I Crossed the Street

Just east of the heart of campus where I went to college ran Ridge Street. On its north side stretched a cemetery and next to that, ironically, the university’s student health center.

Being both an unhealthy young undergraduate prone toward respiratory conditions and a literature major prone toward melancholic iambic tetrameter, I would often walk down Ridge on the cemetery side of the street to make two purposeful stops. I would visit the health center’s cheerless nurses, chatting them up for antibiotics and hoping for recovery in the land of the present moment. And I would visit the quiet dead, walking or sitting on the grass near them, writing lines of verse, in the land of stone and grave, of the organized past.

In those days I had a preference for neither place, for I preferred neither death nor life. Whether reading Time in a waiting room or epitaphs on headstones, I infused all my reading power then with a perfect, poetess-maudlin ennui. Some friends blamed this on my colds, others on my obsession for Sylvia Plath. I blamed it on nothing: I was a suffering poet in training.

One day near the end of my sophomore year, I was out and about sporting lit books in my backpack and a sonorous cold in my lungs. I had been to the health center, and as there was nothing more the doctors could do for me, I decided to visit my friends the Dead. I left the health center for the cemetery.

As I walked, my mind raced through the opening lines to the prologue of The Canterbury Tales, which I had to memorize and recite in a few days with some semblance of Middle English accent for my professor. This assignment excited me, for I adored the challenge of speaking in any accent other than my boring midwestern one. As my California-born college friend Annie always claimed, there is nothing more hilarious to the ear than to hear your visiting aunt from Minnesota call up the stairs, letting loose a barrage of lightly melodious but undeniably overly short ‘a’ vowels: “Oh, Aaaaannie. Do you want to go out for a Taaaaaco Saaalaad?! I can drive us to Aaanaaaaheim!” We loved Chaucer for the same reason we loved Annie’s aunt: The language made us laugh. As English majors, we needed all the laughs we could get.

I looked up at the sky and trees now as I walked, thinking of Chaucer, spring, and accents. I was thinking how Annie’s aunt was a midwesterner but sounded so very little like me. I wondered if I studied linguistics I would learn why.

A moment’s daydream, and I missed my turn into the cemetery. Instead, I found myself at its far eastern gated edge where stood its mausoleum. The mausoleum's walls were old, stone-cold-looking and moss-greened. Butting up just feet from the sidewalk, it was so close to me I could almost touch it.

Suddenly, I halted, dropped my pack to my side, doubled over, and spat the lozenge I’d had since the health center into my hand so I wouldn’t choke. A coughing fit had started. It was a bad one, keeping me doubled over and holding to the cemetery wall. When, moments later, I stood, body sore and eyes watering, my ears detected, of all things, music.

It was coming from the other side of the street, from a building I’d passed many times before but into which I’d never stepped. It was a gym. Given its proximity to the cemetery, it served as another example of campus planning irony.

I turned my sore back to the mausoleum and looked at the music-producing building. There were four tall basement windows facing Ridge Street, and never in my perambulations down it toward death or respiratory recovery had I seen the gym windows’ blinds open. But this afternoon they were, and so were the bottom halves of the windows. The music coming from them was stop-and-go: a recorded piano, melodic, repetitive. I saw movement in the window. They were dancers.

What I could see were ballerinas standing in three rows, their backs to me, looking into a mirror that ran the length and height of the wall in front of them. I think I was spying a dance studio.

From what I could see, they were moving their legs and arms around, slowly, turning to face forward, then to one side, then to the other, then forward again. There was an identical mirroring of movement going on among the dancers. It was people in formation, similar to what athletic teams do, so it made sense a gym would house a studio, but the dancers’ lines reminded me of nature and not of sports. They reminded me of tree rows. Of birds in flight.

I crossed the street.

I sat down in the grass at the far corner of last window on the right and peered in. The ballerinas were dressed in solid-color leotards and tights: pink and pink, pink and black, and black and black. Some looked into the mirror at themselves, and some looked at the floor beyond them. I saw them seeing. And if I leaned far enough into the scene, I saw me looking into the window, seeing me seeing them see themselves. I took a few deep breaths and swallowed a couple of times and settled back.

Momentarily, the one who was the teacher demonstrated some flowing arm movement and pointed to the corner in front of the furthest window on the left. The dancers broke their triple-line formation, walked to the windows, and made a long line the length of the studio, from said corner to my window. They took turns in groups of three doing sweeping moves to waltz music diagonally across the room. They whisked by effortlessly, and when they’d finish, they’d get back in line, prepared to waltz through the studio again, over and over.

Now the teacher changed the song on the record, and faster music played. After she clapped a tempo, the ballerinas started kicking one leg out to the side and leaping a little in the direction of their kicks, and landing, and then doing the same on the other side. From this they started turning, quickly drawing their arms out and in, out and in, while taking lots of little steps. And from this they made a dancing circle chain.

I took my hand to my nose to repress a sneeze. My throat lozenge was still in my hand, now candy-stick stuck, so I sucked on my palm until the lozenge loosened, and I sucked it back into my mouth. I rolled my eyes at myself.

Now the dancers started leaping across the room. Run run leap: the rhythm of the anapest. One at a time, the dancers made lines of poetry with their bodies. Lines of physical music. Oh this, oh this, oh this, oh this was what Yeats understood: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?” I sat statuesque, the ghost of pain from my racking cough barely near me.

A dancer came to my window. She was so close I could touch her. She was heaving, holding onto a ballet barre beneath the windows that ran the length of the room. She was huffing and bent over to catch her breath, assuming the very pose I had just moments ago on the sidewalk. She was healthy and sucking in as much oxygen as she could for the sake of her dancing, whereas I had been wrecked and gasping to get anything at all into my body to calm the jangling of my illness so that, eventually, on a good day, I might have something to write about, and energy with which to do it.

She spotted me. Rather than startled, she looked curious. She gave me a little, polite wave of her hand and smiled. I mirrored her wave with my sticky hand and smiled awkwardly back. Then she moved up into the dancer’s line only to leap again. In a moment, I rose and walked home.

That afternoon, I checked the course catalog and learned that my university offered dance classes for physical education credit. If I believed in the Muses, and if my destiny was poetry, that day taught me I’d have to answer to the bell of inspiration and study ballet. Linguistics and Annie’s A-flat aunt would wait.

In truth, I didn’t know if I did believe in the Muses, and I didn’t know if in essence I was a poet, but I did know one thing for certain: Observing that dance class had made me so very, very happy.

Twelve weeks later, I stepped into that very studio a nervous beginning ballet student who over time would become accustomed to the cemetery view from the dance-y side of the street. On this new side, I would be on the side of vigor, of beauty, and eventual health. I would be on the side that was companion to myself, not solely on the ghostly side of endlessly turning pages of the entombed, indifferent, unmoving past and the infirmed, unchanging, chaotic present. I’d crossed the street, and I was feeling a future, dancing out my newfound preference for life.

Rubber Ducky, You’re So the One

It is 6:30 a.m. She is sitting in the opulent guest bathroom of her sister- and brother-in-law’s Chicago home, snuggled up in a throw, on the floor, writing. Her husband and dog are still asleep in the adjacent guest room, and she doesn’t want to wake them. The three of them will be traveling later this morning to Wisconsin for a short autumn beach vacation.

Her in-laws are boat owners who sail as often as they can, and their guest bath is decorated in rich sea imagery: sailboat votives and towels, the colors blue and green, seashell shapes, and a framed nautical chart of Cape Hatteras. An adventurer’s source of direction is found printed on the clear vinyl shower curtain. It is a map of the world.

She gazes at the map and, true to form so early in the morning when she writes and is sensitive to all things considered, it becomes a meditative focus. As though she’s looking at a large Pollock--her favorite painter--and responding viscerally to the drips and swirls, she looks long at the map and begins to think of herself in relation to it. All its borders, its colors, its place names.

After just a moment, though--unlike when she would be studying a Pollock and feeling connected, kinesthetic, and inspired--she starts to feel uneasy. She closes her eyes.

She begins recounting her life, and in her recounting, she has landed in fourth grade, when she first pieced together the big world and the notion of traveling.

It was in fourth grade that she made a colored salt map of the earth’s seven continents, in seven different colors, and wrote a history of each one. She then wrote a long report on the solar system and declared it’d be fun to visit the moon. (The summer prior, Apollo 11 had landed.) She received an A++ on both assignments. Her teacher said it appeared she was going to be a world traveler someday, and she told her teacher she was right. To prove it, she made a list of places she would visit when she grew up. The list was lengthy. She had big plans.

She realizes this morning that of the places she declared as a girl she would someday visit, she has visited exactly none.

It is not long before the light of day begins to fill the bathroom.

*
Memories have a way of taking hold, and sometimes they are awful in their holding: heavily draped, needy, lingering. She has many memories like these. She knows that if she lets memory and regret take to her now, these feelings will drive her onto that old familiar path of overwhelm. She will get swept down some crazy river into the rough rapids of her heart’s deepest disappointments, which will feel as they are rocking her on some too-small raft, tossing around with her while some deep-ocean, humpback whale tune mourns in her ear: This sky, too, is folding under you/And it's all over now, Baby Blue. She starts to feel quite uneasy and sad and wishes she could take cover. This is not the quiet time she was hoping for, here on her first day of vacation.

So. My life is not what I intended it to be when I was ten, she writes. Does that matter? Does it? She writes more, of past mistakes, of paths taken and abandoned, of lost opportunities, of sorrow.

Her husband and dog start stirring in the next room. Now it is time to get ready for her day, which she is desperately hoping will improve.

Moments later, when she pushes open the shower curtain map of the world and leans to draw a bath, she spies one more decorative bathroom item. This piece is not nautical. It is whimsical, childlike.

It’s a yellow rubber ducky. He’s springy, perky, and perched atop a folksy, twisted beaded wire hung over the tub’s faucet. Dangling jauntily from the wire like a crooked sign nailed to an old road post is a clear plastic packet of bright green bath gel, and the packet reads, in snow white letters, “I know there are some things in the world a bubble bath won’t cure, but I don’t know what.”

And in another moment, she steps into the bath, takes a few deep breaths and closes her eyes again, warmed by message, warmed by water.

Right here, right now, let go of the ‘must see’ list, she tells herself. Right here, right now, at the start of a vacation that isn’t Morocco, is miles from Machu Picchu, and is not as mighty as young-girl dreams of Marseilles, here today on the way to Manitowoc, be grateful. This is your journey. This is your journey for now. The miraculous Midwest of the United States, Cleveland to Chicago to Manitowoc, this is journey enough.

And this is the journey extraordinaire: a simple bath, a simple act to soothe one back into one’s presence, to return one unharmed to the moment, the incredible, intimate journey of life, of craggy existence and its sometimes solid, sometimes slippery stepping stones, of home, of hope with all its feathers, of generous family and friends, and of the traveling, sprightly-footed spree of the indomitable heart that knows all this, and which is the eye and the spyglass rapturous, waiting, on watch in the crow’s nest at the top of the world.

She sinks. She surfaces.

What Kind of Foo

I am traveling by car with my husband and dog on the first day of our short, autumn beach vacation along Lake Michigan in northern Wisconsin. We are going to walk the beach, read, mosey around town, eat, and sleep. That’s it. I anticipate that we will be renewed, that our dog will be ecstatic running the beach and swimming, and that when we return to our daily Cleveland lives, I might try a few times to spice up our vacation reports to friends with some storytelling verve, some humorous or deep twist of adjectival hyperbole and detail overdrive, but I also anticipate this will prove unauthentic. A vacation like this is a quiet, little, small-vocabulary adventure, so anything from this adventure worth relaying can make its way to prose here.

Our rental car came equipped with satellite radio. New to it, I right away take to it. This is the first road trip for me where the need to search for powerful and interesting enough stations while cruising in and out of variant radio wave zones is eliminated.

Even after just an hour of SR experience, it tops my vacation happinesses list. It is bringing me into a small world mood not exclusive to vacation but certainly welcomed whenever it occurs, especially if the vacation is small and unremarkable, like this one. I scan for stations I like. I groove to the fact a station can reach and sound the same to someone in San Francisco.

Somewhere near Elkhart, Indiana, I look at the SR screen to check the details of a song that’s just started playing. Who is that cool singer?? The scrolling radio text screen is a mini, digital theatre marquis offering three bits of currently playing informational hits: It rolls “Siriusly Sinatra.” Then, “Sammy Davis Jr.” Then, “What Kind of Foo.”

Foo! I snicker. I think of food. Of Egg Foo Young. Of Kung Fu. Of foolish kings. Of the fact that something as enormous as satellite radio’s technology is partner to a comparatively minuscule screen display for communicating its ‘whatsis’. It’s like watching the world’s biggest globe revolving on a dressmaker’s pin! It’s precarious.

I love globes for the largess they offer. But today, in honor of the pin, the skinny abbreviating Sirius screen, I offer up today my pin-thoughts, my unremarkable, McSnippet comments about time and space and the unremarkable, McSnippet travel that connects and remakes them both. If I knew texting lingo, I would employ some here to make my McThoughts even McZippier. Or if I had time to tweet all these, I would sound off my commentary Twitteresque, arabesque. But I don’t, and I don’t.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “There’s no road has not a star above it.” If you want to reach the stars, walk. If you want to walk your life’s path, keep your eye on the sky.
• There’s nothing more exotic than staying put on your porch on a summer night, swinging back and forth in the same porch swing space, sharing stories of the past, about this or that, with your friends, family, neighbors.
• If you want to be a famous travel writer, tell of your greatest loss and where that took you.
• When asked, while on an acid ‘trip’ conducted under medically controlled conditions, what time felt like to him, Aldous Huxley reported that he said he didn’t know, but that there seemed to be a lot of it.
• In Sanskrit, ‘pada’ means foot, journey, and page in a book. Every step you take is a chapter in your life’s journey. Is there any greater travel experience than simply being alive?
• Vacation postcards sum up our space-time continuum dreams. ‘The weather is great. Wish you were here.’
• If space is the final frontier, time is the cowgirl that’s wrangling its horses and stars into the barn.

I will post more vacation blogs in the coming weeks. I certainly have the time, vacationing fooL that I am.

Nobelization: Obamanation

The Nobel committee mobilized the world’s emotions yesterday by selecting Barack Obama as this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient. This morning, I woke ready to help people take the next step beyond this momentous occasion because, like it or not, spouting opinions about an award this prestigious once it has been announced is beyond the scope of reasonable thought and energy expense. He won the award, period. It’s not like he’s some football star-turned-dog-torturer who needs to be stripped of his athletic medals.

Whether you like or dislike yesterday’s announcement, I offer here some advice about 'getting to the next level' regarding yesterday's news. Obama himself said this award is a call to action, so what better time to act than now?!

If you like Obama and what he has achieved, act first by celebrating! His administration, the committee, and the many, many others like you around the world deserve to have your voice added to the mix of celebratory song, for this is no small award. The committee's breathing hope into our world as well as its confidence in Obama's ability to effect lasting peace are very much worthy of your raised hearts and hopes. Ignore the naysayers. Keep on keeping on with the notion that world peace is possible; by giving the award to Obama, the committee obviously 'gets' that. Get even more inspired yourself now. Obama could be your inspiration for acting peacefully and civilly at every moment of your life! You could even invoke the spirit of John Lennon in the coming days: "You may say I’m a dreamer/But I’m not the only one./I hope someday you’ll join us/And the world will live as one.”

If you don't like Obama and/or this honor bestowed upon him for whatever reason, know this: The committee does seem to have erred at least once in history by never awarding Mahatma Ghandi the Peace Nobel. Ghandi, some might argue, was above the award, but indeed, either way, he WAS peace. No human can argue otherwise, so, based on that alone, you could possibly argue that there is misrepresentation in the Peace Nobel awardee lineup. Rest easy! Rest easy in this imperfection and sit down immediately and make a list of ten people YOU would have awarded the Peace Nobel to this year, and then write why, and then write to the Nobel committee with your suggestions and reasons. Your memo subject line to the committee could be something like "Maybe next year?” Keep on keeping on with the hope that YOUR person will win some day--there are so many deserving peaceniks and leaders out there, and I'm sure you know a lot about them all. Or, better yet, so you don’t have to sit down and figure all this out, take a REAL stand now! Become a world leader yourself so that YOU can win the Nobel! I hear it's really easy to become a fabulous world leader respected by millions.