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Friday, November 5, 2004 |
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Oh what a weird week. The election day, the skosh* of hope, the heavy depressed mornings-after. Then the intrusions of real life--evading my accountant's phone calls--why can't he write a letter, like everyone else?--avoiding my friend, who did nothing worse than accidentally reveal one possible future, and in the nick of time. On a lighter note, I had an actual phone conversation with my now-2-year-old granddaughter on Halloween, our first, and I must say she has about the cutest little voice you ever heard. She was a cat for Halloween--or a "Meow-me," her own word for her favorite animal. Her brother, who is 4, was a Jack-in-the-box. They sounded excited and happy. I ached to hold them both. Tomorrow I shut up the house and haul my brother and dogs down to the valley floor for the big birthday party Sunday. I'll pick up some stickers and a "Meow-me"-related present once we reach the city. On the way in the morning I'll stop in Likely to see how Lucero is doing with her little Mac computer, and to install some games I found in a box of old floppy disks. *** I continue shifting the furniture here. Took two enormous chairs and an ottoman to the dump. My brother and I got a bookshelf stuck in the stairwell trying to get it into my room. No amount of geometry can budge it. It's still there. I'll take a picture. The whole house is upside-down, except my bedroom, which, although it lacks a bookshelf, is welcoming and removed, just what I want. After unpacking the groceries this afternoon, and checking the phone messages and email, giving the stuck shelf another nudge, I made supper and flipped through the DVDs for something to eat by. I've seen them all 100 times. Except one. So out it came, and I found myself actually watching About Schmidt a second time. And paying close attention. And it's a story, all right. I, uh, I don't know, it was probably the wrong choice for this particular Friday. But you know, this afternoon I was driving and driving, from the village where I get our mail to the little town where I get our food, and you know how sometimes you'll hear music in your head, little unbidden songs that invade the silence, and almost always, regardless of how annoying its persistence or how divorced from your current taste, the song, the lyric, will turn out to be appropriate for what you've been thinking or saying, if you think about it. And today I realized that instead of Lefty Frizzel or (jeezus) Doris Day, my mind was playing Philip Glass, the "Heroes" symphony, and turning up the volume, and how weird that was, and what could I associate with that? The first time I heard the "Heroes" symphony I was in my old Westfalia, very early on a January morning six years ago. I was moving from Bisbee, Arizona, up here to Modoc County, California, and my older son was driving the U-Haul truck up ahead, and the Westy was filled to the ceiling with my stuff, and my two dogs, and one elderly cat, and my brother. And we'd just spent the night in a little cell in Tonopah, Nevada, in a strange motel that was more like a concrete fortress in a storm, and now there we were, heading north at dawn on a vacant ribbon of highway through a completely blank smooth white white pinkish-white landscape that stretched ahead and to either side without a blemish or feature but the occasional ascent for as far as I could see, and as we set out I split the cellophane on the new unordered music-club CD that had come in the mail the day we left Bisbee, and I slipped the disk into the little portable player between the seats, and the first notes sounded, and I realized my life would never be the same, ever. I crossed some threshold in the hour that ensued. And hearing it again today in my head, out of nowhere, in this time of such personal uncertainty, in this time of such global uncertainty, gave me reason to wonder whether some new threshold might not be approaching. Whether I'm not, we're not, subconsciously gearing up for a step out. Probably this is just movie aftermath. I'll let you know when I reach the other side. * I couldn't find "skosh" in the Mothership (big dictionary), and could only find "skoshi" in the slang dictionary--"a little," from servicemen in Korea/Japan in the early '50s (Jap. sukoshi, little). And on the way to that page I stumbled on "sharp as a box of monkeys. See straight off the turnips." Hey, is this a great language, or what? 9:19:12 PM  comment []
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