Work Smoothly, Lifetime Peace

When an idea for a story comes, it almost always comes to me as a setting, or as an image.  I’ve come to realize that I am more attracted to places than to people, generally, so I guess this is not surprising.

I’ve several tremendous images in my head.  I’ll take this as a good sign, a sign that the torpor and exhaustion that have lead to my not completing anything of value for six months are beginning to lessen, that, with summer’s ascension will come the cloudburst.  Here’s hoping.

The most powerful of these images is of monks on a hill.  It is sunset, or just after, and it is summer.  The day had been tremendously hot and humid, and violent thunderstorms had broken over their convent.  With these storms, the eventide has turned sharply cooler and, below them, in the valley of a slowmoving river, fog is rising like an armada of ghosts.  They have eaten their simple evening meal in deep silence, and then have come outside for evensong, and vespers. 

Their voices rise, myriad, entwining and climbing the cool air together.  And as these men are singing, bells begin from the carillon towering behind them, clanging and cacophonous yet oddly melodious, just as the concurrent music is atonal yet strangely harmonious.  I think that they are in Spain.  I think that one of the monks has a terrible secret involving a nun at an adjacent cloister, and that there may be ghosts.  It may also be metaphor.   I am not sure, but that image is strong within me, and I think that I will need to write it.

(There is an old record set I found a few years ago called “A Treasury of Gregorian Chants” on Everest Records (from the mid 1960s) that I play often in the summer, especially in the morning.  It is beautiful and it focuses my thoughts and my energies.  On several of the songs, the Benedictine Monks are singing when bells join them.  It always makes my heart swell to hear it.)

Another image is of Japan.  There is a rural hot springs hotel in the mountains, Hokkaido (a part of Japan I have not visited).  It is late in the spring but the weather, on account of the altitude, is crisp and very cool.  There is a rushing river and an old steel bridge that crosses it.

A third: a small suburban place, where a character finds himself stranded on a business trip.  All the houses and shops and restaurants are clones of other places, everything is cookie cutter, and there is nothing unique about it, no individuality.  The character (me?) takes a walk on a weeknight, and finds himself at the edge of this nowhere place, with the lights mostly behind him.  There is a stream with a derelict path running alongside it.  Walking down it, hearing the spring peepers and smelling burgeoning spring strongly in his nose, he feels something huge and ancient and latent and wonderful and terrifying lingering just below the surface of everything, and knows that this place is special in an antediluvian way, that it is unique and individualistic and calling out strongly to one such as him.

(I’m not sure I will be able to turn these into anything, but I look forward to the trying.  That is why I am so grateful for summer.  I can rise late, and read whilst listening to Stan Getz or Miles Davis or The Trappist Monks Choir of Cistercian Abbey, and then try to bring these ideas to fruition.  I may fail, but the effort is still amongst my favorite things.)

And then there is the trip I took to Saskatchewan, broke and alone with a car that seemed to be on its last legs.  That was in 1999 when I was newly graduated from Purdue with a degree in Forestry Recreation.  I was brokenhearted and optimistic, straining at the bit to bust out and really see the f****** world.  I want to tell this story, and get it right, for it came to so clearly define my course in life over the coming decades, my willingness to take chances, my penchant for doing things that people my age just don’t do.  I’ve been meaning to write it for years, and now I know how to do it…I think.  Again, whether I can or not remains to be seen.  But I can sure as hell try – and the thought of taking that trip again makes dormant parts of me sing.

(I recall so clearly how it started.  I was walking to class one day in June, crossing the Chauncey Hill parking lot headed for the Purdue University campus proper.  The day was cool (like today) and the sky was a blue wash, windswept.  Puffy, white, fair-weather clouds were hurrying by, and a thought came to me, seemingly from nowhere: “This is what the sky must look like in Saskatchewan.”  And I knew then, no matter what, that I would go.  And I did.  And the trip was lovely and lonely and beautiful and sad and wonderful.)

*

I am on summer vacation.  It has been three days and I have slept a combined 28 hours.

Friday, as always, Patricia and I began the summer with a trip to La Pena Ecuadorian Restaurant, in far-distant Portage Park, the place we always go on the first night of summer.  Usually, I have two packs of second series Garbage Pail Kids (unopened) in tow, a sort of celebration of my pseudo return to childhood, but, due to my Ebay account being hacked, these were sent to someone named Nikita Lozhka in Bear, Delaware…so no go there.  It was still wonderful to eat Ecuadorian food and listen to Ecuadorian music and usher in my summer on a hot and humid night.  (And if anyone reading this knows a Nikita Lozhka in Bear, Delaware, please tell her (or him) that I want my cards!)

Saturday was a slow-moving river…a late start, reading, monks, a trip to Calumet for graduation (the end of my fifteenth year of teaching – egads!), and then a visit to my parents’ house.  My mom is still recovering for major surgery back in April, and she was in better and better spirits, even though we were assailed by mosquitoes.  I don’t say it enough, but I love her.  (My dad, too, even though he is annoying!) :D  Later, P. and I stopped at the Purple Steer in Hammond for some late night Frenchie Toast…How cool is it to be able to order coffee at 10 o’clock?

Yesterday, I woke very late and finished the new Stephen King novella, “Gwendy’s Button Box”, which was creepy good fun, while listening to the aforementioned singing monks and accompanying tintinnabulation.  Then I did yoga, for the first time in a week (I’m just getting over being quite sick) and it felt good to sweat and limberly move in the hot air.  And then I went to a coffee shop and sat outside and read about William Faulkner’s life – which is somehow simultaneously depressing and uplifting, discouraging and inspiring.  (Mostly, I am inspired by his almost Sisyphusian dedication to his craft, and his ability to find solace in creativity, even as his personal life was a shambles.)  And then P. and I ate dinner together, a wonderful Blue Apron vegetarian meal she cooked.  And then I watched the Cubs sweep the Cardinals, did some more yoga (catch up time) and then sat down to begin this.  I need days like this, days in which I can move at my own very slow rhythm.  The fact that there are two and a half months of them coming makes me smile.

Today was more of the same.  Inspired by my recollections of my trip to Saskatchewan, I want to burst out and see the f****** world, but I also know that a few slow days are in order.  Thus, I am at a coffee shop (Z and H) writing and looking over Lonely Planet Canada…Patricia and I are planning on redoing our Honeymoon to Canada for our tenth wedding anniversary, with an emphasis on all the things we saw but didn’t have time to explore (Newfoundland, camping on Prince Edward Island, etc.).  (I am also trying to figure out a way to fit Saskatchewan into the mix, despite its being on the other side of the world’s largest country.  Let’s see how successful I am.)

Later, I plan on cleaning the apartment while listening to Roger Waters’ new album, Is This the Life We Really Want? which is (so far) just lovely and wonderful – in a ferociously anti fascist (and anti-Trump) way.  Do I know how to party or what? 

(Speaking of Roger, Patricia and I just went to see him last weekend, in Louisville.  He is my favorite artist of all time, and though this was the sixth time I’ve seen him, I was as moved as ever.  (In fact, I found myself near tears for much of the show.) I am always inspired by people (Leonard Cohen, Bernie Sanders, Neil Young, Roger…) who care deeply about others into their twilight years, and Roger Waters really does.  We were planning on seeing him in Chicago, for he has three shows coming up at the United Center (July 22, 23, 28), but my cousin Heather is getting married in August so we had to move our vacation time up.  If you are free on those days, and have no issues with a total evisceration of President Trump, you should head out. J)

Tomorrow, Patricia, my former student Mya and her mom and I are going to see the Cubs.  Mya is a HUGE Cubs fan who has not been to a game since 2013 and, as she honored me as her most influential teacher at the National Honor Society graduation ceremony, and as I was planning on going to a Cubs game soon anyway, I thought that a very fitting gift.  The Cubs are playing much better these past few days, too, so, yay.

So, yeah, this is my annual end of the year posting - rambling and occasionally inspired - just like me.

I’ll now close this post with some hopes for the summer…I’m not quite ambitious enough to call them goals (at least not yet).

I hope I can find the muse, and keep her near. 

I hope I can surmount my insularity and contact my friends who have contacted me only to be met with long silences.

I hope I can increasingly live in the moment and less inside my head.

I hope that, one day, I can get my arse out of bed before 11:30.

I hope that, wherever I find myself, I can be there.

I hope that I can, as I move into my 40s, be as creative and inspired and compassionate as the people I look up to (Bernie, Roger, my mom, my mother in law) are in their 60s and 70s.

I hope I get to meet a dinosaur some day.

End communication!