The world is full of non-places.
The parking lot outside the window of Room 212 at the Sleep Inn in Omaha, Nebraska is one of them. On an autumn night, wind makes the plexiglass window hum, and so I peel back the shade of the tomb of a room and look.
It’s a parking lot, entirely empty. The few guests here tonight have parked out front. Beyond the blacktop and curb is a bank of trees, a field, an office park, and, at last, a regional airport whose last flight already left.
The parking lot is a space created by man and left alone by man. Out there in the dark, windy, unknown and unnoticed spot, no two human bodies have ever met in passing, never touched, never spoken. Never admired, never even thought of. Maybe, once, a confused deer or a rabbit might have emerged from the little group of trees, suddenly tense at the exposure, wide-eyed at the flatness. But that would be all. This place has no retrievable past and no hope of anything happening here in the future. The last moment in history for this place was the day it was paved.
Even so, Lord Jesus, quickly come, come to the place outside this window, and night shall be no more. For where can I flee from Thy presence? If I run into the windy, abandoned parking lot behind Room 212, Thou art there before me, and after I leave, Thou remainest behind, dwelling in a place Thou lovest and that Thou rememberest in the midst of all the changing universe.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
The Bicyclist
Pudgy, you’d call him, or squat, a smallish boulder of a man, but in any case well-balanced. With two bearskin hands bearing down on the handlebars, he whizzes through dew-laden traffic in the early morning suburban outpost of a metropolis. Beneath his bulk, the bicycle looks like it could snap, like the just-too-thin tree branch giving way beneath Pooh on his way out to the honey hive. But up he stays, and then some, cutting off cars, torpedoing down the hash marks while they, the inflexible hulks whose mirrors reach out to clip his elbows, wait at intersection lights.
He’s older than you’d expect, and he wears no underwear, a fact abundantly revealed as he glides past the corner crosswalk, hunched over for speed, pulling the fringe of his pleather Redskins jacket up, and the beltless hem of his light blue Levis down, revealing a wide fleshy band of gargantuan pinkness. We on the corner pretend not to notice the magnificent jest of his enormous presence.
He’s older than you’d expect, and he wears no underwear, a fact abundantly revealed as he glides past the corner crosswalk, hunched over for speed, pulling the fringe of his pleather Redskins jacket up, and the beltless hem of his light blue Levis down, revealing a wide fleshy band of gargantuan pinkness. We on the corner pretend not to notice the magnificent jest of his enormous presence.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Sea-Tac Burger King Girl
“Can I help the next person!” It’s not spoken as a question. Nargiza (so says the gold bar name badge pinned to her black polo) calls me to the newly opened register. She, the manager, is hopping on to open the relief valve on a line building up behind me.
“I’ll take a number one,” I say, “with no mustard or mayonnaise.”
The number one comes with no mustard—only mayonnaise and ketchup. Did I want just the ketchup then? Yes. With cheese on that? Yes, with cheese.
“Nargiza. Is that how you say it?”
It is.
“What a beautiful name.”
“Order number five,” says Nargiza and hands me my receipt. For a moment, half a moment, she smiled. “Next in line please!”
I step back into the school of circling passengers, waiting with one hand resting on the raised handles of our roll-away suitcases and the other cradling our smart phones. Reflexively, I reach toward my pocket, to sate the ever-present hunger for a morsel, just a morsel, of email. That’s when I see her.
Over the counter, beyond Nargiza’s round, sloping shoulder, through the cut-away window linking the broiler room to the registers, I see her. She’s sixteen, maybe seventeen or eighteen with a young face, her features delicate, long, dark hair pulled off of her neck by the strap of an oversized visor that matches the polo shirts. She’s wearing crystal studs in her ears and, visible when she smiles to herself, braces on her teeth. Both her lips and earlobes are like her visor, a little too big for her head, a little bird-like and cartoonish as a result, and all the more lovely for it.
She’s absorbed in her work, which I watch, a theme with variations. First she looks up at a screen of some kind, invisible to me, hanging slightly above her (she is quite short). Her eyes move to precisely that point on the hidden surface where they will glean the information they need. Then her chin and attention tilt down to the stainless steel counter, she reaches to her right, presses her fingers onto the corner of a square of wrapping paper upon which an open-faced burger lays prostrate for its adornment, and slides paper and burger in front of the hard plastic tubs nestled in front of her. Her hands, wrapped in oversized plastic gloves, move quickly to the pale tomato slices, the ridged pickle chips floating in saline juice, a pinchful of diced onions and a handful of shredded lettuce—then out come the flat-edged blades to slab ketchup, mustard (not mine), and mayonnaise (definitely not mine) on the naked half of the bun, which she then flips on top of the veggie-and-patty pile—immediately, her hands move outward to the corners of the waxy paper, which she folds into triangles and brings in to the center above the burger, tucking in the edges with her spare fingers all the while. She turns the package, lifts it; her right hand produces a black artist’s pencil and marks something on the paper. Finis. At last she turns outward, through the window, toward me, drops the burger down the sloped aluminum chute, where it rests for a moment, before Nargiza picks it up, puts it in a brown paper bag already steaming with fries, folds down the top of the bag and says:
“Order number two!”
It’s horrible, of course, what lies behind that burger. You think of the cows. There are many, many sharp machines between a calf in her momma’s belly and the burger in that bag. You think of the kids in college who became vegetarians over that.
I think they became vegetarians because they hungered for the real, for Reality, more than a comfortable hamburger. Wake up! This is really happening, and you’re a part of it! That’s what their choices said. It’s pretty unimpeachable, that witness to, not just violence, but hidden violence. Shine the light on reality. How does a burger really get to you in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport?
And yet, and yet, and yet…Reality is like a germ, or a bamboo plant, that you can’t snuff out, can’t quite root out of the system, no matter where along the production line you find yourself, because part of how a burger gets to you in the lonely, invigorating amoeba of strangers in the airport food court is through that girl.
Three bags later, Nargiza calls my number. She almost smiles at me again, and then I’m gone, she’s gone, the girl in the window is gone, just like all beautiful things eventually.
“I’ll take a number one,” I say, “with no mustard or mayonnaise.”
The number one comes with no mustard—only mayonnaise and ketchup. Did I want just the ketchup then? Yes. With cheese on that? Yes, with cheese.
“Nargiza. Is that how you say it?”
It is.
“What a beautiful name.”
“Order number five,” says Nargiza and hands me my receipt. For a moment, half a moment, she smiled. “Next in line please!”
I step back into the school of circling passengers, waiting with one hand resting on the raised handles of our roll-away suitcases and the other cradling our smart phones. Reflexively, I reach toward my pocket, to sate the ever-present hunger for a morsel, just a morsel, of email. That’s when I see her.
Over the counter, beyond Nargiza’s round, sloping shoulder, through the cut-away window linking the broiler room to the registers, I see her. She’s sixteen, maybe seventeen or eighteen with a young face, her features delicate, long, dark hair pulled off of her neck by the strap of an oversized visor that matches the polo shirts. She’s wearing crystal studs in her ears and, visible when she smiles to herself, braces on her teeth. Both her lips and earlobes are like her visor, a little too big for her head, a little bird-like and cartoonish as a result, and all the more lovely for it.
She’s absorbed in her work, which I watch, a theme with variations. First she looks up at a screen of some kind, invisible to me, hanging slightly above her (she is quite short). Her eyes move to precisely that point on the hidden surface where they will glean the information they need. Then her chin and attention tilt down to the stainless steel counter, she reaches to her right, presses her fingers onto the corner of a square of wrapping paper upon which an open-faced burger lays prostrate for its adornment, and slides paper and burger in front of the hard plastic tubs nestled in front of her. Her hands, wrapped in oversized plastic gloves, move quickly to the pale tomato slices, the ridged pickle chips floating in saline juice, a pinchful of diced onions and a handful of shredded lettuce—then out come the flat-edged blades to slab ketchup, mustard (not mine), and mayonnaise (definitely not mine) on the naked half of the bun, which she then flips on top of the veggie-and-patty pile—immediately, her hands move outward to the corners of the waxy paper, which she folds into triangles and brings in to the center above the burger, tucking in the edges with her spare fingers all the while. She turns the package, lifts it; her right hand produces a black artist’s pencil and marks something on the paper. Finis. At last she turns outward, through the window, toward me, drops the burger down the sloped aluminum chute, where it rests for a moment, before Nargiza picks it up, puts it in a brown paper bag already steaming with fries, folds down the top of the bag and says:
“Order number two!”
It’s horrible, of course, what lies behind that burger. You think of the cows. There are many, many sharp machines between a calf in her momma’s belly and the burger in that bag. You think of the kids in college who became vegetarians over that.
I think they became vegetarians because they hungered for the real, for Reality, more than a comfortable hamburger. Wake up! This is really happening, and you’re a part of it! That’s what their choices said. It’s pretty unimpeachable, that witness to, not just violence, but hidden violence. Shine the light on reality. How does a burger really get to you in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport?
And yet, and yet, and yet…Reality is like a germ, or a bamboo plant, that you can’t snuff out, can’t quite root out of the system, no matter where along the production line you find yourself, because part of how a burger gets to you in the lonely, invigorating amoeba of strangers in the airport food court is through that girl.
Three bags later, Nargiza calls my number. She almost smiles at me again, and then I’m gone, she’s gone, the girl in the window is gone, just like all beautiful things eventually.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Cutting My Lawn In A Hurricane
You waited two weeks, say the neighbors to themselves, two whole weeks to let this veritable prairie grow in your yard, and now you pick now? Now? Now that it’s about to hurricane, you decide to cut the grass?
It’s true. Dark all morning, the first spit of the storm is just now carrying in on the wind. It is time for action.
Progress is a steady, unflinching process in the front yard, one damp row after another. Wet grass clumps to the blade and mattes the head of the mower, but I plow straight through. Behind me, the finished patches look like a wide-eyed young marine after his turn with the razor.
My back yard, though, is deep, dark even on a sunny day with all the tree cover, and the lawn is a woodsy salad of blue grass, clover, and broad-leafed vines hung over the wooden fence and carpeting the ground with generous leftover portions. By the time I reach it, the rain is picking up; the drops are fatter and colder. Looking up against a framed patch of polished silver sky, the drops look like shards of ice, tossed around in the wind.
Back on the green, green ground, the blade catches on a particularly wet and tangly patch. The engine coughs, loses its breath for a moment, then kicks back in. The wind whooshes. The blade catches a second time and its heart stops beating, just for a moment, before the engine-spirit takes pity, turns away from the light and decides to remain with me for a little while longer down here in the storm. A third time and it just dies.
There’s still a triangle left though, the thickest part of the whole yard, and although that vegetative cholesterol killed the engine once, I’m determined to see it devoured before the fierce part of the storm arrives. I scamper to get the gas can, pour unsteady elixir into the open, empty mouth of the engine while trying to shield the water from getting in as well, screw the cap back on with wet, grassy, gassy fingers, and pull the chord. Life!
Life, life, life. I finish the job, remembering this storm is called Irene, which is Greek for peace.
It’s true. Dark all morning, the first spit of the storm is just now carrying in on the wind. It is time for action.
Progress is a steady, unflinching process in the front yard, one damp row after another. Wet grass clumps to the blade and mattes the head of the mower, but I plow straight through. Behind me, the finished patches look like a wide-eyed young marine after his turn with the razor.
My back yard, though, is deep, dark even on a sunny day with all the tree cover, and the lawn is a woodsy salad of blue grass, clover, and broad-leafed vines hung over the wooden fence and carpeting the ground with generous leftover portions. By the time I reach it, the rain is picking up; the drops are fatter and colder. Looking up against a framed patch of polished silver sky, the drops look like shards of ice, tossed around in the wind.
Back on the green, green ground, the blade catches on a particularly wet and tangly patch. The engine coughs, loses its breath for a moment, then kicks back in. The wind whooshes. The blade catches a second time and its heart stops beating, just for a moment, before the engine-spirit takes pity, turns away from the light and decides to remain with me for a little while longer down here in the storm. A third time and it just dies.
There’s still a triangle left though, the thickest part of the whole yard, and although that vegetative cholesterol killed the engine once, I’m determined to see it devoured before the fierce part of the storm arrives. I scamper to get the gas can, pour unsteady elixir into the open, empty mouth of the engine while trying to shield the water from getting in as well, screw the cap back on with wet, grassy, gassy fingers, and pull the chord. Life!
Life, life, life. I finish the job, remembering this storm is called Irene, which is Greek for peace.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Feathers
From the train window, the wet blacktop behind the warehouses of these Connecticut towns slithers by. Banks of dark green foliage on the other hand—dark because it is August and also eight o’clock—they whoosh by, like wings.
My taxi driver this morning, who took me from mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church to the wedding at Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Church, was named Steve. He used to be a sausage salesman, which he liked for the same reason he liked the taxi business: he took care of people. Losing that sausage job, he said, was harder than his divorce.
And there were friends, friends I saw this weekend, though not as many as there used to be. Ray and Sherri, who took me in, even as they were packing to move to Florida. And Phyllis, Phyllis my Oracle, eighty-seven years old and tucked away in a houseful of antiques on Edgewood Street; Phyllis, who asked me in all earnestness what it was like to break someone’s heart.
There was a toast at the wedding reception this afternoon, (held on cotton table cloths and paper napkins in the church hall) a toast given by a friend of the bride, a searching-eyed, long-haired young man who quoted from Emily Dickinson. “Hope is the thing with feathers.” He and the bride used to memorize poetry together, and she used to love him, but he never did. Then he sat down.
Before the train got to this great iron bridge, the color of cities in Connecticut, the color of rust, we passed by a lake, filled in among reeds and cattails. Two swans were swimming across the surface of the black water, cutting V’s into the gloss.
My taxi driver this morning, who took me from mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church to the wedding at Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Church, was named Steve. He used to be a sausage salesman, which he liked for the same reason he liked the taxi business: he took care of people. Losing that sausage job, he said, was harder than his divorce.
And there were friends, friends I saw this weekend, though not as many as there used to be. Ray and Sherri, who took me in, even as they were packing to move to Florida. And Phyllis, Phyllis my Oracle, eighty-seven years old and tucked away in a houseful of antiques on Edgewood Street; Phyllis, who asked me in all earnestness what it was like to break someone’s heart.
There was a toast at the wedding reception this afternoon, (held on cotton table cloths and paper napkins in the church hall) a toast given by a friend of the bride, a searching-eyed, long-haired young man who quoted from Emily Dickinson. “Hope is the thing with feathers.” He and the bride used to memorize poetry together, and she used to love him, but he never did. Then he sat down.
Before the train got to this great iron bridge, the color of cities in Connecticut, the color of rust, we passed by a lake, filled in among reeds and cattails. Two swans were swimming across the surface of the black water, cutting V’s into the gloss.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Bump
To escape the heat for just a moment, a man, dressed in a full suit, probably a lawyer, stepped out of the cattle herd flowing toward the turnstiles out of the McPherson Square metro station, and walked over to one of the giant circular fans whirring within its metal cage, trying to circulate air in the station. He stopped right in front of it, put down his briefcase, and tilted his head back. The fan blew across his neck, over his tilted cheeks and lifted the hair falling back from his forehead.
I watched him do this, and saw a pleased, satisfied smile settle into his face. For just one moment, he was breaking a pattern and mining a moment of delight out of a vein of possibility that most workmanlike prospectors did not even see. He knew it: this moment was there and he had found it.
Thud! I walked right into the retractable barrier that admits and releases passengers through the turnstile. Bouncing back a step, I reflexively swiped my metro pass over the sensor again, and the barrier opened before me. I laughed. Something about slips and falls and bumps strikes us as hilarious; no doubt there’s a theory of comedy to explain this. My own theory is that collisions and delight are both at the foundation of the material world: we imagine that atoms are things zipping around like inexhaustible billiard balls on an infinite table, colliding and crashing off in a new deflected direction every millisecond because that is just what makes sense to our notion of delight, even joy you might say, down at the deepest heart of things.
I watched him do this, and saw a pleased, satisfied smile settle into his face. For just one moment, he was breaking a pattern and mining a moment of delight out of a vein of possibility that most workmanlike prospectors did not even see. He knew it: this moment was there and he had found it.
Thud! I walked right into the retractable barrier that admits and releases passengers through the turnstile. Bouncing back a step, I reflexively swiped my metro pass over the sensor again, and the barrier opened before me. I laughed. Something about slips and falls and bumps strikes us as hilarious; no doubt there’s a theory of comedy to explain this. My own theory is that collisions and delight are both at the foundation of the material world: we imagine that atoms are things zipping around like inexhaustible billiard balls on an infinite table, colliding and crashing off in a new deflected direction every millisecond because that is just what makes sense to our notion of delight, even joy you might say, down at the deepest heart of things.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Ascension
There’s a book out there that I haven’t read yet, but I mean to, called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The title is so wonderful that I like to imagine that I already know the gist.
Sometimes, a person can feel so at peace, that they sheerly whisp through the rooms and hours of a day. All is well, all will be well, no matter what comes—even if sadness comes. Lightness permeates all. Have you ever felt that way? There is a twinkle to your very existence. I like to imagine Jesus, forty days after being resurrected, having walked and loved and eaten with so much pure twinkle in his soul and in his body during those several weeks, that at a certain point he just hardly couldn’t help it: He lifted. Up! Lightness into lightness.
But why unbearable? Well, have you ever been light like that, and then remembered how much you love a processed cheeseburger and cherry coke late on a Friday night with friends who are a little drunk and thinking of nothing but the delights of filling their fleshyness with calories and movies and maybe even—well, probably, even—making out with a beautiful person? The lightness is higher, it is a more perfect pleasure; it is why Aristotle fell asleep with a bronze ball in his hand, so that at the moment he fell into too deep and delicious a REM it would slip from his fingers and clash to the ground that he needed to escape, jarring him awake to return to the pursuit of contemplation. The lightness is higher.
But, o!, the ground! Rich soil, indeed. We are beasts with bodies, too. It’s helpful to remember at these times that even as Jesus lept and lifted (and laughed—how could he not laugh at the sheer delight of it?) he left his Spirit behind.
Sometimes, a person can feel so at peace, that they sheerly whisp through the rooms and hours of a day. All is well, all will be well, no matter what comes—even if sadness comes. Lightness permeates all. Have you ever felt that way? There is a twinkle to your very existence. I like to imagine Jesus, forty days after being resurrected, having walked and loved and eaten with so much pure twinkle in his soul and in his body during those several weeks, that at a certain point he just hardly couldn’t help it: He lifted. Up! Lightness into lightness.
But why unbearable? Well, have you ever been light like that, and then remembered how much you love a processed cheeseburger and cherry coke late on a Friday night with friends who are a little drunk and thinking of nothing but the delights of filling their fleshyness with calories and movies and maybe even—well, probably, even—making out with a beautiful person? The lightness is higher, it is a more perfect pleasure; it is why Aristotle fell asleep with a bronze ball in his hand, so that at the moment he fell into too deep and delicious a REM it would slip from his fingers and clash to the ground that he needed to escape, jarring him awake to return to the pursuit of contemplation. The lightness is higher.
But, o!, the ground! Rich soil, indeed. We are beasts with bodies, too. It’s helpful to remember at these times that even as Jesus lept and lifted (and laughed—how could he not laugh at the sheer delight of it?) he left his Spirit behind.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)