The places I haven't been

The comet

The comet that’s going to end the world is a beautiful emerald green. They’ve been talking about it on the news for weeks as though it was a monstrosity. Quite simply, it’s beautiful. It’s more like something from a dream rather than reality. The sun is impossibly warm. I stand near some of my neighbor’s out in bathrobes and towels, a couple of older children staying awake past bed time. For once, we don’t talk about our pets, our children, or the local schools. As we stand there, admiring in some small way, our demise. One mother tells her son that it’s time for bed and he dutifully complies. I keep wondering what people will think of me, how I will face this last and greatest test. It’s silly, I know as everyone will be gone, turned to ash and dust. But I can’t shake the feeling that someone will still be watching in the dark that will follow, to see if I faced everything cleanly, if the bits of matter that once comprised this self, floated just so.

Mistranslation

It’s dark now. The Spanish countryside now looks any other countryside. Just shapes in the darkness. I am reading a copy of Swann’s Way, distractedly. A professor of mine once said that you only needed to read a few pages of Proust to understand the whole. It was as good to turn to a paragraph on page 727 as on 343 and dutifully read out the words. I suspect though, that he’d read the entire thing. I find myself, as I read further, obsessed with translation. I read a sentence from page thirty three, Davis’s translation, then from Ortiz, then from Spence, comparing the subtle nuances, the slight changes in diction. How could one person interpret the sentence so differently then another? Perhaps his meaning was always meant to contain multitudes. Or perhaps I should just learn French. Translating, it seems, is a strange business. For instance, as I was leaving you said, “I’ll see you next summer.” But now, looking out into the darkness I fear that I’ve been given a poor translation. The cold window where my cheek is now resting, the darkness outside, and the book in my hand are all suggesting a new meaning to your words; they are saying that you are gone. 

My Neighbor and I

We used to stand, my neighbor and I, behind the red brick wall that separated our houses from the corner store. He smoked, and I did not. We talked often of our children, close in age, mine a mere four months younger than his. His son was better than mine at throwing rocks and kicking soccer balls. His son was good at putting together puzzles and ornate toys. Mine was excellent at drawing pictures of the sun and inventing games. Neither one of us felt we had anything to brag about in our children. They were just ours, and so we loved them. Years later, while reading the morning news, I came across an obituary for his son who had gone off and died in a war. Tears, of the sort I couldn’t control ran down my cheeks and I called my son, grown up and living four states away. He picked up on the third ring and said, “Hello dad.” And suddenly the world lurched back into place, and I asked after his wife and children. It was only after I’d hung up the phone that I thought again of the wall that separated our houses from the store. How my neighbor always kept an ear out for his son, and left at the first noise. “He’ll be up now,” he’d say, stubbing out his cigarette, opening the gate, and disappearing back into the safety of home.