The weather today is so fabulous that to mar it with words would ruin my experience.I have a lot to process. I returned from my trip over the bridge last night. I was exhausted. I feel like there should be periods between each of those words. I. was. exhausted. I couldn't even talk to mom about all that happened, it was too much.
Eventually I gave her some of the basics. What I was able to say I had a still moment of clarity that was the exact same as the night I taught my first ESL class. Remember I called you when it was over? I remember every detail, sitting in my car that night on the phone with you. Knowing I'd stepped foot on a new, totally unknown path. The big, calm feeling of it. Yesterday, sitting in my car, was exactly like that. But even this morning in the sun in my torn salt-weakened beach chair barefeet in the gravel of the front driveway at the Pines, sitting still, I just wanted quiet. I relaxed in to the tight feeling in my jaw and the thick-creased feeling of crippledness in my shoulders and neck that scream money!?!? and sat inside the bad feelings until it all released. I breathed in the sunlight and fresh air. I returned to peace and happiness of today, this moment, the sound of tree-breeze. Nothing but this, only this, only this. My smile was big and I didn't even realize it.
My alt boys station on Pandora is nailing it right now. What's really on my mind, what I came here to write about, is friendship and familial ties. Mandy bought a house in Pasadena over the summer. I cross the Anne Arundel County line and freak out she said, she is talking about crossing in to HoCo and I laughed because I get it. We are sitting across from one another at her kitchen table. We are thirty-somethings. She has two kids now. She told this funny story (she's the best story-teller I know, pulls out no stops just gets ghetto with it and then pushes it even past that so much so that I've sometimes questioned if she makes them up they're so often that over the top) about her cousin who lives on the line between Baltimore City and county and I am secretly smiling the whole time because that's what I want, that life, those I dont give a fuck we'd never call the cops 'round here people. I think of my family roots all Brooklyn Park inside the edge of the city prideful and blind and righteous, working-class Catholically-arrogant and equally innocent all of us, scared to get out, and more scared not to, too. Being a kid on Church Street, in my memories from that young time the sun was always shining. There was always sunshine on the side of the house, on the cement sidewalk, on Grammy's tablecloth. On Pop's records and tea cup. My uncles were twenty-something, wild-eyed, like their sons now. I was a baby-grl, three, four, six, ten. Enraptured with it all.
Last year when Mandy moved home she and her mom and her brother and his fiance all got a house in Crownsville, which is this heavily wooded suburb outside of Annapolis where we moved when I was 11 and where I grew up until I moved to the Eastern Shore in 1998. I clung to that, to her house there, to walking in knowing where the coffee mugs were, where food was, what her mom would smell like (smoke and floral fragrance) when she received my hello-hug. I never thought it would mean something to me, I thought I needed to see the world and that was what mattered. Mandy said that too the other night, leaning against her dishwasher, adding to her grocery list. Talking about where we are from. Talking about how good it feels to be with people again who get her. The little things.
She tosses me a towel yesterday morning and tells me to shower in her bathroom. It lands next to my head. It's almost ten, she's been up for hours with her kids and already's dropped Derek off at pre-school. I am laying in her bed, we slept there together and talked each other to sleep like we used to the winter we were nineteen and lived in my basement at mom's in Crownsville. When we would sleep on the pull out couch with the metal bar in our backs or spoon in my twin bed. This woman knows the story of every man I have ever loved. I know every one of hers. We make decisions now for practical reasons. We are still wild as the wind. She ate oodles of noodles on Tuesday while we talked across her table. Just like back then.
I've always looked up to her. Always looked to her for direction, looked not to what she says but to how she makes decisions, what she does and the authority which she uses when I cant find my own. Last year she moved in to that house in Crownsville and spent time with her family and her family's--her brother's--friends every day. I took that sense of familiarity to the Pines and rooted in to my own. Tuesday I drove to Pasadena to see my cousin play soccer, then met a bunch more other cousins on Edmunson Ave in the city to eat grilled cheeses. Then went back home, Mandy's home her own home she owns in Pasadena, in the County, to be with her.
I can't imagine being any better--any more arrogant, any more innocent--any more aware, anyway, than this...
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