I have a longer, more coherent thing percolating—something synthetic, something that makes storyline about a lack of storylines. As a result of thinking about that, I have been aware how many free-floating thoughts I have in a day that don’t fit into any storyline. They just surface like a message in a Magic 8 ball, and then sink away again. I figure I’d toss them all down here, strew them around in basically the same this and that way they occurred to me. “Apropos of nothing,” I might call them.
We went to Montreal this month. Driving into the city, we were stopped at a light, and a man clutching an empty paper cup wove between the cars. He was well-dressed, in a long wool coat. He half-staggered, half-danced as he looked into each driver’s face, registered their indifference or their averted eyes, and in each case, briefly laid his mittened hand on his chest and bowed, letting the forward dip be the momentum into his next flowing sequence of steps.
Instructed, during a meditation session, to think of someone very easy to love and cherish, I think of myself, plant a kiss on my own brow.
The thing about death I find hardest to believe is not that I will die, but that the rest of the world will continue on without me.
In the copy room at work there’s a Dracaena in a pot on the windowsill. Someone must tend it because it’s doing well, though maybe it’s root-bound because there’s a nubbin of root poking through one of the decorative holes in the pot. It looks like a finger through a buttonhole, or an erection through an unzipped fly. The root must have quested for something, sensing some extra room through the gap, but it emerged into thin air, under fluorescent lights, which must be a bizarre sensation for a root to experience. I wonder if this decision by the root is like when people jump out a window or into a churning surf to escape a fire.
I watched a video someone took from a plane window of the Palisades fire. I watched it on my phone, from New Hampshire, watched the fire through a phone of a phone of a window on a plane on its ordinary journey somewhere. I thought of the Icarus myth, and Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts, which is how I first encountered Brueghel’s Icarus—the poem of the painting of the myth. How many layers removed can you be and still feel something?
My son was home from college for a month. He liked sleeping in the basement on the days I’d had the woodstove going. I would creep down there before dawn, sucking the yellow-gray salt lozenges of mucus that I cough up every morning in winter. Crouching in front of the stove, trying to crumple newspaper quietly in the dark, in a fug of his proteinaceous farts, I thought of Robert Hayden’s poem Those Winter Sundays. I first encountered it as a teenager myself, identifying maybe with the speaker, maybe the father, maybe, an eldest daughter, as both. Anyway, I recited the lines each time I built a fire while he slept in and later woke to its hot breath.
"Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?"
He left to go back to college this week, taking his shoes which had, for a month, been in the way on the floor by the door like they always used to be. All his mess and sprawl and laundry briefly back in my way.
I awkwardly half-hugged him from the side as he gathered his things, and sent him off with the mittens he asked me to draw on for him.
He did not know I turned out the lights in the bathroom so he wouldn’t see me as I propped my chin on the windowsill and watched him pack his car and drive away.