A Place in the Sun

Call me romance
Call me Pensacola...
-- Jolene

Tomorrow, we are traveling down to visit Heather's mother in Pensacola. I'm looking forward to the drive perhaps more than I should in light of how challenging every long trip with Abigail has been. It's going to be a long day -- probably between 12 and 14 hours altogether -- but could we be bound for a better place? The gulf coast as a destination after the past two gloomy winter months is unbelievably fortunate. Thinking about driving that long and far to someplace in Iowa makes me want to insert bamboo shoots under my fingernails and hang myself from a balcony.

So I am bound for palm trees, white sand, cool blue water, and (hopefully) plenty of warm sunshine. Although it will be too cool to float around in the gulf, I hope to sit, think, and watch the water for hours. What is it about watching water that is so relaxing? Watching the ocean reminds me of listening to a classical composition for the first time. You sense the deep internal patterns and rhythms, yet can know the surface notes only afterwards. You can never be quite certain where the music will take you, which is a great joy of all new music, but particularly of classical music for me. The joy of watching water is not dissimilar. You sense a pattern in and rhythm to the tide and currents but can know how the water will ultimately go only afterwards. Waves are metronomes for the mind: They keep the rhythm while you pluck the proverbial keys, trying this thought on and that one out, follow this one here for a while, then jump over here. Schopenhauer wrote that life and dreams are leaves of the same book: reading them in order is living; skimming through them is dreaming. On the beach, I become more acutely aware of just how intertwined the conscious and subconscious are: thoughts, ideas, insights, reflections, daydreams, and dreams form the diagonal, criss-crossing strands of an intricate piece of woven fabric -- in this moment I am on this strand, now I am tracing along that strand. As steady as the waves, my mind extends, now draws back within itself, it overflows with abundance, now I am dying of thirst, it generously gives, now it takes.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
-Wallace Stevens (from The Idea of Order at Key West)

The road trip also gives me occasion to sort through music as I prepare a mix tape. Music carries the indelible stamp of time ago -- musical photographs. Music can encompass whole events in our lives in the span of a couplet, a refrain, a series of measures, because it is there with us as we go about living. To read a book, we must temporarily stop all life aside from the act of reading -- Go Away! Can't You See I Am Living In This Book Right Now -- and perhaps allows some peripheral joy like ripe fruit and warm coffee. But books are greedy. They require all of our time, all of our attention, all of our life in the moments we are reading. Books constitute a whole universe we peer inside as we read, but that universe is not our own. Music is more generous. Music is in the background when we share Belgian Ales with friends, and there as we drive to our wedding, there while we hold our baby for the first time, and when we reach the mountain peak just in time to see the deer eating blackberries disappear in a brown blur into the green thistle. Music supplements the life we are already living and provides a type of framing context. It complements our time and memories rather than constitutes them.

Today, just from shifting through my CD collection (massively downsized before the last move, by about 300 records I would guess), I have already recalled in vivid detail the crazy beach trip in May 1997, which began with 30 minutes' notice and ended with the worst hangover of my life and second-degree sunburn. I've recalled the five Our Lady Peace concerts (on the Clumsy tour) in seven days Hollie and I attended in the middle of spring 1999 semester, darting from the University of Georgia, to Clemson, to Tremont Music Hall, to Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill, and finally to Roanoke, Va., in her little black Laser while listening to Radiohead down long stretches of interstate between somewhere and nowhere.

I remember the many nights spring 1998 I drifted to sleep listening to Portishead or Pink Floyd with the gigantic windows in my fifth-floor dorm room open to the smell of rain and grass and pine, dirt and leaves mixing under quick feet, and the faintest hint of cinnamon incense drifting from the room below into the cool-metal air, the halo of uptown Charlotte hovering on the deep purple horizon. After hours of reading Thomas Hardy and crunching fresh apples to the core while perched on the window shelf, I'd write bad poetry in a small spiral notebook. Delacroix wrote that if you're a writer at 20, you're a poet. If you're a poet at 40, you're a poet.

Feels like all the days are gone
Just catch the breeze
You know it had to fall
Rain, washes, ways down
And I, I want the world to pass
And I, I watch the wind to fly
You can believe in everything
You can believe it all
Hey, are you feeling something new
Just watch the rain, it helps in all you do
The breeze, it blows, it blows everything
And I, I want the world to pass
And I, I want the sun to shine
You can believe in everything
You can believe it all
--Slowdive (Catch the Breeze)

May 2002 will always be a month I remember vividly although, ironically, I can’t remember many specifics. For the most part, it blended seamlessly into one carefree procession of beautiful days. Abigail was on the way, Heather and I were content, I had been accepted into graduate school, and I knew I was leaving The Herald. I was as satisfied as a blind squirrel who had found an acorn. There was uncertainty, but the scrambled emotions from March had subsided, and we found temporary peace of mind. We did not yet know what August and everything after held for us.

The place on Ebenezer Avenue in Rock Hill was our home, and we both loved it. It had originally been designed as Winthrop University student housing in the fifties or sixties, with many eccentricities common to older places. Hardwood floors and wood paneling on all the walls were complemented by the eclectic decorations Heather had collected from her years living and traveling around Europe. All of this contributed to, as Bachelard says, the poetics of space. I even miss that fur ball she had, although I had to change the litter box several times a week (that, my friends, was love). If it was bigger and we didn’t have to relocate for graduate school, we would have stayed there. We often speak of missing the warmness of that little place.

On evenings I had off, I enjoyed reading in the sunset pouring through the two large windows in the front, sunbeams scattered about by the labyrinth of twisted oak limbs out front. I recall fragmented moments from the simple dates we shared at the Atlantic Brewing Company in uptown Charlotte, or at Time Out listening to the Avett Bros. play bluegrass, or dinners of curry duck at the Thai House. I’d often listen to former Whiskeytown front man Ryan Adams’ solo album Gold, and my favorite tune, although not particularly relevant to my situation at the time, was La Cienega Just Smiled. The music has a quality of escapism to my ear, and although I wanted to do anything but escape my life then, a quality of escapism is something I think we all cherish in at least some of our music. I miss those days...

This is a litany of lost things,
a canon of possessions dispossessed,
a photograph, an old address, a key.
It is a list of words to memorize
or to forget -- of amo, amas, amat,
the conjugations of a dead tongue
in which the final sentence has been spoken.
Dana Gioia (from The Litany)

And then there are the albums that remind you of the old flings, make you thank god for heartbreaks and indecisive ex-girlfriends, for how else would any man retain happiness after years of marriage if not for the thought of some gorgeous, wonderfully perfect, sweet-as-candy and yet utterly dim-witted nincompoop he dated in his past? She is in the back of his mind along with the thought he could have married that one instead, and so he is happy with both what he found in his wife and what he lost in the other, and so he comes to believe there is a God in heaven and order to the universe. And all his days he wakes and kisses his beautiful wife and thanks her for being intelligent, and wonderful, and generous with her patience, and charitable with her forgiveness, and mostly, for being all the things the others were not.

And thank god for the beautiful girls you only watched from a distance, afraid that if you spoke she would have burped or farted or sneezed snot on her sleeve -- something that would have made her human, less ideal, somehow like the rest of them (and us) and therefore completely unworthy of the special place she holds in your memory. You never even knew her name, but because you never got close enough to witness her humanness, you can accept that all is not lost, all is not hopeless, there is and can be some semblance of ideal beauty without the interference of unpleasant bodily functions. And thank god there was always at least one in every math or science lecture, lectures that made your brain devolve back to the state it was a millenium or so ago. I left those lectures feeling like the Butthead Distinguished Chair of Statistics, but at least I could blame her for underperforming -- how can I be expected to watch the teacher wade neck deep through a 20-minute confidence interval on the board while I'm sitting several rows behind her? (I guess a responsible person would say that inscribing "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" across the top of my statistics exams and then proceeding to work every problem differently didn't help my case.) But at least there was someone pretty to look at the whole time.

And so, yes, I'm ready for the drive down, and the cello adagios I'll listen to as we zip past cow pastures in four states over 13 hours, and the wonderful wife who will talk to me about literature and politics and religion all the way down, and the daughter who will time dirty diapers for 30 minutes on the far side of the rest area, and who will make me listen to what sounds like lithium cowboys singing the Noah's Ark version of Old MacDonald Had A Farm (two of EVERYTHING), and the mother-in-law who will have something sweet to eat and a nice glass of wine when I finally arrive, and the wonderful books I'll read after I arrive while sitting on the white sand, in the warm sunshine, listening to and watching the deep blue ocean thinking about everything, and anything, and nothing, all at once.

Wonder is a pause of reason.
-Dr. Samuel Johnson