Week 8: LIGHT INVISIBLE
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Look up. Look to the sides.
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2.23.15
Endives - pale, strange, bitter - finish growing in complete darkness. Farmers check on them with flashlights in cold storage and forcing rooms, marking their shadowy progress toward market. I wonder how their cells react when they are delivered into the light again, when sight registers and remembers them.
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People have a difficult time placing me. I have light brown hair that grows quickly in between diverse haircuts and colors, the perpetually red cheeks of a Viking, and a fairly androgynous wardrobe. When my hair is short, DMV personnel, cashiers, and homeless men call me “sir.” I loathe small talk, so I dig my way down to more meaningful dialogue through big questions that launch my new acquaintances into monologues - leaving, with those folks oblivious to in-kind inquiry, little room for my own information sharing.
Once, a colleague of a dear friend, whom I had met several times, could not remember who I was until my husband - a visually distinct man with deep-set blue eyes, a red and white beard, and colorful tie collection - joined us later in the evening. She could only make sense of me as connected to him - and voiced as much. She is part of a life-long pattern. My armor, or apology to self, has been to remember most everyone, to store their small anecdotes and big admissions, and surprise them with these memories upon encountering them again. I see other people even if they don’t see me.
I am accustomed to reminding people, sometimes over and over again, how they know me. For years, I took offense to their dim recollections. A few weeks ago, however, I finally registered the luxury of my chameleon properties while walking home at the end of the work day. Up ahead on the sidewalk, I saw a woman I had met a couple times in the past. I was not in the mood to stop and talk with her, so I pushed my sunglasses tight against my face, and strolled right past her. I knew she wouldn’t recognize me, and rejoiced in my invisibility.
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I know about endive from my dad, who sought out the oblong chicories for the first course of Christmas dinners. For years, he chose the odd lettuce underdogs to star in a fussy holiday meal. In the bleakest season, in the lowest light, he always saw them.
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2.24.15
Not quite two hours into the day, my love turned 41. We celebrated small this year with a late dinner at the counter of his favorite restaurant, a 90-minute break flanked by work and sleep.
Beforehand, I killed an hour in the copper bar glow at Absinthe. It should have been raining. It never is. One barstool to my left, an intoxicated friend of the restaurant windmilled his arms to emphasize his point about a wicked ex-girlfriend. Even during the drought, every night here is humid - stable menu, fogged windows. It’s even cozier on a Monday night, with fewer of us sharing the secret. I drank my wine and turned over my oyster shells - time enough to reflect etiquette back to myself.
Eating alone is second only to eating with my favorite person.
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2.25.15
At 6:07 p.m., sunset pinked the sky, but I was no longer riding home in the dark. The light is coming back: I said out loud, twice, low, standing on my pedals.
I’m far away, in the returning light of a perilously mild February. I’m a distant satellite to my (blood) family - the only one in the dry Golden State while they hunker down to endure yet another blizzard, shovel great heaps of snow, and walk out onto improbably frozen seawater flats extending from the beaches edging Buzzards Bay.
The water here lies in underground basins. The water there is locked in ice.
I picture my sister tucked between blanket drifts, feeding my infant niece.
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2.26.15
I ate lunch in the rehabbed plaza by my office with Erik. We covered the following subjects, rapid fire: Sweden, renting, fracking, birds of prey. Lengths of oil slick ribbon glinted in the branches of the trees overhead to thwart pigeons. Erik said the bright flashes mimic the hungry, focused eyes of predators. After the politics, I said we had to end on a better note and we traded stories of recent, favorite dishes (Erik: buttermilk biscuit with homemade butter; me: rice pudding with sour cherries).
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2.27.15
This morning: keyhole fog bank smoldering at the end of Folsom on my ride downtown.
This evening: mountainous, bruised clouds lining the Bay across Third St., on the T to Josh’s opening in the Dogpatch.
We celebrated under the relentless white light of the gallery, then piled into cabs to devour delivered pizza back at our red-lit apartment. Eyes and appetites equalized.
I delivered drinks to Willis and Crystal on the couch in their socks. Willis asked, “What have we done to deserve this?” I told her, all I want is to feed you and make you comfortable.
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2.28.15
We spent the day in bed. I watched the cloud cover shift through bright and dark patches marching across our pillowcases. The sun set underneath a mounting storm wall. The city held its breath, but rain circumvented us.
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Thunder, BLTs, and divorce live in Minnesota. Last August, a lightning storm threw spindly punches from behind gathered cloud vestments in the Sunday flight path. We sat out on the driveway pavement, adopted Californians pining for the alchemy of humidity and electricity from childhood summers in the Midwest and on the East Coast. It was above and in front of us, but we missed it at the same time.
A day earlier, Josh’s best friend had told us he and his wife were splitting up. We spent our last night in town at the kitchen island, drinking down my in-laws’ beer fridge (Summit, Schell’s, Lift Bridge), and spooling out the details that needed attention: real estate, religion, bank accounts, sleeping arrangements, first days of kindergarten.
On our visits, we rarely have enough time for the pull tabs and meat raffles, the hay rolled snuggly in damp fields, the corn parade interrupted by baseball diamonds, the main streets alternating churches and liquor stores. Sometimes, we stop and get our fishing licenses at the big bait shop en route to a borrowed cabin. We loll for a few morning hours on the launch with Greg - part-time fishing guide, part-time fireman - and, if we’re lucky, haul Northern pike out of Mille Lacs and up the dock to Cary, who excises the pesky y-bone and sends us home with coiled flesh in a cooler for a lunchtime fish fry that is at once immediate and nostalgic.
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3.1.15
I could tell the empanada window on the corner was closed by the thrown shadows of its gate a half block prior. I used to think flies congregated on this part of the street because of the dirty cafe that preceded the Chilean pastries - but Chile Lindo is immaculate and the flies still swarm. I now know they’re seeking something in the bark, leaves, flowers, pollen, roots, or reliability of nearby trees.
I tried out a new perspective: Sunday delight instead of Sunday melancholy. People trailed their newly mobile granddaughters, carried laundry, sipped coffee, called their mothers, adjusted expectations, forgave one another.
