When I was young we traveled to find snow. I remember one particular morning when my mother drove us up to the snow because we were all fighting in the back seat and she deemed us unfit for church. Instead, she drove forty five minutes up into Paradise or Forest Ranch, got out of the car and started pelting us with snow balls. She was a good mother. Last night S asked me to take out the trash. I wandered into the crisp night air, bag held out from my body, feet crunching through soft bit of snow. The sky was clear, but I didn't look up. I could see the moonlight on the snow, and in the alley, the reflection of the streetlights on the patches of ice that were like islands in a stream. I had one of those moments where you are transported back into childhood or some prior version of yourself. As my feet crunched through the snow I felt a certain dislocation. Surely I must have been staying at a cabin, making a special trip outside in the brisk air, taking in the cold and the snow as a kind of novelty. And yet, instead there I was doing the most mundane thing, taking out the trash, stepping through bits of something that used to be magical. For a moment though, I forgot that I was in my yard. Rather, the moment become full with time, and I pictured myself stepping through the snow of a decade or two ago, my feet making small indentations in pillows of snow. The night air cold and clear but soon to be left behind.I have somewhere warmer to be.
I
Observation #2
I was struck this morning by the absurdity of the locker room. I walked quickly through a set of double doors and immediately began shedding my clothes as if stripping your clothes off was an Olympic sport and the most natural thing in the world to do. It suddenly struck me as absurd, sitting on a bench amongst strangers in my underwear that I should be in such a rush to take off my clothes. Under any other circumstances such behavior would be considered pathological or grounds for disbarment. And yet, in a locker room, it's commonplace, the most natural thing in the world to strip down among strangers in the fashion of two teenage lovers. What absurdity? Of course, most of our customs are strange contrivances built sometimes over centuries. I suppose it was just one of those moments when the essential silliness of our existence is made plain.
Observation 3
The other day I got into an argument with a bus driver over whether he'd passed me by and whether I was able to stand in the street and knock on the door. I said some harsh things, and he said some harsher things. Later, we shook hands. Today I took the bus and did not argue with my bus driver. I sat quietly next to a young guy who was taking up 1.5 of the seat are and read a book quietly. My eyes passed over the words like God passes over the problems of evil, quickly and silently. I get sick when I read on the bus sometimes, a fact which is most prominent when the driver stops and starts like someone learning to drive stick the first time. But today I wasn't sick. Today I read a book on the bus, unwinding the scarf from around my neck as the world passed by outside my window, cold and white. I left the bus and traveled into the sun's rays of early morning, with no story to tell, no hand to shake, no face to remember. My story now was someone else's, mediated through the pages of the book. Perhaps I should argue with my bus driver every day, to undergo the act of sin and redemption, to have my fight or flight instinct kick in, my adrenaline rise, so that my mind can start whirring in an attempt to make sense of the morning. Instead, my mind is swimming with words until I am near drowning. I am paddling my way into the shores of the morning on words like indigo and fastidious and recalcitrant. I wonder where the bus driver is that I argued with on Friday morning, what things he's puzzled over today? If he to, like me, is suddenly lonely.
remarkable writing..good insights..
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