Greater than old

He was handsome. With horn-rimmed glasses, bright eyes, shiny black hair and a smile to melt your heart.  And he stood there looking fervent but free, leaning against his brand new Studebaker in a button-up polo shirt and black trousers, grinning up at me from a yellowed scrapbook page resting on the kitchen table. I turned my head toward the man showing me the photo. He was frail now; his black hair thinned and grayed; his glasses a little more practical.  But then he smiled and the young man was both in the picture and by my side.  His eyes glistened and it was almost like the shiny Studebaker was right there in the living room begging to be driven.

He was not an old man, I realized as I looked at more yellowed scrapbook pages.  He was an added-upon being. He was a small toothless boy sitting with his mother in a living room in Holland. He was the father proudly wrapping his arms around three giggling little girls. He was the grinning groom holding hands with a beautiful curly-haired bride. He was the soldier in uniform at a camp in Vietnam.  He was the cheerful man with the accordion, playing the tune of a place and time long gone, but not forgotten. He was the smiling person by the sea, in the desert, in a castle, in a garden, in a small apartment. He was the grandfather in a fishing hat, chatting with a grandson at the lake.  And he was here on this page before me, the proud owner of a brand-new car, ready to take on the world.  

And all of these people – the boy, the soldier, the father, the grandfather, the handsome man in a polo  – they look out at me when I look into his eyes.  They sing to me when he whispers an old melody.  They beg to not be forgotten, even when the body they live in has grown frail and the laughter that comes out of it isn’t as loud as it used to be.  They plead with me to remember all the people inside this one man, so that when I look at him, I will not see an old man, but a great man; a collection of so many experiences that looking at his stature does not do him justice.  To see the boy soldier father grandfather handsome man, you have to look at his soul. Look in his eyes.  And then when you hug him, you know you’re embracing decades of memories and experiences and darkness and light and pain and beauty and love. 

 And you feel so very glad you came.

Truancy

I got work off today because we were definitely going to go to Vegas.

No, really. I swear. We had big plans.  We were heading down there with some friends and we were gonna bask in the 120-degree weather and jump in a pool and see family and everything.

But then we changed our minds.

So the inner moral conflict I dealt with was thus: Should I keep the day off and ignore the workload waiting for me merely 15 minutes down the road while my coworkers spend the day making up for my absence? Or should I keep the day off that was promised me for no real reason whatsoever?

I decided to skip.

And then I totally felt like I did in ninth grade when my friend Tesha and I skipped gym class just to go to the playground across the street to play on the swings for an hour and talk about boys.  There were still girls outside in their gym clothes when we came back, so we tried to be stealthy by sort of awkwardly bending over as we ran right past them.  But everyone knew what we were up to.  And we both got after-school detention, and my mom had to come pick me up, and I was grounded for like three weeks during a crucial window of perfect spring hang-out weather.  But oh, was that playground time WORTH IT!

So when I felt like that I told myself, “Self.  You’re a grown-up now. You’re taking this day to get important things done, like finish the laundry and get the oil changed and catch up on imperative facebook correspondence.”

I was definitely going to do all that stuff.

But instead I went to the park and fed the ducks. They loved my bread.  And I wasn't even sorry.

This isn't even the duck I fed.  I forgot my camera card today so stole this duck from the Internets.

I’m still half waiting for the principal to call my house.

Memories of puppy love

Focus.

Geography test Tuesday.  I’ll write that in my planner. Later.
We stayed up talking until 4:30 this morning.  I wonder if he made it to work on time.  The way his hands feel resting on my leg while staring at me with those deep, brown eyes…

Focus.

What’s the difference between political realism and constructivism?  Houghton is looking at me like he wants me to volunteer a comment. I raise my hand and share an idea from Alexander Wendt.  We could be together right now. We could run away to the beach for a day.  I’d let his hand go up, up, up my leg…

Focus.

We’re on to liberalism.  The democratic peace theory. Current explorations in globalization and interdependence.  We talked about politics. Movies. Us.  I’m picturing us in an airport, where we sit side by side on the floor and wait for our next flight, our own agents of globalization.

The role of international law in constraining state behavior…

Last night he said I love you. Whispered it so closely it tickled my ear.

Focus. Focus. Focus….

The ghosts of "me" past

We were driving home yesterday when a strange thing happened.

We stopped at the light on the corner of University and University. We were holding hands, as usual, and I looked up at the Riviera apartments across the street.

Then suddenly I saw myself five years ago, passing this very light, driving to see a friend at those apartments, not knowing that when I met her boyfriend a few moments later I would be meeting my future husband.  Not knowing that, five years later, we would be driving home to our cozy little cottage from a Friday night date to Jason’s deli, stopped at that same light, holding hands and laughing at each other’s jokes.

Time is an interesting thing, is it not? I wonder what I’ll be remembering five years from today. I wonder what, in five years, will make me marvel yet again at how perfectly the little pieces of life put themselves together.

Our weekend in the desert

Last weekend we went to the desert, where my throat engages in a constant, selfish supplication for more water, and I turn into the dried-out creatures I see wandering the desert on shows like “Life”: yellow-eyed and slow.

I always thought that beauty had to include green.  The lush jungles of Hawaii or the mountainous pines of the northwest or the flowery meadows of my very own Utah create memories that look like romantic impressionist paintings. Going to the desert has taught me that beauty can also be the contrast of a blue sky against an endless stripe of red-brown. When you recall the desert, it looks like modern art.

In the desert this weekend, we went through years worth of old, dusty boxes in Kendon’s childhood home. The goal was to salvage the treasures and throw away the rest. And I started thinking about the significance of a box.

The problem is, nothing can go into a box unless it is a treasure to begin with.  We fill boxes with sentimental knick-knacks, samples of our finest work, and with the quiet hope that the contents of our box will one day see the light of day again; that our children will admire them, that they’ll go on display, or that we’ll put them to use years down the road.

So when a box gets reopened, the reasons flood back.  The nostalgia and the sentiment and the hopes may be dusty, but they’re there, waiting for you in their dark cardboard confines.  And you have to decide if your treasured things are now trash.

And sometimes it’s painful, the decision; the remembering.  Important treasures, like love, get packed away into our boxes, where they become forgotten until they disintegrate from years of wind and sun beating them into dust.  And when the box gets reopened, you remember what your treasure looked like before it was nothing.  And you feel a little sad.

So I was careful last weekend as I went through someone else’s treasures.  I was careful to remember that, buried beneath the cobwebs and dust of each box was another memory, another quiet hope.  I tried to imagine my Kendon playing with each toy as a little boy, making little boy noises and turning the living room couch into a racetrack, or a war zone, or the Wild West.  I tried to imagine the concentration and pride he put in to drawing this purple monster or winning this plastic trophy. I tried to imagine the love that went into each letter and card; the comfort and laughter it once gave to its recipient.  I tried to imagine each object’s life before the box. And I tried to hold onto these thoughts when I had to throw their containers away.

When we left the desert this weekend, I started thinking about my own boxes, tucked away in a closet at home.  And I decided to blow away some more dust.

All of my falls

Fall is every fall preceding it. I smell smoke and I am eight years old, walking down a country road to a friend's Halloween party. A dead leaf crinkles beneath my feet and I am clumsily holding hands with my father in our leaf-covered driveway, or holding hands with a lover on an important leaf-covered walk, or alone with the leaves, walking with my hands in empty pockets, shivering from the bitter chill of heartbreak and dreaming of an impossibly faraway spring when everything will be better.  When I see a clump of raked-up leaves I am in a dying Soviet park, jumping in a fresh pile right before a homeless man asks me for five cents.  I see a child making the walk to school and feel the butterflies of a new teacher and a new year. I see the fragmented memories of relationships and friendships from seasons long gone by.  I recall dreams that blossomed, greened, then shriveled up and fell to the ground, crunched on and broken to pieces by passersby.  Fall is the fading away and the reappearance of things that once were.  Thoughts and ideas in this season drift away from me in the cool breeze or become frozen, numb, motionless overnight.

But with the complexity of fall comes hope.  The crunched-up dreams will rest beneath layers of snow all winter long, nourishing the ground and making it green again when the right time comes.  My thoughts and ideas will return to me in another fall, inside another memory.  And next year I’ll have this fall to add to my collection of falls: one where my hands are always warm and my pockets are rarely empty.