Thurs.
Last night (Well, technically early this morning), I’m reading a piece out of Replacing Memory by Barry Lopez. I’m tired, but he has me in a trance. He's visiting Whittier, CA and tries to find two of his childhood homes.
At one place--he's guessing though--he walks across a perfectly flat lot: trees, bushes, numbers on mailbox, beehive--all "swept clean, empty," except for "the tread marks of a single tractor." He finds an apricot pit at the back of the lot and puts it in his pocket. But he finds the next house still standing, occupied by an elderly woman he once knew, says an old neighbor. She doesn’t answer his knock because “she's inside dying of cancer."
I'm leaning against pillows on a white feather quilt. My dog is draped over my feet, and Cat is curled up under my arm as close as she can get. She doesn't like it when the wind blows hard enough to swirl the birds outside. I'm wrapped up in the smell of lilacs I picked earlier—a sweet, slightly syrupy smell like getting off the plane in Hawaii the first time. Tori Amos plays on the IPod: Piano notes as light as raindrops:
"Excuse me, but can I be here for awhile?
. . . And sometimes, I said sometimes, I hear my voice, and it's been here -- Silent All These Years.
. . . So you found a girl who thinks deep thoughts. What’s so amazing about deep thoughts? Boy, you best pray that I bleed real soon. How’s that thought for ya? My scream got lost in a paper cup. I think there’s a heaven where the screams have gone.
. . . But I don’t care.
. . . Years go by and I’ll still be waiting for somebody else to understand. Years go by, even stripped of my beauty and the orange clouds raining in my hand. . . . Easy. Easy. Easy.
. . . Your mother shows up in a nasty dress, and it’s your turn now to stand where I stand, and everybody looking at you. . . . But, I don’t care.
. . . And it’s been years. And I’ve been here, I said I’ve been here, silent all these years.”
Whew. Amos is a morning gift. Vaguely I hear the birds start in and wonder again why they can’t wake up one at a time. It’s like some big bird conductors taps their wand on a tree branch, cough, and say in chirp talk: “Ready? Hit it.”
I turn back to Lopez, feeling that dull dread of the day coming after I haven’t slept, already anticipating sore eyes, a stiff neck:
He writes, “I told her something Wallace Stegner wrote: whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterward. I said I thought it was emotional sight, not strictly a physical thing.”
Duh. Why did Lopez have to add his own thought? Couldn’t he just let us hear Stegner, since what he adds is obvious?
Back to the page, where he walking around the side of the house, which holds the woman dying of cancer, and I’m suddenly whisked away from this Idaho dawn to California where Leonard Cohen feeds me “oranges that come all the way from China”:
Lopez says, “We were standing on a concrete path, where I squatted down to peer at a column of ants going in and out of a crack. I had watched ants in this same crack forty years before. These were their progeny, still gathering food here [Ah, I love that line].The mystery of their life, which had once transfixed me, seemed in no way to have diminished. [Don’t like these two sentences, but love the last one, except for the word “deliberately.”] I felt tears brim under my eyes and spill onto my cheeks. The woman touched my forearm deliberately but lightly, and walked away.”
It’s those ants. Those ants get me every time because they’re such a minute detail, and they remind me how small I am also. My problems fall away, sort of shed downward like dead skin, for a moment, although I wonder if this generation will have the luxury of noticing that some parts of life always stay the same.
In her sleep, the cat scoots toward the bird sounds, but then slumps, like bones dissolving into milk, rolls over, and twists her head in a circle, with paws curled in the air. She makes me laugh. How can she sleep like that? And I notice I feel happy. Completely happy.
For a fleeting second, I realize how long it’s been. Whew, so long that the feeling is strange--unfamiliar, but I relax into it (because who can predict when it’ll come again) to watch the dawn, which does not come up over the river. It’s nothing swift like the “rosy fingers of dawn.” It’s more like slivers of color flow into gray then dissolve the darkness, like water filling up an empty sink. No, not quite like that. The light does not even “push” the dark out; it blends with it until it’s just more there than the dark. Dawn moves into another day smooth and soft, like the best kind of quiet. And now Santana plays his guitar in the background. Ha. Mmmmmm--sound of pleasure to hear that Black Magic guitar with dawn birds as grey moves into day—I have to smile again. I mean, people pay big bucks for moments like this.
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