When I was getting dressed this morning for work and rummaging through my closet hoping to find something wonderful I didn’t know I had, I actually did. A beautiful DAY Birger skirt of net embroidered with aqua yarn. I splurged on it about three years ago in a fit of optimism that I would fit into it one day. Three years and 30 fewer pounds, I do! At first I decided to save it for a special occasion instead of putting on the Ritz just to go to the office. But then I realized that every day I’m alive should be a special occasion, that whenever I walk out the door there’s a chance I’ll meet my soulmate, that this skirt needs to be lived in instead of left in the dark. Waiting. That’s what I spend so much time doing–waiting for the future, waiting until I have the perfect tools before I start an art project, waiting for an idea to find me. So I’m wearing the skirt to work today, feeling like I’m the special occasion I’ve been waiting for.

All too often, I find myself bitching about where I live, chafing at the known-ness of it, the social boundaries and perimeters, the maddening political climate. But last weekend I went to a Guerrilla Cuisine dinner, a mobile supper club staged this time on the edge of the Lowcountry marsh as the sun set and oysters roasted over a fire and shadows stretched from the oaks down to the water. Later, seated at long tables, there was the buzz and fizz of conversation among strangers, plate after plate of amazing food, plenty of wine and laughter. I don’t think it’s altogether bad to kick against the pricks, to want to push against the predictability of place, but I needed to be reminded also of the briny liquid in an oyster shell, the bite of homemade hot sauce and the plunge of a porpoise making its way up the creek as we toasted the remains of the day.

When you have been very sad for a very long time, you notice immediately any scrap of blue sky, any break in bad weather. I realized yesterday that I hadn’t cried one time all day, and this morning I found myself singing along with Roseanne Cash to “Seven Year Ache” on the way to work. Loudly. Badly. Joyously. Although I was sweetly surprised, I immediately felt guilty, as if I were being unfaithful to my grief. I have this poem by e.e. cummings pasted in my journal, and I’m trying to believe that I can incorporate the person I’ve lost into my being and carry everything he gave me wherever I go. That it will be a happy, celebratory thing to do. My head knows it’s true, but my heart lags behind. I just have to trust that in time it will catch up.

I’ve had this vintage leather suitcase for so long I don’t even remember where, when or why I bought it. I’ve moved it from place to place and at one time used it to store old letters. It’s been sitting empty, taking up space in a closet for several years, and in a tornadic frenzy of  crying and throwing things away a couple of weeks ago, I put this on the street for the trash truck or a trash picker to take. In the same haul, I cleaned out my freezer and threw away everything in it. Outdated salmon patties, frost-bitten fruit, over-the-hill veggie burgers and on and on. Stuff no longer edible but that I kept shoving around in order to find an ice tray. Next, I went through my clothes and got rid of everything I no longer wore but crammed in the back of the closet. A wool kilt that hadn’t fit me for 30 years, t00-big jeans–just in case, an expensive, boxy leather jacket that made me feel nunnish. It didn’t escape me that I was simply making an outward statement of what was going on internally. I’ve stuffed old sadnesses and wounds to the back of my psyche year after year, rummaging through them periodically but unable to completely let go. Right now, my freezer is still empty, and more useless possessions have since followed the suitcase to the curb. I’m clearing a space, but I don’t know why or what will come along to fill it. Maybe nothing, maybe a small, tender mercy, maybe something I’ve waited for all my life– I’m not chasing it, just waiting to see what happens.

]]> http://fridaville.com/the-waiting-room/feed/ 4 http://fridaville.com/party-of-one/ http://fridaville.com/party-of-one/#comments Sat, 10 Jul 2010 23:02:58 +0000 nikki http://fridaville.com/party-of-one/

I’ve been having a completely nonproductive, unintellectual weekend and loving it. Friday after work, I went to the restaurant across the street from the office and had 1 1/2 glasses of Chardonnay, talk to the bartender (who I love because he warned me to stay away from a guy I met there), and write in my journal. I can’t say that anything memorable comes out of those writing sessions but the stress of a week of work gradually fades away as I brainstorm with myself, draw, and make to-do lists for the next week. I had dinner with friends and came home and read a poorly written historical novel. Thank god for the bad historical novel writers who keep me company in my insomnia. Today, I again did nothing useful except go to the post office and take vitamins. I brushed my teeth and put on a bra before leaving the house, so I think I get some points for that. Then I spent several hours playing MahJong online, reading Vanity Fair and listening to the rain. So here’s the thing — given that “our ground time here is limited,” as Maxine Kumin noted in a poem, shouldn’t I be making stuff, thinking big thoughts or taking flying lessons? Yes, I think I should, and I wish I’d spent more time doing that over the course of my life instead of reading People and going to T.J. Maxx. But I love the “wasting” of time, too, so I’m caught up in a familiar existential dilemma. And now that I’ve finished reading VF, I’ll get right back to Buddha’s Brain…soon. After all,tomorrow is another day, as Scarlett said to Sartre.

I never thought I could live anywhere but the south, because I thought I had to have hot summers and mild winters. But being in Seattle for the past week has made me shift my perspective a little and wonder why I rule out so many possibilities. I feel so much more awake here, maybe because it’s utterly different from the flat, open-to-the-sun coastal Carolina landscape. The giant ferns and towering trees here conceal pockets of cool shady mystery. And every day I wake up to see the Olympic mountain range catching the passing weather on its peaks–it’s as good as a movie, because the sky is as changeable as the ocean. Moody and sullen with gray purple clouds or wild blue with meringue clouds peaking up as they glide by…and all of this can happen in the space of one day. Beyond that picket fence are deer and coyote hiding in the brush and a border collie chasing a red ball over and over. And beyond that is the forest and then the wide water and then the unfathomable mountains. The wind blows the sun around, shakes the windchimes, ruffles the dog’s glossy black coat, sweeps the grass back and forth.  Everything in motion, everything in place.

I was listening to NPR a few days ago, and someone was interviewing a guy who had invented an app that lets you avoid red lights by rerouting you to your destination through green lights only. He didn’t know if it saved much fuel, and emergency vehicles don’t need this app because they use a different system, so I think it’s mainly for the sake of not being slowed down on the way to our oh-so-important jobs, lunch dates, business meetings, grocery trips, soccer games, hair salon visits. To shave off 11 minutes from our commutes. And ,of course, to let cab drivers drive more maniacally than ever with no stinking red lights to impede them. I could hear the ghost of my irascible grandfather in the back of my mind yelling, “That’s what’s wrong with America today!” I love technology (too much) and I don’t want to be a cranky naysayer, but something about this app makes me uncomfortable. Because sometimes we need to be stopped in our tracks, to take turns, to give way, to be inconvenienced, to learn patience, to pause and breathe, to yield, to have a chat with our passengers (especially small ones), to reflect on where we’re headed in the morning, to slow down at the end of a day, to read the bumper stickers on the cars in front of us, to expect to encounter obstacles and roadblocks in our lives. There’s no app for that — it’s called real life.

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

I saw this cryptic message painted on the back of a road sign today when I was coming back from a walk to the island near my house. I guess it’s an official warning because of the phone number, and it’s near the same spot that the Tsunami Evacuation Route sign used to be, except that one was facing the direction from which a tsunami would presumably appear so it was hard to take it seriously. I felt there was something I should be watching for that I didn’t know about. The end of the world (always in the back of my mind)? Earthquakes? We’re on a fault, but how can you prepare?  Or was it a more general existential message about the nature of being alive and the risk of letting life pass us by? That life is both fatal and beautiful and we have to move toward the darkness that we know waits at the end of our journey and yet we pretend we have all the time in the world?  That we need to wake up and be alert to routine things in a new way? The dun-colored marsh grass, the ugly condos on the waterway, the flock of white birds taking flight in the distance in a kind of spiral formation–all of which I take for granted and none of which will be exactly the same tomorrow. Stay alert.

I was hungry for poetry when I woke up this morning, like having a jones for Starbucks Pumpkin Loaf, which I am so addicted to I only allow myself to have one slice on Sunday. I drove to Barnes & Noble to get me a big old helping of Antonio Machado, but none to be found, so I settled for Caramel Macchiato and ordered the book online. In an audio book I’ve been listening to on the way to work (more about that in a future Postcard from Fridaville), the author says that when you read a poem every day or even part of a poem, you have, as Blake wrote, “a moment in the day that Satan cannot find you.” Because we are always striving and striding toward our next big success or accomplishment or chore. Poetry requires silence and a slowing or stopping of time. But I find it hard not to be on the move, trying to outrace my demons, so I packed up my computer, iPhone, cords, books, notebooks, pens (right now I have to have Varsity disposable fountain pens in aqua and green ink) and went to a new coffee shop  (with the exact color of walls and floors and the right flowers on the table to induce writing). So far I’ve spent 35 minutes preparing to write, which leaves me 85 minutes in which to actually write. This place is called Hope and Union and the logo is a sheep suspended from a balloon. I’m not hip enough to know what it means, but I hope my thoughts will form a union with my words and pour like milk and honey into my computer. Until then, here is a poem to keep the Devil at bay for you and me. It’s by Czeslaw Milosz, one of my favorite poets, and it has haunted me ever since I first read it years ago:

Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.