A World of Reverie
It's #LetsBlogOff time again. This go-around the bi-weekly confluence of bloggers sharing their ideas about a chosen subject and promoting them on Twitter is charged to answer this question: "If you could stop the world for one day, what would you take the time to do?" Well, this is not the proper place to talk about my top preference so the next best thing would be spending a glorious day steeped in working on this material, which I hope will some day take on a life of its own in book form. Thanks so much for stopping in, and hop on over to the Lets Blog Off blog to check out the ideas some of my favorite tweeps are sharing today.
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After a week's worth of struggle that found Jim and I trying to settle back into our lives in Tennessee, we managed to call a truce. We simply had to; we were heading to Seattle with a group of his business associates and it made no sense to go if we were not even speaking. When we arrived, we were shown to a room on the fourteenth floor perched above the downtown business district. The buildings surrounding us rose into the palest blue sky, interrupting distant slices of water that curved to shore and mimicked the same subtle arc of the hotel window. It was as if the spots of aqua were placed in perfect geometric alignment at the edges of the man-made scene, natural baubles to ornament the uniformity of the city's architecture.
Sailboats dotted the dissected pieces of blue, looking as though someone had tossed a basket filled with magnolia blossoms, gleaming white in the sunlight, onto the water's surface to let them bob in the breeze. Being at the whim of the tides, a cluster of them eddied toward the shoreline as the mountains rose behind them—some speaking in amplified voices of deep charcoal while others farther afield whispered in the coolest shades of blue-gray. As I pulled the heavy drapes to one side of the room, it was as if the buildings confronting me were as varied as a pile of river rocks—some slick and new, others worn from perpetually tumbling at the bottom of a swift-flowing stream.
I took my writer's notebook to Pioneer Park so I could record my impressions of the rather downtrodden part of town. I sat on a bench and surveyed the filthy cobblestones, the dirt in between them littered with cigarette butts, and pigeon feathers and droppings. Large trees mottled the courtyard with leaves along one edge where a group of Native Americans were lolling. They were nearly replicas of each other—long black hair tied in ponytails; dark skin; faces, pocked with past acne scars, built of high cheekbones and flat noses below dark eyes. They talked of prison, hard times and detox units, the word "man" ubiquitous in their laments.
My vigil was interrupted by a dirty man carrying a soiled denim jacket and a plastic bag. When he plopped down on a nearby bench, a rush of breath escaped his lips as his butt met the wood slats. He began throwing dried husks of bagels from the plastic bag onto the stones, drawing scores of pigeons. They pecked the filthy ground, skittering into each other in their attempts to grab as many crumbs as they could. As I sat there, I had the strange feeling that I was intruding on a world of constant pain—almost as if I had not earned the right to sit on that bench which had likely served as someone's bed the night before. I have not paid my dues, perhaps, I thought, and I could tell by their glances that the ragged beings gathered in that park agreed with me.
They were certainly curious, yet they seemed to palpably hate what I represented. They openly jeered at several women passing by but for some reason they left me alone. Maybe this is an homage to my silent suffering, I thought as I made my way out of the plaza, happy to no longer feel like bacteria under a microscope. Little did I know this wouldn't be the last time I would come under the scrutiny of these marginalized Americans.
That episode convinced me that it was best to stay away from the inner city so I was happy we were immersing ourselves in nature for the lion's share of the trip. We boarded the Victoria Clipper to make our way to the British Columbian capital, and as I took a seat, I felt the rolling of the ocean rocking us as if we were perched upon a piece of driftwood it had set sailing for its own amusement. I was in awe of the vibrating hulk of a vessel that made my feet feel as if they had been hooked to jumper cables. When the horn exploded, the blast of noise was all the more startling in tandem with our lurch forward. As we clipped along, the water spraying from under the hull foamed and churned, marking a trail behind us.
We'd not been underway for very long when I saw them: loons! I'd longed to hear them in person my whole life and here I was, frustrated to find myself locked away in a massive boat with the engines throbbing in my ears. They were tiny slips of matter floating atop the choppy straights, beaks turned downward before they dove, disappearing below molten liquid that swallowed them. The empty surface silvered so quickly I thought for an instant I'd made up the fact that they had been there at all. The cliffs that cascaded to the water drew my eyes away from the empty swaths of the sound, firs atop the gray stony plateau fingering into the sky. There was a lonesome lighthouse that seemed so desolate in its setting it made me sad to think it spent night after dank night weathering the cold alone.
As I watched Seattle's skyline disappear, the rows of statuesque cranes, their tall arms extending skyward like they were saluting some great watery dictator, made it clear this was a shipping town. In the distance, Mt. Ranier was obscured, as it was most days—smoke and haze parting only once since we'd arrived for me to have a glimpse of its mammoth shape, its snow-mottled top rising far above the other mountains with rugged, knobby tops of their own. The ring of peaks reminded me of a bumpy origami sculpture that sprawled for miles. As we passed Whidbey Island, an assortment of waterfowl traversed the choppy waters, diving and resurfacing like continual shivers on the skin of Puget Sound.
We vibrated across the water in the gloomy gray of a northwest morning—the sun we'd enjoyed the day before locked away above a thick layer of billowing clouds. In Victoria, the surroundings were so misty that the seascape read like an endless expanse of palest graphite beneath leaden clouds. The masts of sailboats wobbled as if trying to draw rudimentary letters in the dull sky, and seals swam playfully in the harbor. I could have watched them for days as they nudged each other with their whiskered snouts and heaved themselves onto any surface they could reach. They would drape their big flippers this way or that as they raised their noses high in the air, their barks sounding like hoarse coughs as they extended their necks. I marveled at their muscular chests that puffed proudly as they let the world know they had something important to say and that they were saying it boldly. Large gulls bobbed in the harbor, waiting to be fed by tourists gathering on the waterfront walkways and I realized I'd never seen such an abundance of marine life in one place at one time.
The next day we took a trip to Rainier and I couldn't believe the proliferation of grasshoppers clicking through the air as we walked through the Grove of Patriarchs where Marmots were wooly and brazen as they posed for photos, their protruding teeth yellowed and their flat black feet shirred like a closely cropped fur coat. The mountain seemed like a felled giant, waiting for the right time to pounce as it felt our light footfalls. It made me want to tiptoe as gingerly as possible so that I wouldn't awaken his ice-covered fury. The snow gave me the impression that the top of his head had grayed from worry but what could he possibly have to fear?
It was as if the glacier faults drawn across its hulk formed a wearied brow puckered in sleep. Wild meadows running partway up the mountain's back and arms formed a burly body—like a teddy bear's, but it was clear that his thrust was far from sweet or serene. We climbed and climbed as we tried to reach his heart but he kept it hidden from us, allowing us only one patch of reachable snow, which was mottled with rock flour, during a day-climb. I felt we'd come upon as much of his forbearance as we would receive just before we crept away. I looked back toward him as we were leaving, seeing his breath form wispy clouds though his chest never once heaved with his breathing.
As we drove back to Seattle, I realized I was nervous about going home because I didn't feel I was doing anything with my life. Somehow, it was easier to pretend that this was not the case when I was absorbed in the sensory details a new environment brought to bear on the senses. Sure, I made contributions through Jim, but there was no truth in them for me so there was no satisfaction in them either. This was all the trickier since my commitment to him kept me from being myself. I felt that if I didn't begin to get a grip on this, I would be lost from ever being a truly happy and fulfilled person and partner. I wanted to find something to do that I was passionate about; I wanted to be close to my partner, but to have a piece of me that was fully mine. I somehow knew, twenty years his junior, that I needed to be a fulfilled being in order to be a good wife. I wanted to improve my self-esteem so that I could be happy, to develop my spiritual self and to learn to relax. Was this really too much to ask?
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks again for stopping in!
