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diaryland
turning and turning in
09 January 2007 - 06:03
I was sitting in a coffee shop, eavesdropping on strangers, as usual. Nearby sat two men, one quite old and the other younger.
Older: "I just wanted a cuppa joe. Not a latte, a mocha. Just a plain old... You know, I've been seeing people I used to know lately. Not used to know personally, but I was watching [I forget the name he said] and I saw the accordion player from Lawrence Welk."
I wasn't sure whether the older man was a bit out of it or not, but his younger companion took all he had to say in stride. He made validating statements and seemed very sincere to me. I marveled at his patience and his ability to converse in a graceful and positive way.
And then it occurred to me how many other ways there were to view the conversation. For example, perhaps the older man was completely lucid, and instead of being accommodating the younger man was being patronizing. Even if that weren't true, someone might have that interpretation. What was to say my own interpretation was correct at all?
It became obvious to me that my interpretation of the conversation had very little to do with its content or with the character of those conversing, but instead it pointed to my own conceptualization of the world; my own standards, guidelines, and preferences; my feelings about myself.
I weaved through Northeast Portland on my way home, purposefully taking a long route as the sun set invisible behind the clouds. I saw what I can only call my personal visual triggers -- small aesthetic details that recall another world, another life, another time. A weather vane of a certain shape, a white gazebo on a hill. The beauty of the trees and houses in my city filled me with heady rapture (and perhaps my own "cuppa joe" helped this feeling grow). I thought, I wish I could be born again, understanding the world as I do now, with all my memories intact from the moment I take my first breath.
And then I understood that to have some of these realizations is, in itself, to be born again.
***
Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of watertrucks and now then the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.
--Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
(best beginning sentence for a book in recent memory)
