Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Sunday, February 19, 2012
The Life Section
There is much written now about "the third place," that place where you go when you're not at work or at home, that other place where you feel comfortable and welcome. Starbucks stressed this. I remember in my interview I had to describe what makes a good third place and how I would contribute to making Starbucks that place for every one of our customers. Smile, greet them, ask them questions, make sure everything is clean, say goodbye.
But, though I miss the people I worked with at Starbucks (it's wildly been over a year since I worked there), it can't be my third place. I'm too familiar with it, and the lines are too harsh: tile floor, echos of the espresso machine, no corners to hide in. No, I need an anonymous, quiet place. And that, as I've mentioned here before, is Panera Bread on the west side.
I got there this morning around 8am, the perfect time on a weekend morning. There were only a few people sitting with their coffee, books, spouses. The music was not yet on, so the room felt hushed, as if we'd all just woken and were shuffling slowly into the dining room as siblings. I ordered oatmeal, a bagel, and coffee and went to my usual table for two near the window, as I like to look out in between pages and bites. This morning, I watched the rain collect in black puddles on the parking lot and read from Pulphead, essays about brothers in blood and literature.
As I waited for my oatmeal, I paused at an empty table and pulled the Life section from the pile of papers left by someone already there and gone. I knew my friend Steve would be featured by my friend Andrew today, so I found the article and stood there reading, then took it back to my table to finish it as I ate. The papers were gone when I went to put it back in the pile, but I noticed a couple nearby had taken it to share at their booth. Like a daughter passing her favorite section down the table to her parents, I placed Life on their pile and said "Here's the other section," smiling, and returning to my table.
A few minutes later a couple came in looking for a table with access to an outlet. A gentleman popped his head over a partition and said the corner booth has one. The man looked around at the corner behind me and said, "I don't see it." My mouth was full, so I waited to point it out until I would be legible. His wife then came over, scanned the wall, and said, "I don't see it either." "Along the baseboard," the man behind the partition called. I pointed, after a gulp, "It's black, it blends in." The woman looked again, her head moving quickly from one side of the wall to the other. "There, between the two tables on the bottom," I said, gently, as to my grandmother, and she finally sighed, "Oh!"
It's for moments of small connections in the quiet of a Sunday morning, over coffee and bagels, sometimes the windows spotted with rain, that I come here. I know no one, and no one knows me, but we come together in the most intimate time of day to be quiet alone or with a loved one, to share papers and help one another find what we're looking for. A family of strangers, if I've ever felt one.
By the time I leave just after nine, the booths in the main part have started filling, the music--mostly instrumental--marks the start of day, and no one says goodbye when they leave, the spell broken but taken with us to carry out the hours of Sunday and the noise of moments in the rush outside.
But, though I miss the people I worked with at Starbucks (it's wildly been over a year since I worked there), it can't be my third place. I'm too familiar with it, and the lines are too harsh: tile floor, echos of the espresso machine, no corners to hide in. No, I need an anonymous, quiet place. And that, as I've mentioned here before, is Panera Bread on the west side.
I got there this morning around 8am, the perfect time on a weekend morning. There were only a few people sitting with their coffee, books, spouses. The music was not yet on, so the room felt hushed, as if we'd all just woken and were shuffling slowly into the dining room as siblings. I ordered oatmeal, a bagel, and coffee and went to my usual table for two near the window, as I like to look out in between pages and bites. This morning, I watched the rain collect in black puddles on the parking lot and read from Pulphead, essays about brothers in blood and literature.
As I waited for my oatmeal, I paused at an empty table and pulled the Life section from the pile of papers left by someone already there and gone. I knew my friend Steve would be featured by my friend Andrew today, so I found the article and stood there reading, then took it back to my table to finish it as I ate. The papers were gone when I went to put it back in the pile, but I noticed a couple nearby had taken it to share at their booth. Like a daughter passing her favorite section down the table to her parents, I placed Life on their pile and said "Here's the other section," smiling, and returning to my table.
A few minutes later a couple came in looking for a table with access to an outlet. A gentleman popped his head over a partition and said the corner booth has one. The man looked around at the corner behind me and said, "I don't see it." My mouth was full, so I waited to point it out until I would be legible. His wife then came over, scanned the wall, and said, "I don't see it either." "Along the baseboard," the man behind the partition called. I pointed, after a gulp, "It's black, it blends in." The woman looked again, her head moving quickly from one side of the wall to the other. "There, between the two tables on the bottom," I said, gently, as to my grandmother, and she finally sighed, "Oh!"
It's for moments of small connections in the quiet of a Sunday morning, over coffee and bagels, sometimes the windows spotted with rain, that I come here. I know no one, and no one knows me, but we come together in the most intimate time of day to be quiet alone or with a loved one, to share papers and help one another find what we're looking for. A family of strangers, if I've ever felt one.
By the time I leave just after nine, the booths in the main part have started filling, the music--mostly instrumental--marks the start of day, and no one says goodbye when they leave, the spell broken but taken with us to carry out the hours of Sunday and the noise of moments in the rush outside.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Entrance
I'll be out walking and start composing my entrance to an essay, write the rhythm of the beginning and know when to pause--white space--and where to begin again. I choreograph the pieces of my experience in relation to steps, the magnitude of birds and toads of the lake. It comes as an external narrator translating movements into sentences, an out-of-body experience. I write word after word in silence and return home to lose every syllable before they become visual, the thought of making something imagined a reality becomes an exhaustion. All those words, stuck, hung like photos on an attic wall.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Five more acts of love
1. Connection: a Twitter exchange that brought the absolute geek out, in which I tweeted, "Loaning @ifyouknewthen to @rural_sultan today so he can experience the essay magic, particularly 'First.'" And Ryan Van Meter (aka @ifyouknewthen, author of If You Knew Then What I Know Now, one of my favorite books of 2011) responded, "I like the term 'essay magic.' Makes me think of silk scarves and bunnies being pulled from a piece of paper.'" Connection!
2. For weeks now I've had the new Snow Patrol album Fallen Empires on repeat in the car, learning its language and personality like I have each one since Final Straw in 2003. I wrote the following from a prompt this week in Writers' Night Out:
3. Across the lake, a white and black creature sniffing the ground, morning steam rising from the water, thinking skunk against the brown needles of the ground, staring at the only wild skunk I've ever seen until it spread its wings and walked toward the water to swim.
4. Cinnamon roll and coffee, legs warmed by the sun, and two hours to read alone.
5. A big arrow in Quiet on p. 135 near the top with the note, "This is where I realized I'm dreaming again and what it means." To dream is everything. To have a book help you understand how and why that is is powerful. To be in a place where you are once again the person you know yourself to be is an incredible relief.
2. For weeks now I've had the new Snow Patrol album Fallen Empires on repeat in the car, learning its language and personality like I have each one since Final Straw in 2003. I wrote the following from a prompt this week in Writers' Night Out:
The first time I heard Snow Patrol's "Called Out in the Dark" I was in my office at home, struggling with unhappiness and loneliness. I hadn't felt like dancing in months, but the music video called for it. In the video, Gary Lightbody tried to sing, tried to be the star, but he kept getting pushed out. The dancers were simple, the moves simple, the beat and melody in major key. "It like we just can't help ourselves." I danced down the hall, put the video on repeat. I needed an anthem, something to cling to and help me move forward. I needed something to call me out of the dark of my own, felt like I hadn't smiled in months, like I hadn't been myself in years. The song became my trigger for movement, the auditory signal to smile. Just days later I adopted my dog Scooter, his face the visual equivalent of song, his whines signals I should sing and react, his eyes cues to laugh. I have lived with this album for weeks now. I'm learning its story like a lover. I know how it says hello with a soft jolt, how it exits without words.There's one line in "Lifening" that I've been singing as "An island in the World Cup, either North or South" and puzzling over it. An island, I thought, not tied to anything else. Okay. But then yesterday I heard it in a different way as I was driving and laughed, hitting the steering wheel in happy realization. It's "Ireland in the World Cup," silly! Of course, that's Snow Patrol's home. (Also, SP tickets bought for April 2 in Atlanta: a birthday pilgrimage, of sorts.)
3. Across the lake, a white and black creature sniffing the ground, morning steam rising from the water, thinking skunk against the brown needles of the ground, staring at the only wild skunk I've ever seen until it spread its wings and walked toward the water to swim.
4. Cinnamon roll and coffee, legs warmed by the sun, and two hours to read alone.
5. A big arrow in Quiet on p. 135 near the top with the note, "This is where I realized I'm dreaming again and what it means." To dream is everything. To have a book help you understand how and why that is is powerful. To be in a place where you are once again the person you know yourself to be is an incredible relief.
Monday, February 06, 2012
Five acts of love
1) A series of fallen trees, discs of roots lifted, abbreviated red. Trunks shoved by what must have been wind. It would be cliche to say giants.
2) A Burger King commercial in which a man marries bacon and the priest says, "You may now eat the bride."
3) A convergence of S's. A small dog found on the corner, the circles of tails and noses, the shaking of one in my arms, the jumps of the other. The five-minute friendship of Scooter, Snickers, and Skipper.
4) A review that made me squeal and go to the dictionary: Gerard "demonstrates some unique linguistic brilliance, painting vivid, pullulating scenes of 'summer skies choked with thunderheads' and 'golden afternoon light cooked by the deep verdure of swaying evergreen trees.'" (on The Patron Saint of Dreams via Publishers Weekly)
5) A mother who, after decades of evading technology, tells you she's done internet research on your life, knows more than you about something you're trying to learn the hard way.
2) A Burger King commercial in which a man marries bacon and the priest says, "You may now eat the bride."
3) A convergence of S's. A small dog found on the corner, the circles of tails and noses, the shaking of one in my arms, the jumps of the other. The five-minute friendship of Scooter, Snickers, and Skipper.
4) A review that made me squeal and go to the dictionary: Gerard "demonstrates some unique linguistic brilliance, painting vivid, pullulating scenes of 'summer skies choked with thunderheads' and 'golden afternoon light cooked by the deep verdure of swaying evergreen trees.'" (on The Patron Saint of Dreams via Publishers Weekly)
5) A mother who, after decades of evading technology, tells you she's done internet research on your life, knows more than you about something you're trying to learn the hard way.
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