Shuffle off

Saturday night I slept curled in a little ball, preserving the scant warmth my body was emitting. Although frost licks the rooftops in Buffalo, and we were wearing scarves and hats that afternoon, Doug still hadn't turned his heat on. Eventually, the air under the quilt was heated by my body, and I felt warm.

Aside from that, I had a great time. I met Doug for breakfast early that morning. We walked down Elmwood Avenue, one of the last parts of the city that hasn't given in to decay and poverty. It's still thriving--the place where all the young people want to be. We headed into Allentown, where the Towne Restaurant is still serving up chicken souvlaki and oily coffee (bottomless cups--great for poor college students).

Later, we drove out to the lake, past the old grain elevators that sit where Lake Erie meets the Buffalo River. Their massive silos have been vacant for decades. The industrial decay gave way quickly to windy, country roads. It was a bright sunny day, and the autumn leaves were at the peak of their fall color.

Doug was caretaking for a friend's cottage. It was just down the street from Mickey Ratts, a place I spent many summers convincing my mother to take me to. It's a place where twenty-somethings come on summer nights to drink Bud Light, play beach volleyball and pick each other up. By day, families lumber down the dirty sand beach (trucked in from somewhere, I'm sure) with their beach chairs and heavy coolers. As a 12-year old, it was the closest I could get to a day at the beach.

Though the cottage was less than a mile away, it was in a different universe. The small, white building was tucked in at the end of a row of houses and looked right out onto the water. Doug's friend was a photographer who spends his summers working weddings and his winters travelling through places like Bolivia and Kenya, which was what he was currently doing. I poked around the house to find bookshelves lined with art books, good literature and weighty volumes on cultural studies. His house smelled clean. His linens were laundered. I thought briefly of meeting him, starting an affair...stormy...exciting...then remembered I am married. Funny. I don't even know what he looks like, but his home told me enough.

Doug checked the mail and then we climbed down the steep wooden stairs to the beach.

I never realized that underneath Lake Erie lies a massive bed of shale. It was everywhere, along with smooth, rounded sandstone rocks. The sharpness of the shale against the sandstones seemed impossible. How could two types of rock so different get in one place? I chose a egg-shaped stone that was white and heavy to carry home in my suitcase.

And we walked, which is always the most fun way to spend time with Doug, because he is not distracted by a million other things. In the city, he was checking his cellphone, saying hi to people on the street, stepping into stores. But on the beach with only the water, the rocks and me we talked about writing and making music, old friends, and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

The beach was infested with ladybugs. They gathered on rocks, driftwood, dead leaves. Thousands of them. Were they dying? Mating? Laying eggs to hatch in the spring? We also discovered an odd form of water plant, the size and shape of a grapefruit, but bright green and covered with seed pods. Doug joked it was corn on the cob meets seaweed (meets christmas ornament, I added).

We walked until the beach ended, turned around and headed back until we came to a divey beach bar. We decided Baileys and coffee would hit the spot on a cool fall day.

The bar smelled like that combination of beer and stale cigarette smoke. It's the way every pool hall and bowling alley in the country smell, no matter what state you're in. College football was on the big screen TV. Doug told me a story about S.D. I had never heard. It filled in a piece of a puzzle for me. Something I had wondered about for a long time. Something that confirmed that the decisions I made long ago, based on gut intuition, were the right decisions. (That's vague, I know. I'm being purposely so.)

Though I could have stayed at the beach all night with a bottle of good red wine and a toasty fire in the fireplace at the cottage, we drove back to Buffalo for dinner. We stopped for pizza (as only you can get in Buffalo) and an extraordinary treat for a former WNY-er gone vegetarian: veggie chicken wings! Wedges of eggplant, breaded and fried, and doused in wing sauce (Frank's Red Hot and butter, if you must know) and served with a side of blue cheese sauce, celery and carrot sticks. Divine!

That night, we ended up at a house party. His roommate's band was playing there. The house was packed with college students mostly dressed as zombies (the undead was a a popular Halloween theme this year). We were the oldest people there.

As I waited for the bathroom, a guy in a Chewbacca suit asked me, "Whose place is this?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Cool. YOu know it's a good party when total strangers show up." Maybe it was his house and he was messing with me.

Down a flight of stairs and into a dark cavern of a basement, pipes exposed, and bent nails stuck dangerously out of big support beams. This was the kind of house that could have been part of the underground railroad, You could imagine secret passageways that were bricked off long ago. But that night, three men in nothing but white body paint, wifebeater t-shirts and tightie-whities were playing death metal. Their faces were painted to look like skulls. We lucked out, since we arrived right at the end of their set. The band we were there to see was up next: Knife Crazy, and they were good. A drummer, bass player and guitarist dressed up as two bananas and a hot dog (phallic?)

The skull band had only made peoples' heads bob, but two songs into Knife Crazy's set we saw it happen. A guy in front of us simply let himself fall sideways--started movement--created space. The tension broke. The dancing started. I was on beer #4 at that point, and more than happy to join. A John Cusack look-alike slammed into me, and made me spill my beer all over my coat, but I quickly forgave him. When was the last time I had the chance to be drunk at a basement punk show?

"DO YOU LIKE LAB COATS? I LIKE LAB COATS! LET'S BE SCIENTISTS!" they screamed.

After that, on to another bar with a Neil Diamond cover band (bad) and then to yet another party with another band. But soon, the eggplant chicken wings in my stomach were rising up against me, in cooperation with the amazing amount of beer I had consumed, so soon I found myself back at Doug's place to settle in for a cold, cold night.

Buffalo. It really is a beautiful city. It's old and crumbling. There's poverty and crime. But...it's cheap for exactly those same reasons, and that means that real artists, making real art can afford to live there. I saw it everywhere. There's art happening in basements and garages. Out of the decay of Buffalo comes creation. It's as if the death of the city creates a blank canvas available for the imagining of a new life.

Portland is a town of crafters and would-be artists. But let's be honest...all the people who could devote their lives to art are busy working in ad agencies so they can pay those West coast bills. We set aside a sunday afternoon for handmaking, but only after we've decorated our homes with Pottery Barn. It's a smooth affluence that imitates art, as Rebecca Solnit says.

When I first moved here, I was so in love with this city. I've outgrown my passion for it. Somedays, I hardly feel like I live here, and especially returning to it after a day in a broken-down town where I felt so alive.

Update: Men and women...

I updated Men and women in Key West. Those two paragraphs are the most difficult things I've ever written.

On being lost

Perhaps the only time I was truly lost was when I was seven. It was my first day of school in a new town. My mom put me on the bus in the morning, and I got off with all the other kids and found my way to my classroom. In the afternoon, I made it back to the bus somehow, but wasn't familiar enough with my new neighborhood to know where to get off. The bus was empty, and the driver had finished her route, and I was still on it. I don't remember how I got home that day.

As a child, I remembered places I had never been before. I blurred real and imaginative spaces. On a tour through an 18th century farmhouse, I felt I knew the place. That credenza, that drawer full of flatware. I knew them.

My friends have always called me the "normal one," because, I imagine, I have never appeared lost to them. I think the truth is that I have never tried to anchor myself too securely. I take comfort in knowing I can live anywhere, pick myself up, meet new people, make a new life. I have done it a dozen times.

In seventh grade, I cast myself off from my three best friends with a dramatic note:

Dear Libby, Amy and Sarah,
Goodbye.

I spent the summer in exile: babysitting, going to tennis lessons, watching television. I would do anything but play a part in the girl dynamics that had developed.

In tenth grade, my best friend forced me out. I had no choice. I remember coming home one night and spotting a party going on at her house. A dozen or so people we knew in common were hanging out on her back deck acting stupid. They were making jokes about getting high on oregano, rolling oregano joints from from the spice rack and stiff cardboard and lighting them on
fire. Perhaps they really were stoned, but it's not the cue I picked up. What I felt was their icy stares and unwelcoming recognition of my presence.

We are kept in place by the people who surround us. When we are cut off from them, we become someone else.

Both times, I found new groups of friends, neither as satisfying as the old. My new skin did not fit right.

I will return home in two weeks. I worry about seeing someone I know who will force me to locate myself. Their "hello, aren't you...?" will make my body flesh and tie me to that place again instead of allowing me to remain an observer in a parallel dimension. I also worry about not feeling tied. That the bricks and wood beams of buildings, the maple and oak trees won't talk to me. They'll refuse to play my remembering game.

Meditation on apples

Honeycrisp apples are the invention of mediocrity, come to fruition this fall. An enormous genetic windfall. It's the first time I've ever heard an apple promoted on the radio. The name: "honeycrisp." So literal and American. It the simpler, less sophisticated cousin of the gala and the fuji.

One has to eat a honeycrisp with a stack of napkins handy. Otherwise you will l have sticky hands and wrists and drips on your chin and all over the furniture. It is not an apple for the delicate.

Honeycrisp. Honeycomb. Crispy Crunch. Honey smacks. Crackle pop.

No matter how big and beautiful, I just can't trust a honeycrisp apple. Like a big, blowsy, Las Vegas trophy wife. Painted face, sequined jeans and stiletto heels. Not too much trouble but still disturbing.

It's what the executives wanted from a red delicious, which is truly a bit of marketing genius because although they are red they are never delicious but rather mealy and too sweet. Easily bruised. Over-waxed.

Red delicious. Superstitious. Regal bitches. Sew on stitches. Made for riches.

The list begins

Well...now it's official. There are people out there who hate me because of what I write on my blog. There's certainly one person out there who's on the list...and there may be two.

I learned tonight that B gave my blog link to a former co-worker who passed it on, and that person passed on, blah, blah, blah, ad infinitum, until the former co-worker whose bridal shower I raized got the link. Ooh. Ouchie. It's also one big possibility that a certain former boss has gotten hold of it too.

Oh well. It's not like I posted it naieve to the fact that she might read it someday. I knew it was always a possibility. The whole point of this was not to hide.

What is this expectation that we have simple feelings? That either we like each other or we don't and it's as easy as that?

I'm feeling more and more caught as I go down this path and leave the safe stuff for the riskier stuff. There's venom in there, darkness, a cheat, a hoarder, a two-faced liar, a critic. I can't write if I can't talk about that stuff.

B and I talked today about diving into the irrational. It came up in reference to gardens, when I told her to not be rational about plants. The same way you can't be rational about art, or god. How can I put this? I can read books upon books about where to put certain plants--in the sun or shade--and how much to water them, or whatever. But when you put the books aside, and just do it, and just listen in a slightly different way, you know exactly what to do with that plant. It's opening up to something beyond learned knowledge. It's like learning to dream when you're awake. Learning to feel the warmth radiating out of the shape of a petal and knowing that its meant for a warm spot.

And the more I practice it, the more I have to go for the venom. The more I have to write what is really there. The more you embrace the rational, the more you leave the rational stuff behind, like science, or being polite. It's just too hard to dig down so far and then come up saying, "Oh yes, I've had a very nice time."

Is it faith? Or is it sticking your hands down into the soil and feeling that everything is connected, and you are part of that connection. That love is connected to hate, that life is connected to death, and that flowers talk, and a person can feel one thing while feeling the exact opposite at the same time, and and that it is not so simple.

Ah, well. Sorry D. I didn't have fun at your shower. Doesn't mean I don't like you. Doesn't mean I didn't wish you well.

Prowling...