Memory: a golden bowl, or a basement without light*

Last night I dreamed I was in some sort of internship program under the U.S. Secret Service helping to provide security for the White House. Neither I nor the half-dozen or so members of my internship team carried weapons or were assigned any sensitive duties. Instead we were issued uniforms resembling those worn by mall security guards and were assigned tasks like guarding the property’s flower beds – which were populated mostly by pastel-colored peonies and enclosed by old chain-link fences painted white – and watching over the presidential kennels, which were filled with friendly dogs of every variety.

The members of my team included a middle-aged, heavyset African-American woman, two older men, two young women, and a young guy who was the spitting image of the lead actor from the film, ‘The Hurt Locker.’ All were strangers except for the two younger women, whose identities constantly shifted so that they would resemble first one pair of friends from my waking life, then another, then another. Hurt Locker Guy was an actual veteran of the Iraq conflict. I commented on the amazing similarity between him and the actor and I asked him what he thought of the film. His response was measured and neutral: “It had its moments.” As for myself, I looked the way I do in waking life, but my dream self was originally from upstate New York.

I felt a great deal of affection and respect for all of my team members. We ate meals and played cards together. We talked argued about politics and discussed classical music and good places to eat. I explained the sport of parkour to one of the older men. During lunch, we heard a crash and saw federal officers swarming around the White House gates. Soon they were coming in through the windows of our break room, assault rifles at the ready. We stayed low until they were gone. The highlight of my time there was when I got to hold the door to Marine One for the First Lady and her daughters. I was surprised to find myself suddenly wearing Marine-issue olive drab fatigues from the Korean War era, with that peculiar peaked ball cap common to the branch at that time.

One night K came to pick me up from work. The parking lot was full, so I could only hear her voice calling my name. I was overjoyed at the thought of seeing her. I knew she was parked at the far end of the lot, on the other side of a small hill, so I was going to walk toward her in a normal way. But remembering what I had told my coworker about parkour, I started running. I was practically weightless. I bounced across the tops of the cars in my way, dodged pedestrians, barely touched the hill as I glided over it, to where she was waiting for me. I jumped into the car and we both began talking at once. We were so happy to see each other. We both looked the way we did when we first got together. It seemed as if we had been separated for an eternity, and we couldn’t wait to share our respective stories. We were grinning and giddy.

I woke up, excited to tell her about my crazy dream, and I was puzzled to find her not in bed. For a couple of seconds I didn’t know where I was; I thought I was back in our bedroom in Catonsville, that it was 15 years ago.

But it wasn’t. It was now, and it was Greenmount Avenue, and it was only a dream of something that had changed and gotten sick and gone away.











*Mary Oliver

and the clouds flew around with the clouds

The pleasures of merely circulating

Normally I love rainy days, especially in the spring, when I am awakened by a small gust that rattles the venetian blinds, a breeze weighted by moisture and city smells: asphalt and motor oil, the feathers of pigeons and crows, earthworms, mulch from the little flowerbed where the season's first jonquils and crocuses just bloomed two days ago. And behind all of these, the sense of high, whipping clouds that look down somberly yet tenderly on the rowhomes and the jagged circles of umbrellas.

The awareness of the clouds wheeling above the city brings to mind other streets and other skies, ones that I've walked among and nearly forgotten, or else ones that I know only through old songs and favorite books, yet which are so familiar and therefore so real that it takes a moment to remember that I I've borrowed the memory of them from someone else.

These are the days when I like nothing more than to be by myself, to watch television and smoke cigarettes and drink tea and read books. Forget housework and taxes and office deadlines, I just want to sit on the couch and listen to the radio and edit a few photos before making a late breakfast.

Today, though, is Monday, and those options were unavailable to me. I had a morning meeting in Dundalk, where the men are squat and stoop-shouldered, with close-cropped white hair peeking out from under meshback baseball caps emblazoned with military insignia; or else they're rangy and blond, with ruddy cheeks and rough hands and a drawn, haunted, belligerent wariness in and around their eyes.

My car is increasingly becoming a source of anxiety. The wiper blades need changing, so all they did was smear the oily drizzle all over the windshield. The oil needs to be replaced. The brakes are spongy. When the window is down I can hear a high rattle, probably a timing belt or something equally expensive. I have no money for repairs, so I'm trying not to drive anywhere far away, which is one of the reasons I didn't go to Massachusetts a couple of weeks ago.

April 15 is fast approaching and I haven't done the taxes, mostly because I'm worried that I'm going to owe the government money, rather than the other way around. I need new shoes, new shirts, new trousers, new sportcoats. I feel threadbare and lumpy. At my job, I'm doing the work of three people; I had to come into the office both Saturday and Sunday, and I still got e-mails from people demanding to know why they haven't received what they are expecting from me.

And there is the ongoing death of my marriage. We've been separated now for over seven months, the divorce becomes final in just a couple of weeks, each of us has found another partner, and yet those mooring lines, though frayed beyond repair, refuse to give way entirely, which would allow the boat to drift safely away from the pier. It's like a loved one with a terminal illness whom you never wanted to see die, but it's progressed to the point where death would be welcome, and yet he keeps hanging on, the organism clinging to life.

I know that relationships as deep and longstanding as ours was never really go away. Even so, I harbor this hope that once everything is done, once the lines are finally snapped, once that boat gets taken by the current at last, that it will be easier. That the memories won't be such constant companions. That each of us will be free to create new memories, find new anchorages and new berths.

So the rain continues, and I bounce from meeting to meeting and I wince at the amount of unanswered e-mail on my screen, silently chiding me for my lack of response. And I miss the one I love, and I feel alone.

And yet. I'm helping to plan a surprise shower for two friends who are getting married, thanks to Washington D.C.'s recent acceptance of marriage license applications from same-sex couples. And yet I met good friends this past weekend for a night of gonzo burlesque. And yet this evening my coworker and I attended a reception celebrating artwork by young people in Baltimore's criminal justice system, boys who found support and understanding and possibilities in the midst of hopelessness and trauma. And yet I am surrounded by love and friendship. And yet there are spring flowers blooming amid the plastic shopping bags and soda cans and cigarette butts along Greenmount Avenue. And yet the scent of the high, wheeling clouds overhead, brisk and surprising, calls me to other times in other places under other skies.

Mary

Mary
Originally uploaded by mobtownblues

Earlier this week, Rev. Mary Glasspool, Canon to the Bishops in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland,, cleared the final hurdle to being confirmed as Bishop Suffragan of Los Angeles.

As soon as the news was announced, the Bishop of Maryland and his staff hastily convened a service of thanksgiving and prayer. Mary, who delivered the closing benediction, choked up as she thanked us all for coming on such short notice, and she led us in a round of applause for her partner of 22 years.

Mary is a dear soul whom I have come to know a little through the midweek contemplative Eucharist at Baltimore's Cathedral of the Incarnation. While I will miss her warm smile, prophetic preaching voice, and heartfelt singing on Tuesdays, I wish her all joy and success in her new post.

Solvitur Ambulando

We leave Baltimore just before dawn, wheels up as the sky lightens from black to indigo. Now we are over the Rockies, white peaks topping the brown, crinkled slopes that shift in and out of the flotsam of cirrus clouds floating between the airplane and the ground. We are racing the sun westward. It is gaining on us, traveling at over 450,000 miles per hour, turning clouds and snow into a shifting ocean of white and gold.

From up here, the mountains are indistinguishable from one another, nothing more than creases in the earth's fabric, like wrinkles in the striped dress shirt that so stubbornly resists my best attempts to iron it. On the ground, though, the topography commands attention. Each hill has a set of distinguishing characteristics, a pattern, a face. Some may be now, or may have been regarded by people in the past, with religious reverence. Some might be imbued with personal meaning: that's where I went camping for the first time; she lives on the other side of the mountain; when I see that peak from the highway, I'm halfway home. Age and duration and immensity, encountering the fleeting, the subjective, the individual.

I'm reminded of Gary Snyder's 'The Mountain Spirit,' in which the poet contrasts human time with geologic time.

And the Mountain Spirit always wandering
hillsides fade like walls of cloud
pebbles smoothed off sloshing in the sea

old woman mountain hears
shifting sand
tell the wind
"nothingness is shapeliness"

Mountains will be Buddhas then
when-bristlecone needles are green!
Scarlet penstemon
flowers are red!

Mystics and theoretical physicists contend that there is no time, that the division we perceive between one moment and the next is illusory. To the Ultimate, each moment - even each possible moment - is sempiternal. I am sitting on the runway in Baltimore: so it was, is, and ever shall be. I am 30,000 feet above the Rocky Mountains: so it was, is, and ever shall be. I am eating tacos with Linda in the Mission tonight: so it was, is, and ever shall be. I overslept and missed my plane. Linda can't meet me because she has to work late. We decide to get pho instead of Mexican food. The plane crashes. I survive the wreck. I die on impact. So it was, is, and ever shall be. All moments are one moment. There is only the flow.

So goes the theory, at least. I've only had a direct experience of it a few times in my life, usually on a spiritual retreat. Once in rural Connecticut, when Adam sounded the gong to end the zazen session, and the reverberations rang through everything, through me, became me, lasted forever, had always been. Once walking the grass labyrinth in Croton, when the night sky opened like a window and the starry void hung before me, closer than my eyelashes. Once at the Claggett Center near Frederick, when the whole world became nothing more than windblown sunlight moving amid the grass. Once at 3:00 a.m. in the chapel at Holy Cross, as monks broke the Great Silence with the versicle of a psalm.

Otherwise I remain trapped in time, and usually not in the present. Like most people I know, I take vacations in the past and try to catch sneak previews of the future. Right now, this moment, slips away. Now. Now. Now. My left ankle hurts because of an injury I sustained 25 years ago. When I get that raise, I'm going to buy a better pair of dress shoes, which support my ankle better. Right now I'm thinking about the raise I might get.

To my conscious mind, I am moving forward along a straight line from left to right. Its beginning is 37 years, seven months, and twentysome days ago. Its end is occluded to me. The red plastic fire truck my father bought for me when I had the measles. The acrid smell of my father's breath as he railed drunkenly at me. The sound my father's ashes made as they poured out of the black plastic bag onto the forest floor. All are coordinate points that can be plotted along that single horizontal axis.

But perhaps our experience of time is more like walking a labyrinth, like that one in the Hudson Valley I stepped into so many years ago. The pattern is already there and we are in the midst of it. In order to remain in the tracks of the maze, we keep our eyes downcast, just a few inches beyond our toes. But the design is whole. There is no journey from point A to point B, because there is no point B: point A is all there was, is, and ever shall be.

If that's the case, though, then what is it that does all this chopping up of existence into time? What is it that gets excited about spending a weekend with John and Kelly on the farm? What is it that exults at the prospect of seeing Jessica? What is it that dreads? What is it that grieves?

Less than two hours out of San Francisco now. The mountains flicker in between clouds, brown and white, brown and white, ringing out in peals of gold.

An Accounting

Hello, dear, disused blog. I apologize for letting you collect dust for so long, but I've had a busy few months. Since you are, among other things, a compilation of lists, here is a list of what I've been up to since we saw each other last.

Separated from my wife
Traveled to San Antonio for work
Traveled to Denver for work
Traveled to NYC to sing and visit Rachel
Traveled to Pennsylvania to sing (twice)
Performed at the Patterson Theater
Read Kent Haruf's Eventide, Leif Enger's So Brave, Young, and Handsome, Marilynne Robinson's Home, Greg Rucka's A Gentleman's Game, Robert Pinsky's Gulf Music, Jacqueline Carey's entire Kushiel's Legacy and Imriel series, and Mary Oliver's Evidence
Initiated attempts to raise over a million and a half dollars for a work project
Began advocating state legislators again
Caught the flu (not sure if it was "The Pig," as a colleague terms it, but it was definitely something)
Talked to a roomful of lawyers about philanthropy
Went on a contemplative prayer retreat led by the Bishop of Maryland
Attended a chili tasting at the World Champion Punkin Chunkin festival in Delawaer
Euthanized my elderly and infirm cat
Photographed my coworker's wedding
Scoped out potential new singing spaces in the Northern Shenandoah Valley
Hurt
Leaned on my friends
Fell (deeper) in love

I've had, in short, just a few things going on. But I'm gonig to try (my perennial resolution) to be more faithful about posting here.

Did I actually write earlier that smoking was my last vice? What an asinine thing to say. And untrue. If patience is a virtue, then surely gluttony, avarice, indolence, and the rest of the seven deadlies count as vices, and I struggle with those constantly. I lost battles with most of them today as a matter of fact, as evidenced by the now-ravaged pint of Ben & Jerry's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream sitting in the freezer right now.

The lentils turned out delicious. I over-salted them somewhat, but was able to salvage them with the addition of some stock and steamed jasmine rice. What really brought the dish together, though, were the cumin seeds sauteed in ghee with asafoetida, the flavors of which harmonized brightly with the lemon juice and the garlic.

Time for bed. Coming up tomorrow: church with Patty and Chad in the morning, a benefit for the Ronald McDonald House in the evening.

A day of tranquility and indolence

I slept until nearly 11:00 a.m., which is unheard of for me. I said the morning office and fed the cat and listened to 'Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me' while making breakfast: refried beans, scrambled eggs, tortillas, and a full pot of coffee. After washing the dishes I sat out on the porch and read Thomas Merton and exchanged a friendly word with my landlady, who was out gardening. I edited a few photos, listened to 'This American Life,' and watched an episode of the BBC-America sci-fi series 'Torchwood,' which I found entertaining, if not spectacular. I answered a couple of e-mails. I chanted the midday office. Then I chatted with a friend until she grew sleepy and lay down for a nap, and that was all very good.

I haven't taken a shower yet, which is also unusual for me. There are ten thousand things that need to get done, but I don't feel motivated to do them. My car got towed on Thursday because I was stupid and I had to spend nearly $300 to get it out of the impound lot, so now I have almost no money until I get paid next Friday. There are things I want to buy -- two area rugs, a plant stand, some plants, supplies for container gardening, a couple of prints -- but they can wait. I do need to purchase some staples: bread, milk, cheese, cereal. Otherwise I am well stocked. I have rice and legumes of various sorts and tea and, most important, good coffee. I'm broke right now, but I'm not poor.

Now I'm cooking lentil soup and jasmine rice and listening to the rain while I update my long-neglected journal. After I hit post, I will go say evening prayers. That reminds me of another thing on my immediate-needs shopping list: incense. I've been burning pine incense at prayer times since I moved in, and now I need some more. Maybe I'll buy frankincense this time, although I don't want the apartment to smell too much like a cathedral in Advent.

After prayers, then dinner. After dinner, perhaps more chatting or perhaps another episode of 'Torchwood' or perhaps one of the 'Simon Schama's Power of Art' DVDs I rented. If I go out at all this evening, it will only be for more cigarettes, my last remaining vice.

The simmering lentils are filling the apartment with the aroma of cinnamon and tumeric and garlic and cumin and asafoetida. I am a little lonely, but not much. I am a little sad, but not much. I am a little guilty, but not much.

All in all, a good day.