Canta Y No Llores/A Free Association Day-in-the-Life

A strange day. In retrospect, a turning point. Don't get too excited... Times we turn just a little bit - the barest hint of a course change, or none at all. Course correction. The head-shake to shake off a three glass drunk. Today, we worry about teeth rotting from the inside, we wonder if we can pay for it; how long we can put off paying for it. We wonder whether and when we went along a path that made us into a man that needs his teeth intact. Whether one day we'll sit witless spouting obscenities by a railway station, forgetting our teeth and remembering every injustice, every blind snubbing of an indifferent... This all sounds very melodramatic. Mine's not a bad mood... it's a thoughtful and weird mood.

Here's why... This morning I woke up at 4 AM thinking about dark oily and toxic clouds bearing down on my state. I thought about the times I've run my fingers at night through the cool Gulf waters to see how the bubbles trailed, glowing, in their wake. I wondered if that will disappear soon. In a few days, I mean. I felt an impotent rush of hatred for people who think we should drill off the shores of my beloved home state. Then I felt a measure of self-loathing; Who am I? I drove a damn truck. Drove anywhere, as often as I liked. Mine was armchair activism. A trust-fund hippie's preaching, all talk no action. Now my state...

Here's also why... There was the conversation with the old lady I tutor:

I:       Tomorrow's the Cinco de Mayo!
She:  The...
I:       The Cinco de Mayo.
She:  The cinq...
- ...de mai, I finished. It's a Mexican Holiday.
-(Surprise) Why do you celebrate the Holiday?
-(Shrugs) There are a lot of Mexicans in the United States, motioning with my hands, silently placing handfuls of Mexicans into an invisible United States in front of me (Hand signals are a trick I picked up teaching foreigners English. It tends to confuse rather than enlighten.).
-(Interest) "That's insteresting, she says, slightly mispronouncing the long words. That you... searching... identify... What do you feel?" She finishes. I didn't quite follow. 
Confusion showed. 
She continued.
-What do you feel, about your nationality? Your origins?
-Oh! Southern. Confusion from her. Southern United States. Like... not SOUTH American, but... in the United States... drawing circles with curled fingers in the air... in the South.
-Ah! So the United States, of course.
-Yes, but... the South.
-Pauses... If you were to ask me... As I am not French... As I am Jewish... As I am from Poland... I would say that I am without origin. I lived in the East with Russian speakers... I can't remember everything she said... And the Germans came, and of course exasperated the problem...

The problem. Of her identity. I remember someone telling me she lost most of her family in the Holocaust. When I think about that I think about how slowly she's moving through The Snows of Kilimanjaro and how studiously she teases meaning - layers of meaning - from every sentence. The slight smirk that she wore without maliciousness when she tied an invisible scarf around her neck, rolling her eyes at the sometimes dandyish dress of French men - A moment of bemused comprehension between immigrants... I feel grateful for that moment. I think of her nimble mind, of her bright interest and the light in her eyes when she grasps a strange twist of English intuitively. I think of how she takes the stairs, asks me "See how sporty I am?", and I wonder that anyone should ever want her dead who did not know her. Then, I suppose, if they knew her it would be more mysterious still. Bigotry thrives for want of experience, and suffocates from seeing too much.

I'm Southern, but I don't know when I'll see the South again. On the first warm day of the year I sat in the park in La Rochelle and told Rebecca about a dream I had where she told me she loved me.


-And I was glad, but also sorry. Sorry that I hadn't told you first. Not because I'm competitive, but because I'd been wanting to say it for a while.


So I told her I loved her. It was a perfect day for it.

Now I'm going to Seattle.

I think I'm inclined to be more sentimental than the lady I tutor is about her past... When she tells her story, and when she tells of the effect it's had on her, it's academic. Interested, dispassionate. Another exegesis, like she's talking again about The Snows of Kiliminjaro. Not as though she doesn't care about it. It's the present that occupies her.

***

Then speaking of the present... Today ended in furious pedaling. In skies streaked in cobalt and violet, and flame-orange. In photographs of a silhouetted tree stump like the dessicated claw of a hand reaching skyward in a dying breath. A sobering memento mori at the end of the day. A day that started in worrying; that added new worries, or the same worries anew.  That ended in sobriety, not worry. That ended in me thinking I should get out more... watch for moments like these with impossible light that drenches everything in sunflower yellow. Fucking beautiful. Thinking I should figure out where my life is going, get my resumé polished.

Then there was the message from David, advising me to take part in "something both ancient and perennial: Lose [my]self in fuck." Then the half-hour trading Forgetting Sarah Marshall references. Fucking beautiful.

Happy Cinco de Mayo.