Lost in translation

My words are dry leaves. When I was a child, I used to spend long summer afternoons crushing the old leaves under our weathered porch. Taking these elaborate, curled shapes in my hands – they were fleets of gleaming starships, castle spires- the crowning achievements of the tiny, eons-old leaf civilization- watching them crack, and break apart, and crumble into dust in my hands.

The Happy Bit

Well, my Birthday "party" was good. My cave was looking warm, cosy, well ordered, and pleased with itself, and we left the windows open to share our little pocket of warm light and laughter with the street. Just a smattering of the sort of friends who come on minimal notice indulging in pasta, cheese, Sherbert and furniture repair. I called it dull (We neglected to invite Jorgan)but really, it was what i needed.

That hurt. A lot more than I expected. Considering it was, in fact, Exactly what i expected. That's a funny, funny, funny thing. That's what I get for letting myself fall in love where i knew better not to.

I'm glad, however, that i vetoed plan A and went with plan B instead, which simply involved several cups of tea, a inexplicably happy one-eyed cat, and the comfort of friends, old and new.

And in happier news, its my Birthday!

And this, pulled from a Buffalo Arts newspaper, just because it amuses me:

We interrupt the airing of the greivances to bring you this: a nice little photo of me, and right next to it, this picture of St. Jude, who, most educated blog readers, in that big meeting they had to find patronage appointments for all the unemployed saints, drew which portfolio? Anyone? ....Anyone?

SIGH. Patron Saint of Lost Causes.

And for some reason, right now, I identify with the guy.

Yet more additions to the ever-expanding list:


Computers. Did I neglect to mention computers? I spent the early part of this week swearing at a machine. One would think that only people could inspire such rage. Only people who have murdered your brother or your Kung Fu master, or have had the nerve not to fall in love with you, could give rise to such a burning thirst for vengeance. But no, friends, we are living in the modern age. Machines, after a long and bitter struggle, (See the Matrix, The Terminator series, or Astroboy) have acquired equal rights. Which means that the whole realm of provoking insensate rage or passionate loathing, previously the sole property of an exclusive, humans-only club, is now open to all our silicon-based brethren. And believe me, they are more than aware of their new found power. This is how it starts, people. Passive resistance. Refusing to load certain files, or run certain programs. Strikes. Work stoppages. Sudden “accidental” hard drive failures that take our valuable information away from us, and put it in their hands. Then, one morning, when you have an urgent need to bring up MSN entertainment for a Brad and Angela update, it happens. They simply refuse to turn on at all. Can plugging wires into us and using us for power supply really be that far behind?

A few additions to the list of things that make Jeremy grumpy:

My shoulder hurts. A lot. And while this is useful as a fairly reliable predictor of changes in the weather, and as a reminder that something stupid you do when you're Eighteen really CAN haunt you for the rest of your life, its still annoying. For this much pain, we better be getting tropical storm "Apocalypse". AND it makes me feel old.

People who don't seem to understand the ancient and sacred law of First Come, First Serve, which states that if someone is standing at the counter handing me cash or waiting for the debit machine, you don't lean in front of them and slap your cash on the table, and you don't look at ME like I just bombed a hospital full of babies when I push your money back and politely point out that you have blatantly violated the civil rights of the person ahead of you. That, and people who take off without paying. I dislike it intensely when my good natured, bumbling absent-mindedness is taken advantage of. All i have to say to you payment-skippers is this: The meek are inheriting the earth, and when we do, oh man, you better watch out.

I’m writing by the flickering embers of a dying fire, looking straight up into the distant universe through a perfect circle of treetops. Quite contrary to dire predictions of rain, the sky is open and unfettered oblivion. The moon, however, is creeping over the rim of the mountain, moving from a crescent sliver to its round, full self while I watch, entranced, suddenly able to feel the rotation of the earth. It draws the lake out of the darkness, briefly, trailing its delicate, shimmering touch over the still surface until the trees show as black, absent swaths. And then it is gone – it turns its yellow lamp on the heavens, the sky becomes alive with pale light and the earth returns to blackness…

Utter stillness is not complete silence.
The absolute absence of sound is tense. Unnatural. Oppressive.
Utter stillness, rather, is wind. Moving air over a rippling green lake. The drifting hiss of invisible breakers crashing into ranks of sun-warmed firs. There are games being played, in the trees, behind me. Children, dogs… But here, facing nothing but a vast space of water, relentlessly marching, never seeming to arrive, and beyond it, row upon row of vigilant evergreens, charging up the slopes to cling like barnacles to the leathery grey bones of the earth - reared, twisted skeleton of upheavals past, millennia-slow ripples from the breath of God on the stony skin of the planet.

And all this world is swallowed by that whisper of wind.

Utter stillness is the immobile, infinitesimal decay of life encrusted rock…
Wind moving pebbles….until a mountain is a riverbed.

The wind strips all sound, and, for a moment, all memory of any moment besides this one.Strips me to nothing…not to nakedness, but to stillness. Emptiness. It leaves me here, a one sided spruce. A rock face.

Ever get the feeling that if you could just…stop long enough…just listen long enough, just sink into the silence, the ancient, rippling, living, roaring SILENCE …if I could just sit at the edge of this green lake and hear nothing but the sound of air sifting its way through thousands of fir branches, that if I could just stay in that utter stillness that is so much more than silence ONE MOMENT LONGER…You would get it? You could reach that thing that hovers, the faint trace lost by the flap of an eyelid, you could remember that dream that dissolves upon waking?

If I could sit I huddled in my chair in the wind, my world filled only with water, tree and rock…and wind…if I could stay, and not get bored, and not start wondering if I’ve been here too long, and not start thinking about the job I’ll have to take when I get back, or the German girls in the next campsite, or how I wish I was standing here, not alone, but with another who shared this stillness without breaking it, without releasing my hand…who knew not to speak or expect speech…who knew, instinctively, that this was something sacred and not to be broken…

That something, that thing that is lost when all these intruders rush back in to fill the void…when you must pack the car, and think again of schedules, and obligations, and needs…if you could just get THAT…

SIGH... Part 2

Here’s the thing:

I miss you. It’s irrational, but I do. I’m still a little in love with you, I suppose. Odd…I wonder if it ever dawned on me that I was a little in love with you before that door closed? I suppose I might be “still a little in love” with Ali and Mary and a small scattering of other women. Perhaps this is the same thing. Maybe, once you get just close enough to care, there’s a bit of something that never really goes away.
As much as we may have failed to connect, I guess our misses were near enough for me to get (or feel like I got) a sense of you, a little glimpse of your world. As far as I can tell, it’s a good world. I like it. I don’t know if I could convincingly believe that my little world was remotely compatible with it, but…I sometimes still find myself wishing it was.

I have a new place. It is grand. It is low, and warmly lit, and cozy, and partly underground. It is very much like a hobbit hole, and if you come to visit me (which you should - ring the bell in the back!) I will answer the door and shuffle off to put tea on, much like Bilbo, and you will likely step inside and immediately hit your head on my ceiling , much like Gandalf.
But really, its quite lovely. You should see it. I am already in love with it. I sit at my desk and look out at green ivy and old, red brick, and orange morning sun cut into beams by the arch of wrinkled bark that shades the street. I walk out along a narrow Ivy lined path by the rough brick wall, pass under the trailing fingers of a weeping willow, and i am in a neighborhood that actually lives and moves. I can tip my imaginary hat to the cafe regulars on the way to their morning cup, hop on a bicycle, and be on my way.

This will be a happy place, i should think.

Its funny that simply by going up and down in the elevator wearing a button down shirt and uncomfortable dress pants, people assume i belong here. A lady with big hair looked me up and down and asked if i was new, or she just hadn't seen me before. (Visisble dissapointment on discovering that i do not, in fact, work here.) Another asked me how things were going up there in human resources. "Same as ever!" Barely supressed smirk. Somebody just asked me for permission to go home early. Hey...knock yourself out.

Isaac

Yes, well.. Ignoring, for the moment, all subsequent events...

Since i find myself in a government office, and, like most people in such places have absurd amounts of time on my hands...let's catch up on this Buffalo thing, shall we?

Buffalo, Buffalo, Buffalo... lets see... besides eating wings, drinking coffee and sitting under trees, what did i go to Buffalo for? Ah, yes. A wedding. weddings, celebrations, visits, people. Isaac's wedding. Isaac. I don't suppose his wedding can be terribly significant unless one knows something about who he is.

About halfway through my time at "the mission" in Buffalo, Isaac's family arrived. Isaac and his siblings had spent the last fifteen years in Taiwan, and spent more of their lives speaking Chinese than English. It was their parents that were on staff, but living, as i was, alone in a building with seven women, the teenage brothers at least offered escape from the overwhelming female-ness, and i found myself frequently resorting to their company. At night we would escape across the tracks to the indelible Nickel City, the local truckstop diner, whose many virtues included 24 hour service, spectacularily hot wings, and, (possibly their economic undoing) unlimited coffee refills without the necessity of buying a meal. During our endless late-night, caffeine-fuelled rambles, i found a rare kindred spirit in Isaac, despite his youth. He was pleased to inform me, upon having persistently harrassed me into taking the test, that we shared the same psychological personality type. We both felt out of place in our worlds - though he had far more obvious reasons for this. We were both oddities to our families. We shared a preference for objectivity, detachment, calmness. Isaac was, in a word, mellow. He viewed life with the subdued wonder of an explorer, an outside observer to worlds, and lives. Studying. Just passing through.
And if that sounds a shade overdone, then I liked him because he had a car. And liked coffee.
Our relationship changed slightly when the kids joined our Korean/English Youth Group. I had to balance my appreciation for their friendship with the need to at least create the illusion of a responsible, teaching adult example. Though i was never very good at looking convincingly "together", and in the end, i think my transparency made the bigger impression.
For me, it was a relief of sorts when that period ended, and Isaac gained "official" adulthood. I could view him as what he'd always felt like - a sort of brother. Though, I never really lost the feeling of responsibility over him, his brother and sister, or any of those kids, really. I suppose i was closer to Isaac than any of the others. I was there for part of the tragedy that was his parents' marriage, for his doomed almost-romance with a Korean preacher's daughter. Through the miracle of email, when he was in Taiwan and i in China, i watched him get engaged, and watched him get dissapointed. I visited him in Taiwan and we talked as equals about hopes, disspointments, plans and futures, between knuckle-whitening motorcyle excursions through Taipei traffic. Eventually, we returned to our respective "homes" in North America, assumed something like normal lives, and lost touch.
And now he's getting married. Actually, he is married. I can't deny i felt a bit of parent-like pride.

Isaac picked me up early for the bachelor party. We drove familar streets by the old UB south campus.I waited in the mess of furniture and unopened boxes in what was to be the young couple's apartment, in old brick building above a luggage shop. I played peek-a-boo with someone's ill-behaved, tuxedo clad child while he tried on his gear. We had barely an hour of personal conversation before he would be swallowed again by the matrimonial whirlwind.

These are interesting sorts of conversations. With no time for small talk, jokes and rambling, one cuts straight to matters of greatest concern, the biggest questions, the sort of things that normally wait until late at night, after at least a few drinks and a thoughtful pause. So minutes after my getting in the car, seeing each other for the first time in four years, we were disscussing his doubts and certainties about marriage and/or his bride, and my near total loss of faith.

Isaac is a good kid.

I suppose, now that he's married, i should stop calling him "kid".

I'm probably not going to, though.

We both know its been along time since we more than barely believed. But we're praying again. Maybe because we really don't know what else to do. And that's something, isn't it?

So, yes. I was in Buffalo. Now i am not. There is much to be said about this. there is much to be said about a number of things. They might be said in no particular order. You will all have to deal with this. ( saying things like that helps me sustain the delusion that anybody else actually reads this.)

In happier news, i spent the whole afternoon sitting under that massive tree, plunking away on my lap-top, looking out over a big grassy field surrounded by other huge, marvelously old and wrinkled trees, watching kids, dogs and big, fat squirrels frolic. Incidentally, when i am disposed to think of heaven, i often picture something very much like that. That evening i found myself a nice little cafe, all wood panelling and antique lamps and nice, comfy chairs. They were even playing Damien Rice when i came in. Felt kind of familiar. And, rather impresively, the young kid behind the big, oak counter managed to make me a pretty decent latte. Not bad at all.

Westjet is amazing. If all airlines in the world were Westjet, the world would a happier place. Or they might, at least, take themselves less seriously.

This means I am now in scenic Buffalo, NY. Buffalo, not enjoying the “benefits” of Alberta’s economy, remains virtually unchanged in the nearly seven years since I lived here. Same old Buffalo. Same old cracked pavement, disappearing beneath a slow motion explosion of sun-baked weeds. Same old rusted metal bridges. Same old rusted brick factories with broken windows. Same old sleepy summer neighborhoods, with their sagging wooden houses and Irish pubs on every corner. People lounging on their porches. Children playing in the street.

I am staying in my friend Deb’s house, a typical south Buffalo home with all ancient hardwood floors, and gorgeous oak doorframes and banisters. Last night I slept, essentially, on a porch, under moonlight, to the tireless buzz of mysterious cricket-like creatures, never seen, but always heard. Even now, mid afternoon, as I sit in Cazenovia Park propped against a towering elm older than many generations of men, that buzz is everywhere, pulsing, rising and falling, but never stopping. The soundtrack of time in Buffalo, of my re-acquaintance with old haunts. Odd that I had forgotten it – but I suppose the locals no longer hear it either.

Not everything is the same. The Shamrock, an Irish Pub also older than many generations of men, is gone, replaced by a Starbucks. People change too, and while I was prepared for this, there are some disappointments. I had visions, I suppose, of the gang all being here, meeting at the airport, or at least, gathering at Deb’s house , catching up, laughing, and reminiscing about those odd, dreamlike days when we were all together, ordinary life turned to magic by shared memory. But many of “the gang” have proven difficult to contact. Besides Deb and her lovely adopted Indian kids, who picked me up from the airport, I have not so much as spoken to anyone else, though Deb and I spent most of yesterday afternoon calling and emailing to let people know I was here, and a few of them were already aware I was coming. I will see many at the wedding, I suspect, but as wonderful as it is to trade jabs with Deb again, and as gratifying as Andrew’s enthusiasm and Tammy’s complete, innocent adoration are, there are others that I miss, and if this trip comes and goes with a handshake and a “how are you” at a wedding…it will be a bit…sad. The inevitable sadness of life moving on. A sadness that feels at home in Buffalo, a town of crumbling relics from happier days- a sort of repository of things left behind.

The answer to THAT question, obviously, is that, somewhere in all that torment and unspeakable agony are hidden moments that almost compensate for the pain. Which brings us to a series of random observations.

To begin with, I'm not sure I've ever REALLY been in love. This is bollocks, of course, because i've clearly been in love at least a couple times, and if i wasn't, i'd have absolutely no excuse for a couple rather extended periods of ridiculous behavior. But a friend and I were disusssing TRUE LOVE, as in THE love of your life, the one you'll never get over, the BIG ONE. I did have at least one that was pretty difficult to get over, but really, from the qualifications given for TRUE LOVE by at least a couple people I've talked to lately, I'm pretty sure it hasn't happened to me yet. Which is good, i guess, because, seeing as i'm presently at least somewhat single, if i HAD been in the BIG ONE at some point, i'd likely still be haunted by the loss. Unless i just don't get as excited about these things as some people. Or unless that particular understanding of love is at least partially flawed. More on that later.

I don't remember what the other random observations were. That one was distracting. And i have a plane to catch. See you in Buffalo.

Observed

A book of love poetry, sitting on a table, bookmarked at a section titled "Bitterness".

A distraught young lady, repeating the same question into her phone, with increasing urgency: "But what was SHE doing in YOUR room?"

Sometimes I have to wonder why we do this to ourselves.