Laughing in the Subway
Over a week since my last final and weak on updating. Not because world's stopped without school, but it could be because I'm now living with about fifty percent of the regular readership. Still, an eventful week in own way. I could have told you about the goodbye scenes. Could have written about my utter denial that the year was over (Erin was gone and Katie fully packed before I started on my side of the room) and my reasons for not wanting sophomore spring to be gone. I might have sketched the minor character of the biker guy who helped me cut down Seema's locked bike I lost the key to. He came to the Greenhouse where the bike had wintered, described his tattoos (crossed American and Italian flags and a Chinese character were the visible) and talked about crashing bikes and the last time he was out of state along with the dangers of leaving. Or I could have told you about the Greenhouse itself, how I hadn't been back all year. The affection I felt turning down Dwight Street for the solid brick. There was a funeral party at the parlor across the street. Don't remember seeing one all summer sitting on the roof. Swung between full blown cherry trees and walked down driveway thinking of each time I'd come home from work this way, swinging step, free for the evening, ready to wriggle out of business clothes and get dinner at an art opening. Then the backyard where conversations lingered in empty space of absence, unreplaced by any subsequent ones since summer. I guess it was nostalgia, but of the nicest kind. Justina was sitting on the back steps in slippers. She told me how the House had fallen apart during the year. Fragmented, factionalized. House meetings had foreshadowed friction of strong personalities, activists with different agendas. Still I hope the House holds together.
Or I could have written down the cinematic moment sculpted out of the drive away from Yale. It was evening of the day we'd been kicked out of the dorms at noon. Lingering longer than most of my close clan of friends, said goodbye to them as they dropped in on stages of disarray of packing possessions. As boxed teapot and dishes, books and more books (after returning twenty-two to the library), wondered at how much material crap I had. Katie hung around till afternoon. We listened to loud music, opened beer bottles on bedstands and threw things out the window. Somehow School's Out for Summer didn't strike me the same. Not with the sheer joy Alice Cooper and I shared at the end of each year of Horace Mann. Then Katie left. Strangeness of saying a goodbye to someone shared 147 square feet with for two semesters. Courtney Cox across the hall and I kept our doors open and shouted back and forth furthering the festive atmosphere, but the end of the year arrived when roommate left. I was ready to go when parents came. Trip by trip my possessions marched to the Honda. Everything fit including the futon. My room, my world arranged bit by bit by my spatially gifted father. And then the moment when the room is bare. Naked, like when it was my new born room in the fall. White walls, big dark desk, two beds. Stripped of posters and paintings and personality, I see where my cranes hung and my thoughts twirled on a gust of wind. The emptiness says things happened here, papers grown, people written. But it is time for the character to take a last look, turn out light, and close the door with something of a smile. Got in the car and right on cue, as we pulled away at sunset, Elvis Costello started singing, "So Young, So Young."
Back at home, I could catalogue the main event of my week and a half of vacation, reading. But the first book I picked up didn't seem like scintillating blog material. Who'd want to read writing about reading about someone else reading, even if that someone is Nick Hornby. Hornby makes his books bought vs. books read list look interesting for fourteen months of journal articles collected in The Polysyllabic Spree. I appreciate his tales of second hand bookstores, but my second hand account of it wouldn't do reader-response criticism any justice. Started my own books bought/books read comparison, but it's a bit of a bore. Burrowing through a used bookstore in Wales automatically makes for better anecdotes digging through dust and Jesse's legos for my tenth grade french textbook. I should also avoid commentary on One Sunday Morning where the heroine ends up in Paris having my spring break, the 1926 version. Next at the plate, batting clean-up in the first inning of vacation was Memoirs d'une Jeune Fille Rangee. It's superb but demands a patient at bat. Swinging rusty French. Simone and I didn't strike out, but I've started in on something else so they won't call delay of game. If I were Hornby I could review David Garroch's Making of Revolutionary Paris and have you falling off your seat, but I'm not. Besides the charming Hornby, now I know who does make people literally crash to the floor with laughter. In my own used book adventures at Housing Works, I picked up Me Talk Pretty One Day. I don't know what took me so long to read the book besides it's always checked out of the library by some one else who's been told by everyone she knows she's got to read it. And now I understand why. Coming home last night, leaning against a column, waiting for the C train, I cracked up. Tried to hide my face behind the cover, tried to stifle laughs as strangers passed with odd glances. The bathroom, the tone, the timing. I didn't stand a chance. I doubled over, bent in half by humor.
Stepping out of the subway onto Spring, I smiled at the Soho he mocks. A girl tripped in leopard print heels. Tourists read a map by streetlamp. A bouquet of pink roses, parallel to the ground, stuck out sideways from a story and a guitar case. The flowers brushed my arm as the man walked by. And then, alone on a hydrant, without a person, bald or hairy, in sight, was a wig of wavy, brown hair. The tendrils trailed to the ground and the bemused look on the hydrant answered my long, stride-stopping laugh.
Or I could have written down the cinematic moment sculpted out of the drive away from Yale. It was evening of the day we'd been kicked out of the dorms at noon. Lingering longer than most of my close clan of friends, said goodbye to them as they dropped in on stages of disarray of packing possessions. As boxed teapot and dishes, books and more books (after returning twenty-two to the library), wondered at how much material crap I had. Katie hung around till afternoon. We listened to loud music, opened beer bottles on bedstands and threw things out the window. Somehow School's Out for Summer didn't strike me the same. Not with the sheer joy Alice Cooper and I shared at the end of each year of Horace Mann. Then Katie left. Strangeness of saying a goodbye to someone shared 147 square feet with for two semesters. Courtney Cox across the hall and I kept our doors open and shouted back and forth furthering the festive atmosphere, but the end of the year arrived when roommate left. I was ready to go when parents came. Trip by trip my possessions marched to the Honda. Everything fit including the futon. My room, my world arranged bit by bit by my spatially gifted father. And then the moment when the room is bare. Naked, like when it was my new born room in the fall. White walls, big dark desk, two beds. Stripped of posters and paintings and personality, I see where my cranes hung and my thoughts twirled on a gust of wind. The emptiness says things happened here, papers grown, people written. But it is time for the character to take a last look, turn out light, and close the door with something of a smile. Got in the car and right on cue, as we pulled away at sunset, Elvis Costello started singing, "So Young, So Young."
Back at home, I could catalogue the main event of my week and a half of vacation, reading. But the first book I picked up didn't seem like scintillating blog material. Who'd want to read writing about reading about someone else reading, even if that someone is Nick Hornby. Hornby makes his books bought vs. books read list look interesting for fourteen months of journal articles collected in The Polysyllabic Spree. I appreciate his tales of second hand bookstores, but my second hand account of it wouldn't do reader-response criticism any justice. Started my own books bought/books read comparison, but it's a bit of a bore. Burrowing through a used bookstore in Wales automatically makes for better anecdotes digging through dust and Jesse's legos for my tenth grade french textbook. I should also avoid commentary on One Sunday Morning where the heroine ends up in Paris having my spring break, the 1926 version. Next at the plate, batting clean-up in the first inning of vacation was Memoirs d'une Jeune Fille Rangee. It's superb but demands a patient at bat. Swinging rusty French. Simone and I didn't strike out, but I've started in on something else so they won't call delay of game. If I were Hornby I could review David Garroch's Making of Revolutionary Paris and have you falling off your seat, but I'm not. Besides the charming Hornby, now I know who does make people literally crash to the floor with laughter. In my own used book adventures at Housing Works, I picked up Me Talk Pretty One Day. I don't know what took me so long to read the book besides it's always checked out of the library by some one else who's been told by everyone she knows she's got to read it. And now I understand why. Coming home last night, leaning against a column, waiting for the C train, I cracked up. Tried to hide my face behind the cover, tried to stifle laughs as strangers passed with odd glances. The bathroom, the tone, the timing. I didn't stand a chance. I doubled over, bent in half by humor.
Stepping out of the subway onto Spring, I smiled at the Soho he mocks. A girl tripped in leopard print heels. Tourists read a map by streetlamp. A bouquet of pink roses, parallel to the ground, stuck out sideways from a story and a guitar case. The flowers brushed my arm as the man walked by. And then, alone on a hydrant, without a person, bald or hairy, in sight, was a wig of wavy, brown hair. The tendrils trailed to the ground and the bemused look on the hydrant answered my long, stride-stopping laugh.
