we sit in silence

3 CommentsWednesday • December 5, 2012 • by Buffy

And just like that, everything changes. In a moment. In a word. You see the things that matter, the things that don’t. And you wonder how you ever mistook one for the other.

Life’s like that sometimes. It gets us in our secret place. Where we go to hide from the world – and from ourselves.

Death isn’t good. It isn’t bad. It just…IS.

But the coffee machine’s still dripping on the counter. And there’s still sweeping to be done of the floor. Life goes on that way. Just a little calmer. A little quieter.

For a time.

We sit in silence.

i’m not as good as i once was

5 CommentsTuesday • July 31, 2012 • by Buffy

I never just breathe. I spend most of my time doing the opposite – holding my breath until it comes out so fast and furious it makes me dizzy. But today, outside the airport, I took a moment to do it…to just breathe. I didn’t worry about the sun on my face or the time on my wrist or any of the things that have been making me feel like not-me these last few months.

In front of me a man stood by a car and told a woman he loved her. They hugged. I moved my eyes, because that’s what I do. Public displays of affection make me uncomfortable. But the eye moving didn’t help. In front of their car was another. Another someone else, dropping off their someone, too. An elderly man, leaving his teenage grandson. The younger man said “I love you”, the older “I’ll miss you, boy.” They didn’t shake hands. They hugged.

I stood there for half an hour. Just watching. Watching people be good to other people. Wondering if they ever took the time, like I never had, to look behind them or in front of them in that long crazy line where everyone just hugged and loved and smiled even when they cried.

It was a beautiful thing. Seeing all those perfect, tiny moments lined up like that affected me in a profound way. Two years of tension just left my body. No kind of yoga ever did that.

If you feel like feeling good about people, and what it means to be one of them, go to an airport. Stand at curb-side drop off. And spend some time watching. Then go back to your car and remember how you used to love Toby Keith and how you’re gonna start loving him some more. Because he’s still as good as he ever was.

the naked woman

9 CommentsWednesday • June 13, 2012 • by Buffy

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window is a victim of accidie, or maybe an exhibitionist, and it would be ‘interesting’ to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes a difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, in the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of choices. We live by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting shadows which are our actual experience.

Didion. But not exactly.

At midnight I was angry. Running in the rain. Shouting. To Flynn. She said perfect things, which I can’t remember. Because I do that when I shout; or when things are said in the rain. I forget. But she’ll say them again. Because that’s what I’ll need. And that’s what she does. Like Didion.

crabtree watching the transit of Venus A.D. 1639

4 CommentsTuesday • June 5, 2012 • by Buffy

I used to spend my lunch hour in Manchester’s town hall. I’d stand in front of a mural by Ford Madox Brown, eat potato chips, and wonder about the time and people who had passed by the painting since it first found its home upon the wall.

Art and architecture and celestial mechanics always make me wonder like this. And Brown’s mural, “Crabtree watching the Transit of Venus A.D. 1639”, buried in that Gothic building, is a little bit of all three.

We know so much, or think we do, that the astronomy behind today’s transit isn’t new or interesting anymore. But there’s a lot of deep-seated comfort in the solid, steady cycle that’s the orbit of planets and stars. In the knowledge that natural things always have their time and place even if our own trajectories are so bent and misshapen we hardly recognize them.

I get all caught up in it sometimes, and in that Mary Oliver poem, about the geese, which I don’t really like, but which comes to mind all the same.

Meanwhile the world goes on.
And the sun moves across the landscape.

and the planet mars took me home

0 CommentsMonday • March 12, 2012 • by Buffy

Alone at night, when I was twelve years old, I looked at the planet Mars and I said, ‘Take me home!’ And the planet Mars took me home, and I never came back. So I’ve written every day in the last 75 years. I’ve never stopped writing. – Ray Bradbury

I’ve been reading a lot of screen plays lately. They’re good stand-ins for poetry. But only when they’re done the way they ought to be done. The Royal Tenenbaums, Lars and the Real Girl. I read these every year. They make me happy. I have in my hand a poem my grandmother wrote the day she turned my age. Disbelieving the birthday that I’ve now passed, the one Jane Smiley called the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. She was so young my grandmother, when she was my age. Ray Bradbury is not young. He is awesome. Listen…

downton abbey. and some smothering dream.

1 CommentFriday • January 20, 2012 • by Buffy

This isn’t a post about Downton Abbey. But it is a post about Wilfred Owen, and he seems to be popping up a lot lately because of Downton. Media Bistro recently published a “Downton Abbey Reading List” and The New York Times even did a piece about Downton and how publishers were using America’s interest in it to promote historical fiction and biographies of the First World War. Both mentioned Owen-Wilfred Owen-a British soldier and poet who wrote, with horrific imagery, about the horrors of war.

*Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is a line from Horace’s Odes. Roughly translated: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” Wilfred Owen was killed in battle one week before the war ended. He was twenty-five years old.

You can see the original manuscript, and other works, at the University of Oxford’s Great War Digital Archive.

regency

0 CommentsMonday • January 9, 2012 • by Buffy

I spent the last few weeks eating pies and watching costume dramas and reading Claire Tomalin’s Dickens Biography. I gained five pounds, discovered the wonderfully squared jawline of a young Douglas Booth, and began to suspect that my favorite Victorian novelist was a wee bit fond of hallucinogenics (see: henbane). I also slept. A lot.

cast your fate to the wind

0 CommentsWednesday • October 5, 2011 • by Buffy

I’ve been listening to the Charlie Brown Christmas Album and various Vince Guaraldi holiday hits since mid-September. They’re all mildly sedative and put the calm in me.

I spent most of last week in the hospital. I didn’t get there on my own merit – a certain someone decided to have a stroke, and there I was. So there I went. Steph was two floors above me, with her own somebody. (Though my somebody was her somebody too.)

We told each other it was okay to cry. Then made a big exaggerated song and dance of it because we were still embarrassed to be doing it at all. We met at 3:00a.m. for cheeseburgers and doughnuts and didn’t even pretend to care about the heart charts on the wall. And we crashed in the 5th floor waiting room more than once and wondered aloud each time whether we were just that tired or “is that an earthquake causing the room to shake?”

As depressing as it all was, there was a certain kind of comfort in being forced to do it together.

I just went to the Apple website. Steve Jobs has died and, all of a sudden, I feel really worn down again because…if Steve Jobs can die, in spite of himself, then anyone can.

But Vince Guaraldi is on the iPod. And that’s something, I suppose.