This morning I was out before eight o'clock with the dogs. It was early enough for there still to be a cool, damp feel to the air. The sun was barely up and sending these almost horizontal rays like spot lights, lighting up a spray of branches or the rough bark of a tree deep in the woods. It was very quiet, but I could hear the low whine and rumble of a sixteen wheeler going by on a highway some where far back in the hills. There was a crow cawing in the tree tops nearby and the sawing crickets.
This feeling of melancholy settled over me. I remembered the days were already growing shorter and soon, at seven forty five the sun won't even be up, the grass will be frosted over and the leaves all fallen. And I'll still be here, in this house.
The army life imparts this kind of randomness to living. A person is sent somewhere, for a reason that popped up like a lottery ball-lucky number 47!-and away you go and there you are, in that place.
Sometimes it's like an adventure. I have lived in interesting places; I can see the route the Army is taking me like a glowing, crooked line over the map. I get to experience one state and then another, I get to try out various ways of living without actually investing in any of them.
Other times it's just lonely.
I actually heard the flat, matter of fact cadence of my voice yesterday. It came out like this:
"Might be more'n 'at."
"Ther comin' up nice."
I said that.
My father was in Boston Commons yesterday morning, walking along the street. He was there to get his teeth done. Being there filled him with thoughts of us, his kids, and he called me. He described the luscious gardens on the elegant stoups of the brick houses. I remember. I can close my eyes and see Boston Commons, with the little ducks and the iron railings and the curlicues baked into the architecture, the side streets with art galleries and small restaurants.
I remember driving over the old, steel bridge into Boston, a huge, threatening tangle of highway lifted over the water that swooped suddenly down into the streets. Now it's a white bridge that looks like a ship in full sail.
How many times have I driven down into Boston in the dark morning hours to catch a flight, my stomach on fire, wearing thick soled black shoes and a black, cloth coat, my luggage in the trunk? And flying back in, flying low over the harbor, gliding over the rippling water, weightless, the lights of the city rising up in the mist of the evening, drunk from an eighteen hour flight and gritty eyed.
Countless times. Clutching a half empty water bottle, ticket stubs in my pocket, a half eaten rice ball wrapped in tin foil in my back pack.
I tried to remember the route by which I used to get to work in Manchester and I couldn't. There was this long, blank stretch. I groped my way from house to remembered house, from a stretch of swamp to a field. Memories leaped to life in my head like guideposts, a line of sight, incomplete.
Sometimes I want to live my life over again, but not to change anything. Not at all. Just to live it all over again, just for the sheer pleasure of how good it was. That Vermont coffee I would buy at the general store in a village along the way, an old wooden building with creaking, sloping floors. I could buy the coffee with the change scraped up from the car seats.
I was thinking this yesterday morning, cresting one of the little hills that fold all the landscape around here into waves and peaks of land. It was a close shaved hillside, golden green from the sun just peaking the top. Ahead of me the path curved back and forth between the towering oak trees, their shadows stretching back into the woods that grew close.
I was thinking how badly I wished I could go back and live it all one more time, how delicious it would be. I can't, but I do have the choice to live as deeply in the present as I wish I could in the past.
Why does it matter so much to me? I'm a strange person, to be constantly pulling myself into the present moment. I wondered if it had anything to do with being abused. Did I teach myself to completely disengage from reality, from the present, untenable moment? Did I take the skill with me, its origins forgotten but still functioning seamlessly, jettisoning me out into what is not real, what was real, what could be real, but never allowing me to dwell in what actually is?
I wonder. Or maybe it's just human nature.
I have stumbled upon a brilliant way of doing housework. I live by my phone alarms. For example, at seven thirty my phone tells me to go for a walk. I'm not always obedient, but it helps. At one pm it tells me to do one hour of housework.
One hour of housework seems like not much, out of a whole entire day. But it's amazing what that one hour will accomplish, especially in five consecutive days of such devoted hours. My house looks as though I have spent all day, every day on it, when instead, I have spent the entire morning Internetting and most of the afternoon watching the Cooking Channel.
Sometimes I wish I could be "cool." Oh yes. I, the weird, vulnerable blogger of passion wishes sometimes that I could have the cool detachment and sarcastic carapace of others.
But I can't be. I have proudly staked my flag and I cannot retract. I am a person that read the following article and almost had tears in her eyes.
"In the midst of our current malaise, we feel overwhelmed by largely short-term problems and our current inability to address them — without appreciating our long-term strengths and present bounty, or learning from past recoveries.
We are soon to revert to the Clinton income-tax rates last used in 2000, when we ran budget surpluses. If likewise we were to cut the budget, or just hold federal spending to the rate of inflation, America would soon run surpluses as it did a decade ago. For all our problems, the United States is still the largest economy in the world, its 300 million residents producing more goods and services than the more than 1 billion in either China or India...
Our supposedly intractable problems are hardly insurmountable. Ascendant China and India have much less freedom and far greater environmental problems, political turmoil, and class disparity. Europe is not as productive as America and is shrinking in population, not growing as we are.
In the bleak 1930s, we were told that German discipline and order were the answer; during the depressing stagflation of the 1970s, Japan, Inc. was supposed to be the way of the future. Then a resurgence of American confidence and renewed faith in our exceptional system dispelled all such nonsense.
The United States still remains the most racially diverse, stable, free, productive, and militarily strong country in the world. Its current crises are largely the political and cultural creations of the most affluent and leisured generation in civilization’s history — not due to longstanding civil unrest, structural weakness, or a sudden shortage of natural resources.
America may well soon decline and become no different from any other nation. But such a depressing future would largely be our generation’s own free choice; it is not a historical inevitability."
-Victor Davis Hanson, "American Decline is a State of Mind," National Review, July 8th 2010
