Smells Like Home

I got on the plane in New York with exhaust in my nose, cigarette smoke and rust.  People and infrastructure smells.  I stepped into Milwaukee and it smelled of delicious cold.  Clean and dry.  Mequon smelled even better... like coffee and snow.  And silence.  A nighttime silence.  It's that perfume Mequon wears in the winter, which I haven't smelled in while.  Fireplaces.  Empty parking lots (SteinsHomesteadPavillion).  Down comforters.  Labradors.  Vacant fairways.  The slow-paced wafts that you can breathe deeply and smile.  The smell overcomes you like something you've seen a thousand times, something old disguised as something new.

The Beginning of Forgetting

The Kettle of Fish pub hosts a monthly reading that I've been invited to since I've joined the Writer's House family.  It's something I'm always too tired for but end up walking out of feeling fuzzy and contented, like a child who has just been read to before bed.  The new, up and coming authors usually prattle on about life and their hands move about in front of them with a sweaty underconfidence that can sometimes be distracting, but for the most part I'm genuinely entertained on these Wednesday evenings.  

Tonight, the first gentleman was 20.  (20!) He reminded me of the kid in Finding Forrester, minus the whole creepy Sean Connery mentor thing.  He had obviously been through a lot and told his sad tale so everyone in the audience could sigh and then shake their heads slowly, closed-mouth-smiling in turn. 

The second woman had a theatrical look to her, the longish, kinky hair and the almost too obviously homemade scarf hanging across her shoulders and down past her nervous knees.  She read from a memoir about her mother with Alsheimers who had just recently passed away.  Her anecdotes were subtle and hilarious, complete with a lot of the necessary repetition that goes hand in hand with living with someone with the disease.  As all diseases do, this one puzzles me to no end.  How can certain things in one's mind just simply vanish, like their own daughter's name, or the street where they have been living for the past 40 years?  Then I remembered, (not like I'd forgotten), that I have been feeling the initial pangs of the horrible disease as of late.  I don't actually think I have it, but I've been frightening myself and others lately with this strange lack of recognition for things I have said or done in the very recent past.  I can recite the first and last names of everyone in my cabin at camp when I was 7 years old, but I can't figure out where I put my glasses when I wake up in the morning.  One morning I even walked out the door and started down the sidewalk without them on, only to realize it after a few seconds of blurred squinting.  Lyrics to songs stick with me forever after only a couple of listens, but I can't remember entire chunks of a conversation I soberly had yesterday.  There's a term for people choosing what they remember, but, of course, that term has somehow slipped my mind.  Everyone forgets things, I know, but my case is beginning to scare me.  I get nervous fast-forwarding a few decades when I'm actually at the age when this is supposed to happen, that I'll walk around without a speck of my former life inside my brain.  That thought, in a twisted way, might not be all that bad...which reminds me of a quote from an Alexander Pope poem that a pretty good movie placed into it's title:

No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole;

Rise Alps between us! and whole oceans roll!

Ah, come not, write not, think not once of me, 

Nor share one pang of all I felt for thee.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each prayer accepted, each wish resigned.

The third woman was short and stalky and had written an entire novel about her cat, Homer, so naturally I politely turned my listening ears off and let my gaze drift outside towards the redgreen Christmas lights on the busy street.

Elsa and Me

Today, her siblings were off at doctors' appointments, dance lessons, and soccer practices with mom, so Elsa and I got to have some quality one-on-one time.  It was the most extraordinary day.  First we chased each other around the kitchen table for a while.  Then we sucked spaghetti noodles through our lips and made kissing noises.  We played fetch on the stairs and I held her by her feet upside down for a few minutes.  Then she looked up at me with her big brown eyes and said "poo poo."  She doesn't say many things I can comprehend, but she does know that phrase, and it's always appreciated.  Then we had some very important business to do out at the park with a slide and a sandbox so I helped her put her shoes on and she helped me put on mine.  We sang (or I sang and she shrieked) the ABC's the whole way down the sidewalk.  When we got back home, we threw things at each other for a few minutes and then turned the lights on an off, laughing at the difference, for what seemed like an hour.  Finally, we took turns putting stacks of paper cups on our heads and cracked up every time they fell off.  To be honest, when her mom came home and I had to speak to a real person with real words and sentences, I was a little sad to be out of Elsa World.

74

I'm an extremely verbal person.  When asked a question about one topic or another, I give about a novella's worth of my opinion whether the questioner likes it or not.  It's not how I want to be - if I had my wish I would follow the Swedish proverb to "talk less and speak more," but alas, Fate or DNA or a subconscious need to be heard has dealt me this trait.  That said, when in the presence of another person, I thrive on conversation.  For me, it is akin to breathing.

For as much as I like to talk, I have never caught myself doing it to myself.  Since moving out to New York, I have noticed that a good number of people out here talk to themselves.  Maybe its a city thing.  The buildings and the traffic and the people get jumbled inside of them and they begin verbalizing thoughts that a person who lives in, say, Nebraska, wouldn't even fathom - no less say out loud.  

In the Russian laundromat near my apartment I sat reading and watching my underwear spin, when an overweight Hispanic woman sat down by the door with a cup of hot coffee in her hands.  She began sputtering of what sounded like a list of colors or types of vegetables or bad 80's songs.  I don't know what exactly her lists were doing out there in the air for all of us to know, but I do think it calmed her to do it, so that made it okay with me.  The only time she stopped was to watch me put my hair up.  After she finished her laundry and walked out, I felt sad, or empty somehow, in need of more lists.

A few days ago, on the way into the city, there was an old African American man seated a few seats across the way from me.  He had been babbling on without a partner and these days I've come to just assume that people have a Bluetooth on the ear I can't see, so I let it be.  Then I remembered that I was on the subway and cell phones don't work down there (thank god).  This man was speaking to himself.  He had a bunch of black plastic bags around him so I figured he was homeless and went back to reading my book.  When he stood up and began a dialogue about the number 74, I knew I wasn't going to get any reading done on this trip.  So I sat back and enjoyed the show.  This man was a performer.  He should have really pursued a career in play acting, because his timing, his body language, his facial expressions were phenomenal.  The best part of it was the fact that he seemed to be having a heated argument with someone who wasn't there.  So this was no ordinary list making monologue.  It was exactly as I had thought it was before: like a phone conversation you witness where you can't hear the person on the other line.  He seemed to be getting pretty upset with whoever it was in his head that he was talking to, so he sat down to calm himself and catch his breath.  He picked up a smallish black bag from his pile and I got nervous that inside of it was a bottle of Fleischmann's or something that might harm me, but he gingerly pulled the bag halfway open to reveal a smiling plastic doll.  The doll was a comical looking man in a black robe with his arms outstretched and his smile almost as wide as his arms.  The man began talking to the doll, and I became more comfortable with the situation because now he had something to talk at besides the passing blackness outside the moving train.  Suddenly, he turned in his seat to face me and the woman sitting next to me and made the doll face us.  He asked, "Have either of you ever seen this before?"  We shook our heads no and he looked at us and the doll in disbelief.  Then he proceeded to walk around the entire car asking everyone if they had seen the doll before.  Nobody gave him the answer that he sought, but he continued to ask the question loudly, now to the car as a whole.  I wanted to see what would happen if I would say yes, but my stop came up and I had to get off the train.  Filled with disappointment that I would probably never see this man again, I also laughed aloud to myself as I walked up the stairs to the street.  People passing me probably thought to themselves, "Oh, another crazy one coming from the underground."  But I didn't care.  The city must be creeping inside of me.