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11.1.4
first day at home
A perfect autumn day, gold and deep blue, where even the shadows are clear and sharp: a documentary light, and I wandered down empty streets in Prospect Heights marveling as the way everything ugly - recycling spilling out of a torn paper bag, half-flattened cereal boxes flapping in the wind - looked new-minted and clean.Walking west along Atlantic Avenue towards the Pathmark, stepped into a street to cross it with Xiu Xiu buzzing-screaming in my ears, I felt my heel crunch down into a shard of broken glass and at the same time I was hit by a blow of wind rushing down the cross-street that almost pushed me over. I grabbed at my headphones and looked up at the sign that said Clermont Avenue, and I felt myself settling into myself all of a sudden, as though something blurry I'd been watching had suddenly come into focus, or double vision resolved into a single three-dimensional image.
For days A. and I have been driving around New England, past the gracious old houses of western Mass., strip malls and freeways and Wal-Mart and the Mass Pike and this autumn's dulled yellow-russet foliage and the shocking discovery that gas these days costs $2.50 a gallon: how do people afford it? Then back to the city and there's the Muslim girl wearing a headscarf and a pair of angel wings, and I'm grabbing onto the sticky silver pole in the subway trying to stay upright while touching it as little as possible, eyeing other women and their shearling boots and push-up bras, trying to figure out who's wearing a costume and who's just hot, a cop standing next to a guy with army fatigues turns out to really be an actual cop, fat blond woman strapped into a catsuit trying to look like Halle Berry, three scrawny black kids dressed like Harry Potter, mentally pulling the gray hair off an ancient retired couple on the subway till I realize it that isn't stage makeup that's their real faces, walking through the emptied shelves of Party City that look like a bomb hit, torn feather boa dangling from a high rack shelf. Who would remember we are at war. Knowing some of the soldiers are real soldiers, some of the cops are real cops, some of the guns are real guns. Three skinny kids walk by in black with death masks on, and a skinny mom behind them with her hair in pigtails dressed like Pippi Longstocking.
Oh stepping-on-glass-and-pushed-by-wind-and-miraculously-keeping-your-balance, oh omen, I think you're telling me there's something real here. If I can just get the space and the time and the sunlight and the solitude to find it. And how lucky I am even to be thinking of those things.
