Hello, I am in the process of returning after a long hiatus. I don’t have an essay that is ready to share yet, but here are some fragments from my notebooks; some raw examples from the “five things” exercises that I recommend to my writing students. Other, realer things are in the works.
Sunday
Last night the scent of autumn was in the city, the smell of wood fires in the cooling air, the rue Montorgueil packed with people, the people sitting under the awnings of the Café Florida looking out towards the black splotches of the park between the lamp posts and the trees, in the long shadows of the big church, the people emerging out of the darkness and into the light, coming from the underground mall, or the metro, or having crossed the park; people on their way to somewhere on a Saturday night at 9pm, in scarves and jackets, trailing perfumes.
Walking over the Pont Neuf in the afternoon, I saw a group of children gathered around a man who was playing the accordion. A teacher was handing out coins so that the children, excited, could each put them into the man's upturned hat. The joy of the children, and of the man, is the kind of thing that one should keep, like a smooth stone in the pocket, to feel and turn over, absentmindedly. On a late September day, the man with the accordion on the bridge, and the joy of 15 small children gathered around him, excited to give him their borrowed coins.
Friday
Yesterday the Louvre smelled of mildew and old blood, of the rain that was leaking in through the ceilings on the top floor, and through the wet ground and into the cavernous basement rooms below the pyramids. Not all of the leaking areas were skylights. Huge cracks can be seen in the stone walls that were built no more than 30 or 40 years ago. I didn't understand the first small pink pillow that I saw on the parquet floors of the galleries, I thought someone had dropped it, this dirty little pink pillow, but then I saw another, and another. I saw the drops of water falling from above, and the words printed on the grimy fabric: absorbent cushion. In the main lobby, below the skylight of the largest pyramid, fake potted plants had been placed to catch the trickle of larger leaks, haphazard and inartful. Women who have been dressed and groomed to too high a polish pretended to walk nonchalantly down escalators or across the marbled lobby with its leaking ceiling, while their friends or assistants filmed them, the humanity of their faces obscured as much as possible by makeup. For some reason, seeing these tourist video shoots always depresses me. They walk slowly towards the person holding the phone camera, and then they go back and do it again, and again. There is usually a wheeled suitcase nearby, with their various costume changes inside. They never appear harmonious. They performed their repetitive walks, making the kind of faces that people usually only make when they look in the mirror, the opacity of the observed self. All around the paintings crouched in their darkened, leaky galleries, silent and watchful, the old palace in the rain smelling like what it was, a site of memory and bloodshed.
Thursday
I remember the old dusty road between the orchards in northern New Mexico, that road that led out to the golf course and then on past the green slopes and the sand traps, and up, into desert rock formations, red earth, cactus, rattle snakes. I will never go back there, to that strange high place with its view of the mountains over the top of an old barn, to that blue house with its clean dust smell of the heating in winter, and the card table I set up in the kitchen under a flea market painting of a cowboy roping a steer. I will never make cheese and spinach ravioli in that kitchen stocked with frozen Weight Watcher’s and hazelnut creamer, will not sit cross-legged in the other recliner, in pajamas, as Lawrence of Arabia or Camelot, or Charade starts up. The orchards, white in spring and bare in winter, their pears and apples piling up in the roadside ditches come November. The desert was almost worth it for that smell it had after the rain, the way the whole earth came alive in an instant; that rich smell of earth and plants all rejoicing, and then the flowers that would come after, like ghosts summoned out of the ground. It is strange to think I may never go back to that high, lovely, lonely place.
I remember your room on campus in the late 90s, the one on the ground floor of that white clapboard house, with the ornamental cherry tree outside, or maybe a crabapple, something with useless fruit, something only for the birds. I remember one too-bright morning in autumn, and the light coming in, your long dark hair lain across my face for the last time, like a screen. There are rooms from our lives that we never leave, that we take with us, and for me this is one of them.