Something Beautiful

Friends, I've not written in some time. And really, despite my recent travels, there is but one thing babbling through my consciousness:

Meet Raniya. She's perfect. She's my niece.

I'm going to teach her all the wrong things.

July 1, 2009

This won't be a good post, but at least I'm writing.

I took great care getting dressed this morning because I'm going in to get my lip pierced later today and I didn't want to seem like a complete blue collar scrub - as if the piercer would look at me, see the machine lube and grime under my nails and packed into the lines of my hands, and think: this lady cannot sustain or maintain such a trendy face hole.
Yeah. I'm in my arrogant, ignorant twenties. I'm allowed to be so shallow and insecure.

What else?

My latest addiction involves eating generic fruity pebbles while watching episodes of "The L Word" on my computer. I read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov when I wait for them to load.
Buying the fruity pebbles is no tiny feat. Yesterday at Walmart, as I hefted the econo-size two pound bag and a handle of skim milk onto the conveyor belt checkout, the kid behind the counter raised his eyebrows at me. He wasn't initiating conversation, but I took it as an invitation and said breathlessly, "I couldn't help myself." And then I did that annoying thing that I sometimes do when I'm trying to be cute or endearing. I cocked my head to the side and half-smiled. As if I was about to burst out laughing and could barely contain myself.
He said, "Yeah. I eat those by the bowl full."
And I wondered if there was another way to eat cereal. I appreciated his effort to contribute to my floundering conversation. So much that I spared him the story of how I'd just spent twenty minutes in front of the face wash shelf, trying to remember which brand I usually buy, and on the verge of tears. It's been one of those weeks. Oh, and I didn't get any face wash.

In response to the lists paving my route east

I woke up this morning because I could hardly breathe. My heart raced; my lungs ached for air. I couldn’t catch my breath.
Outside, the raccoons ripped into the garbage bag I forgot. They were gone before I could think of something abusive to scream. Instead I picked up the trash – bits of tin foil, popcorn seeds. I left the coffee grounds, but they stained my bare feet, so I guess I brought those in too.
My heart refused to be calmed.

In a few days the items on my lists will be things tucked and stuffed and folded into bags. Clothes, too many books, a few packs of Trident. I guess it isn’t as much as it seems. The lists are long. But I still wonder, will I need to throw a tarp over the back of the truck, or will I be able to fit it all in the passenger seat? And I wonder, will my spare tire suffice if I get a flat (will I even be able to change it on the side of the road)? And I wonder, was Grandma right? Should I really dress like a man so as not to be preyed upon? And mostly I wonder, is anyone waiting for me there?

Answers to the question: if you could bottle moments, shelve them, and take them down later to drink and re-experience, which would you choose?

God! How can one possibly choose? Here are a few of mine:

1989 – On the back of his bike, Dad had me strapped into the child’s seat, basically a bucket with a seatbelt. I never wore a helmet; kids didn’t have to back then. I remember gripping the edges of the seat, white knuckled and trembling, terrified. He took a sharp turn around that corner by the gas station (where mom would sometimes buy me an ice cream cone, but only if I overcame my timidity to ask the man behind the counter for my favorite flavor – blue moon), and the bike bent so close to the concrete that I could’ve reached down to touch it.

1991-1997 – The excitement I felt, poolside, when our family stayed a night in a hotel. The sting of rubbery-dry water wings, sticky slid onto my childish biceps. My brothers and I raced down the hallway to the pool, our bare feet constructing a dull beat on the carpet. From the room, Mom supplemented lyrics to the song: “No swimming until we get down there too!” She needed time to complete her borrowed room checklist: pull back the comforters, check the sheets for semen and pubic hair, check the toilet for remains, check the towel situation – nobody touch anything!
The boys lounged in plastic chairs, already slicked from pool room humidity, patiently waiting for the parents to come down. Usually, they traded insults. David is a poost. But at least he isn’t a stoof like Danny. And me? I skittered along the pool’s edge with heels never touching the ground. My arms flapped as if I was already in the water, the water wings rubbing and expressing discontent in the form of rubbered grunts. I giggled, I shrieked, I danced. I didn’t know how to swim.

It occurs to me now that this memory-gathering is an undertaking for which I haven’t time. One more for now. More later, no doubt.
July 2008 – Sleeplessness in Ireland: Sitting on balconies, passing the pipe, drinking wine, drinking Baileys, drinking coffee until our concept of time was so blurred, the days became a conglomeration of drunken conversation and shared affections. The meta-metaphor. The view from your balcony window. The mythical Dundrum foothills. Alighting to Balally. Foxes playing fox games in the courtyard behind my apartment. Such desperation in the final four days, longing for more time, and substituting dark hallways, street sides, stairwells, and closed-eyed kisses for sleep. If nothing else, we were dreaming.

Caricature of Intimacy

May we hold a meeting of conjoined minds, or do I need to speak aloud? This is important. It’s about all the rocks you’ve strewn about simply to prove that they cannot be lifted or made into anything. Then again, it’s also about the way clouds reflect in water and the way rain shrouds hot asphalt in rolling mist. Do I need to say this out loud, or can you hear what I am thinking? Can you hear it? It is about the superficial dimensions of skyscrapers and brick and sheets of glass juxtaposed against the backdrop of expansive sky.
But what of those rocks? Take no disrespect; I know better than to question your plan, but will we be receiving blueprints soon? I imagine we’ll have the technology to lift such weighty things, and by then, well, maybe it’ll be clear as to where you want them. But fire and brimstone. The tower of Babel. Have we not tried before? What is in this teasing?
If stacked one upon the other, these unliftable rocks, could I conceivably climb the structure and reach my fingers toward that expanse? Would I be any closer than I am now, sucked to the earth? The serpent was sucked to the earth, the belly crawler, but what has that to do with me? My forefathers and mothers were fooled, they were had. Are we doomed to slide along through muck? If I reach toward where I think you are, the sunlight refracts from beneath my nails, splitting and spilling everywhere. Is that you? The sunlight itself is refracted and tainted through cloud and atmosphere. After petroleum and necessity and society, can you even reach me through the glass cased stratosphere? Do we not all lean toward the same sun? Do we not climb and climb? Do you not sense the ambition, the worship, to glorify some aspect of you? But what do you expect? What can we know? All we have to show for our efforts are rocks, stacked upon each other, carved into saints and buttresses and echoing domes. And a gift shop in the corner.

I found myself thinking about what kind of socks she might be wearing. The shadowed white could be seen just below the hem of her jeans and the just above the ankle curves of her tennis shoes. I wondered if they were the kind that had gray toes and heels, or maybe had holes torn into the bottoms from over wear, or maybe from snagging them on a nail somewhere. I wondered if they stopped just above her ankle bones, or if the elastic tops hugged her calves, or even her knees. As far as I could tell, they were white, just white. But somehow, for some reason, I knew there were small tears on the dust blackened heels hidden inside her shoes. And somehow, everyone else knew it too and that was why they judged her more harshly - with sideways glances, never inviting, but always brimming with unsubstantiated hostility.

You tell me it was the strangest thing. You tell me it began as simply as standing in line at the bank. With groceries on a list and a paycheck in your pocket, a deposit necessitated itself. Being late on a Friday afternoon, the line vined through a maze of velvet rope dividers that ended at the individual windows of three harried-looking female tellers. Ten or so people stood before you, shuffling their feet, staring at nothing, as if slouching toward doomsday (“which,” you say, “I suppose we all are, in a way”). You were very near to being the last. “It began that simply,” you say.
When the man behind you tapped your shoulder, you courteously turned toward his “do you have a spare pen I could borrow?” Though you had several cluttering the bottom of your purse, you shook your head with an apologetic expression (“eyes sincere, lips pulled into a half smile, half frown, brow furrowed,” you explain) as you twisted away, placing a hand strategically under your offended nose. For with his innocent question, a noxious combination of garlic and goat’s milk, wet dog, musty winter coats, and (now that you think about it), some sort of decaying cabbage soup emitted in (you swear to God) smoky green tendrils from his mouth that blasted into your face. So staggered, you imagined the force of his atrocious breath had actually driven the hair back from your temples. You tell me it reminded you of cornstalks being blown flat in the strong winds. “Like back in ’94, when we had those straight-liners,” you say.
It was then that you forgot about man-in-need-of-a-toothbrush behind you and noticed, so centralized in your cross-eyed vision, the grime packed into the crevasses of your fingers. “Grime,” you say. “Like when you’re a kid and the cops come to your school to show you how they collect the bad guy’s fingerprints.” Waiting to make your deposit, you could distinguish your own unique prints etched into your fingers and hands with the darkest India-black ink. Not only that, but you saw an accumulation of abrasions blossomed on your knuckles. Upon inspection, you realized your hands were filthy.
“I rode my bike to the bank,” you tell me, “and the chain fell off on the way. I fixed it, but that’s when it happened.”
“When the chain fell off?” I ask.
You look disgusted. “No. When I saw my filthy hands.”
You say your grease packed hands reminded you of that funeral. “You know how you can tell when someone just got out of the shower and then stopped to take a shit because you see their wet footprint trail on the bathroom rug?” you ask. “I could follow my thought processes just as clearly.”
I don’t think it’s very clear at all. But I don’t want to interrupt.

You remembered the day, sunny, cloudless, a mockery of what the afternoon would entail. Permeating the air was the distinct scent of earth and flora. There was a mound of black dirt intermingled with clumps of russet clay. The hole, looking as though it had been dug with the care and precision of an archeologist, had perfect ninety-degree walls, and perfectly square corners. “Do you know how faultless that hole was?” you ask without expecting an answer. “Cold, rigid…permanent.” You shudder. “That thing was solid.” You recalled the green tarp surrounding it - pretending to be grass, the circle of mourners parting (“as if the coffin was Moses or something”) to allow the pallbearers to break through. There were flowers everywhere. A nearby grave was adorned with plastic foliage, including a bouquet that had a fake robin stuck into it. Fastened to a wire, the robin swayed with the occasional gust of wind, as if bobbing for the worms that lay below.
“That’s what did me in,” you suspend your description. “The robin.”
I begin to wonder about all the “thats” - part of me is still trying to follow the trail of wet footprints.
Above the site, on a hill some hundred yards away, rested a bulldozer. You could see it in the distance directly over the preacher’s shoulder. If you squinted, you could just make out the curls of gray smoke rising from the diggers, two men who had to wait for the ceremony to end before they could hang up their shovels.
“They had the right idea,” you say. Your hands shook as you searched your pockets for a cigarette. You remember wondering if it would be inappropriate to light up in the midst of the ceremony. “It wasn’t like it was a death from emphysema or lung cancer or something,” you say. “It’s not like it mattered anymore anyway.” But you failed to find a smoke and, just as well, you didn’t have a lighter. All the while, the robin continued to bob and bob and bob.
Without really knowing how or why, you found yourself taking steps backward, you felt yourself enveloped within the black garb of your fellow mourners, as if you were being sucked into the darkness of the hole that seconds ago was at your feet. You continued to back away, away, until you stood outside the circle. “The sun seemed brighter,” you say, “and there was a lot of noise.” You could still hear the preacher’s sorrowful tones, but could make nothing of his words. Instead you heard the sermon of the nature that surrounded you – the great oaks weeping a dirge as the breeze whispered through their leaves, the grass sang in harmony, the same song. You imagined you could see the ants that clung to the earth, beneath and among the grasses, their insignificant pattering legs keeping the beat as they followed a slow, somber line.
“I couldn’t take it,” you tell me. “It was all too loud.”
The sounds crashed into your ears with violent intensity, as if the earth itself bemoaned the interment of another being. You began to run. You ran from the angry earth, the sad trees, the stomping ants, to the hill where the bulldozer waited.
Climbing the slope in high heels proved a challenge and you were perspiring. But by the time you made it to the top, everything stopped – was silent. The diggers seemed surprised when you breathlessly reached out your hand and motioned for a smoke. Without looking and without a word, the older of the two, probably around fifty-five (“he had fluffs of hair in his ears,” you say), reached down into the breast pocket of his overalls and held out the cigarette. Your hand touched his briefly as the exchange was made. He also delivered a light.
“One puff was all it took to put the world back in order,” you say. “It was that simple.”
You finished smoking in silence. The men, uneasy, just watched. You didn’t care. After snubbing the butt with the pointed toe of your shoe, you nodded thanks to the fluffy-ear-hair digger and carefully picked your way down the hill, past the mourners, to your car.
It’s quiet for a moment. I think you finished your story. “How does that work?” I ask. “How did standing in line at the bank remind you of all that?”
You cock your head slightly, a little confused. It seems you’ve forgotten about the bank. “Oh,” you say, “The digger who gave me the cigarette.” You pause again, and you’re no longer looking at me, but looking through me. Your eyes have vacancy glazed over them.
“The digger?” I ask.
“His hands were filthy.”