Finding my bearings
I wrote the title for this blog post and then wondered where the phrase came from. Apparently it means “Establishing awareness of one’s position or situation relative to one’s surroundings.” That works. It also works for me to imagine that I have lost a great many little round pieces of metal and am trying to find them again. Starting work on the book is not a simple matter of sitting down and putting words on the screen. I diddled with it for a few hours yesterday afternoon while Chloe explored the apartment around me, mewing with rising inflections that sounded like question-marks and looking back at me expectantly, as if she believed I could answer those questions if I would just leave that stupid keyboard and apply myself. After a few hours of this, I looked at what I had written and found it abysmally stupid; deleted everything and sat down in my new yellow chair to pet Chloe, to gaze out the window at the sunset bathing layers of cloud in vaguely pink pearlescence, and to listen to Alfred Brendel playing Schubert.
Today I had important errands to do. After several hours of filling out forms, taking a test, paying taxes and fees, and driving from one office to another to establish that my car does not release emissions in excess of what is permitted in Oregon, I am now an official Oregon Resident. I’m licensed to drive in Oregon and have a new identity card with a picture that suggests my wattle and jowls are becoming ever more majestic as each year passes; I have new plates that identify my car as belonging to Oregon, not Texas; and in a week to ten days I will get proof that I am entitled to vote here–which means I’ll be able to vote in the Oregon Primaries in May. I’m also discovering that there are hidden treasures in this building.
The most visible residents are those who hang out in the ground floor lobby, most of them with walkers or wheelchairs, waiting for hours for someone to visit them or give them a ride, waiting to find a willing partner for a game of Scrabble in the Activity Room, waiting to entrap an innocent bypasser into reminiscing with them about the Second World War or fussing about the cooking smells on the third floor. But yesterday I met Stephanie, who was a museum curator in Hawai’i for years, lived in Japan and is an expert on Asian art, and just finished a novel she has been working on for twelve years. In the elevator on our way out of the building to her favorite Japanese restaurant for lunch, Stephanie introduced me to John, a retired radical professor of history who spent his academic career in the northeast but retired here and now has an office at one of the local universities and is allowed to use their facilities for his research. Last night when I checked my mail, a small but determined group of residents I have never seen before was leaving in their walking shoes and fleece jackets, candles in hand, to attend the candlelight vigil marking the fifth year of the obscene and inexcusable war in Iraq. So it appears to me that among the 400 or so people who live in this building, there are many with whom I’ll be happy to make common cause and have good conversations in the fullness of time.
The Alan Bennett books and Thomas Merton books I’ve requested are waiting for me ten blocks away at my branch library, and the food coop gets its weekly supply of coconut-ginger scones today. The cherry and pear trees are in full blossom, shedding petals all over the ground. I need to be out there walking among those pink, white, and mauve petals. On my way home from the DMV I picked up a few more toys for Chloe: as I’ve been writing this she has been tossing her red felt catnip-laced mouse up into the air, throwing it and then leaping on it in mid-air or batting it across the room as if this solitary game of hers is the most important activity on earth. Good idea, I think. Carpe diem. The catnip fragrance will wear off. The petals will turn brown. I can write after dark. I will go out now and find a few more bearings.
P.S. Back from my walk to the library. The flowering trees are so thick there are petal-drifts, like snow-drifts, except in vivid colors, mounting up in the cracks in the sidewalk, in the gutters, and in the gardens that border the sidewalk where daffodils, hyacinths, late crocus and early tulips are all slightly buried in fallen petals. The colors are vivid against the multiply-colored gray skies and the wet sidewalks, and the rain drifts down in a heavy mist, mingling with the flower petals and beading up on people’s jackets. Between my place and the library I counted seven coffee houses, five sushi restaurants, three small breweries with their related bars, fifteen offices for accupuncturists and massage therapists, a creperie, a high-end pastry shop called the Boulangerie, a futon shop, several antique shops, a Native American Art gallery, a scatter of restaurants, a New Age bookshop (Poetry Readings Every Week), and a boutique that specializes in organic pet foods. These are some of my bearings.
Tags: Oregon
Kendall
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