The numbers keep adding up, darlin'. When should I start the tally?Should I start at midnight or when I first wake up? Should they be neutral, stuff that I fall upon naturally or can I include things that are open, blatant, like the poppy husk or the colored geode that rest on my mantle? Should I keep those free floating references contained to a particular geographic region like Kitsap or can I take them out of state, like the back highways of Oregon or Nevada? Should I get out a grid sheet and categorize them? I think categories could be fun, a sheet of lined school paper all boxed up and set up for tick marks.
I wonder sometimes how many times during the course of a day I run into moments where I think about you, where I utter you name, say "oh M". It's not all that difficult after spending almost five years getting to know someone. It's not too hard to imagine that the most everyday things, the sacred vessels of our exquisite mundaneness, would be larded with reference. I don't think it'll be possible to engage in basic housework or do a shopping run and not have it become a hash mark on the grid. I feel, in order to be fair, that those little mind mines have to come up randomly otherwise I feel I'll need to carry a spiral bound notebook instead of a sheet of paper to keep track of it all.
So, for starters, I won't use those two random references to your name that I fell upon yesterday. As it were they tipped the scales of yesterday's unintentional nostalgia trip, if the word nostalgia is even the right word to use. So, knowing that your name will show up over and over again anyway should I count those references as well? Count them in the same way that a man who has been sentenced to 50 lashes with a feather boa counts the strokes as they grace his back?
It's not so much pain as a sudden jolt when I find you in out of the way places. It's more of a "How did you find your way in here?" kind of moment. Take for instance that business of your name popping up over and over again yesterday. There it was, up on a business sign, as I rode down Wheaton Way, and there it was, once again, buried in an article in the Seattle Weekly. Is that fair, for your name to be so prolific? Was it a popular name for awhile or what? Do I go around disturbing you that way? Honestly, how many Wally's do you see on a daily basis? Not many, I am sure. But then I can only wish for that to happen to you, for my name to appear if by magic, if only to return all the sweet shocks you give me throughout the day.
Maybe my mind is just more open to you right now because my bed is empty. Maybe betwix The Boy, the cat, my overgrown yard and lots of daily exercise I can exorcise those demons that plague me. Or maybe I'm suppose to let that happen. To promote susceptablity, through those daily reminders, to the notion that we once loved. Egg on my memories in a such a way so that they don't cleanse as much as spur on a deeper infection through reflection. But those rememberances never bother me as much as I'm sure it bothers other people, the way the smell of gangrene must bother folks sitting too close to an open, unfathomably silly wound. Think Love in the Time of Cholera. A long case of serious life long goofing while waiting for the inevitable to happen. Whatever that inevitability may be. No pistol notches on the handle of my gun as much as vivid hashmarks scribbled in my binder.
So, tomorrow I will start. The reference I found today in the article I was reading in Esquire about The English Patient doesn't count. Tomorrow when I wake up I'll begin. Carry a small pencil and sheet of paper around with me. Make it all meaningful. I'll finish this post Sunday, let you know how it all turns out.
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Got a preview of coming attractions today while I was out shopping. Two copies of the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack on cassette, two VHS copies of The Snowman, one copy of The Time Traveler's Wife. Innumerable games we thought to play and one that we loved, Yahtzee. And I was passed as I walked home by all to many Focus cars. So, is this to be the pattern of the game? To sit on my deck and hear an old Ike and Tina Turner song being played up the street that was once covered by Bob Seger and know that that song refers to my Colorado days and then to have that refererence turn once again towards you because you hail from Colorado? Fair, yes. Just like the Kevin Bacon game. How many steps removed should be figured into this series of upcoming hash marks? Does it matter? I know that I can listen to that song and know that those days I spent in Colorado were some of the best days of my life. I know, too, that I tried to get back there a couple years ago just to be in the land where you began. It would have been a melding of nostalgia and grief and pleasure and pain. A voluntary exile on top of a forced one. It would have been all too strange, sitting in Pueblo wondering if you'd ever swing by to say hello. Even the French Foreign Legion wouldn't know what to do with an expatriot like me at that point.
Ok, openers: it's Memorial Day weekend, so there's that trip I took to Greyland Beach and the wonky phone connection we shared when you got off of your Sunday workshift. Then there's Corelli's Mandolin, the last Calcopo meet, that horrid film with Nick Cage and the strange oblong pizzas I made that never got eaten. How about the Seattle Times article I read about the Chinook Pass opening for the season? The blue Craftsman vacuum cleaner, the same one that you have, the one that'll be vacuuming the floors in anticipation of The Boy's arrival? Do those count in their own sideways fashion?
Then there's that pan of migas that I made for breakfast this morning. Not too far off the mark from the omelet I made for you that sunny spring morning, the kind you started making at home, the ones that you oldest asked you about, as to why you suddenly had a hankering to make them. Then there was the discussion I had with the boy about the back house, about the newlyweds who were interested in renting it, kids we had both worked with, folks that we considered to be our friends, friendly enought that you could flirt in a friendly way with E just to make him blush, friendly enought that we could have K act as our beard when we sent messages to each other through the inner office mail.
There was Freddies, the quietness of the store at six o'clock in the evening, Saturday being the day that we began our last great unhindered week in July of '06 before your Gmail box was found open, the day we met each other in the aisle and called each other "hon". It was also the place where I saw you and The Detective cross the parking lot, the evening I was in the car with Punkin, just having come back from eating sundaes and french fries at Dairy Queen. We were both sticky from chocolate sauce and my heart was racing from excess sugar when I saw the two of you cross that parking lot together, causing my heart to pound even harder. But then my heart always races whenever I see you. It did the winter before last when I saw you and your daughter in the video store. All the same parking lot, all off the same corner. Another corner to be turned, to anticipate, to avoid.
So I walked up the highway to pick up The Boy and got a ride from friends who saw me as they passed, a couple wondered who that pathetic bastard was who humping all those groceries down the highway. Would you have stopped? Could you have? I waved at you in the past as you've passed me on the street, and thus go the memories, like cars down unmerciful highways that don't respect stopping or speed limits. Or limits of the imagination, or the weight of satchels packed full of heart.
Hon, face it, I don't expect for you to stop now or ever to savor the tick marks. I do and that's enough for me.
Know that it is now Sunday afternoon and those marks were fewer than I thought they would be. I suppose because I was concious of my actions, that thinking hard about thinking about you. It took a bit of the thrill out of it, the preciousness I feel whenever I've been ghosted by you.
But I must admit I was calling in all my spirtual markers yesterday on my way to Fred Meyer's. I was pushing god and all his angels, asking the devil and his minions to help me, to have you show up, even in passing, if only to make all that work spent thinking about you worthwhile.
For now I'll let it rest. I have a bbq to go to today. Friends to talk to. This time I'll leave you out of the conversation and let you come along a ghost instead, as a shade in my life, one that covers me like the shade of an Aspen tree would cover me on a breezy Rocky Mountain day.
Good Memorial Day to you. Hmm, now that's a coincidence. Love.
Your WHMB
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