Of Gardens & Glances

One of my favorite lyrics is from a Nick Cave song, Far From Me: 

“Then the sun would leave your pretty face. And you’d retreat from the front of your eyes.” 

The rest of song is lovely but kinda bleak. This line though, what a magic little moment it creates. I love watching people when they’ve retreated like that, turned inward, when they’re thinking about something or watching someone or something else. You’re so vulnerable and human when you’re doing that. We’ve all got our secret gardens we retreat to. Spying on people when they’re in there makes me feel more connected to humanity. What creep, eh? 

In lockdown, the sun left all our pretty faces, and we had to retreat from the front of our lives. Back here floating in the deep space of our solitude, I did not get to engage in my habit of audience watching (an important subset of people watching). No rock shows spent peeking at people transported on an elixir of riffs and stage lighting. No movies to glance over my shoulder and see faces awash in the endorphin glow of Hollywood cheese. 

I did get to peek into people’s windows at night, out in the wet cold, as I beat the streets of the blocks around my home “for the dog” (for me).

I also spied on my kind husband as we watched our nightly comedic episodes. If I look over and he’s smiling at joke, all cute and vulnerably boyish, it gives me a jolt of raw joy. Off topic, but one grim night of lockdown when we were stumped to find any cotton-candy content to send us off to a happy sleep — t’was a season of drowning in the churn of the news cycle and we’d long since finished every last good episode of every good show — Mark thought back a few weeks and wistfully stated, “Ted Lasso was the best thing we had going for us.” In the universe of that 2020 moment, it was True.

Thursday Three

1. Bruce & Barack’s Podcast Renegades

Despite the Boss wearing much too much makeup in his recent blue-collar Superbowl commercial (that earned him white-collar coin), I respect his influence and oeuvre. The River, gah. What a song. Now, listening to him shoot the shit with Michelle Obama’s husband about being a dad and about their dads, about going on road trips and chasing girls and growing up poor in two different Americas, well, I would recommend. With age comes emotional intelligence and the ability to see your life in context — part of human culture and history. You can look back and start understanding the big What Happened, to you, and to your country. That’s just what they do.

2. Falling Back Asleep To The Rain

You think you’re invincible to sleep for the day, that your battle has been won and now you’ll climb down the ladder to ignite a cup of coffee. But then the rain starts a rattle on the corrugated roof, birds sing their spring morning song, smells of deepest forest climb through the dusty window screen and … 

3. Going Gray

I never liked my hair color, it was always too noncommittal. So I spent my youth committing in the extreme. In high school: purple, blue, and green Manic Panic, and once I went black at the tips (think: goth, not ombre). In college: bleach turned my roots an incandescent blonde but the rest of my mop a horror of orange. The white roots created the unsettling illusion that I was balding. I gave up dying my hair a few years back after developing a specific aversion to the way dyed hair looks. (Artificial, dishonest.) And fuck, it was too much work to keep up, which upon self examination I wasn’t doing for me — but rather for “them.” These days, the hair at my temples has turned white. Finally something interesting! 

Spring On 57th Street

April arrives and the sun peeks out. I crawl out of my home like a little mouse. Walking amidst the magnolia boughs of 57th Street, I wade through memories of last spring. You know. Back then. When we were fresh with all the new horrors, obligations and responsibilities of 2020.

In these recent days I’ve been taking stock and recontextualizing, mostly trying to understand. I can’t quite say I’m nostalgic about last spring but it definitely feels like we’ve come through something — something bigger than just winter.

Apropos of that, I read a passage recently by Mary Oliver in her memoir Upstream — which was published about a century ago in 2016 and so has nothing to do with the hard truths of the past year. Still it reads as so specifically about us, about now. It energized me to find that spark of recognition across the distance, years and breadth of human experience. And ain’t that what’s so grand about reading? 

“In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _____. But I don't know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith — only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.”

Spring Deprogramming

To a Portlander in March, the sun is a schedule 1 narcotic. I never hear mention of this: but all of the Northwest is not created equal on the rain/gloom spectrum — Portland’s the legit gloomiest. Leaden clouds hanging over the Willamette River Valley 110% of the time. Many days you can hop on the highway and a few exits east skies are wide open and the sun abides … I digress.

This spring my aura was the color of dirty dishwater and it really needed work. I blame the darkness of the desk jockey life, aka work from home, aka work with zero boundaries.

March came around and I headed off on my annual spring deprograming. This year I went to the desert — not quite local but not quite exotic either. Let’s just say, within the limits of the CDC’s guidelines for not losing your shit in 2021. 

Newsflash: Out in the desert, there are no Douglas Firs. It hit me, I’ve always been in trees. Never not brushing by branches, slouching under forest fronds. But these wild and free landscapes? Sprinkled with pokies catching the sunlight just right? The desert’s like a float tank for my brain. I can breathe.  

In Tuscon, I paid a visit to an old timey friend from — shit, it’s impossible to say the last time I saw her. Probably at a bar that doesn’t exist anymore, the Laurelthurst or Hungry Tiger. Probably surrounded with crinkled tall cans. Anyway, pretty Emily now lives in a pink desert house that she’s slowly renovating in between feeding feral cats and singing Lucinda Williams. It put me in a candescent mood to talk shit for a couple hours, remembering the old days and looking forward to new ones. Straight outta the Guatemalan streets, her pup Abuela simply stole my heart.

In Northern Arizona, the best life decision I ever made was booking an accommodation with a window near the bed, so me and my baby could kick back, drink red wine, and watch the snow fall on fluted red rock. I’m glad I’m finally at the age where I make those kind of decisions for myself.  

The Sad Happies

In an old interview with Cameron Crowe, the god of the movie soundtrack, he said that his favorite music moment from his film catalogue was the ending scene of Say Anything, when John Cusack AKA Lloyd is packing up his room to The Replacements’ Within Reach. 

That scene gives you that perfect conflicted feeling that’s so human and real: incredibly sad yet strangely happy. “That’s my favorite way to feel,” says Crowe.

It's raining and the smell of things outside hasn't quite ticked over from winter (dead stuff, storms up north) into spring (living stuff, deep damp warmth). My dad texted me some old photos from when my sister and I were just little pinecone sprouts back in Colorado. When I look at these photos, I’m filled with so much heliated joy and terrible heartache. It’s Cameron’s sad happies, all over again.

Do you get the sad happies when faced with memories of yourself from late-young childhood? I do. Maybe ’cause, having been one, I know that young girls are full of dark mysteries. And because like any good omniscient narrator I know what the future holds for my sister and me: As Nick Cave puts it, all the “small, yet cataclysmic devastations of life.” And because my dad is younger than I am now in that one pic, dungarees wearing and side-burns-farming, and I’ll never get to hang out and have beers with that cool dude as he was then. 

It’s all so damn wistful and the hardest thing to describe. The best sensations are like that — elusive and full of conflict. Like when you love people unbearably. Like when you can’t stay but it hurts to leave.

In my experience, whether it be memories or the feelings they bring — the heart is rarely afforded any relief. But you have your own 3X5s from way back when … so you already know what I mean.