December 16, 2010

Spent the dark of morning sending Christmas greetings and listening to Handel’s Trio Sonatas. When I left the house yesterday morning, the Ohio boy kicked in and, though it was 8 degrees, the cold stop agonizing me as it had the first days of its reign. Through Tom I met Jack the vacuum salesman, and I decided that I needed a straight, red-necky, gym-rat, door-to-door appliance salesman in my life, so I arranged to meet him for a zumba class at the Y. Our communications crossed, and I ended up in a pilates class, without Jack, the only man, which strain I feel to the extreme right now, Less, though, than I had feared. Tom persuaded me to buy a Kangen water machine a few weeks ago, and I attribute every advance in health, or every failure of disability, to the magic waters. Who knows? The pilates instructor whispered in my direction, “it’s all right to cheat.” Believe me, I was cheating like mad. Jack ran into the locker room looking for me, having figured out the snafu. I helped him look in his gear for a comb, for he wouldn’t go into the weight room without combed hair. I decided not to tell him I don’t own a comb.

My sister has been sending photos of our family–that is to say, grandparents, great aunts and the like–from back in the day. Both of us were amazed how many of them I knew, even to houses and dates and names of dogs. I’d always seized onto details of family heritage, seeking something fuller, deeper than the shallow experience that was ours in the present. I knew that somewhere back in the mists our people must have been passionate, lyrical, interesting. There were photos of our bungalow on Goodview Avenue being built, a hole in the ground, the old brick houses of Malaysia Street visible behind over the bare ground, then dad standing proudly at the back door, opening it for the first time. I was there, in the photos, though of course I don’t remember it. I do remember my consciousness waking standing at that same back door, looking into a haze of summer flowers. What annihilates are the images of my mother and father. My mother was wildly beautiful. I thought so as kid, but kids think that of their mothers generally. The photos confirm it. In the early pictures my parents were so unbelievably happy, beaming, dewy, almost silly with love and confidence. Then at one moment, almost locatable on a calendar, that ceases. Whatever happened to them happened to me, for in the photos at the beginning I’m a grinning, carefree little elf, but at one point–I can point to it in the images– I become withdrawn, furtive, resentful of the camera, shying away from it, as though there were some terrible truth I wanted to gnaw on in secret. The images that have come into my mind when I try to search back for that moment seem cause insufficient for the effect, so I think I have not found it. Something about me? My mother’s incessant illness? Father tapping into his cruelty for the first time? Something else? Though the social quality of my life has prevented this from manifesting too much, I have always wished to be invisible in public, unless that visibility were formalized in some way–if I were on stage, or in a class, for instance. I remembering Harry’s off-hand but blistering observation, “you deflect friendship.” He was right. But it’s because I don’t believe it. I have always believed that no one would be much interested in me unless I were–well– showing off in some way. Nor is the “always” in that previous sentence true. I remember when I was not that way. Something happened. The photos show everything but precisely that. Mostly one looks at the shapes on the screen and murmurs, lost, lost, lost. They are images with syllables attached. Too many doors were shut against our knowing them.

Dinner party here tomorrow night in honor of Russell’s birthday. Russell has taken to joining us for drinks after choir, and he is a tonic. We grimy sophisticates sit around the table watching his guileless, confiding wholesomeness, agape with wonder and, in my case anyway, a sense of loss. The people we could have been, and turned aside for–what?

Rotting snow compacted by rain. A good day to do what I’m doing.