A Good Line

I am reading a novel called Little Fires Everywhere which has some extra local traction because it is set in a posh East side suburb here, Shaker Heights. Mind you, I don't live there but I briefly lived elsewhere on that side of town and worked on that side for many years so there is so whimsy to reading about familiar landmarks.

The book is good. It feels both very familiar and intimate while still foreign. This is my life and No, this is not my life. It feels like someone put to page that feeling of "that kind of thing (Tragedies, sensitive family matters, zaniness) is something that happens to other people" when in reality we are ALL other people.

But, I'm not writing a book review. I got the book at a garage sale and remembered it was "local." The lady I bought it from said "I dated someone who great up in Shaker and his mom gave me that. I never read it and don't want to be reminded of that."

I am glad I found it. It has a beatuiful line that gave me pause. A literal moment where I had to put the book down and say "Wow"

It is..

"In the books she read, every stream might be a river god, every tree a dryad in disuse every old woman a powerful fairy every pebble an enchanted. Anything had the potential to transform, and this to her, seemed the true meaning of art"

The line spoke to me. And not as an artist because I don't consider myself one. No, nothing so elevated as that. Instead, it touched upon a long held and deep seeded feeling of the wonder in everyday things.

I sometimes stare at the bottom of my shoes and draw my finger along where thousands of steps have worn away the soles. My wife will ask "What are you doing" and I will mention"I am fascinated by the concept of wear. Things coming apart." At a cousin's wedding as a child I spent the whole time watching wax candles felt and congeal onto the top of a piano. "It is interesting to watch them isn't it," said an uncle. And I can remember the glow of the yellow light in the chilled event center miasma (There were no windows in this space. Everything hummed in a pale yellow) but better remembered is the fat droplets aching over each other into piles of wax.

Much of this has to do with an imagination leaning towards the fantastical. Not creative but in reverie. Not navel gazing but day dreaming. Like Walter Mitty albeit I found that story beyond sleepy in 10th grade English. "I am sorry I made you read that," said that teacher after I met her years later, myself as an adult and she as a retiree.

They are tales of super heroes and fantastic battles. I will meet someone and think "You are so cool! I want you to be my friend" or "You are awful. Go fuck yourself twice" and then its a grand drama. Which I have mentioned in the blog before but it permeates real life. I tell my kids "Today's mission is to...GO TO TARGET" and this is lost on them.

What frustrates me is how fleeting these are. And its why this blog can be so frantic and fragmented. These are just scenes that pop in and out...

I see a yard overgrown with 8 inch dandelions and grass that has been able to flower. I think that air around it is alive with the organic fluff of seeds and pollen wings. Buried in the grass are snakes, tick as pool noodles and lethargic because while it blisters in the sun, the rays have not penetrated this canopy.

A co-workers dyes her hair in wisps of pink and I imagine she shoots fire.

I hold a pebble and I imagine the strata from which it began. How it shifted up and down the layers you see in text books until it bubbled up in a deep water thermal vent. And it tumbled across seas and times being made smooth until it found a quarry where millennia later it was polished and com modified into the the stones in an aquarium.

I go back to the town where my wife and I met and then a time warp opens and I go back to that year. I have all my memories but no one else does and I have to relive those years my body and mind older but time reset. And I wonder if I will do anything different. Will everything else collide the same. The same happens for a bus stop I have not visited in a while. A vendor or person you see only every few years. "Last time I saw you...you were 3 feet tall!" And, do I want to go back to being 3 feet tall.

I touch the old fax in the office closet and I am sucked back to the last time it fired while in the past (or old present) there is but a wisp of dust and co-workers wondering where I went.

The silos on country roads are indeed missile silos, not for grain. There are sad exhausted faces in the openings for the unit ventilators at my office and they speak of happier times. The tools buried under the boxes of unopened materials from my last move increase my stats giving dexterity and intelligence. Each turn of the screwdriver is a move to be closer to 100% completion.