It is a time-bound book of distinctively American accent, mainly in the sense that Melville realized, with his great contemporaries Emerson and Whitman and Hawthorne and Thoreau, that the very idea of America entailed an obliteration of the past that placed unprecedented demands on the resources of the self. A.D.
Sorry, I was never going to finish Moby-Dick this way. Now that I’ve finished it I can see that. I still didn’t finish Moby-Dick in a normal way, just by sitting down and reading it. I had to rope someone else into the project, and he and I read about twenty pages a week for nine months, with a final sprint at the end. We didn’t meet and talk, we just read it separately and then emailed each other on Sunday nights, our letters crossing each other and usually going unanswered. He wrote to me about philosophy and his experience in the army, and I wrote to him, often enough, about how I didn’t understand what Melville was doing.
Moby-Dick wasn’t much fun to read, was it? Let’s be honest with each other about that, and all other things. I had to google all the biblical names and most weeks I felt either that I was missing a lot or that I was bored out of my head. Especially after I made it out of the opening chapters, which belonged to a different book than the rest of it, one with narrative thrust and a sense of humor. I had read those once already, in order to write the previous posts on this blog. But once I sailed out of the harbor of those earlier, familiar, more obviously novel-like chapters and into the deep symbolic waters (I’ll stop doing this soon) of the rest of the book, I found myself putting off doing the reading each week until Sunday night, when I made a big deal out of it. I said, I have to go read Moby-Dick now, dramatically and as if everyone, meaning my husband and our younger son, should feel bad for me. As if I were important. Then I retreated to our bedroom in a bad mood and did a Sudoku puzzle on my phone. And eventually read it. And sent an email to my friend, who had already read the chapters and written to me about Aristotle, or Rousseau.
I finished Moby-Dick towards the end of the plague time, which coincided with the conclusion of my children’s childhoods—Henry was in his junior year of college and John finished high school while I read Moby-Dick, and I read the last page of it on a trip we took to Spain to celebrate John’s graduation. The world around me, and inside me, was a world of scarcity and if not depletion, then something that felt like it at the time. But the mode I read Moby-Dick in was one of expectation. I approached the book imagining that as I read on and on, and on, I would see its greatness unfurl, so that when I turned the last page I would lay the book down and, inspired, seek out friends to whom I could say, I have read Moby-Dick, it is fantastic! It changed my life. I would shake them or maybe just bore them a little, talking about how great it had all been. There were moments where I saw something of its significance, I had glimpses of beauty, insight, tenderness. They just didn’t coalesce into a form I understood. So when I turned the last page I found myself sort of lost. I’d seen something, but it hadn’t been what I’d expected, and I was disappointed by it.
I had traveled to Spain with an old, battered, relatively compact copy of Moby-Dick so it was not until we were back in San Francisco that I was able to open my pristine Penguin edition and read the introductory essay by Andrew Delbanco I’d been saving to read at the end. Imagine my pleasure when I read:
As anyone encountering Moby-Dick for the first time will discover, it is a book that struggles to maintain its narrative drive against the impulse to digress and meditate and play.
I actually laughed out loud at that. Because I didn’t think Melville struggled, in the sense of resisting this, at all.
And Delbanco had other criticisms of the “boggy,” dense, inconsistent work, each of which I treasured, even as I knew that Delbanco hadn’t written this introduction to argue that Moby-Dick was a bad novel, poorly written. No. Of course not. The opposite. He was describing what he considered the best novel ever written in the English language. To make this argument, he put the book in historical and literary context, giving it its place, as well, in Melville’s life and oeuvre. And the essay’s good, it’s helpful, you should read it. You’d like it. I liked it. Just forgive me if I’m not convinced by any of it, even though in the end he and I come to the same conclusion about the book’s value. My take is this: I should have read Moby-Dick with the understanding that it was great, and that I was going to have to shift my ideas of what great was to fit with what Melville does in Moby-Dick. Not because someone, or even everyone, had told me what to think about it, but because that’s what you have to do, to make sense of anything. Melville didn’t write Moby-Dick so his readers would understand how a whaling operation worked, although he did know something about that, and he did write those facts into his book. He wasn’t writing an adventure tale, either, although he’d written those before. Melville wrote Moby-Dick to express something complicated but true about his life and the difficult, shifting, conflicting times he had been born into. And if I wanted to understand my current moment and maybe, even, express something about it—to myself or to someone else—I would have to work with what I had. And I’d have to love it.
Tuesday, May 30, 2023
Finale
Friday, June 21, 2019
Knights and Squires
“I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.”
My older son graduated high school and is driving across this country of ours with a friend of his. They planned out the trip together over the course of several weeks and shared the route with their parents via Google Drive and Google Maps. We were asked to make comments in the documents and so I copied and pasted the links to roadfood.com, the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin, and the new ticket policy at the Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. On the last night before he left, Henry and I drove out to Immigrant Point and sat in the car and while the wind blew in off the Pacific, he told me things he doesn’t normally tell me, but that he wanted me to know before he left home. Then we went to Walgreens and wandered the aisles looking for bug spray and sun screen. Then we went to the grocery store and bought eight honeycrisp apples and a bunch of bananas that are still in the kitchen, because he forgot them.
I imagine an infomercial that begins, So you’ve raised a son to adulthood! Now what? And then offers to sell me something strange that will take my mind off him leaving. Teach a snake to bike ride! Build your own birch bark canoe! Become extremely flexible!
And then footage of tearful parents desperately pressing the numbers on their phones. Yes! Something! Anything!
One thing that nags at me is the worry that I haven’t passed along everything I wanted to give him. Four nights ago I went over that list, with my husband. I said, He likes music. He reads books. He feels connected with the world. He hates fascism. Check, check, check, check. The list seemed pretty complete. But on the way back to the house from the supermarket, I sat there trying not to spout a series of last-minute additional bits of wisdom at my son. They were all probably things I’d told him before. Also, he’s a smart and reasonable person, and they were all things he could easily figure out. And also, it wasn’t like he was going somewhere there was no cellphone access. We were going to speak again. Nonetheless, I urgently wanted to tell him these things. Luckily, he was feeling kindly towards his old mother, and when I said, as he parked the car, I’ve been trying not to give you final pieces of advice, he said, It’s fine, do what you have to do.
So I did.
Then we unloaded the groceries, and went into the house. David and I made dinner for the four of us, and Henry packed, and we all, including his younger brother, watched a movie together. In the morning, before Henry left, I woke up from a dream and thought about his elbows, which were, in what seemed to be recent memory, soft and hung over with rolls of fat. I could hold onto them and stroke them when he rode in the baby carrier on my chest. And then sometimes he would fall asleep in the baby carrier and slump forward, and become so heavy that it seemed I was carrying a different baby on a different planet with a different gravitational force. I thought about how when he was still little but a little older than that, he would lie with his head in my lap and I would look in his ears and I would think that I could see right into his brain, even though ears don’t work that way. I could hold all of him, right up until I couldn’t. And once I couldn’t hold all of him, physically, I still knew him, continuously, from the time he was born, and I could hold him, in my mind, like that.
Henry ate leftovers for breakfast. Then, to everyone’s shock, we were done with his childhood.
He and his friend are currently driving through desert. After that, they will get to the hot and swampy South, and then, some time later, they’ll turn the car northward, and head up along the highways and forests that lead to the nation’s capital, and then New York, and then finally to Nantucket. There he will meet my parents and relax for a week or so, before, in truly anticlimactic fashion, flying home again.
My older son graduated high school and is driving across this country of ours with a friend of his. They planned out the trip together over the course of several weeks and shared the route with their parents via Google Drive and Google Maps. We were asked to make comments in the documents and so I copied and pasted the links to roadfood.com, the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin, and the new ticket policy at the Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. On the last night before he left, Henry and I drove out to Immigrant Point and sat in the car and while the wind blew in off the Pacific, he told me things he doesn’t normally tell me, but that he wanted me to know before he left home. Then we went to Walgreens and wandered the aisles looking for bug spray and sun screen. Then we went to the grocery store and bought eight honeycrisp apples and a bunch of bananas that are still in the kitchen, because he forgot them.
I imagine an infomercial that begins, So you’ve raised a son to adulthood! Now what? And then offers to sell me something strange that will take my mind off him leaving. Teach a snake to bike ride! Build your own birch bark canoe! Become extremely flexible!
And then footage of tearful parents desperately pressing the numbers on their phones. Yes! Something! Anything!
One thing that nags at me is the worry that I haven’t passed along everything I wanted to give him. Four nights ago I went over that list, with my husband. I said, He likes music. He reads books. He feels connected with the world. He hates fascism. Check, check, check, check. The list seemed pretty complete. But on the way back to the house from the supermarket, I sat there trying not to spout a series of last-minute additional bits of wisdom at my son. They were all probably things I’d told him before. Also, he’s a smart and reasonable person, and they were all things he could easily figure out. And also, it wasn’t like he was going somewhere there was no cellphone access. We were going to speak again. Nonetheless, I urgently wanted to tell him these things. Luckily, he was feeling kindly towards his old mother, and when I said, as he parked the car, I’ve been trying not to give you final pieces of advice, he said, It’s fine, do what you have to do.
So I did.
Then we unloaded the groceries, and went into the house. David and I made dinner for the four of us, and Henry packed, and we all, including his younger brother, watched a movie together. In the morning, before Henry left, I woke up from a dream and thought about his elbows, which were, in what seemed to be recent memory, soft and hung over with rolls of fat. I could hold onto them and stroke them when he rode in the baby carrier on my chest. And then sometimes he would fall asleep in the baby carrier and slump forward, and become so heavy that it seemed I was carrying a different baby on a different planet with a different gravitational force. I thought about how when he was still little but a little older than that, he would lie with his head in my lap and I would look in his ears and I would think that I could see right into his brain, even though ears don’t work that way. I could hold all of him, right up until I couldn’t. And once I couldn’t hold all of him, physically, I still knew him, continuously, from the time he was born, and I could hold him, in my mind, like that.
Henry ate leftovers for breakfast. Then, to everyone’s shock, we were done with his childhood.
He and his friend are currently driving through desert. After that, they will get to the hot and swampy South, and then, some time later, they’ll turn the car northward, and head up along the highways and forests that lead to the nation’s capital, and then New York, and then finally to Nantucket. There he will meet my parents and relax for a week or so, before, in truly anticlimactic fashion, flying home again.
Thursday, October 4, 2018
Postscript
Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad.
To hold a baby’s hot head in your hands. You pour olive oil on it, and scrub off the cradle cap, and the baby yells, and you wish you could do it over again.
To hold a baby’s hot head in your hands. You pour olive oil on it, and scrub off the cradle cap, and the baby yells, and you wish you could do it over again.
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
The Advocate
But though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us a profound homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!
I am a mother, and my mother is my mother. This June, driving near her home in New York, she had a heart attack, and my father drove her to the hospital. In California, where I live, my family and I had just arrived at the airport. We were flying to New York to drop our older son at his summer program. So when we got the call from my younger sister that my mother was having a heart attack, all that happened was that everything became clearer than it was before. All we had to do was get onto the plane we were planning to board, and go to see her.
By the time our flight, delayed, took off, I knew that my mother had had a stent inserted, and that she was stable and doing well. It was an extraordinarily fine day, clear and cloudless almost to the center of the country. I watched the U.S. pass under us and felt things I hadn’t known I would feel, even though I think about my mother, and myself, all the time. It turned out I didn’t think about her deeply enough. I didn’t think about her with any accuracy. I didn’t normally see what I saw as we passed over thousands and thousands of people, and miles, which is that from my point of view, my mother is equal to all those people and all those miles. She has been that powerful.
And then, at the same time, she is weak. I hadn’t thought about her body as a mechanism I had a relation to since I was a toddler, when I needed her to take care of me. I remembered, or anyway I remember now, the fact of her heart, as I knew it then. It beat hard within her—almost excessively, I found. When I came to my parents’ bed one morning, and Mom, needing more sleep, lifted me onto her chest, that heart sounded in my ear, and filled her lungs with air so that her chest rose and fell, rose and fell, and instead of feeling comforted to lie on top of her I felt jostled. I lay awake on her, trying to match my breathing to hers, wondering why I couldn’t get comfortable. After a little while I couldn’t stand it anymore, and had to go. I don’t think that I ever went back.
Is telling someone about a beautiful flight on an airplane like telling someone about your dream? When we were almost in New York the plane dropped down over Long Island, the cloud cover dispersed into strips and rags of fog, and the watery marshes below us were so still that they could have been fifteen, rather than a thousand feet below us. In the hospital in Westchester where we saw my mother the next day—O Westchester, green and lush with spring rain and summer sun, probably the only landscape I will ever really love—she was sitting up in a chair, nauseated, unable to eat or drink. My sisters and I, my children, my husband, my father, some cousins—eight or nine of us spread out around her room with the Sunday paper and salads and snacks from the Au Bon Pain on the hospital’s first floor and had a very good time.
Finally the nurse cleared us out so she could check on my mother, and I saw my mother get out of her chair and climb back into the room’s high bed, where she rested on her back like a statue, arms at her side, nose presiding, under a light.
My children left, one of them for four weeks. The other I saw the next day.
I am a mother, and my mother is my mother. This June, driving near her home in New York, she had a heart attack, and my father drove her to the hospital. In California, where I live, my family and I had just arrived at the airport. We were flying to New York to drop our older son at his summer program. So when we got the call from my younger sister that my mother was having a heart attack, all that happened was that everything became clearer than it was before. All we had to do was get onto the plane we were planning to board, and go to see her.
By the time our flight, delayed, took off, I knew that my mother had had a stent inserted, and that she was stable and doing well. It was an extraordinarily fine day, clear and cloudless almost to the center of the country. I watched the U.S. pass under us and felt things I hadn’t known I would feel, even though I think about my mother, and myself, all the time. It turned out I didn’t think about her deeply enough. I didn’t think about her with any accuracy. I didn’t normally see what I saw as we passed over thousands and thousands of people, and miles, which is that from my point of view, my mother is equal to all those people and all those miles. She has been that powerful.
And then, at the same time, she is weak. I hadn’t thought about her body as a mechanism I had a relation to since I was a toddler, when I needed her to take care of me. I remembered, or anyway I remember now, the fact of her heart, as I knew it then. It beat hard within her—almost excessively, I found. When I came to my parents’ bed one morning, and Mom, needing more sleep, lifted me onto her chest, that heart sounded in my ear, and filled her lungs with air so that her chest rose and fell, rose and fell, and instead of feeling comforted to lie on top of her I felt jostled. I lay awake on her, trying to match my breathing to hers, wondering why I couldn’t get comfortable. After a little while I couldn’t stand it anymore, and had to go. I don’t think that I ever went back.
Is telling someone about a beautiful flight on an airplane like telling someone about your dream? When we were almost in New York the plane dropped down over Long Island, the cloud cover dispersed into strips and rags of fog, and the watery marshes below us were so still that they could have been fifteen, rather than a thousand feet below us. In the hospital in Westchester where we saw my mother the next day—O Westchester, green and lush with spring rain and summer sun, probably the only landscape I will ever really love—she was sitting up in a chair, nauseated, unable to eat or drink. My sisters and I, my children, my husband, my father, some cousins—eight or nine of us spread out around her room with the Sunday paper and salads and snacks from the Au Bon Pain on the hospital’s first floor and had a very good time.
Finally the nurse cleared us out so she could check on my mother, and I saw my mother get out of her chair and climb back into the room’s high bed, where she rested on her back like a statue, arms at her side, nose presiding, under a light.
My children left, one of them for four weeks. The other I saw the next day.
Thursday, January 18, 2018
The Lee Shore
Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
I don’t remember the flights. I don’t remember being cold, although I must have been cold. I do remember viewing Lenin’s Tomb, although I remember it in such a hazy and provisional way that it’s possible I’m just imagining it. It was February, 1989, and I was in Russia on a school trip with the other students in my high school’s Russian program. We were not supposed to buy things on the black market, said one of our teachers, who then sheepishly purchased an army jacket on the black market. We were there at the end-ish—we didn’t know—of the Soviet Union, unable to imagine the past, present, or future of the place we stood in. We were American high school students on a foreign language trip staying in hotels otherwise frequented by businessmen and hookers, with considerable freedom to wander around foreign cities on our own. From our point of view, the dismantling of the Soviet Union was a time of sexual tension, personal growth, and fun.
By choosing to room with each other and not, either of us, with her, Angela and I confirmed what Katharine had known, but tried not to admit to herself, but had been resentful of, ever since she moved to our town from the Midwest, which was that Angela and I were the real friends and she was the third wheel. She had to room with Elissa, who wouldn’t share her maxipads because she was afraid she wouldn’t have enough when her period came. Maxipads! Not even tampons. Meanwhile, Angela, whose boots always needed an assistant to remove, and I fought several battles of our own. After one, I walked out of the hotel and crossed underneath the highway that separated it from the Museum of the Siege of Leningrad, where I wandered around, trying to read the labels on the displays and feeling alone in the world. Boohoo, contextually speaking. After another screaming match, the football player staying in the room next to us came in wearing his boxer shorts to try to broker a peace. He was good looking and the underpants thing was distracting. Angela and I set about making ourselves less opinionated and difficult and more interesting and fun-loving, stat.
I lost a pound a day on that trip, which was like, Thanks Soviet Union, for your easy diet plan! At meals I sat with a group of funny boys who played with their mashed potatoes. One of them wasn’t important, one of them threw all the windows open in his hotel room so the curtains billowed in and out, sneered at people who didn’t know Sting’s “Little Wing” was a cover (I totally knew that), and also went missing for a day and a half while looking for and possibly finding, allegedly, hash, and one of them had a crush on me that I publicly rejected. He became someone else’s nice boyfriend when we got back, while I continued to wander around in a virginal fever until graduation and then for an additional period of time I’m not going to specify here. Not that virginity is anything important, meaningful, etc. Obviously not. Why would someone ever want to have penetrative vaginal sex for the first time?
Little Wing had his luggage tossed on the way out of the country.
We went to visit a Soviet high school, where we met, as one does, students our age who spoke English much better than we spoke their language. One of the boys exchanged numbers with Amelia, a girl the year behind me I considered impossibly dramatic and pretentious, even relative to the rest of us. They made plans for her to come to his apartment. Maybe because I was her only option, she asked me to come with her, and for some reason—not only were we not friends, but at heart I was (am?) a chicken—I said I would. Two boys picked us up at the hotel and we took the Metro across Moscow together. The number-exchanger was good-looking and an excellent English-speaker; his friend was dumpy and silent. I didn’t appreciate the implication, but whatever. The apartment was in an area that had nothing but tall identical apartment buildings. The boys made us mushroom soup and a second course I can’t remember. Maybe a salad? They did not serve us alcohol, although I had prepared myself for that possibility by worrying about it. After this uncomfortable meal, Amelia and the alpha guy went into another room and I sat on the couch with the beta friend for a while being like Now what? Because there is no universe in which I am making out with you. I don’t think we spoke. On the way back to the Metro the boys informed us that everyone in the neighborhood could tell we were Americans because we smiled. That was one of the only moments during the trip when I noticed something significant about the country I was in. Relatedly, I didn’t give anyone the presents I’d brought from the United States, which were copies of To Kill a Mockingbird and Sting’s latest album. They seemed embarrassing and juvenile, suitable only for dorks.
We went to the circus and I was so upset for the animals I had to step outside.
I don’t think that is the last thing that happened on the trip, but I remember it that way: Snow was falling, beautiful, silent, soft and and white. Angela and I had gone off on our own, but now we had to meet up with the rest of our group at a tourist shop near the Rossiya Hotel. Again, the rules on this school-sponsored trip retrospectively continue to surprise me. Why did we have so much free time? Why were we allowed to go wherever we wanted? I had been at a stranger’s apartment in Moscow without any supervision for hours. And now what would have happened if we hadn’t made it to the store in time? We didn’t have a map. We stopped someone to ask her how to get to the Rossiya, and she told us a set of directions, all of which, after the first, we either couldn’t understand or promptly forgot. So we’d walk a little while, ask someone for directions to the Rossiya, take the first direction, then stop someone and ask them directions to the Rossiya. We arrived, finally, at the top of a set of stone stairs that led down and then up again, and we could see across this little gully to the Rossiya Hotel. We burst into the store snow-covered and steaming with our success, to find everyone buying pins and flags from a country that to us was best understood as someone else’s mistake.
I don’t remember the flights. I don’t remember being cold, although I must have been cold. I do remember viewing Lenin’s Tomb, although I remember it in such a hazy and provisional way that it’s possible I’m just imagining it. It was February, 1989, and I was in Russia on a school trip with the other students in my high school’s Russian program. We were not supposed to buy things on the black market, said one of our teachers, who then sheepishly purchased an army jacket on the black market. We were there at the end-ish—we didn’t know—of the Soviet Union, unable to imagine the past, present, or future of the place we stood in. We were American high school students on a foreign language trip staying in hotels otherwise frequented by businessmen and hookers, with considerable freedom to wander around foreign cities on our own. From our point of view, the dismantling of the Soviet Union was a time of sexual tension, personal growth, and fun.
By choosing to room with each other and not, either of us, with her, Angela and I confirmed what Katharine had known, but tried not to admit to herself, but had been resentful of, ever since she moved to our town from the Midwest, which was that Angela and I were the real friends and she was the third wheel. She had to room with Elissa, who wouldn’t share her maxipads because she was afraid she wouldn’t have enough when her period came. Maxipads! Not even tampons. Meanwhile, Angela, whose boots always needed an assistant to remove, and I fought several battles of our own. After one, I walked out of the hotel and crossed underneath the highway that separated it from the Museum of the Siege of Leningrad, where I wandered around, trying to read the labels on the displays and feeling alone in the world. Boohoo, contextually speaking. After another screaming match, the football player staying in the room next to us came in wearing his boxer shorts to try to broker a peace. He was good looking and the underpants thing was distracting. Angela and I set about making ourselves less opinionated and difficult and more interesting and fun-loving, stat.
I lost a pound a day on that trip, which was like, Thanks Soviet Union, for your easy diet plan! At meals I sat with a group of funny boys who played with their mashed potatoes. One of them wasn’t important, one of them threw all the windows open in his hotel room so the curtains billowed in and out, sneered at people who didn’t know Sting’s “Little Wing” was a cover (I totally knew that), and also went missing for a day and a half while looking for and possibly finding, allegedly, hash, and one of them had a crush on me that I publicly rejected. He became someone else’s nice boyfriend when we got back, while I continued to wander around in a virginal fever until graduation and then for an additional period of time I’m not going to specify here. Not that virginity is anything important, meaningful, etc. Obviously not. Why would someone ever want to have penetrative vaginal sex for the first time?
Little Wing had his luggage tossed on the way out of the country.
We went to visit a Soviet high school, where we met, as one does, students our age who spoke English much better than we spoke their language. One of the boys exchanged numbers with Amelia, a girl the year behind me I considered impossibly dramatic and pretentious, even relative to the rest of us. They made plans for her to come to his apartment. Maybe because I was her only option, she asked me to come with her, and for some reason—not only were we not friends, but at heart I was (am?) a chicken—I said I would. Two boys picked us up at the hotel and we took the Metro across Moscow together. The number-exchanger was good-looking and an excellent English-speaker; his friend was dumpy and silent. I didn’t appreciate the implication, but whatever. The apartment was in an area that had nothing but tall identical apartment buildings. The boys made us mushroom soup and a second course I can’t remember. Maybe a salad? They did not serve us alcohol, although I had prepared myself for that possibility by worrying about it. After this uncomfortable meal, Amelia and the alpha guy went into another room and I sat on the couch with the beta friend for a while being like Now what? Because there is no universe in which I am making out with you. I don’t think we spoke. On the way back to the Metro the boys informed us that everyone in the neighborhood could tell we were Americans because we smiled. That was one of the only moments during the trip when I noticed something significant about the country I was in. Relatedly, I didn’t give anyone the presents I’d brought from the United States, which were copies of To Kill a Mockingbird and Sting’s latest album. They seemed embarrassing and juvenile, suitable only for dorks.
We went to the circus and I was so upset for the animals I had to step outside.
I don’t think that is the last thing that happened on the trip, but I remember it that way: Snow was falling, beautiful, silent, soft and and white. Angela and I had gone off on our own, but now we had to meet up with the rest of our group at a tourist shop near the Rossiya Hotel. Again, the rules on this school-sponsored trip retrospectively continue to surprise me. Why did we have so much free time? Why were we allowed to go wherever we wanted? I had been at a stranger’s apartment in Moscow without any supervision for hours. And now what would have happened if we hadn’t made it to the store in time? We didn’t have a map. We stopped someone to ask her how to get to the Rossiya, and she told us a set of directions, all of which, after the first, we either couldn’t understand or promptly forgot. So we’d walk a little while, ask someone for directions to the Rossiya, take the first direction, then stop someone and ask them directions to the Rossiya. We arrived, finally, at the top of a set of stone stairs that led down and then up again, and we could see across this little gully to the Rossiya Hotel. We burst into the store snow-covered and steaming with our success, to find everyone buying pins and flags from a country that to us was best understood as someone else’s mistake.
Friday, May 19, 2017
Merry Christmas
It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet; very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a voyage—beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say goodbye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,—poor old Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came back on deck, and looked to windward, looked towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the land; looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lanterns, for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much to say, “Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can.”
You are in a room. It is a fairly spacious room, for a bathroom. The walls are white paint above white tile, the floor is also tile, old brown tile, with old dark grout between the tiles. Everything in the room is old—not ancient, but, if you had to guess, thirty years old. A little younger than you are, at the time. The sink is the kind of sink you’ve been seeing your whole life—it sticks out from the wall, its guts are visible underneath, it has a tiny lip around it that can just fit soap and a drinking glass. It has a mirror above it, and to that mirror you stick, by their suction cups, two plastic animals, an elephant and a giraffe, whose bellies open up to hold toothbrushes. This is not your bathroom, after all, it is the bathroom of your infant boys.
The toilet is standard issue. When you are potty training your son, you spend a lot of time in the bathroom, sitting in front of him as he sits on the toilet, as if he is an idol you must prostrate yourself before. When the other toilets in the house are all occupied you sometimes sit on this toilet yourself, generally in some kind of wet.
The closet has two louvered doors that open so you can step inside it a little, and look around on the shelves for what you want. It is more generous than any bathroom closet you’ve ever had, and is a good place, if you’re little, to hide during hide and seek. A low shelf on the right holds a pile of soft white cotton towels, each with a corner stitched over to make a pocket that will hold your baby’s head. You have scattered thermometers a higher shelf, and spread Band-aids around on another. The humidifier on the floor was bought in a humidifying emergency, and will never be used again.
The tub is a very familiar tub. Every American who is reading these words knows this tub, with its white, sloping, ceramic sides, its once-tacky, worn-down, anti-slip shapes on the bottom, its metal and frosted glass surround, the doors running in a sharp metal track that cuts your arm when you lean over it to hold your boy, to scrub your boy, to fetch toys from the drain for your little boy to play with. The toys fill with water and then with mold, and are a minor source of dread, since mold is probably bad for babies, but you can’t figure out how to keep the toys, with those little holes in their bottoms, from developing the mold, which then squirts out shamefully when the boys squeeze them during playtime. Unless you’re just supposed to throw the toys out all the time? Some people, you’ve heard, wash their toys with bleach. And some people have net bags that they hang from the side of the tub, into which they load all the wet toys at the end of the bath, but you and your husband don’t do this, you leave the toys in the tub where they lie stranded, once the water has drained out.
When your son is sick, you two sit on the cool tile floor together in the middle of the night. He goes to sleep in your lap and wakes up to be sick, and then comes back again to sleep on you. You sit on some towels, so you will be more comfortable.
The light coming through the window behind the toilet is green from the leaves on the trees in your backyard.
It is really a very pleasant room. Bath time at night can be hard because your boys don’t want to get into the bath—and then, almost always, when the bath is done, it seems they don’t want to get out of it. And in the summer, you decide that swimming at the town pool is like having a bath, and put the boys to bed without washing them, which means, I guess, that you sometimes find the whole thing a pain.
But now that you are not strictly and officially in the room, the room is bathed in a heavenly golden light. The boys are so little, with such slippery, sticky skin. When they’re a certain age you bathe them together. You wash first one uplifted, twisting face, then the other. One time you knock your boy’s loose tooth out while you do this, and he sees the blood and somehow is out of the tub before you can stop him, running around this room screaming and trailing pink blood over the towels and across the tiles. You clean each boy’s hair by soaping it with a soapy washcloth, then tilting his head back, pouring warm water through it, leaving it shaped into soft clean curls. You sing to these sons, songs about baths, but you also have strange, unmeasurable periods of time, where they play happily in the water, and your mind is free and untethered to the place where you are. And you see, although you don’t see this for some time, that this room is a room machine, and you can go there, or leave there, anytime you want.
You are in a room. It is a fairly spacious room, for a bathroom. The walls are white paint above white tile, the floor is also tile, old brown tile, with old dark grout between the tiles. Everything in the room is old—not ancient, but, if you had to guess, thirty years old. A little younger than you are, at the time. The sink is the kind of sink you’ve been seeing your whole life—it sticks out from the wall, its guts are visible underneath, it has a tiny lip around it that can just fit soap and a drinking glass. It has a mirror above it, and to that mirror you stick, by their suction cups, two plastic animals, an elephant and a giraffe, whose bellies open up to hold toothbrushes. This is not your bathroom, after all, it is the bathroom of your infant boys.
The toilet is standard issue. When you are potty training your son, you spend a lot of time in the bathroom, sitting in front of him as he sits on the toilet, as if he is an idol you must prostrate yourself before. When the other toilets in the house are all occupied you sometimes sit on this toilet yourself, generally in some kind of wet.
The closet has two louvered doors that open so you can step inside it a little, and look around on the shelves for what you want. It is more generous than any bathroom closet you’ve ever had, and is a good place, if you’re little, to hide during hide and seek. A low shelf on the right holds a pile of soft white cotton towels, each with a corner stitched over to make a pocket that will hold your baby’s head. You have scattered thermometers a higher shelf, and spread Band-aids around on another. The humidifier on the floor was bought in a humidifying emergency, and will never be used again.
The tub is a very familiar tub. Every American who is reading these words knows this tub, with its white, sloping, ceramic sides, its once-tacky, worn-down, anti-slip shapes on the bottom, its metal and frosted glass surround, the doors running in a sharp metal track that cuts your arm when you lean over it to hold your boy, to scrub your boy, to fetch toys from the drain for your little boy to play with. The toys fill with water and then with mold, and are a minor source of dread, since mold is probably bad for babies, but you can’t figure out how to keep the toys, with those little holes in their bottoms, from developing the mold, which then squirts out shamefully when the boys squeeze them during playtime. Unless you’re just supposed to throw the toys out all the time? Some people, you’ve heard, wash their toys with bleach. And some people have net bags that they hang from the side of the tub, into which they load all the wet toys at the end of the bath, but you and your husband don’t do this, you leave the toys in the tub where they lie stranded, once the water has drained out.
When your son is sick, you two sit on the cool tile floor together in the middle of the night. He goes to sleep in your lap and wakes up to be sick, and then comes back again to sleep on you. You sit on some towels, so you will be more comfortable.
The light coming through the window behind the toilet is green from the leaves on the trees in your backyard.
It is really a very pleasant room. Bath time at night can be hard because your boys don’t want to get into the bath—and then, almost always, when the bath is done, it seems they don’t want to get out of it. And in the summer, you decide that swimming at the town pool is like having a bath, and put the boys to bed without washing them, which means, I guess, that you sometimes find the whole thing a pain.
But now that you are not strictly and officially in the room, the room is bathed in a heavenly golden light. The boys are so little, with such slippery, sticky skin. When they’re a certain age you bathe them together. You wash first one uplifted, twisting face, then the other. One time you knock your boy’s loose tooth out while you do this, and he sees the blood and somehow is out of the tub before you can stop him, running around this room screaming and trailing pink blood over the towels and across the tiles. You clean each boy’s hair by soaping it with a soapy washcloth, then tilting his head back, pouring warm water through it, leaving it shaped into soft clean curls. You sing to these sons, songs about baths, but you also have strange, unmeasurable periods of time, where they play happily in the water, and your mind is free and untethered to the place where you are. And you see, although you don’t see this for some time, that this room is a room machine, and you can go there, or leave there, anytime you want.
Friday, March 31, 2017
Going Aboard
“Morning to ye! morning to ye!” he rejoined, again moving off. “Oh! I was going to warn ye against—but never mind, never mind—it’s all one, all in the family too;—sharp frost this morning, ain’t it? Good-bye to ye. Shan’t see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it’s before the Grand Jury.”
Dentist yesterday. I sit in the chair—there is a fountain somewhere, but the water in it doesn’t tinkle, it splashes—with my mouth open, and I think, What is the answer to this? Do I have them pull all my teeth and replace them with fake teeth and then I have only fake teeth and those teeth can’t rot? But is it accurate to say that fake teeth can’t rot? And even if they can’t, don’t you still have to take care of your gums and get check-ups for your gums? So then what should I do? How can I possibly get out of coming here three times a year, every year, for all my days? How can I avoid feeling my mouth fill with water until it dribbles over my lower lip? And involuntarily clasping my hands together in my lap? And having to stare at the overhead lights and listen to the music that is still elevator music even though it has been upgraded to tasteful covers of famous songs performed with guitars and quavering female voices? And the answer is, There is no way out of this that you would like.
Dentist yesterday. I sit in the chair—there is a fountain somewhere, but the water in it doesn’t tinkle, it splashes—with my mouth open, and I think, What is the answer to this? Do I have them pull all my teeth and replace them with fake teeth and then I have only fake teeth and those teeth can’t rot? But is it accurate to say that fake teeth can’t rot? And even if they can’t, don’t you still have to take care of your gums and get check-ups for your gums? So then what should I do? How can I possibly get out of coming here three times a year, every year, for all my days? How can I avoid feeling my mouth fill with water until it dribbles over my lower lip? And involuntarily clasping my hands together in my lap? And having to stare at the overhead lights and listen to the music that is still elevator music even though it has been upgraded to tasteful covers of famous songs performed with guitars and quavering female voices? And the answer is, There is no way out of this that you would like.
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