salvation

All those who know me know how much I hate my job. I have hated my job for the past…well, since forever, really.

So here is news: I got a new job.

A new job, at a new company, in a new field. A complete career change. I got a writing job at a public relations agency. And a very cool agency at that. I start Monday. And now I’m just counting down the days.

Goodbye beige cube. Goodbye souless marketing mediocrity. Goodbye white, 30-something males in blue button-down shirts. Goodbye bland death-by-boredom corporate hell…

august

It’s fall already. Where did the summer go? The last two months have flown by – what have I been doing that I couldn’t stop and record a thought or two? The other day I took out my little black notebook to jot down the name of a book, and found pages of notes I’d scribbled reminding myself to remember…

In August we went up to The Island in Maine, my dad, Den and I. The Island is a summer camp that has been in our family since the turn of the century, built by my great-grandfather. It’s one hundred years old this year. It sits on East Grand Lake in Forest City, Maine. Too far north to become a tourist resort, each visit is a walk back in to time, amazing how little has changed over ten, twenty, a hundred years. The boulders, the trees that frame the shoreline, the evening sunsets – always the same. Some things do change a little: the black-eyed-susans outside the kitchen window are gone – a little pine tree sprang up in their spot; the hammock tree came down in a storm. But pretty much everything else is just as we last left it.

Den and I were up for a weekend last year, but before that I hadn’t been up to the island since the summer before I started college. That was the last year my grandparents made it up too. I spent that summer reading and sulking in my teenage way – it didn’t occur to me that I should be savoring the end of something special. For years after I ached to be back at the island with my parents and grandparents. But returning this summer – after thirteen years – my dad and Dennis and I began to lay the ground for a new era. This is why I live in New England – so I would never be far from our island.

Opening camp always begins with a day spent sweeping batshit from the surfaces of everything. Unshuttering the windows. Uncovering the furniture, moving tables and chairs back outside to the porch. Hunting down wicks for the kerosene lamps. Firing up the gas fridge.

Our island has no electricity or plumbing. The kitchen features a green pitcher pump, a gas hotplate, a wood stove (in which my grandmother used to bake her legendary blueberry pies), a “modern” gas refrigerator, a gas light fixture. In the living room is the obligatory trophy deer head mounted above my grampa’s desk. My grandmother always hated that deer head, but for some reason it’s still there. The desk had originally been an organ, brought over by my great-grandparents in their big boat, the Green Dragon. At some point the organ rotted and was converted to a desk. We still have an outhouse, use of which is politely referred to as “going down the lane.”  There is discussion of replacing the outhouse with a biological toilet, but I am steadfastly opposed to this modernization. The outhouse was good enough for Grammy, I say. We take our baths in the cold, cold lake – with ivory soap, because it floats – and then run back to warm ourselves by the fire. As a child I used to huddle shivering and blue in the green rocking chair by the wood stove after a cold morning dip, chattering to my grandmother over a mug of Campbell’s instant chicken noodle cup-a-soup.

My dad slept on the balcony watching the stars. This is where my grandparents used to sleep – my grampa in his iron bed and my grammy swaying in her hammock. Every morning my grandfather would rise early and make my grandmother breakfast in bed. As his eyesight declined it took longer and longer for breakfast to arrive, and my grandmother would be trapped in bed long into the morning. As a child I used to scramble upstairs and swing with her in her hammock while she waited for breakfast.

Den and I slept in the tall, sturdy bed my great-grandfather built. The head- and footboards are made up of crisscrossed poles of cherry logs, papery bark peeling along the edges, but still amazingly intact just as when he and my great-grandmother slept in it a century ago. We went to sleep at night to the sound of the restless black lake flinging itself up against the boulders. Sometimes our lake is remarkably still – the surface smooth as glass and crystal clear. But not this year. All night and all day we heard the lake beating up against the rocks, rhythmic and constant like breath. If you look out the window at the right hour during the night you can see the moon shining through the pines and casting a golden path across the lake.

You awaken in the morning to the call of the loons, the lake still lapping steadily at the shore, the sky pink, warming from the east, air chilled enough to beckon a fire. The loons call their mournful call: “where arrrre yooou?” And another answers back: “heeere I am. Here I am.” Sometimes the loons sound like they’re laughing. “Still laughing at Katy King’s dirty joke,” Sam Brown used to say. Nearly twenty years ago it must have been since Sam visited us at the camp, the same year that my friend Katy King from the mainland stayed with us on the island. The joke wasn’t that dirty – or that funny – it just shocked the adults to hear it come from a ten-year-old’s mouth: what do you call the sweat between Dolly Parton’s boobs? (answer: mountain dew). Raised eyebrows and embarrassed laughs – Katy cracked herself up – and then the loons joined in and Sam said “they’re laughing at Katy’s dirty joke.”  There aren’t as many loons as there used to be. Used to hear them all day long. They say it’s because of the acid rain – it weakens the shells of the eggs.

On the morning of our last day at the island, I woke up with the sunrise and sat in bed writing these notes to myself in my little notebook with a nub of pencil I’d found (from my grandfather’s last crossword puzzles). The sky was pink. The pines along the shoreline were still dark silhouettes. As the sun rose across the sky, it shimmered down on the lake’s ripples like diamonds. The water was so clear you could see the rocks on the bottom standing on the balcony. This place is heaven to me. The souls of my grammy and grampa live here. The soul of my father’s childhood, and of mine. This is the real pace of time, not the hyperspeed clock of city life.

We closed up the camp. Shuttered the windows, covered the furniture. Tucked away the linens. Locked down the food items. Dragged our bags down to the rocks and waited in the sun for my dad to come around with the boat. As my dad came into view, a cheesy image came to mind: when my dad shows up in heaven, he’ll arrive just like this – driving an old outboard motorboat, motor whining, bumping up and down on the choppy water, hair blown back, squinting in the sun, East Grand Lake a glistening expanse of blue and diamonds all around him.

cricket-sound

The crickets are back. I hadn’t heard them before tonight. The quintessential summer-night sound. Softer than the shrill cicada whir of hot, sticky southern summer nights, heavy air close around your skin. The cricket-sound is more subdued. This is the languid sitting-outside-under-a-mercury-lamp sound, bare knees tucked up and glowing, grass lit up phosphorescent yellow-green, fingers poking with twigs at the tiny insects hopping from blade to blade. This is the sound you hear in your little-girl years, lying in bed awake as the grown-ups go about with their grown-up lives, their murmur passing through the wall from the den, mixing with the tv drone and summer night sounds. The headlights from passing cars make squares of rolling light on your wall, the breeze blows in through the open window, and the zig-zag rhythm of the crickets lulls you gently into little-girl sleep. All is well in the world.

I find myself awakening on the living room couch tonight to the sound of the crickets. Dennis comes in from his run. The screen door slams shut. Dinner is half-cooked in the kitchen. “C,mon, I’m not that late!” Dennis says with a grin as my eyes blink open. I had fallen asleep with the words of Annie Dillard running through my head, finger still holding the page in my new book, stretched out on the couch, with my cat’s soft little body pressed against my stomach, thinking, what could be more perfect in the world? A summer night, the sound of crickets, a purring cat…

I played hooky from work today. Thought I was getting sick yesterday, told my manager I’d be working from home. But I woke up feeling fine. Better than fine, because I decided to stay home anyway. Commuted 15 seconds from bedroom to living room. Worked from the couch, frumpy and unshowered. Sat outside eating blueberries while Dennis fixed my bike. Went to taekwondo with more energy than I’ve had in two years. I think I might be on to something.

I get up from my doze to finish cooking dinner. Nectarine shrimp from my old brown recipe notebook. Scribbled in rough estimates, given to me by the owner himself of the Five Spice Café in Burlington, Vermont. The last time I ever ate there, the last time I was in Burlington. That would be about six years ago to the month. I think. Dennis’ friend, Merry Moses, is moving to Middlebury in September. We said we’d visit her lots. I can’t wait to eat at Five Spice again.

Heat oil in wok. Add garlic, don’t let it brown. Add olek sambal chili sauce, 1 teaspoon. Add coconut milk, 1/2 cup. Add fish sauce, Squid brand, 1 tablespoon. Bring to a simmer. Add shrimp and sliced onions. Sugar peas, etc. Cook nectarines through.

I cut a tomato from the garden. It is redder than I’ve ever seen a tomato be. It practically glows under the bright kitchen light. I tear up lettuce. Slice a cucumber, an avocado. I bought a sunchoke from Wholefoods today. “Do you know what a sunchoke is?” I ask Dennis, holding up the shriveled brown root. “A what? A sunchoat?” My mother used to buy them for me. I never knew what they were but I liked the crunchiness.

What could be more perfect in the world? I ask myself at the dinner table. Dennis is chattering away, I’m being quiet, words and cricket-sound running through my head. I stumble over the perfect part. It’s like I’m waiting for something. A pinnacle of some sort. Why? What is a pinnacle in life? What is perfect? Nothing more than this. This is life. A summer night. The sound of crickets. The breeze blowing the curtains in the neighbor’s window, in ours. A black cat on the window sill and another under the table. A mess of dishes in the kitchen. Dinner on the table. Warm companionship. “The applechokes are great!” Dennis says.

What could be more perfect?

I’m sitting outside now trying to think of what the word is that describes the cricket-sound. Not a chirp, or a whir or a whine or a buzz… I’m sitting in the dark, the porch light has shut itself off, my computer screen casts a blue glow around me. I don’t have an answer. I can’t think of a word for the sound of crickets…

the persistence of memory

July 4th weekend. Three barbeques in two days. Burgers, chicken, scallop cerviche. Corn-on-the-cob. Watermelon. More watermelon. Puppies, babies, suburbs, a new house. Missed the fireworks. Roamed the streets of Somerville, looking for a hill with a view. Hit my social threshold, three times over.

Lately conversation seems like work. Dying to talk about something other than houses, jobs, babies, dogs, the South Beach diet, and George Bush. My soul feels unnourished. Nothing feels very real anymore.

Monday, a holiday, woke up to drizzle following a beautiful-weekend-for-barbeques. Woke with an ache in my chest, in that spot at the center where your ribs split off. The diaphragm, I think it’s called. I kept putting my hand there throughout the day, trying to feel the physical spot on my body that the ache was emanating from.

It was residue from my dreams. Tiring, winding dreams full of emotional alleyways. People known and not known floated in and out. The last moment before waking, standing in the kitchen – my mother’s kitchen – red brick linoleum, white countertops, wooden cabinets – someone is making me go through the cupboards and throw stuff out. I don’t know who. A shadow presence. Myself, no doubt. I open a tin of China black tea, hold it up to my nose. The smell of the tea hits me with a wallop. No, not a smell, an emotion. A memory. I clutch the tin of tea to my chest and silently plead to be allowed to keep it. Please don’t make me throw this one away. A primal cry shakes my soul.

I awaken aching. Clutching my tea. My sleeping, waking pragmatic mind tries to wrestle it to the ground. What memory are you clinging to? I ask myself. A resonance of my last weeks in New Zealand surfaces as the answer. Yes, this again. Always this. But what is the memory of? I flip through my scrapbook brain searching for a snapshot, searching for the source of my ache. I find nothing. I find no single accountable memory.

I sit up in bed. It’s 8 a.m. My cat stretches and yawns. “What’s the matter?” Dennis asks.  “I had a weird dream,” I say. My dream hurt me. Punched me in the gut. “Do you want to tell me about it?” “No. I don’t know. I can’t remember it. I want coffee first.”

Before leaving the house, I checked my email. Got an email from an old friend. A friend from my last year of high school, a few college summers. He tells me he’s been thinking about me lately – works with someone who reminds him of me – wants to hear my voice. This email from my friend, his memory of me, this voice from my past, links hands with my tea tin and settles into the ache in my chest. I wonder what I’ll tell him of the life I’ve developed for myself, of the person I’ve become. Will I complain to him about how expensive real estate is in the Northeast? Will I rave to him about the South Beach diet?

Nestled at a table at 1369, feet tucked up, table lamp casting its warm yellow glow, I seek safety in my coffee and magazine. I’m reading a month-old New Yorker. An essay called “Hard Lines.”

“I think I would have been happier in publishing,” I say to Dennis, apros pos of nothing. He looks up from his newspaper: “Well? What’s stopping you?” Oh, how many times have I had this conversation.

Dennis once had a pal in Europe. A ROTC kid. A truly lost soul. He’d walk past a toy store and say, with utmost earnestness, “You know, I always wanted to own a toy store.” Then he’d pass a dog on the street and say, just as earnestly, “I always wanted to be a veterinarian.” What would be known in my family as a complete flake. The notion of which prevents me from chasing after every half-baked dream that floats into my head. Dennis mentions this kid whenever I say things like, “maybe I should go back to school for psychology.” Dennis thinks I should pursue writing. It’s obvious to him. It’s not obvious to me. In my indecision – in my fear of my own capacity for flakiness – I just stay where I am. Corporate marketing wonk. Perhaps this is why nothing feels real anymore.

I go back to my magazine. I go back to my ache. I no longer know what my aspirations are. There’s nothing that I’m dying to do with my life. Not even writing. I just know that I don’t want to do what I’m doing. I don’t want to be a marketing wonk. I don’t want to go to barbeques and have conversations about buying houses in the suburbs and fad diets.

“I feel like I’m living an emotionally half-assed existence,” I say to Dennis. He looks up from his newspaper again. He doesn’t really want to have this conversation. I tell him about my dream and about the email from my friend – this voice from my past, which in a way represents my own voice from a self I no longer am, holding me accountable for who I’ve become. I’m on the brink of tears. The ache, I realize, as I’m talking, comes from feeling like my memories are more real than my actual life. With my fingers I trace the grain of the wooden tabletop. I observe the color of the lamplight on the wood. I lay my hand flat on it’s surface. This table should be more real to me than my memories. But it’s not.

The persistence of memory. I loved that particular Dali painting for a long time before I ever understood it. It was featured in the creative writing chapter of my third grade English textbook. My introduction to expressionist writing. I finally came to understand what it meant at a tiny Dali museum in Paris. The only museum I went to the entire time I was in Europe. I don’t much care for museums. But standing in front of this particular painting in the museum’s small, dimly lit enclave, it suddenly made sense. The melting clocks. The unreliability of time, of reality, melting under the persistent force of memory. That was my interpretation anyway.

I talk myself out. Babble about the poignance of my memories, the absence of poignance in my life, my lack of direction, the dullness of our friends, the dullness of my job. Dennis listens, his infinite patience belied only by the rhythmic twitch in his jaw muscle. I take my cue. I offer him another coffee, and go back to my half-read essay.

The passage I return to begins with a big letter “M.” I read it out loud to Dennis:

Memory is fiction – an anecdotal version of some scene or past event we need to store away for present or future use. John McCrone, a British science correspondent, writing in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement, calls memories “cognitive reconstructions,” and goes on to say that our brains, though not well evolved for retrospection or contemplation, never give up a reshuffling process in their effort to extract what is general and what is particular about each passing moment of life. Garry Wills, in his book “Saint Augustine’s Memory,” writes, “The past…is not an inert structure in which we can deposit a remembered item to remain unchanged until called up again…In fact, what is being recalled is the experience that a person underwent in acquiring anything to be remembered.”

I sometimes feel as though I’m living my life on autopilot. I go through the motions, but the real living is going on in my head. I guess the point is to make your life more real than the activity in your head. I guess that’s easier recognized than achieved.

I listen to the rain outside. Feel the cool damp air brush against my bare arms each time the door opens. Drink down the last of my now-cold coffee. I look around at all the Inman Square bohemians spending this rainy Monday afternoon in the little pink coffeehouse. I take note that this moment is more real than that tea tin in my chest.

contentment

Saturday Dennis drove from Kentucky to Massachusetts. Pulled into the driveway at 4:30 a.m. The next chapter of my life has now begun. Or rather, it is now time for me to begin the next chapter of my new life. Now that I have nothing left to complain about. [As if. I can always find something to complain about, otherwise I’d have no blog!]

As Dennis drove across the country in his little blue car, I became restless. A little frightened. Do I know what I’m doing? I kept asking myself. As if I had an answer to give myself. Dammit, answer me! my frantic mind swore at some other part of self presumed to know anything about anything. And in the absence of an answer I balked at my vast potential to fuck everything up.

And as if to prove my frantic, foreboding mind right, I pulled out an old journal one night and flipped open to a random page. The page contained my reflections upon arriving in New Zealand. The sea was an unimaginable color blue. I was happy and hopeful. I’d never been so excited in my life, I wrote. With the hindsight of seven years, I read my reflections cynically. How naïve I was, thought my frantic mind. So I flipped to another page towards the back of the journal. Where I found fodder for my frantic mind. Malaise and discontentment had set in. Questioning whether it was me, or Simon, or New Zealand that made me unhappy. Why couldn’t I ever just be happy?

My frantic mind sneered. You see, you’ll never be happy, you’ll just fuck everything up. You’re better off alone. And I began to count down the days left to be alone. The abundance of alone time I had been loathing these last several months, now strangely coveting.

But you know what? It’s not like that.

Dennis pulled into the driveway at 4:30 Sunday morning and ate the blueberries I left him as a midnight snack and then climbed into bed. But not before mailing two postcards. One to me: I’d cross 3,230 miles for you…And I just did! One to the cats: Dear black cats – Behave yourselves! Which we received the day before yesterday. And everything is fine. My frantic mind hasn’t imploded under the immense pressure not to fuck up my life. I think the thin voice of my rational mind must’ve spoken up when I was sleeping and told my frantic mind to put a sock in it. So now it’s back in its corner, quietly chewing on its sock.

And now I have someone to come home to in the evenings. Which is good, because my job is sucking more than ever. But now I can come home and chatter glibly about how much my job sucks, how horrible traffic was driving home, what I want to eat for dinner. And I go off to taekwondo and come home and we cook dinner – and I’m eating better now, not just pasta and frozen meatballs and whatever else I can heat up in a bowl – and Dennis plays with his iPod, and I doze off reading my book. And this weekend we’re going to do some gardening – and I’m going to pretend that I don’t kill everything that grows in dirt – and we’re going to go see Fahrenheit 911, and we’re going to go swimming at Walden Pond. And it’s just normal. How things should be. Can I sustain contentment? Maybe…if I quit asking myself that blasted question…

nashville

I’m in Nashville. For work. Staying at this monstrosity of a hotel and convention center that is The Gaylord Opryland.

Surreal doesn’t even begin to sum it up. From the little private balcony outside my room, I can look down on a waterfall and dozens of species of greenery, a simulated rain forest dotted with white-clothed restaurant tables. To the other side is a swamp, replete with cypress stumps and Spanish moss. Plump, brightly clad families with bouncy, sugar-happy kids pay to take boat rides around the food court. Nine acres of man-made nature co-existing in harmony with gift shops, steak houses and Chick-Fil-A, all encapsulated beneath a giant dome of glass. Climate-controlled and not a mosquito in sight. A biosphere for the fucked up state of the human race.

And heading meaningfully towards the conference center along the Garden Walkway are the corporate-logo-crested-golf-shirt-and-khaki-pants-wearing-laptop-toting conference attendees. Of which I am one. Oh lord, of which I am one. I head straight to the usability lab, where I take refuge in my flimsy purpose for being here, and from whence I reemerge ten hours later, head spinning, stomach aching, wondering what the hell I’m doing in a conference center wearing a golf shirt two sizes too big.

But if the Opryland Conference Center exists in Nashville, so does my blog-buddy and ethernet poetess, Annie. Whom I have finally gotten to meet in person.

Last night Annie picked me up and took me far away from this lush hell on earth. She transported me to The Lipstick Lounge, Nashville’s strangely classy local gay bar, where we ate burgers and drank beer and played very bad pool in a cozy upstairs room amidst vintage photos of heroic women. Where we got fawned over by beautiful boys that had no intention of taking us home. “Gay boys are so affirming,” Annie said. It’s true. And so are gay girls. I felt affirmed. Downstairs Tuesday Night Karaoke was in full swing. The ladies were getting rowdy. We sat down at a corner table of assorted gay and straight girls and boys and watched beautiful people sing karaoke extraordinarily well. Everybody clapped and yelled. Everybody loved everybody. Everybody was so damn cool. I was beside myself with happiness. I was mesmerized. Another beer down the hatch and Annie got up on stage and sang Debbie Gibson in a sultry alto. I sat in the corner — the shy, straight girl in black — and grinned till my cheeks hurt. I could have stayed in this little world forever.

I want to be gay and live in Nashville, I said to Annie, in the car heading back to my hotel. I was only half kidding. I think what I meant was, I want to be real.

Back in the contrived elegance of the Opryland Cascades Lobby, I sat down in an armchair and tried to call Dennis. No answer, just a message, he’s in Denver tonight, staying with his brother.

I’m plunged into dissonance. I don’t want to go back up to my hotel room with its sterile, scratchy hotel sheets. I don’t want to put my corporate golf shirt and khakis back on tomorrow. I don’t want to go back to my corporate job. I don’t want to go to work every day just so I can someday pay for an overpriced mortgage for a house in the suburbs that I don’t even want. If I knew what I wanted to do, I’d throw the towel at the corporate wall and go off and do it. But I don’t. I don’t yet. I only know that I want to be real. I want to be cool. I want to be affirmed. I want to be someone that people like to be around.

I think I’m on the precipice. Teetering. A fall might do me some good.

boxes

I moved last weekend. Said goodbye to the trees outside my window, threw my bedroom into a box. Dennis came into town to do all the work. I shuttled furniture around the rooms till it looked just so. Fussed over curtains. Filled the drawers and cupboards. Put rugs on the floor. Set up my big rimu New Zealand bed.

And within a weekend we had a home. A bedroom and a spare, living room, dining room, kitchen. Two black cats perched in the windows – Marley gets the front and Tosca the back; when they meet in the hallway they hiss. But those are the only squabbles. No roommates fighting in the kitchen.

Then Dennis went back to LA for his last two weeks of gainful employment. The last trip to the airport. June 13 he’ll load up his car and drive east.

My new route to work gets me there ten minutes faster. But coming home to my own empty house is something I’ll have to get used to. Like clomping around in my mom’s grown-up shoes, it feels too big for my little girl feet. I remember now why I chose to endure roommates rather than live alone – it’s easier to fill up your alone space when you’re shutting out unwanted company, than when you have all the alone space in the world, all to yourself.

I turn on the radio for company; circulate the same five CDs over and over. Toss toy mice for the cats. Cook dinner to fill my new home with smell. Take long baths. Tuesday I bought myself a chocolate pie and ate half in one sitting…because I could…feeling rebellious like a kid left home alone. Ate the other half Wednesday.

Tonight I began to tackle the rest of the unpacked boxes. But I got sidetracked. Nobody to interrupt me, I spent the evening pouring through Dennis’ photo albums. I’d seen the pictures before — he showed me, narrated. But now, alone, I studied each photo, looking for threads connecting the boy to the man he’d one day become. I know the man; I know some things you don’t yet know, I think, looking at the grinning, joking little boy. But you know so many things I’ll never know. Who were you? How did you grow to become the Dennis I now know? I know the stories, I try to connect the pictures along the chronology of places and events. I can never figure out where the long-hair pictures fall. And absent are the college years. I know that this is when the joviality began to cast shadows, the gentleness took on an edge. I look into the eyes of the friends and girlfriends, trying to decipher what they’re saying to the boy on the other side of the camera.

I learn too much and nothing at all from this exercise. I learn that you should never presume to know all there is to know of a person. I look forward to all the yet unrevealed things I’ll discover in the man I think I know.

The boxes are still on the floor. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll finish what I started…

interlude

I’ve begun pulling books off my bookshelf and re-reading them. Searching the pages for something lost. Unearthing old scraps that I once carried with me like treasures. Pages folded down, little reminders to remember, saying someday, read me again, remember this…

In Douglas Coupland I found my calling, briefly, though I’ve since lost it. Generation X, perversely – a book given to me by a friend who had just read it for an English class and thought it pretty cool – before “Generation X” was the official title of our generation – lying in my bottom bunk one spring afternoon, something in one of the passages caught me – perhaps this one:

“…looks with strangers became the unspoken question: ‘Are you the stranger who will rescue me?’ Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really an excuse to look deeply into another human being’s eyes”

– and I thought, I could write stories like this, and I thought, I should write stories like this…to touch one person as Douglas Coupland and countless other writers have touched me would be a life worth living. And I changed my major from Psyc to English Lit.

But I sometimes regret that decision, because I don’t write stories anymore. And now I’m just lost, wondering what it is that I’m supposed to be doing with my life. That part of me that once wanted nothing more than connection with another human being has since given up. Or grown up. The connection seems false, the desire self-indulgent, misguided…a need simply to connect with oneself and an irrational fear of looking in the mirror.

And so I returned to Life After God for solace, written by an older Coupland for the jaded souls of thirty-somethings. When I read it in my early twenties I guess I didn’t really get it all. I get it now, though I also find myself critiquing his grammar, wondering where his editor was…I wish I wasn’t so pedantic…

And in Life After God, I found another one of those passages that I tucked away and forgot about, unwittingly living out these last few years:

“When you’re young, you always feel that life hasn’t yet begun – that ‘life’ is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays – whenever. But then suddenly you’re old and the scheduled life didn’t arrive. You find yourself asking, ‘Well then, exactly what was it I was having – that interlude – the scrambly madness – all that time I had before?’”

This morning I got a note from Mr. Haggarty, reminding me of one of the early blogs I wrote a long time ago. From parental heights he wrote to me of the importance of living in the present. He told me that the experience of 52 years of life lived reveals that the moment is the only truth.

I think he’s right. Though I haven’t been cherishing my moments much lately. I’ve been trapped in the waiting game. It’s almost here, it’ll be here any moment now, just around the corner: my life.

Waiting is a waste of time and I know it, but waiting is what’s occupying my living room. And when I look beneath the couch, under the cushions, behind the curtains, all I find are dust bunnies, frustration and lonliness. Life becomes tarnished the longer I spend staring at the empty bus I expect to take me to it.

So the paradox. What I want to know is how does one cherish the moment when most of their moments are spent in a beige cube? Is there something quintessentially beige or cube-like that I should be appreciating? If I were to turn and walk away to pursue moments that I could cherish, where would I go?

And right now I’m sick as a dog. Which always makes me wonder, why do they say that? Dogs never get sick… And with a wadded tissue stuck up my nose just wishing for the moment when I’ll be able to breath again, this isn’t a moment I can find much beauty in. Though I do remember a moment when I was sick that I did – at fourteen with my wisdom teeth impacted, I was home from school for two weeks while my mother came in each hour to try to feed me another teaspoon of applesauce, and it hurt so much to swallow that I had to be knocked out on painkillers…but I remember waking from time to time and feeling the oscillating fan blow cool air against my forehead, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, before drifting off into sleep again…

baldwin. again.

I’m reading Baldwin. Again. Re-reading Another Country. My introduction to James Baldwin back in college, wedged in amongst the pages of Zora Neale Hurston and Ann Petry and Richard Wright and Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor. But Baldwin was my favorite. My patron poet. Stripping away the boundaries of love, of labels, tearing the individual out from the collective to stand up and be accountable. At twenty I emerged from the prose of Another Country feeling my horizons broadened, my depths plunged. Another Country was for me, then, a story about the fluidity of human relationships, and love without context or containment.

Funny how ten years later, reading the same copy of the same book — chewed at the edges by my little albino guinea pig, Stephe, long since gone on to feed the tulips — I now read in Baldwin’s words another story. The words come together on the page now to tell a story of loneliness. Of the chasms between people, of love unreachable. Or broken.

Why? Where did all this jadedness come from? What’s become of the Baldwin of my youth? How many other books will I re-read to find the words on the page the same but the meaning changed?

Some solace however in the one passage remained in tact. The passage that grabbed me by the throat at twenty, and then continued to play in dark corners of my sleeping poetmind for years. The passage that made me hear Coltraine.

“…And, during the last set, he came doubly alive because the saxophone player, who had been way out all night, took off on a terrific solo. He was a kid of about the same age as Rufus, from some insane place like Jersey City or Syracuse, but somewhere along the line he had discovered that he could say it with a saxophone. He had a lot to say. He stood there, wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? This, anyway, was the question Rufus heard, the same phrase, unbearably, endlessly, and variously repeated, with all of the force the boy had. The silence of the listeners became strict with abruptly focused attention, cigarettes were unlit, and drinks stayed on the tables; and in all of the faces, even the most ruined and most dull, a curious, wary light appeared. They were being assaulted by the saxophonist who perhaps no longer wanted their love and merely hurled his outrage at them with the same contemptuous, pagan pride with which he humped the air. And yet the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? The men on the stand stayed with him, cool and at a little distance, adding and questioning and corroborating, holding it down as well as they could with an ironical self-mockery; but each man knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them. When the set ended they were all soaking. Rufus smelled his odor and the odor of the men around him and “Well, that’s it,” said the bass man. The crowd was yelling for more but they did their theme song and the lights came on. And he had played the last set of his last gig.”

ten million miles

Ambivalent spring stumbled in today. Not in that blue-sky-tulips-pushing-up-euphoria-in-the-air kind of way, but with a shrug and a shuffle, and a resigned tepid warmth.

And in Harvard Square, the layers were shed, our pasty New England flesh revealed, begging for some UV rays. The benches filled up, parents and toddlers and dogs and students and street urchins and musicians. Restless. Grateful for the warmth but wanting something more. And despite the pile of unread books on my floor, I couldn’t resist the bookstore’s pull. I went straight for the B’s. James Baldwin. Balm for a troubled soul.

And made a beeline for a café. Where I ordered a double macchiato and read my new book. And looked out the window. And in my heart, silently begged the two strangers beside me to invite me into their conversation. But they got up and left instead, as strangers do, and so I read my book some more. And I looked around at all the eccentric Cambridgites – society’s proud misfits that keep me somehow tied to this cold unfriendly city – and I noticed the man with the headphones and the Kant furtively trying to catch my eye, and then looking away when he did. I’m sure something in my demeanor said, Don’t bother trying to talk to me, I’m a New Englander just like you.

All these alone-people sitting alone in cafés. We hide behind our books and our furrowed brows. We pretend to be deep in thought when all we really want is for someone to say Hi. Or even just to offer a smile, rather than pretending to stare past us when we catch them looking our way. I’m one of them. I do that.

Last weekend at 1369 I did something uncharacteristic. Behind me I overheard two girls talking about how difficult it is to make new friends in Boston… and I did something I never do… I turned around and said “Hi.” I said, “I couldn’t help but overhearing your conversation…” 

But I’m not bold enough for this sort of social rebellion on a regular basis. And though I really did kind of want to talk to someone, I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to talk to anyone who wanted to talk to me first. You know how it goes. Because I’m a New England snob too. So I finally put away my book and left. As strangers do.

And I went home and cooked my usual weekend brunch. Fried up some onions and chili, some cumin and coriander, scrambled a couple eggs… Put my new Patty Griffin CD on the stereo (thank you Annie)…And thought about how I came to be here. How I came to be one of these alone-people sitting alone in cafés… And Patty sang to me:

I must have walked ten million miles, wore some shoes that weren’t my style, fell into the rank and file, so just say I was here a while, a fool in search of your sweet smile, ten million miles…

I traced my movements back through the years. How I came to be in the Northeast. How I came to move to the other side of the world. And back again. How I came to find comfort in cities where nobody knows me. How I came to find comfort in cafés behind the safety of books avoiding the furtive eyes of strangers.

And I wondered who I might have been with different friends.  I wondered what it would be like to live a life surrounded by people that give a shit. Does any girl get through school without being bludgeoned by her friends?

And then my roommate came out and slammed the door. Didn’t like my music. Or didn’t like my singing. Or didn’t like me. And this is how my life goes. Why I’ve come to prefer Alone.

Stretched out across my bed, I pull open the window. Try and let Spring in. By now the sky’s gone a fuzzy matte gray. Must be about to rain. Still, Spring might be ambivalent but the birds aren’t. Euphoric, they puff up their little chests and dance around. Warble and chirp. A gray squirrel leaps a branch carrying a nut the size of his head. My cat jumps onto the bed with big eyes, ears twitching back and forth. I spot a pair of cardinals – the only bird I know how to identify – red boys and gray-green girls. I don’t remember ever seeing cardinals here before.

Maybe I just wasn’t looking.