Too Much Thinking, Not Enough Doing

"All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.  Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.  One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.  For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.  And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality."

                 -George Orwell, "Why I Write"

Mirror Image

The night of May 2nd I fell asleep reciting French verbs, or at least, I fell asleep murmuring  combinations of sounds that could have been French verbs, my throat sore from hacking up a bunch of r's for two hours. Those meticulously measured puffs of air were the only music I heard before my mind turned off...

Between waking up in my parents' bed and being consumed in a dark blanket of snow, my dreams took me to a space station that looked like something from Star Wars, with octagonal portals covered in blinking lights and screens. Andrew and I were wandering through the set as if we were in a museum, hands in pockets, eyes up and overloaded. He was wearing khaki pants and a fleece pullover, not his typical garb. But the shoes I remember; he'd hiked Scotland in them. Approaching an elevator where an attendant stood with her hands behind her back, we decided to try out the game contained inside, the game being a sort first-generation, true-to-life video game--virtual reality without the technology.  I took my spot, kneeling on a cheap, moving stage that looked like it'd been stolen from a carnival ride, while Andrew looked on.

I hit different buttons and pulled on the levers and handles protruding from the elevator walls as the stage moved up and down, sluggish and rigid. We were both laughing hilariously, knowing how ridiculous this had turned out to be. The game stopped and the attendant handed us slips of paper to color in.  I looked down at the outline of a little girl eating a slice of buttered bread, innocent and unwittingly coy, and decided to color her in blue and purple. With a colored pencil, I filled in the colors with vertical strokes, carelessly going above and below the lines. As we exited the elevator, Andrew handed me his little square of paper, looking me in the eye just a wee bit longer than was comfortable.  He had colored her dress with the yellow-green pencil, and her hair he'd colored red. Hanging cock-eyed above her red head he'd drawn in a yellow halo.

In the morning, I was haunted by the image of the little girl, her deep wishing-well-eyes watching me, and I wondered where I had seen the picture before. Later in the afternoon, in the car with my mom and sister, listening to Helplessness Blues for the second time through, it hit me (as most answers do when you stop trying to find them): the girl in my dream is the little girl from the "Grown Ocean" video. I couldn't remember the last time I'd watched it, and I was astonished that my mind had conjured up her picture.

I double-checked my theory when we got home, and sure enough, there she is at the 2:55 mark, except, in my dream, she was the mirror image. The mind always fascinates me, but more particularly, my dreams never fail to amuse and amaze me in all their mystery and overwhelming power of recall. Perhaps they possess some spiritual power, but it could be that they are nothing more than waking life in mirror image.

My dreams--asleep and awake--tend to look something like this video, in its brilliant but faded colors, where everyone lives in the forest and dances through life; because why bother taking it too seriously?  After all, as Robin Pecknold reminds us, life was made to end.


 

Chubster

He suddenly appears at the edge of my vision, a round, squat preteen boy with a crew cut.  He's dancing on the sidewalk, sort of doing the robot, but adding his index fingers to shoot from the hip.  There's a chance he's dancing for the amusement of the boy across the street, Jonathon, my next door neighbor, and I chuckle behind my book.  I can't see Jonathon from this side of the truck in his driveway, but when the chubby kid crosses the street, I assume he must be there and must have seen the spontaneous dancing.  Or maybe not; Chubs recrosses the street just a few shakes later.  But I don't see him until he's already back on his side of the street, hands up by his ears, shaking all ten digits in what looks like exasperation, but there's a good chance it's just more interpretive dance.  I've never seen him before; he obviously doesn't get out of his house much, whichever one that may be.  He approaches a house a couple up from mine, rings the doorbell and waits.  No answer.  He rings again, cupping his hands around his face to peer through the glass storm door.  Still nothing.  He rings again, this time opening the door to look inside.  I'm laughing now, thoroughly amused and a bit incredulous at my luck, at this free entertainment that came to me, sitting here on my front porch.  He presses the doorbell one more time and then scurries off to a corner of the porch where he can't be seen by someone coming to the door.  A woman emerges and spots him in his hiding spot.  She is about as dumpy and round in the middle as he is but taller and without the crew cut.  Narrating from my front porch, she scolds him for ringing the bell so many times and making her get up from the TV.  This is surely what happened, judging by the way he hangs his head and shuffles into the house, small enough to fit under her outstretched arm.

Birthday Bookends

I concede that April 2nd has some competition for the title of "Most Beautiful Day of the Year," and that day happens to be today, my mom's birthday. We spent the afternoon buying fresh produce and working on our sunburns, and tonight we played champagne drinking games to day-old coverage of the wedding across the Lake. But I don't mind sharing the title, and it doesn't come as much surprise, considering the source of our mutual good fortune. So, today, happy birthday to my mama, and tomorrow, wear your galoshes and zip up your rain slickers.

Have You Heard...

...the bass line of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"? I mean, really? I heard it for the first time last night with the help of in-ear earbuds, half-asleep in the backseat of my parents' car at the end of a trip in the dark. For as many times as I've listened to the white album, I had never realized just how intricate Paul gets with his bass line, playing his own solos under Clapton's. I sat in the car listening to it after everyone else had gotten out, not sure if I was just hallucinating in the space between wakefulness and sleep. I informed my brother right away, immediately questioning the validity of my observation. But in the clearheaded light of this morning, I know what I heard, and I want you to hear it too.

"The moon's a fine dance partner..."

"...but he talks about it way too much."


Do yourself a favor and spend the five bucks for this ip.

Presented Posthumously

I can't remember a birthday that wasn't beautiful.  Even last year, when my birthday coincided with Good Friday, there were no thunderstorms at three in the afternoon; there were hardly any clouds at all.  We spent the day basking in the sunlight, riding bikes, drinking wine on a patio shaded by hanging potted plants.  We found swings for flying--and jumping from.  I fell and scraped my knee, laughing the whole way and then getting back on to try it again.

That morning I'd woken up to the sound of birds chirping and a cool, fresh spring breeze through my open window.  My mother was already up, cutting up fruit and putting it in the special birthday bowl with the strawberries painted around the inside lip.  She squealed with delight and hurried to come give me a hug when she noticed me coming out to the kitchen.  Then we shared the last skinny wedge of pound cake she had made, a recipe of my grandmother's.

"You're a lot like her," she said, tearing up a bit.  I could feel my own eyes tearing up and glanced into my cup of coffee. Being like my Grandma Genny is something I've always aspired to, assuming it was a lost cause, my own temperament being too impatient and short-fused to be like the calm, elegant woman I knew from photographs.  And that's the only way I know her; her heart gave out eight days after I'd been born, proving that when one goes out, another comes in.

Other than her name, my Grandma Genny gave me her quiet presence, her resourcefulness and her musical abilities.  That's what my mother tells me.  Grandma didn't waste a thing: she used cereal box wax paper to wrap up cakes and leftovers, and she recycled the rinse water from one load of laundry for the next, using the last tub of water to scrub floors.  She built a desk once, using a pattern and materials she'd ordered from a catalog and reupholstered a bench that had been falling apart.  When my mom told me this, I finally felt connected to something that was bigger than myself and yet, of myself.

April 2nd is always the most beautiful day of the year.  The weather makes everything feel like a rebirth, like cool grass between bare toes or a bashful ray of sun on your face.  It doesn't seem to matter what the weather's doing in the days before my birthday--or even if there's been snow the week before--I can count on one nice day to spend outside, to celebrate being alive.  And I know that's not by any coincidence.