i really feel like any day i could have a total fit of irrationality and adopt a cat without a moment’s notice.
i’m not even ALLOWED to have a pet in our apartment. and i’d never do anything without matt’s approval or consent. but animals speak to me and tug at my heart strings and i truly worry that i’ll forget rules and propriety and bring an animal home. two summers ago my father rolled his eyes and called me something akin to “mother theresa” when i went searching in our backyard crick for a little cat who was lonely and mewing. he was skittish and i couldn’t get him to fall for my Obvious charms. but most cats i can win over because i’m the queen of cheek and back pats. i love dogs so much - the black labs in vermont, shooter and huckleberry, are swimming atheletes with mottled unpretentious fur and they’re so beautiful - but cats are wise and make you earn their affection. cats act aloof but they’re really just schmaltzy little furballs and i love that! i found a cat in occoquan with matt this weekend. she was tan and black with blue eyes and she had a definitive territory but invited us in. i would never thieve a cat but i would happily rescue one. in my weaker moments, i definitely imagine matt coming home from a hard day at work to a sheepish me sitting on the couch with the latest furry addition to our family.
i don’t think this is such a bad vice. at least i’m not doing drugs or forcing an “accidental” pregnancy, right? my heart vies solely for a new cat.
anyway this is snoresville for everybody other than me (maybe i’ll liveblog a film with subtitles again and REALLY send you over the edge) but when matt and i were first together, i started writing monthly paragraphs about the stuff we’d done and what i felt about it. i imagined my grandchildren stumbling upon a book of these write-ups and hopefully the whimsical ones would find it romantic and also really delight in the history of two people growing up so many decades before them. i wrote about ten months’ worth before i fell off the wagon. i am going to post them here in order to shame myself into finishing some more of the months. it’s important to me and i’d like to write them into a book one day for matt and our relatives. is that the hokiest thing you’ve ever heard? i guess i really don’t care, sorry. but i love you. anyway.
1. april 2006
i get a shirley temple at the train station that better resembles a storage hangar. it’s a structure more inclined towards ice cream stands than nineteenth century doorjambs. i don’t know what to do with my hands, so i muddy my fingers with newsprint. i compose text messages in made-up shorthand, a language two parts giddy and one part desperation. when i think my heart will burst from the changing of the placards, you appear. boston is the first witness to the opening strains of this, of us. the red sox lose, and you probably miss a show for the ages back in baltimore, but neither of us care so much.
we go to copp’s hill and invade on a storytime group whose members sit splayed between the graves of soldiers and fishermen. the black birds pick in the grass, high above the swatch of harbor to the right. we walk through the common and talk about writing and science and plans. the public library has got some exhibit of an obscure german illustrator and you take his name down for me, like with this information i can invite him to a dinner party. i change dresses before dinner. afterwards, two irish coffees and tremont street, we walk in front of my parents, laughing when we accidentally hold hands, or come close to it.
you lend me your jacket on lansdowne street when it begins to rain. you can hear the disappointment from inside fenway, the rain drops falling like poised spittle into untended beer cups. i’m not happy about the music but you’re a sport and play pool with the boys while i try to plan our escape.
2. may 2006
we execute only one high five during the game, when david ortiz issues the game-clincher. we both recognize the sanctity of such things, i think, and i smile. this is the only game we’ll witness all season where the crowd has enough wind in its sails to sing an enthusiastic sweet caroline. you don’t understand the song selection, of course, and i smile thinking about all the sacred rugby rites that i know will someday baffle me.
cape cod is deserted because the public is strict about its preference for a temperate tide. we don’t care as much and so the atlantic laps at our ankles and turns blood to slush. the surfers wear full wet suits, some don head gear. after a brief tussle with the carcass of a crab, we sit to watch them. we’re still learning things about each other and the drive through yarmouth, dennis and brewster are proof of it. you’ve won the top scouting award for navigation in australia. i’m not even .0000001% surprised. at the general store we buy postcards and fudge, glasses and blueberry soap. we take it all home and walk for tapas, finish off sangria with rocksolid chocolate cake.
then i quit my job and spend the next two days whispering over the phone to you on the floor of hotel bathrooms that my employer has paid for.
3. june 2006
maryland that month will never cross my mind as anything other than scorched - scorched, despite the green suburbs, despite ceiling fans working overtime to thwart body heart. i’m good for the winter, i promise you. but in the summertime, i’ll only make you warmer.
we institute the tradition of maker’s mark in the kitchen when you cook fajitas. i offer bourbon and bagel chip commentary for your efforts. i’ll never open that bottle right, the red waxy shards forever scuttling into the corners of the tile, underneath the sink.
we hold hands, looking at the way that judith prepares to slice off holofernes’ head. there are giant cicadas and african beetles dead, pinned, held beneath glass. some family’s old coat of arms hangs useless above the doorway.
during the days i filled up my life when you worked. i tried to justify the hours, tried to smile at old people walking dogs, tried to stop for kids and lemonade stands. i wrote or walked or shuffled around the smithsonians. i saw teddy roosevelt’s presidential remains while you worked. i saw the woolworth’s lunch counter, and whale vertebrae.
lullaby & exile is the song that defines it, really. m ward singing about how love will get you in the end. i like how he generalizes love, how it’ll happen to your sister and doctor and the postman. i think maybe we listened to this more than anything. the sentiment resonates strongly in our heart chambers and bones.
4. july 2006
the children’s choir sings from the top of a flatbed truck, candles with paper wax catchers held aloft. we are too busy being enamored with gambling tickets you peel instead of scratch. it’s a much more satisfying procedure and it’s conducive to these patriotic carnivals i sell you on. at quarter to ten, they shut off the lights beaming neon pools onto teenagers and basketball courts, leaving the moths in disarray. we sit on the grass and the pennsylvania mosquitos are either too young or too stupid - they don’t bobble over the grass to find our legs or shoulders. people bring blankets and i kept half-hoping somebody will take pity on us and share a portion of one. but the grass is good enough. blakely puts on a fireworks show for the county-ages, the explosions clocking in at a good twenty minutes. when we think it’s over we’re wrong, by now the gunpowder smell has made its way to us from the high school football field ceremoniously dedicated to some fabled coach.
at the cottage we stand around, hands on hips, surveying the lake that is unimpressed with the holiday. we take turns scuffing away the dirt on an old aluminum sign of my grandfather’s. it is a sign whose underbelly probably houses a thousand creatures of the dark, you tell me. you say it some way other than that. we buy ice cream fresh from the dairy farm that boasts two silos and baby calves. i drive us home with one hand as we listen to bob dylan.
5. august 2006
you pick me up at the same time every day, give or take five minutes. i stand outside the gates of your workplace’s campus, under trees whose leaves no caterpillar or gypsy moth has eaten pin-sized holes out of. when i’ve got a few minutes, i stand around imagining what it’ll look like in the autumn. i live out of a bag, and i live out of your second drawar. i live out of your room and your temporary-house. i live out of maryland, and it sounds so odd to say. but i would keep doing it, if i had to. i always would.
6. September 2006
in ikea, you single-handedly hoist a mattress onto the cart of an overwhelmed baby boomer. his son hugs and asks me if i have any children yet. you are the Patron Saint of Good Deeds at ikea. you also help a pregnant woman load up her spoils. we thrice miss out on the swedish meatballs, but i don’t care so much.
when you have an appointment around capitol hill one saturday, i amble through eastern market. there are waxy, primary-colored capsicums, mushrooms sullied with natural dirt, sprouts, pecans and a taxidermied chicken in one of the butcher shops. i miss you, so i entertain myself by watching the chicken for movement.
the national gallery has an henri rousseau exhibit on. he sees life bizarrely and i like that. people are bizarre - unruly and just a bit mottled. he paints children as huge, hierarchical figures. his rugby men look like garish clowns. there is more taxidermy to be found in an installation that had inspired rousseau as a young man - a lion sinking its fangs into the haunch of a large antelope. the figures are real and they are ancient - the lion’s fur has worn away in critical clumps.
when we get tapas, i let you have the last garlic prawn. it isn’t like in boston, and there any many good things to be found in that.
we stand second row to watch m ward. i like the songs without percussion. he sings about hiding her locket under the dirt. we drive home happy.
at the air and space museum, it’s a wonder that the spirit of st louis does not crash onto us. it’s strung up from above, this artifact of the wright brothers - or is it lindbergh?! we snub all of it for the war planes. you tell me about the red baron, the daring and unstoppable at last shot down. you tell me about how people stole fuselage and his own boots for personal mementos.
7. October 2006
the last raspberries of the season had fused onto their vines, spent and dried. we have better luck with the apples: two dozen baking ones. i never do anything with them. we have to wander to great lengths in the orchard to find unsullied branches. the dogs all rival methuselah in age. they do not lift their sun-drenched heads as we bend to pet them. little kids work their way through hay mazes and two horses wait aloofly for charges. going home i roll down the passenger window and waste extra film.
i do not impress you with my knowledge of the lipid bilayer. the memory of it is rooted in distaste for me, the way that text book illustrators always depict it fatty, yellow, with staunch blue beads. you teach me how to feel my liver while i lay atop our bed. i try to take my fingers away from my side when it gets all too visceral. yours are on top of mine, and you won’t let me.
at the arboretum, we watch the koi suckle their fish lips up out of the water. we debate feeding them but don’t have a quarter for the standing machine. the pitcher-shaped flowers slowly dissolve moths. in the conifers section, a grasshopper refused to launch itself or flee our encroachment.
we pick two pumpkins but never gut them. they survive the trick-or-treaters, who want nothing more from us besides a little candy and praise.
8. November 2006
for your birthday, i hire the cake loaded with as much promise and chocolate as i can find. at your birthday party we cut it together, for your friends and old labmates. your friend sarah gives you a hitchcock film. australian rod gives you a gift cert to sound garden. mark buys you a three wise men shot. everybody winces as you two down the warm concoction in unison.
they play an entire smiths album at the bar while the patrons watch college football. it is the running of the preakness as well. afterwards, they have to euthanize a horse directly on track. the news stills and horrifies me: like it’s the opening line of a story sylvia plath never had the chance to write.
i am the designated girlfriend, and i take you to sound garden to make purchases. the sugar refineries are drenched in neon red across the harbor. i’m nearsighted, so it almost looks like the promise of an amusement park to me.
four days before my own birthday, you save three homeless cats from a winter on the streets. it takes all day to coax, trap and drive them to a temporary home in virginia. by the end of it, i’m out of tears. i love you more than i ever thought possible that day. you drive me home, i’m quiet and euphoric.
at the casino in pennsylvania, we watch people with oxygen tanks gamble their pension. we’re overwhelmed, but not by the penny slots. you win us something like thirty dollars on the haunted aztec one. we escape the clutches of the mohegan sun, hand in hand.
9. December 2006
we make a pledge, over shots of jager, to go and see bob segar in concert with eric and brendan. it is a pledge we have forgotten by morning. to shake off the previous night, we hit the streets, ambling towards the mall and dipping into smithsonians with abandon. the bibles before the year 1,000 exhibit does not offer much in the way of information. it makes up for it with its historical offerings. we see marginalia that is 1700 years old. we struggle to read it, separated by thin glass.
we sit on the marble steps at the end of the day. the washington monument is a half mile right, the capitol just a jaunt left. for a swan song, we view the american history artifacts still on display. jefferson’s bible, fdr’s radio microphone, lincoln’s top hat, edison’s lightbulb. i steal the french fries you buy as a late lunch.
evan dando asks you, specifically you, about which song to play next. he plays outdoor type. brendan, our drunken teenage son standing behind us, finally starts to act chaste.
we make it to manhattan after christmas, a few days after i’ve given you a coffee maker and you’ve given me a ruby stone necklace. the natural history museum has a troupe of stuffed elephants in the darkened hall of africa, a faux but life-size whale hung from the rafters in the blue-tinged ocean land. when you hear australians chatting on the street, i implore you to walk up and join them. i am ever-aware of your homeland but i am deliriously happy that you are right here, with me.
