The party goes on, someone picks up something by Montaigne

The party was supposed to have started at seven, and, by 7:45, he was terrifically bored. He was in love, which was usually a cure for boredom, but Jane hadn’t arrived yet, which meant he was spending the evening talking with people with whom he was most decidedly, not in love. People with whom he was not in love had a greyness that hung about them. They were vaguely put together of eyeglasses, mustaches, hoop skirts, braided hair, balding. They had accents of varying degrees, often talked of the weather, the latest hunting season, and novels. He did not actively detest them as a group. In fact, he felt as though he didn’t have the space or time to care much more about them than he did about a lamp or a book written in French, which he assiduously did not read.

            He crossed the room to speak with his father, George. George was a kind and robust man. In the middle of life’s way he had begun to expand ever so slightly, but in what can only be described as a pleasant way. He had a large mustache that was greying from the center out. He had a large head, and deep set eyes, which were almost always twinkling in a way that made him appear as if he were enjoying some silent joke.

            “Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked, Daniel, placing his large hand gently on his son’s shoulder.

            “It’s impossible not too with so much pleasantness gathered in one room,” Daniel answered, peering around the room and trying to find someone pleasant. His eyes alighted on his father’s old business partner, Mr. Denby. Mr. Denby, unlike his father, had begun to be whittled away as he aged. His legs were slender as was his waist. His voice was thin, reed like and a bit nasally. He had a daughter, Charlotte—a cold girl who spent most of her time up north with a fiancée whom everyone pitied for having hitched himself to such an unpleasant girl.

            The evening didn’t really start for him until Jane arrived. Jane—a girl he’d grown up with, a girl he’d walked through the fields with, named clouds, named stars. He’d been intending to marry Jane for years. They’d grown up, as the children of close friends often do, in close proximity. They’d played in barns, at funerals, at weddings. She was quite beautiful, thin-boned and pale. She reminded him of a very beautiful swallow. She was quick-witted and she laughed frequently. She threw her head back when she laughed. She laughed with every fiber of her being.

            She had the habit of swiping the hair away from her forehead with her left hand, and tucking it behind her ear. She was, as anyone who has ever loved can tell you, probably not as objectively pretty as he thought, which was entirely beside the point because objectivity and love are not strange bed fellows, they live in separate countries, speak different languages, and would only ever hear of the other in the way that a baby can hear the distant whine of a mower, thin and soft.

            She arrived around 8:30, long after he’d wandered round the room wondering why everyone else in the world was so recalcitrantly dull. He’d spoken for a while with Mr. Denby and his daughter. They’d talked of how he’d spend the summer, up north, working with his uncle, who was a lawyer. He had tried briefly to engage his daughter in conversation, but she’d been almost pointedly ignoring him. For a while, she’d politely nodded in the background of their conversation, which hadn’t bothered him much. Her eyes wandered over the room, and she’d signaled a waiter to bring her a cup of water. After a moment, she’d excused herself and wandered towards the book case.

            “Excuse me,” he’d said to Mr. Denby, crossing over to her. “Are you looking for something in particular? My father is not as well-read as he’d like us all to believe, but we have most of the classics, Shakespeare, Donne, Sophocles.”

            Her forefinger trailed along the spine of a book, The Merchant of Venice, before she answered him. “I am looking for something more entertaining than the conversation that’s currently taking place in this room. With that in mind, I’m finding great success. Why? Nearly anything will do,” she said, opening The Essays of Montaigne.

            He was too young not to be taken aback, though he’d been thinking the same thing himself moments before. “That’s rather rude,” he said. “Certainly you bear some responsibility for making the party entertaining don’t you?”

            She looked up briefly from her book and said, “Hmmm.”

            She was disagreeable that girl. There was really nothing to be done about it. Or if there was, it should have been done ages ago. He was angry, but he knew that he was not angry on his own behalf, but on behalf of his father, who’d thrown a party and invited his old friend Mr. Denby and his wretched daughter had attended, eaten the food, drank at least the water, and then sneered at it.

            Jane arrived shortly thereafter, and he was immediately soothed. For this too is a strange quality of love. That though it is often equated with wild passions and proclamations, what it really brings is a sort of serenity beneath the madness. That serenity is the heart finding a place to rest. And so, when Jane walked through the door, shaking hands with a few ladies before their eyes met, he saw her, and rested. He was home. 

In which I write more but from a different period in time because sequential ordering feels too much like real life, which is always, annoyingly sequential

           

 The party was supposed to have started at seven, and, by 7:45, he was terrifically bored. He was in love, which was usually a cure for boredom, but Jane hadn’t arrived yet, which meant he was spending the evening talking with people with whom he was most decidedly, not in love. People with whom he was not in love had a greyness that hung about them. They were vaguely put together of eyeglasses, mustaches, hoop skirts, braided hair, balding. They had accents of varying degrees, often talked of the weather, the latest hunting season, and novels. He did not actively detest them as a group. In fact, he felt as though he didn’t have the space or time to care much more about them than he did about a lamp or a book written in French, which he assiduously did not read.

            He crossed the room to speak with his father, George. George was a kind and robust man. In the middle of life’s way he had begun to expand ever so slightly, but in what can only be described as a pleasant way. He had a large mustache that was greying from the center out. He had a large head, and deep set eyes, which were almost always twinkling in a way that made him appear as if he were enjoying some silent joke.

            “Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked, Daniel, placing his large hand gently on his son’s shoulder.

            “It’s impossible not too with so much pleasantness gathered in one room,” Daniel answered, peering around the room and trying to find someone pleasant. His eyes alighted on his father’s old business partner, Mr. Denby. Mr. Denby, unlike his father, had begun to be whittled away as he aged. His legs were slender as was his waist. His voice was thin, reed like and a bit nasally. He had a daughter, Charlotte—a cold girl who spent most of her time up north with a fiancée whom everyone pitied for having hitched himself to such an unpleasant girl.

            The evening didn’t really start for him until Jane arrived. Jane—a girl he’d grown up with, a girl he’d walked through the fields with, named clouds, named stars. He’d been intending to marry Jane for years. They’d grown up, as the children of close friends often do, in close proximity. They’d played in barns, at funerals, at weddings. She was quite beautiful, thin-boned and pale. She reminded him of a very beautiful swallow. She was quick-witted and she laughed frequently. She threw her head back when she laughed. She laughed with every fiber of her being.

            She had the habit of swiping the hair away from her forehead with her left hand, and tucking it behind her ear. She was, as anyone who has ever loved can tell you, probably not as objectively pretty as he thought, which was entirely beside the point because objectivity and love are not strange bed fellows, they live in separate countries, speak different languages, and would only ever hear of the other in the way that a baby can hear the distant whine of a mower, thin and soft.

            The house was large, as houses were in those days. The front porch was adorned by a pair of red greyhounds, old porphyry standing guard over the door. On the eastern side of the house was a field, laden with wildflowers, buttercups, phlox, Queen Anne’s lace. In summer, the children would take walks with their nannies through the field, chasing nut hatches and hummingbirds through the thin reeds. Beyond the field was a brook, which turned into something vaguely resembling a river in early spring. At its height, it would overflow the banks, raising the groundwater, leaving the field a treacherous collection of swamp and gnats. A sodden mess which the children, whenever they’d discover it on their own, would run through with glee, for as any child knows there is a real pleasure in getting dirty. It is something that adults forget and will remember no more than ten or so times before they expire. So much is left in the past.

            When they were children he was not much in love with her. He was in love with the sound the wind made slipping through the branches of the elm. He was in love with the fish, silver flashes in an otherwise dark pool. He was in love with the smooth stones embedded in the rich loam that he sent skipping across the river. The good ones would uncurl across the stream, up onto the other bank, scattering leaves in their wake, disappearing into whatever world existed on the other side.

            One afternoon that they both remembered intently, they’d snuck away from their nannies and into the copse of trees. Down by the water, which cooled their pink cheeks, they’d watched a rabbit, trailed by four of her offspring, big-footed and  yet tinier than anyone could imagine, scurrying down by the water to forage for something. They’d wanted, as you or I or anyone would want, to capture the little rabbits to keep as their own. 

With this in mind they’d devised a simple plan: Jane would flush the rabbits out of the burrow by stomping on top of the ground, and he’d catch the tiny rabbits up in his coat. Tenderly, she’d crept across the roots of the elm, stepping softly across the bits of sand and gravel. When she’d reached the appointed place she began stomping, her small feet raising flecks of mud that would have spattered had they not been landing on other bits of the same.

            Eventually, the rabbits bounded out of the den, scurrying like tiny players across some unbounded stage. Daniel couldn’t catch any of them. They moved like the wind. They moved like wraith. They moved like the dream of rabbits rather than rabbits themselves. The two of them were apple cheeked, breathless and happy. What pleasures they derived even in failure.

            When they stopped laughing they could hear the nannies calling for them from close by, which only made them laugh more. Beneath this sound though, she became aware of a faint whimper, shallow and persistent. She got his attention and the two of them pulled aside the bits of sand and gravel until they saw the body of one of the little rabbits, curled in an unnatural position, gathering shallow breaths, its small ribs rising and falling rapidly. Neither one of them were yet versed in mercy.

            Their only thought was to cover their crime as quickly as possible, so they heaped the dirt and sand back upon the ragged little body until its thin breathing was hidden beneath the rush of water, the sound of the wind through willows and elms. By the time their caretakers arrive they couldn’t hear a thing.

            Months later, when the leaves were on fire with fall, they’d visit the dirt and dig up the small bones of an animal, stripped clean that had lain there since summer. Who’s to say what binds any two people together?

One afternoon, they’d been reading a book together in the library, his feet playfully placed on her lap, in the way of childhood friends. The book had been, well, something by Sterne perhaps. The late afternoon light was hidden by an oak. They sat in the dark, though not precisely the dark, but something like it. She was reading from the book intently, her eyes flicking back and forth like sunlight on water. Her eyes were green and deep. Everyone’s eyes are little pieces of jewelry when you’re falling in love. And he thought that he’d always remember the particular words that she’d been reading in Sterne the moment that he realized that he loved her, though it wasn’t true. It dawned on him completely as she was turning a page, her head lifted briefly, eyes half shaded by a cascade of hair. I love her, he thought. 

                       

He sat in the meadow, bees drowsing about the field, alighting on flowers and then humming away. It was not a bad summer, he thought, to be in love with two women. The tall reeds of grass bent easily, pillowing his head. He blew puffs of smoke from his pipe that miniaturized the clouds above. It was a hot summer. The river was down to a trickle, exposing its alluvial belly to insects and the cardinals, jays, and starlings that sought them mercilessly. The banks were covered in scrub, abundant ferns, verdant—fronds vaguely reminiscent of swan’s wings.

            A rich black smoke hung untethered against the backdrop of a low lying mountain. The train was winding its way through the hills and valleys from the City up north. The train moved like black serpent through the hills, slinking through valleys, past rivers, and burrowing beneath mountains. The train was industrious and fast.  It reminded him, in some strange way of something almost antediluvian, a predator arriving through a patch of dense forest.

Everyone down south loved watching the train enter the city’s center, greeting relatives who’d spent a week or two, sometimes the whole winter up north. And as custom demanded everyone, after taking off their hats, unloading bags and hugging whoever was there to greet them, always said how nice it was to be home where it was warm. It was considered gauche to say anything else.

            Occasionally someone from the North would arrive, overdressed, wearing a top hat and a fur coat, looking for all the world like a fish out of water. They pitied the poor people in the north, obsessed with the clocks, with work, with keeping idle hands busy. 

What was life for? Who knew? But certainly, certainly it could not be for staying busy. Or so was the thinking of the people who lived in the south, whose pride was as vicious and misguided as any businessman in the north. People everywhere were vicious and stupid, which made them at least agreeably similar.

            The field was full of swallowtail butterflies, wings flexing impressively, paying homage to their own beauty. They were quiet but not shy of beauty. The meadow was two hundred meters behind his parent’s house, tucked beneath a hillock. Beyond the meadow was a small copse of trees, ash and hemlock, which eventually gave way to the river. Tenants farmed most of the land, but these two acres were where he’d spent the best parts of his childhood. And now he lay in them, skin tickled by gorse, as an adult, wondering which woman he’d end up marrying. 

In which I continue writing, but this time not just about love but bunnies

           

 The party was supposed to have started at seven, and, by 7:45, he was terrifically bored. He was in love, which was usually a cure for boredom, but Jane hadn’t arrived yet, which meant he was spending the evening talking with people with whom he was most decidedly, not in love. People with whom he was not in love had a greyness that hung about them. They were vaguely put together of eyeglasses, mustaches, hoop skirts, braided hair, balding. They had accents of varying degrees, often talked of the weather, the latest hunting season, and novels. He did not actively detest them as a group. In fact, he felt as though he didn’t have the space or time to care much more about them than he did about a lamp or a book written in French, which he assiduously did not read.

            He crossed the room to speak with his father, George. George was a kind and robust man. In the middle of life’s way he had begun to expand ever so slightly, but in what can only be described as a pleasant way. He had a large mustache that was greying from the center out. He had a large head, and deep set eyes, which were almost always twinkling in a way that made him appear as if he were enjoying some silent joke.

            “Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked, Daniel, placing his large hand gently on his son’s shoulder.

            “It’s impossible not too with so much pleasantness gathered in one room,” Daniel answered, peering around the room and trying to find someone pleasant. His eyes alighted on his father’s old business partner, Mr. Denby. Mr. Denby, unlike his father, had begun to be whittled away as he aged. His legs were slender as was his waist. His voice was thin, reed like and a bit nasally. He had a daughter, Charlotte—a cold girl who spent most of her time up north with a fiancée whom everyone pitied for having hitched himself to such an unpleasant girl.

            The evening didn’t really start for him until Jane arrived. Jane—a girl he’d grown up with, a girl he’d walked through the fields with, named clouds, named stars. He’d been intending to marry Jane for years. They’d grown up, as the children of close friends often do, in close proximity. They’d played in barns, at funerals, at weddings. She was quite beautiful, thin-boned and pale. She reminded him of a very beautiful swallow. She was quick-witted and she laughed frequently. She threw her head back when she laughed. She laughed with every fiber of her being.

            She had the habit of swiping the hair away from her forehead with her left hand, and tucking it behind her ear. She was, as anyone who has ever loved can tell you, probably not as objectively pretty as he thought, which was entirely beside the point because objectivity and love are not strange bed fellows, they live in separate countries, speak different languages, and would only ever hear of the other in the way that a baby can hear the distant whine of a mower, thin and soft.

            The house was large, as houses were in those days. The front porch was adorned by a pair of red greyhounds, old porphyry standing guard over the door. On the eastern side of the house was a field, laden with wildflowers, buttercups, phlox, Queen Anne’s lace. In summer, the children would take walks with their nannies through the field, chasing nut hatches and hummingbirds through the thin reeds. Beyond the field was a brook, which turned into something vaguely resembling a river in early spring. At its height, it would overflow the banks, raising the groundwater, leaving the field a treacherous collection of swamp and gnats. A sodden mess which the children, whenever they’d discover it on their own, would run through with glee, for as any child knows there is a real pleasure in getting dirty. It is something that adults forget and will remember no more than ten or so times before they expire. So much is left in the past.

            When they were children he was not much in love with her. He was in love with the sound the wind made slipping through the branches of the elm. He was in love with the fish, silver flashes in an otherwise dark pool. He was in love with the smooth stones embedded in the rich loam that he sent skipping across the river. The good ones would uncurl across the stream, up onto the other bank, scattering leaves in their wake, disappearing into whatever world existed on the other side.

            One afternoon that they both remembered intently, they’d snuck away from their nannies and into the copse of trees. Down by the water, which cooled their pink cheeks, they’d watched a rabbit, trailed by four of her offspring, big-footed and  yet tinier than anyone could imagine, scurrying down by the water to forage for something. They’d wanted, as you or I or anyone would want, to capture the little rabbits to keep as their own.

            With this in mind they’d devised a simple plan: Jane would flush the rabbits out of the burrow by stomping on top of the ground, and he’d catch the tiny rabbits up in his coat. Tenderly, she’d crept across the roots of the elm, stepping softly across the bits of sand and gravel. When she’d reached the appointed place she began stomping, her small feet raising flecks of mud that would have spattered had they not been landing on other bits of the same.

            Eventually, the rabbits bounded out of the den, scurrying like tiny players across some unbounded stage. Daniel couldn’t catch any of them. They moved like the wind. They moved like wraith. They moved like the dream of rabbits rather than rabbits themselves. The two of them were apple cheeked, breathless and happy. What pleasures they derived even in failure.

            When they stopped laughing they could hear the nannies calling for them from close by, which only made them laugh more. Beneath this sound though, she became aware of a faint whimper, shallow and persistent. She got his attention and the two of them pulled aside the bits of sand and gravel until they saw the body of one of the little rabbits, curled in an unnatural position, gathering shallow breaths, its small ribs rising and falling rapidly. Neither one of them were yet versed in mercy.

            Their only thought was to cover their crime as quickly as possible, so they heaped the dirt and sand back upon the ragged little body until its thin breathing was hidden beneath the rush of water, the sound of the wind through willows and elms. By the time their caretakers arrive they couldn’t hear a thing.

            Months later, when the leaves were on fire with fall, they’d visit the dirt and dig up the small bones of an animal, stripped clean that had lain there since summer. Who’s to say what binds any two people together? 

One afternoon, they’d been reading a book together in the library, his feet playfully placed on her lap, in the way of childhood friends. The book had been, well, something by Sterne perhaps. The late afternoon light was hidden by an oak. They sat in the dark, though not precisely the dark, but something like it. She was reading from the book intently, her eyes flicking back and forth like sunlight on water. Her eyes were green and deep. Everyone’s eyes are little pieces of jewelry when you’re falling in love. And he thought that he’d always remember the particular words that she’d been reading in Sterne the moment that he realized that he loved her, though it wasn’t true. It dawned on him completely as she was turning a page, her head lifted briefly, eyes half shaded by a cascade of hair. I love her, he thought.  

In which I write the first portion of something that is obviously going to turn into a novel....or you know, more likely not

            

              The party was supposed to have started at seven, and, by 7:45, he was terrifically bored. He was in love, which was usually a cure for boredom, but Jane hadn’t arrived yet, which meant he was spending the evening talking with people with whom he was most decidedly, not in love. People with whom he was not in love had a greyness that hung about them. They were vaguely put together of eyeglasses, mustaches, hoop skirts, braided hair, balding. They had accents of varying degrees, often talked of the weather, the latest hunting season, and novels. He did not actively detest them as a group. In fact, he felt as though he didn’t have the space or time to care much more about them than he did about a lamp or a book written in French, which he assiduously did not read.

            He crossed the room to speak with his father, George. George was a kind and robust man. In the middle of life’s way he had begun to expand ever so slightly, but in what can only be described as a pleasant way. He had a large mustache that was greying from the center out. He had a large head, and deep set eyes, which were almost always twinkling in a way that made him appear as if he were enjoying some silent joke.

            “Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked, Daniel, placing his large hand gently on his son’s shoulder.

            “It’s impossible not too with so much pleasantness gathered in one room,” Daniel answered, peering around the room and trying to find someone pleasant.

 His eyes alighted on his father’s old business partner, Mr. Denby. Mr. Denby, unlike his father, had begun to be whittled away as he aged. His legs were slender as was his waist. His voice was thin, reed like and a bit nasally. He had a daughter, Charlotte—a cold girl who spent most of her time up north with a fiancée whom everyone pitied for having hitched himself to such an unpleasant girl.

            The evening didn’t really start for him until Jane arrived. Jane—a girl he’d grown up with, a girl he’d walked through the fields with, named clouds, named stars. He’d been intending to marry Jane for years. They’d grown up, as the children of close friends often do, in close proximity. They’d played in barns, at funerals, at weddings. She was quite beautiful, thin-boned and pale. She reminded him of a very beautiful swallow. She was quick-witted and she laughed frequently. She threw her head back when she laughed. She laughed with every fiber of her being.

            She had the habit of swiping the hair away from her forehead with her left hand, and tucking it behind her ear. She was, as anyone who has ever loved can tell you, probably not as objectively pretty as he thought, which was entirely beside the point because objectivity and love are not strange bed fellows, they live in separate countries, speak different languages, and would only ever hear of the other in the way that a baby can hear the distant whine of a mower, thin and soft. 

That time we went to Italy

The city center is remarkably small and we come upon the San Lorenzo square after only a few missteps. The B and B where we stayed abutted the Basilica San Lorenzo, a great old monolithic church with a dark interior and oil paintings on the walls from centuries ago. We are tired Americans though and in a hurry because I can feel my sciatic nerve trying to flare to life underneath the weight of my pack. The knocker on the door is the head of a great and fearsome looking lion. We are in Florence.

          The first thing we did in Florence was sleep. We were exhausted from the flight, from the train, from trying to make sense of the language that floated past us like a barge on a swiftly moving river. “What did she say?” “Probably something about how beautiful we are.” “That seems likely.”

          I cannot recommend highly enough that the first thing you should do in any major beautiful European city is sleep. We made the mistake in Paris of trying to take in Notre Dame after an overnight flight, and I wound up comparing it to something I built with legos when I was seven. We were not quite in the right frame of mind.

                Time, that old bastard, is linear. He’s immutable, a father who won’t pull off at a rest stop for his child to pee. Like life we are born into time, whether we’d like it or not. I like it not. And yet, fly to Italy, jump ahead in time six hours on a clock and those hours will still hang on you, calling to you, reminding you of their existence in heavy lidded eyes, cold sweats, slightly upset stomachs. Time, that old crank, is inescapable.

                By the time we reach Florence the exhilaration of travel has started to shed—a spray of water breaking against the prow. And still, we awake at seven. The sunlight creeps through our window, alighting in bed, gently pulling at our eyelids, making us warm beneath the covers. In San Marcos square, the sunlight makes ¾ of a square, the left-side is obscured by the presence of the Medici Chapel: a monolithic structure, with Gothic inspired spires and flying buttresses. On the opposite side of the square a line of street vendors has formed, hawking leather belts, shoes of all varieties, flowers—sun flowers and blue belles, and then more shoes and more belts, shirts, hats, and coats. The market, unlike the seedy seeming underbelly of most non-food related markets is one of business. In America, these types of markets are generally staffed by men with long hair and braided beards. In Italy, the proprietor looks less like a member of the Grateful Dead and more like someone who can get you a nice belt. 

On the way to Florence

The train from Bologna to Florence cuts through the Italian countryside, leaving Bologna behind in a hurry, taking us through large fields of waist high grass, past brooks and streams, and individual houses set in the valley, with Italian clothes blowing on Italian clothes lines. My partner says that we can’t sleep at the same time or our packs might be stolen. She tells me that we’ll sleep in shifts and is asleep herself minutes afterward. I do not want our packs to be stolen, but I was also deeply, deeply, sleepy. By nature I’m more trusting than she is, less worried about the many things that can go wrong. Often, she’s right, and I’m wrong, and things do go wrong, but sometimes they don’t, and I feel very superior and justified in my position because humans are like that.

          I doze in and out of sleep as we pass through mountains, lumbering through dark tunnels like a dragon, only to arrive out in the dazzling mid-afternoon light ,the grass, the houses on the hillsides like snowflakes. Every time she wakes up she asks me if I’ve been sleeping. I tell her no, then smile, and she asks me where I got the drool on my shoulder. “Someone put it there,” I assure her. “He just spilled some water on it after he borrowed our packs. He said he’d bring it right back.” This gentle ribbing does nothing, or maybe it does. Maybe it keeps me sane. Maybe it keeps us both sane. Who knows? We just get this one brief blink of an eye.

          We move through a variety of other stations, places I don’t remember that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. The train stations out on the edge of some small town as if it were the American west and tumbleweeds were about to blow through. Finally, we get off the train in Florence and lug our bags, which I’ve been told weigh only forty-seven pounds, but which feel as if they carry the weight of the world in them. “I’m Atlas,” I say, but no one ever gets Ayn Rand jokes because she’s mercilessly not funny. (The referent, of course, is not originally from Rand). Our packs are so heavy that it’s hard to imagine carrying them from the train station to our hotel. It’s hard to imagine carrying them anywhere. Not for the first time I reflected on what a shame it was that I hadn’t been born independently wealthy. Wouldn’t it be nice if a porter had been doing all those things for us? A fellow we could befriend to make it okay, but still, someone who could carry our bags? We’re a frugal American couple though, scouring the internet for cheap flights for months in advance and we carry our elephant sized packs on our backs as punishment.

          We walked from the train station towards our accommodations, referring frequently to a map in our guide books, so people would be sure to know that we weren’t from Italy. “Is there a McDonald’s here or what?” I asked everyone that I could, using exaggerated Italian pronunciation that my sister told me was really only true for Mafioso southern Italians. I’m certain that we’ll have to walk for miles, but it’s only a few blocks. The streets are serpentine and cobble stoned. We round a corner and come upon the Duomo, built by Michelangelo or some other Italian asshole, depending on who you ask. Something about Italian sculpture makes you feel as if you have wasted most of your life on frivolous things. He built the Duomo, and all I’ve got is this shitty poem about pigeons. 

On Childhood

If you've never had a person suggest that they'd like to read your writing perhaps this post won't make any sense to you. However, we were all young once upon a time, and perhaps even remember bringing home a picture from school. My pictures were devoid of any artistic talent, and yet, I wanted the same approval that other kids garnered when they skillfully drew with a variety of rulers, and colored pencils that included colors like cobalt blue that I didn't even know existed, or rather, thought of as just blue. Those same children, tongues pressed to their cheek or slightly exposed above the white ridge of their teeth, focused, intent. The light coming through the small rectangular windows in squares. The windows themselves crisscrossed by black lines that to this day remain inexplicable. And even at that age I already knew that I was not gifted. That the pen was not an extension of my mind. That it, the pen, was something that would betray my dreams rather than fulfill them, such that when I drew a small blue river, with blue willows along the side, and blue birds in the sky, and it was not awful, my mother hung it in our kitchen for two years. She perhaps realizing that this was as great as my artistic achievements were to get. 

The smell of coffee on my kindergarten teacher's breath overpowering, and the pen not obeying in the sort of fashion that would suggest the beauty of order, linearity. The desks are the type that can be lifted up, so that each child can keep an eraser, and a ruler, and some pieces of paper in it for weeks on end. The other children all have the big pink erasers that they apply liberally and neatly to any error, blowing the bits of lead off onto the great white expanse of floor. Myself, not in possession of the big erase, but constantly losing pencils, and being left with one of those eraser less types that scrape and eventually tear the page when applied with any force. The mistakes themselves occurring at such a frequent rate that the stress of the pencil scraping through the paper is almost too much to stand. And, the paper itself once ripped is replaced by yet another sheet, and we haven't learned yet about the environment and how we should stop wasting things like paper and maybe I was some sort of martyr for holding on to that old pencil. 

And at recess the other kids gathering around the large play area, filled with gravel, which at the time, was considered to be the safest thing, little stones that slightly larger children would fling themselves into from black swings with silver chains, when the ladies, mostly Asian, who watched over us would turn their heads, the pebbles getting lodged in the tender skin right in the middle of the hand. And me, knowing that some sort of social hierarchy exists that is related to the scissors and the writing of names in good solid block handwriting, and pink erasers, and cool pencils, of a variety of colors, not just the standard old no. 2 sans eraser that I'm using. 

Some of the kids in the class get up often to sharpen their pencil, and you are aware by the stare that the teacher gives them, the herding type motion of her arms as she pushes them back into their seat that it annoys her. And so, you sit, with those windows of light, small rectangles, seeming like miles away. And why were the windows so high in those old classrooms? And even though your pencil has been worn away and you're just writing with the nub, barely able to withstand the shiver that using that small nub on the paper creates in your spine, you don't get up. 

This being the first of what's to become a litany of failures, though that particularly verbiage was certainly not available. The teacher's hair, short and severe, her last name Marx, like the German. She drives a small sports car and drinks copious amounts of coffee, and has a son of her own, though it's hard to imagine. Your glasses are affixed firmly to your forehead, the light now creating a slight glare to coming up off them, the glasses, during math time, which really just amounts to kids sitting around with a bunch of beans, practicing taking them away and then putting them back. The math itself, fairly easy, but the act of breaking through that fourth wall, the wall that exists between the inner and the outer self, the public and the private, nearly impossible to break down, so that you sit quietly while other children move beans and gain little pats on the head from various student aids, your hands nearly shaking under the table. And you are happy, in a way, to be viewing the world through those big round lenses, gaining just a little bit of extra space from all that was new. 

If I wrote you a letter, this is what it would say

Hello Darling,

I hope this letter finds you in good spirits or something approximating them. I’m going to try this again, this time written from the perspective of someone who is very sad. I’m not very sad. I’m constitutionally unsuited for it. Whenever I feel myself getting sad I take a drink of bourbon, or go for a stroll in the woods and try and identify different species of birds merely based on their calls. I know shit about birds, but listening for their unique calls distracts me. It slows me down. I suppose it connects me back to our old animal instincts, which have nothing to do with feeling sad or grey on particular days and everything to do with staying alive. I am happy to report that I am staying alive.

If you walk due north from the cabin where I’m staying you’ll find yourself soon greeted by a trail head. Keep walking north and it tells you that you’ll reach the top of a mountain. To the east, at least according to the sign, is a waterfall. Traveling west leads you back to a loop trail, and heading south leads you back to the cabin. I travel west most days because I have a strong sense of irony. Life is cyclical now isn’t it?

Stranger still though, at least to my admittedly feeble intellect, is how much sense the signs make. Go here: see this. And I take a great deal of pleasure in knowing that east lies a waterfall. Life, as we both now know, manages to be queerly related to well-labeled signs. Once you’ve chosen a path it gets rather hard to deviate. If you start out heading east, chances are, you’ll wind up seeing a waterfall. Head north, a mountain. And yet, the sign in life’s case is also illusory. It is entirely possible that while traveling east you will tumble down the hillside, spraining your ankle in the process. In which case, you will not see the waterfall. Or perhaps a tree branch will fall and strike you in the shoulder, leaving you incapacitated. It is a tension that we all live with at least on some small level.

I say this all not entirely to bore you, though I admit that was at least a part of my intent. I say it because it seems strange to me now that we’ll never see each other again, when months ago, even a year, I’d have said that we’d know each other for the rest of our lives. In life’s infinite branching of circumstances it’s hard to know if this was inevitable or not. That is to say, I’m not sure whether we slipped off the path and broke our ankles, or whether this was the path all along. Do you know? Does God? Could we ask him in prayer? I think not. Even if he exists, such troubles as ours lie even beneath the birds of the field. To believe otherwise would be a form of pride, which is the greatest of the sins.

Of all the things that you said to me during those months that we spent together I remember one thing the most. We were sitting at picnic table, eating sandwiches from a local shop. A hornet was buzzing around, menacing both of us. I said we should just abandon the sandwiches, knowing when we were beat. You laughed warmly and said, “That’s exactly what I thought you’d say. You’re always willing to give up.”

And you were right. Look at me now. I’ve given up on nearly everything. I’ve given up on us, on you. I find it so much easier this way. Snow started falling this morning, think flakes from a grey sky. I hope that it snows for months that I’m trapped here, in this cabin, thinking of you, not thinking of me. 

I and love and you

Hello Darling,

I’m writing to you from a wicker chair that I’ve pulled near the fire. It’s warm here, but I love the smell of wood smoke and can picture it curling away, bluish into an ashy sky. Little bits of flame break off and wink out of existence. The water in the bay is dark in places, and darker still are the shapes of the trees. The sunset is the color of a yellow rose, faded by mid-summer.

I’d say that I missed you, but it wouldn’t be entirely correct. I miss the idea of you. It’s strange of course because we hardly know one another. I wandered through my pictures this evening, hoping to catch a glimpse of you. You aren’t in any of them. But sometimes, if I look closely enough, I’ll see you somewhere in the margins. In the picture, I’m drinking a glass of champagne. My cheeks are bright and rosy, and I have my arm around a girl. And yet, if you look deeper into the photo, past the tumble of russet oak leaves hanging over my left shoulder and into my eyes you’ll see an absence. Like the ocean on a grey sort of day, where the horizon and water are indistinguishable. What’s missing, what makes the picture lack definition is that I was thinking of you and am therefore, not really present anywhere. Look at any picture, and you’ll see that its composition is incomplete. It’s defined by absence.

Way out over the water a bird is hooting in a way that reminds me of an owl. But no owls live up here. No one lives out here right now but me. Your toe nails are painted red, or they are in my mind. Your lips are sometimes thin, and sometimes full. Honestly, I can’t really recall. This afternoon I paddled out into the brackish water in a kayak. I started to write a poem. It had something to do with ashes, and bones, and a reference to Pompeii that tied back in to something from out of one of the death camps. It was inefficient and unlovely.

Do you think if we’d made love, or exchanged phone numbers, or done any of the things that normal people do when they start to fall in love that I would be sitting here by myself at this window? Probably. In the vagaries of time; time which I don’t believe to be linear or immutable, such a state would result in profound boredom for a creator or the universe, in the vagaries of that time, I believe that a certain evening exists, in which you are not miles and miles away, but sitting here, watching the light drain from the sky, a fire crackling near our extraordinarily warm toes. “Should we,” you’ll say, and I’d put a finger to your lips, to quiet you while we listened to the distant thrumming of water at the shore. 

That time I bought an area rug

When you're going out to buy a rug it's important to bring your color wheel. Without a color wheel, you are shi- out of luck. It's not easy to find a carpet that really "defines the space." It's important to use terms like "define the space" whenever you are talking about your new home. Don't let anyone tell you that a house is just a house. A house is a space that you fill up with stuff. It's important to define that space. I define the large area that we have most of our belongings in as a house. However, I've always been a bit of a literalist when it suits me. 

Do not ask your wife's opinion when you are going to pick out the rug. We who live in places like Washington, D.C. or New York, or the United States of America, or Russia, or... don't really get a chance to hunt anymore. We can no longer slay that fatted calf and bring it home to our sig. others. Ergo; this is our last bastion. We have been sent out into the night, with only a small hybrid car, almost incapable of carrying even a bag of groceries with this task: buy me a rug and maybe a trunk. 

SIL: That rug looks fine. You don't really need an area rug. 
M: I thought that was an area rug. I think I was looking for an area rug. 
SIL: It looks good. It looks fine. 
M: I'm not sure it's defining the space like I want it to. 

One of the best things about buying our multi-colored space defining rug, though admittedly a rather small space, was carrying it out to the car in a freezing rain. I'm fairly certain that several cars carrying women probably had to stop just from the raw scent of masculinity that must have been wafting off me as I lifted that moderately light carpet into my arms and carried it into the street. 

Girl: Is that a multi-colored and slightly bright carpet he's carrying? 
Girl 2: All by himself? 
Girl 3: He is all man! 

I think that's probably a fair assessment of the sort of discourse that took place as I stumbled up the frozen sidewalks and tried to wedge the beautiful carpet/bath mat into the back of our car. In real life the role of the three girls was played by three guys who were smoking the entire time I was in the store in the freezing cold weather and who were still smoking when I came out. I'm certain they were equally as impressed, as the imaginary girls were, at my ability to choose a carpet with some mauve in it. Confession: I don't know what color mauve is? Is it green? 

Dear friends, I have not even told you how I wrestled a moderately light trunk into the back of my car with the help of the salesmen. 

Sales: Will you slide that seat up? This thing is killing my back. 

Me: You bet. (Slides seat up earnestly while trying not to think about the fact that I am participating a bit too much in the loading process of the trunk. And trying not to think about what it means that I am annoyed by participating a bit too much in the process. Does it show that I am spoiled by customer service? Is it some sort of class distinction that I feel is being violated? The contract between store and customer? Why am I thinking so much? Did the two of us wrestling the trunk into the back of the car create some sort of bond that allowed me to nod my head at him after we finished and wish him a Happy New Year? Did he recognize in me a customer who was willing to go the extra mile. Someone who isn't just a sharply dressed (I was that day. It was not my normal jeans and a t-shirt attire)World Market Customer. I was someone who was kind of like him, a guy who had worked hard lifting boxes at some summer jobs in the not too distant past. Wasn't I?) 

And then I drove home and rolled out a carpet in our living room. I put a Vinod trunk priced at 199 dollars in our living room. I sat down on our practically brand new couches and tried to decide if the space defined me. If the space was really showing the sort of person that I'd made of myself after thirty or so years on this little ball of blue. I concluded that putting your feet up on a coffee table is one of the rare pleasures and life that would now be eluding me. I considered the cost of ottomans. I tried to remember a time when I still thought an Ottoman referred strictly to the Turkish empire. I concluded that our rug was not a proper area rug but perhaps that would be all right.

That time we went to Italy

In the morning, no one spoke of the urinating. That’s one of the difficult things about marriage. It divides you in ways that other things don’t. The fact is that my sister and I would have laughed over the frequent bathroom breaks if not for spouses, but there we were, pretending as though I hadn’t spent half the evening looming over their sleeping forms and cursing at the darkness. Though, to be fair, one does not usually talk of urine at breakfast.

          For breakfast we have espresso and coffee. At that point in time in my life I’d never had coffee. I’d always found the taste too strong and was waiting for enough of my taste buds to die off before I took up drinking it. One of the difficult things about being a guest is that you can’t turn your nose up at breakfast like you can otherwise. I don’t eat oatmeal at home because it tastes like exactly what it is, meal, a term generally used to denote a poor texture. And yet, serve it to me for breakfast, maybe throw in some blueberries, and I’ll probably tell you that I’m taking a bite out of heaven because I lie fairly frequently, often without meaning to.

          I love coffee now, and I learned to love it on that trip, but I suppose, more specifically, that morning. Many other moments in my life have followed a similar trajectory: fear or distaste followed by pleasure. For instance, for years I didn’t talk to women only to discover that it’s surprisingly easy, in large part because they tend to listen better than most men and are generally more empathetic and have similar interests as mine including 19^th century novels, the Pride and Prejudice series done by the BBC and Ryan Gosling.

          I hadn’t thought of it in quite that dichotomous of a way before: the difference between night and dark. And yet, there was a life before I enjoyed a coffee and a life after I enjoyed coffee, which began that morning. I’d always found the taste to be bitter and strong, though I quickly learned by watching my Italian brother-in-law that copious amounts of sugar poured into thimble sized espresso cups can make the experience far less bitter than I’d first supposed was possible. At times, I wondered if the cup had enough room for all the sugar he was adding.

          Afterwards, we had cookies that we were to dip in coffee. Having espresso and coffee on the same morning cured me of my distaste, though the coffee was cut rather heartily with milk. I treated the first few sips daintily, like a woman of proper 19^th century upbringing should, fearing that the rush of taste would leave my tongue stricken as it always had before. But it didn’t. In fact, it was pleasurable. And that’s how I learned to love coffee. A similar introduction to roller coasters ended with me nearly throwing up and the girl I was with requesting that I sit out the next ride, so I’m not saying that it’s always wise to toss the baby bird out of the nest in order to make it fly, but it’s not the worst idea.

          In the afternoon, we’re taking the train from Bologna to Florence. My sister is sad because she wants us to stay with them for longer, but I couldn’t abide staying with anyone for more than a week in a foreign country. There is too much of the world left unexplored. And though I’m usually partial to red wine and conversations that last late into the night I also feel a pull out towards the open road, into unexplored streets, ancient histories, dusty hikes. 

That time I accidentally peed in a closet and went to Italy

I barely noticed the roaches, but I did notice the heat. A lot of houses in Europe don’t have air conditioning, which is great for the environment but it makes trying to sleep in those spaces a trial of its own. I’m stripped down to my underwear and sweating on a pull out couch. The sort where you can already tell that your back is going to hurt in the morning. In order to get to the bathroom you have to open their bedroom door, traipse through, and then sit for a spell. It has a bidet. Back then, I usually slept well, arising sometimes as late as nine or ten after a long night’s sleep. Of course, that night by 2:30 I had the floodwaters of the Nile moving through my urethra. I tried to sit for a spell as if waiting would make the urine pass. A slender breeze cools the sweat on my skin. In the distance I hear cars rushing by on the street, the cities version of the ocean. It was raining, or it sounded like it had been raining, or the cars had poor mufflers.

          Eventually, my bladder got the best of me, and I walked through their pitch black room, banging my shin on their bed before peeing vigorously and staring confusedly at the bidet. On the way out, I bump their bed again, to remind them that Americans don’t do anything quietly. For a while, I sit in bed, sweating, watching my partner sleep peacefully, as the reeds of an Italian breeze float through the window, billowing the curtains on the way. Eventually, I drifted off to sleep.

          By 4:30 AM I’m awake again. The need that I have to pee is somewhere between urgent, and I’m probably going to wet the bed for the first time as an adult. 

Years earlier, I’d accidentally wandered into a closet at my brother’s house in Virginia and vigorously peed on a water meter in the front closet, only realizing half way through, as bits of spray rebounded into the air that I was probably not in the bathroom. After that, I’d gone back to lie down in my sleeping bag, only to be awoken by my sister’s voice, “Andrew?”

“Yes,” I answered her.

“Did you just pee in the front closet?”

After a pause, “Yes.”

And then the two of us broke into a giggling fit, despite the fact that we were both far too old to be laughing at pee jokes before cleaning it up with a role of paper towels and never telling my brother or his wife. It’s just one of the many reasons that I love my sister so much.

          In retrospect, I suppose I should have just peed in their front closet. As it was, I banged my way through their bedroom and peed again, banging my shin on the bed again, and partially rearranging the mattress. I’m certain they were awake for the whole thing and probably wondering if I needed some cranberry juice for my bladder infection.