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I’ve made a newish resolution about regulating my sleep schedule, and was in bed by 12am last night and up this morning by 8am. I was hoping to get lots of work done on Liesl and Rosa’s World Lit curriculum (just reading the translator’s preface to Stanley Lombardo’s The Iliad was exciting, geez) and on GS’s grant application. After an amount of morning stuff (tea, sermon on the mount, cutting the grass around the tomatoes), Mom calls me and I go out to Starbucks where she buys me a cup of coffee, after I ran out of gas in front of my house and had to borrow the neighbor’s gas can, and these mornings of ours can’t really last less than three hours or we feel gyped.
After we got everything talked over I stop for gas at the BP at the end of my street, can’t get the car started, run to my house to get my clicker-unlocker thing in case it was the anti-theft mechanism messing up, still can’t get it started, kind man pushes me out of the way of the gas pump, I call Dad, he and Roy come out and polish corrosion off the battery, re-connect a mysterious hose coming out of the transmission (“I think that’s supposed to be a vacuum!” & “Wonder how long that’s been like that!”), and tape a penny over the clutch safety switch with electrical tape, cause that was the problem. Also, since I’ve been finding fleas in my house this week, I do some internet research on the life cycle of the flea and find out that I’m screwed. Apparently adult fleas lay upwards of fifty eggs a day. And I’ve probably killed four in the past few days.
Last night I was looking at pictures online and found one of girls in prom dresses holding chickens…
I like that. Anyway I feel like today is really bizarre, and if it was just car stuff (“I was wondering if you could tell me how much you’re charging for the rubber bumper that goes on the clutch arm and engages the clutch safety switch…I need one replaced…”) I might just be stressed, but since I now am living in a flea infestation, I’m thinking about girls in prom dresses holding chickens and looking thoughtfully & serenely into the distance, and how I kind of like that. How I might want to make some bread today, or how I’m not sure why I’m not working at a bar in Caraballo. Patrick is happy in his new home, & his fleas are happy in their old home, & I will be happy soon in my new home, because this is ridiculous, and I’m about to yell, and you’re going to have to send me to a home.
Natalie and Carla are moving out and I think all the change is hard on everyone. I know it’s hard on me, who often prefers that things stay the same, always, ever. I have to be shaken up a little to remember the rush of excitement and fresh air, newness, that comes with a large change, like losing my roommates to other parts of the world, having to re-make my house, having to find money and new roommates and always forever more courage for life. It’s times like this that I remember that courage happens, it doesn’t just exist. Alone. By itself, in you, or in me. Being forced to rearrange the furniture so I won’t feel so much the huge hole and being forced to post my house on Craig’s List and interview all these girls who come to look at the room means that I am doing courageously (by my standards), means that I am courageous. I’ve been hoping that all the coils forced into each other from the impact of all the life changes of the past year or so will rebound, and finding myself reluctantly opening small windows is a huge deal. If you can imagine me, standing at the window on the fortieth floor, drawing back and then throwing a paper plane out there, watching where it flies, whether it falls. But that it’s leaving my room, small plane, just one.
I took the recycling today and found another Mt. Olive pickle jar, and a set of lovely old encyclopaedias. I had to lean almost all the way into this huge green recycling tube/box/metal house, and ended up getting inside because I thought I saw another volume of the encyclopaedias way back there… Nope. It’s amazing, the person I am, amazing that I live so smally and am contracting unless I’m expanding, unless I’m being lived-in by God. If I didn’t have contrary reasons, I would be one of these hermits, wall my garden, lock my doors, go dumpster-diving at night. Kids would hit their baseballs into my yard and go buy a new ball. This is the person I would be / am going to be, unless I push open these doors and ask God in, since I’ve known from far back that He brings a kind of joy with Him that invests even haemorrhage with beauty, even chronic aching with a secret hope. All this about a “secret singing,” this is stuff I know. So, buck up, buck the hell up, find joy, soul.
It’s 10:14 a.m. and I’m remembering some moments from yesterday that stand up all by themselves, some moments from several days ago. This is a grand place that I live, duplex with large windows and white window- and door-frames. I have a list of things to do, which includes working on the baby book, writing letters, making small lovely things for some friends, having M over and working on the journal that will have mountain laurel stitched on the brown leather cover. I’m working at Jordan’s duplex tomorrow and have all day today to be amazed at the space in my soul, the space I suddenly have to live, to think about the way the light comes in the windows and hits the blue walls of my room, to think about how in the world I’m going to stake my tomatoes (no idea).
I have to document. I have to record the fact that I had coffee this morning and the curtains were pulled back in gorgeous draping shapes, shade & shadow, so light, clean, airy. I have to record the fact that I’m listening to Feist’s The Reminder and wearing houseshoes. I have to say something about the bird feathers that we found sprinkled throughout the living room this morning, no bird attached. I have to say something about how much I want my life to be this exciting, flashing thing that catches everyone’s eye and rushes through the world like a storm, or some kind of royal procession, I want the things I consider and do to mean something profound. I guess I say this all the time, but living in a season that requires patience means that this comes up a lot, maybe every day I wonder whether this time of my life is growing anything that will last or become beautiful. I think it is, I think it will, but it seems like all I can do is wander out to water my herbs, tomatoes, flowers and look at the sky. Which is like a city, which is always (on stormy weekends like this one) like cities of clouds moving on over our heads, thinking their own thoughts, doing their own business, caring about their own missions.
I saw Candace last night at Remedy, and she had her baby with her. Of course. Now that so many people I know have babies I’m starting to be afraid of it. Now that it’s more possible and less a daydreamy kind of thing, I’m reconsidering. It will change your life, and I don’t want my life to keep changing. I want it to stay the same for a little while, I want to get my bearings and follow some path with some peace of mind for a while. She was so beautiful, tired eyes and pale face, so beautiful, so beautiful and she had a baby, that is hers, that lives with her and is hers. She takes a stroller with her and a bag of diapers and wipes and such, but mostly she takes the baby with her, and is so thin and tiny like a fairy, and is so beautiful. She seems soberer than before, still cheery, but soberer. It will change your life.
Which reminds me of the song, change, you don’t want to waste your life. I’m going to be ready to do whatever, even though I’m not ready at all. I’m going to open my life again, I’m going to go ahead and turn over my soil again. Which is what this post is about, I guess, in its retardedness.
1:29 p.m. update:
I found all kinds of photos of button quail chicks and walked to Kroger for milk and sugar (planning to make cornbread for lunch) — not sure why I feel the need to update my blog about this except that today is special and I want you to know about it — and saw a HUGE mound of almond boxes that said $2.99! A whole bag of almonds for $2.99 … my luckiest day of all time! They appear to be kind of a little mouse-eaten, but I can’t believe they would sell almonds that were mouse-eaten, so I’m just not going to think about it, and throw away the ones that look downright gnawed. Am I freaking anybody out? What are the diseases people catch from mice, besides the Plague?
I have to say something! About baking! It’s this! I have MISSED IT! Being too poor to even buy milk or eggs is ok for a while, but then you start to parch and starve in your soul. Making money this week has been a little liberating and I’m daydreaming today about biscotti, biscuits, muffins, cornbread. Fritters. Crumb cake. Etc. Anyways. Now to work on the button quail!
It’s raining, like the days of my childhood. I remember the rain and want to carry its threads in through the present room. I know I don’t know whether you will be around forever, but I’m tired of taking that into consideration, I imagine myself telling you things about the rain you didn’t know and walking with you in it, barefoot or rubbers, maybe reading poems or lectures in plastic-covered pages, under taut black umbrellas or under the cloths of heaven but at any rate headed out into country, where the only loud talking is hidden underneath splattered leaves but is song, is the occasional Te Deum.
And this morning was up with anthems, I was listening to singing in the Ely cathedral and the King’s Collegers and et cetera, I’ve forgotten this is another part of me, that I used to dream of one day singing Tallis or Gibbon in a for-real church. Now I’m listening to one of my mixes, still thinking about the jobs I just applied for, still thinking about the jobs I will apply for in the future all misty with vague fears and firm decisions … how on earth did I miss R.E.M.? where was I? And where did I come off feeling like roses were common flowers? beginning to revere the wildflowers, the black-eyed susans, cornflowers, daisies, fringes of purple and green grasses, all the nameless little women of the field, beginning to assign the roses to the category of carnations, despicable flowers? I now have roses, they’re coming up fuschia, scarlet, salmon. salmon roses, the salmon roses. where am I?
nothing is getting done except what I am doing, and I am doing all I can. I hope this is good enough. I mean, I know it is, but I hope it begins to feel like enough, so that my movements and my stillnesses keep me together in one piece, keep me with God, keep me. I need keeping.
Joe and Kami made me a cake, brought it to me at Bongo Java, I don’t know how to process generosity like this. Katie and I went to see The Sunshine Brothers (& Sisters) at Mercy Lounge last night, I wandered around taking photos that I found out later (when Drew showed us the ones he’d been taking on his digital monster) will be washed-out and bad because of all the red light, but I love those people Richard on the drums Drew walking around the stage, walking onto the stage, walking through the maze of the stage, Chris just sneaking around with the sax and then on the floor twisting knobs, Matt up front at the laptop, Ashley with those undeniable boots, yes. Backstage afterward where cigarettes were loosing smoke in slow curls, a train rushing past underneath the window. Giving Chris a ride and talking about concept art and Antony and the Johnsons and Seinfeld. Asleep at 3.
Dinner with Greg, Dana, Laura, Joss, a kitchen table at which I’m at home, drawings on the walls, setting off the smoke detector, picking one’s way across the floor over small children, talk with friends. Talk with friends, friends close enough to speak exactly the right things, decode, interpret, love. Friends. Friends, Landon and Madison, scrabble and the word “nog” unfortunately not in the Dictionary of Choice, neither “ruth,” shockingly; how they remembered the biscuits I made last time I was there, while I only remembered how I’d forgotten to turn off the oven of course; how at home I was there in that brown comfortable bachelor livingroom. And then the house of girls, seeing Megan, sleeping in Katie’s room on the air mattress, talking into the night, trying on pants and bras, remembering with affection past days at school, the two of us, or the four, or the eight, and her giving me both a cd and a record of A Room With a View’s soundtrack. I am now the envy of the world.
Sitting at the bench in front of Kenna’s desk in the English office like old days, so many many days of doing that and listening to Kenna or Kenna and Dr. Hearn batting back and forth, so at home there I am. Other students wandering in and profs and there we were, watching the inauguration and half of us crying. Did we all get to see Yo Yo Ma smiling at his bowing, fingering? And running into Dr Moore who also loves me and who smiled brightly and in his exceedingly gentlemanlike way offered to show me the new music building and asked about my job-hunt and my health. Aging but tall as a church steeple and going on a cruise to Sudamerica with his wife and conducting two ensembles and teaching a few classes again. Walking down the halls with his gentle commentary and toddling gait, remarking that I am liked my many people after Dr Hughes came out to say hello to me.
I see my younger selves’ footprints going into the door and to the window seats at Fido and so I follow them there, I meet Kayla and Ana and we talk, talk, talk; I see them going in the door at J-J’s and I go there, too, finding it almost exactly as I left it; old footprints up from the back parking lot into the front door at Bongo Java and I go there, too, this is the place I had that one encounter with the strange boy, where I saw Patty Griffin, where I sometimes saw Aaron Shepherd, and always that one dark-haired boy with long nose and darkest eyes. This is the one place I never just asked for hot water because the baristas always intimidated me.
But also seeing Amanda in the English office, also seeing Andrew and Lindsay at their lovely apartment that looks so amazingly similar to mine, seeing the book they made for the article they got published in The Other Journal, seeing how their home and hearts seem to be places of great spaces of peace. How I wished they could move to Knoxville. I’ve been saving their letter for almost last, and I probably should write it soon…I hope I can say what I want to say. These two are some of the best people I know. What else?
Breakfast with Dr. Reed in her well-appointed house. What a woman, what a woman. I hope I can be as kind someday. It’s so godawful to be so young, to have to much to learn, further to go. It’s a difficult night, for this reason and others, despite all these memories written in gold. Or maybe because of them. This is the first time I’ve grieved on leaving Nashville; always it’s been the other way, grieving leaving Knoxville. I want to understand this. I suppose the decision to be in one place means necessarily leaving another, however loved. I’m between these two places, and I hope to learn to better live there. Learning, takes so long, is so hard. For example, beginning to process emotions after surgery. To emphasize: I’m only starting to do that now. Whoo. It’s been a long day and this is a ridiculous blog entry but it’s long and already written and oh well!! Articularity will come later! After some sleep and more writing! Though I won’t put that drivel here, you’re welcome, no more drivel here for a while; only award-winning pieces.
