a good invisible

I am so breeze-blown comfortable so as to feel invisible. Glad my life is simplified down, down to the basics: chair, desk, electric fan, apricot, apricot pit.

What are you supposed to do with all the memories that you lived, of which the amount is increasingly growing? Soon, will I be composed of nothing but mental images of the past, with only a sliver of present left? All those years, witnessing, witnessing…

Tomorrow, you’re pushed out into the slot that was set up for you the day before, as if there are no choices. You place a vase on a bookshelf in 1985. You clean the dust off it in 1995, again in 2005, and then in 2015, you’re still cleaning dust off it. In the meantime, real things happen. The fear of things happening – you fear the death of your loved ones in a fiery crash, and then it really happens to other people, but not to you, fueling the fear. Mostly, a bunch of nothing happens, but this nothing is the essence of life. We only remember the passionate kisses, overseas travel, and the deaths.

My dad telling me the same stories over and over until one day, he couldn’t remember them anymore. But I do. My unsentimental mother’s hidden memories that I’ll never know.

My mom couldn’t say it, but she proved it. Dad could say it, but he couldn’t prove it.

I wonder about who came before me, and I always picture them in black and white. Even in the medieval dark ages, people walked around in bright colors and sunlight. White clover and its familiar muffled scent has been around all my life. Their little round heads are actually made up of many tiny white flowers with their own tiny petals. You smell them in passing, always in passing. When I was younger, if you saw something memorable, you’d go home and tell people about it – you’d grope for the words, or you’d paint a picture, or take people back to the very spot. Now, you can capture the memories at your fingertips with no effort and send them to people across the ocean.

Sometimes I feel like a heart without a rib cage, or a brain without a skull to protect it. 

I can’t tell…is the earth raging with fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, terror, or is it another quiet dusky evening? It’s all of it. It depends on which street you walk down.

It’s all there contained in this 5-foot-something blob of flesh. The whole story and more. Other people’s stories are in there too.  My grandma and grandpa’s octagonal window of their modest house – I could tell you a story of inside that window. And the birdbath in the backyard, painted an opaque sky-blue in its basin.

It makes me want to hide in my grandma’s linen closet with the muted lily-of-the-valley scent from the bars of soap she slipped between the towels.  As a girl, when I slept over, she would get fresh sheets and pillowcases from this closet in her hallway. The hallway still exists, but the linen closet is filled with other people’s things because grandma is no longer with us. My lovely grandma, I miss her…

I smelled a rose on the side of someone’s house, and it made my leaning over worthwhile with a watery fruity smell. My mom said that if I ever smell a flower in someone’s yard, always do it with my hands behind my back, so they can’t accuse you of wanting to pluck it. And my mind instantly flashed to my grandma bending over to smell a gardenia with her hands behind her back. 

Remembering the day 16 years ago that we brought our newborn son home from the hospital, wrapped in his hospital-issued blanket and cap. Everything was exciting for me, a new mom. This is the only home he’s ever known, our little old duplex; by the time I was his age, I’d lived in 7 places. His tiny world, a bedroom, grew until his world was the whole apartment, then the block (around in a stroller), then the neighborhood. And one day he was old enough to say the name of a street, instead of calling it “the big street.” When we drove around, he’d look out the window with fascination, from the perch of his car seat. Now, he’s a teen with a phone and various devices, plugged in. Asking, “Hey, Google…?” instead of “Hey, Mom…?”

My poor Daddy’s teeth are falling out of his head. He is so little and bent over, and in mental and physical discomfort just living. Can’t one’s body wait til one is dead to start rapidly declining? It’s unfair…he’s being pushed out of his own life.

Yet Thomas Moore calls aging a “metamorphosis;” not just the decline of a body, but the transformation of a spirit. I need to tell you this, and tell myself too.

Daddy, I heard ‘the Chairman of the Board’ on the radio tonight, and I always think of you at around age 30, handsome and suntanned, dressed to the nines, taking the woman whom you adored, my mom, out to dinner at a fancy steakhouse. You are living all the idealistic 1950s lyrics that Frank sings about: a stunning wife to come home to and spoon, 2 babies to cuddle, the blue Impala parked right outside your California home in a quiet neighborhood. A family created by love.

I’m reading The Grapes of Wrath and the second diary of Bridget Jones (The Edge of Reason) at the same time. The two books couldn’t be more contrary. I don’t want Bridget Jones to end…it’s like savoring a cream puff… funny and delightful. I only allow myself to read it when I’m depressed or anxious, using it as a balm. The Grapes of Wrath is so masterfully written, it almost makes you gasp. It’s very dark, dusty, gritty, tragic, but something everyone needs to read. It makes you appreciate all that you have because the characters are have-nots and suffer endlessly. They are hungry, dirty, and sick, yet they have hope, which cranks the pages of the book forward. Bridget Jones is about shopping, calorie counting, cigarettes, alcohol, shagging, boyfriends, gal-pals, and Colin Firth without a shirt. Life itself is kind of like going back and forth between these two books.

Maybe it’s both at once. Blessed with bounty, and full of dread. That. Is. Life.

Sometimes I imagine a perfect 3-day weekend and I am reclining in a lawn chair, mesmerized by the perfect green lawn and cool water nearby. It is warm and finally silent as I sink deeper into the lawn chair. A delicate breeze sweeps over me. After all the chaos, you are finally relaxing and life is effortless. However, at what point does it cease to be perfect?

How do you live a moment…as it is here…? Do you grasp it with arms wide, colliding with it? Do you embrace it like an octopus would? Or peel it and bite it like a plump navel orange, squirting sweet succor? How do you live a moment to the fullest, to the edges? Do you come up close to it, just observing, allowing it to be and grow, just whispering to it? Either way, it will pass… the next moment may be similar, or better, or worse, but just as fleeting. How do you tell the moment that you appreciate it for being here? How do you say that you did it justice…that you didn’t obscure it with fretful thoughts…that it was a worthwhile bit of time, a moment well-lived? Be grateful for it, even if not much happens, but a streaky-orange sky on a July evening when the sun sets at 8 p.m. By the way, tomorrow the sun will set at 7:59 p.m. (I wish it were going the other way, and setting at 8:01. Though in wishing this, have I lost sight of the moment?)