the Nixionary

I got up and looked for snow, like I have on all Christmas mornings in Colorado.  But it was warm and there was just my Nebraskan neighbor getting dragged by his 100-pound Weimeraner across the sunny sidewalk.  The presents had to wait for people still sleeping, so I read a thin little book called Pleasure which is written in spurts of prose about birds, death, cooking fish, and having kids.

The author, Gary Young, writes: “Who would volunteer to live any moment more than once?”

I would.  Here are mine: running to the Jack and Jill for waterballoons in rural Illinois with my brothers, eating skinny frozen hamburgers for breakfast in my Grandma’s bed, late nights in Rome when my roommates and I requested just-sauced pizza rossa from the bakers downstairs, flying in a plane before there was worry, making buttered fettucine with my mom after kindergarten and calling Patrick Smith to come over the fence to swing, running around the hallways of Mullen and popping up in classroom windows behind a huge grinning African mask we made from butcher paper during yearbook, hiking a humid trail in Kentucky up to a mirrored lake with a statue in the middle, tossing tied flies into the Williams Fork on a freezing day, driving between Savannah and Charleston in the middle of the night with all the windows down and all the sounds and small bugs of the south coming through the sunroof, sprinkling a fresh-caught king salmon with pepper and salt and strawberry jelly and putting the whole cutting board into the fire so we could watch the wood turn to an ashy curve.

Other Christmas moments: David read a passage about how we have to be incompetent like little children to feel God’s largeness, and Garrison Keillor’s Christmas column on “dumb wonder” said pretty much the same thing–how he liked Greek mass better before he learned the language.  I guess some things are best appreciated when they just happen, before they have evolved.  Mom called the gravy catty-whompus and Uncle Jody (flanneled) explained to scowling Aunt Ria (more light-hearted this year than last) that giving the dogs booze is better than drinking alone.  Dad proudly sliced the prime rib and I gave too much of it to the dogs who could barely walk the next morning.  Then David tried to climb up over Michael at the dinner table and ended up doing a handstand on the armrests with his 30-year-old legs swaying over the Christmas smorgasbord before crashing hard into the wall.

Scottie, our friend’s little boy, came inside, looked at Luke’s dog Soldier, and announced, “Hey! He looks like my dog that’s dead.”  My cousin is second in nursing school after hating the classroom his whole life, the water pressure in my parents’ shower is perfect, and my quirky friend from Alaska sends me a short story he has written (on the side of doing janitorial work in Antarctica) about deformed friends who perform together in a carnival, and in which the happy man with clawed hands says:

Good company is the most important thing in life. Remember that.

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Ashley opted to stay in the car on account of creepiness, but Kate and I had a mission to take our old firepit from the abandoned front porch.  She put the small key in its matching port under a sign that said LOCKS WILL BE CHANGED in big red letters, and we pushed open a door swollen with scrawled threats and rainwater.

Kate had been in our house just a few months prior to rescue my sea green couch.  She figured it shouldn’t go to waste like the rest of the place had.  When I left New Orleans for Denver in May, a 20-year-old named Elizabeth took my lavender bedroom in the back of 1434 Constance Street.  But then she left silently in the middle of the night and stiffed Kate with hundreds of dollars of electric and utility bills.  She might have left because the ceiling I used to sleep under collapsed on her bed while she was waiting tables.  Kate left to pursue a PhD.  I left for one major reason and he had offered to move to New Orleans.  The other reasons I’m still circling.

It was weird going back.  First of all, it’s weird to be a visitor in a place you consider your second home.  Second of all, the charming dilapidation of New Orleans hit a little less charmingly while we were roaming through the exposed frame of a place that used to not just be sheet rock but our life-container.

In the middle of the living room floor were some of my old shoes, a few LP’s that had once lined the mantle, the gold velvet curtains I had sewn by hand for all of the floor-to-ceiling windows.  I almost cried, but the whole place felt so alien to the same spaces we had inhabited, something stopped me from being heartbroken.

It felt like right after Katrina when we found our plants crispy and a big rusty stain where the fridge had been.  But this time was different, unexplained, untouched by “natural” disaster.  It startled me to see that disasters of neglect leave behind the same detritus as the ones spurred by weather.  There were wavy pictures of us and the old dresser that had sent me to the hospital for inhaling black mold.  There was a fridge we didn’t open and Kate’s maroon canopy that had taken us so many attempts to hang.

I was looking for an old sweater and the sign of a struggle.  It’s not often someone leaves in the middle of the night without explanation.  Or maybe it is in New Orleans.  All weekend, as we giggled in and out of small shops on Magazine Street and watched the sun dip into the Mississippi, I kept trying to put my finger on why I moved.  It was sunny and 70, people knew our names inside every wooden door.  I was nostalgic and elated, overwhelmed and carefree, predictably conflicted in a city built on unresolved ambivalences.

Kate, Ashley, and I brought the firepit over to Patrick’s house on St. Charles and drank spiced cider aside the smoke.  I talked for a long time to a long-haired, crazy-eyed man who went blind in Alaska, had his retinas reattached, and believes in miracles.  Mostly, we talked about the feeling we both get coming down over the river with its lights and ships and many promises.  By the time I left, all my clothes smelled like cigarettes and camping.

Sunday night at St. Joe’s, we were minding our own business with our blueberry mojitos when this man in a newsboy hat and thick-rimmed glasses came up to us and said, “Anyone in the mood to eat?”

Pierce left with him and when they came back, they were carrying 30 pounds of just-roasted pig, homemade cole slaw, pork grease biscuits, and spicy cajun sauce.

“Where’d you get all that food?”  I asked the cook.

“I cooked it.”

“For who?”

“Anyone who wants to eat it!”

When I tried to drag more of the story out of him later, he wouldn’t talk to me anymore.  I asked his sultry friend what was wrong and she said from under sunken eyes, “He’s just drunk.  If you ask him questions in the morning, he’ll have answers.”

In the morning, I wake up in Ashley’s sun-filled house with a stomachache and take her to Louis Armstrong like nothing has changed, like we will come back to this place like we always have and our problems will be marvelously deferred.  While Kate and I are drinking wine and eating cheese in twin white rocking chairs, two teachers I used to know come down from the upstairs apartment, relight the pit, and torch all the papers they think they’ll never want to read.  I want to tell them they’ll want to remember everything about this place, that what’s destroyed is never gone.

I can’t decide if the trip was so meaningful because I want to move back or because I don’t and I can’t reconcile the gap between opposite feelings: too much happiness and too much sadness.  Too much art and too much carelessness.  Too much poverty alongside unthinkable wealth.  Too much complacency and too much desire for someone like me to find the happy medium within each dichotomy.

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It’s so cold here I keep waking up with my knees against my chest. The sewers look like they have something to prove.

When I was in high school, my dad cut a piece of rubber to the size of my windshield so I wouldn’t have to scrape the windows on cold mornings.  That was when I was driving this Hawaiian girl to school who had the longest, most beautiful hair in the world.  Then she put bronze highlights in it and looked American.  I was disappointed. I had nothing to say to her.  We watched our breaths and rifled through bad radio stations.  She liked hip hop.  I pretended to.  Those were the coldest drives I’ve ever taken.

I used to wear mittens more often and dread the cold less.  This year, I am re-acclimating from the South to the mountains, and finding that weather recollection is not something built into our muscle memory.  I am constantly surprised by the dawn and dusk chill, like I’ve never felt air that bites.  Other things I remember better: songs, street names, phone numbers, the smells of southern flowers.  I picked up a honeysuckle candle this weekend and it put me right back on our warm cypress-board porch.

What I do love is down comforters and snow like down, and the moment right after the sheets aren’t freezing anymore.  On the 100-degree-plus days in New Orleans, all we could do was lay on the couch with the fans sprinting and the beers sweating and our hair strands strapping themselves in wet lines down the sides of our faces.  The same fatigue effects me in severe cold.  There is less energy, at least for me, in the extremes.

Because of my preoccupation and my occupation, I keep seeing missing marks everywhere: semi-colons, commas, a gratuitous letter here, a meaning obscured there.  I spend all day behind this screen pruning and adding.  If I could prune the world, I would take away unnecessary apostrophes, bad tempers, and joint pain.  If I could add things they’d be: indoor pools, places you can nap if you need to, and handwoven blankets for all the cold people on Speer.

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Change is afoot. I can feel it in my scattered friends, who are mostly in school. New ideas create new conditions. I keep searching for flights to places I’ve already been like I haven’t quite learned enough from them. Last night, we were pulling random objects out of a brown paper bag and writing about them.

Here’s what I got: a cracked-open nutfruit from Singapore, rosary beads, and a wooden ball with a lobsided face.

The fruit had a snarled shell, like petrified hair, and inside was a bulbous fig, once soft and white, but caramelized by time. It smelled like my grandma’s attic where my cousin and I used to sleep under a mounted rifle and I’d pretend she was my sister since I never had one. One year, we found a dusty case full of old black and white photographs. We spread them on the ground around our anxious little knees and gave exciting names like Aloisius and Beneficent to our revealed prehistory. I keep wondering if kids today can still escape so instantly to their imaginations.

The rosary beads reminded me of my classmates fainting on the shag green carpet in the front of the church when we gathered during Lent to pray all those ten-piece decades and Glory-Be’s. Then I was thinking about how we used to have birthday parties at Bead It! First, you took a clear glass tray with indentations and circled through rows of hundred-hued beads. Swirly globes, ones shaped like roses cut by fairies, satin, glass, felt and flat, bone, birch, and shale. Then you strung them together, and it was like a creation of preferences made into a neck-strung world. Wearing a rosary around your neck was a big no-no, but we all secretly put them on each other like necklaces so we could feel that weight, that mysterious, forbidden feeling that we were doing something grave and revolutionary, which is what everyone wants to do at some point, I think. It is a constant struggle to just let the glory be.

The unbalanced faceball made me think of a halibut who carries his eyes on one side of his body and his history on the other. When you pull up a halibut with an abundance of scars on its white belly, you know he’s old because all the star-shaped caverns and linear nicks are from his journey on the bottom of the sea. A halibut is not a pretty fish, but a bottom-feeder, literally–fish finders can’t even see them they skirt so close to the sea floor. I like them because their skin tells a story.

I’m a little worried about forgetting, and about not ever doing something with gravity. I’m also worried about where all the writers will go if books and newspapers stop being published, and what will happen to the other-worlds of kids if everything is relegated by money, stress, and screens. Luke says a strapped economy will never erase our need for literature. What is rock bottom? What is recession? Does it lessen our cognitive function or increase it? If the economy is in recession, does that mean our brains go into a mode of inflation?

If I told you to stick your hand in an empty bag instead of a full one and then write, would you have more things to say or less?

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“After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.” -Virginia Woolf

On doubt, my friend Sara writes to me this morning, from her storm-enclosed cabin in Kodiak: all we can do is capture what we can right. Her husband is trapped in Larson Bay for days, her son is swaddled in so many snow-clothes, she says he can’t walk.  It is snowy in Denver, too; puffs like cottonwood fall-offs interrupt the gauzy sky.  It is wet snow, though, the kind the road can’t hold onto.  If words are snow, I am that road.

I have been looking at this word: CAPTURE, from the Latin captura: seized or taken, and I think it could serve as a noun and verb for almost everything I try to do all day on any given day.

Definitions: an act or instance of taking; one stream diverting the upper course of another stream by encroaching on its catchment area;  a move in a board game that gains an opponent’s piece; absorption by an atom; to record accurately in words; to bring permanently into gravitational influence; to record in a permanent file; one that has been taken (as a prize ship)

I’ve been imagining the last definition for a few hours and it looks like pirates, red, and gold, which probably means I’m not getting something.

Today feels like a movie, slow, with snow like screen static. We went on a field trip this afternoon to a Chinese tea house and tasted three varieties: one smelled like weed, one smelled, according to my coworker, like wet socks, and the other like leaves.  Plucky Asian music sounded from the ceiling as the owner talked of Hangzhou and farmers growing Camellia Sinensis (the plant from which all true tea comes) in humid rows.

What I learned: tea has been around for 5,000 years.  Herbal teas aren’t teas at all.  One can become a Certified Tea Master.  One can talk with a Tea Master about tea for two hours or more.  Adding honey to one’s tea is frowned upon.  (Too bad for me).

I was wondering what other kinds of Certified Masters there are–what Masters are offended by my inconsiderate consumptions on a daily basis?  Or does a true master take no offense to the ignorance of others?  Offense is a scary thing for me because it’s usually wordless–wordlessly spurred, silently taken.

I wonder how many unwritten books would be written if there were no one to offend.  If everyone died tomorrow but me would I write everything I’ve ever wanted to or write nothing at all?  I think part of creating is that any artist wants their work to be captured, absorbed, made part of someone else’s permanent orbit.  We want to be taken captive.

I think Sara was right about capturing what we can.  All we can do is what we do.  Maybe we try and catch too many things until that one thing catches us, if it ever does.  Maybe truth is a cup of tea, maybe a single word is more vast than one writer’s attempt at a phrase.

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