Flip flops slap across the freshly mopped marble floor of the new Cathedral. Outside, it is the first hot day of the year in Houston. Inside, the shade is cool—people in t-shirts enjoy the feeling of their own bare arms, swinging free, uninhibited, putting flowers around the statutes of the saints, around the Roman altar, the brass-plated tabernacle, still open and empty, but without so much of the horror. We committed murder yesterday, but that was yesterday. We’re different now. Time has passed—last night, this morning—and things are different now.
The candles are still not out; all the sticks stand empty. The rose quartz basins of holy water at the entryways are still padded dry; nothing for the people in t-shirts to bless themselves with as they slip in and out through the heavy doors, going for another load of clean linens, reserved pew placards, boxes of new candles, more flowers—lilies, petunias, forsythias, hydrangeas—nothing to bless themselves with except their own hands. The baptismal font, though, has been refilling since early this morning and its granite lips are now brimming over again. The sound of the fountain’s trickle, running out of the mouth, down the chin, down the neck, shoulders, spreading over the torso of the interior column, soothes the anxious brows of the t-shirted people as they make the preparations. Tonight, the font will be the co-Star; right now it supervises.
Across town at a supermarket, someone has just purchased the last lamb roast from the butcher. Raise the interior temperature to 160ยบ, says the meat man. It is high strawberry season in Texas, and you can purchase a whole box of them for 99¢ (limit of four). In dairy, the sample lady is giving out brochures and little medicine cups of ultra-active yogurt culture drink—new from Japan, she says, sold in little five-pack bottles, one for each day’s lunch. At the front of the store, Janelle is slicing samples of bunny cakes patted with coconut flakes to give Peter Cottontail the impression of fur.
Further out to the west, rollerbladers enter Memorial Park from the bayou mo-pac trail. The foliage is lush and green in many places now, but the leaves still droop limply, like a stilt-legged colt not yet used to its own weight. Wick-away mesh shirts and sports bras and a Big Brother throwing routes to a Nike-ed kid over a broad-blade grassy patch where the ground warm and damp with life. A man and wife push their rubber tire stroller under the shade of an oak and pull out foil wrapped sandwiches.
Houston bakes. It is Saturday, this Saturday, this one, holy Saturday. Inside the Cathedral, flip flopped feet slap the floor on their way out of the sanctuary—whap, whap, whap, whap—to return again soon in full-toed leather.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
A Microcosm
Before I left, though, my grandparents had bequeathed to me their old cast-iron skillet: chipped orange enamel on the outside, and thirty years of blackened grease coating the inside. It was heavy; it was perfect. You can’t buy skillets like this; they have to be earned over decades of use, so that all of the oils and fats of meals past soak into the iron and add their bouquet to meals present.
I didn’t have a toaster, and until my first paycheck, I didn’t have a whole lot of money either. So in the start-up trips to Ikea—make that Target—make that Walmart, I had to pick and choose. A toaster missed out of the first cut. Butter was cheaper, though, and I soon discovered a secret: melt a little (or more than a little) butter on the skillet, put a slice of bread face down on it, then flip and repeat, and you’d get toast. In fact, you’d get great toast, a crispysavory crust of fried butter locking in a chewybready core, at the ready for jams or fried eggs and cheese or even just plain. The technique worked so well that I began buying higher quality bakery bread to go with it. It just seemed fitting.
Pass a few weeks, establish ruts of the daily routine, and I noticed something I’d missed before: it takes a long time to make toast on my skillet. For one thing, my skillet is really only large enough to toast one regular-sized piece of bread at a time. And another thing is that you have to watch the toast all the time, to flip it at the right moment, just before golden brown would turn to smoke and charred black. You can’t just press and button and trust springs and levers to do the work for you. I began to have toast less frequently.
Then one day in Target, I noticed some very inexpensive appliances. I’d gotten a little money by then, a couple of paychecks, so that a $7 toaster didn’t seem like all that big a deal. At least it wasn’t on the margin anymore for making my month’s rent. I brought home the cheapest one, a little aluminum box painted white.
Now I have toast more frequently again. It’s nowhere near as good delicious, but it works as a vehicle for peanut butter and jam. Now, I pop down my bread—pre-sliced—while I’m frying my eggs and the two come up done at just the same time. And that is just how things are now.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Fearfully and Wonderfully
The world's best hairdresser: Miriam, a 40-something Colombian immigrant, now a U.S. citizen, who learned how to cut hair by practicing every weekend on her family members back home--8 siblings and God knows how many cousins. We found each other by accident my 1L year of law school. After the first haircut in October, I went to no one else. Miriam was a true craftswoman. It took her 50% longer to cut my hair than other stylists, but when she finished it was perfect. It's not easy to make my hair look handsome, but she did it. Miriam cut my hair each month of that year, until one day in late May I stopped in the salon on Broadway and she was gone. Nobody knew where she went. She'd talked in the past about attending secretarial school at Gateway Community College, so I figured she'd made good on her plan.
My 2L year, I got by on free haircuts from a friend. The price decline was great, but the quality also took a correlative dip. Not that this mattered much. As my mother and sisters can attest, I've never paid a great deal of heed to hair care. My college roommate once described me as "a cross between Michael Jackson and a broccoli stalk." A hit; a palpable hit. It stung, but only because it was a fair point, at least so far as my head was concerned: since puberty my hair has usually been a steel wool mess.
All good things must come to an end, including my free-clipping friend, who moved away from New Haven last summer. When I returned for my 3L year I knew I'd have to start fresh with the worst of both worlds--so-so haircuts that I actually had to pay for.
A few weeks into September and a few days out from official Chia-Pet sponsorship, I had a couple hours to spare for errands. So I took a walk down Wall Street looking for a barber. I stepped into the first one I saw and who should I behold but Miriam. She recognized me immediately. "Same haircut?" she asked me when I sat down. Same haircut, I said.
At one point in our conversation that followed, I made a weak joke about how the soft, yellow-blond hair of my childhood had transformed into this bland and wiry tangle. What Miriam said next caught me by surprise. "But it is beautiful," she said, pinching a tuft between her fingers. "It is ash."
Ash. I'd never heard someone call my hair ash before. "It is what the people, they ask for their highlights," said Miriam. And just like that, for the first time in my life, I saw the beauty in my own hair. It is ash, a subtle, complex beauty; a coat of many colors really, but with all distinctions honed within the tight spectrum of ice-white to bronze. What a gift, to see one's own hair with affection for the first time.
The end of the story is that Miriam convinced me, in what must be a minor miracle, to order a $25 bottle of shampoo. This is equal to the total amount of money I have spent on shampoo in the past five years combined. Beauty, though.
My 2L year, I got by on free haircuts from a friend. The price decline was great, but the quality also took a correlative dip. Not that this mattered much. As my mother and sisters can attest, I've never paid a great deal of heed to hair care. My college roommate once described me as "a cross between Michael Jackson and a broccoli stalk." A hit; a palpable hit. It stung, but only because it was a fair point, at least so far as my head was concerned: since puberty my hair has usually been a steel wool mess.
All good things must come to an end, including my free-clipping friend, who moved away from New Haven last summer. When I returned for my 3L year I knew I'd have to start fresh with the worst of both worlds--so-so haircuts that I actually had to pay for.
A few weeks into September and a few days out from official Chia-Pet sponsorship, I had a couple hours to spare for errands. So I took a walk down Wall Street looking for a barber. I stepped into the first one I saw and who should I behold but Miriam. She recognized me immediately. "Same haircut?" she asked me when I sat down. Same haircut, I said.
At one point in our conversation that followed, I made a weak joke about how the soft, yellow-blond hair of my childhood had transformed into this bland and wiry tangle. What Miriam said next caught me by surprise. "But it is beautiful," she said, pinching a tuft between her fingers. "It is ash."
Ash. I'd never heard someone call my hair ash before. "It is what the people, they ask for their highlights," said Miriam. And just like that, for the first time in my life, I saw the beauty in my own hair. It is ash, a subtle, complex beauty; a coat of many colors really, but with all distinctions honed within the tight spectrum of ice-white to bronze. What a gift, to see one's own hair with affection for the first time.
The end of the story is that Miriam convinced me, in what must be a minor miracle, to order a $25 bottle of shampoo. This is equal to the total amount of money I have spent on shampoo in the past five years combined. Beauty, though.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Old Rugged
I saw his billboard--www.VaticanHidesPedophiles.com--and drank it in. He saw me, and I saw that he saw, and we locked eyes. His twinkled like Kris Kringle. He wasn't irate; he was exuberant, rather like a convert. He shuffled forward and reached over two rows of passengers to hand me his pamphlet, a cut-and-copied sheet railing against the moral imbecility of Pope Benedict and all the progress haters in the Vatican. I drank this in, just like his sign, just like his face. I absorbed it. I drank.
The only butterflies came when I gave him a cross of blessing. By then, though, he was on the other side of a window and I was on the platform. It was a moment of perfect indeterminacy: he was looking down when I began the cross; the train rolled forward; my hand slid across the horizontal space toward the third nail; his neck creaked up; by the time his eyes could have possibly followed I was turned, taking my own way. And he passed beyond me.
Godspeed.
.
The only butterflies came when I gave him a cross of blessing. By then, though, he was on the other side of a window and I was on the platform. It was a moment of perfect indeterminacy: he was looking down when I began the cross; the train rolled forward; my hand slid across the horizontal space toward the third nail; his neck creaked up; by the time his eyes could have possibly followed I was turned, taking my own way. And he passed beyond me.
Godspeed.
.
Friday, July 11, 2008
On Venice Beach
The ocean is like my breath; except that it will go on longer.
If I hadn’t been told head of time that Venice Beach was something special, I wouldn’t have known it was special. The shops, bars, and motels lining Washington Boulevard all have a trapped feeling about them, like they were supposed to be quaint and cared for, like a small chestnut heirloom piece, but instead were discarded too soon, and so acquired the dust and nicks that make them look cheap. Strewn among the garbage of billboards and littered straws, they feel too deeply filed away in the immense warehouse of Los Angeles to ever be remembered and polished and restored again.
The beach, the actual Venice Beach, is hedged in by rock piles on either side that circumscribe how much of the ocean’s eternity the beachgoing public is allotted. Looking north along the shoreline, over the rock pile, mountains crowd in along the bend of what must be a beautiful natural harbor. The air, however, is so mixed with fumes that the green mountains have a spectral aspect that makes them seem much farther away than they are. They are ghosts in mid-day light, and the only passable route to their country, you sense, is not by walking the beach—there will be too many sharp and unnatural things sticking out of the sand, crowding you into private fence lines—but by the new natural way of the automobile. Duck into a small space, take safe passage through the hot pastel asphalt wasteland, and emerge onto another previously meted slice of sand meeting eternity.
But the miraculous thing—and the reason why your heart can still receive enough whist to write—is that eternity does seep in. The seagulls and shells are the first signs. They were not placed here. They were born here. They will die here; and the ocean will draw them out into itself, into its center far out beyond these noxious cotton-candy fumes that cling to this little thumbprint on the shore called Los Angeles. Out there where no country is seen, the ocean will caress their carcasses and flexible bird bones and sink them down deep into itself. They will be forgotten then; but they will not be lost.
Turning back upward toward the beach, back to the landscape of so many lost things, I saw a man who I did not recognize as a man at first. I was told there would be weird Californians on Venice Beach, but most of the people I saw were surfers flopping about and elbowing for more space in the tide waters, women whose tattooed hips and bellies bulged out of their bikinis, or middle-aged androgynes in sunglass-and-earbud helmets power jogging on the wet-pack. This man was unique. His face was invisible behind a tangled veil of charms, fishhook ornaments and Indian dreamcatchers, hanging from the brim of his hat. He stood completely still, and might have been doing so since the late 1960s, since the long gray hair that lay down his back was so ratty it seemed to have grown moss. The rest of him was covered in dark green and black canvas material that looked more like a broken-down tent than actual clothing.
As I passed by him, I considered stopping to pose the question, “who are you?” Instead, I carried on back to my hotel, satisfied at least that there are unexplored patches of eternity even further up, in, and among.
If I hadn’t been told head of time that Venice Beach was something special, I wouldn’t have known it was special. The shops, bars, and motels lining Washington Boulevard all have a trapped feeling about them, like they were supposed to be quaint and cared for, like a small chestnut heirloom piece, but instead were discarded too soon, and so acquired the dust and nicks that make them look cheap. Strewn among the garbage of billboards and littered straws, they feel too deeply filed away in the immense warehouse of Los Angeles to ever be remembered and polished and restored again.
The beach, the actual Venice Beach, is hedged in by rock piles on either side that circumscribe how much of the ocean’s eternity the beachgoing public is allotted. Looking north along the shoreline, over the rock pile, mountains crowd in along the bend of what must be a beautiful natural harbor. The air, however, is so mixed with fumes that the green mountains have a spectral aspect that makes them seem much farther away than they are. They are ghosts in mid-day light, and the only passable route to their country, you sense, is not by walking the beach—there will be too many sharp and unnatural things sticking out of the sand, crowding you into private fence lines—but by the new natural way of the automobile. Duck into a small space, take safe passage through the hot pastel asphalt wasteland, and emerge onto another previously meted slice of sand meeting eternity.
But the miraculous thing—and the reason why your heart can still receive enough whist to write—is that eternity does seep in. The seagulls and shells are the first signs. They were not placed here. They were born here. They will die here; and the ocean will draw them out into itself, into its center far out beyond these noxious cotton-candy fumes that cling to this little thumbprint on the shore called Los Angeles. Out there where no country is seen, the ocean will caress their carcasses and flexible bird bones and sink them down deep into itself. They will be forgotten then; but they will not be lost.
Turning back upward toward the beach, back to the landscape of so many lost things, I saw a man who I did not recognize as a man at first. I was told there would be weird Californians on Venice Beach, but most of the people I saw were surfers flopping about and elbowing for more space in the tide waters, women whose tattooed hips and bellies bulged out of their bikinis, or middle-aged androgynes in sunglass-and-earbud helmets power jogging on the wet-pack. This man was unique. His face was invisible behind a tangled veil of charms, fishhook ornaments and Indian dreamcatchers, hanging from the brim of his hat. He stood completely still, and might have been doing so since the late 1960s, since the long gray hair that lay down his back was so ratty it seemed to have grown moss. The rest of him was covered in dark green and black canvas material that looked more like a broken-down tent than actual clothing.
As I passed by him, I considered stopping to pose the question, “who are you?” Instead, I carried on back to my hotel, satisfied at least that there are unexplored patches of eternity even further up, in, and among.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Itsy Bitsy Ideas
In the shower yesterday, I reached for my washcloth, hanging from the curtain rail, like usual. On the underside of the yellow terry cloth was a small brown spider, which, startled, I swiped away. The spider landed at the bottom of the tub, clearly wounded by the blow and the fall. He or she squirmed and kicked six remaining operable legs wildly in a panicked tarantella. As an act of second-order mercy, I directed some of the shower stream toward the spider, who was caught in a miniature eddy, struggled, weakly this time, for a few more seconds and then floated dead, like a speck of dirt, down toward the drain.
I’ve killed a lot of bugs this summer. Living in a basement apartment, they come out readily through all the cracks and spaces one finds in an old and sub-ideal house. Watching the spider struggle yesterday, I relived a familiar sentiment: a pinch of pity followed closely by a dusting of guilt. In almost every case this summer, however, I’ve swiped away this feeling with an idea as swift and deadly certain as my hand; namely, that an insect or arachnid, while possessing a “soul” in some Aristotelian sense of the word, is in no part constituted of an immortal, rational soul.
Correct ideas matter. I wield my belief about the nature of bug souls like a flyswatter. Without it, I would be compelled to act differently; I’d be resuscitating spiders and performing capture-and-release operations on pill bugs. Or, I’d ignore my qualms, and over time that dusting of guilt would settle, layer upon layer, obscuring and eventually encrusting my conscience. But between slavery to absurd compulsion and moral autoanesthesia lies the freedom of reason. I’m quite sure that not all of my intuitions are correct—there are simply too many contradictory influences out there, which have molded me, even beyond my knowing, for me to take the “just believe in yourself” message seriously—but I’m also quite sure that in developing the habit of ignoring my scruples, I would be neglecting to exercise one of my most important human faculties—and duties—at the risk of one day discovering that I had no conscience, not even a less-than-true-north conscience, at all.
Incorrect ideas matter, too. It I were wrong about the moral status of my spider victim (I don’t think I am, but if I were) my flyswatter of an idea would actually be more of a bloody knife. Not to belabor the point with obvious historical examples, but plenty of people have been convinced by wrong ideas and put them into practice with horrific consequences.
How to tell the difference? What reason helps us sort through reasons? Well, for one thing, “ye shall know a tree by its fruit.” Ideas whose implications are self-defeating, death-bringing, are not the ideas with which I care to ally myself. I also tend to trust the older ideas before the novel ones, which, given how long we’ve been swatting mosquitoes and kicking anthills, is bad news for the bugs.
I’ve killed a lot of bugs this summer. Living in a basement apartment, they come out readily through all the cracks and spaces one finds in an old and sub-ideal house. Watching the spider struggle yesterday, I relived a familiar sentiment: a pinch of pity followed closely by a dusting of guilt. In almost every case this summer, however, I’ve swiped away this feeling with an idea as swift and deadly certain as my hand; namely, that an insect or arachnid, while possessing a “soul” in some Aristotelian sense of the word, is in no part constituted of an immortal, rational soul.
Correct ideas matter. I wield my belief about the nature of bug souls like a flyswatter. Without it, I would be compelled to act differently; I’d be resuscitating spiders and performing capture-and-release operations on pill bugs. Or, I’d ignore my qualms, and over time that dusting of guilt would settle, layer upon layer, obscuring and eventually encrusting my conscience. But between slavery to absurd compulsion and moral autoanesthesia lies the freedom of reason. I’m quite sure that not all of my intuitions are correct—there are simply too many contradictory influences out there, which have molded me, even beyond my knowing, for me to take the “just believe in yourself” message seriously—but I’m also quite sure that in developing the habit of ignoring my scruples, I would be neglecting to exercise one of my most important human faculties—and duties—at the risk of one day discovering that I had no conscience, not even a less-than-true-north conscience, at all.
Incorrect ideas matter, too. It I were wrong about the moral status of my spider victim (I don’t think I am, but if I were) my flyswatter of an idea would actually be more of a bloody knife. Not to belabor the point with obvious historical examples, but plenty of people have been convinced by wrong ideas and put them into practice with horrific consequences.
How to tell the difference? What reason helps us sort through reasons? Well, for one thing, “ye shall know a tree by its fruit.” Ideas whose implications are self-defeating, death-bringing, are not the ideas with which I care to ally myself. I also tend to trust the older ideas before the novel ones, which, given how long we’ve been swatting mosquitoes and kicking anthills, is bad news for the bugs.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Returning Home on a Wednesday Evening
Before I even take off my suit—the sky! The sky! The sky!
It is gray and gold, darkening as the evening draws on. If I look straight up into the gauze, I see a patch of evening blue, rimmed with gold hanging above. There are gods and spirits there. There is so much there.
I have thought too often of late about what is on the ground. I have stopped to smell the roses on my way to work. I have looked for the beauty in my weedy overgrown lawn. I have rested upon my fondness for the hard-beaten grime of the sidewalks. I have not looked at the sky.
Love of the near and gritty is one thing. But the sky! The sky! The sky! To step into a small propeller plane and lift—be lifted. To bob and weave and spear through the space, so much empty, substantial space. Cool and gray and blue space—and gold resting on top, like the smile of your favorite just as she’s falling asleep.
Enough of this ground. Put me on a plane, a jumbo jet—instead of loving small things, I’ll love the way big things look small.
It is gray and gold, darkening as the evening draws on. If I look straight up into the gauze, I see a patch of evening blue, rimmed with gold hanging above. There are gods and spirits there. There is so much there.
I have thought too often of late about what is on the ground. I have stopped to smell the roses on my way to work. I have looked for the beauty in my weedy overgrown lawn. I have rested upon my fondness for the hard-beaten grime of the sidewalks. I have not looked at the sky.
Love of the near and gritty is one thing. But the sky! The sky! The sky! To step into a small propeller plane and lift—be lifted. To bob and weave and spear through the space, so much empty, substantial space. Cool and gray and blue space—and gold resting on top, like the smile of your favorite just as she’s falling asleep.
Enough of this ground. Put me on a plane, a jumbo jet—instead of loving small things, I’ll love the way big things look small.
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