less, just passing through, not even sight-seeing, just wandering, people watching, reading in cafes in strange cities, watching myself with satisfaction as I blend into one foreign context after another, seeing me woven into all these different tapestries of varying colors and textures and languages.

Of course, Brad and Leonora only thought they were going to Spain to see the gothic cathedrals; really they were going to Spain to decide whether they should marry or breakup. But this too was a ruse, Brad didn’t find an answer to the nagging question of where the relationship should be going, what Brad found instead were old memories of his mother.

My eye is drawn to a complex design on the floor made up of patterns of shadows and sunlight. In amongst the shadows of stool legs are an arc of upside-down letters spelling out “The 1369 Coffee House.” I look up to notice for the first time the white letters painted in an arc across the bottom of the picture window. It reminds me of reading “The Allegory of the Cave” in my first college philosophy class. Which is real, the shadow or the image casting the shadow?

Living in New Zealand was nothing like the month I spent traveling in Europe. Traveling in Europe, my aimlessness was liberating. Living in New Zealand, one of the most unsettling aspects was that very aimlessness. It’s the difference between living in a place and moving between places. If not for the structures we create in our life, we could not appreciate moving between them, or better, escaping [temporarily] outside of them. But escape is not a way of life. Eventually you just have to build yourself new structures.

Living in New Zealand, I wasted away three years of my life and beautiful scenery looking for purpose. I had found myself in New Zealand on a complete whim: to be with “my guy.” Had anybody else told me such a story, I would have thought it very romantic and would have wished that I could live a whimsical, bohemian life such as theirs. Now that it was my life, however, I was trying very hard to prevent myself from arriving at the forgone conclusion that it had simply been a stupid thing to do. And so I continued in my search for purpose and meaning. Like Brad and Leonora, I told myself and others that I was in New Zealand to complete my masters degree and to see a bit of the world while I was still young and relatively free of responsibilities; but also like Brad and Leonora, I knew deep down that I was searching for the answer to something, though I never quite knew what, and never even quite knew what the question was to begin with.

I remember as a child visiting my grandmother – my Grammy Ginny – at her old house in Greenwich one spring break. I think I was probably about ten, and must have been particularly difficult to entertain. I generally spent my spring breaks with my other grandmother, my Nana, down in Florida, where my Nana and I passed our time alternating between shopping and going to the beach. But my Grammy, a little older than my Nana and always just a short memory away from the Depression, didn’t spend her money that way, nor her time. Instead she encouraged me in crafts or in walks in the woods near the house – the sort of activities that unspoiled grandchildren are meant to engage in. I remember sitting in front of the bookshelf in her bedroom one morning flipping through her numerous art books. She had bought me a canvas the day before and had set me up at an easel in the basement where she did her own painting. One book in particular caught my attention and, although it was too sophisticated for me at the time, the concept stuck in my head over the years. The book gave an instruction on drawing from the left side of the brain, and on the cover was a half-drawn chair, in which by shading just the background, the chair began to gradually emerge from the white.

This concept returned to me recently as an analogy for something…something that I had a difficult time putting my finger on. I mused to a friend of mine over dinner about my new Philosophy of Chair Slats, and as I tried to explain the book and the premise behind it, I gradually began to figure out just where I was going with this analogy: life itself is like a blank canvas, full of color and texture and events, yes, but devoid of meaning. We assign the meaning to it ourselves. Like the slats of the chair, we become so accustomed to seeing the slats that we fail to see the space between them. But this isn’t an absolute value, this isn’t “reality” – we can learn to see the spaces around the chair. But then, which is real, the slats or the spaces between them? The shadow or the object that casts it? That is up to us to decide. The two simply exist, with or without meaning.

And so, returning to my reflections on travelling, on aimlessness, on purpose, and on my time in New Zealand, I stare off into space where the wheels of my mind do their turning. But when I bring my eyes back into focus, I am looking again at the shadow letters on the floor spelling out “The 1369 Coffee House.” I’m mildly fascinated by the notion that I had never noticed the sign in the window until seeing the upside-down shadow of it on the floor, that my eye had failed to see the letters as it looked through them out the window and at the movement on the street. It’s actually kind of the inverse of the chair slats. And I realize suddenly what it was that I actually found in New Zealand, and that the reason I hadn’t seen it was precisely because I was so convinced that I had been looking for something. What I had found, quite simply, was that there was nothing to find there. That in fact, there is nothing to find anywhere, really. Places, things, events – they have no meaning of their own. The meaning is assigned by us, and it comes from within. What I had found in New Zealand, I had become accustomed to saying upon returning to the US, was a new appreciation for home.

What I had found, moreover, was the spaces between the slats of the chair.

sitting in the ashes of youth, of grief, of growth…

I spent three years living in New Zealand, from the age of 23 to 26. I learned a lot from that period, but most of it I learned retrospectively, after returning “home” to the US. What I was most conscious of while I was there was the uncomfortable feeling of transience I so often felt. There were times that I would surface, only to wonder what I was doing there, how I’d gotten there, and how I was ever going to get back home. And then worse, whether I even had a home anymore, or ever would again. So far away from my family and friends and anyone who had known me for longer than the present, sometimes I felt like I didn’t even exist. A peculiar feeling that makes no sense at all unless you’ve ever felt it.

I remember waking up early one morning – dull gray and drizzling outside the window – and for a moment I lay peacefully watching the shapes in the tree branches as they moved in the wind, scratching softly against the windowpane. And as I lay looking out the rain-streaked window, I remembered laying awake in bed as a child on dark winter mornings, and just like now, watching the shapes in the tree branches as they moved in the wind, scratching softly against the windowpane. A dog, a witch – they were always the same array of shapes, because they were the same trees, morning after morning, year after year. And then I began to cry, because these tree branches did not make the same shapes, they were not the tree branches of my childhood, I was in a strange place with strange trees and nothing was the same anymore. And I cried because I missed my childhood room. And I cried because I wanted my Mommy. And I cried because I knew that, in a way, I no longer had a “mommy” to want – my mother could no longer offer me the sort of blanket comfort that she once could; thus, I could no longer find solace even in the very wanting of such comforts. I cried because I realized that neither could my father offer solutions to my problems any more, he could merely offer financial support, but the rest was up to me. I cried because I wished that I could just be grounded again for my errors in judgement, rather than being left to pay the consequences that life demands. I cried because at 26 I was still crying, and because I still didn’t know what else to do. And as the gray drizzle began to open up into a somewhat brighter gray drizzle, and as I continued to cry, the concentric circles of my early morning terrors began to wind gradually out of the abstract into the more concrete, until finally I was able to stop crying and contain my despair enough to get out of bed and begin my day with some semblance of “adultness.”

I told all this to the “then-not-yet-horrible Adam,” and he told me a story, which I have since tracked down as being at least in part derived from a biblical reference. He told me about a boy who wanted to be a warrior, and he thought that he was grown enough to go off and be a warrior, but he was told by his elders: No. Before you can become a man, they told him, you must first sit in the ashes of youth. And the boy sat in his ashes, and sat in his ashes, and sat in his ashes some more, and when he was done sitting in his ashes he went off to the woods, where he found that he had become a man. And the “then-not-yet-horrible Adam” told me sagely, “you may think that you have already sat in your ashes, but you have to go back and sit in them some more, until you are done sitting in your ashes.”

And I did. And I never consciously saw myself get up and leave those ashes, but it seems as though I have.

I wonder sometimes, though, whether we ever finish sitting in our ashes. Or whether perhaps this is a place to which we must continue to return throughout our entire lives.

Which adds a new dimension of the notion of home.

the betrayal of Miss Laperouse

Sitting beside me in the window at 1369 are a pair of young elementary school teachers, talking a stream of chatter about school, homeroom, their “kids,” and the other teachers. I try to tune them out, try to make myself more interested in getting through last month’s Harper’s than in their not-particularly-interesting schoolteacher gossip. But even banal as their conversation is, or perhaps in fact precisely because of it, I find my interest repeatedly pulled away from “Le Divorce,” until I finally just give in and stop trying to ignore them…

In so doing, I find myself transported back to a time and place I haven’t visited in quite a while. And for a moment – which really was just a moment, but may as well have been an eternity – I am back in third grade, a period of my life not especially eventful or interesting, but a time in which everything seemed certain, occupying only one dimension, one reality. I remember myself at eight – I have long hair, which I am in the habit of chewing on as I daydream out the window (something my teachers used to scold me for repeatedly). And as I think of my elementary school days, I’m remembering a scene played countless times over – it’s the end of the school day, after lunch, and we are working quietly at our desks while Miss Laperouse sits at her own desk in the front right corner of the classroom grading papers. She looks up from time to time, casting her all-knowing third-grade-teacher gaze across the room to make sure we’re all doing what we should be doing. My attention wanders between my deskwork and out the window, where I watch the movement of the pecan trees and daydream about whatever it is that awaits me after the final bell rings at 2:30, and then back into the room where I watch Miss Laperouse where she sits serenely at her desk. And as I sit daydreaming at the end of the school day, one day in October, one moment in one day amongst hundreds of days, that moment is held suspended for me as I return to my spot in the window of 1369. And from the perspective of twenty years past, I am able to look back fondly, nostalgically on the momentary and yet all-encompassing reality of an eight-year-old child – a reality seemingly so certain of its completeness that it allows room for nothing but what is, and what has come before.

Returning to my own now – U2’s Joshua Tree is playing, two dogs are sniffing each other excitedly on the sidewalk outside the window – I hear the elementary school teachers still droning on in their dull, driveling way about the good kids, the bad kids, and the cute kids in their classes. And I find myself suddenly wedged in the doorway of two different consciousnesses. I am my eight-year-old self, damp hair in mouth, contained wholly and completely by my eight-year-old worldview. I am watching the pretty, young Miss Laperouse sitting at her desk, feeling the as-of-yet untested and unconditional trust and respect of a child for a benevolent authority figure. But in the background I am hearing the flippant chatter of the two young teachers beside me – they are roughly the same age that Miss Laperouse was when she was my third-grade teacher, and it occurs to me that they could be Miss Laperouse, Miss Laperouse could be them – and I feel dimly betrayed.

Sitting on my stool, staring blindly into the street, seeing nothing outside the window but the crossing of two once parallel realities, child merging into adult merging into child again… my wet hair drops from my mouth as I realize, betrayed, that the benevolent authority figure is neither benevolent nor even authoritative; I take a sip of coffee and recognize that that unshakable child-view of reality that I look back upon with such longing – longing for a time when things were simple and whole – had in fact been flawed, skewed, deceptive; I turn my head to examine the two girls to my right, both of them roughly my own age, to see if they in any way even resemble my memories of my beloved and revered elementary school teachers. And although they don’t really, I feel betrayed again to recognize that all such worldviews that appear whole and all-encompassing are in fact deceptive, and that Miss Laperouse could well have occupied realities other than those created for her by her third grade students – as suggested that scandalous day when she stepped out of the room for a few minutes and it was rumored (by someone with a seat beside the window) that she was talking to her boyfriend. I now realize, horrified, that in fact, not only did Miss Laperouse have a boyfriend, but she may have even chattered flippantly and a bit daftly with other elementary school teachers (like these two) about the eight-year-old me and the rest of her “kids” – in the process, reducing us down to simply the good ones, the bad ones and the cute ones, leaving us devoid of any individuality or unique personality.

It’s a little like learning that God is really just a man, crass and ignorant as the rest of us – a discovery somehow more devastating in its way than the realization that God doesn’t exist at all…

Labor Day weekend in LA

I didn’t expect to like LA. Mostly because it is not in the Northeast. And it doesn’t snow in winter. And because it is a city which features billboard ads for divorce lawyers and liposuction on bus stop benches. But it’s a funny thing about expectations, isn’t it?

Not that I loved LA. LA is not a city capable of inspiring love. It does not charm or seduce or haunt. Perhaps that in itself is its unique inverted appeal. It is a city of everything and nothing. Traffic jams and open space. It is a strange city, where nothing seems to fit with anything else. No quaint picture-perfect neighborhoods, no weathered old brownstones or regal plantation houses to remind of eras past. This is not a city to inspire halcyon dreams. It lacks shadows. And even the palm trees are staged.

(I hate palm trees. Palm trees are to trees as Chihuahuas are to dogs.)

“Cozy” you will not find in LA, not easily anyway. But it seems you can find pretty much anything else. I found a French bistro where I could sit outside in the sunshine with my book and drink Orangina and eat salad nicoise and pass the afternoon not so much differently than I might were I in Provence instead of Los Angeles.

And for $5 you can buy what is literally a “bucket” of Jamba Juice.

I think I was wrong in some of my assumptions. I loathed the very idea of LA for the idea I had of a 90210-esque artificially blonde and freshly liposuctioned dominant culture. You can find that too, I’m sure, but what I found instead was that there really is no dominant culture in LA.

LA is, for the most part, rather flat and ugly. But it is surrounded by hills. Monday evening we drove up Mulholland Drive to watch the sunset. We parked and climbed up to the top amongst a throng of other sunset-watchers.

Up in the hills it is quiet and dusty and still. You hear crickets. You feel far away from the city. As the sun goes down and the dark night sky rises up, the expanse of city lights pulsates in the heat. Silently, rhythmically – it’s like the view from an airplane as it descends towards its destination city. And in fact, if you look up, you see little lights blinking in a circle in the sky around the city – all of them airplanes waiting their turn to land.

Up at Mulholland Drive, a youthful man sitting next to us with his dogs asks if we know what that expanse of unlit, seemingly undeveloped greenery is right in the center of the city. We don’t know either, but we make jokes about the developers waiting to get hold of it, like the developers salivating over the prime real-estate that is Central Park in that other big over-developed city. The man sitting next to us is named George. He recently moved to LA from Austin and is pleased to find others who are not native “Angelinos” – particularly pleased in fact to find that the four of us are from the Northeast. He has always found people to be much more genuine in the Northeast, he tells us – George seems like a pretty genuine guy himself. George went to college in the Northeast and then moved to Austin where he did a doctorate in Marketing. He wanted to work with non-profits. What he does now, he’s embarrassed to tell us…video production, he says. George is a porn director. Go figure. Non-profit porn? I ask, and George laughs. Still a really nice guy though.

LA is a very strange place. Nothing seems to fit with anything else, least of all with expectations.