Strange Currents

Two costumes deep and nowhere to wear them. A few bags of check-out counter candy run-off in a last minute panic that trick or treaters were going to come by our apartment door. I may put on my Angela Chase costume all the same and eat Almond Joys with Jordan (heheh – Jordan) while we watch Hocus Pocus on the pull-out couch. This will have to be enough holiday for now, because keeping pace with multiple lives is an exhausting business: work, writing, French class, cooking, fires on the beach, old friends coloring the west coast with an odd sort of implied time travel. Maybe I’ll pull it together for late-night Halloween karaoke. It’s possible… but I doubt it.

The kitty surveys her carnage.

The cat has eaten my Mac cord.  Literally must have swallowed pieces of it while I wasn’t watching, because not only is it in chunks, it is substantially shorter. She is a strange bird these days – racketing from room to room like a furry, white comet making little chirruping noises as she goes. She follows me while I fold clothes, clean the mirrors, look for my keys and she finds various perches from which to observe and evaluate my behavior. She is tolerant, if not affectionate, but oddly more involved and invested in the goings-on of the apartment than she ever was back in Seattle. And now she’s eating electrical accessories when they’re plugged into the wall. I worry about her.

I worry about all of my time on a motorcyle, too. In my experience, the most dangerous thing about being on a motorcycle is also one of the best things about it. Not the speed or the risk, either. It is the quiet of it. Not, certainly, the quiet of the engine or the wind that harasses even the most smartly buttoned leather coat or the roar of other irritable cars on the road – the internal quiet. Without music or conversation, there is really nowhere for you to spend time but in your own head. On a long enough ride, you can take some truly meditative journeys and find yourself at the top of Mount Diablo a bit surprised at having arrived on a peak from which you can see most of the surrounding country. One considers the validity of one’s contribution to her job, the state of climate change, whether our democratic process has really imploded, if living up to one’s potential is actually that satisfying, the regrets of past conversations. It is possible that you speak of this to no one.

Traveling to Pittsburgh in the fall means pumpkin carving and friends and the smell of leaves that reminds me of a brick-buildinged campus that is almost a decade in my rearview. It means that people I love have made a small child that has the most perfectly pink lips. This small human and I looked at each other: me, considering the first very tenuous weeks of her life that brought her here to my lap and what it will be like for her to grow up in a generation that has always known Facebook. I wonder what her prom dress will look like. Her trim little shoulders seem to shrug when I sit her upright on my thighs and frown over these thoughts.

Sandy in Nantucket, MA

Much of my family (real and chosen) is back East – scattered from Maine to Massachusetts, New Hampshire to New York. They stayed away from their windows and hoarded water in their basements with a resigned New England air as Hurricane Sandy pummeled the coast this week. My mother lost power quickly enough, even though they never cancelled her classes that she taught at school that day. My cousin on Nantucket Island sent photographs of water flooding the port and Main Street and surrounding the lighthouse of Brant Point. My pregnant cousin is still without power, ferrying herself and the rest of the family to the community center to periodically recharge their phones and shower. It is possible that they won’t have electricity before the election on Tuesday. A close friend’s basement flooded waist-high in Brooklyn and their car bobbed down the street and away.

With my hair like this...
it hurts to look at me.

These are the things that I’m thinking about on my couch while wearing a plaid shirt and black leggings, wondering whether it’s really a complete costume if I don’t dye my hair red. I’m thinking about the disparate driftwood of experience that is making up the lives of the people I know, feeling (as ever) a bit overcome.

Look, it’s a strange year and we’re caught in strange currents. Nearly everyone I know is living their life at a higher volume than they’re used to; making bigger moves and maybe vibrating at a slightly higher frequency as a result. People are moving, quitting their jobs, writing their novel, buying houses, having children, sitting in hospital waiting rooms, falling in ill-advised love, and going back to school. Maybe it’s 2012 and there’s an enormous prophesied bird-dragon headed right for us, maybe I’m in my thirties and so are many of the people that I know and love, and we’re going through those big life changes that we’ve been hearing about all these years. Or maybe I’m thinking too much. Maybe it’s not all as connected as it seems. But troubling as some of these realities are, I like thinking of my life as more comprehensive and inclusive. The boundaries between me and you don’t feel quite so linked to geography that way.

Last Saturday a small pack of East Bay kids crossed the bridge and headed for Ocean Beach: three scientists, an architect, an ex-theater kid, and a socially ungainly writer who would be the oldest person in the group. We dug a hole in the sand and built a fire that evening.

I’ve never made a fire on the beach (though I’ve certainly spun fire and watched fire spinning by sunset before on the shaded, well-trafficked beach of Golden Gardens in Seattle). But simply watching a flame swallow branches and old cardboard is better than most forms of entertainment that I pay for (internet, film, shows, museums). It is a pleasantly primal experience to hold a stick and marshmallow near a flame and watch it brown. The fire stays in your clothes for days afterwards, causes you to lean into strangers, share blankets, lick your fingers of small dabs of chocolate. It feels more permanent than most things in our commercial break world.

Just another pack of strangers discussing the weather, politics, stories we’ve loved, times that we’ve been left, nicknames we’ve adopted (by the way, I now refer to Jordan as “zombie”), all edging around the borders of vulnerability wondering what’s too much to share or say.

But what if nothing was too much and you could just say what you meant at that moment? What if you could tell strangers that you were lonely and have them put a blanket around your shoulders? What if you could tell the girl with the glasses that you think she laughs better than most of the people that you’ve known in your life? Maybe you could talk about what faith is like, where it gets lost, how difficult trust is, how grateful you are. What if simply saying things out loud felt like a solution? Perhaps that could be California in October.   

To Risk Forgetting

At the very moment I am starting this blog, I am waiting to go on a ride. A ride at sunset on a bike so large that it can pin a man down. It has been a long time since I tried organizing my American life back into words and it occurs to me that strangely, it is somehow more difficult to process with jobs, and apartments, and responsibilities slowly rolling into view. I think about the highlights, the small things: the bus ride that got me here. On the way, I saw a man on a unicycle at a stoplight and a restaurant where people have to order their food as though they are praying. The West Coast of America often seems so polluted with quirkiness that it feels deliberate.

The effect should be that everyone is so wonderfully offbeat, that everyone else is free to be themselves, but that is not always true. And in my first few weeks in this city, I find that I am more shy and reflective than I am ready to tromp along the pathways of Lake Merritt wildly spinning my fire poi. I am approaching this new city perhaps with a little hesitation.

There is a hat shop along Haight Street in San Francisco that has been a family business since 1895. Sure, they might have shops in all of the major American cities now (including the one that I just left), but there is something warm and personal about the staff that help my mother and I pick out a hat for her husband in the Goorin Brothers hat shop that makes me feel very comfortable, even gabby with the smartly suspendered employees.

As so often happens when I am shopping for someone else, I end up shopping for me. I pluck at brims along the rows of plump mushroomed gatsbies all in a stack or leather-molded fedoras when I come to the women’s sale section and find a fawn colored drop-pin hat with a tiny trim of black polka dotted ribbon.

When you are already deeply wading through moving debt, it is easy to convince yourself of one more frivolous purchase and of all the things that I have acquired over the past several weeks (sauce pans and their lids, ashy blue pasta bowls, a sofa, hangers, a grown-up-person television), somehow this is the most important.

Sometimes, for me, a piece of clothing is the place that I’m inhabiting. When I buy it, I remind myself of where I am, who I could be here. When I was in Paris, it was a black pencil skirt with tiny slashed pockets angled in just at my hip bones. When I was in Swizerland it was a string of blue beads that I found next to a postcard rack at a street market for four dollars. When I was in Gibraltar it was a ripply pink dress with the thinnest coffee-colored belt to match the polka dots. It went well with the wind that came off of the Mediterranean.

People recognize these pieces on you – they are the things that people comment on: “what a nice dress,” they say, “that necklace suits you,” “I love your scarf.” And, it helps, of course, that you do look fabulous in these things.

Here, in San Francisco, it turns out that “me” is a clean white cap that looks both retro and hip. It is the color of my sleeping cat’s fur. It comes close over my ears, somewhat muffling the already garbled loudspeaker voice of the bus that conveys me and my mother back to the Beaux Arts ferry building at the end of Market Street. It is soft and the brim is just enough to keep out the sun. The woman across the aisle from me on the BART to the East Bay leans forward and smiles conspiratorially, “I like your hat.”

In City Lights booksellers, by contrast, there is a general air of amused sentencing. I overheard a UC Berkeley boy flirting with a girl by giving her a quiz, questioning her on Alice Munro’s short stories and the cashier high fives me when I correctly identify the music as “Battle Without Honor or Humanity” from Kill Bill as though I’m an initiate in his club. But upstairs is a second floor nest dedicated entirely to poetry with a view to a building where white stone figures are spreading their arms wide in some sort of transport of ecstasy or simply appearing to pull taffy between their outstretched hands, delightfully out-of-place statues that would be better served on a church in an older country. I purchased a copy of Jack Gilbert and a fresh sheaf of postcards.

These little selections of life become your impressions and then your beliefs about a place, about yourself. For instance, I will not be surprised if my first few weeks here come down to a crème brulée gelato purchased in the North Beach area that led to a small plot of picnicking green in Washington Square within pealing distance of Saint Peter and Paul’s cathedral which chimed briskly (almost mechanically) on the hour. Lying there in the grass with a breeze and sunshine all muddled up in my wrinkly warm shirt, I put my head on my purse and this half hour nap may become all that I remember about that afternoon, that day, these first few weeks here: listening to the well-oiled bells with my eyes closed in the sun.  

I’ve been contemplating “forever” (as I tend to do) and wondering about all of the unmourned terminated things out there in the world. The last bus ride on a discontinued route, expired sloshy bottles of cream leaning as cross beams in the garbage, the last time an old woman goes outside to fetch her mail. Sometimes I think that I hold the permanent so holy simply because it is a monument to all of the finality that will go out of the world unnoticed. Potentially my own. And all of the things that I will forget in this year of firsts and explorations and meetings and partings. No ceremony to their departure from my memory. But I suppose that is what is required of a person willing to change, the readiness to forget and not preserve everything, but carry forward only what is necessary.

The ride we end up taking at sunset is through Tilden Park. He tells me this and I smile bemusedly. Simply the promise of a motorcycle ride is enough to get me out of the house, but I imagine that it is going to be a rather tame (and brief) outing when the destination is a park. I picture a plasticine playground with woodchips, maybe a dog run and a tennis court. If I’m lucky there will be a climbing rock with a view.

But it is not that kind of park, Tilden is one of the oldest parks in the area that takes in not feet of territory, but acres. 2,079 acres to be exact that are a shelter and sanctuary to natural wildlife and flora. It takes over 200 maps on their site to give comprehensive coverage of the area. Though none of this is apparent as we’re approaching the park along Canon Drive with its washed out two story houses built against the rock, blurry in the mist and I am dubious in spite of promises that it is a beautiful park. It is not until we are within park grounds and out of sight of the suburban Berkeley Hills that a sudden, incredible expanse of ridges with trees reaching far into an rolling bank of mist pouring through the sky that I realize this is not a park, but a separate world. And this is, perhaps, when I begin to fall a little bit in love with California. The park receives millions of visitors a year, but it was not a place that I knew was there to be found.

Although the afternoon and evening in the East Bay have grown gray and overcast, the ride through Tilden Park is a curvaceous, expansive journey that seems to cover about four different climates. I was shivery cold as I clung to the back of the driver and moments later was sweating under my helmet in the evening sun. The road swept out at drastic angles and flooded down into ravines, valleys, and reservoirs. The hills were seeming waves of movement in scrubbed greens and golds.  The kind of hills that people imagine when they think of California wine country. Its tall-reaching trees in the fog remind me of mournfully brisk mornings in Hawaii, its sweeping hills with comprehensive vistas remind me of walks in Andalusia Spain, in its shadows I can recreate the mossy rainforests of Washington State. It is like so many places that I’ve visited and like nowhere I’ve ever seen.

The instinct I have is to pull out a camera, get it all on film, process it and preserve it, but I am glad that there is no camera and that this is not an option. Because I will have to actually be here instead: leather jacket wind-beaten on my body, long dips and arcs with peek-a-boo views to lower lakes and distant peaks. I can’t go back to this moment on a Facebook post or photo album, so I have to be here now instead and risk forgetting it.

But I don’t think I will.