The rain was crushing the ground today. Like it wanted to tear the concrete apart. I love the way the lamplights were playing in the parking lot, the way the puddles kept rippling and flowing, the cars kept circling, the roof leaking.
For today's culinary lesson, let's kick it up several notches, shall we? A good cook's kitchen should be laid out in such a manner that the chef could perform in the dark, so: light's out! We'll make pastries tonight, perhaps the hardest of all baking, but with a little care and planning, and the Professor's careful tutelage, everything should work out fine. First, arrange all your ingredients and implements in a logical order.
I don't remember how it started, we were suddenly talking, walking, just loitering around Dinkytown. I was on my final go-round as a student at the University of Minnesota, I'd been there off and on from three years, and was losing sense, not gaining it. She, I suspected from our conversation, was on the same track to nowhere. She had been to a rock festival that I had been to the summer before, she described being hassled by the bikers there, she may have spared me all the details. We seemed to hit it off, with a lot in common to talk about. After about an hour of this, I really had to go to work. I didn't ask her for her number. I was (am) kind of slow about using telecommunications to my advantage, I figured that we'd meet again somehow.
... to putting spice back in your marriage.
"...I only loved her shadow and cared nothing for her reality." -Leonard Woolf
The speaker was an elderly man who was with two middle-aged adults, presumably relatives. The man was addressing my elderly father as I was escorting him from the parking lot into a restaurant somewhere in southern Minnesota. The other man's companions looked startled. My father, as was his fashion, immediately began the "routine"- "who are you, where are you from, did you ever know so-and-so?" Much to everyone's surprise, the man did grow up in my father's hometown (several hundred miles away) and after a few more questions on both sides it was ascertained that the man had gone to school with my father's brother, and my father had known other of the man's relations, back in the thirties.
x-x-x-x--x-x-x--x-x-x--x!
It just doesn't seem worth it, sometimes. Why don't I just find a cushy job and coast until retirement?
i've cut out my heart with life's dull edge
Somehow I found myself on a hayride. At the tender age of seventeen, my opportunities for "good, clean fun" had been somewhat limited. I could blame it on my Lutheran upbringing, I suppose, but that hadn't prevented me from having "bad, dirty fun." This was to be different. A nice girl (weren't they all nice?) had somehow invited me to a hayride; I think it my have been her mother's doing- the girl had barely spoken to me before- perhaps her parents had known mine from PTA. What was different about this date was that I knew that she was on the pill- still a bit shocking for a high school student in 1967. We had been on the school newspaper staff which held regular classroom hours. The teacher usually left, so the students just goofed around a lot. Kenny, the zen joker, thought it would be amusing to pretend that the nice girl's purse was a bomb, and that he was a demolitions expert, employed to defuse it. He had taken a eyelash curler from the top of the purse and was using it to carefully remove the rest of its contents, one piece at a time. When he got near the bottom he pulled out a card of birth-control pills. The nice girl was embarrassed, but not as embarrassed as Kenny.
The facility appears to be a bee-hive of activity. A mysterious pipe extends from the attic, emitting an irregular "brap-brap-brap" disturbing the peace on Garðastræti. A diesel-powered document shredder? Or a cold-war confession-extractor? There were men on the sidewalk throughout the day, once a van pulled up and a swarthy "agent" unloaded black-market items: Cigarettes, beer and packages that could contain secrets, or chocolates, or nylons, perhaps? The yard adjacent to the Embassy was filled with steel I-beams, one day I saw babushka-wearing matrons priming these girders. Another afternoon I saw a man carry some white, square cardboard containers out the rear entrance- microfilm , perhaps? (or maybe just pizza boxes- he placed them in the trash bin...)
One night, as I headed down the hill into the center of town, one of the basement windows (visible in the photo above) was open, and I could hear voices in animated conversation; through the semi-sheer draperies I could see that a dinner party was taking place, with wine, beer and what smelled like delicious food. When I returned, several hours later, the lights had been dimmed and a stereo played emotional Russian music, there may have been dancing...
...confuse the state of being in love with being lonely, and think they are the former when in fact they are the latter; in love with everyone and no one, just because they are without a man. A girl without a man does not know where she is placed. A man comes up to her one night as she stands preoccupied outside a house, and before you know it she goes home with him, where he confides to her everything: nothing. Was that love? No, she had only thrust a gag into the gaping jaws of a ravenous beast which was threatening to tear her apart, a dummy into the mouth of a thirsty unweaned infant: herself. The man was no more than an implement; and if that was wrong, then life itself was indeed the poet-singer's awfullest crime.
Wheresoever I goeth, summer follows, or so it seems. Today it was in the mid 70's, I mowed the lawn for the last time- with the bagger on the mower to collect the chopped leaves for mulch. My latent agrarian instincts emerged and the final harvest has been completed- I'm done with gardening for the year. After I put the mower away and was admiring my vacuumed estate, the wind picked up, the temps started to drop, as well as more leaves from the neighbor's trees. Those leaves will have to wait until April, leaf mold be dammed. Now where did I store the snow shovels?
A late afternoon nap somehow stretched into early evening. The chosen couch was next to an unshaded window. Awakening, the full moon shone through the glass, onto the drowsy professor. "I've become a lunatic" exclaimed the stricken man to his significant other, who just shrugged as if to say, "Tell me something I don't know already."
One thousand meters, that is. I recently realized that I had spent eight days In Iceland within a thousand meter radius of my apartment. A very small world, to say the least. Waking to the sound of the Cathedral's bell, going out at night to the venues of the Airwaves festival, shopping, and even swimming at the outdoor pool, all within 1000 meters. While shopping, I had picked up some books at Máls og Menningar, mostly Halldór Laxness titles which were not distributed in the USA. When I returned home I started reading The Fish Can Sing (Brekkukotsannáll) and on the first page I found a small map:
Saturday, sometime in the twenty-first century...
Those crisply enunciated words greeted me as I answered the phone in a sleepy daze.
too much, much too much
Deep breaths.
