Old Victoria

Waxing nostalgic (ie conveniently denying reality) about my old neighborhood this week, here's a picture of my favorite house. I was always half-thinking of schemes to buy it, being in love with the weathered carved wood and peaked roofs. 

Ultimately, I'm glad we didn't, having become all too familiar with the risks of living in an historic house. Dark wood that seems to absorb all the light, the freezing floors, the ever-collecting dust, ceilings you can't reach, the lack of insulation that suddenly becomes PAINFULLY OBVIOUS during the rare cold snap.... all things that can make a house un-homey indeed.

We've learned our lesson, and the next place we live, we want it to be bright and airy and full of windows. Preferably on a beach.

But still...doesn't this looks like the perfect house for a dark and stormy night? I'd wander through the rooms wearing a long white nightgown and carrying a lantern. Or stand on the balcony invoking strange old gods. I would scare the hell out of the neighbors.

Well, wouldn't you? ;)

Cheer Up!

Cheer up, frowny anthropomorphic tree. Things will get better.

Forlorn Road

 (sorry, this picture is a photograph of a drawing and rather dim and crooked, but...never mind. It's all I got.)

Having written about the Forlorn Intersection in the previous post, I began to think about the drab grey little street that led through it - might as well call it the Forlorn Road. The Forlorn Road could be seen from my window across the vacant field, its drabness evident in the glow from the street light at night.

The day before Bill Clinton came to town on the stump for Hilary, we were sitting on our porch when a big truck labeled simply "fruits and vegetables" rumbled by.

 "How much you want to bet that truck is really full of secret service agents ready to stake out the neighborhood?" I asked, thoughtfully.  

"Oh, I'm sure. If not that one, then it's another. They're bound to be all over." said my husband. "But 'fruits and vegetables' certainly seems suspicious."

Early the next morning, around 5 AM, I awoke in the dark. As usual, I could see the Forlorn Road through the window, but something was strange. There a bright light hovering in the sky above it. At first I thought it must be a plane, but as I lay there and watched it, it continued to hover there motionless. After five minutes had passed on the clock, I grew bored and turned away. It stood to reason; things were bound to be weird when the Secret Service was in town.

I don't know what the light was or if it really had to do with the Secret Service. It could have been a black helicopter on silent mode or could have been that old standard swamp gas or an usually bright planet Venus. Who knows?

But it's more fun to imagine something much more dramatic happening over Forlorn Road.  Certainly more fun to draw. But I still can't decide if that shadowy figure is being picked up or dropped off. :)

The Fringes

Going through my files tonight, I came across this crude map I'd drawn of  my immediate neighborhood, back in 2008. It was obviously meant to be somewhat humorous, but it was also meant to illustrate a particular problem at the time.

What happened was, I had found a set of knives (marked in red text, above) on the ground outside my bedroom window. This was disturbing, but it was not possible to tell if someone had been lurking outside the window for some nefarious purpose, or if they had been hidden there after a crime, or they had been flung there by someone needing to get rid of them fast (for instance, a parolee who'd just seen a cop).

We took the knives to the police station, and while the cops seemed unimpressed, it was still worrying. I drew this map illustrating how all three scenarios had potential, and posted it to an internet forum so my online friends could give it a look. (For the record, most people thought scenario 3  - someone  running from the Forlorn Intersection had flung them there - was the correct one and since nothing ever came of it, I assume they were right.)

Looking back on it now, though, what I see is a psychogeographical map of a fringe area. Fringe areas are of particular interest to me, being transitional places where one thing becomes another. Fringe areas are often overlooked, even though they are around us all the time. Entrance ways and exits, alleys, the outskirts of towns. Fringe areas are also frequently places where crime is more likely to occur - though I hasten to add, my family never personally experienced any crime there.

There were a few transitions occurring in the scope of this map. First (and most noticeable in person) was the petering out of the gentrified neighborhood of restored houses into unrestored houses and then, across the tracks (off the map) into dusty slums. There was an overlapping of social backgrounds and economic status. Then there is the blending of traditionally racially identified areas. Many different types of people came together in this street.

Studying the map (and also from memory) the true fringe area must have been the Forlorn Intersection. I knew quite a few very nice people who lived on the other side, but that intersection - just a drab little road, really - was always the place where things went down.

It's interesting to note that right on the edge stood the convent house - A Poor Clare monastery, to be exact. Quiet, peaceful, shining like a beacon on prayer nights. No one ever, ever messed with the Poor Clares. Regardless of status, they were there for everyone.

All these years later, it occurs to me that there should be many more things marked on the map. Like the house with stained-glass windows, or the silent hedges. I feel lucky that some of these things are captured in the early part of this blog (which was kind of the point, really). But there are other things that aren't so easy to capture. Dust and silt. Humming streetlights.The church carillon that rang every day at 8, 12 and 5. These are little things that make up the secret nature of a place.

One white hot summer day, my friend Arturo was riding past on his bicycle and we stopped to talk. He waved a copy of the local newspaper. "Did you hear? About the creature?" he asked, pointing at the front page picture of the Cuero chupacabra. We both thought it was fascinating, but agreed that sometimes things were better if we never learned the whole truth.

If I could, I would put that on the map, too.

(apologies - I ended up posting this yesterday before it was finished. (long story))

The Anatomy Of Remembered Spaces

 

 A friend rang the other morning. He said, I'm calling from inside your old apartment. They are about to tear the building down.

And just like that, the place we used to live moves from tangible to intangible. It exists solely in memory now

Live long enough, and it's bound to happen. We don't only lose people, but we lose places, too. It's been happening at a steady clip as long as I can remember. It's progress, and commerce, urban development and all those other things. The grocery store of our daily errands is now a call center, the club where we used to dance becomes a gym.

 If  we believe in an afterlife, we can imagine that our lost loved ones are with us in spirit. Aside from the occasional time slip and trans-dimensional gas station, though, the existence of remembered spaces is far more nebulous than even a ghost. Unless, perhaps, the shades of long-ago shoppers still patrol the rows of telephonists, reaching for loaves of bread circa 1996.

 

The house of memory is a peculiar place; everything  lives on top of each other. The boundaries of such a house are permeable and strange. The empty room is never really empty. Minus space time and plus soul time, as Nabakov once said.

You wouldn't know it but there is someone hiding in that picture above. Of course you wouldn't, because he has concealed himself behind the bench. You could raise a legitimate point and say it doesn't matter, since until now, only he knew it and I knew it. If either of us forgets, is the meaning of the photo lost? If a 10 year-old boy hides behind a bench, sometime in the summer of 2001, and no one remembers, does he disappear forever?

For all practical purposes one could say yes, but as long as there are tales of long-dead monks roaming ruined churchyards and Roman soldiers marching along no longer existent roads, then I am not so sure.

 

The place had stood for 30 years, housing any number of college students, young marrieds, the elderly and refugees alike. Hardly any time at all in the great scheme of things, but more than enough time for the drama of human life to play out.  I would be delighted to learn, in 50 years time, of reports of disembodied laughter  and running footsteps at twilight, or the sound of splashing from a nonexistent pool. I can even imagine the astonished murmurs as a mirage of the lighted corner store sign (now also gone) appears in the night sky. 

And by then, only the old folks will remember why.

The Clock Tower

It was about 10 minutes 'til midnight, and I had settled into watch Late Night With Conan O'Brien when  I realized the electric bill was due. I didn't have a car in those days, but judging the distance between my doorstep and the utility company, there was just enough time to drop a check into the night deposit before deadline if I walked fast enough. I grabbed my sweater and scampered off down the hill.

Walking through a small town late at night can be a special experience. The quiet streets, empty shops, traffic lights shining in the dark. Even the striped barber shop pole curling upwards into nothing, straight out of a Ray Bradbury story.  It's these kind of things that a night walker treasures. Though at this point I was mainly concerned with getting downtown before the bell struck twelve.

The fastest route would take me past the Protestant church, with its own lighted clock tower, which could be seen from my bedroom window on Winter nights when there were no leaves on the trees. The glow from the gas lamps was soft and comforting and I wasn't at all afraid.

For some reason I don't know  - maybe a windstorm or something like that - several of the frosted panes of glass on the west facing clock (the left side, above) were gone at that time, replaced temporarily with clear ones. So on the night of which I speak, the areas between the 7 and 12 could be seen through, though not much of interest was ever visible - except on that particular night.

It was only natural that I would look at the clock as I approached the church, worried about the time as I was, but I was not expecting to see what appeared to be looking back. A huge, grey, leathery-winged creature leaned on the edge of the window, peering down at me with an affable grin. I was startled, to put it mildly. Not only was it unlikely to see what looked unnervingly like a real, live gargoyle, but even more unlikely to see one in the tower of a Protestant church. It did occur to me, before I sped away, that at the very least it looked friendly.

I've never maintained that what I saw that night was real, and not just a trick of the light, or an instance of  pareidolia, or even some piece of statuary that had been stored in the tower for reasons unknown. Maybe it was a hallucination, inspired by an unconscious whimsy that the local Protestants were sadly lacking in gargoyles. I've never maintained it was real, but on my way back from the utility company, I still took a different route home.

That was a long time ago now, and I suppose I'll never know what I saw in the tower that night. There didn't seem to be any way to find out. Pulling the minister aside and saying "...so, about that winged monster in your clock..." would probably be a real conversation killer.

Sometimes in life, there are questions just better left unasked.

But Then Again...

When I get really obsessive about something, I have to ask myself, who would be more fun to spend time with? Howard.... or Vince?

By the way, I do dearly wish I could have a subscription to Cheekbone Magazine. That would be awesome.

Catherine's Eyes, Or The Peculiarities Of The Human Psyche

It's been one of those frustrating weeks, when the behavior of other humans seems endlessly, irritatingly confusing. Do people really not know what they do or why they do it? Do they really lack so much insight into their own foibles or worse,  hypocrisy? This eternal headscratching is one of the pitfalls of the bookish introvert (me) who must spend the requisite several hours a day in relentless examination of  this thing they (horror of horrors!) don't understand. 
 

When my overwrought brain gets stuck on this particular spin-cycle, a memory or two will come to the surface, much like lint from the towel you didn't know was buried in the bottom of the washer. A couple of years ago, such frothings produced the saga of Heinrich and Peggy; this time - due to a specific situation that's been developing -  it's coughed up a story about my friend Catherine, or more properly, the effect Catherine had on men.

Catherine was (well, is) a fun girl, beautiful, very clever, and as such had a cadre of friends. Male friends especially, but female friends, too. I'd known her for a long time and very well, so...how can I put this?...it was normal for Catherine's male friends (the heterosexual ones, anyway) to be in love with her. She has a way of making a man feel like he's the most fascinating thing on the planet, so whenever her lovely green eyes lighted on him, he'd get this massive ego-boost and come over all soppy in love.

 This was just par for the course, and not something it ever occurred to me to think about overmuch. It's just a Catherine thing. In other words - don't take it personally, she's like that with everyone.

On occasion it did come up, when one of the guys came to me hoping for an inside track of Catherine's affections, or just to talk about their anguished unrequited crush. Then I would shift to the motherly role, giving them a pat and talking in soothing tones. I did not give them false hope -  in those days, Catherine herself  was suffering a bout of crazy love for one particular man, and frankly, no one else had a chance in hell. Oh, I'm sure I was kinder than that, but that's the gist. For her part, Catherine was glad I was there as a comforter of desperate love angst - that way she didn't have to hear awkward  confessions like "I feel like a giant blinking neon penis whenever she walks into the room."  ;)

This was the situation, back in Catherine's single years, and as I say, par for the course. This is not what's been preying on my mind, the lint in my mental load of washing. No, it's something else. It's that there were other men, too - also "friends" of a sort, but not so close, more on the periphery of Catherine's circle, and they were not like the sweet yet passive buddies who came to me with their feelings, or even just garden-variety friends. These were the ones about whom Catherine would sometimes say, "don't leave me alone with him" or "if he calls, tell him I'm not here".

There was no more promise of a romantic relationship with these guys then the others, but something was different. I could feel a cold, hard-edged rage coming from them, and the rage was not directed at Catherine - it was directed at me. This was an uncomfortable situation, and I tried hard to understand it. I knew they didn't like me and worked extra hard to be nice - though of course mindful that my friend did not feel comfortable alone with them - but the overwhelming feeling I kept getting was that I had ruined everything, that the only thing keeping said guy and Catherine apart was me, champion cock-blocker of all time.

 There were only a few of these guys, but that was plenty. It's never a pleasant situation to feel so much hate flowing your way. Had I been more sophisticated at the time, I likely would have identified this as the kind of red flag situation akin to the the man who fawns over his date at dinner but denigrates the waitstaff. But if I'd been more sophisticated, I  probably wouldn't feel the need to write this. Strange as it sounds, it's  possible to be naive and knowing at the same time. It's the nature and sensation of being hated - that particular sort of hatred (disgust? derision?) that's been puzzling me. Being the target of a sort of blame I didn't understand.

This is where it gets muddled. It's hard to put into words. The best I can do is to say that, in the eyes of these men, Catherine was a sparkling treasure, and I was clearly some slimy thing that had crawled out of the bubbling muck at Innsmouth and was STOPPING THEM FROM CLAIMING THEIR PRIZE, DAMMIT!

But the thing was, I knew this wasn't true (about Catherine, not the Innsmouth thing). Catherine wasn't interested in them that way. I wouldn't have been there if she was. I was only there because she wasn't. For Pete's sake, who would bring along a friend if they were trying to make a sexual conquest? No one with any sense, and certainly not Catherine. So what did they think was going to happen? 

And more to the point - was I really that awful, so wretched in comparison? Is my low self-esteem justified? These are the questions that keeps the bookish introvert up at night. 

Long experience has taught that whenever something is muddled, there has usually been a failure of logic somewhere, or some clue that's been missed. In this case, the kind of clue that your average fourth-grader would have picked up, but must have slid right past me at the time. These particular guys - no doubt the more aggressive, possessive type - had misread the light in Catherine's eyes as romantic (or at least sexual) interest. In their minds, she must have been a sure thing, if it hadn't been for "the friend". Because the human psyche is full of  peculiarities and blind spots, they didn't get that she was like that with everyone, or that she wasn't a possession to be claimed, or that this very attitude made them even more unappealing to her. Hey, there's nothing wrong with me, so it must be Cthulhu over there at fault. Not questioning why Cthulhu was there in the first place. 

Well, it makes sense, but it's really not that hard to grasp. Surely I must have known this at an intuitive level? I'm not that dumb. Yet the subject still seemed muddled. Logic was still failing me somewhere, and therefore I had to worry it like a dog with a bone. This sort of obsession always means something is wrong, a blind spot in my own psyche. What was it that I couldn't see? 

It seemed irrational, on the face of it. If someone is a close friend of the object of desire, it stands to reason that it would be foolish to alienate them from the start. After all, they're in a position to have information that one might want to know, aren't they? A potential way to someone's heart? Even from that strictly Machiavellian perspective, it makes no sense. And then I understood. The reason I fielded so much angst from Catherine's lovelorn buddies was the same reason for the cold-blooded disdain from those other guys.

This quiet girl, sitting there, contained one particular piece of information - that they would never, ever sleep with Catherine.

Omens

Maybe it's just one of those nights - too still, too quiet. Heaviness hangs over everything, like a watchful fog. Outside, two owls (great horned ones, by the sound of them) call to each other from each end of the street. A bad omen, according to legend. Witch birds on the prowl.

Then again, roosters crowing at night are a bad omen, too, and if that were true, this whole neighborhood would be doomed. Regardless, I can't be too careful. Last night I dreamt about dark magic: a handmade doll, with burning candles choking the air with smoke. One of those dreams you can't shake, no matter how hard you try.

Time to circle the house with salt and say a few prayers, perhaps. Stuff my pockets with ash leaves and rosemary sprigs. Wave some sage around. Ring a brass bell. Write the name of my enemy and tear it into nine pieces on the edge of town. Why not?

It all seems perfectly reasonable, on witchy nights like these.

Cold, Dark, 45 degrees

I can't recall a New Years day that wasn't so. There is no fighting the dead of winter.
There's only one song that fits my mood on days like this.

Might as well curl up with a cup of tea and dream of old romance.