𓇢𓆸 Wonderful Things, I-III 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

I.              

I keep having a dream.

A good dream, a warm dream. A dream that possibly I could classify as recurring with only slight variations each time in the setting, in the actors, in the duration. It feels nice. It feels kind of weird, honestly, to be having this dream. I feel like I’m trespassing. But if there’s one thing that I have learned from my dreams over the years, it’s that there is probably a reason I’m having this dream. Although I have no idea what it is and it could just as well end up being entirely my subconscious with no real purpose, I think there might, probably, actually be a reason. I’m not sure, and I’m not particularly interested at this moment in finding out, but years down the line if I encounter this same good, warm feeling dans la vie, just know that like so many other turning points of my life, I dreamt about it some time before.

 

II.            

I shared a wonderful moment with a stranger the other day, last Sunday, I think it was.

I went for a walk at the Rivanna. On the way back I was driving through the little side streets in town right beside the big, old church. I had my windows down because I was sweaty and it was hot, but it was the good kind of hot. The weather is of two minds right now in Charlottesville, and I like how some days it decides to scorch everyone with no remorse for the oppressiveness of the heat and humidity, and then other days it cools off and blows my great grandmother’s wind chimes on my balcony, asking me to open my window and let it fill the room. Yes, still, I string together ungodly and unlikely combinations of profanity almost every morning that I step outside of my apartment and feel the 85 degree humidity at 8:00 in the morning, but there are other days, softer days, when I realize that the weather just can’t make up its mind, and soon enough it will be cold, and the trees will no longer have their leaves. So, while the weather fights with itself I will just be here and be glad that I can feel the sun for a little while longer.

 

Back to the car.

 

So, my windows were all the way down and I was sitting at a red light. “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield was on my stereo because I was playing my, “I am a teacher!” playlist. There was a man crossing the street pretty close to my car. He had on discolored khaki shorts and a tattered yellow t-shirt. He sort of scooped around the right side of my car and then curved his way onto the cross walk, and I could see him start to sing the song as he walked in front of my car. So, I blasted it. I blasted it and he started dancing, and the dance he was doing resembled some sort of mix between ballet and interpretive dance. Every now and then he’d look back at me as he moved further down the cross walk and toward the bridge over Water Street, kicking his leg back, arms in the air, and, at one point, using the post that suspended the stoplight as some sort of wall for him to kick off of and twirl. We were singing with each other and pointing and laughing, all the while Natasha Bedingfield was singin’: “FEEL THE RAIN ON YOUR SKIN NO ONE ELSE CAN FEEL IT FOR YOU ONLY YOU CAN LET IT IN.” And then at the break between the first chorus and second verse, like clockwork, he just kept on a walkin’ and the light turned green. It made my eyes well up a little bit after I drove away just because of how pure of a moment it was. I don’t know who created that moment – me accidentally or him on purpose, or him on accident and me on purpose – but I really enjoyed it, and I will probably always think about it now when I hear that song.

 

III.          

I read Their Eyes Were Watching God last week for one of my classes.  

Learning myself has taught me that the mark of having found a work that will live inside of me until I die begins with me feeling like every other sentence of the work needs to be annotated in order for me to imprint it within my mind, and that it ends with some other cognitive, too-big-of-a-science-idea for me to explain, unconscious shift in my mind. I think that this is how it works: The shape of it gets inside of me. I pick it up and spend however much time learning the shape of it, holding it in my hands and in my mind, and then after I am finished, I put it down. I then know the shape of it and I still hold it in my mind even if I don’t always hold it in my hands.* Certain parts, then, of the currently shapeless, amorphous future shape of my mind are made and remade by the existence of the work and my understanding of it. As I press on, the shape of my mind resembles, slightly, the shape of the work. I think in teacher speak we call part of that, the thinking part, an enduring understanding. The other part is maybe some sort of impression. An impression of the book upon my mind that if someone were to know what they were looking at, they would see evidence of the works scattered here and there in pockets of my writing, my thinking, my love, and my relationships that only came to be after reading the specific works. There are like touchstone shifts – the first time I read Call Me by Your Name, the first time I read Harry Potter, the first time I read The Pisces, Ulysses, Stephen Orgel’s “The Performance of Desire,” Othello, Henry Staten’s “The Decomposing form of James Joyce’s Ulysses,” Near to the Wild Heart, Percy Shelley’s “On Love,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison,” Frankenstein, A.R. Ammons’s “Eyesight.” The list goes on, and despite there being more than just one or two titles, it is a narrow list when I think of all of the things that I have read. Their Eyes Were Watching God is on that list now. It is beautiful. It is wonderful. It is heartbreaking. And Janie’s blooms are a metaphor that I feel like I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

 

*This is with the exception of Call Me by Your Name which, for years, I have taken with me on every trip, every long car drive, every big day or new beginning because its shape is something that I feel has come to be synonymous with my own. It’s comfort to have with me, I smell life when I breathe in its spine.

 

“She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”

                        -Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston