Feeling numb inside today. Could it be the weather? The 12 hours of sleep? The existential abyss over which I hover? I don’t know. A hardness in my heart felt loosened after a couple of correspondences.
I was reminded last night of a funny thing that happened years ago. A friend from college was in town. He was at a party at someone’s house when he started talking to a woman. In the course of the chitchat she mentioned that she was from Tampa. Totally as a joke my friend said “Oh, you’re from Tampa, you must know a guy named Mark Thomas?” She replied “I grew up right across the street from him.” Turns out it was Ann, and she was there with her brother Michael, both of whom lived on Diplomat Drive right across the street from me. I gave her piano lessons for a little while… or maybe it was Michael. I never knew them very well. Today I find that Michael lives in New York and works at Google.
But that meeting between a college friend and my childhood neighbors, well, that was damn weird. Kismet, it is called.
I sent the story to my sister, thinking I had probably already told her this, but that it never hurts to revisit a good story once in a while. In the course of the conversation she came up with a happy memory, or a happy tale. She said an elderly woman stopped her on the sidewalk recently to say that she used to stop in front of the house to listen to me play the piano. I knew people did that but the arrangement of things was such that I never actually saw the people standing there. That’s nice to know I’m remembered in a positive way by someone, however stray the connection might be.
“Come, memory, let us seek them in the shadows.”
Is that the line? See if I can remember this:
ON THE DEATH OF FRIENDS IN CHILDHOOD, by Donald Justice
We shall never meet them bearded in heaven
nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell.
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight
Forming a ring, perhaps, in games whose very names we have forgotten.Come, memory, let us seek them in the shadows.
That’s probably not 100% accurate but it’s one of my favorite maudlin poems from the days when poetry was new and beautiful to me. Justice was a favorite in those days, though I find him a little hackneyed now. I do think this is a great line, however:
Men at forty learn to close softly doors to rooms they will no longer be entering.
Yes. I’ve had flashes of that basket of mortality that fills itself with people we will never see again, places we will never revisit, experiences never to be repeated despite how common they might have been in earlier stages of life. A friend from high school came to New York on a work-related trip. When he left I had the feeling I would never see him again, even though we have plenty of years left. It just didn’t seem to make sense to me at the time that I would ever return to Tampa, or that he would revisit here. I’m not so sure I feel that certain now.
Once many years ago I bought a box of pencils and thought, this is the last box of pencils I will ever buy for the rest of my life. I don’t use them much now, but the prediction that these would be the last pencils ever arose from memories of how many pencils I went through in earlier years. Not many. Even when I did more composing I rarely if ever used pencil, always pen. The writing implement of the pencil was just never a big thing in my life. Today that box of pencils sits in the kitchen drawer, lightly raided of its contents with well over half the original squad of pencils still there, unsharpened.
I still do not feel good but I might try my chances at the bar tonight, to see if anyone capable of conversation exists.
I left the noise canceling headphones at home. So I am typing with the noise again. Does it even make a difference? It feels like it should.
I did not report to the library today, for the first time since I started going. I wonder if they missed me. There is a social reportage structure at work there, I think, with people checking in and talking to nobody, just to be seen and to take comfort in the knowledge that the people who see them there regularly know they are OK. I have not worked myself into the primordial social squall, and I might never pursue that level of interaction at the library.
