Notes of a Fine, Upstanding Citizen

The truth now: have you ever been kicked out of a place?

I have twice suffered the ignominy of being escorted from a place, if one does not count evacuating Georgia.  (Which I do not, as I find an invading Russian army to be suitable reason for anyone to be escorted from a place.)

Both times, it was a museum exhibit which caused my downfall. 

I blame Modernity.

See, although I wasn’t alive to test this hypothesis during the 1600s or even the early 1900s, I suspect that I wouldn’t have been kicked out back then.  Mostly as I likely wouldn’t have been even allowed in to start with.  Thus securing my fine, upstanding reputation.  This sad truth would nettle any but the most wise of souls, but fortunately I am as sage as can be.

The first museum to unRuth was in Haifa, Israel. 

There I was, earnestly having my mind blown by my insanely intelligent cousin, who was explaining some dimensional theory in physics.  I mean, who can focus during times like these?

I certainly cannot.  And the task of explaining the incredible to the uncomprehending meant my cousin was of no mind to focus on minor details, either.

And so it was that we accidentally meandered into the exhibit itself.  A model Neanderthal community, replete with model Neanderthal men, women, hearths, instruments and huts.

Visitors got a unique flavor of history that day, a glimpse of prehistoric man fashioning crude instruments and modern man fashioning crude explanations for nuclear physics.  We, on display, lingering outside a Neanderthal hut, felt the exhibit was more hands-on than typical, but otherwise noticed nothing unusual whatsoever.

Security did notice.  We were escorted to the café.

I began a strict regime of noticing my surroundings when I entered museums. 

This succeeded for a decade, until New York.  This time, it was not inattention that would garner an escort out, but rather my intense concentration on the art.  I feel this lends the entire thing a certain air of respectability, don’t you?

We were in my favorite museum ever, the Metropolitan, softly abutting Central Park.  A friend and I were exploring the American Wing.  The Met’s so lovely and full of scrumptious art and numerous wings that I had never actually even made it into that particular wing before, and I was quite ecstatic to be seeing the gorgeous Tiffany lamps.

So on this particular day, R and I got into earnest discussion about the lamps.  The question: if we could have one, which one would we want. 

Only the thing is that both R and I are avid readers and also fans of Tiffany glass.  So we took this question most seriously.

It would be the earnestness of our admiration that would get us in trouble.

We began holding books under each desirable lamp, reading a page or two here or there to get a sense of how good the lamps were at providing light, real light, to read by. 

Apparently, Tiffany lamps in the Met are NOT there to provide reading light for visitors, and next thing we knew an alarm was peeling and we too were peeling away in flight and terror.  We slammed into someone at the Frank Lloyd Wright room, and then realized the only way out that we knew was back through the Perilous Minotaur Room of Tiffanies.

We unsuspiciously crept through the room, our bags and books hiding our faces, until we made it out to the Egyptian Wing. 

I like to think we were mostly unnoticed, only a guard coincidentally was walking right by us, departing only once we were deposited safely away from light sources of artistic value.

I do love the Met still, of course—love it dearly, in fact—but I still get a certain illicit frisson when I wander into the American Wing .  I grow red and keep the book in my bag hidden, and keep a healthy non-reading distance from the Tiffany lamps.

In fact, ever since that day, I am more likely to spend countless hours searching for the Temple of Dendur, a lovely haven in the middle of the museum which R showed me that day, but which has eluded me ever since, much in the manner of Platform 9 ¾.

I may have Muggled the Met.

So, what about you?  The truth now. 

The Pond in lower Central Park

And on one absolutely unrelated note:  First Date, the movie with Tina Fey and whatsisname, is hilarious.    And the scene where whatsisname mentions Central Park…–brilliant. 

One Night in the Midwest

It was a beautiful night, swelling with stars and cricket songs, and I was on the front porch with a glass of red wine. B and I listened to the sounds of the party inside; the raucous music, the jumbled laughter.

That’s what I heard, anyway. He heard the lyrics of the song. When he broke the silence, it was my life plan that shattered.

“I remember the first time I held one,” he murmured.

I looked at him, confused, and then the song’s refrain came through the curtains, a chant of “Kalashnikov, Kalashnikov.”

B, hold a Kalashnikov? Dread stiffened me. B was urbane, intelligent, witty, unmilitary—not that a military person couldn’t be all those things too. He was just so obviously not military.

But what B was, was Bosnian.

I had spent years studying his region; it was my passion. I was studying his language. I hoped to travel to his fractured country one day and work. It was one of my life goals. And now he was on the verge of cracking my rose colored glasses.

I wanted to know and I didn’t—what his path to the US had been. Who he was. What it had been like, surrounded by the tanks and rifles of the Serbs.

I wanted to know and I didn’t; and he who always kept his silence, he who never, ever was inclined to talk, was cradling his glass of wine and being brought back into the memories by the music, and he was telling what I wanted to know and didn’t.

He told me then about getting the rifle. It was common lore already that the Serbs had guns but not enough men, and the Bosnian Muslims had men enough but not enough guns. It couldn’t have been easy to get a gun, then, in that city under siege.

But he got one, a Kalashnikov. And he crept to No Man’s Land. And through it. And he made it out, with men shooting at him from both sides.

His family was long since saved—he’d arranged it the moment he saw tanks in the streets of Sarajevo when the war was theoretically only being fought against Slovenia. That’s when he knew, the war was coming home.

He made it to Pale, the town known to me only as the base for Serbian military action in Bosnia. The place that in my mind was actually called “Beyond-the-Pale.” He made it there, and then, over time, he made it out.

My heart pounded the whole way through his few words. He spoke briefly, sketching only vaguely what must have been terrifying and unknown.

I was young then, and I tried to encourage him to have faith in the future. “Go back and rebuild,” basically.

He laughed silently and humorlessly. “My grandmother’s home was destroyed three times, and by whom? Not by the Germans. Not by the Russians. By our neighbors. No, I’m not going back.”

He sipped wine and returned to the Indiana summer, and I stood in the breeze, and I never returned back to the same moment I’d left when B opened his mouth and said, “I remember the first time I held one.” I’d learnt what I always wanted to know and didn’t.

I’ve learnt more since then—more that I’ve always wanted to know and didn’t. Funny how you never go back when you learn. Painful knowledge doesn’t destroy as much as push; at the end of the day, who are you, the person pushing back? That’s what you learn.

Well, that’s what I learn. For every lesson that my nature seems to seek, I leave carrying a glimpse, a shadow of the pains of other people’s lives, and that pain makes love and beauty and strength and hope all the more radiant, even if they’re all ultimately equally true, equally human.

Tbilisi Winter, 2008

It wasn’t what I was expecting.

Not that I had great expectations.  Mostly, I just expected the same old.  Which I quite love.

But instead, as I turned the page of my delicious new book–Holderlin’s Hymns and Fragments–and absent-mindedly looked out the living room window, I saw something quite unusual.

Not, I will grant, unusual in and of itself.  After all, people do bathe.  They just don’t usually do so in front of me. 

It turns out that across the street, there’s several floors of the building which have 6-foot high windows in the shower.  In the shower, ladies and gents.  Not just in the bathroom, but in the shower.

At first I thought it was a woman getting dressed, and that she kept her armoire awfully close to the window, and ought be told.  Then I noticed the person manically scramble their hair and thought, hm, when I do that, I’m usually…washing it.   And oftentimes this happens rather far from my armoire.

Then the person, who was becoming, on closer scrutiny, a butt-nekkid man, began a love affair with his body that more closely resembled washing it than dressing it.  Huh. 

I turned the page.  Someone ought tell that man he needs a curtain, I thought.

A few minutes later I looked up again.  What on earth was that guy doing now?  Strange exercises, it appeared.  Then I realized.  He was squeegeeing.  Way too much. 

Seriously, I thought, rather than squeegee your own thin veil away, why not move your bath a few meters away from the window and invest in a curtain?

Marvelous.  Apparently I DO have a room with a view.  And I need curtains. 

Stonework in Sighnaghi, Republic of Georgia

Developing Characters, or: What Doesn’t Kill You…

The other morning I had a guest over for brunch.  In other words, I had to tidy the apartment.  The problem was that my apartment was already tidy. 

This is because I’m writing a book, and writing a book requires time to think.  Most often, taking “time to think” results in my getting caught up retightening the legs of my chairs, vacuuming the couch, cleaning the stove, polishing the floor, and even cutting and filing pieces of wood to hold up tapestries.  With steak knives.  In other words, procrastination leads to a tidy house. 

(Of course, too much predictability is boring, so when my original mission is to do housework, I artfully procrastinate by reading.)

Please, don’t try this at home.  I am a master and cannot promise you’ll have the same results.

So there I was, looking at my altogether far too tidy living room and thinking: I need time to think.  And then I thought, why, I really should clean the coffee table.  A lady never entertains guests on a laptop-and-paper-strewn coffee table.

Now, my coffee table is a Moroccan brass tray table.  In other words, it carries heat.  I always place a large and slim volume between my table and my laptop.  As a lady never overheats her books, I have a constant rotation of books.  Hard-covers being preferable for lap-top writing, I use paperbacks usually for table-top writing.

And so it was that Frog and Toad was on the couch, and Writing the Breakout Novel: Workbook was on the table.  I squinted at it, not out of suspicion, mind you, but because I’d just switched on the lights.  Then I sat down and flipped it open listlessly.  (I was, as you’ll recall, currently tasked with tidying up, and it fell to my lot to procrastinate by reading.) 

The book fell open to the section on antagonists.  I read a few lines of the worksheet Maass, the author, wanted me to fill out.

Meh, I thought. My antagonists are just fine.  I yawned.  And then an idea began to niggle.  I slammed down the book, yanked Frog and Toad back from the shelf and slipped it under the laptop.  And began answering the worksheet.  Egad.  It was amazing.

And bizarre.  I would read a question and think, but I already know… and then I’d type the question anyway and suddenly the groove would kick in.  I’d write sometimes totally what I knew, what I expected…  And then he’d ask me to subvert it, to fight my character.  And suddenly…great stuff.

I’d think I was rehashing, but suddenly—D’s future opened up for me.  I realized what was in store for him—in detail.

I was thrilled and horrified.  I’d just broken thoroughly into Act III.  I knew, finally, what he didn’t.  I had an emotional moment.  I decided to put all my characters through the process—protagonist and antagonist alike. 

And then, of course, as that meant writing, I cleaned the stove instead.

Okay, fine, so I did keep on writing.  Time-to-think rules don’t apply when writers have actually caught hold of a wriggly little fairy of a genius insight, and indeed one must often crush the desire to “think” too much over the stove or under the furniture.  Writing requires that key ingredient my dad used to tell me about:  Glue in the ass.

Anyway, this breakthrough’s been amazing.  I’ve been racing with Act III scenes and have plot points written up for others.  My antagonists are ready for their face-offs, and my heroes are heading to the denouement.  I’m exhilarated to feel it take shape.  It’s a great nexus—my vision, which I’d felt impaired for a long time, is back; and with it my sense of patience is restored.  Emotional truth and structure are both in sight, and the plot’s sense of inevitability is back—although I hope not its predictability.  We’ll see. 

I am utterly realizing anew what they mean when they say that the first draft is the writer telling the story to themselves, and that the subsequent drafts are writing it for others.  The first draft is when I find out what happens, really.  Only then can I craft it into something that will be enjoyable to read.  Then finally is the time to exert power over the text, because I’m not floundering in my own sea of questions.  My spidey-senses tell me that that’ll be a whopper of an experience–rewriting and editing.    But we’re not there yet.  We’re finishing Act III, mehopes.

Other stuff on my to-do list are:  two protagonists that need development and three secondary characters that need work—one of them I have decided is mostly invisible because she’s still the wrong person.  It took me several versions of M to find him fitting, and longer for him to start to move into himself, to develop his grays.  H isn’t there yet.  Maybe H has to go, and someone else take her place.  I wonder how M finally worked and how I can make my other protagonists stronger like him…

Welcome back, heady rush of story!  Welcome back euphoria!  Goodbye housekeeping!!! 

How’re you guys doing?

View from Central Park, New York City

Cold, cold ground…

I remember last winter very well.  I remember how the cold never died; how I never shed my layers, not even indoors.  How I wore all I could to bed.  How my water bottles froze by my bed.  The wind rushing into my room through the broken window.  How water froze in the pipes, and for three months it didn’t run.  How a trip into the capital came to mean “shower” to me.  How the word “bathe” became part of my vocabulary and how this came to mean using baby wipes.  The smell of burned wood in my clothes, in my hair, in my nostrils.  Choosing what to do and when based on heat.  Hovering over wood stoves and gas heaters when they were in a room.  Making Turkish coffee on heaters.  Burning my legs against them, so close did one have to be to feel the dissipating warmth in non-insulated rooms.  The outhouse smells changed.  My standards of cleanliness.  I remember that winter well.

I remember it now as I sit warm in my apartment.  As I marvel at my tank-top in December.  At how I shed layers.  How I shower.  Everything is different.  Everything.  I can’t complain of the heat in the building.  I can’t complain at all.

How we live is so different from how the world lives.  How ignorant we are of it.  How blissfully unaware.  Blind. 

I read books sometimes that are set in other periods.  Maybe Victorian England, for example.  And I can imagine the cold indoors.  I can imagine the closeness of space.  No… I can remember it.  Times have changed, and times have not…

So when people ask me now, two weeks away, what do I want for my birthday…how can I answer seriously?  What on earth do I want for?  Don’t I have it all?  Yes, yes, it can be snatched up in a moment and turned to cinder and less.  We’re more ephemeral than dust, for dust at least keeps its shape over time.  But that’s true of every living thing.  Every one of us wriggling in a moment, our own, special, significant and aware moment.

Yeah, I’ll appreciate the kindness of family and friends, but I can’t possibly use the words “I want” and speak of things, without feeling awfully blind to all I already have…

Besides, I just started working on a birthday present to myself.  And it’s a fine one. 

There’s something someone once said…and I paraphrase and lose part of its power, I’m sure.  But the gist of it is: “If you haven’t done something today that’s frightened you, that’s unknown and bigger than anything you’ve ever done before, then you haven’t lived today yet.” 

When I started writing, that was my new, frightening unknown.  But now, in the lead-up to my birthday, after getting all those “what do you want” questions…I’m doing something rather different, too.  More on that as it solidifies; I’ve signed up to do something that I think has worth, and that will require its weight in work, too.  But basically it has to do with “giving” rather than “getting” for my birthday.  Wish me luck!!

Happy Holidays, everyone!    Any good plans?

Greater Caucasus

Ask, and ye shall receive…

“Excuse me, miss, I don’t want to disturb you,” he said.

His eyes were a wide blue, his cheeks covered with stubble.  A man in his mid thirties or forties.  Slovenly and of feeble carriage.  His voice neither deep nor high, but on the higher end; the kind you hear from whatever plane of mind you were in, drawing you into him and his world and his problems.

Because the line “I don’t want to disturb you” implies immediately that disturb you that person will.

Maybe there’s an irony here.  An irony I didn’t feel till now that I write these words.

His approach, his words, they pulled me from my head on that busy New York street.  On the curb, still moving, I turned my head at his words and took in his appearance, his tone, his words in a fleeting two seconds, and then, without pause, without a word, I kept walking.  I looked him straight in the eyes and then past him, like there was nothing to it.  Nothing to him.

And that disturbs me even now.

Life teaches you to act instinctively in a variety of circumstances.  One beggar, two, four, twenty, one hundred.  One fake limp, three, ten, a hundred.  One hoax, two, three, almost everyone.

And then the decision, reached without words and conscious thought, that almost no-one asking for money can be trusted, and that anyone asking for anything from a stranger is really asking for money.

And from there the dehumanization of one another. 

There on that blowsy Broadway corner, I took him in, computed his existence and without a word, without a blink—for reaction of any sort to a potential predator is a weakness—I discounted him as unworthy.  I fancied I could fathom his purpose from a second.  From one clause.  Unworthy of even the breath it would take to hear a second one.  Unworthy of engagement.  And I passed him without a break in stride.  (God, how dehumanizing!)

And then across the street from him I saw myself and was disturbed.

I resolved to write about him, but although I could think of nothing else on the way to work, once there I didn’t spend lunch writing.  Like that moment of actual need on the street, I found it easy to live in the rest of the day, and not in that question.

I guess there’s no truth but your own truth.  That’s the only one you can live honestly—that is, in harmony with your principles.

What I mean is—who knows about that man.  God forbid the man wanted help I could have provided and I shamed him by my treatment.  But you know what, it could have been.

Then again, maybe he’s just for some reason using others to fulfill his needs without due cause.  Due cause being he truly CAN’T get a job for a good reason.  Who knows, I don’t.  You don’t.

That morning on the street, I chose my interpretation.  I chose it.  Yes, he could have been anybody, and you know what, he was.  He was anybody, and I treated him like nobody, like I would any anonymous face.  But there is no anonymous face to the soul behind it.  An anonymous person doesn’t feel less, doesn’t feel less defaced, less degraded…

Yes, yes, I know, if he was just a cynic using public good will to satisfy a desire for drink or drugs or porn or god knows what, then my ignoring him just means someone else must give him the cash he wants.  I know.  He doesn’t see me as any more human than that, if that’s the case.  I know.

But I don’t, I don’t know.  I don’t know anything about him.  All I know is, a human being as I believe it is a special thing, and deserves to be treated with respect and dignity.  And knowing that, it’s cheaper for me to take the second or minute out of my day and spend it engaging him—that most valuable of currencies, time—and then spend the twenty five cents he requests. 

As Polonius said, “To thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”  Better I should be true to myself in my ignorance and hope than that I should treat a man more poorly than he deserves. 

For oh, I did not stop to let him disturb me, but it was I, in the end, who disturbed myself the entire day long.

the best laid plans…

I was planning to fall into a deep slumber.  I was planning to get to it immediately.  I didn’t see that I could stay awake one more minute.

So it was no surprise–or rather, it ought not to have been–when I got a text that would veer me utterly off course.  L was in the country.  Not just in the country.  To be more precise, he was in the country AND in town, and L and I are usually continents apart.  In fact, I hadn’t seen him for 16 years, not since I left Africa.

So when he suggested we meet up, it was clear that no slumber would be had anytime soon.  I saw through this glass clearly. 

“Come over now,” I said, and with those words dashed out of my apartment to buy groceries.  I would make a delicious, quick and low-fat meal.

That, dear reader, is where I stopped seeing through the glass clearly.  Clearly.

Instead, I served what I’m going to have to call “glump.”  What is glump?

Glump: 

A mass of various undistinguishable mashed foods served from one dish, usually with a ladle. 

Now, glump can be yummy, or it can be horrid, or it can be, as it was when they arrived, tasteless.  It’s miraculous that way, glump.

I was putting the final touches on my glump–in other words removing it from the heat and frowning at it–when the bell rang.  I ran to the door, tearing my apron off.  (My name is stitched on its front as if I get muddled sometimes and must look down to confirm it.) 

As I unlatched it and wrenched it open, I smacked my face with apron and was left with it half on, drooping awkwardly from my waist.  No worries–L’s doubtless seen me much less dignified.  So I let them in and gave them the tour.

“This is my living room,” I said, gesturing expansively to my sofa and dining room table.  They ooh’ed and ah’ed beautifully.  “And this is my furniture,” I said, in case they hadn’t noticed.  They cooed kindly. “This is my hallway,” I said, and stopped as if to survey it, causing them both to bump into me.  They looked about in the tight space and nodded. “And this,” I said, walking into the dark room, “is my bathroom.”

They paused at the door with a giggle. 

“Come in!” I said.  And so they did. “Come here,” I said, and stepped into my bathtub.  With another laugh, L complied.  And then he saw my view and understood the appeal.  We stepped out and P surveyed the view.  (Trust me, it’s worth the extra step in the dark.)

But now I couldn’t delay dinner any longer.

I made P taste the glump before dishing it out, so that he could judge how hungry he was.  He tasted it and maintained a politely interested yet faintly surprised miraculously neutral expression.  In a way that only a South African living in England can.

“Can you save it?” I asked.

I didn’t have to ask twice.  He moved quick.  Rummaged through my spices.  Only two had English lables.  Rosemary and fenugreek.

“Rosemary should be added earlier in, er, the process,” he said, and so we added fenugreek.  And then more fenugreek.  And then P made the executive decision that my expired parmesan wasn’t really expired.  And I have to say…he made it yummy!  We ate the whole pan of glump, the three of us, together with salad and buffalo mozzarella cheese.  ‘Twas oddly perfect with my dark chocolate and the South African pinotage and Chilean cabernet they’d brought.

Then again, I can’t in all honesty report that.  I never made it to the cabernet. 

I think we all had a great time in the end.  We hung out till after midnight, and my new dining room table got properly eaten and spilled upon, so all was wondrousness.    I was TOAST at the end of the night, crawling into bed around 1am, and there was no way I was getting up in four hours to write.  So I slept late; got up at seven and indulged in two cups of coffee and absolutely zero brain activity.

All this is to say that I should know better than to plan.  For although the best laid plans can disintigrate into a much fuller and truly wonderful, irreplaceable evening, they indeed are so prone to dissolving as to make one feel one is brazenly tempting fate when one says (as I’m about to now):

This is going to be a great writing weekend!

Turkish bath and Sunni mosque in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia

At Long Last…

I don’t even know where to start.

It’s hard being an early-riser sometimes.  The past week in particular has been really tough.  On Friday, I had the fortune to wake up bright and happy at 4:30am.  Deliciousness–a crisp morning of writing awaited me.  And indeed, I was fruitful and the pages did multiply, and all the problems of weeks past were chased away.  Brilliance.  Only something else also happened EACH DAY.

Namely, before it was decent, whilst windows across the street were still dark with slumber, time and again, I would come upon in my research an amazing, absolutely gut-bustingly fantastic little-known fact that I HAD TO SHARE.

But with whom?  With whom?, I cry!  (Yes, worthy even of mid-sentence sentence-ending punctuation.)

I know, I know.   Thou thinkest I exaggerate.  No.  Not I.  I never use hyperbole. 

Sample Gut-Busting Fact:  In 1545 (see, already your blood begins to rush with excitement), a little town in France had its vineyard destroyed by flies.

What, you say, suddenly wondering if these early mornings (or perhaps the unfiltered coffee I favor) has made me bonkers.

But I’m not done.  WAIT FOR IT, folks:

What did the townsfolk do, seeing their crops thusly destroyed?  That’s right.  They sued the insects. 

There, I thought you needed a moment.  [Waits patiently for the jaws to hover above the floor once more.]  Yep, they sued them.  So, the flies were assigned representation by a distinguished canon lawyer.  He must have been good, because the insects were acquitted.  His case was strong.  He cited God’s will, you see, that the flies “be fruitful and multiply.”  Thus in eating the crops, they were fulfilling God’s will, and could not be judged as wrong-doers.

The court agreed.  But what to do about the crops?  Finally they came upon a genius solution.  GENIUS.  (Wait for it.)  They assigned another field for the flies to eat of.  Yep.  That’s right.  Want to read that line again?  They assigned another field for the flies to eat of.

Did this gentle compromise work?  Apparently we may never know.  You see, the reports of success have not made it to our century.  They were, it is said, destroyed by insects.

[You can thank me later for this tidbit, which I KNOW you're dying to share now, as I was these past few mornings, along with other similar fascinating facts.]

And on this painfully delicious information was I forced to sit and not share.  On this bounty did I bounce impatiently waiting for the time to tell the world.

Consider yourself, World, told. 

Ah, and in case you were wondering if in between the gathering of salacious facts I actually got any writing done:  YEAH, BABE!  The story is zooming.  ZOOMING.

Love it. 

Subway Station in Brooklyn

Not an Elizabethan Tragedy

I was only an exit away.  In other words, I was primed to be stopped by the cops.

It was October 1, 2002.  My last day living in Washington, DC.  My first day living in New Jersey.  A state roundly mocked by one Ralfast only seven years and three weeks later. 

I was stuffed into a rental car with my belongings, making the drive to my new home.  I wasn’t, to be honest, very happy about this move.  I had been having bad dreams about it.  But still, I was speeding toward my new home.  Because that’s what I did.  Speed.

It’s less about the destination and more about the journey, after all.

And so it was, one exit away from my new home, that I saw the lights pick up and the car swerve behind me, and I knew the day was getting even better.

He walked up to my window, so I rolled it down.

“I stopped you,” he said slowly, chewing over his words, “because you were flying.” 

He didn’t bother looking into the car; standing authoritatively above me was good enough for him.  For me, too.

I silently passed him my license and registration.  I mean, I’m of the mindset that I’m free, and likewise free to pay the consequences of my actions.  I don’t ask to be released from tickets.

He took my info and walked away.  I rested my eyes on the ramp sign ahead and tried not to think of my life left behind, and the feeling I had that I was heading for trouble.   He came back, cleared his throat.

“Your plate’s from Virginia,” he said, as if this was news to me.

“Yes,” I said.

“What’re you doin’ out here?”

“I’m moving.”  I tried not to think about the fact that I was moving.

“Where to?”

I tried not to think about it.  But I had to answer him anyway.

“Elizabeth.”

Now he lowered his head.  Looked in the car.  Right at me. 

“Why?”

My lips trembled and I spoke quickly, to get the words out before my feelings could take me over.   Tears rolled out anyway.

He was silent, watching me.

Then– “Have you SEEN Elizabeth?”

“Yes!”  Now I bawled.  I sensed him walk away.

I was sniffling when he returned.  He snapped a sheet of paper into the car.  I took it from him.  I didn’t look at it.  Was it over?  I looked at him. 

“This,” he said, “is a non-moving ticket.”

I stared at him, confused.  “What?”

“A non-moving ticket,” he explained helpfully.  I didn’t know where to look.  “For not moving,” he said.

I was numb.

“But, isn’t that…the opposite of what I was doing?”

He walked away. 

I should have mulled it longer, but instead I put the ticket away, and sped to my new home.  I’d end up forgetting about the ticket; discovering indeed, the move was a mistake (although it was also the life-changing kind that teaches you a lot about yourself and therefore you cannot regret it); taking on community theater (joys!); living on ramen noodles and coffee in between scant paychecks, and later being subpoenaed to go to court (provoking new rounds of shock and horror) to pay the forgotten bill (which had been sent to my old address).

What a year.  And what a way to start it. 

Construction Worker Takes a Call

Who Needs a TV?

That is, when you don’t have curtains.

Winding down for the evening, I shut the lights at my new apartment.  That second, a hundred different screens blinked into life–windows across the way.

Truth is, not much is “on” when your screen is someone else’s life as seen through their windows.  People watch TV or have silent conversations.  They clean and walk around seemingly aimlessly.   Some even read, or are they doing homework?  Who knows.  And that’s about it.   Mostly my reflections focused inward. 

On my window frames, on my bare apartment, the expenses, the future.  And then on memories.  Memories about frames.

Like last winter in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital.  When for light and heat I broke down and burned the wooden frames on my art.  How I learned to remove heavy duty staplers with a single hard-working tweaser.  (It’s all in the wrist.)  On deciding to make it festive by having friends over to skewer marshmallows (an overseas gift from a friend) with kebob sticks, toasting them over the picture frame fire.  Indoors.  The crackling sparks made by hidden staples that foraged so deep into the wooden frames that they’d ended up in the fire.  Our headlamps on.  Our laughter filling the cold, chasing out the void.

Frames.  They don’t have to be what we use to capture an image.  They don’t really even limit anything.  They just hold an image of an image, and even then, only for a moment. 

Then again, our lives are over in a blink, too.  In the meantime, it’s fun to think on reshaping frames, on tossing them into fires to make up our own ones.  At least then we’d never hold them sacrosanct.

Truth is, frames are part of our lives.  I suppose our brains need them.  And they do hold paintings up rather well.  And as Jesus and the Naked Guy are coming back soon, I’d best find me some new frames.  So when folks look into my apartment, they have something worth tuning into. 

Turkish Courtyard Seen through Doorway