Haespring

 On the wayward road out to the point there is a broad bridge that crosses the estuary.  A giant bird stands on a weather-worn wooden beam staring out across the mud and the muck.  Breathe in.  The ocean air has a complex scent. Intricate. 

Wind

As kids, or, shall I say, young adults, a six hour drive may once have been an impromptu affair, my sister once drove for three days straight to see a boy across the country, but we're nearing forty now so it takes preparation. We pack apple slices and make a big deal about potty breaks.  We easily tire of the tinny radio and our glaring devices.  We play that road trip game where you have to sing songs with lyrics in the second person as if the singer had intended to address themself in the mirror:  “Can't take my Eyes off of You”  “You make me feel like a natural woman” “If I ain't Got You”

The road to the point is curious because it's just desert in the absolute most primitive sense. A jornada. A lost road.  There are no other cars, until one appears right next to you instantly and overtakes you going 100 miles per hour and vanishes into the shimmering sands, but we don't measure velocity in these units here, the signs are all in KM.  So that's what those little lesser numbers are for on the speedometer.  The road veers into the sand for miles and then some hills arrive and one suspects that one has veered far from the map, away from the sea entirely, but suddenly there it is, a great blue ocean, rising in a high arc somehow tremulous above the land, above the horizon, if that's even possible.  

We stayed at a cousin's house there, a second mortgage affair of theirs. Having planned the route meticulously knowing we wouldn't have wifi or sat-nav out of the country, we turned confidently left off the main road, took two turns and were immediately lost.  Luckily some of us retained from scouts a good sense of cardinal direction and waypoints. The development had grown organically between the city and the estuary, which had been cordoned from development by a preserve.  Within the expatriate housing some semblances of organic organization was devised and we were there by sundown.

Expecting a flimsy box we were immediately impressed with the sturdy dignity of the place. We marveled at polished wood and stone staircase, the hand-hewn old growth rafters, her generously stocked pantry, the oven-mitts in the drawer.  The whole house was filled with the kind of cozy familiar appurtenances of home that caused one to puzzle at our cursory relations to our own everyday things. The cousin's only request was that we water the plants and make time during out stay to go to the contemporary art museum, if we could.

The first night we cooked veggie burgers on the grill and felt like it was the fourth of July, serving Mexican corn on the cob on the two white wooden tables in the garden. It got cool quickly in the sea breeze – but the sky was a breathtakingly impossibly beautiful lingering slideshow so we sat and bundled and took lots of pictures and felt peaceful, both young and old feeling both older and younger, respectively and simultaneously, and some of us had more to drink than we needed, talking and laughing. 

Sand

Some towering tongue-tied truth has been sedulously gripping me like a secret to the heart these past few weeks or months, more or less.  I can just barely intuit what it is when I'm dreaming but in this big buxom bed I couldn't sleep.  The tequila has served to help alleviate some of the worser worry.  But repressing thoughts throughout the late winter months had begun disrupting my other refuge, work, and with the anomie of anxiety facing down on me I decided that I should quiet the noise in my mind and write some things down.  So I got up to journal.

My secrets used to be buried just beneath boundaries of ego, always on the brink of bursting and tied up beneath too many knots to escape, but lately they seem to reside elsewhere and make themselves known in mysterious ways, and at least with writing I can still exert some semblance of control over their release.  It's a task I like best early in the morning.  There's fewer chances of being observed, no one pausing to wonder why your breathing changes when you get into a good flow of words and ride it.  No one piecing together the puzzle that is your eyes flashing with recognition of some exciting emotional whatever.

As whispers of the coming sunrise made their glistening kisses upon the shrubbery outside the cousin's study window we all woke up.  For the first morning we cooked pancakes and eggs with bacon and freshly squeezed orange juice. Cooking on a strange stove is anxiety-inducing, because one does not know where to put one's hands and every little mess becomes a problem that needs to be solved right away.  Once the kids had eaten it was as if a veil was lifted from their eyes and the sea became visible and they bolted out the door in various states of undress racing to see who could put a toe into the ocean to first test it's temperature before any of the others.  We stayed where we were and had coffee and wiped the counters and reminisced in the way that is acceptable, looking forwards as an excuse for looking back.

“Remember when we went to that restaurant?”

“I must have erased it”

“I remember.  I wore that green dress.  Remember that green dress?”

“How could I forget?”

“We should go to that restaurant tomorrow.”

We left to join the others by locking up, a needless extravagance on a semi-private beach, and removing our rubber sandals to caress our toes in the warm mid-morning sands of the path between the dunes, then lumbering down to where the breakers were churning out one after another and the sounds of familiar of beach play could be heard over the wind and the waves once again.  

What does contentment mean, anyway?  It comes from the Latin, doesn't it?  To hold it all together.

On the second day we hired a charter out to see whales.  This required everyone wake up very very early and schlump into the car.  Just past the point there is a large harbor and soon we were aboard the ship, a big 90 footer with two large pontoons beneath us and a swaying man with an eye patch and a sleeveless Def Leppard shirt under his neon orange windbreaker topping off our watered-down drinks in bright brisk the morning air and announcing a sighting, they rose as if from a dream, lumberous and snoring. 

“How deep are we?”  

“Ninety-three feet”

Harbor

In the town there are shops with chinese trinkets and superglued-shell picture frames, magnets and hats, discount cigars and shot glasses.  I found a bookshop with a book about books, and was looking at pictures of celebrities bookshelves when they sent a kid to find me who said “come eat.” I enjoy looking at other people's bookshelves because they can be as revealing as maps, or those roadsigns like the kind on MASH, 1500 miles to San Francisco, 750 miles to Tokyo, only the directions are all intellectual.

In the town there is cheap food and drink. At 1:30 in the afternoon I found my friends seated at the bar wearing wet rubbery grins and that kind of smug anticipation that comes from putting twenty bucks worth of songs on the jukebox.  Around them were mountains of plates, bowls, half-eaten, and many glasses and bottles.  Their laughter was toxic and leaden.  When the right song came on they danced and she grabbed me.  One could open oneself to the promise of this encounter but it wasn't right.  She was like dancing with a sack of grain. Underwater.  She backed me into a corner as if it wasn't broad daylight and suggested we do things that are best described without talking about.  I suggested, that maybe I'd better double back and take another look at those sandals I liked one more time.  There was a mist of rum about her as she floated off.  

I herded the kids together and took them back to our pad for the rest of the day.  You see, it's lent, so I've been sober.  But if you squint hard enough and you can feel the Saturday tequila bleeding from the cab that brought the rest of the party back into the astringent arms of a lily white dawn. A big sterile moon still up in the sky, probably humming a little song to herself.  I left them on the couch to wake as they were ready. 

Water

A note was left announcing that I could be found in town and would be back shortly.  What I didn't say was that I would be going to church.  It's nearing Easter, I feel the pull.   There's a cathedral in the town by the boardwalk, a heap of heavy straight stones that inside was impervious to weather.  The narthex was dark and smelling of incense and disinfectant, but there was an old old woman just inside the door, her face flickering in candlelight, illuminated in prayer.  But prayers in a different language.  This may not matter to God, but to a monoglot like it's it's incantory and strange, familiar enough if only by it's shape within the contours of the Mass.  Mass is Mass, and I still retain a muslce memory of the motions necessary to participate in the process.  I dipped a finger in the font there at the door, and contemplated the notion of  holy water as I slipped silently into a seat in the very back in time to hear the sermon.  Listening to it was like looking at yourself in a photograph from your youth and remembering who took the picture and what they were wearing.  The man three pews forward had his greased hair clasped back with pins.  A little girl and her sister, or mother, wore cobalt blue that reminded me of a tablecloth.  The saints on the walls and pillars looked past us, as if we were hummingbirds wings to them, and I had the sensation of seeing the congregants and myself all as if in a scene from a movie, as extras, the main action elsewhere.  In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.  Outside the sun flared trumpets of heat and light to remind us that it was at 11AM, and the seagulls sang contrapuntals with the church bells, and the sidewalk was decorated with a row of seated ragwearers with outstretched hands, patiently and faithfully entrusting us to have deeply embraced the notion of Christian charity.

Shells

One thing I do is stride ponderously up and down the beach looking for sea-shells.  The last morning this was what I rose before dawn to do.  It is not a rational activity, but I do it whenever I am staying by a beach, just as when I am in the mountains I go out of my way in a dedicated search for small coloured stones to line the pocket.  On the beach, one keeps a keen eye out for a kind of stunning pearlescence, which is often pointless because frequently those “rare” shiny finds lose all their lustre later when they dry out.  Still, I trod on,eyes peeled, indulging in a habitual quest, mayhaps a rite of passage.  

Habits are like flies.

I heard a sound on the beach and jumped, it was just an outboard motor heading out.  A few minutes later another, then another still. FIshing time.

I remember the old religion in moments such as this, feeling a presence, hearing a sound on the beach and I remember the old mystic truth, that an inner voice is merely one in a loud cacophany of spirits inhabiting everywhere, and sometimes places out far away you can hear the others the best.  Lonely spirits.  Howling djinns. We tell ourselves that modernity has distanced us from them but really we're not that far away.  Turn off your wifi, your bluetooth, your notifications.  Sleep out under the stars and you'll feel fragile fingers of light from each distant star touch you faintly through the unfathomable reaches to say hi, hey, to tell you their sadness and their truth.

Walking out along the delta of the estuary at receding tide one marvels at the wet blue earth.  I always find myself wondering how far out it will go before it stops, just as, hours later, I find myself wondering how high the tide this time will climb.  The earth breaths it's restless exhalations, then drinks in again and drowns.  Tiny rivulets no bigger than a toenail, tiny mud volcanos the size of a pinky.  I see the cascading patterns in the sand, up and down, up and down, and think of those broad mountain ranges in Nevada with valleys in between, the same thing as this but on a geologic timescale.  The shells are curious remainders, their colours undoubtedly imbued from whatever chemical was most at hand while being calcified.  In a way, you could say that they are nothing more than fishy smelling colorful little pieces of shit, and you wouldn't be all wrong.  The land the sea don't seem to be equal partners in a dance at the beach.  The sea is winning, it always does. Little ragged weeds and blotchy corpses cling to the rocks for a while until they are eventually reclaimed, back into the earth's bloodstream, a pulse of waves.

Back in time for breakfast, coffee, with no one specifically waiting for me but everyone happy to see me.  Our big blended vacation family.  I lay my treasures on the table and the kids marvel at them and then soon forget, distracted by shiner objects still.

Tide

Heading home, in the rearview mirror, our teeth all look whiter and brighter, but its just our suntanned skins providing added contrast.  The giant bird is still there on his beam.  Watching, waiting. I wave. We'll all be back at work on Monday and they won't have even noticed we've been gone.

Grand Silences

 

The thing was, if we knew each other it was probably based on what dorm we lived in. It wasn't exactly a time for depth in relationships, there were other concerns. What were we going to do, who were we going to be, what was that assignment and when was it due? We knew each other by our majors, or by the color of backpack we wore. We knew each other by what classes we shared, where we sat. Sure, we were making connections, but everything there was encouraging connections. Connect the dots between these historical causations, connect these chemicals, connect this author's themes, connect these numerals, once that fall I stopped worrying about where I was stepping and looked up at the exact moment that a girl was looking up and we looked into each other's eyes and she fell in love with me. This, by way of example, okay? It happened. I was bashful and eager and was less the exception than the rule. Were we making connections that were there to be made or connections that were destined to happen? Could you really know anyone if you didn't even know yourself? One guy I knew only as "Batman" and I even met his parents, but that's a different story.

I recall a guy named Tony, a particularly fine physical specimen in his senior year of college. He wasn't a friend, we never confided nor ever really hung out together, outside of work that is.  Part of that was temperamental, part age.  He was three years my senior, and at 18, as I was, one is vigilantly attuned to the minutiae of social hierarchy as affected by experience, which is like a vast playing field where you can't even fathom the end zones, and you've just milliseconds ago been nauseatingly thrust from the bench.  Age-wise Tony had a leg up, and psychologically speaking he was driven— or maybe it was the other way around, maybe he was a driven individual because he had a leg up age-wise, as I said, we weren't close —I recall his work ethic right up there in the short list of attributes to which I could to ascribe him, he was handsome, kind of a jerk, and I seem to recall multiple people alluding to his reputation as a bit of a man about campus, however, the guy was mostly a mystery to me. How he ended up with Heather I'll never know.

Paul, Business, lived in the dorms about a mile separated from the main campus, behind where I lived, in a block of one-room off-campus private apartments.  Freshman year, having spent a morning alone, again, avoiding the painful realization that I was either going to have to get a job or drop out of school (or ignore the bursar indefinitely, by hiding behind a tree? Not likely, in this  bare winter weather) I was surprised and relieved when Paul called and asked if I wanted to go out for lunch.  I said I did.  He asked if I wanted a ride or wanted to meet him there.  Peaking out the lone window I could see scattered midmorning snowflakes falling like ash, a salted garbage truck with a big green shamrock wired to the grill slowing to stop at the light.  "A ride would be nice." He was downstairs in 5 minutes. Paul drove his brother's Camaro with both reverence and panache.  He had failed to repair the strip of molding on the door but had souped up the stereo system and made a big show out of selecting the right CD for this particular journey out of the dashboard binder, selecting a primitively sharpied:  Meatloaf/Van Halen/Bon Jovi MIXXXX.  The hot-dog place he wanted to go to was only like 3 minutes away, so we sat and idled in there for a minute to let the song finish then went inside and wiped the snow from our boots, Paul marching right up to the counter to order while I gawped at the menu, "You ready?" he asked, adding "my treat."
"In that case then yes, I'm ready." 

"Paul," I broached, "I think I need a get a job."
"You should get one. It'll be good for you.  Lot of work though, being a student and holding down employment."
"Do you think, maybe, you could get me a job at the camera shop?" 
He wiped his wiry whiskers thoughtfully.  "No."
"Oh.  Why not?"
They called our order number out so I got up and got it, four large chilli dogs with fries and drinks on a big red plastic tray.
"Well, for one thing, what do you know about cameras?"
Now it was my turn to strike a thinking pose.  "Not much."
"Exactly.  And add to that, we're not really hiring right now.  It's kind of a small shop."
"I see."
"Tell you what though, my buddy Stewart is always looking for guys to work.  I'll give you his number."

So that was how I got a job at the fertilizer plant, which was where I met Tony.  First day on the job, he said, "put these bags over here, and put these bags over there, and when the pallet is full call one of us over to move it until you're trained on the forklift?  Get it?  Got it?  Good bye." He wasn't exactly friendly.  In fact, I'm not sure he ever spoke to me there again after that.  He spoke at me, which is not the same thing.  I might as well have been a piece of gum on the sidewalk to him.  He worked harder than the rest of us though, this much was clear to even me, who showed up to work my 3 mornings a week often late, and if I could afford it, hungover and dragging.  It was clear to the boss too, who put him in charge of the swing shift, which meant a pay raise, and you can bet that went to his head.  We were never really on the same level, Tony and I.

I worked full time all summer and was feeling pretty good about myself all things considered come fall when my buddy Gary, Education, and I had signed up for the same Dramatic Arts elective, along with Gary's girlfriend Kary, Music, and, it turned out, much to my surprise that first day of class, Tony. We were all sophomores, and so it came as no surprise when our production of Romeo and Juliet cast Tony, the senior, as Romeo. Gary, much to his delight was announced as Mercutio, and Kary was cast as Juliet, angering almost everyone.

“What's the big deal?” Kary asked.

“The big deal? The Big Deal?” Gary's voice quavered. I checked to see if he was being ironic but I detected only sincere irritation.

“It's not like this was my choice.” It was a cool early November evening, and the streetlights came on as we walked across the Quad.

Gary was not to be diffused so easily. “Have you seen him? Don't answer that. Doesn't matter. You're going to see him. A lot of him.” I was carrying my girlfriend's bag because earlier that afternoon we had parted ways and she didn't want to carry it all the way over to her Statistics class and her car was too far away so I took a peep inside and found a Didion paperback called White Album while we came into the student lounge and crashed on a pair of couches.

“It's just a part,” Kary said.

“It's not just a part” he was gesticulating with his hands now. Working himself up with his arms and raising his voice, although no one was looking, yet “it's not just a play. It's Romeo and freaking Juliet!”

I decided that Didion held nothing of interest for me and got up to go get a snack. Deciding what you like and what you don't like is not difficult. I decided on pretzels, but also a tiny bag of mixed nuts because I felt a sudden craving for peanuts and justified to myself the purchase with the admonishment that if I didn't eat them all right now I could store the remainder easily in my pants pocket and eat them later and be grateful to myself for the foresight.

When I returned to the couch they were still hot on about the casting announcement. “I think,” I added, skittishly, “that congratulations are in order, Kary. Juliet is a much-coveted part. I hope you break a leg, as they say.”

“Stay out of it.” Gary jabbed, but this time I could tell that his intent was purely sarcastic. He was just scared. But it turned out that there was nothing to be worried about. Our Romeo and his Juliet, Tony and Kary, got on like cats and dogs, or should I say, Capulets and Montagues.

“Learn your damn lines, is all.” Tony said one rehearsal and Kary, I could see, about slapped him in the face. He brushed tired pompadour from his eyes and prompted her again “there lies more peril in thine eye than twenty of their words; look thou!”

“I would for the world you were not here,” she responded, ready to give him a black eye.

The thing about a school production was that it was generally terrible, but hanging out with the rest of the cast was once-in-a-lifetime fun, and Tony and Kary really did give it their all despite their personal animosity. Gary's roommate Mark, Economics, started dating Hazel, Mass Communications, who played Juliet's nurse, and that's how we came to know Heather, Hospitality, maybe?, Hazel's twin sister. But that was all later on. In the green room before each of our three performances Tony had established a warm-up routine and subjected the rest of us to (because he was lead) involving turning the portable stereo on full blast and blaring Mamma Mia by the A*Teens and Tony Christie's (Is This is the Way to) Amarillo. I could hear his urine splashing merrily into the toilet we were all supposed to share, “Tony, I uh, I have my CDs with me, could we listen to something else.”

“No.” I turned and held back Gary, plugging both hands over his ears and about to commit a justifiable homicide, Tony just ignored us and turned to the mirror, he did his own makeup. The rest of us guys had the girls do it for us. I would have been mad at his outright dismissal of us if it had seemed like a fight worth having, but it didn't. We were all nervous, Tony especcially. For different reasons than myself, obviously. Even knowing that I had very little of consequence to do didn't help me, Tony I figured was best left to his own devices, all those lines. Something about friends and strangers wandering into a crowded room and sitting in the dark to obsessively observe what we had spent five weeks working on together. My girlfriend brought flowers but could not stay for the after party, at which Tony made a loud show of shushing everybody by clinking a glass with a fork and proceeding to give a short heartfelt speech about “shaking the yolk of inauspicious stars” by ending his Senior year with this as his high note “so thank you, all of you!” Kary chose that moment to loudly walk out.

There is actually not much more story to tell about Tony. That winter Gary extended the invitation to me to move in with he and Mark for Junior year, with three of us we could afford to all get off campus and get some more space in a house. We were pretty much hanging out all the time by then anyway. Some night's Hazel and Heather would come by. They weren't identical twins, but they were both pleasantly attractive, in both their features and their personalities. Button noses and contagious laughs. It was fun to be around them. Hazel could best anyone at dirty-joke telling, and Heather was everyone's best friend instantly, one of those people who just instantly engender trust. I was drinking lots though, so I'm wanting for actual anecdotes to prove this. What I have is photographic evidence. Here we all are before the after-party, still in our costumes. Here's a blurry one of me and Gary in the dining hall smiling. Here's Paul's brother's druggie friend Jacob smoking out on the curb while holding an almost-empty bottle of Jack. Here's all of us one night outside Paul's place in the snow, Mark's looking away, his mouth open, arm raised as if to make a point, his eyes half closed, talking to someone, and Batman's hand groping Mona's breast. Here's two of Kary and Gary kissing and pretending to fight. Here we are in the kitchen floor, wrestling? Here I am in the big red chair with Heather on my right looking innocently flirtatious and Kary on my left, making a show of lasciviousness, I am red-faced and have my arms around both of them. We look young. None of us had any idea what would happen next. What happened next was winter break.

While I was home the plants in my small room's lone window had all almost died (almost all died?).
“They say that singing to your plants can help them grow,” said Anne D, Psychology, one of Kary's two roommates, whom I'd invited over under the pretext of utilizing her skills as a psych major to discuss the breakup with my girlfriend. She earnestly inspected the brown brittle leaves while humming a sweet little song while I earnestly imagined what color underwear she had on under the jeans, a kind of restlessness. The effect of being newly single was curious, I felt perpetually like hopping one leg at a time instead of walking, for instance. It was both exciting to not know who you were going to talk to on the phone at the end of the day, and also kind of sad and terrifying. What was I doing? I had put my hands on her shoulders.

“What are you doing?” Anne D asked, and I apologized but she was too keen to get out of them to hear anything much I had to say after that. I tried going out with Maureen, from Geology 102, but that all blew up shortly before The Valentine's Dance, for which I had served on the committee, so I still had to attend and serve (non-alcoholic) drinks. Luckily Paul, who was DJing, loaned me his flask so I spiked my single serving cans of off-brand Sprite with sippy tinctures of vodka all night and somehow made it through.

When the news came out that spring that Tony and Heather were dating, at first I could not believe it. It was so improbable. Like learning that your pre-teen niece is dating Conor MacGregor. I couldn't check with Tony because Paul's buddy Stewart had suggested I leave the fertilizer plant with him, so I had done so. It was Hazel who confirmed it, I saw her one day during finals, walking distractedly out of the library. Since she and Mark had broken up I hadn't seen much of her, but I wanted to assure her whose side I was on so I cheerfully waved hello and hustled over to join her, (groaning at the exertion) “Yes,” she said, I studied her face for a sign, of what, I was not certain, “it's true.” Her gaze dwelt for a moment on the middle distance, like a trauma victim, but then she wiped some imaginary sleep from her eyes and smiled reassuringly. “Is this year done yet or what?”

“Or what.” I answered.

“Have you picked your major yet?”

I had not, and it turned out I didn't have to because the gig that Stewart got me hooked up with quickly went full time and I followed it out of state and so I missed Fall Registration, or I forgot about the deadline, or, at least, that was the story back then. Gary and Mark were pissed, since they'd already put a down-payment on the house we were all to share, but I didn't want to to go back, and when they stopped speaking to me it was just that much easier not to. It was Kary who kept in touch and told me that Tony and Heather were engaged.

I thought about it all today because I saw on Kary's friendbook feed that they are having a twenty-year anniversary party next month. Jesus Christ. It was almost twenty years ago, for a few years it was that, and before that, it all had just happened a just few months ago. Time is subjective. I still can't believe they got together, and I can't understand what she saw in him. But apparently they have two kids and, thinking back it, in a way, it's brave, if one must put a positivist slant to the whole affair. (Are we still calling bravery a good thing, post me-too? post Putin?  Post post-history?)  What I mean is, choosing anyone or anything when you're eighteen, nineteen, twenty, to me, now, trapped here, seems preposterous, but the more I sit and stew over it I can't decide if it's the deciding that's preposterous or the being eighteen/nineteen/twenty years old.

There's a very magic time when, if you are lucky, you will be faced with divine uncertainty, and if there's one common trope inherent to the response to this scenario, facing the endless expanse of possibilities and freedom, it is to wither, to shrink to safety. My God, it's daunting out there under the sun, best cling to this rock and it's shade.  Marriage.  Career.  Get thee from this glare.  I spent hours wallowing and winnowed by the grand silences of solitude in my little room, sometimes not even staring out the lone window trying to figure out which way to go, what to do, who I was, how to be, and Tony, that big handsome talented hardworking asshole met a nice girl and swept her up and got married and that's what he's been up to ever since. Twenty years.  I'm sure that a big part of him making it this far is that she has kept him on the straight and narrow, but, maybe I'm too harsh on the guy, maybe I didn't see it, the capacity that is, we weren't ever really, as I've said, friends.