Lying in wait (a screed)

I’m feeling petulant in this week of disappointments, way too old to pout and sophisticated enough to know passive aggression when I display it, the urge to subtly pollute the waters, to leave everyone with a bad taste in their mouths.

Late cancellations in a full schedule. Those who take the easy out. The not-listeners and eager beavers. The ones whose motives are unclear even to themselves.

But here I am, sharpening the old pencil (readying the shiv?), a reliable carpenter in an unreliable world. Sure, I’ve slipped out the door. I’ve not returned the call. I have let the better part of me say yes and the worst part of me decide not to go at the last minute. And I have a job that prides itself on reliability and airing things out. 

Last night, I dreamed one of our greyhounds got away from me. We were walking along a California coastline cliff, some dream version of Point Reyes. The path was barely big enough for one person. Lorca was on lead, Hugo was not. His first disappearance was down to the water in a pack of other dogs. He frolicked. I called. He eventually returned.

The second time was my fault. The weather went from sunshine to snow. I sought higher ground, a wider path up the hill. Hugo did not come. Hugo! Hugo! Hugo! I could not see him. The hillside steepened. Children created slick paths with their sleds, icy slopes to the lower path. Hugo! Hugo! Hugo! Lorca and I took a step along the hillside and the snow beneath us began to slip. I woke up to that sensation of falling, Hugo’s name still in my throat.

Sometimes, the responsibility of it destroys me.

From the prompt Lying in the wait

Surfacing

I keep a bowl full of crystals in my office. This is not for new age reasons. I do not focus on the healing, energetic properties of rocks. I find them beautiful and fascinating, something of heft and cut to hold in the hand, to trace with a finger, for a client to press into Crazy Aaron’s thinking putty and distract themselves with patterns. Some of the crystals have their outer skins, the dull rock they emerged from, still intact. The average person would never know the color and edge that rough dullness contains.

This is what I think of when I remember the Elk, a brown-green, mucky-bottomed river on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, weekend and summer cottage spot for the lower middle class of Delaware and Pennsylvania (at least in the 1950s-80s, when my mother and I were growing up). Appearances are deceiving. What this river contains is childhood, freedom, skinny-dipping, sex, the undertow of passing ships moving from the C&D canal to the Chesapeake Bay.

When my mother’s well went dry, she filled five gallon buckets with water from the Elk to tide her over. The first night I met D, it was in the parking lot next to the beach, a memory attached to memories that fill me with yearning, regret, and sadness. From the phone booth next to the clubhouse that my grandfather totaled when driving drunk to the homemade raft created from barrels and planks to the crab pots attached to the pier – crack open the memories, go beneath the surface, and what exists is something dead and gone and alive in my mind, in the stories I tell

From the prompt: Child swimming

Resolved

There was a time when I was self-propelled. My two feet transported this gamboling shamble on the road. I had a need for speed, was compelled to escape the wanderings of my mind and so went walkabout. That’s what I want to do today, to rush out in the rain, to flush out the bad and sad thoughts, to feel connected by running away.

Still. Upstairs the boy practices viola. The man naps in the back room. A dog and cat sleep beside me and another dog curls on the couch. The rain tosses itself against the window, repeating its name before it disappears into the earth. My placid, stationary feet rest on the hearth, gathering heat from a fire that I built and maintain.

This is not all joy. I struggle with connection and am, in many ways, more cut off from the wider world than I was a decade ago. I wonder whether I will ever allow myself to be truly vulnerable. Parts of me feel sealed away and I’m not sure whether I can make this life work for me without permanently pruning what feels untidy and untoward.

And there is joy. Laughter. The basic satisfaction of compatibility, of everything fitting together like a child’s jigsaw puzzle, simple shapes painted primary colors. With this sort of bland comfort, this predictable placement, who wants to show their jagged edges? I am torn between acceptance of this way of being, of continually sanding away the burrs—the anger, the hunger, the feelings—and figuring out how to make space for my ragged, full self. 

Surely I can be all of this, can let the rough patches touch smooth curves. I can wander and come back again, feel and express myself as I am. I am capable. My life has room. Freedom is possible. I choose two words for 2020:  honesty and connection. There is plenty of space to read between the lines, to make choices and create stories, to be alone and in community.

Giving it up

Twenty-five years ago, it was meat. A year and a half ago, alcohol. Television in various forms has come and gone, mostly replaced by mindless internet surfing and streaming with the occasional DVD tossed in the mix. My daily newspaper, the routine of unfolding and refolding, of following the lede, has been usurped by links, clicks, and refreshes. And two days ago, I deactivated Facebook with little fanfare. This break is unlikely to last, but I’ve been surprised at the ease of leaving, the statuses left unsaid, the photos not uploaded, the thumbs left in neutral position.

I didn’t post the Halloween pictures or compose an appropriate caption. I didn’t check in on the exes or follow the plight of the galgos or surround myself with news of fire and the death of democracy. I miss some folks, but I also don’t know what I am missing.

What would it be like, an unconnected life? This would be written by hand in a journal kept by my bedside. My calls would be touchtone, extra charge for long distance. Vines would overtake fields of screens, soon to be further obscured by fall’s shedding and turned to shards through the forces of ice and thaw. In this fantasy, the broken Earth calms her nerves and gets her groove back. The seasons return. The feeling of national and global doom fades away, and I take out a piece of paper and start a letter.

There is so much more to shed. Giving and taking advice. Life hacks. Tips for smarter living. Shortcuts to equilibrium. The idea that anything could or should be perfected. The delusion that all of this will last forever and that what crumbles will not emerge again in a different, glorious form.

Youth and the hopefulness of decay

It was autumn and the 80s hadn’t wrung themselves out yet. The tree branches, free of summer’s frivolities, crackled in the November breeze and pushed the funk of leaf rot, a foreshadowing of eventual growth, into my apartment. I sat on the scuffed linoleum kitchen floor, low-lit, filled with anticipation, alcohol, and a kind of hope.

With a shiver, I pulled a blanket around my shoulders, faced the empty room, and dialed information in Pittsburgh, where P had gone for graduate school. I’d slept with him once, had been obsessed with him before and after. It was his thrift store coat. It was his thick orange wool sweater and international acumen. It was my absolute need.

But now that I’ve built the scene up–have returned to that kitchen and that apartment, to that mostly fucked-up time—I don’t have any follow-through. P answered. We talked briefly, my diction blunted by booze. I never called him again and hold no torch for a three decades gone projection of need onto a stranger. But still that time, that phone call, did return to me recently one evening as October’s wavering and breezy twilight fell into darkness.

I’m on the eve of turning 50 and these kinds of scenes seem so far away and so achingly tender and lonely, a series of empty memories where salvation was just around the corner, one man away. It’s romantic in a way that I no longer am, along with desperate and so. . . young. My youth was made up of these obsessions, a focus on potential saviors, men to distract me from the ache (the basketball whiz; the older man; the dorm punk; the wounded WASPs; the artsy Mancunian; the bad idea.) Autumn was new hope and ache and alcohol, my mind fuzzy with loneliness.

I wouldn’t want to return to it, though a dash of naïveté sounds refreshing. I no longer blur the lines with drink. I am sensible in my expectations. I know that no person can complete me and am also grateful for my grounded and funny husband and my boy on the verge of independence. My obsessions were fires that kept me distracted and wishing, hoping, to be chosen. Those unwitting strangers were stand-ins for the undefined parts of me, projections of a need to be seen.

 Here I am. Visible to myself. And perhaps to you. Autumn stretches before us with its aches and pains, with its little declines and slow deaths, all in service to spring’s soft greenery, the future, fuel for the young fumblers who will figure it out eventually.