Selig Sind

When I was eighteen, absurdly, I sang the Brahms Requiem.

I was fresh out of high school, paddling through my first long, confusing semester at college.  I wasn't giving much thought to death.   I was taking Russian history, moral philosophy, music history, music theory, private lessons, choir, and, in an ill-advised attempt to meet nerdy boys, beginning chess.

It was a scattershot array of classes, as if I'd fanned through the course catalog and dropped, from the palm of my free hand, a smattering of pins.  In fact, my course selection, like my dorm selection, like my selection of that first troublesome boyfriend, had been agonizing, a sweaty marathon run over many days and nights.  That the ultimate result of my labors resembled nothing so much as random variation was characteristic, if frustrating.

Much ado about nothing.

It's what I thought about the Requiem, too.  It's what most of us thought.  We were eighteen, nineteen, twenty-two at most, a hodgepodge of majors and minors.  Some of us had lost someone significant, but most of us had only glimpsed loss through the lens of fiction, stared at it moving there, under the scrim of words, like a strange, single-celled organism caught beneath the microscope.  We were there to sing, yes, but also to flirt, to mingle, to speculate on who we were and who we would become.  Doctors, lawyers, artists, activists, musicians, movers and shakers.

Dead wasn't on our list.

Of course, it should have been.  It was the only thing any of knew with any certainty we would be. Though we didn't really know it, not in our bones, not in any way we could feel.  Death entered our mouths and sat on our tongues before reemerging, whole, undigested, with perfect vowels.  Tod, wo ist dein stachel, we sang, and laughed.  The words were lumpen, amusing.

On the night of the concert we put on the most attractive black and white clothes we could dredge from our closets.  We giggled.  We strode out onstage in front of our fellow students and the busloads of old folks from the home and plowed, joyfully, through the requiem.  Finally, something we knew!  Out of all the confusing new somethings required of us during our first year away from home, here, at last, was something we had actually rehearsed.

Death, where is thy sting?

I'd sing it differently now.  More fearfully.  All flesh is grass, meaning you will die, meaning I will die, meaning my parents have grown old and my teachers are dying and  I've boarded that long, slow train of loss.   I suspect, too, that I'd sing it still differently if I were forty, or  fifty, or seventy.  Maybe Brahms's masterpiece isn't finished, really finished, until you've sung it again, and again, and again, like dye bleeding through layers of cloth.

As absurd as it is to sing about death at eighteen, at least you've gotten it in your ear.  You've learned the way death stands and sits and swells, the rhythms of it, the way it buzzes against the bones of your skull.   You won't remember until you need to, until you hear Brahms on the radio and realize your loss isn't singular and new but plural and very, very passe.

Requiems, after all, aren't for the dead.  They're for the choir.  For anyone who sings together, lives, grows up.  Selig sind die Toten: Blessed are the Dead.  It's the rest of us who remain onstage, mouths wide.

Minority Report

I'm back in the inner city schools this year.

Accordingly, things have changed.  Gone are the beginning-of-the-year swag bags from the PTA.  (Gone, for that matter, is the PTA.)  Gone are the disability advocates, the helicopter parents, the fully-functional technological equipment.  Instead, I'm back to the familiar business of...triage.  Children without shoes.  Families without electricity.  Disconnected phones.   My daddy's gonna shoot you.  Mommy's asleep.  We haven't had a working printer since February.

It should be shocking, but unfortunately it isn't: I spent the first three years of my SLP working life in an inner city system in another state, and poverty is poverty is poverty.  It actually -appallingly- feels comfortable: a return to business as usual.  It's amazing (amazingly horrible) what you can become inured to over time.

But one thing is different, this time around.  Inner city systems tend to serve students who are predominately African American.  In Indianapolis, smack in the middle of one of the whitest states in the country, a majority of the teachers and other school employees were white.  In Richmond, out of 160 preschool staff, I'm one of only 5 or 6 white members. 

It's been interesting, watching myself react to being one of a few.  I've become suddenly, acutely aware of all of the mostly white environments I've been inhabiting unthinkingly, without any sense of the privilege that attaches to being part of the majority.  Now, in the minority, I feel conspicuous, instantly recognizable, unable to blend in or fly under the radar.   Today, a woman who got a glancing look at me from 100 feet away during introductions was able to pick me out of a crowd, probably because I can be IDed with a simple three-word description: "that white girl."'

It's no wonder that the only folks who believe we live in a post-racial society are white. 

Certainly none of them teach in the inner city schools.  Segregation is alive and well, folks.  We just pretend it's not.

Friendly

I do have friends.  Really I do.  Or, I used to.

The girl at the coffee shop hands me my espresso and I wander over to the table by the window and sit down.   Alone.  Again.  It's the raw hour of 9:00 AM.  There are Couples, families with kids, pairs of women gossiping.  I set my purse on the seat across from me.  It looks kind of like another human being if I squint.  And remove my contacts.  And have two margaritas, a whiskey sour, PBR, and a benadryl.

Surely, at some point, someone liked to hang out with me?  Other than my husband, who averred that he would hang out with me forever in front of God?  My coworkers and I talk desultorily about their children.  My students hand me money at the end of our conversations. The old women at church like to talk about old women at church stuff, and while it's true that I am eighty years old in my heart, I can't contribute much to discussions of sciatica, liturgy, or death.

Where, exactly, are you supposed to find friends during the adult stage of your life?  You can troll for spouses on the Internet without shame, but there's some stigma attached to friendlessness, some whiff of moral decay.  It's tough to admit to, like unemployment or venereal disease.  You may be able to spin whole Hollywood franchises off of the search for Mister Right, but even those painfully single heroines of whatever-movie-I'm-watching-on-the-airplane boast posses of bubbly gal pals.

I've been in Richmond a year.  I have zero friends.  I'm not so bad, I promise!  I tell jokes.  I laugh.  I listen.  I am ambulatory!   I can formulate complete sentences!  I don't want very much.  A couple of happy hours!  Some walking!  Coffee!  Maybe a book club or two....

I feel sad and desperate and shameful, like a closeted gay man in the 1920s.  Of course, if I were a closeted gay man in the 1920s, I could mosey on down to the club and meet some fellows for drinks.  As it stands, I've stooped to browsing the "strictly platonic" listings on Craigslist (wherein, incidentally, there seems to be alarming confusion as to the meaning of the word "platonic."  It's not the Platonic ideal, folks.   Back it up).

Sigh.

Seasonal Allergies

I don't mind it when my peas touch my corn, but I sure as heck take (ineffectual) umbrage when summer gets tangled up with September. It's supposed to be fall, dang it!  Or, if not fall, that sweet gasp immediately before fall, the moment midair when you know, though don't yet feel beyond a  prickling of the skin behind your ears, that shortly you'll be on your way down.

Instead, the birds are chirping away like they're having a karaoke party and I'm wearing shorts.  SHORTS.  The indignity.

I'm reminded, quite vividly, of picking up a glass of what I thought was water when I was a child and taking a sip.  It was milk.  I spewed white everywhere, not because I dislike milk (I love milk) but because the mismatch, the distance between my expectations and the substance that slopped over my tongue, was terrifying.

Maybe the lesson here is to have no expectations.  To feel at home nowhere.  To come to the world with the blank, peaceful mind of the yogi or the zombie or the inordinately inebriated.

I prefer to remain curmudgeonly.  Avast, summer!

It's My First Time

Yeah, It's been a while since I've used that line.  It's probably been a while for you, too.  Yet those were the words I uttered - actually tongued, aloud!- this morning as I rested my elbows on a reception desk deep in the bowels of a strip mall on the edge of town.

It's my first time.   I spoke the words with no irony and a twist of trepidation.  The grandmotherly woman behind the desk squeaked as if I'd goosed her.

"Oh!  How fabulous!  It's fabulous.  Isn't it fabulous?"  This to the woman who'd come in behind me, already removing her shoes.

"It's fabulous," the woman confirmed. She bounced up and down on her toes, adjusted a pair of shorts smaller than any I'd seen on any adult woman, ever.

"OK," I said, "Great."

I wasn't gunning for fabulous.  I was gunning for tolerable, or maybe non-lethal.  I was at the Bikram yoga studio, prepping for my first class.

Oh, sure, I practice yoga.  If practice means whiz through a 20-minute video on your computer while thinking about what to have for dinner and occasionally checking your Twitter feed during upward-facing dog.   But I'm not a serious yogi, and  I'd never done, or much wanted to do, Bikram yoga, which involves spending 90 minutes flailing semi-nude in 104 degree heat amongst flexible and odiferous strangers.

Yet, here I was, clutching my towel.

It was the gift certificate's fault.  Nothing gets my cheap little heart beating faster than the prospect of losing out on free stuff, and a while back some misguided soul had gifted me with expirable Bikram.  A lot of expirable Bikram.  Good for a year, gifted a year ago.  It was strip or be stripped.

I stripped.  I lay back.   I closed my eyes and thought of England -which, among other virtues, boasts a climate substantially cooler than the interior of the Bikram yoga room.  I did some other things I don't want to talk about, having yet to work through their ramifications for my dignity.

I didn't find Bikram horrendous.  Nor did I find it particularly revelatory.   It was what it was, and I will probably go again, if only because I continue to labor under the crushing psychological weight of additional expirable Bikram.  But it won't be as important, because it won't be my first time.

It's my first time.

The real revelation I took from Bikram today was just how God-awfully long you can go without speaking those words.  As we age, as we work ourselves into the more or less comfortable ruts of our lives, there are fewer and fewer instances in which we require of ourselves the leap -and it is a leap- of doing something we come to naked.  When's the last time you did something with which you had no experience, something you weren't even sure you wanted to do, but nevertheless, were up for trying? 

There comes a point at which we've made many of our leaps.  We're married, most of us; we have careers and kids and hobbies and homes and tastes.  Nevertheless, I think it needs to be done: stepping, even if ever so briefly, out of line, opening the door, opening our mouths.

Hey, yes, It's my first time.

Damages

So Irene's been and gone.  She was poorly named, to my mind.  Irene is someone's great aunt, a stooped, sweet old woman who plays makes bad cookies and plays the organ when the regular organist takes vacation.  Alternatively, she's a California baby boomer lawyer, smoking her medical marijuana after a long day spent prosecuting the deviant.  Perhaps, just perhaps, she's a waitress at a diner in the Rust Belt.

What she's not is a hurricane.  Zorg is a hurricane.  Wizwallop.  Ixminy.  It's possible I have a new career ahead of me as a dubber of hurricanes.  Codswalloper!  Ning.

But nobody asked me, and in any case, Irene has passed, if slightly more violently than we anticipated.  The winds blew for longer, and stronger, than the weather service had guessed, and 80% of the city lost power.  We clung to ours, but nevertheless, Irene's going to cost us: $550 for two days of lost work (and counting) on my end,  $325 for tree branch removal, plus several hours of picking up sticks and hauling branches.

Of course, it could have been worse.  There's a sycamore through the middle of our neighbor's house, bisecting it neatly, like a knife cleaving a cow's heart in middle school science.  You can see the boxes in their attic, festooned with insulation from what used to be their walls.  You can see where the rain came into the house, and the nothing where the chimney used to be.

Even for the neighbors, it could have been worse.  Their house will be condemned, but they have insurance, and all of them are alive, saved, evidently, by their preteen daughter's devotion to the downstairs television set and iCarly.

The incontrovertible truth is that "it," whatever it is could, always, always, be worse.  That's what one of my social media friends was trying to get at, I think, when he complained about the endless hurricane coverage.  Come on, he railed, what about all the people dying in Afghanistan, the Sudan, Syria?

He's right, of course. My irritation at being out hundreds of dollars pales in comparison to losing a home, which pales in comparison to starvation.  There's a long ladder of misfortune, and we can always drop a rung or two.

That's the trouble with being human, though: We name things.  We personalize our hurricanes and we remain, for better or for worse, deeply attentive to the squalls and breezes of our own lives.   We're limited, we humans.  We're small.  Irene can take us, even as we baptize her: an old, bent woman, the spitting, gusting image of ourselves.

The Hunker

Hurricane, here.  Well, really just a tropical storm in Richmond. Meaning we're just outside the range of Irene's full wrath, but we can still hear her rattling our windows.  She's a snake of a rattler.

And so we hunker down.  We drag our lawn furniture indoors, take down our tiki torches (why did we buy these?!), and stock up on batteries.  We pray our power keeps flowing, so that we never have to confront the disturbing prospect of no Internetz, no microwave, no milk.   We get a little stir crazy, debate a run to the store, to the coffee shop, anywhere.  Then we look outside and stay home.

It's peaceful, hunkering, but it's also, at least in this day in age, frenetic.  I imagine our grandparents holed up in snow storms, in thunder, in raging wind.  The rain would have come like chloroform, blurring the edges, smothering the senses, until the only thing you could see, could feel, was you.  Your own heartbeat, your own breath, your own body hunkered it its skin.

Now, of course, we have radar.  We have weather radio and television and twitter.  Since I woke up, I've been glued to all of these simultaneously.  I've been tracking the garish progress of the storm, the increasingly agitated twittering of weather nerds, all the preparations and perturbations taking place in our wide, wet world. 

It's an improvement, of course.  You've got more info, more facts, you are better equipped.  And, unless you happen to be the poor schmuck chosen to stand in the blinding rain clutching a microphone to your chest, you are safer.

But you are also -doubly- inundated.  Flooded with the wet weals of the storm, flooded with the surge of more, better, faster information.  It's wonderful.  It's overwhelming.  Which is why, in a minute, I think I'll close up my computer and listen to the rain.