A Catalogue of the Senses

San Francisco is a sensual paradise. My life there was full of sights and smells and sounds so unique and strong that I miss the city itself as much as my life within it. The eucalyptus, permeating the parks as well as pant cuffs and stroller wheels—smelling faintly acrid like cat urine, but spicy and dark and alluring as well. The strength of the coffee smell that would follow me home from working at Café Abir—the slightly off smell of liquor and syrupy, rotting fruit that clings to the mats and counters of an unopened bar. The crinkly and sharp sting of soy sauce that trailed me home from tsunami

And the sounds—the hushed, deep, far-off sound of foghorns as I lay in bed at night. The electric hum of the buses as they accelerated up the street, the clanking and whirring of the cables beneath the downtown streets. The winding up and holding constant of the siren that sounded every Tuesday at noon (sometimes the only sign that time was indeed passing in the season-less city). The wind clacking of the long hard leaves of the eucalyptus trees, clapping together like tentative applause—the onset and rush of wind as the trees bent above the park. The rough scratchy grating sound of skate boards speeding down the hill I lived on. The sound of the Ocean and the grinding sing of sand beneath my feet on the beach. The echoing scrape of heels on pavement in the quiet morning hours when I went to open the café. The gulls screeching and circling above AT&T park at the end of a Giants’ game. The too-loud gruff voice of my downstairs neighbor—the hollow knock of knuckles against my backdoor. Once, I changed my phone’s ring to church bells and for a full week I missed every call but would stop and wonder at the sound, thinking I’d never noticed the church bells before.

The sights. A slice of bay floating between tall buildings. The red reaching of the Golden Gate Bridge leading into the fog or green of the Headlands. The white and yellow bleaching of the sun on everything, that is a different kind of light than anywhere else in the world. The pleasure of a lit taxi sign in the dark blue of night just when you need it. The elegant arches of Chinatown—the dirty lighted Broadway tunnel which one night I walked through, silently, and felt transformed. North Beach lit up and sinful with strip clubs and XXX shops, but also the cloistered setting of City Lights Bookstore. Streets so steep there are steps carved into the sidewalks. The segmented sky, gridded and divided up by the buses wires overhead. The gleam of a headlight shooting along the wires before it crests the hill. SFUs chaple steeple lit up a glowing yellow white against the early night sky. Pan handlers and people in all kinds of dress; people lounging and talking on every corner. Vibrant, violently colorful murals in the Mission. Color everywhere.

A city where every single person knows they live in the most beautiful city in the world.

Spring is in the air

As spring approaches, the bear who has been hibernating must slowly return to himself. His pulse quickens, his metabolism awakens in him a hunger for food he has not had in many months. The longer, brighter hours must necessarily signal to his closed lids that heat and warmth and light have returned to the bare landscape that had been vanquished by winter.

I feel the same. Slow impulses gaining ground, silently amassing behind curled knuckles, tender sleepy palms, beginning to feel the blood pump. I am awakening. The sun is drawing me out and once out I am loathe to return indoors. I look for excuses, bundle the kids and go for long walks. I am thrilling at the longer days, at the quickening life within me that had, for all intents and purposes, deserted me entirely. Dearth. Winter. Silence. Barren.

And now, what next I want to scream, jumping raising my inactive arms. Life begins again. Shoots break through frozen ground, push aside clods of dirt. The bunny makes almost daily appearances. Grey has seen his first blue sky in a long while and has pointed to it, announcing “Dis! Dis!” because for him it is a revelation.

Henry is back in the realm of his “future” as he calls it. We are back outside, walking the streets, going to the parks. We have been loosed.

All of this is to say, life returns to frozen Chicago. And I am determined now. To make a life of it, no matter how long I’m here. To dig in and set down roots. What makes a home is as much the rootedness as the health of the soil.

Soon I will get an Illinois license and then it will be official. But as for now, I’m making plans to bloom here. My shoots are breaking through the frozen soil too, and I’m going to have a go of it.

Wild Rabbits and Warm Hearts

I’m reminded of the expression cold hands, warm heart. I do hope that’s true here in winterland. But maybe this necessitates my leaving the house, because now my hands are ensconced in the perma-69-degrees of central heating. Gordon believes that houseplants need to be stressed to become hardier. Perhaps this was only his logic after we had gone through a season of not watering them because life was too busy, but they always survived. I might need to get out of the house more and let the bitter cold play across my cheeks and sting my fingers.

The idea of venturing out into the cold today is not purely derivative of cold hands, warm heart. It is actually the inspiration of my dream that I can’t shake. It was so powerful and so detailed—and most of all it dovetailed so perfectly with what I wrote about in my other blog last night, that I know it was from beyond me. Before bed, I posted Maybe I need a rabbit-fur coat… in which I draw strength from the bunny I observed in our yard last night. We can both make it through the winter here, I thought. But then, I dreamed about rabbits. Two rabbits. That I rescued from a friend’s yard. I put them into cages to transport them and then brought them into my house. I let them out, but they were wild. They could not be held without scratching and they immediately began to defecate all over my white rugs. Oh, I said, I hadn’t thought through the whole pooping thing. My friend said they could be trained to go in a litter box. Ugh. This was not what I’d had in mind. I suddenly wondered why I had brought them here at all. Wild bunnies—in my house. I clearly couldn’t live with them here and they surely didn’t want to be here. At first I decided to take them to a shelter, until I realized the thing to do was just to release them. They needed to go back outside—it would solve everything.

After waking up with the initial that was odd… I began to think about the juxtaposition of my dream and my writing and found that they were connected. The rabbit does just fine out in the winter, but the inspiration I may need to draw from it is to allow it to draw me outside. To breath the cold air and allow myself to feel the chill and the wind. To feel the sadness of moving and being lonely at times. And to see the sky and the snow and the birds and the people. To enter into the streetscape that passes me by through my double-paned window. Maybe I need the cold hands to warm my heart.

The Winter of My Discontent

I stand, forehead pressed to glass, so cold and hard on my skin. Looking out at this winter landscape. A white frieze of snow clings to the bend in the bare branch beyond the window. White against the dull dark gray of bark. White tipped branches stretching towards the gray colorless sky. A landscape in sepia. Gordon says we can see things more clearly in the winter. Brutal. Honest.

I see the beauty in it. I do. It is stark and stripped and minimal. But I’m not cut out for the winter—my body suffers in it. My wrist and fingers ache on one hand. My skin is chapped and rough. My cuticles are brittle and peeling. I’ve already had 3 colds. I cook food that is too fattening and I eat too much of it. I am leached completely of Vitamin D.

I dreamed last night that I was behind the wheel of a small car that I could not manage to keep within the lines of my lane. I was careening down a steep, twisty incline in rainy weather, scraping against guardrails and other cars. The road ended on a small spit of land upon which sat a structure that contained only a small square room lined with benches. The sea raged on three sides and was wild and tangled with kelp. The interior of the room was bland and stucco and off-white and there were no windows. It was a waiting place. And it was peopled with odd acquaintances of mine from my distant past and one little boy who had lost his mother. I was there for a long time. Remembering. Thinking back on the past. Offering comfort to the little boy. People would come and go from the room. It was never clear what we were doing there, only that we were waiting.

I awoke with a strong sense of that space: of the sea swelling and ebbing just behind the walls. I carried it with me today—that raging sea. That uncomfortable feeling of waiting. Of suspended, upended time. Of the loss of direction. Or the just plain lost.

Winter is a time for longing. It is a time of absence. The beauty of chiaroscuro.

Found Journal Entry--written 4/8/09

San Francisco.

Leaving this city will be so incredibly hard. Here, in these lines, how can I sum up what it was to hear the tincan rustling of the eucalyptus leaves, and walk home with their scent clinging to my pants cuffs? How can I capture the way the yellow sun fell on the whites city made up of tiny squares, laid out on hills like a miniature train set? The rumble and clacking of the trains on the streets and the clanging of the trolly cars? A city so much a city, where you can still hear the cawing of seagulls that swoop over the buildings reminding you of the nearness of the sea. Cresting a hill in the center of a city, and seeing a fragment of bridge and a wedge of the bay floating disconnected between the tall buildings of downtown. Walking the uneven, dirty sidewalks of the Western Addition, avoiding dog poop and broken glass, even as the air smells of flowers and lavender and again, always, the eucalyptus, towering over the parks and perfuming the air with their heady, urine soaked scent. Beautiful and overpowering all at once.

What is it to say goodbye to all the people you know you’ll never see again. You were just one more face in the ocean of faces that made up their background of life, as they were part of yours, and yet how connected we are to this artifice, this external stage set that we acted upon and in front of. What a terrible thing it is to have to say goodbye, to close the final chapter. It’s like reading a book that you love dearly, and not wanting to finish it—wanting so badly for it to never end, so that you turn the last page, and immediately begin touching it and leafing through again, as if there must be something more, someway to continue the journey it took you on.

Twister

Wide open spaces of the Mid-West. Straight horizontal lines and easy walking. San Francisco was the opposite of here--it was angles and sharp curves and deep challenging hills. There were copses and stands of trees, sitting up on top of hills and parks--little clumps of dark green against the pale pastel collection of rooftops and neighborhoods which clustered together on inclines--opening like fans. A city that you could see from anywhere. You crest a hill and there it was--more of it. This neighborhood there which you can see in it's entirety, or that park there where you can make out joggers or strollers being pushed lazily on the stepped walks above Pac Heights.

Oh magical city. There is nothing like you. The sharp yellow light, the relaxed posture of your citizens. The brisk wind and the damp. The cat-urine smell of crushed eucalyptus that clings, still, to my stroller tires and certain pairs of shoes. Acrid and stinging, sickly, that smell always makes me cry. If I were there today, I'd reach down to the path and gather up a handful of those wonderfully reeking needles of leaves and stuff them into my pockets to bring home--I wouldn't care who was watching.

And then there's that of course. Who's watching? In San Francisco, no one cares. No one judges. Well, they do, but not for the same things as other places. No one judges by differences. It is the city of opposites--like a land from a childrens book. The only thing you can do wrong is to be just like everyone else. Homogeny is frowned upon. The normative is to be different, rebellious, to go against the grain. And after awhile this becomes tiresome as well--it is horribly hypocritical to all do the exact opposite of everyone else just because it's opposite. But when you're back in the middle of the country, the idea of the city seems so refreshing. So lovely. California is it's own country, and San Francisco is the left-most section of it.

It could not be more cliché to say that I left my heart there. Maybe it would not be accurate either. Maybe it would be best to say that I am always turned toward the city. As if, when I am somewhere else, it just feels as though I am that far away from home.

In San Francisco, no matter where I lived, the corners of Divisidero and Fulton were my main node, the heart of the city to me. And where I lived was just 6 or 3 or however many blocks away from that point on the map. When I was not there, it was if I leaned toward it subconsciously. As if life is just an enormous game of twister and I will always have my left foot stepped squarely onto that circle. Left Foot San Francisco, Right Hand Atlanta, Right foot Chicago. And I am just that off-balance. beginning to wobble

Beginnings

This blog is simply a space for me to write without anyone reading it, necessarily. It's a space that, at least for now, will be only for me. I have such stage fright when I approach my blog. I fear opinions, failures. I want a space where language can play out of me and I don't need to worry about it. I need a space to practice, to exercise, to remember.