Friday 31 October 2008

The first time I touched my husband was right around Halloween, in 1996 before a Smashing Pumpkins concert at the Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The coliseum’s bathrooms smelled like cardboard soaked in beer. I’d go there with my parents for the circus or the Home and Garden show when I was small and get existential anxiety over the fact that the place was so much older than I was.

Kids lined up in the same arena for elephant rides during circus intermissions decades before I was born, and over the years the place had become not only mythical but also really, really dirty. To cope, I turned the structure of the building into junk food. The walls were chocolate ice cream sandwiches mortared together with vanilla icing. The lights were a million wintergreen lifesavers lighting up on command. Somehow, by making the place edible, going there became bearable.

So I was in the Memorial Coliseum again, a college freshman with this tremendous crush on a sophomore with big hair and slight hips and burgundy Doc Martens. I waited for him in the lobby, scanning the doors. When he finally fished through the crowd and found me we hugged intuitively, for the first time, for a while. Once, driving in a car with other people, he fell asleep and I touched the sleeve of his cardigan and it lit me up. But it was nothing like this.

People fanned around us. We could have been the drinking fountain, the trash can, the vending machine. Or something edible, as fantastic as wintergreens, sparking in time.

Thursday 30 October 2008

Late fall makes me want to re-organize, probably because around Halloween was when, as a kid, we’d get our house ready for winter. Leaves were raked and bagged, the screen door was changed to a storm door, and lawn chairs were moved into the shed.

It’s a strange dowry, how everything in your parent’s house became yours by inheritance. We’re a nation born into sauce pans and light bulbs, worn-in couch pillows, salad dressing, and telephones.

Wednesday 29 November 2008

It gets light so late now that when fire trucks roared through Capitol Hill waking up my street earlier this week, nobody knew if it was midnight or 7 a.m. An apartment building on Bellevue caught fire. The structure was mostly abandoned, but tragically a man still living inside one of the units became trapped and died.

Every fall my elementary school held an assembly about fire safety. The principal, Mr. Stebbe, urged each student to make a family escape plan in case of house fires. One year, my mom volunteered to make our house the safe harbor on the block. We put a little orange sign with a home inside a heart in the front window. It meant that if your house caught fire and you couldn’t find your parents, you could come to ours.

I wondered when it would happen–it could have been any night–that kids like kittens would scratch on our screen door and run inside smelling like burnt toast. We’d give them matzoh ball soup late at night. We’d turn the porch light on so that parents could find their kids sprawled across our living room with new socks, wrapped up in blankets my grandmother crocheted. Everything they owned could have just burnt up, sure. But we were a safe harbor, a salve.

I keep imagining the sleeping man who died on my street Monday waking up and escaping instead. Maybe he’d find an orange safe harbor sign at the coffee place Bauhaus or Edie’s, the shoe store across the street. Neighbors would take him in and he’d have new shiny boots and hot chocolate and could watch everything burn with everybody else, the building becoming an effigy instead of his body.

Tuesday 28 October 2008

The passing from lighter to darker days doesn’t have a sound so much as a scent. The lessoning of light smells like someone else’s burning clove, fresh ground coffee, freezer burnt vegetables; it’s the rubber on the bottom of a new shoe, a jug of sour wine, a moth-balled sweater. It’s like breakfast for dinner, waking up before sunrise and leaving work after sunset.

Everybody’s touching everybody else’s head, as if to say, “Think along with me. Get ready. These short days are going to happen so that the rest can feel long. And if you need it, you can always find a loop of light inside a clear bulb, whiter than the triple e icing on top of a Hostess cupcake.”

Monday 27 October 2008

Jesus Mary and Joseph it’s a beautiful day.

Friday 24 October 2008

Thick clouds, low 50s

This morning I went to the Crumpet Shop in Pike Place Market for groats. The word, I learned, is related to grits, but the hulled oats taste more like hominy. You can get a huge bowl with frothy milk, currents, and honey for a few dollars. I brought Sophie’s World to breakfast, a book that I really should have read in college.

I have a philosophy minor and am ashamed to say I remember so little…Plato’s cave, Cratilus’ finger wave, Occam’s Razor, Foucault’s Panopticon, really basic logic. So this book about a 15 year-old girl who takes an Alice in Wonderland dive into the history of philosophy is surprisingly good for me.

I was half-reading, half-watching the owner of the Crumpet Shop, a woman in her 50s with pink-tipped wispy hair, pouring batter into molds and popping out hot crumpets in a rhythm you only get while working with your hands…crocheting through the loop, scrubbing the toilet, pressing leaves.

Then for this second, everything became mythic. The groats were manna, the book was sacred, the baker’s mixing and shifting was wind. Typical Seattle gray gave space to flannel brown, red, and green.

Thursday 23 October 2008

The Coast Guard just rescued four living, breathing fishermen, found floating belly-up in the Bering Sea. Later, another vessel named The Courageous found one of seven dead bodies—the crew was made up of eleven men total–drifting away.

I once met a man who spent winters on fishing boats in Alaska. He would work in wild, harsh places in the coldest months to earn enough to paint and travel in the summer. He’d come back to Seattle in the spring with longer hair and new lines around his eyes. I always imagined that the skin around his palms was especially rough but was afraid to touch them.

On a day like this one in Seattle, high clouds passing from visible to invisible, it’s hard to think of it. You’ve fallen off a wrecked ship near Sitka, life vest bobbing up and into ice water. You think about how, in the vest, the water is a mattress. How you’d do anything to be dry and held together in a thick featherbed. How crab season is coming up after cod season. How you are famished.

Now you understand how hunger works. It’s an itch that spreads from back to torso. Your appetite grows when it’s fed, and as much as food feeds you, so does water. You decide then that, if you survive, you’ll fish through crab season. Because the weakness you feel when you’re away from the water–the thing that’s nearly taken you–only doubles the need.

Wednesday 22 October 2008

Sometimes novelists write characters in this way that feels so confident and tart. Eat a plate of milk and cookies, nod your head with satisfaction, curl a lock of hair behind your ear, crack your knuckles.

That’s how today feels. There’s this crisp, confident thing happening. Like the sky’s saying, “Hell yeah, I can really do this. I can down roles of Lifesavers and whole sleeves of saltines.”

Tuesday 21 October 2008

This morning it was too cold to go outside until the sun hit the top of Capitol Hill, so I kept cleaning. I swept the wood floors, made the bed, and washed my oatmeal bowl. I washed my face twice and shaved.

When I finally started walking downtown, I noticed that the best blush was already almost gone, red leaves all over the wet sidewalk. It happens so quickly every year that I have to stop and say, “This is when fall begins. With this walk. Past this tree.”

Someone stuffed an old blanket through a wooden porch frame on Bellevue. I would have stopped right there, wrapped myself up and sat down, waited out the morning if I’d known you were going to walk by.