Girl with dog and torch

I was a little hesitant to schedule engagement photos–I’d never done it before, and it seemed like it might be a little cheesy.  How could we spend two hours…doing what?…posing?  Kissing?  Showing off my ring?

As it turned out, it went wonderfully.  We had to do it at eight o’clock in the morning, because I have a big conference this week at work, at four museums, for which I’ve been planning for months.  Had to get right to work Monday morning.

So M. and I met our photographer and rode the bus up to a park near the GW Bridge; the park has a miniature version of the bridge in it.  It was pretty cold, and not exactly sunny, but it was great fun running around the park.  And yes, we kissed a lot.  After a while there, we rode up to the Cloisters.  The whole area was almost empty, but the flowers and flowering trees were in full bloom, so we got lots of great photos around them.  For one, we laid on our bellies in front of a yellow flowering bush, and the photographer took a picture through the branches at us. 

She asked us to talk about our wedding plans, and how we met.  It was so much fun to just focus on _us_, on our love for each other and how much joy we feel when we’re together.  And the photographer took 700 photos!  Which is exciting, because I’m sure that means there will be a few good ones.

Last weekend, with spring in full, full bloom, M. and I trained down to NoHo to walk around the neighborhood.  One of his teaching colleagues is an artist who works with printmaking and mixed media; two of her pieces were being displayed in the Art Walk.

It was so great to be out in the city.  The HealthcareNOW offices are down there, so I was familiar with the neighborhood, but had only been down there in the heat of summer.  With the trees in bloom, even the brick buildings looked more beautiful.  This city has so totally grown on me.

I’m recovering from it.  I’ve had the longest, strangest dreams.  I dreamt an entire college class, with syllabus, and short fiction reading, and everything.

First I was late for it.  Then I arrived, in pajamas, but syllabus and handout in hand.  Wooden desks, the kind without a full desktop, just the side.  Schools that use these have one “lefty” version per room, where the desk curves around from the left-hand side instead.  I had a standard version in my dream; the desks were in a circle, the professor–Rob Cobb–was already seated.  The class was on Southern [American] fiction (exactly the kind of class I would like to take.)

I tried to apologize to the professor for missing so many classes, I opened my colorful folder (contrasting colors inside from outside) and pulled out my reading.  I began to read–I was reading part of the short story and it was good.  My lucid mind said, “Remember this story, this sentence; you can write it when you wake up, and it will be like discovering a new story.”

Then, as dreams will, a flood began to happen, and I wasn’t in the classroom, I was in an old rickety house, on an old bed, holding my story but in a brand new location.  And I can’t remember anything after that.

I don’t remember any of the story I was reading.  How fantastical was it that my mind would create a piece of fiction for me to read from, in my mind?  How sad is it that I can’t remember it at all?

Once, coming back from Haiti, my dear friend K. got really, gravely ill, and we thought she had malaria.  Her fevers and fever-dreams were incredible.  We were worried, but she said, “At least I can do good writing when the malaria comes.”  As if she was Hemingway, or some writer stricken with the kinds of fevers that bring genius.

Apples.  I know that it’s spring, and berry time.  I’m ready to make berry tarts, folds, crumbles, and buckles.  But my love of loves isn’t sure he likes berry desserts, so I’m hanging onto apples–the fruit of fall–for long enough to make an apple pie this weekend.

I made bread last night, braided loaves with asiago, salt, butter, rosemary, and thyme kneaded in.  They turned out beautifully, rose full and fat, and kept their curvy plaits.  I would have taken photos, but they were all eaten up, used in Chapel for communion and then shared immediately.  But I’m making them again, maybe next weekend.  For now, though, it’s all about the apples.

A little after eight o’clock this evening, my floormate D. came into the Common Room to tell us all that there had been (another) car accident down in the intersection below our floor.  It’s apparently a tricky intersection; there have been many car accidents there over the two years I’ve been here.  I sleep on the Quad side, so I have a very quiet room, but people on the Broadway side speak often of accidents.

We could hear the sirens then, and hear them pull up below us.  We kept on with conversation, and dinner, and watching basketball.

About a half hour ago, two police officers (but in regular clothes, just with big badges clipped to their coats) came to the floor.  I was in the kitchen washing dishes, and heard the female officer ask the three who were back in the living room their names and personal information, and tell them what had happened.  I couldn’t hear over the water, and didn’t want to stop and go in, for fear of being nosy, or of being disrespectful (me wanting to know the details versus what might be a tragedy).

After the officer moved along the hall, I came back in and sat down.  She saw me out of the corner of her eye: “Where’d she come from?”  Pleasantly, warmly she said it.  I said that I had been washing dishes, and didn’t want to be nosy.  She said (again, warmly, kindly to me), “This is a time when we need people to be nosy.”  She said that there had been (another) robbery attempt outside, and the robbery victim, frightened and trying to escape, ran into traffic and was hit by a car.  She said he was in bad shape, and might not make it.  Had I heard yelling?  Arguing?  Seen anything?  She took my name, school, room number, age, and phone number.

She left again.  We sat in silence, thinking about the robbery victim, the robber running away, the poor person driving downtown on a normal Friday night.  K. came in and took my hand; she looked sick.  She walked me silently down to the far kitchen, at the end of the hall, and made me look out the window, down into the street.  We could see the blood: a lot of it.  It was more red, and brighter than I would have expected to be able to see, from this (seven floor) height.  I also saw a shoe, and a bag of groceries.

I feel guilty for looking.  I feel bad that what I saw is so indelible.  It’s linked to the badge on the officer’s coat, which I couldn’t stop looking at, except that I was trying to be serious and respectful, and look at her while I spoke to her.  I kept thinking of all of the episodes of Law & Order I watch, and how many pretend interviews I’ve seen, just like this one, and pretend accidents, even filmed here at Union.

We’re afraid it will turn out to be a student here.  Everyone who voices this sentiment says, in one breath: “Not that it’s not bad enough, being someone we don’t know…but,” they hope it’s not someone we know.

I don’t know what else to say.  Probably tomorrow they’ll e-mail around a police report, with bare details.  Probably not the name of the victim, though, although I guess if it’s a classmate I might already know.

I surf handbags on Etsy while watching Law&Order in my pajamas.

(From top to bottom: Paco Lupe, Daphnenen, TheLeatherStore, Daphnenen.  All on Etsy.com)

It rained all morning.  All I wanted to do was burrow in and watch movies on Bravo! and TNT.  But alas, my thesis is due tomorrow.  So I had to buckle in and work.  I went out once, to see what time the stationer’s opens in the morning–what time will I bind the copies of my thesis for my readers.  By that time in afternoon, it was no longer rainy

I don’t know where the last six hours have gone; all I’ve done is footnotes.  I still don’t have a title, either.  I want it to be two words, something short, like a good novel title. I’m worn out by typical thesis titles, all anchored by the ubiquitous colon.  The Power of Now: Immediacy and Hope in New Testament Healings. Finding Their Voices: Call and Response in Israelite Travel.  Neither Saint nor Angel: the Defiance of Holymaking in Postmodern Relgious Narrative.

(I made those all up just now.  Blah, blah, blah, I think: but they resemble what everyone will be turning in tomorrow.  I want POW! on my title page.)

In sum, it was a day full of typing, a brief shot of sunshine, and one trip across the street.

I watched just the first few minutes of the movie Hoosier earlier tonight.  The camera follows the car as Gene Hackman’s character drives down blacktopped roads through Indiana. 

It looked so much like home to me that I was immediately riveted, and flooded with homesickness.  I know those fields and intersections, I’ve driven past those ditches and barns.  I used to play the Cranberries in the tape deck when I drove out to my grandparents’ farm from town, because the Irish sound of her voice and that band seemed the only thing I could find to capture the way water looked standing in the rows of corn, or the way all my eye could see was fields, with a lone houses dotting the distance.  On the blacktop, with no street signs and long, straight shots, you could drive as fast as you could bear.  I learned exactly where I needed to start slowing down, on the Blairsville Blacktop, before I had to come to a stop.

The Blairsville Blacktop ended at at T with the main road into town (if you turned the other way, you drove out of Hamilton County into Fairfield, or to the interstate–after passing the two package stores on the county line, and rounding the curve where the gypsy kept the junkyard…but I digress).  When I was younger, there was an old house falling down right at the intersection.  During the night (no streetlights), you could see its dark, hulking shape standing against the open field, and you’d have a sense of when to stop.

When I was a junior in high school, they tore the house down (finally) and plowed the yard into the fields that surrounded it.  During the Fall Festival, I was on top of the Ferris Wheel, in the middle of the town square, when I suddenly had a small vision: that my friends were going to be in a car accident.  I pictured the group of them, all boys from my Scholastic Bowl team, and the car, and the danger.

Immediately, I prayed.  I prayed specifically that God would keep and protect them.  A little while later, I heard sirens on their way out of town. It turned out there were two car accidents that night.  One of them was my group of friends.  They had been driving down the Blairsville Blacktop, careening along, and–without the black shape of the old house to signal the end of the road–they had driven right into the intersecting road, into another car.  The car was totalled, but everyone was safe.

Now, every time I happen to be driving from the farm (which isn’t often, anymore, less than once a year), I think about the old house, about speeding, about my old high school crushes and the Ferris Wheel crammed onto the tiny courthouse lawn.  (One Fall Festival, they brought a tired, dusty-but live-monkey, but that’s another story.)

By the time I was that age, old enough to drive, I was beginning to realize that most of the world was not like the place where I lived.  I had already stolen T.S. Eliot from the library, and fallen in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald.  But I could still pay attention to the fields, and the way the sun struck water in the ditches, and shadows water towers made.  I’m glad, looking back, that I didn’t scorn Hamilton County, that I didn’t mock it with a faux-worldly eye. 

Ahh: Spring.  The garden quadrangle I usually enter daily, even briefly, has been shut down for a few months now; one of the spires that rise above it was in danger of falling.  Just in time for Spring, it was reopened.  I happened to walk through it, in a bit of a hurry, earlier this evening.

 Rushing, rushing, sending a text message, wondering about the time, hurrying up to start typing again—and.

I was outside.  Surrounded by old stone buildings, in a strange evening light that I had forgotten.  The church bells rang “seven” and I stopped what I was doing.  I looked at the grass, at a chalk drawing on the sidewalk, at the greens and browns in the light.  I looked up at my bedroom window, above everything.  I smelled the wet air.

I know it’s cliched to remember how we forget to notice the details, but it’s true: I was suddenly wholly grateful for where I live, and the beauty that surrounds me.  I saw a mossy tree trunk, and I literally wanted to touch my lips to it, to feel how cold and fresh it was.  (I did not, but I did lick a piece of pottery from the Welsch coast earlier this evening, and it tasted of salt.  So that is enough tasting for one day.)

Check out Dwight Hopkins on CNN*, being interviewed on a panel about Black Liberation Theology.  He was right on, but I really felt that the interviewer was clearly, clearly biased.  When he read aloud from Trinity Church’s website, the tone of his voice when he said, “…black…” and “…Africa…” was clearly racist.  He seemed angry, but why?  He has all of the power, and is dismissive of the expert on his panel–why can’t he be gracious, thoughtful, and genuinely inquiring?

And then, to add insult to injury, they had white women talking about “how far we’ve come since the Civil Rights movement” and to say that “certainly Reverend Wright’s comments were inflammatory.”  First of all, why did it pan immediately to the white women?  I am seriously not interested in what they have to say.  They are still in the positions of power.

And finally, the further insulting poll question: “Black liberation theology: healing or hurtful?”

Time to segue: shock and awe: the death mark in Iraq (for American soldiers only) has hit 4,000.  As the commentator put it, “almost difficult to conceive.” Indeed.

*You’ll have to google it yourself–it just ran on the telly and isn’t up yet on CNN.com  I’ll link it later if I find it.