I imagined, over dinner in a nearby sushi place, making a title that somehow described the sounds the heavy winds make when they tune themselves on the wire fences they installed on the Golden Gate Bridge just before the pandemic.
The sounds that come off that bridge at night! At first you could find poetry in it. Those first few hums and then they grow in height, if that were a way to describe sound. They claw their way ashore and hit the unfortunate residents of the Presidio first. Then the Marina. Then they finally make their way, like wayward dogs, through the windswept tents of the homeless on Market street and into my backyard. When I step outside at night, it’s cold. Always cold. And the wind, relentless. The songs of the bridge, also relentless. They keep talking about taking those fences down. I forget what they were for. Extra guardrails so people wouldn’t hurl themselves off the walkway on either side into the path of trucks and cars? But why when the jump into oblivion is right there?
The journey to Ireland continues its own plodding and aggressive march into my life. I have to make it so in case I am possessed by the Fear and suddenly change my mind. Everything about this is about pushing it so far, I have no opportunity to turn back. It’s occurred to me several times that if I were younger, I would be salivating. Chomping at the bit. Throwing everything in the dumpster and setting it on fire with an over the shoulder throw of a lighter into the pool of gasoline underneath and not looking back as my life burns.
I worry about my possessions some times, even though most advice I’ve received is to NOT worry about things. Yet, I need to make sure my books are safe. I was going through them last night, like children soon to be sent to the orphanage. Thumbing through them, enjoying random passages. I can’t part with them and the seven years they languished in a storage shed in Massachusetts while I paid $75 a month, it now seems worth it. Though I questioned that when I flew back there from SF to fetch them. I flew into Boston, rented a car and drove to the hot, steamy summer outback of Western Massachusetts to find what state they were all in after sitting there for over 7 years. That was exactly 8 years ago, for it was Memorial Day weekend when I flew back there to get my life back and bring it home like the remains of something lost then recovered from a distant land or something.
Those 7 years where I yet again had to reinvent myself, was sick with the Swine Flu, ate Bahn Mi sandwiches from a small Vietnamese deli in White Center because they were a cheap source of food. And looked and looked for work. It was 2009. There was no work.
I moved four times while in Seattle. All the while, the books weighed on me. I could recall the titles. Which ones I had burrowed into for inspiration. Which ones were signed first editions. Which ones had liner notes. Also, my pilot logbooks were in there and they also became vital to recover. All those years working as a pilot, until one day, I cut my losses and walked away. I was 27 or 28 when my last logged flight was with my father on a month long journey to Yellowknife, CA far north in the Northwest Territories. We flew to the Arctic Circle in a pure floats seaplane. It was a trip that at turns was frustrating and terrifying and full of awe. So I had to get those logbooks back.
And when I finally had the many boxes of them delivered to my new San Francisco address, the relief was so tangible. Here I was, after a decade of absolute struggle, here I was home. A close friend had died and made sure I had her beautiful flat and now my books had a place to dwell. I lovingly put them in five ceiling to floor book cases at the foot of my bed. They are the first things I see when I wake up. I’m home, I used to think, and they made it home with me.
But this desire for travel is still a porous dream through which the strange daily mundanities of my own life drain through. S., the Czech lead engineer at work leans into our Zoom call the other day and raises his hand, “Some bee, it stung me when outside” and his hand is swelling and he holds it up to me like Keat’s “This Living Hand”, (see here it is, I hold it towards you) but already my mind is gone to the time when my ex-husband Jiri and I drove to Kutna Hora and we stood on a medieval overlook and the winter sun danced off the 12th century walls and strangely a bee aggressively buzzed us while we squeezed in a few pictures before fleeing to the car.
We stopped at a small village after that and I ordered a “Salad” and what came was a dish of winter pickled vegetables and Jiri laughed at my surprise, my ignorance.
And S. then interrupts this flash memory and says “no one knows when we get the “jab”. Some say Sputnik is bad, tainted.” He shrugs with that same look of disdain all Czechs seem to have and says “I may wait many months more but America is back to being America.”
So part of my carefulness about this next journey is just how keenly aware of time and its fastidiousness I’ve become. I see people whom I only remember as being 32 now turning 60. I see images of my face collapsing in 10 or 15 years and becoming unrecognizable. I wonder to myself if this is a mid-life crisis, but then if that were true, one could argue my entire life was a mid-life crisis.
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When Djuna Barnes was living in England she wrote, “Everything we can’t bear in the world, someday we find in one person, and love it all at once.” This is how I think of place. Courting a new place. Deeply stalking it and secretly framing it from afar. Like in Lithuania, if we are somewhere where we don’t intuit the speech or language, we must rely on ourselves to intuit it. To imagine ourselves safe or seen or accepted or welcomed. Or, as in the case of the questionable Russians my friend and I encountered late one night in a Vilnius cafe, safe enough to make it out alive through a darkened square with one of them following us and my friend and I stumbling in unfamiliar territory back to our hotel.
The Polish HR woman today said, “You’ve never BEEN to Ireland before? You gonna love it. And when you get here, I buy you Irish Coffee and we will have fun talking about America and the differences here.” I did tell her I had been to Poland once, that it was a dream of mine to always see Poland and then for my 49th birthday, I went one time with my best friend and we rode a train and got off in Poznan and stayed for two nights. “Yes,” she agreed, “Poznan, a truly beautiful place.” Of course, I thought of when I was there and our taxi driver showed us where the Gestapo headquarters used to be. How it was a school now.
All of those travels are woven into me now.
The edges of the unknown are being pried open by the same kind of wind that sings to us every night from the Golden Gate Bridge here in San Francisco. That loud, siren like hum and wail of our own misguided, yet hopeful, engineer. It’s a very human thing to create an accidentally poetic moment that careens out of control. Paradise, may be for me, any place that’s not home. Not settled in convenience. Somewhere I stumble into and find in a half dream of life and growing old and mitigating disappointment, sorrow, loneliness and a modicum of hope.
Djuna Barnes also wrote, “An image is a stop the mind takes between uncertainties.” And I am here in one uncertainty going towards a new image. A new place to dwell. A new spark, so to speak.