Dreams

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

-Joan Didion

Nearly twenty years ago, I followed my dreams to a better life. Not the pasty pink, bedazzled “dreams” that are aspirations, but the gritty movies that play on the screen of the sleeping brain. Living far from my family in a city where I could afford to do nothing more than pay for rent and food, working for a rapidly decompensating crazy person, and finally aware that The One was not, I was miserable. One April night I dreamed that my father had died, a dream so vivid that I spent the following workday somber and shaken. Two nights later, I dreamed that my brother died in an accident. Half awake, struggling up from sleep, away from the dream that seemed to be pulling me deeper into despair and isolation, I heard a voice. “Go home,” it said. Go home. Whatever it was, my subconscious, a glass of red wine, or some supernatural force, it pointed its finger like the ghost of Christmas Present to the place where I belonged. I did go home, where I opened like a flower kept too long in the cooler; I prospered and bloomed.

The death dreams have been with me all my life, and I have learned to be attentive, to give a gentle shove to the images and emotions that hang dense around me as I awaken and look for the real message. Almost always there is an Error Message somewhere in my life, and although I continually reboot and develop work-arounds, the problem really requires serious attention. I am a rational person who believes in objective evidence kinds of things, but I also believe in the awesome powers of the spiritual world to move, unbidden and elusive, through our lives. Dreams may be nothing more than the repurposed scraps of our busy brains, they may be coded Freudian signs of pathology or Jungian clues to what we have suppressed during waking hours. They may, as the Chinese believed for centuries, be spirit guides.

I have other recurring dreams, one in which I am taking a test and know none of the subject matter, one where I am about to go on stage to perform in a play and do not know my lines, and one in which I am in a serious setting and discover, suddenly, that I am missing my clothes. Classic anxiety dreams, these have changed from my childhood dream of being left alone in a car that slid into the river near our house. I also dreamed that a vampire was trying to get to my neck, after which I slept for years with a large teddy bear (named Edward) between my neck and my pillow as a safety measure. These all seem ordinary to me, dreams that I think most of us have in one form or another. They are common as dirt, those dreams, and seem to require little in the way of analysis.

The dreams that perplex, that defy easy interpretation, are dreams of longing. The miraculous reunion with the long-dead friend, the birth of a baby long after such a thing is biologically impossible, these are the dreams that color our waking hours with melancholy and a sense of loss that can’t be conquered easily by brisk activity or a mental promise to address the issue with a twelve-point plan. Standing on the beach beneath the scorching, cleansing sun of Rational Thought, we hurl something into the darkest, coldest depths of the ocean. Days, months, years later it washes up on the sand at our feet, a small, perfect shell filled with loss, regret and a searing tantalizing hint of sweetness. I cannot believe that some spirit guide is pointing us back to a place impossible to reach; it must just be some sort of psychic flotsam that lies hidden beneath the gently waving seaweed until it’s released by some shift in the current.

In dreams, all guards lowered, all channels open, nothing is ever really gone.

The Golden Letter

On June 21, 1981 I was home from my first year at The New England Conservatory of Music, and my parents were having a party to celebrate The Royal Wedding. It was, because they were fabulous throwers of parties, quite a “do.” My father wore his kilt, my mother dressed in a Queen Mum outfit with a floral dress and a picture hat. Two friends, theatrical types, wore morning coats and a couple from the neighborhood appeared in tweed and cashmere. There were scones, clotted Devonshire cream, pots of strawberry jam, a standing roast and Yorkshire pudding. The guests of honor, absent due to the pressing demands of a honeymoon in Hampshire, were toasted with admirably good champagne.

Upstairs in my childhood room, suffering from the agony that comes with the return home after a year of living in a dormitory among soul mates, I sulked. I would go downstairs and be pleasant, but it was not my party. I lay on my bed staring at the whorls of white paint as familiar as the feeling of a breath filling my lungs. It was not my first time at the rodeo; I had spent more hours sulking in that bed than I had ever committed to any productive activity. I was prototypical Emo, a creature of thin skin, my heart beating bloody on my sleeve.

The phone rang, and from the thick tangle of laughter, chatter and ice in glasses downstairs came my father’s voice. “Annie?” I rose and went to the top of the stairs. It couldn’t be the phone for me; my local friends were all gone, and my Conservatory friends were more likely to write letters in those days of landlines and long distance charges.

“Yes?” I hollered back. I knew he hated it when I did that, shouted instead of taking the time to go where an actual conversation was possible. I knew he would hate it even more in front of a house filled with guests. He came to the foot of the stairs, a vision in his Graham plaid kilt, a bonnet on his silvering hair.

“You have a phone call,” he said, loud enough for me to hear him over the madding crowd. “A boy. Ruben something-or-other.” I was suddenly hot and then cold, and required the solidity of the wall. “Can you take it up there?” My father asked, oblivious to the fact that my internal organs were melting and I was thrumming with anxiety.

“Can you tell him I’m not here?”

“I already told him you were here.” Oh. I was going to have to talk to Ruben Rosenberg unless I chose, at that precise moment, to throw myself down the stairs, or run into the bathroom, break a glass and eat all of the pieces.

“Hang up when I pick up?” I asked weakly. I might get sick, I thought, in fact, I felt sick, like I might throw up, or fall over, or have one of those atypical heart attacks 19-year-olds occasionally had. I walked into my parents’ bedroom and looked at the ivory plastic phone, wondering why, if someone was really mad at you, really hated you, they would call you from New Jersey on the day of the Royal Wedding. Or at all. Why would there be any need for further connection, more cuts and abrasions to the psyche, further entanglement? I picked up the phone, heard the noise of the party downstairs. “I’m on, Dad,” I said. There was a click, and the noise stopped. I heard only breathing.

“I just wanted to tell you that you’re a bitch.” He said. “I spent a lot of money on that dance, and you could have told me you didn’t want to go with me. I spent a lot of money on that necklace, too.” I breathed, raggedly. There are girls who, at 19, know things about boys. They know how to attract them, how to please them, and the art of the gentle rebuff. They are comfortable in their roles as vixens, charmers, and holders of power. I was not among them.

“I’m sorry,” I said on an exhale. I was sorry. I had met Ruben when I was invited to New Jersey for Thanksgiving. I had gone to New Jersey with Pat, an oboe player from Oregon who I was in love with in ways juvenile and excessive. He and I were too far from home to justify plane tickets for a four-day trip, and his roommate’s parents had invited us to eat turkey with them in Cherry Hill. Later I would know that Pat was gay, he would tell me in the eighth floor laundry room one night, and I would slap him, and cry for weeks.

Later, in my grief and panic I would welcome the letters from Ruben, who was the roommate’s best friend from high school. He had had joined us on our post-turkey excursion into Philadelphia, and decided that he liked me. He was smart, and funny, he was male, he paid attention to me. He drew cartoons for me, and he sent me a gold “A” on a chain, the first real present I had ever received from a boy. I swelled with the attention, buckets of water for a plant that had, only recently, been near death from drought. I had no feelings for him at all; he was Not Pat, not the face I wanted to see, not the right fit, but breathing. It seemed, as it often does when one is swimming in the solipsistic sea of adolescence, that it was a fair trade offered by the cosmos: I had lost Pat, who returned to the dorm every morning with a toothbrush in his pocket, but I would get the devotion of Ruben, who made up in eagerness for what he lacked in desirability.

“You’re sorry?!” his voice rose. I hated his voice. He was, in my mind, vaguely reptilian. He had a kind of a beard, which I didn’t like, and I remembered him putting his hand on the small of my back to steer me through a doorway, and the meeting of lips that had made me recoil and sent everything racing downhill. Pat had told me that kissing a girl was “like kissing white bread;” he could do it, but he felt nothing. Kissing Ruben Rosenberg, all I could think of was that he was Not Pat, Not Pat, Not my Pat. “You’re sorry. Well, here’s the thing. I have a girlfriend now, and I’m really happy.” I waited. He said nothing; he had clearly expected some kind of reaction. Downstairs, there was a roar of laughter, a clinking of glasses.

“That’s good. Ruben, I have to-“

“She’s pretty. She’s really pretty. I didn’t want to tell you this before, but you look like Miss Piggy. Especially in that stupid dress. How does that make you feel?” I had invited him to The Strauss Ball, the end of the year formal at the Conservatory. My friends were going, I had never been on a real date, and if I couldn’t go with Pat, waltz with him, listen to him breathing as he pulled me close on the dance floor, it made no difference who took me. I made plans with Ruben, he took time from school, rented a tuxedo, and made reservations at the Top of the Hub, the revolving restaurant in the Prudential Tower. He appeared on a Friday, corsage in a box, looking to see that I was wearing the golden “A” along with my Gunne Saxe dress. I knew as soon as I met him in the lobby of the dorm that it was wrong, all wrong, terribly wrong. I became progressively quieter until, by the third revolution of the restaurant, I was mute. I cried while I put on my long dress and pinned up my hair. I met him at the end of my hall, we sat down on a bench before walking across the street to the Ball, and he tried to kiss me. I pulled my head away and told him, tears destroying my inexpert makeup, that I couldn’t go. I was sorry, I was so sorry, but it was a physical impossibility for me to go down in the elevator, walk across Huntington Avenue and dance to Strauss waltzes. “Well?” he demanded. “How does the truth feel? I did all that stuff because I felt sorry for you, Miss Piggy. I want that necklace back, by the way, it was expensive. My mom says you should send it back to me.”

“I don’t – I guess I-“

“How does it feel, Miss Piggy?!” He was getting louder, the party was escalating as more corks were popped, I had no words for anyone. “Miss Piiiii-geeeeee,” he made a sort of hog call, “I want that necklace back you bitch. I had to miss a final to go to Boston, I had to go ask my professor if I could take it on a different day because of you, Miss Piggy.” My father appeared in the doorway, looked at my blanched face and wet eyes, and looked at the receiver in my hand with a raised eyebrow. I nodded. I needed him, my dad the highland host, I needed him to save me. Ruben continued to speak as I put my hand over the mouthpiece.

“It’s a guy from school. He’s being really mean, I can’t get him off the phone.” My father extended a hand, took the receiver, and spoke in his most awesomely terrifying voice.

“No gentleman harasses a lady, young man. This conversation is over, and you had best not call here again.” He returned the phone to its plastic cradle and looked at me. “Get cleaned up and come down,” he said gently, “people are asking to see you.” I walked to my room, stuffing in trailing bits of guilt, humiliation and a swelling of love for my father. On my dresser was the “A” in its velvet box; I had liked it there, because it was the only present I ever got from a boy. I snapped the box shut with a resounding thwack, opened the top drawer and shoved it in, far behind the balled socks and “No Nonsense” packages. I looked in the mirror, saw more than I could yet understand, and got ready for the Royal Wedding party.

Music and Lyrics

Lately I have been thinking about lyrics and music. I posted the two as alternative choice on Facebook, and was surprised to find that the vast majority of commenters believed that music reigned supreme. (My brother, for example, commented “Music. Duh”). I remained unconvinced.

It’s best when they work together, of course, when they dovetail so seamlessly that the words could not have been set to any other music and the music cannot be imagined with any other words. The Magnetic Field’s “Busby Berkley Dreams” with its dreamy, tongue-in-cheek retro lyrics and the purposely untuned and ancient piano. R.E.M’s “Nightswimming” with music that warms and encourages the wistfulness of the lyrics to make an atmosphere all hot, “quiet night,” with the photograph stuck to the dashboard of the car moving through the dark, moist heat.

If you had to choose, though, sifting through the universe of songs that compose the musical warp and woof of your spirit, would you choose the songs that made you move unconsciously to the beat or the ones that spoke to your soul with words that you could have written, if only you could write like that?

Although I am annoyed by a stupid lyric, there is an ease, a primal sort of connection to certain kinds of beats; we all feel the pull of “Money, Money,” “Twist and Shout,” and “Tutti Frutti.” Consider, if you will, the lure of the late, great “Mmmm Bop” or the “Do Ron Ron,“ or that Swedish song called “Cobrastyle” that had lyrics to the effect of “gdang gdang diggy diggy.“ We feel our hips loosen and sway, find ourselves snapping, tapping, humming and bobbing our heads. It isn’t about lyrics; the lyrics are utterly ridiculous. It’s about music as a drug, the kind that catches you the first time even if you are only half paying attention, and makes you want it again.

There are Ramones songs that are lyrically uninteresting but I will listen to them back to back because of the way they make me feel tough and fast and alive. There is a song called “Beat The Devil’s Tattoo” by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club that had me at “hello,” although I can make neither heads nor tails of the lyrics. It’s slow, deliberate, but persuasive in a way that won’t let me go until it’s finished. It’s kind of a dirge, but a very naughty, sexy dirge that makes me think I could really just put on my studded boots and try a little heroin if I didn’t have to drive the kid to school. You would not quote these songs, or write the words out and tape them to your notebook, but they get to you.

Then there are those other songs, those that are poetry set to music. The ones that give you mantras and take-away stories to hold close during storms. Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, The Beatles, Ani Di Franco, and The Smiths have all given me words, literally, to live by. Joni Mitchell gave me this:

You’ve had lots of lovely women
Now you turn your gaze to me
Weighing the beauty and the imperfection
To see if I’m worthy
Like the church
Like a cop
Like a mother
You want me to be truthful
Sometimes you turn it on me like a weapon though
And I need your approval

I feel the pain in Cohen’s “love is not a victory march/it‘s a cold and it‘s a broken hallelujah,” the matter-of-fact resiliency of Di Franco’s “what doesn’t bend, breaks,” and The Smith’s “for once in my life let me, let me, let me get what I want this time.” The words “Let It Be” are my most basic directive in life. They are mantras, those words, they are worthy of attention, and thought, repetition and analysis.

But every one of those songs with the lyrics that I hold close, read like poetry and secretly believe to be written just for me, have beautiful music. They all have music that fits them, not perhaps the brazen, addictive riffs of “Mmmm Bop,” but a quieter charm that seems at first like a supporting player but becomes as essential as the words to a patient listener. You may start out listening to Tom Waits’ “Martha” and becoming entranced in the story of old lovers reconnecting, but soon you will find that the music itself, simple, acoustic and repetitive, spinning out into a chorus warmed by strings, is perfect. Perfect and necessary.

As it turns out, I can get what I think is a syllogism out of this: all great songs have great music, and some great songs have great lyrics, but not all great songs have great lyrics. That means, I think that a) I should not give up my day job and become a scientist, and b) music is more important than lyrics. They were right. Even my brother.

There is, in the final analysis, no need to choose. I will turn up “Superfreak” and bang the steering wheel, or I will get lost in Roberta Flack and (if no one’s looking) I’ll get all misty eyed. I will love songs that perfectly marry music and lyrics, a category which includes most of The Pretenders, Tom Petty, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Paul Simon, Elvis Costello, The Magnetic Fields, Talking Heads, and hundreds more that I’m forgetting. I will love songs that have ridiculous lyrics but make me want to move, like those of The Bee Gees, Herman’s Hermits, and Abba. I will unconditionally love Van Morrison, whose lyrics are sometimes incomprehensible but which make me believe that I am in receipt of a communication from a soul that is yearning to connect with my own.

I’m not done with this, quite yet. I don’t know where to put logocentric genres like rap and hip hop, or dance and club music that seems to be all about the beat, but what about “I Will Survive” which has some of the best getting-through-a-breakup lyrics ever written? What about country songs and folk ballads that are really all about the story, the John Deere green, the lost maiden with the raven locks? This analysis may be the work of a lifetime. Next year at this time I will write off all of my iTunes purchases as “work-related expenses.” After my death, a massive tome will be published outlining my theory on thousands of tissue-thin pages with multiple glossaries and indexes.

A girl can dream.

Bescrewed

Having written previously about being janked, and wishing not to bore you, gentle reader, with anything repetitive or stale, I will tell you today about being bescrewed. It isn’t as much fun as it sounds.

My litany for today, a day which has begun as charmlessly as a Miley Cyrus interview, is that I am “janked, bojanked and bescrewed.” By which I mean that I awakened to discover that I am not, in fact, the 30-year-old who lives in my head and heart, but the 49-year-old whose body I have been abusing mercilessly. I feel old.

My stepdaughter has a baby who is beautiful and good, and I watch her two days a week. I adore her ferociously, and although there is no shared blood, I know that I would throw myself in front of anything that threatened her. I have struggled, though, with the idea of being “grandma.” She has two perfectly good, biological grandmothers, and since my only actual child is barely 14, it seems strange suddenly to be “grandma.” (I am totally ignoring my brother’s suggestion that she call me Grandma Cranky, “Crank” for short). It is my fondest wish, my fantasy, that when I am out with the baby people might think she is my own. I am, after all, dyed of gray and full of face, wrinkle-free, a youthful dresser and maybe able to pass for 40 on a good day. If I lived in Hollywood and had a nanny she could totally be mine.

This morning the illusion failed, the curtain opened to reveal man who is not only not a wizard, but has apparently been dead for months. I am falling apart. I have bandages on both big toes from wearing precipitous, 4-inch platform wedges all weekend. I have a great divot on the inside of another toe from wearing flip flops to take the baby for a long walk yesterday. My feet throb, they are covered with Band-Aids, and they are old person feet. I should clearly be wearing sensible beige shoes with orthotic inserts.

My head is stuffed up, and my stomach is protesting the “retro casserole” I cooked last night, a concoction of highly processed substances that I have never even considered bringing into my house. I will have to take 27 pills this morning instead of my usual 20; not only do I need to stay on top of my blood pressure, my thyroid and my cholesterol, but I will need antihistamine, decongestant, and Pepto Bismol. My aged corpus will now run only on fresh produce and Greek yogurt. I am old.

I have said, for most of my adult life, that I didn’t care about getting older. I would let my hair go gray when I was ready, I would embrace my increasing maturity and wisdom and wear beautiful, loose clothes by Eileen Fisher and look like that model with the long, silver hair and the young face. I would do yoga every day, radiate inner peace, and serve as a role model for whipper snappers everywhere. “Gosh,” they might say, “I hope I can be like Ann Nichols when I get old.”

Well they aren’t saying that now. I am bescrewed, bandaged, bojanked, Bismol’d and old. The idea of blow drying my hair exhausts me. I do not feel like going to work, getting the gym shorts out of the dryer that is ALL the way in the basement, or finding a pair of shoes that will cover the Band-Aids and not squeeze the blisters. I want to lie around reading and complaining, howling to the gods who have snatched from me my juicy youth and replaced it, seemingly overnight, with life as an old lady.

I am thinking of writing a screenplay for a sequel to “Bewitched,” about an old witch who looks more like me than like Elizabeth Montgomery at 25, a witch who twitches her nose and produces precisely nothing. It will be called “Bescrewed.”

Iron Maiden

I recently read about a study which confirmed that ones’ taste in music is a veritable turducken of emotional intrigue. Criticizing an artist or genre that someone loves is tantamount to a psychic slap, because the music we love is part of our identity. Woe betide the insensitive thug who makes a casual joke about the ridiculousness of music that means something to somebody.

Following that disclaimer, I will say that there are kinds of music that I have never been able to tolerate. I have let Country into my world in small doses, and I have learned to listen to rap and hip hop with my son as an eager native guide. I am still unable to spend any time listening to jazz, polkas, or earnest Christian rock. It seems to me that Jesus would prefer that his message be disseminated by means of something exquisite by Bach or Faure rather than bad, fake arena rock.

Metal was, until recently on the list of music that I could not endure without breaking out in hives. My husband likes metal, listens to metal, and reads about metal, so I have been interested in a superficial sort of way that had nothing to do with the actual music. I like the bad-assness of it all, the idea of the middle finger raised at polite society, the long hair, leather, and tattoos. As a courtesy, I learned to distinguish Speed Metal, Death Metal, and Classic Metal, and to know my Anthrax from my Megadeth. I could, perhaps, have passed a test, but I had no feeling for the music. It did not transport me, excite me, or make me want to play that one track again and again to get that narcotic rush. It was, for me, just loud noise with really great guitar work.

Over the past year, a little romance blossomed. I really liked Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” and then I fell in love with Apocalyptica, a group of cellists who cover heavy metal music in ways I could not have imagined in my life as a Bach-toting classical cellist. I kept finding out that music I already liked (Jethro Tull? Led Zeppelin?) might actually be classified as metal, and that, well, I already liked it. The deal was sealed two days ago when I watched a documentary about Iron Maiden. I was impressed that their lead singer was also a licensed pilot, able to fly a 7-something-seven filled with band, crew, and equipment all over the world. I admired the fact that men their age could still run around stage, clearly love what they were doing, and (unlike some bands that have played the Super Bowl half time show in recent years) do it incredibly, energetically, well. I found myself, after two hours of concert clips, singing Iron Maiden songs to myself. I liked those songs. I loved them. I wanted to hear them again.

I bought an Iron Maiden album on iTunes.

Now that my toe is firmly encased in black metal and chains, I have some observations. First, I will vouchsafe that I love the music, the voices, and the consummate skill with which Iron Maiden does its thing. What I do not get is the fascination with all things Faux Medieval, Runic, and Pseudo-Historical, all of which reminds me vividly of “This Is Spinal Tap.” There are metal bands that seem to fall into some adolescent male Dungeons & Dragons thing that makes no sense to me. Rush, a band my husband loves, and which, in my opinion, has the awesomest drummer in the world, falls into the category of “D & D/Stoner/I May Have Pimples But I Can Kill You With My Mace” lyrics. Metallica does not. Iron Maiden does, AC/DC does not. How does this work? Can I, a lifelong lyric lover listen to music and ignore the ridiculous lyrics? Is it like listening to Brahms lieder, which I can’t understand a word of because it’s in German, but which I love just the same? Will I develop an uncontrollable desire for chain mail and begin to gnaw meat snatched from a bread trough?

There is also this whole thing about female fans, and flashing and waiting back stage. I have seen every “Behind The Music” about hard rock or metal bands, and although most of them once lived for a fifth of Jack and two teenage girls from Dubuque with lots of black eyeliner and inadequate tube tops, they are now married with children. If I say that “I like Metal,” am I endorsing the wholesale exploitation of women, and irresponsible use of various substances? (Or did I already do that when I said I liked Hip Hop?)

I want to expand my horizons, and I do love this Iron Maiden album which is in constant play, even as I block out the lyrics. On the other hand, I will never, ever, be seen in public wearing leather pants, lifting my t-shirt to catch the eye of some superannuated drummer with hair longer than mine, or doing that thing with my hands that looks like the Texas Longhorn symbol, but isn’t. I might, on occasion, bang my head a little in private.

We aren’t really a great fit, Metal and me, but I think that I’m falling in love.

Summer: A Preview

Summer is my least favorite season. I am a ghostly pale person, I sweat easily, and I do not garden successfully. I am allergic to chlorine and can’t spend days by the pool without breaking out in hives, and I am not generally given to hiking, camping, kayaking or doing any of those other things that involve being outside, sweating, and getting burned. I complain a lot about the heat, which may explain why I often find myself alone in my air conditioned house drinking iced tea and reading.

Today, though, today it was 80 degrees after an interminable and bitterly cold winter. Stepping outside tentatively in my cotton skirt and flip flops, I was overwhelmed by sense memories, good ones, the kind that made me sit down on the peeling porch steps and savor them. As the hair at the back of my neck coiled inexorably into ringlets, and the warm air extended its seductive fingers to touch parts of me that have not been unwrapped in public for five months, it seemed that maybe I didn’t hate summer any more.

I remembered all of the Only Summer things, the Farmer’s Market on Sunday morning, bags full of vegetable love in the form of tiny Patty Pan squash, gritty zucchini, scallions with shining white bulbs, garlic scapes, baby eggplants, tiny and fiery Hmong peppers, and the tomatoes, oh Lord the tomatoes in their juicy, flashy glory. The fruit, too, cantaloupes, Honeydew, watermelons, and berries, nothing in a plastic box from California, strawberries that have a smell and can make strong men tremble as they offer up their sweet/tart essence. I think about cooking in my summer kitchen, window open, Janis and Jami through the speakers, a little buzzed, very happy, asking the world to “take another little piece of my heart, now baby” as I bless fresh mozzarella and heirloom tomatoes with a chiffonadeof basil and a drizzle of olive oil. I wonder why I love cooking most in summer, it seems backwards, I should cherish the heat and coziness when it’s cold outside but the truth, the truth is that I am happiest cooking the crispest, juiciest, most potent version of everything under the sun, in my flip flops, when the sun is heading out for the evening.

I do adore my flip flops, which I keep in a basket so that I can pick the right color and height for any occasion. I paint my toenails luscious colors in the summer: mango, azure, spring green, and the color of ripe strawberries. I wear skirts so light that they barely touch skin, tissue weight T-shirts, and sandals. It’s hot, and there’s a reason, I think, that “hot” is a synonym for “sexy;” it is totally sensual to be almost barrier-free in the warm, moist air, open to the universe without layers of coats, sweaters, boots and socks. There is a conspiracy of the elements to make me feel fully alive, to make my hair curl and grow wild and to give me a perpetual, dewy flush. Winter is about drawing inward and keeping warm, Fall is about brisk new beginnings, and spring is frail, pastel, and gentle. Summer is about opening out, pulsing with ripeness, full bloom, and the headiness of so many things alive at one time. It is intoxicating.

It’s not really summer; this was just a preview. Tomorrow it will cool down again, for a while, but it’s coming, another summer, in all it’s ripe and languid glory. Maybe this year, I’ll surrender, balance the discomfort of sweat against the ecstasy of a cool shower, and the mosquito bites against the thrill of sitting on the porch waiting for a thunderstorm to break the tension in the air. I think I’m going to like it, this time.

Austin

 

I have been slogging through hip-deep mud, grateful for something so small as the sight of a sleeping baby in a shopping cart, or so large as a startling moon melting like golden butter into the surrounding cosmic fuzz. I have been looking for signs, things that make my heart jump, and my brain whirr, and let me imagine a life on high, dry ground. I require not a paved path, but something firm and passable with rocks small enough to kick away, or pocket for later examination. I am not asking for much.

I might need a vacation, but not the usual kind. I am not interested in lying on a beach, which bores me to tears and burns me scarlet, nor in Action! Adventures!, historical sights, days of shopping or even museums and restaurants. I want a perspective shift, new experiences, meaningful work, different surroundings, baptism by immersion in the soul of a new place. I want to come back to my home, my family, my life, but I want to come back seeing it all without sorrow, fatigue, and the sucking, killing weight of mud with every step.

The signs point me to Austin, a place where I have never been.  I want a clean slate of a week in which I slide into a pinon-scented sonnet of hard work and fresh confidences. I will rise before the sun, drink three shots of espresso with a swirling hit of heavy cream, and go to work in a bakery, baking pies. I will roll out the shortest, richest crust anyone has ever tasted, and fill it with fresh berries, intoxicating banana and coconut cream, and astonishing Texas pecans. I will make lattice tops, crumb tops, and blankets of brown-tinged meringue. When my offerings are finished, sitting pretty on Fiestaware pie stands behind a barrier of thick, clean glass, I will hang up my vintage apron and head home to sleep.

In the late afternoon I will walk through the crowds who have come to inhale the music and funk of South by Southwest. Every sound check, every practiced riff, every street musician with an open case and big, hungry eyes will be an infusion of life and hope. It will be humid, my hair will frizz and my face will be perpetually covered with a thin film of sweat, but it will be all right because everyone will understand. The girl selling real green chiles from an air stream trailer will have her own puffed, blonde hair held off her neck with a silver clasp garnished with a chunk of turquoise, and she’ll smile at me in recognition because my own red curls are held up with a single, purloined chopstick.

After hours of music, and colors and sound, I will retreat again to make myself into a new thing, someone in a flowered skirt, Doc Martens and crazy curls set free. I will wheel my bass to some small, dark club with a dartboard and a tiny dance floor, and play with a band. It doesn’t matter that I can’t really play a standup bass; I can play the bejazus out of a cello, and it can’t be that different. I’ll sway, and slap, close my eyes and float on the current of “You Cast a Spell On Me,” and fall a little bit in love with the lead singer whose words break open my cold, closed heart. By the last night, I will be thinking of home, missing my family, sure that I am once again on ground solid enough to allow me to stride with purpose in my new, red cowboy boots.

I am not going to Austin, not today, and probably not tomorrow. I am probably not even going so far as an adjacent zip code. I can bake pies, though, and listen to music as potent as any drug, letting my hair go wild and looking for kindred spirits behind every face I see. The signs point to Austin, and even if my Austin exists only in my own, weary mind, I’m planning to travel. I hear the roads are clear, and dry, and I know the bright spring moon will light my way so I won’t even have to stop for sleep.