Ten minutes on March 16, 2008
Ten minutes on March 16, 2008
Saturday night I found myself out with Margann, at a café called Chocolat. They have a da kine bowl of organic chicken soup, and all sorts of drinking chocolates in the Euro style. We ate in that companiable space of the long married, and the silly space of the never quite grown up. The water came in a glass replica of the Tour d’Eiffel. It made pouring water a long distance affair, and the cups were small, so I was quite involved with the graceful structure in its glass form all evening. The off waitress (the one outside; we were inside at the community table, a warm corner of a warm place) looked like the young Faith Hill as a hippy, with dreads and a killer white dress in flounces and cowboy boots and a nose ring and the best affect and smile.
We ate food and then got sleepy and I looked at her face (the midwife face, the one that was up all night on Friday delivering the stunning woman who screamed during the sew-up, reliving trauma abuse ah the mysteries of the body and its soul) and she was so half mast I thought back to the television of my youth when a station would go off the air during the last stint of babysitting “this is the end of our programming day” and that big march music would come on “OHHH say can you seeeeeee” and jets would fly across the sky flags would wave at sunset and it would be time for exhaustion. I started playing the song in my fake-trumpet voice and she smiled a sleepy smile and tilted over to lay her head on me, like the Eiffel Tower leaning, a little Gallic smile on her face, on the Arc du Triomphe, and saying, you drive.
I drove to the 515 (a bar on Cedar) to pick up the credit card I’d left after two single malts had limited my short, medium, and long term memories to a slight buzzing sound like bees in a bottle. Then home again home again jiggity jig to the egg shaped green of cohousing, above the usual stars pretending to be a hunter a bear a dog a club a scorpion. The night was darkdark black with brilliant pinpricks of diamond light gems on a velvet cape I thought not for the first time words fail here the word home for example or alive or quiet or year or season. Season in particular glows for me in memory; it was not warm out, a bit of a sting in the air, Margann walking in front of me, passing the trees one two three all going off flowering the scent like no other thing in the world so specifically sweet a halo of scent around each nowdark tree
I found myself laughing to think that the scent reminded me exactly of the scent of these exact trees exactly one year ago people lived like this by scents temperatures colors and the years accumulated in the senses so that this year this tree this scent had in it – has in it – all the other springs, the other selves I was, the other particulars of relationship, love, friendship, sorrow, dream, fear, wonder.
Aging, once again, flipped around and became remembering, putting back together, composing. I am many, said Whitman; I am you, I partake of multitudes. How many in my little neighborhood my little community walked tonight by these trees, going off like fireworks, redpink in the day with a berry here and there, at night pink catching light and winking like eyes…how many remembered last spring, four springs ago, a happiness not thought of or felt for years, a longing remembered and longed for again? All of us, so different in what passes along the neural corridors, so similar in having such corridors. We are like our houses; the floorplan is almost identical, the furniture and art and where the silverware goes so different. And like our houses, ten years in, stuff is falling apart,the toilet paper roll falls off its cheap bracket, held on with a screw worth $.0000001, our happinesses are more fragile in some cases, or there is dry rot in the foundation of the relationship, and much work needing to be done, and a great deal of sadness in the whole business.
Margann walks in the door, I walk in the door, and the dog dances like we are the King and Queen of All Reality, and he desperately curries our favor in some great affair of State.
Time for a walk.
Saturday night I found myself out with Margann, at a café called Chocolat. They have a da kine bowl of organic chicken soup, and all sorts of drinking chocolates in the Euro style. We ate in that companiable space of the long married, and the silly space of the never quite grown up. The water came in a glass replica of the Tour d’Eiffel. It made pouring water a long distance affair, and the cups were small, so I was quite involved with the graceful structure in its glass form all evening. The off waitress (the one outside; we were inside at the community table, a warm corner of a warm place) looked like the young Faith Hill as a hippy, with dreads and a killer white dress in flounces and cowboy boots and a nose ring and the best affect and smile.
We ate food and then got sleepy and I looked at her face (the midwife face, the one that was up all night on Friday delivering the stunning woman who screamed during the sew-up, reliving trauma abuse ah the mysteries of the body and its soul) and she was so half mast I thought back to the television of my youth when a station would go off the air during the last stint of babysitting “this is the end of our programming day” and that big march music would come on “OHHH say can you seeeeeee” and jets would fly across the sky flags would wave at sunset and it would be time for exhaustion. I started playing the song in my fake-trumpet voice and she smiled a sleepy smile and tilted over to lay her head on me, like the Eiffel Tower leaning, a little Gallic smile on her face, on the Arc du Triomphe, and saying, you drive.
I drove to the 515 (a bar on Cedar) to pick up the credit card I’d left after two single malts had limited my short, medium, and long term memories to a slight buzzing sound like bees in a bottle. Then home again home again jiggity jig to the egg shaped green of cohousing, above the usual stars pretending to be a hunter a bear a dog a club a scorpion. The night was darkdark black with brilliant pinpricks of diamond light gems on a velvet cape I thought not for the first time words fail here the word home for example or alive or quiet or year or season. Season in particular glows for me in memory; it was not warm out, a bit of a sting in the air, Margann walking in front of me, passing the trees one two three all going off flowering the scent like no other thing in the world so specifically sweet a halo of scent around each nowdark tree
I found myself laughing to think that the scent reminded me exactly of the scent of these exact trees exactly one year ago people lived like this by scents temperatures colors and the years accumulated in the senses so that this year this tree this scent had in it – has in it – all the other springs, the other selves I was, the other particulars of relationship, love, friendship, sorrow, dream, fear, wonder.
Aging, once again, flipped around and became remembering, putting back together, composing. I am many, said Whitman; I am you, I partake of multitudes. How many in my little neighborhood my little community walked tonight by these trees, going off like fireworks, redpink in the day with a berry here and there, at night pink catching light and winking like eyes…how many remembered last spring, four springs ago, a happiness not thought of or felt for years, a longing remembered and longed for again? All of us, so different in what passes along the neural corridors, so similar in having such corridors. We are like our houses; the floorplan is almost identical, the furniture and art and where the silverware goes so different. And like our houses, ten years in, stuff is falling apart,the toilet paper roll falls off its cheap bracket, held on with a screw worth $.0000001, our happinesses are more fragile in some cases, or there is dry rot in the foundation of the relationship, and much work needing to be done, and a great deal of sadness in the whole business.
Margann walks in the door, I walk in the door, and the dog dances like we are the King and Queen of All Reality, and he desperately curries our favor in some great affair of State.
Time for a walk.
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