This is going too fast. I thought that yesterday, on the highway, as I was driving little man to the mall for some shopping, and the more I thought about this idea, the more it seemed to apply to my life on a broad scale. I think you've finally deserted me as muse, which hurts more than a little and leaves me feeling depressed and disinterested in my writing. This is a problem. A significant problem. It seems like a decision is facing me, as if there's a rapidly closing window of opportunity for me to reorient my life around your calmness and devotion to scholarship and your happiness, to reorient it around you (hang on, the oven is beeping which is sure to wake the household via a wobbling domino effect, the dog, with her traumatic memories of that beeping shock collar she wore in our fence-less yard in Atlanta will get up and pace nervously and smack her lips which will wake my wife who will bang about getting ready to go run, which will wake my son who will then roll and rattle his crib and begin the process of discovering that he needs milk). And I want to reorient it around you. And this is what troubles me; the idea that a window is closing and that I don't have all the time in the world to make a decision. Some opportunities don't come a second time. And as they say, to not make a decision is to make a decision. And my wife believes, I think, that we've got the whole issue resolved and that she and I are going to stay together. And I keep telling her, as clearly and as unambiguously as possible that I am not sure I want to be here. I'm in that uncomfortable space between knowing and not knowing. And I feel that, more than anything, I need to slow down.
I was thinking about this as we disembarked from the car and moved through the walkways of the mall. It was a pretty day, sunny and mild, with a milky blue sky and a hint of salt in the air from the easterly winds. I had come to get shoes -- oh, who cares? I don't even care. I can't pretend to be interested in this drivel. It's my life. It's not very interesting, I know. But there's something here. Something I'm uncovering. So I'll push on.
I go to the store, I look at the shoes on the rack, I dither. A salesperson in a forest green polo shirt comes along and recommends a shoe to me. I ask for my size. The shoes are brought out. The place is crowded. Big screens showing a Sunday sporting event. People sitting on benches next to stacks of boxes. Tissue paper strewn about. A steel foot caliper, looking like the frozen splash of a giant's step in a puddle, peeks out from under the bench. I can't decide between a 12 and a 13. I suspect the right foot of being larger than the left. None of this is relevant or interesting yet. I decide to order the 12.5 size in this shoe online and we leave. My wife is having a blood sugar attack so we roll down the sidewalk in the milky sunlight past hot dog vendors and panting perfumed storefronts. My son has a red plastic baseball bat which he waves about, impacting the knees and thighs of the passersby. We go to the local vegetarian restaurant and sit outside eating our cardboard containers of rice and vegetables. My son eats a cookie and is occasionally inspired by a fit of magnanimity to press toward our mouths a piece which he's broken off. He is proud of himself for sitting in a big boy chair and he takes small satisfied sips from his cup of milk and gazes indulgently at his rapidly disintegrating cookie.
After the meal my wife goes to the stores and I take my son to a little park that sits in the middle of a rotunda. There is a small snack vendor set up at one edge of the park where people are queued, waiting. A squinting bald man, his dome gilded by the sunlight, comes away with a cup full of French fries, smacking his lips in anticipation. There are three ponds in this little park, two of which hold various common marshland fauna. A few turtles stacked up on a sunny rock from biggest to smallest, their droll feat of balance and one-upsmanship drawing the shouts and pointed forefingers of an endless steam of children. Two mallards, male and female, on a nearby rock, sunning themselves. A ceramic frog. In the depths of the adjoining pond the colorful opaque koi whirl dumbly about, shifting their ocular bulges surface-ward in the hopes of snagging a dropped crumb. Two pelican statues spit water into the pond through a tube in their beaks. A third desists, spoiling it for the others with his iconoclastic ways.
Two women on the other side of the pond are smacking their lips and between utterances they probe with their tongues for stray morsels. They are both thin and dark, and wear huge dark glasses. A woman and her blonde daughter are in the same cycle of mallard-admiration as my son and myself, traveling from pond to pond as the ducks bob and flutter and paddle about. The woman tells me not to worry, that they aren't stalking me. I laugh and say, not at all. She's not tall, blonde, with large Gucci sunglasses, fairly thin, but with a certain amorphousness in her midsection. She wears sandals. Red bits of toenail pressed into pillowy toes. Her daughter is dressed in pink. The woman tells me that her husband travels a for work and that she's got a two month-old daughter at home. I am kneeling before the mallards, one hand rubbing Jonathan's back, as if in some act of worship. The woman continues to tell me about her birth-agonies and the agonies of deciding to have another child.
"But I was turning forty, so I knew it was now or never. And once I decided, it was fine, let's do it, another baby," The woman says.
I want to ask her what she means by that statement, I want to delve into it and figure out why exactly she chose the second child, I want to make the components of her situation analogous to mine and so guide my own deliberations, but the woman does not look like an intellectual (she's carrying a Matrioshka bag, stores nested within stores) and besides, I become aware that my son has just pooped (he was standing there so quietly I should have known).
We go find a place to change him. There's nothing. No changing station. So I change him on the sinks in the bathroom while impatient and disgusted men jostle me as they pursue their hasty ablutions. And as I bring my son outside I understand that all these little acts, these diaper changes, these conversations with strange women, these sunlit strolls through crowded malls, they are all taking me further away from you. Once all my motion seemed to being me closer, to draw me more tightly to you, but now the equation has been reversed. And I think, for one absurd moment, that I will stop right here. Hold Jonathan tight. Hold my breath. Stop my heart from beating. Right here right now I can still see you, if only faintly, but the moment is coming soon when you will slip over the horizon and be lost to me for good. The world moves me on. My son wants to see the ducks again.
I was thinking about this as we disembarked from the car and moved through the walkways of the mall. It was a pretty day, sunny and mild, with a milky blue sky and a hint of salt in the air from the easterly winds. I had come to get shoes -- oh, who cares? I don't even care. I can't pretend to be interested in this drivel. It's my life. It's not very interesting, I know. But there's something here. Something I'm uncovering. So I'll push on.
I go to the store, I look at the shoes on the rack, I dither. A salesperson in a forest green polo shirt comes along and recommends a shoe to me. I ask for my size. The shoes are brought out. The place is crowded. Big screens showing a Sunday sporting event. People sitting on benches next to stacks of boxes. Tissue paper strewn about. A steel foot caliper, looking like the frozen splash of a giant's step in a puddle, peeks out from under the bench. I can't decide between a 12 and a 13. I suspect the right foot of being larger than the left. None of this is relevant or interesting yet. I decide to order the 12.5 size in this shoe online and we leave. My wife is having a blood sugar attack so we roll down the sidewalk in the milky sunlight past hot dog vendors and panting perfumed storefronts. My son has a red plastic baseball bat which he waves about, impacting the knees and thighs of the passersby. We go to the local vegetarian restaurant and sit outside eating our cardboard containers of rice and vegetables. My son eats a cookie and is occasionally inspired by a fit of magnanimity to press toward our mouths a piece which he's broken off. He is proud of himself for sitting in a big boy chair and he takes small satisfied sips from his cup of milk and gazes indulgently at his rapidly disintegrating cookie.
After the meal my wife goes to the stores and I take my son to a little park that sits in the middle of a rotunda. There is a small snack vendor set up at one edge of the park where people are queued, waiting. A squinting bald man, his dome gilded by the sunlight, comes away with a cup full of French fries, smacking his lips in anticipation. There are three ponds in this little park, two of which hold various common marshland fauna. A few turtles stacked up on a sunny rock from biggest to smallest, their droll feat of balance and one-upsmanship drawing the shouts and pointed forefingers of an endless steam of children. Two mallards, male and female, on a nearby rock, sunning themselves. A ceramic frog. In the depths of the adjoining pond the colorful opaque koi whirl dumbly about, shifting their ocular bulges surface-ward in the hopes of snagging a dropped crumb. Two pelican statues spit water into the pond through a tube in their beaks. A third desists, spoiling it for the others with his iconoclastic ways.
Two women on the other side of the pond are smacking their lips and between utterances they probe with their tongues for stray morsels. They are both thin and dark, and wear huge dark glasses. A woman and her blonde daughter are in the same cycle of mallard-admiration as my son and myself, traveling from pond to pond as the ducks bob and flutter and paddle about. The woman tells me not to worry, that they aren't stalking me. I laugh and say, not at all. She's not tall, blonde, with large Gucci sunglasses, fairly thin, but with a certain amorphousness in her midsection. She wears sandals. Red bits of toenail pressed into pillowy toes. Her daughter is dressed in pink. The woman tells me that her husband travels a for work and that she's got a two month-old daughter at home. I am kneeling before the mallards, one hand rubbing Jonathan's back, as if in some act of worship. The woman continues to tell me about her birth-agonies and the agonies of deciding to have another child.
"But I was turning forty, so I knew it was now or never. And once I decided, it was fine, let's do it, another baby," The woman says.
I want to ask her what she means by that statement, I want to delve into it and figure out why exactly she chose the second child, I want to make the components of her situation analogous to mine and so guide my own deliberations, but the woman does not look like an intellectual (she's carrying a Matrioshka bag, stores nested within stores) and besides, I become aware that my son has just pooped (he was standing there so quietly I should have known).
We go find a place to change him. There's nothing. No changing station. So I change him on the sinks in the bathroom while impatient and disgusted men jostle me as they pursue their hasty ablutions. And as I bring my son outside I understand that all these little acts, these diaper changes, these conversations with strange women, these sunlit strolls through crowded malls, they are all taking me further away from you. Once all my motion seemed to being me closer, to draw me more tightly to you, but now the equation has been reversed. And I think, for one absurd moment, that I will stop right here. Hold Jonathan tight. Hold my breath. Stop my heart from beating. Right here right now I can still see you, if only faintly, but the moment is coming soon when you will slip over the horizon and be lost to me for good. The world moves me on. My son wants to see the ducks again.
1 comment:
OOf, know that feeling of family pressing out your very notion to breathe on your own. I eat three meals a day alone, but I cook for all them for the family.
I have seasons. It's come to this: I write in the September/October, and in the January/February of my life.
During the holidays I am the holidays; in the summer I practice cooking new dishes. I'm thinking about sewing a dress in the hot days of '09.
Find your seasons, let them season the writing, and above all else, don't talk to quacks whether they're mallards or muscovies.
CJ
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