Moon over the Freeway

When I go to the edge of the parking garage, just out of the car and stiff from sitting still so long, and look out over the city, it seems like the world might not, even though from where I stand it looks infinite. The consciousness of so many people in that space weighs on me. If this world is only a figment of my imagination, or a figment of somebody else’s imagination that I’m facilitating by my existence, I am responsible for the existence of all those people! Think of it: I’m Einstein. I’m John Adams. I’m whoever I can think of, just by thinking of such.

The sunset over the city is beautiful—it always is—as one catches glimpses of the sun burning through the buildings, but as always it reminds one of the Simon & Garfunkel song and the apricot sphere becomes irascibly linked with a mushroom cloud, the doom, the very sunset of humanity. The first stars come out, and I have to disagree with the poets, the novelists, the naturalist essayists. The twilight is so much more beautiful in the city, where you have to appreciate the contrast between the sky and its brash surroundings, and that maybe this is where the sun will never come up again.

Excursions

It was nearly a year ago—it will be a year in April—when Kelly took her children and me to the New Hampshire seashore . It was my first time there; my family visits Cape Cod during the summers, and hence the only ocean I know is, though just down the coast, so many miles different; the beaches there are much larger, much more a part of the local identity than in Plymouth, where the thin, hot strip of sand and shallow water is crowded against the hot asphalt of the cramped parking lot and hot asphalt street lined with beach houses in various states of repair. It is, of course, always dangerous to some degree to travel with someone with post-natal depression, more so in retrospect when she tells you she can’t remember any of it, none of those three months when she talked, with slightly manic desperation, so much to you in the hot, full van; and it was an unprecedented decision. One day Kelly decided she wanted to go to the beach and I happened to be available; I complied to her request that I help her handle her four small children. Isaac, her month-old son, swaddled in a sling, held close to her torso, and Grace with her tiny hand in mine, Kelly and I went to the seashore.

Of course, Kelly’s mood was not far missed by mine, plunged for some reason into a nostalgic depression of fourteen. We stood in the sea spray beneath the beating sun all afternoon; Grace encountered the ocean and promptly got my shirt soaking wet, Emma raced the waves and Alex tasted the ocean. We trooped around southern New Hampshire, stopping at gas stations to buy gallons of water for refilling the water bottles and to use their tiny bathrooms. The drive there felt interminable even to me, especially after the first, tantalizing smell of the salty sea air wafted through, accompanied by the cries of the gulls, the open windows; and then, crusty with salt, pockets filled with seashells and shoes with sand, we drove back the same way to the cool April evening which seemed so sweet and full of the promise of imminent summer.

Inamorata

I was sitting in my bedroom reading Jane Austen when I had a sudden picture of a girl lying fast asleep on a bed, bathed in the warm silver moonlight that came through, like some unearthly liquid, the window opened to the calm summer night: my old girlfriend.

I don’t know why I thought of her, but it was probably, according to the Freudian logic my current girlfriend is immersing us all in, a song on the radio they played when we were together those years ago that prompted a suppressed memory. If I proposed the idea to her she would probably seize on it with a passion and begin a prompt psychoanalysis, not getting jealous that I’ve ever thought about other girls—some would, but not her; that’s why I love her.

But just thinking about what that song could be, man, takes me back. The thought of her gives me a lump in my throat I just can’t explain, even though it’s been a few years and several girlfriends since I’ve seen her—I mean, I’m over her. Maybe it was Sinead O’Conner—that girl was a big fan of her, and played her records late into the night when we were together, still a happy couple, dancing until midnight.

Anyway, for one reason or another, I thought of her. She was an inamorata of prodigious skill—or maybe it just seemed like that to me, blinded by my own side of the matter. She was never skinny, and not quite fat, but if that was always my favorite thing about her it was her least favorite things about herself. I never understood it, the way she tried to diet, halfheartedly, and I still don’t. I remember also that she never made it through the week without having to, for one perfectly legitimate reason or other, bake a pan of brownies, or a chocolate cake, or the ginger cookies everyone loved—laughing, all the time, at herself, and then eating a plate of whatever it was when it came, steaming, out of the oven, and urging me to follow her example. She was a writer, too, though she never took herself seriously. It was impossible for me not to, because she’s the one who taught me that you have to include the good with the bad in a story to make it great. Since she left I’ve never done that quite as well. The idyllic has always been my preference, and my failing: I create utopias with no foundations, and untested they fall far short of their embryonic fantasy beginnings. Of course, she went through my rough drafts lining them with the teachers’ red pens she used to correct them, to ground them and give them perspective, structure.

It was on such a classic night for us this memory takes place, the sweet scent of a chocolate cake in the oven flavoring the air as I, her helpful assistant, made frosting—such a vital skill for the boyfriend of a cook, it was the only thing she had been able to teach me to make. It was partnered by the subtle sound, quiet as snow falling, of my girlfriend correcting my latest short story, the longest yet. I had worked for weeks on the seven pages, building them up and paring them down day after day. I watched her shear away sentences, and even from across the kitchen I could almost see the way she brought out what I had meant to say as though it was a tangible web of steel beams and bolts growing up around my worn phrases, slowly and as inexorably as water washes sand away. She sat back, and I could see she was tired. “Dearest, why don’t you go to bed?” She sighed, leaning forward to rest her forehead on her palm.

“I think I might. It was a long day.” Slowly she got up to give me a goodnight hug and kiss, and left the kitchen for the bedroom we shared, almost filled by the double bed we kept there. In a whirl of chivalry, I remembered, I frosted the cake, using abundant globs of frosting to glue the two halves of the cake clumsily together and giving it a proud, wobbly chocolate crown. When the kitchen was finally still, the dishes and bowls she and I had used washed and the cake set under an upturned tin, I went into the bedroom to find her fast asleep, stretched out full length in the moonlight and peaceful as a monument to a buried princess—so serenely and inimitably beautiful I nearly cried then as I nearly cried when I remembered it those years later.

Fear

My Biology teacher asked me recently if I was nervous about the upcoming arrival of our decision letters. Looking her straight in the eye I said, "No, not at all." I was, as she suggested, calm cool and collected. I am calm, cool and collected.

But wait--this is not right. I find myself feeling alternately that I have been drinking water in which pennies have been soaked or that I must have been electricuted recently. My mouth floods with the acrid, bitter taste of fear, paralyzing me where I sit or stand; my palms grow sweaty and start to go tingly or numb; my toes cramp; I get facial tics. I hope every day this does not happen during Band. After some brief introspection, which is how I arrive at all my mental-health analysises, I decided--calmly, coolly, collectedly: I am scared s*******.

Despite the fact that everyone I've talked to, except for perhaps my paranoid study hall teacher who has no reason to like me, has said they think I'll get into the three high schools I applied to this year, it appears that fear is not a logical impulse. Damn.

Now what is my fear exactly? As Sinead O'Connor so wisely said, back in oh-something when she got back into the music biz: "I started to wither away and think, No one will ever know I'm here, dogs will eat my corpse, that whole thing." Fear of being stifled in this god-forsaken place of beauty, idiots, and my friends. But the beauty and the friends will hopefully not be enough to keep me here. Sorry, DJ...

March 9, 2008- 3:43 (8 hours and 17 minutes)

An Appeal to Your Mercy

It was an afternoon in early March, smack-bang in the middle of the school year, or nearly so, and Scaggs, our earnest scholar of, at the moment, geometry, had taken up his well-read text in the school library, a noble institution outfitted with a number of inviting circular wooden tables and an astounding array of lofty bookcases filled with a selection of the finest volumes available, and now peopled with Scaggs, a party of his friends settled at the table next to his—scattered with assorted papers and assignment books—and one or two pairs of Scaggs's fellow scholars, discussing quietly at various places in the room the finer points of, shall we say, middle eastern philosophy. It was a fine day, the skies above painted the most brilliant blue and ornamented with only the whitest, fluffiest clouds, as though the heavens were holding a talent show, and the remainder of the school had poured outside to enjoy the first really good weather of the season. Scaggs began to solve the very first proof of his homework, dealing with the law of cosines, and had written down only a few lines when he was rudely jerked from the land of adjacent/hypotenuse by a loud burst of laughter from the next table, accompanied by various of the cruder expressions of the English language which our friend Scaggs, being properly reverent of the great facility of language in humankind, the very great leap into civilization it represents and the importance of using it properly, was caused some pain by these interactions. He cringed from what was, in his young soul, the highest offense any human could deliver to the faculty of speech: blatantly improper grammar, insinuating turns of phrase he disliked profoundly, crass innuendos, and a general Dionysian, Epicurean attention to nothing at all; the descent of the airy nothings until they were no longer airy or even spritely but lolled obviously, impervious to disgust at its lack of substance...

Nevertheless, Scaggs, being a brave lad despite his delicate sensibilities, forged ahead in the realm of triangularity, doing his best to ignore the vagrant flagrancy of his classmates. It caused him endless distaste, but he endured it: the immediate crudity that made its ugly presence known, an ancient crusted sea monster, after every comment which a perverted mindset would interpret as in bad taste: “Oh,” they cried, gulping with thin laughter, “that is what she said!”

But Scaggs did not break down until he had made his way, stumbling over the audible tangle of his friends nearby, through the third, fourth and fifth problems and was adventuring onto the sixth, a knotty, puzzling problem involving the square root of the hypotenuse’s third cousin twice removed and the opposite and/or adjacent sides. The cousin was discovered to be away to tea with an elderly aunt, and the weight of the relations of the put-upon triangle in his proof was such that Scaggs, on the behalf of his woebegone shape, desiring only to calm its sufferings and bring home the offending relations, snapped under the dual strain. The chattering of his friends suddenly overwhelmed him; the pettiness of their affairs concerned him more than they concerned the parties actively involved.

"Don't you know," Scaggs cried in desperation, "that you are offending the very matter of my being by existing in such a fashion as you do, as though life were no more than a series of fashions to be tried with the flighty fancy of the vapid butterfly who flits from flower to flower, and the way anything serious is discarded by you with not even a glance at its character rends at my greater moral sense until I can barely stand the pain?"


"Why, Scaggs, old fellow," they exclaimed reproachfully, "you'll never have any friends, if you take that attitude towards life."

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

This was a beautiful book to read, nearly prose poetry as it tells the convoluted stories of a family of sorts and the people who touch their lives. Though you will need to read it with either much care and obsessive archiving of the intricacies of the plot or a mind very open to abstract ideas and transitions, Divisadero paints a strangely clear picture of the people it describes. In fact, it is perhaps better absorbed than read. 273 pages long, available from my local library: Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje.

Manuscript

There was a girl and there was a boy. The girl was younger than the boy, a little sister. There was a sense of freedom around the house where they lived, because it was June, mid-June, and the warming air reminded one of the end of school, the golden days flowing into each other freely, and as the school days took up less of the working day the schoolchildren began to transition into living lives outside of the prime hours in the middle of the day consumed by school; in any case, the girl took her school duties less seriously at this time of the year, arriving there each day but spending the majority of her hours there sitting idly in classrooms, half-listening and happy in her idleness. She was graduating middle school that year, and, in the laxness typical of their lives, she was unsure, in the hazy days of early summer, whether she would go to high school in the fall. She suspected, in the back of her mind where the winter’s urgency lay dormant, that she would, but she did not much care now. She was fourteen, just too young to get a job but old enough to appreciate her fast-dwindling freedom and to savor it nearly too much.

She came home from school at three, in the prime of the afternoon, with the evening still in her command, and played her flute leisurely before the old piano, whose keys, loose with age and collecting the grime of so many hands, she would occasionally, meditatively, strike, before her lack of skill or training made itself obvious in her inability to connect the proper notes; she stumbled from the middle C, the only note she knew for sure, to now an F, now a G. Occasionally she lamented the contrast between her playing and that of her brother, but for the most part the interlude was enough to bring her back to life, and she would pick up her flute from where it had fallen, braced between her legs and the keyboard.

It was on such a day that her brother came home from the store where he worked weekends and after his high school classes finished. He carried nothing but a small stack of paper and wore a shirt, pants and boots. He came in the open front door to find his little sister sitting at the kitchen table reading a beat-up book and half-threw the stack on the table across from her. Immediately she looked, the slap of the paper on the wood waking her up.

“Is that it?” Her brother nodded. “What did they give you?”

He sat down at the other chair, in front of his stack of papers—a manuscript—and flipped it across to her. She accepted it, leaving the book without consideration by her elbow, and began to read it. When her eyes crossed the red number at the top, scrawled indifferently across the words by some careless teacher, correcting the last papers of the year, she frowned. But she didn’t say anything, and proceeded to reread the paper; in the time before it was due, in late May, she had read it and reread it more times than had been necessary, and in her sisterly eyes in was nearly perfect. She reread it now as objectively as she could and still pronounced it the best it could be.

The grade was a 64, the comment was “outlandish. run-on sentences”.

She looked up quizzically into her older brother’s face, and what she saw there surprised her. A faint smile was playing itself across his face, as indifferent as the scrawled 64 which had so wounded its recipient’s editor. “You don’t care they think it’s crap? They nearly failed you!”

He shrugged. “It was an assignment. I don’t give a—and watch your grammar, that was a plural…”

“To hell with grammar! That thing’s the best damn thing I think I’ve ever read!”

“Mind your language. That’s an exaggeration.”

“You don’t care that they don’t care about it? I know you cared about the writing!”

“The fact that they don’t care about it changes nothing. Its reception in the world, perhaps. Remember The Fountainhead. My writing still exists; all I need is something to write with and something to write on. It’s a very primal thing. Count myself lucky. At least you and me,” he leaned across the table to touch her forehead, wrinkled with consternation, “we know what’s important. Right? As long as we know that it’s all right.”

The girl shook her head. “You make no sense.”

Her brother grinned and stood up, removing the manuscript gently from her hands. “I’ll send it off to some periodical. Changes are it’s only the first page messed up. Chancily isn’t a wordy grader. So I’ll retype the first page, hide the grade I got from my high school English teacher. It’s all right.” He left the room, and his little sister marveled at his apparent disinterest. But the careful observer would see, upon careful reading of the manuscript, that its pages had been flipped through by its author, that the absence of comments had been duly noted, and the observer who didn’t know him better would say that either he was entirely cold and unfeeling or that he was putting on a very well disguised show—he had, after all, worked so hard every evening on its twenty pages, hunched over the typewriter in the corner, unable at times to restrain the urge that drove him to write, breaking his personal vow that he would never type so loud as to wake his little sister upstairs so many times; he had poured passion into the manuscript in careful doses so that the entire thing was coated in a rosy, brilliant glow. But those who knew him knew as he knew himself knew that what he told his sister had been the absolute truth.

Goings On About Town

I had not meant to see the new middle school--had refused, with defiance typical of persons in more dramatic situations, to see it of my own violition until the need to visit my teachers was too pressing to be ignored. And somehow, I managed, my fate with its typical perversity, to see it on the very day it opened: yesterday. It was not until I was actually on my bus, not til it was veering down the road, ignoring the ordinary fork to our usual transfer station, the fire station, going to the middle school that I realized. I felt a thrill of panic at my helplessness for a moment, but it passed into passiveness even before we reached the Welcome banners, stuck in the monumental snowbank by the front drive, decorated with cheerful flowerpots. The drive is long and winding, much longer, I thought in my spitefullness, than it has to be. After a few curves the trees opened to reveal our new middle school, square, boxed-in and tall, and I thought all at once of what a hatred I have for new places, places with no history, and the way they dare to exalt themselves against the years of tradition, the many lives, the many people who have passed between the walls of older buildings. I felt no emotion at all except for a strange sort of annoyance, a fear, and a hatred all combined. Strange; I had expected a sort of new-school feel; but the new school left me emotionless...
~
It is cruel of me perhaps to expect activity on a Tuesday morning from anyone at all, and yet the morning left me so bitterly disappointed I cannot help but think perhaps I am only being cruel to myself in my expectations. Nonetheless, the fact that half the choir can arrive at rehearsal--eighty percent late--and half of them spend more time talking or staring in sleepy oblivion into the carpet at the center of the room than singing--why, it is preposterous, it is a scandal--or ought to be--it is an affront to the few of us who sang, who expended any effort, to the auditions required to get into the group. The phenomenon continued in Chorus, which is more reasonably not auditioned; fortunately, an exit for my frustration was forthcoming: spirituals are predominate in the program we are rehearsing for the spring concert, and though their passion was notable today only in its prevalent absence among the lumps calling themselves my classmates, it was an outlet. Although--I am being unreasonable again. The fiery heat of anger has, once again, taken hold of my better sensibilities. Still; I am one of the quietest people, one of the quietest singers, anywhere, and I could hear only myself and Linea next to me. I'm not supposed to be able to hear myself, not as the course normally runs itself...the whole situation calls to mind a quote I've recently read by Virginia Woolf from The Evening Party, a short story in a collection of such I borrowed from the library:

"Ah, we're an ungrateful race! When I look at my hand upon the window sill and think of what pleasure I've had in it, how it's touched silk and pottery and hot walls, laid itself flat upon wet grass or sun-baked, let the Atlantic spurt through its fingers, snapped blue bells and daffodils, plucked ripe plums, never for a second since I was born ceased to tell me of hot and cold, damp or dryness, I'm amazed that I should use this wonderful composition of flesh and nerve to write the abuse of life. Yet that's what we do. Come to think of it, literature is the record of our discontent." -