Friday 16 December 2009

wintercraft.

Wednesday 14 January 2009

It’s like closing up a summer house, when the stillness of winter washes over cities. The snow Seattle was handed around the holidays made the buildings downtown look like they were covered with old floral sheets, windy across what could have been wicker chairs and wooden tables post-Labor Day.

My grandparents used to have this table at their lake house in Michigan with open-mouthed lions perched stately on each of its corners. I used to feed the lions bits of hot dog or spaghetti at our last dinner just before Labor Day. When the snow melted and we’d return in the Spring, I’d run into the house right after I arrived and check each lion for dried up bits of food, my mark from the year before. What I’d left waiting all winter for a warm hand.

Tuesday 13 January 2009

I didn’t grow up rich, but as a kid I used to stay in rich-people hotels in Chicago with my parents. Why we did this is another story entirely involving craps, the band Megadeath, and a horrible craving for Ritz burgers.

No no no, don’t get the wrong idea, that I had a wildly privileged country club youth. I was then and am now firmly middle-class, and the Ritz Carlton has faded into a fuzzy, somehow embarrassing part of my childhood.

So all I ever wanted to do in these rich hotels was swim. And the Ritz has this palatial, dome-roofed lap pool. To get there, you have to walk through a locker room filled with wet saunas and Q-tip jars on vanities and hair blowers.

Inevitably the locker room was also filled with old, crinkly women completely in the nude, just hanging out after water aerobics. Hordes of them prancing around from the wet sauna to the shower, diffusing hair or putting on earrings. Nobody wore a towel, I supposed because these women were filthy rich. I reasoned that, when you very likely had bathtubs full of money back home in Aspen, why would you need to hide behind terry cloth robes with embroidered lions on the breast?

Today at the gym, I walked in the locker room and right in front of me there was a woman, naked and sort of prancing between the lockers. In the locker room, women are naked all the time. And it’s a really beautiful thing. All this skin of all these colors come in different shapes and moves differently. We all become one woman somehow, which feels very honest.

But this lady today, the way she was arched and fluttering around put my mind back into my body as a kid. I’m at the Ritz, wearing a bathing suit with a big pineapple on the front, trying to tip toe around a happy-sad parade into cool, deep water.

Thursday 8 January 2009

People are burning leaves, ironing pants, peeling vegetables–really existing next to the abyss. Turns out that the tallest part of the ocean is devastatingly close to big, weighty cities like Tokyo and Manila.

At thirty-six thousand feet, the Challenger Deep in the Pacific is the darkest, deepest part of the ocean.

If you sliced Mt. Everest off its base, flipped it on its back and pegged it into this oceanic trench, water would still cover the mountain’s peak by a mile.

Which I used to not be able to run as a kid. I mean, the first time I ran a mile I went out for margaritas. It was a big deal. And one mile is just a pinch of salt on top of all that earth and water.

Tuesday 16 December 2008

My wife’s hands are in her lap, and she’s sitting in front of wallpaper with nymphs and satyrs. She’s listening to Edith Piaf, humming a Sam Cooke song, and thinking about a snowy cul-de-sac on the Peninsula. It’s gaudy, hallowed, and such a gorgeous pity.

Monday 8 December 2008

I listen to local radio when I can’t sleep because I know somebody is in the booth at any hour. It’s a good sad, that the “on air” light blinks in a dark hall for nobody’s benefit. There’s a comfort in the very idea third shift, the sound of cars on the state highway I can hear from bed, and all of the trains huffing past the bay.

One summer in New York, D and I were on our roof in the Village at 4 a.m., arms flopped off the side, just watching people walk around. A skateboarder, a firefighter, and a woman in heels walking her dog eating an ice cream cone passed by. Watching people so awake when everyone in the building under us must have been asleep made the city a good enough place to stay put.

At night, to communicate without communicating may be a half-comfort but it’s a comfort all the same. Watching and listening can get you through a heavy winter, re-placing a need to be accounted for with a need to co-exist. It’s an insomniac’s bread and butter.

Friday 5 December 2008

Madrona and the empty trees