If you’ve been wondering what I do with my newfound free time and insomnia, well wonder no more. You may want to cover your ears, though.
Welcome to the first day of the new year. The first day of the rest of your life. The first…the first. The last. The beginning grown from the end. The start of the end of something else.
The sun is edging in through the cracks in this metal room, my watch face sends perfect ovals of it dancing onto the shoulders of the Italian couple across the row, like a new year’s gift to christen them into their first holiday of 2012. Did I maybe pass them on the street yesterday? Did the man in 16A share my metro bench? Is the infant wail wafting back across the rows the same one that lifted its voice to ancient skies above ancient ruins only hours ago?
There’s no photographic evidence. I might not have even been there, without proof that it was so. Is the evidence of my own eyes and ears enough?
The astringent scent of fresh fish blooming from the concrete - flooded with water and groomed by hard-bristled brushes - that signals the end of another market day.
The wisp of curling smoke that spun and fell from the old man’s cigar, floating and dancing like stray cotton wool, rising and plunging with the breeze.
The tinny tap of a ball peen hammer, slowly striating a coconut’s furry coat as its watery milk spills over its new owner’s fingers.
Mandarins stacked in lumpy hillocks, their shriveling leaves clinging tenuously to stems as proof of their journey from grove to Roman street.
The anemic lemon tree, drinking in Porsche and Vespa fumes, extending friendly fronds to the rusting dumpsters and corner flower shop that constitute its neighborhood.
Are these enough? Do the memories make the experience real? Did it happen if you cannot facebook, flick, tweet or tumbl it? Did I really climb a winding and ancient stair, silently sharing the journey with a stout and ancient woman and her groceries? Did a dog really lift its leg to a marble park bench while Ethiopian immigrants sipped coffee above him?
Without record, it sometimes seems like the real is smoothed over and erased by the repetitive wash of time. A name scratched into the shoreline, a tidal memory, a pop-up life. A new year from 30,000 feet.
Last November, I was in Knoxville with my housemate Jen to see a concert. We’d driven over after work and had an hour to kill, so we decided to get dinner at a restaurant on Market Square in the trendy part of downtown Knoxville, if such a thing exists. It was miserably rainy and freezing, and I remember my flats seemed to hold up poorly against the deluge – my feet were squelching in icy water with every step – so we sprinted, arms-over-heads, into the restaurant closest to the car. When the hostess asked us where we wanted to sit, I pre-empted Jen with the single requirement on my mind: the warmest place in this building.
It was a Monday, and there was, at best, a smattering of people in the place. It’s one of those restaurants that clearly used to be something totally different and is divided awkwardly into separate little rooms with tables in them, an open kitchen flanking the far back wall. And that’s where we sat, so the glow of the kitchen’s heat could residually warm us.
There were a few other tables back there – two couples in their mid-sixties, drinking red wine, wearing nice sweaters and looking very much like the kind of people who read the New Yorker every week, a small family with a baby tucked into a high chair at the end of the table, a group of trendy grad students and us. And for the first 20 minutes, it was great. We ate pesto fondue, we drank Riesling, we cracked jokes with our waitress about not actually knowing much about what Riesling is. It was a good dinner. It was warm.
And about halfway through the pasta, two male voices sort-of wafted over from the kitchen, their volume just enough above the level of normal chatter to be noticeable. I hear an f-word, and I assume that it’s two employees joking with one another before leaving. On a slow Monday, this is the time when you cut servers from the floor to save on labor costs. But then I hear the ‘f’ coupled with a ‘you,’ and that seems slightly out of place.
So I glance up, just in time to see glints of silver flash across the room. My first stupid thought is of a camera or maybe a laser pointer, and it isn’t really until I see one skitter across the floor and land near the foot of the baby’s high chair that I realize the glints are knives. Two of them. And they’re not like butter knives or those matte, Ikea box-set knives that don’t really cut anything tougher than bacon. These are genuine, shiny, keep-them-in-a-felt-roll, sand-in-the-handle, have-foreign-names kind of knives. The ones that sad chefs pack up dramatically when they get voted off Top Chef. And it seems like they’ve just been thrown across the dining room.
The baby is peering down over the side of her high chair at the paring knife laying benignly two feet below her fat legs. The other, larger knife is almost-comically stuck in the wooden bar. In my memory, I want to remember it quivering there, like a Bowie knife in some old Western, but it isn’t. It’s just jutting awkwardly on its edge, barely held in the grain of the slab of wood that separates kitchen from dining room. It’s a supremely surreal few seconds.
My eye follows the trajectory of the knives’ flight and lands on this guy in kitchen pants, tall, with red hair and a baggy parka with fake fur lining the hood. He looks like a grill cook, presumably leaving mid-shift. And he also looks pissed. Having tossed his knives, he’s now starting a fight with the other voice, a skinny guy in all black who I take to be the line cook.
And this is the point in the story that I find the most interesting: everyone in the dining room did absolutely nothing. No one screamed or moved, the mom didn’t scoop the baby out of the line of fire. Jen and I were exchanging wide-eyed looks that said, ‘look natural, bring fork to mouth, pretend you’re talking about something non-knife-related, don’t make eye contact.’
I mean, clearly, the normal paradigm of mid-range dining has completely shifted here. And I was surprised that our behavior didn’t change accordingly.
I’ve worked in restaurants for years, with a number of exceptionally sketchy people. Food service seems to attract them. I worked with the former leader of a Puerto Rican street gang. I worked with guys who had been in prison multiple times. I worked with a guy who still went to prison on weekends. I worked with pot dealers, coke dealers, cokeheads, alcoholics and one guy who sold stolen plastic spinner rims out of the trunk of his Chevy Cavalier. He had face tattoos and actually kept a knife in his sock. I worked with a bartender who used to get drunk on unfinished bottles of leftover wine and tell me about growing up in the Albanian mafia. And I have never seen anyone throw a knife anywhere. Especially not kind-of at a baby. And now everyone was pretending to carry on conversations like nothing was happening.
After about 30 seconds of profanity-laced tirade, overt threats to Skinny Guy and some puffed-up shoving, the manager sees that it’s time to intervene, threatens to call the cops and eventually convinces the knife-thrower to collect his weapons and leave, shouting threats to everyone within eyesight and their various family members all the way to the door.
Following the exodus, things went back to normal, everyone exchanged chatter about how crazy all that was, we all got our meals paid for and the night progressed in a fairly mundane vein from then on.
For the most part, it’s a pretty basic story about eating dinner with an element of surrealism thrown in. It works well at bars and parties because, well, it’s a knife throwing. That’s not an everyday event outside Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. But really, there’s only one compelling moment – guy throws knives – then nothing follows that and the action dies. And this is why I like it.
I can’t get it out of my head or stop telling it because it runs counter to what I want to believe about myself and other people – namely, that we would act in the face of unexpected threat. Or at least consider acting.
I once heard a series of interviews with Carnegie Hero Medal winners, people who faced rampaging bulls and jumped in front of trains and ran into burning cars and things of this nature. ‘Regular guy rescues other regular guy,’ kind of stories. And most of them said something like ‘I just did what any normal person would have done. I had no choice.’ I remember listening to that and believing its truth, confident that I’d do the same thing. One man described the melting headliner of a flaming car falling onto his back, saying, “I couldn’t just leave them in there.” And I actually thought, “well of course you couldn’t – who could?”
But this story suggests to me that, you know, maybe I could. OK, no one was in mortal peril, but geez, we didn’t even heckle the guy. We didn’t even look at him. I didn’t even think about it. What if his posturing had turned to action? Would we swing into action, too?
I know – what, were we all going to all rise up and confront the slightly violent guy with some sort of collective indignation suddenly imbued to all of us regular people? Probably not.
And I can’t blame the manager for hesitating – he was quite young and the disgruntled employee had a solid few inches on him both vertically and horizontally. As the Monday-night manager, he wasn’t anything so much as a server with a business degree. He joked afterward with us and the waitresses that they’d left him out there to get stabbed.
“Yeah, I just left you to it. I was crouching in dish,’ said one girl, laughing.
“Dish hider,” he derided wryly.
Since then, that’s become a running joke for Jen and me. We call the other a dish-hider when someone is avoiding a situation or throwing the other good-naturedly under the bus (mostly with regard to housekeeping or fielding telemarketing calls).
But I think about it sometimes, and I hope that, in a genuinely perilous situation, I wouldn’t be a dish-hider. Or if I was, that surely I could at least throw a few plates as I went.
c’est belle.
oui, vous devriez l’essayer, il serait beau regard avec vous cheveux.
désolé, un peu français. anglais?
ah, yes. try it - very, very nice on you.
do you think so?
yes, trés belle, madame.
i’m sorry, it is truly lovely, but…um…trop euro?
then it is from me a gift, to your heart, to light again your eyes.
what? no, but really, i couldn’t. i mean, thank you, but…
oui, and when you light again your eyes, then make, from you, a gift, too…
Around 3.30, somehow both doors of the Cork & Bean were opened and just never got closed. It was one of the first truly nice days of spring, icy in the morning but sunny and glorious when the fog burned away; warm enough for bared skin, without the heat of sweat.
The sun played in pleasant, geometric angles through the windows and across the artfully distressed table-tops, the kind that people sand from new to appear antique. Martha Stewart calls it ‘shabby-chic.’ But she also hand-ties all her Christmas bows and takes stock market tips from shady brokers, so considering it part of the general lexicon is probably debatable.
Still, the atmosphere is pleasant and warm, and not just via the mercury, but in the way that you’d expect Martha Stewart’s house to be at Christmas, actually. Inviting. Friendly.
And around the time that the second door began welcoming in a nice cross-breeze, a kid wandered in. Two kids, to be exact. One a teenage boy with shoulder-length, middle-brown hair and a green lantern t-shirt, also on-purpose distressed (though I’m fairly certain no one would call it ‘shabby chic’). He sported high-tops and that awkward side-lope so common to young men who have vertically outgrown their boyhood faster than they can adjust to it. When he passes the window, the light behind him illuminates the tiny flyaways of his clean-but-unbrushed locks, like a halo of incandescent solar flares.
The other is a girl, probably around three years and a solid two heads below the boy, with the same fresh-yet-unkempt head of hair that signifies middle childhood – no longer forced under the mother’s comb, not yet forced under the almighty social pressure of teenage grooming. In short, no one has yet introduced the lucky girl to the straightener. Or the curling iron. Or Sun-In. Or Seventeen Magazine in general.
She’s wearing this short-sleeve shirt in lemon yellow, the kind with tiny lace rick-rack edging the collar only found in tween clothing stores. Over it is a long patchwork dress, made from some chiffon-nylon combo. It’s floral all over and raucously colorful; it might be tacky but isn’t, only because she is so very clearly happy in it. It bounces around her ankles and sways jauntily in the breeze as she pokes her head over the counter around her brother’s outstretched forearm, swinging the skirt’s slight flares rhythmically back and forth.
He pays for their drinks and she laughs the laugh of middle childhood – no longer forced into the mental incarceration of babyhood, not yet encumbered by the shackles of adult social couth. She is perfectly content in herself, to be herself and think her thoughts and laugh her laugh and wear her crazy dress and be naught but her – cerebrally autonomous yet completely unselfconscious.
Her unruly, wavy hair, a few shades lighter than her brother’s, bends with intention over her YA novel, and at once I love and pity and envy her, here in her last spring of middle childhood, soaking in the last first rays of spring sun as just exactly what she is; unknowingly basking in that tiny space of unnoticed time that we all spend the rest of our lives trying to reclaim.
It is, really, the essence of the best parts of childhood - to find joy in a patchwork nylon maxi dress, a Coke and a YA novel. And who can say they don’t wish they could still do the same? It is, I think, a thing worthy of envy indeed.
There are few things in life that please me more than bananas and chocolate-hazelnut spread in pastry. To those of you living life without crepes, my heart weighs down with pity and sorrow for you and your tastebuds.
Also, I just interviewed a woman named (honest to God) Judy Jetson. I think that, coupled with this banging’ crepe, makes for a glorious win of a day.
On my way home, I listened to an innocent man talk about his 20 years in prison.
I snaked along this empty road, one headlight dark, only a few feet of black asphalt at a time looming from the towering and oppressive trees. They seemed to shrink from my tiny car like water from Moses’ staff.
It’s so dark, and I hear this man’s warm and lilting voice describe this murder he didn’t commit. He’s from Trinidad. His voice is truly gorgeous, his story sad. He is riveting. When I pull up to my porch, I kill the engine and the lights and sit, listening. I listen until chill bumps rise on my arms in the mid-March cold. I listen until I have to press my frozen fingers between my jeans and the cracking leather seat.
The narrator, pushing the story along, deftly pulls the victim’s brother into the narrative, sets up his unlikely role in the release of the innocent. He is Jamaican, but sounds like it only on every fifth word.
“I remember when I got that letter from the lawyer I didn’t know, telling me there was no way this man had killed my brother,” he said, as this bare, skeletal piano dances with his voice, rolling up and down the keys in haunting minor thirds.
“And it pulled me right back there, right back to 1980. To April 10, 1980.”
And the piano trills and falls eerily quiet, and I am pulled back, back to 2008. To August 2, 2008.
The car door is still open. I don’t really care. The radio is still on, too. But somehow I’m out, in the cold, shivering but standing on the pavement in front of this porch. And in my mind it’s warm – you know, that humid, oppressive warmth of dying summer, and I look down and see myself, three years younger, sprawled prone on the pavement in my own memory.
It’s such a clear night, the moon is practically a street light, illuminating everything. And I can feel my own heart beating on that August evening, like a giant pair of crushing steel hands is slowly, methodically pressing my chest and thorax together, bringing my heart and lungs closer and closer to the very edge of my body.
My closest friend had died and I could stumble no further than this very spot. That night had no moon and three dim stars. But tonight this spot is lit with that pale, white, induplicable lunar light.
I have not stood here, thought of that night and that feeling of being crushed and that particular grief. But now, the moon is like stage lighting, playing once again a wordless, visceral one-act so long on furlough in my mind.
From the car, I hear the quaver of that lonely piano, its minor-key melody sliding up and down in arpeggios, like a weird soundtrack to this private show.
It’s been a long time and so much has happened, but with piercing sharpness I can still see the miniscule pieces of gravel and sandy dirt lying next to my nose, the few berries that have jumped from the trees in anticipation of fall crushed under my cheek.
Some guy I barely know - “there was a crash and well, she died.”
I never forgave him for it, really. Saying it that way. I can still feel myself melting into the pavement.
But the piano fades eerily once again, landing softly on a tinny high-C that echoes for a fraction of a second, seeming to waft into the washed-out night. A cloud veils the moon’s face.
It is over as soon as it began and I’m turning to close my door, get my computer, camera, reporter’s notebooks from the backseat where they’ve been haphazardly slung by my frenetic driving.
Laden, I turn the doorknob with my hip and close my eyes in the dark kitchen. They hurt when I close them, almost pleasantly, that singular feeling that follows hours and days of crying, though I haven’t cried - over anything - in months.
Even as I’ve already almost forgotten that short one-act, my memory is still reaching back to me for one last touch, through my eyes, an ephemeral reminder of the ever-drifting past splayed behind me like a wake in the glow of the face of the moon.
Today I am beginning an ambitious experiment - the fourth incarnation of an experiment started six years ago.
It started with some fellow art and architecture students. We took a picture every day. At the end of a year, they went up as tiny squares in undulating lines on a gallery wall, simultaneously chronicling the year from different perspectives. We drank wine from boxes. I made uncomfortable conversation with my older sister’s talented artist friends. I was barely 19. And awkward.
2.0 was another photo chronicle, now online and a solitary pursuit. I was 21, at a new university and much less awkward. I sidewalk-chalked the campus in the dead of night. I tacked a record sleeve of the Miami Vice soundtrack onto my wall and had long arguments with friends about international justice and Jane Austen. I took photos of slinkies.
3.0 - pen and watercolor drawings. I’m living in Cork, on the south coast of Ireland. Ballintemple, to be exact. I knit and work at a radio station and eat half-price samosas from Marks & Spencers. I go to the freezing beaches with my friends and eat chinese takeaway while listening to Empire of the Sun. I am 23. I draw only everyday items, every day, accompanied by what I assume to be witty commentary.
And now 4.0. I’m 25. I live in the Appalachian mountains. I’m a newspaper reporter. And I’m not sure where my life is going next. But I think I still value the challenge of generating creativity on the daily. So for Part 4, I’m moving out of the visual, into the verbal.
Since this is Everyday 4.0, I’m making this a 40-day experiment.
I’m dubious about my chances of success.
I don’t actually like the sea in practice. Only in principle (and design principle).
Please can I be this talented? No? How about half this talented…
I used to know an old man named Major.
I worked for a while at this retirement community – you know, the kind that market themselves as all-inclusive resorts full of golf carts and oddly attractive geriatrics partying their way classily into death.
It was a step-down facility, where you start out living in those little cottages on the outskirts of the property – almost-normal houses, kitted out with emergency please-help-I’ve-fallen buttons and steel shower rails – then you end up, eventually, in a glorified nursing home in the massive central building. There are phases in between, of course, but that’s the basic trajectory, a neighborhood plotted in concentric circles around a bullseye that marks the grave.
Major was in the penultimate phase, an apartment in the main complex, easily accessible, with a nurse to check on him daily and an unlimited meal plan that offered him access to the dining room for all three daily meals.
I worked in the dining room as a waitress, mostly on evenings and weekends. The system had all of the trappings of a waitress-patron relationship, but it really wasn’t. Just like Iris Place – that was its name – wasn’t really Sandals for Seniors, though it had all the requisite elements.
At each meal, we’d start at one end of the room and work our way to the other, switching ends on even and odd days for the sake of fairness and not getting fruit thrown at us by deeply bitter octogenarians.
They would “order,” though the menu options were limited to a few choices, reworkable into a handful of combinations, depending on how friendly the waitress and how endearing the diner. And we’d trot their plates back out, table by table, arranged precariously on too-small trays and topped with cracking, plastic versions of a butler’s plate cover.
And so it went, back and forth, table to table, for drinks, main courses, dessert and plate-clearing in between. Each waitress had a row, and the kitchen had an ‘in’ door and an ‘out’ door, so we all spent every meal on endless rotations, like planets moving in intersecting orbits or sushi conveyor belts snaking around a multitude of dining counters.
Major sat, generally, at the far end, close to the automatic front doors that opened and closed constantly, apropos of nothing, and the overly-grand staircase that led to the upper floors. His perpetual dining companion was a gentleman named Jack, still in possession of his mental alacrity and, somehow, a great measure of good humor. Major, when I met him, still had a generous dose of the latter but considerably less of the former.
I’m not entirely certain what Major’s real name was, or even that Major wasn’t a part of it in some way. I’m not sure that anyone did, actually. The general consensus was that he had, at some point, actually been a decorated major, though which particular branch of the military had originally bestowed the moniker was unclear.
He was almost entirely bald, save for a wispy fringe of white hair, the texture of pillow batting, that dotted his age-spotted scalp. He had a slight hunch to his shoulders that never seemed, as many do, a posture of sadness and dejection at the weight of life, but a friendly slouch, the sign of comfort in the presence of friends.
Dressed mostly in those cottony button-downs sported only by old men, he vacillated between lucidity, confusion and detachment, as all who are slipping deeper into age do. But even so, I rather liked Major.
We had a daily exchange, which was repeated with surprising accuracy at each meal, a script with virtually no improvisation that went, pretty much exactly, like this:
“What’s you’re name? Anne Marie?”
“No, Major. My name’s Colby.”
“That’s right, I know that. [turning to Jack] Did you know that? I knew that.”
And then we would go about the business of faux restaurant work, each meal ending with a request for ice cream and black coffee that I was usually able to oblige, thanks to my special friendship with Hector, the cook.
Hector was Puerto Rican and spoke both Spanish and English strangely, like he was a jack-of-all-languages, master of none. He had fading tattoos in the badass genre – busty women, slogans splashed across rippling ribbons – from his youth spent in some Puerto Rican street gang in New York City. He called me Miss America and assured me that his gang bore little resemblance to West Side Story, though he conceded that such a reality would have been more entertaining, once I recounted the musical’s premise.
Hector was never averse to me slipping Major some ice cream on non-ice cream days.
There were other girls who had this verbal ritual with Major, all somewhat-slender brunettes, but none so much as I. They would be mistaken for the mysterious Anne Marie only every so often, usually on Major’s less-cogent days.
I never asked Major who the real Anne Marie was. I always felt like it would be disrespectful to the integrity of the exchange, like an actor taking liberties with Shakespeare. It felt untoward.
But my friends were curious, didn’t venerate the custom like I did. So one of the two male servers queried Major twice. Once, he said that she was a beautiful woman he used to know. The second time, he said, rather less generically, that she was a woman to whom he used to give $20 every week, because her husband was a terrible man and she was an excellent and beautiful woman.
And that was it. She was a beautiful, badly married woman in receipt of a weekly sum of $20.
We speculated, of course, on who she may have been, to burn such an indelible impression into Major’s brain, a glittering memory that remained intact even as the rest of his mind was falling to entropy.
A prostitute? A mistress? A family member? A former lover? Simply a friend? Who knew. Certainly she had entered and left Major’s life long before his acquaintance with anyone at Iris Place, so our efforts to mine other, sharper minds were futile.
And I found that, though my imagination conjured up an image of myself with pin curls, a shirt dress and the glamorous, deep-red lipstick that seemed to disappear with the 40s, I did not need to know who Anne Marie was, really. Major saw in me some of her, and because she was so vivid in his memory, I did not need her to be as vivid in mine.
When I left Iris Place to move to London, I made my rounds to each table, saying my goodbyes.
I bid farewell to all the Dorothys – Crazy Dorothy, who once threw a turkey sandwich at me and was ever attempting to seduce a poor man more senile than she, Northern Dorothy, who told me I would look good in red nail polish and replied, in her thick New-York-yenta’s accent, “honey, I’m not a sports-on-TV kind of person,” when I’d asked her about the Super Bowl once, Angry Dorothy, who spent nearly every waking moment by the phone in the dining room, flipping through her tiny address book and calling every family member she could think of, alternately threatening to disinherit them or giving them cryptic instructions to access safe-deposit boxes in exchange for her release from Iris Place (she also called grapes “berries” and would berate you loudly if they came within feet of her).
I gave final greetings to my favorite table, two men and two women who were, without exception, the funniest human beings I’ve ever encountered and whose jokes were simultaneously witty, erudite, childish and bawdy.
I hugged the woman who looked only 45, but was, in fact, 70 and had just returned from a holiday to Antarctica.
And finally, I visited Major and Jack for the last time. I gave Jack a hug, and turned to Major, telling him that this was my last day. Ever the professional, he recited his line flawlessly.
“What’s your name? Anne Marie.”
“Yes, Major,” I replied, “it is.”
His eyes sparked with the burning embers of both lucidity and recognition, and he looked into mine, as though he knew that I was, at once, both lying and telling the truth.
“Well hello,” he said, with a warm and knowing smile, “it’s so good to see you again.”
I’m pretty sure this isn’t named “Fruit Loop Dregs Floating in Milk” or “Breakfast’s End.” But it should be.
(Source: curioos-arts)
i miss everywhere on the earth but here.
cairo’s teem at sunset
inked onto the flimsy page
makes me homesick
for the world.
st. james’ park in winter
floating across the silver screen
makes my soles itch
to touch down
on every other shore.
mizrahi hip-hop’s bass and whine
crackling deeply in the speaker paper
makes my eyes long
to see the cobbles
of every city’s avenues.
planted in the place
so long labeled home
i miss everywhere on the earth
but here.
sometimes i don’t give a shit about life
and sometimes i give far too many.
i can smell the goodwill in the sweater next to me
and see the spotty flakes in the cold dregs of tea
and feel the pinch of the jacquard wrapped around my feet.
and i wonder if the sweater or shoe or tea
is that particular part of life that gives a shit about me.
