A cup of green tea, no wine, no more beer. Not even that warming glass of scotch my skin asks for with its gooseflesh.
The word I needed to review today: Bohemian... somebody who does not live according to the conventions of society.
But whose conventions? Don't we all make those up as we go along?
I need to be more careful here. Some forget that my words are only words, that the interior voice belongs to whatever character is playing a role today. I don't need the trouble of the attribution back…. I always screw up my pronoun antecedents too… because you see I don't write the words, I live them first.
Last week I had to go back and change every verb. EVERY verb. When I wrote it, it was happening. But the text called for past tense. No wonder I forgot to change the pronouns.
A miraculous thing happened though, when I took the advice of my colleagues. They said: you don't get to know what happens to those kids if you stay true to your pov. And guess what? One of those kids said, phew, that was close, and he ran away. Poor soul has no clue what happens next. But it solved a plot problem and a bit of triteness I wasn't quite sure how to get around and the book is still alive. For the moment.
If that makes no sense, please don't worry. It isn't necessary, just a placeholder.
We drove to the beach today. I was hungry for the salt air and the soothing rhythm, and it had been months… I didn't realize they were reconstructing the bridge. The boys came begrudgingly (adverbs adverbs!) and brought their skim boards. But when we got there, it was too windy to be comfortable, the sting of sand blended with the chill off the water, and we opted instead for food. Don't we always?
The times book review featured Extremely Loud today, and I had to set the section aside so that it wouldn't spoil the ending for me, but I couldn't tear my eyes away fast enough not to notice what the review pointed out about the ending, and I had to flip to it in the novel, so now I feel a little cheated. I don't want to get too much farther because I know the ending is awful. Its like the train wreck though. I can't not keep reading. Just as I couldn't turn off the television after 9/11. In many ways the depression I've been dealing with these past years are tied to that day…. Many ways. Maybe it is the dragging on of war or maybe it is that I associate that event with sadness in my own life. I just know I've not been the same since then. I don't expect to be.
Ah well.
I've not done stream of consciousness memories for several weeks now. Let's spin the wheel and see where it stops. This is a writing exercise for me, much the way writing sunrises used to be, to try and free the demons caught up there in the crinkles of the gray matter, if you are new to this place. I close my eyes, and where ever the … bottle? Stops? Oh but I am not one to kiss and tell. {smile}
It is April third… that day has two significant attachments. It is the day my father was born, in 1913. He'd have been 92 if he'd lived. He died at 56. I don't remember much about his birthdays. I suppose it is because he must have been nice on them, and I refuse to remember him nice. I can be a bitter unforgiving bitch.
The other was the Tornado. My freshman year in college, a campus chosen because it sat on 500 acres of woods overlooking the Ohio river, one of the most beautiful places I'd been up until then, and still quite lovely today. 3:53 in the afternoon, I don't remember where I'd been but the sky was green and I'd lived in Indiana long enough to know it wasn't right. I went into my third (top) floor dorm room to find my British roommate, Laurey, whom I dearly loved, sitting listening to music and paying no attention to the sirens or the wind. It grew dark, the power went, and I remember grabbing her hand and telling her we had to go NOW. She trusted me, and we headed for the tunnels beneath the building… six flights down. We had reached the stairs between the first floor and the tunnels when the pressure changed. …like it does as an airplane takes off or lands…and the noise overpowered our voices. Laurey was screaming, but I just pulled her along until we were with the others and were safe.
The all clear was sounded sometime later… the girls whimpering in the tunnels were sure it was, as it always is, a drill…. Laurey and I knew better. She was quiet for a long time after that.
We emerged from the tunnels expecting life to be unchanged. But the dorm was missing its roof, and much of the third floor. Our room wasn't destroyed completely, but it was a mess. The worst part though was walking outside. On the beautiful quad, trees that had stood there for three hundred years were uprooted like carrots, pulled and left to dry in the sun. A block away, a sorority house was flattened.
Miraculously, there were only "minor" injuries. A professor walking in the woods had taken cover by a tree, and the wind pasted him too it… mostly shock for him. In the ad building, someone trying to close a door to the wind lost all the fingers on her hand when the door was sucked closed. There was 13 million dollars worth of damage to the campus, but no one put a value on the swath cut through the woods, as wide as a football field.
And for those of us who lived through it, a bond was formed, the kind that forms when you realize you've survived. Three days without electricity or water, and a blizzard followed the tornado. We got to see what we were made of.
That night of the tornado was the first night I slept with a writer. He held me close all night, assumed the nightmares were from the storm. He was my favorite person in college, with his shaggy hair and brown eyes, a day or two's growth of beard most of the time. It was odd to see him pulled together…. I tended not to like it much. Even now, I have a special place in my preferences, if you will, for the scruffy writer look. Together we solved many of the world's problems, and postulated, discussing Einstein over coffee, that life is indeed relative. If you stop existing for me, perhaps you don't exist at all, or perhaps you never did. Or maybe I don't?
Enough. Good night.
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