Stranded
It was time to get the rear tires on the Honda changed, and the wait was six hours. No appointments. For various logistical reasons, the situation was unavoidable; I knew what I was in for, and I was furious about it.
Actually, though, it turned out to be just what I needed -- six hours of enforced hookey. I've been feeling knotted up and frazzled and out of contact with my own psyche. Far from being peeved, I should have been overjoyed.
After leaving the car at the shop, I set off looking for somewhere to read. I crossed the vast parking lot of the Home Depot/BJ's/Bed Bath & Beyond complex and arrived at the banks of the parkway. On the other side, I wandered into a zone of office buildings and more parking lots, these ones uncannily vacant. I thought of the neutron bomb, of B-movies in which the hero wanders out into empty boulevards, all the people gone.
I didn't find anywhere to sit and read, so I returned to the box store plaza. After mulling over my options, I went into BJ's, the wholesale paradise, where I sat in the food court drinking Nestea and reading a book of poems by Bei Dao, a leading figure in the "Misty Poets" movement of the 1980s in China.
BJ's, it soon became clear, was the place to be. With school starting up, it was even more densely populated than usual, and especially by moms and kids -- who were carting off enormous boxes of supplies, enough pencils, crayons and spiral binders for the entire year. A woman at the next table over struck up a conversation with me about the scarcity of carts. "I'm hanging on to mine," she said -- she had one arm over the railing, holding the cart while she ate. "I've had two disappear. Just looked away for a second, they were gone."
I read about half of the Bei Dao volume -- mostly short lyrics, the style condensed, telegraphic. Themes of flux, boundaries, crossings, the disintegration and reintegration of meaning, memory, the self..."The poet," Michael Palmer writes in the intro, "disappears -- almost disappears -- into this deterritorialized space while becoming ... the resonateur of various forces and tones of the mind and the world. What results is a poetry of complex enfoldings and crossings, of sudden juxtapositions and fractures, of pattern in a dance with randomness."
The book has both the original text and the English translation -- as I read the poems, I also studied the ideograms and tested how many I knew. Not many. Most were learned during our trip to China last year. Train platform. North. Exit.
I alternated between reading and people-watching. There's a kind of thrill in behaving non-functionally within a functional, routinized environment. Nobody questioned me or asked me to leave, though a skinny, manic looking guy in the company's trademark red vest seemed to be wondering what I was doing. I had my plastic drink cup in front of me, as a sort of alibi.
Finally, the car was ready. I picked it up and drove home, feeling buoyant.
8:54:06 PM 
|
|
