Dear Stillness

Dear Stillness,

     My name is Joe, and although I very much doubt that you remember me, we have met several times.  To be fair, it's a bit of a stretch to say that we've "met."  Your carriers, I've met.  You, I've only seen.  I've admired you - marveled, actually.  I long for just a sliver of what you have.

The first time I saw you, when I was seventeen, you seemed utterly foreign to me.  You took the form of my best friend's aunt, a retired teacher from the island of St. Thomas.  You were constantly surrounded by activity.  Your husband laughed and joked incessantly, and your brother was - and I presume still is - a whirlwind of noise and adventure.  Yet, somehow, you maintained your serenity.  You had an elegance, a way of gliding through all the chaos with a calm, warm smile.  I'll never know how you did it.

Gossamer Cumulus Fluff Over St. Thomas - 1995

A few years later, I saw you in the person of my sophomore crush in college.  Everyone thought you were an airhead of some sort, so slow to speak up, so blue-eyed and faraway.  I knew you were more than that - smarter than all of us, and full of the same insecurities and nineteen-year old angst that plagued us all.  You were probably just counting to ten before responding or reacting to anything or anyone, but it came across to me as the kind of stillness that usually accompanies one much older than you were.  Even if you were totally faking your serenity, it was a skill that I lacked, and I envied you for possessing it.

[Photo deleted - release not obtained]

Then, you appeared as a fictitious character, portrayed by a young and relatively inexperienced actress.  I must admit that in 1992, I utterly failed to notice that it was you, but a few months ago, when I took a closer look, there was no doubt.  As portrayed by the not-yet-hated-at-the-time Christina Ricci, little Wednesday Addams in the big-screen adaptation of "The Addams Family" showed me a new facet of you.  You weren't just still - you were cool.  It was as if movement of any kind - physical or emotional or otherwise - was simply beneath you.  Ricci was like ten years old when she did that movie - how did you DO that?  I would be thrilled to have just a day of being so committed to motionlessness.

Finally, you might think that I'd been too busy to have noticed, but your presence in my father did not escape me.  Even before his stroke, you had him sitting quietly at the edge of the action.  Not quite a wallflower - he was perfectly willing to participate in a gathering, and when he did so, he was extremely capable.  But, he didn't need to move, to make a sound, to be heard.  He -you- would just as soon observe, note, learn, and be.  He could do small talk, but by that last decade, even I could see that he abhorred speaking in the interest of the avoidance of silence.  This was, to me, one of his greatest gifts and, Dear Stillness, he got it from you.  It made those few words he did venture to say just that much weightier.  

The Man and His Books

I don't regret the fact that I inherited his temper and his sarcasm - but not his stillness.  However, I do both rue and lament it.  Yes, I stole that line. I'm not as clever as he was, either.

Anyway, Stillness.  I like you.  I admire you.  I want what you have.  I don't even have the excuse of a house full of children, or a high-octane career, but for whatever reason I cannot reach you.  I won't stop trying.  

To be still.  To be at peace.  Just for a moment.  Must be nice.

Love, Joe 

Rock Creek Valley Elementary School.  Snow.  Night.  Stillness.

 

Improved Perspective via The Pull-back Shot

[Fade in.  Interior.  American cubicle-style accounting office.]

Sometimes, the effective execution of my relatively simple job is significantly impeded by errors in the input I receive from others.  I have to stop and waste lots of time and energy tracking down answers to simple questions that shouldn't need to be asked.  This is not unique to my job, and all you need to know about my Monday is that I had a LOT of that, today.

By now you might know that I have coping mechanisms for days like this.  Today, I tried a new one.  While waiting for my myriad answers to questions that shouldn't need to be asked, I looked up and picked out a faraway speck on the National Geographic world map - a freebie that came with one of [Maris]'s multiple 2012 panda calendars.  This part is not new.  I often try to put myself somewhere else.  As Laurie Anderson said, "Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better."

As a kid, I would find myself on the first day of school, only days removed from our vacation trip, trying to picture what was happening at that moment in Rehoboth Beach.  Back then, I'm sure not a whole lot was happening in Rehoboth Beach, after Labor Day.  Once I had seen the Caribbean, I could close my eyes and see the  places I'd been - beaches, bars, restaurants, the house in which we stayed.  I knew which places would be quiet, which ones would have a band and a cruise ship crowd, and so on.  When weather.com arrived on the scene, my vision could be even more complete.

Today, the first speck upon which my gaze landed was Israel/Palestine, where the pace of killing-each-other's-children-over-bits-of-dusty-earth-and-so-much-less has recently picked up, again.  I knew that while I sat there in my cloth-covered work box in Maryland, mothers and fathers over there were crying themselves to sleep over the decimation of their lives, as their midnight worked its way toward one in the morning.

Obviously, that made me sad.  I wondered if there was a rule that dictates that all expansions of perspective had to result in melancholy.  So I pictured Rehoboth, cold and quiet, but not as dead as it used to be by November.  I saw St. Thomas, with the first of the week's cruise ships tied to the docks of Charlotte Amalie, their international passengers scattered about the island, muttering at the immeasurable slowness with which the service personnel moved.  I became aware - or at least more aware than usual - of all the activity taking place elsewhere on my planet at that exact moment.  At any given second in time on earth, someone is being murdered, someone is giving birth, someone is losing a baby, someone is drunk, someone is blowing an interview, someone's getting arrested, beaten-up, fired, hired, high, sober, dressed, asked out, inspired, crushed, rewarded, passed by, late, early, startled, fed or - just now - hearing his stomach growl.  All of this and so much more, all over the world.

I pulled my imaginary camera shot back further, and all those activities melted into a din, loud at first, but growing soft and muddy as I backed away, leaving a view of a quietly humming blue-and-white sphere, set as a jewel against the black of space.  I thought, why stop there?  There's a little earth-made robot SUV on Mars - right now - and it's doing something at this very moment.  At sixty-ish million miles, my picture was a little fuzzy - I had to fill in some of the details - but I could see it.  Human-controlled activity, farther away than any human has been from this world - happening right now.

Why stop there, and why stop with human activity?  I always tried to picture who was driving my favorite blue bumper-car at Funland when I was home, who was now living in my first college dorm room, who was sitting at [Maris]'s and my table at Louie's Backyard in Key West, and so on.  What about Jupiter?  Jupiter is spinning in space as I type this.  Stuff is going on, there.  Storms are raging, thousands of years old and larger than our planet.  Somewhere, WAY out there, the Voyager spacecraft are hurtling at inhuman speeds into interstellar space, still calling home. 

I pulled back still farther.  With 200 to 400 billion suns in our galaxy and at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe (possibly many times that figure), I have no doubt that there are, right this very second, other worlds with intelligent life. I'm sure it's unimaginably different from human life, and I have little doubt that any of it is exactly where we are, technologically, but I'll bet somewhere, somebody is close enough to be considered at least a distant cousin.  On that world, as I type this, someone's being born, getting pregnant, stealing something, learning something, fighting over what to others looks like nothing, laughing, sleeping, winning, dying etc..

My perspective was improved, but because I never know when to quit, I took my tracking shot back one last step.  Beyond the lives of beings, nations and planets lie the lives of stars.  Right now, someone's sun is exploding.  Right now, galaxies the size of our own are colliding with each other in multimillion-year spectacles of violence and death on a scale that cannot be expressed in human terms.  Right now, in the Orion nebula and millions of others like it, stars are being born.  

It's taking place very far from here, and incredibly slowly, by our standards, but stuff is happening elsewhere.  Massive stuff.  With my brain struggling to get its feeble paws around that, my spreadsheet with the missing $20 payment became so very manageable.  I, at least, did not have to give birth to any solar systems, today.

[Fade to black]

It's All Fun And Games Until Someone Gets His Neck Bitten Open By An Undead Neighbor

Hello, my wonderful and loyal reader or readers! Today, I am feeling an overwhelming need to post some drivel here. Unfortunately, I'm also feeling just oh so lazy. Well, not as much lazy as just too busy. So, remember that little NaNoWriMo novel I wrote in November? "Worcestershire In The Embalming Fluid!" Here's another tiny taste, lovingly extracted from an early chapter, long before the main character (or the author, for that matter) has any clue as to what is happening back home...

* * *

Two days later, as they left Magens Bay in St. Thomas, Bill amused himself for an hour by playing with his old AM/FM Walkman. Thanks to a phenomenon called "atmospheric skip," he was able to tune in the all-news WTOP from Washington, DC. He chuckled as Lisa Baden reported on the horrid traffic on the American Legion Bridge, Doug Hill warned of the coming of the first frost of the season and both of them did their best to tolerate the utter inanity of Mike Moss and Bruce Alan. Today, like most days, they were howling with exaggerated laughter at the slightest provocation - intentional or otherwise - by their supporting cast of imbeciles. Kristi King was excitedly, amateurishly "reporting" on the unspeakably alarming outbreak of "some kind of rabies-like disease" among the squirrel population of the Annapolis-Baltimore-Washington region. Speaking to her listeners as if reading a storybook to a roomful of four-year olds, she attempted to explain that similar outbreaks were being reported in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio, and that the Centers for Disease Control was investigating. No - not funny, per se, but Mike and Bruce thought it the most side-splittingly hilarious thing they had ever heard in their lives, ever. "Squirrels biting each other - HOHOHOHOHOHOHOHO..." Just as Bill's Walkman was letting go of the signal, he heard Ms. King mention, almost as an afterthought, that at least two people had been bitten in our region, and that one had died.

Bill put the Walkman into his backpack of electronics. (Well?) woofed Doug, returning to the deck from his doggie bed below.

"I got WTOP from home, buddy! I know, right! It's weird to hear their voices down here, looking at St. Thomas. Sounds like there's something wrong with the squirrels, back home." he explained.

"Bark! (Squirrels!) Doug's tail waved enthusiastically.

"Man - I'll bet you miss the squirrels. I hadn't even thought of that, dude. Well, maybe we can hit a couple of nice beaches along the leeward islands, and you can chase some birds or children or something." Bill said, patting Doug's head.

Doug woofed appreciatively.

"Would you like that, Dougie? You wanna go to the beach? You wanna go herd some children and chase sandpipers and run around and bark and jump in the water and (sniff, sniff) ugh - maybe have a real bath someplace, so you look good for the girl beach dogs. And so you don't smell quite so much like a sewer. Sound good? What do you think, buddy!"

Doug barked his approval.

* * *

There. Now I feel like I wrote something tonight. Everybody wins! And no, you may NOT have those six minutes back. Sorry. That's life. I do have a couple of things cooking, but at least one of them is not fun or the slightest bit funny, and that stuff is always hard for me to get up for. But I'll try.

Back soon, but possibly not before Christmas. So, Merry Christmas, reader! Or readers! Peace...

What Happened On The Plaid Pirate?

Indian summer 1986 had arrived at Montgomery College, and I was sitting outside Science West, basking in the unseasonable November warmth, happy to be getting one last look at legs, when Deandra rushed up behind me and took ten years off my life. “Dude!” she yelled into my left ear. This was our little pet greeting for each other. It wasn’t always shouted, but we typically tried to put as much urgency and alarm into it as we possibly could. Of course, this was easier when we came upon one another outdoors, and the element of complete surprise was a bonus Deandra adored. She gave me a moment to recover my bottle of “New Coke,” which was rolling away, embarrassed, as quickly as it could. I gave her my best look of wounded terror and held up my bottle of caramel-colored foam.

“I love you!” she chirped.

“So you say,” I muttered. “What’s up? You ready to get this Psyche quiz over with?”

“No. But listen – when I said ‘DUDE,’ I really meant it. Dude, you are SO not going to believe what I just heard!”

“There’s a bomb threat in Science West and our quiz is canceled?” I asked hopefully.

“No.”

“What a crock. I called one in! Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. Guess again.”

“You’re not going to give me a hard time about calling in a bomb threat?”

“No. I know you didn’t. Guess again.”

“Woman, I have no idea. You’re pregnant!” Dee punched me. Hard. She was exceptionally strong. I don’t know why I could never remember that before I’d say something punch-worthy. I was just glad she never hit me in the face.

“Okay, what’s your favorite place in the world?” she prompted.

“Your bedroom.”

She reared back with another fist of fury, then paused and tilted her head at me. “You’ve never been in my bedroom.”

“That doesn’t mean it can’t be my favorite place.” I cupped my hand over her raised fist and held my free arm over my face, just in case.

“Focus, jerk! What’s our favorite place on Earth, even though we’ve never been there together? Think tropical…” She was patient enough to be my buddy but we’d have certainly killed each other if we had ever tried actually dating.

“Virgin Islands?” I knew I was right.

“Yes! And are you familiar with the Plaid Pirate pontoon party raft?”

“Yeah. Haven’t been on it yet, but I’ve heard it’s pretty cool. I’ve seen it a few times. What happened? Did it sink or something?”

“Better! Too bad you took so long guessing – we have to go take our stupid quiz now. I’ll have to tell you after class.” She was clearly disappointed to have to hold on to her news for another hour.

“I’m gonna spend the whole hour wondering what the hell you’re talking about. Can you just give me the short version?” I asked, following her into Science West.

“No. What does Gestalt mean?”

“Dude – the whole quiz is about Gestalt theory! Did you even read the chapter?” I scolded.
“Not really. What’s it mean?”

“Uh, I’m not sure. Something about patterns or something.”

She put her head on my shoulder as we entered the classroom. “We’re so screwed.”

“Do you still love me?” I asked.

“No.”

Psychology 101 was not a terribly difficult class, but Deandra and I made it tougher than it needed to be by chatting too much. We had hit it off on the first day, when somehow we ended up learning that each of us had recently been dumped by someone who had gone away to school. We also had both just returned from separate vacations in the Virgin Islands, plus we both worked part-time at video rental stores. We had lots of common ground. At first I think we had both seen our relationship as a potential romantic rebound, but that sense dissolved into a comfortable platonic friendship before a single date could be proposed. Now we were buddies, sharing our romance woes (and all sorts of other woes) like a couple of chatty girls. My knack for turning potential romances into this kind of friendship was beginning to deeply annoy me. But Deandra and I had fun just hanging out together, drinking and dancing platonically at “our bar” The Wreck Room and occasionally pretending to be way more of a couple than we really were. We usually acted “couple-ish” when some unsavory male person was hitting on Dee, although on several occasions I think she did it just to torment me.

After our quiz we decided to blow off the rest of the day’s classes and sit in the amphitheatre over by the Humanities building so that Deandra could tell her story. All the way across campus I tried to get her to start talking.

“It was hijacked by Libyans?” I asked.

“No. Just wait.”

“You won a free trip for two to St. Thomas, including airfare, ground transportation, hotel accommodations and complimentary passes for the Plaid Pirate, and you’re taking me with you?”

“No. Wait.”

“The Pirate called, and they want you to return that stolen grass skirt?”

“No. Wait for it.”

“They’ve banned alcohol on the Pirate, and now no one wants to go on it?” I pressed.

“That’s stupid. Just wait a minute.”

“I know – that was a little far-fetched. I got it – they’ve offered you a waitressing job, and you want me to move there with you so you’ll have someone around to pretend to be your boyfriend when unruly Eurotrash tourists hit on you?”

“Dammit, you guessed it!” she answered sarcastically.

“Yep, and let me just go on record as saying that I will base my decision as to whether or not to accept your invitation solely on the length of the grass skirt you’ll be wearing.”

“Grass skirt? They said all their girls have to wear bikini bottoms and tied-off wet t-shirts. Good enough?” she teased.

“Hmm. Well, yes. I suppose that will do. Is the water cold?” We finally reached a vacant spot in the amphitheatre and Deandra turned around with her “time to get serious” look. She dropped her books on the bench, grabbed my shoulder and pulled me down next to her.

“The owner of the Pirate has a price on Jimmy’s head.” she said with all the humor of a tax auditor.

“What? Jimmy from my Erol’s? Jimmy, who just last Saturday at The Wreck Room you told I haven’t hit on you because I’ve discovered I’m gay? That Jimmy?”

“Yes. They want to kill him!”

“What the hell for? I know he was in the Islands last spring, but he didn’t even mention the Plaid Pirate, let alone making anyone want to kill him!” I was stunned. Jimmy was a big teddy bear, very easygoing – downright placid.

“I’m not exactly sure. Apparently he caused some major incident on the boat when there were all sorts of celebrities and dignitaries aboard and some old football player is suing the owners for like a million bucks or something. Jimmy’s been living in the back of The Wreck Room for weeks.”

“That hardly seems like something to murder him over. I don’t think lawsuits against bars – floating or otherwise – tend to get very far.” I said.

“Well, supposedly he got video of the whole thing that would be really damaging to just about every big shot who was there, should it ever get played for the public. These people are seriously pissed off.”

“I don’t get it. Why bother killing Jimmy? Shouldn’t it be the tape they’re after?”

“That’s just it – the tape was in Jimmy’s rented Erol’s Betacam, which he returned to the Wheaton Erol’s with the tape still inside! By the time the Pirate people got in touch with him, the camcorder had been rented out again, but the manager at the Wheaton store said the tape was making its way around to a bunch of the store managers. There’s even a rumor that some copies have been made.”

“Whoa. Wait a minute – where did you hear all this?” I suddenly had the feeling that I was either listening to a very gullible girl or totally being had.

“Curtis told me.” she said with a slightly defensive air.

“Oh great – Curtis, the BARTENDER at The Wreck Room? Hardly a reliable source, Dee.”
“You can ask Jimmy. He says it should all be worked out within the next couple of days. Has he been calling in sick at Erol’s?”

“Yeah, but he was there on Sunday. He did leave through the back door, though… Well I’ll be damned. Big Jim, caught up in a big ugly incident with the rich and famous. We’re both scheduled to work tonight. I’ll give him the third degree. I can’t believe he would tell Curtis and not me.”

“Okay. You have to tell me everything tomorrow.” Deandra squeezed my arm, the playful urgency returning to her voice, “Take notes or something.”

“Okay, but then you have to tell Jimmy that I’m totally not gay and that the reason you and I stopped having sex was because it was becoming too time-consuming and affecting our grades.”

“We’ve never had sex.”

“Maybe in your mind we haven’t.” I said.

“If that’s what you want, you’re really not helping your cause right now, buddy.”

“I know, I know. I’ll get the scoop on Jimmy and the bad guys and call you tomorrow. Think about that waitressing gig, though. I think it could be very beneficial to both of us.”

“I’m sure it would, dude. Later.” She kissed my cheek, got up and crunched away through the dried leaves that covered the path. I watched her, mentally counting down the six seconds it would take for her to look back and catch me watching her walk away. Right on schedule, she peeked over her shoulder, smiled the smile of a girl about to blush and continued on her way.


“DUDE? Deandra? If you’re there, pick up. Pick up! Damn. Here’s the deal – some new Erol’s manager – Dan something – got Jimmy his tape back, plus like 4 copies of it. Swears that’s all of them. Jimmy handed them over to some goons who came into the store tonight. The lawsuit will supposedly be dropped, and Jimmy’s gonna live. They said as long as no other copies of the tape turn up, he’s cool. He’s not convinced, though, so he’s gonna move away and won’t say where. He said to say goodbye to you and Curtis and everybody at The Wreck Room. But first, he told me more about what happened on the Pirate, and it is seriously messed up. Call me, dude. Later.”