He said to me, “Son of man, now dig through the wall.” So I dug through the wall, and behold, an entrance.
Upstairs, in the living room with wide windows overlooking the overgrown weeping beech, William tells me about Japanese crickets. If there would be someone right now, this summer, at this minute, to mention Japanese crickets under their breath & without mind, it would be William. William has Shirley Temple curls & a receding hairline, & his glasses automatically tint in the sunlight. When he is listening to someone speak, he uses three methods to show attention:
1. The Hands Clasped Loosely Across His Stomach, Smiling Method.
2. The Hands Clasped Tightly Behind His Back, Smiling Method.
3. The Hands On His Hips, Eyebrows Raised, Lips Pursed, Quizzical Method.
William & I, we are putting an air conditioner into one of the wide windows. It is the end of the day, & it has been a long day. We are being rough with the air conditioner, sealing everything around it with duct tape & saying things like, “Good enough” & “Whatever.” There is a cardinal on the weeping beech, pointed crest & dark red. I do not remember what the males & females look like, but at the time I am not thinking about that. William whistles at the cardinal, feigning bird noises to garner attention. The bird’s attention or my attention, I am not sure. But attention nonetheless.
“Hey, I think it hears you.”
“Yeh. Like the Japanese & their crickets.”
“Ha. What?”
“You don’t know about the Japanese & their crickets?”
This is the kind of question William always asks when I say “What.” It is the kind of question that is able to both make me feel stupid & make me curious at the same exact second. In a way, it is an ingenious question.
“In Japan, they keep a cricket in a box by their front door. If the cricket stops making noise, it means someone’s come into their house. It’s like a watchdog.”
Oh, I get it. It is like a watchdog. I make a mental note to put a cricket by my door tonight. I will not, but I make a mental note to write down that I have made the mental note to do so anyway, because that will add to the story.
William has lived in this area his whole life, & he says words like “warsh” & “idear.” There was a day last week when William & I drove fifteen minutes away in the pick-up to load a refrigerator into the hatch & deliver it back to work because someone was donating it. It had not been an overly difficult task, but we both acted like it had been. William treated us to breakfast at a local coffee shop in his town. There were flamingos everywhere. There were flamingos hanging from the ceiling, inflated, & there were stuffed flamingos sitting on stools in the corners. I had not understood the theme. I had not asked. It was a free breakfast. William swore to the blueberry pancakes, he had said they were the most amazing blueberry pancakes on the east coast. We ate two each, & bacon & coffee, & we drove the refrigerator back to work. He had been right, the pancakes had been unbelievable. I could not believe those pancakes, at the time. I do not know if food is a very interesting thing to read about, but if you go to The Coffee Break in Clinton, Connecticut then you will understand.
At work, because this is a retreat center for old women seeking the spiritual, everyone is in slow motion in the hallways. Because I am too young for this job, far too young & far too remarkably spry, this slow motion does not work. The women wear their hair in one of two very distinct, old styles. There is the proud hairsprayed puff & the sad, lonely mat. In the first of these two hairstyle choices, the hair is injected with hairspray & it responds by puffing out like cotton candy. This could involve tight curls or loose curls. The second of these two choices involves not bothering with one’s hair after one wakes up. This insures a very sad look for the old woman, whose hair remains matted to her scalp. In this case, the hair is usually kept very short. These women most times look like they are dying, & to them I must be like the New Years Eve Baby. Out with the old, in with the new, & all that.
I learn to walk through the hallways quietly when the summer season kicks into full gear. The summer season kicking into full gear means that the week-long silent retreats have started, programs in which women rounding life’s final bend take a vow of silence & probably cry alone in their rooms at night. Maybe I am unfairly guessing about that. In any case, they give the appearance of women who would fear death & in fearing death, cry alone in their rooms at night. My heart is strong, though, my veins prominent but not in the way varicose veins are. They are the veins of someone who will never see Social Security or the eight-track tape coming back in style. They pump the blood of someone with an over-abundance of healthy blood to pump. I may not do everything with ideal thought given to my health, but I do not cry alone in my room most nights. The old women want to be me, & I would let them have their wish at the drop of a hat. I would let them be me if it would mean I would not have to silently nod at them in the hallways, silent because they are silent, despairing because I can read the despair in their eyes.
Marina is not at work today. William says her uncle died apparently, only he puts “apparently” first & says it as if it is a question.
“Apparently, now her uncle died?”
“Jesus. I can’t believe her luck.”
“Yeh. Either that, or some people just like to make drama.”
I will write down that he said this not because I want to exploit it, but because I am not sure whether he is right or wrong.
~~
Tonight there are fireworks. Independence Day is one day away, but tonight there will be fireworks regardless. Work sits along one thousand feet of private beach, the Long Island Sound restless & silent, the water no different than bathwater, were one to enjoy cold baths. On the eastern end of the one thousand feet there is a chain link fence stuck firmly into a collection of large rocks placed there by Man’s hands. On the western end, there is the same thing. Directly in front, the Sound spills into a sky that changes daily, blue to gray to blue to gray. On blue days, I watch Long Island’s interminable skyline. I watch Faulkner’s Island & I wonder if the lighthouse there is still being used. I make a mental note to buy the lighthouse & live there one day. On gray days, the Sound never ends. For all I know, on gray days Long Island & its inhabitants don’t exist. Long Island has never existed. When the Sound never ends, its Island never began. I think about how meaningless this all is, how poetic it will all sound. I think about why things sound poetic even if they are written down, unspoken. Perhaps this will read poetic. This will read poetic until it is spoken. Then it will sound poetic.
~~
But tonight there are fireworks. They are scheduled to begin at nine o’clock, & William has said that from the beach at work, if you are facing southeast, you can watch them. The sound will be off, the explosions slightly delayed due to distance. But they are fireworks regardless.
At ten minutes to nine, I stop writing & I put on a clean shirt. I walk out of my room & down the hall, through the courtyard & out the other end, behind the building where the pointed white gazebo sits. From the top of the steps that lead to the beach, I can see William walking on the sand, holding hands with a woman who I assume to be his Sicilian girlfriend. His daughter is thirteen & is going to be good looking when she gets older, & she is walking twenty paces ahead of her father with a friend of hers. As I watch, the two girls wander farther up the beach until they reach the next set of stairs over from mine. As they wander up them, I look towards the sky. It is starting to get darker out, & if I stand perfectly still for too long the insects think I am perhaps a tree to burrow into. I am never still for long.
I am not certain if they live in a tree on our property, but I have seen a flock of lime green birds flying overheard during the day. Before flight, if I am rearranging the wicker furniture under the gazebo’s pointed top or combing the beach for litter, I can hear them. There is a shrieking noise, collectively rising & falling in a syncopated avian rhythm, & they take sudden flight at an unlikely speed. It is almost beautiful to watch, but nothing that lasts as quickly as their flight is beautiful to me. Perhaps instead it is only striking. A bright green streak, wings tilting to allow the sun to glance sharply off of, then noise & disappearance. I do not know where they come from, & how they came to live in Connecticut is too much for me to think about.
William’s daughter Molly calls out to me from a distance, & I shield my eyes with my hand even though it is getting to be dark out. This must have become the universal sign for “I can’t see you” somewhere along the way, rather than “The sun is in my eyes.”
“You got a new hat!”
“What?”
“Your hat!”
“Oh yea, this is just another one I have. I still have the other one, too.”
“I like the other one better.”
“Heh. Yea, well. Fair enough.”
In ten minutes’ time, I will leave before the fireworks have started. The bugs will become too much for me to stand. In my room, I can hear the blasts as if they are happening directly over my head. After about an hour, there is a series of shorter explosions, brightly colored & accented sharply. There are soaring crescendos, a dive-bomb denouement. The finale. A Laurie Anderson song comes into my head without me noticing, its lyrics disgustingly poignant:
I.
I feel.
Feel like.
I am.
In a burning building.
& I gotta go.
~~
On Friday, on July Fourth, I am asked to play housekeeper. Marina does not come to work, & because Fridays are the days each guest room is cleaned & each bed re-made, & because without Marina there are only two housekeepers, reinforcements are called in. Reinforcements, I discover, are me.
~~
A short & unexpected series of anecdotes concerning the housekeepers:
(a.) At the annual picnic for staff & board members, in which the rain & thunder has driven everyone inside except for William & Gail & myself, the three of us sit under the gazebo’s pointed roof grilling hamburgers & something called “red hots.” When I bite into one, I learn that a red hot is essentially a very spicy hot dog. Gail is the head housekeeper, & although she has only had one or two plastic cups of white wine, she is teetering very close at the edge of tipsy, ready to fall into drunk. Gail has hair the unnatural red of a very pigmented rose, scarlet & full. She wears glasses & complains loudly about how slow the retreatants walk through the hallways. At the grill, under the gazebo, Gail sits on a wicker rocking chair with her legs crossed, both hands all bone & taut skin gripping her cup with the grip of a vice. She turns to me, sitting in a chair next to her, & tells me that she was not always a housekeeper. She tells me she has been to college, was once a twentysomething, once had passions & interests beyond a dust rag.
“I have a degree in education, you know. And I have a Masters in art. I had my own business once, did you know that? Yeah, I created & ran my own business. I have two degrees & I’ve lived my life, & I decided that really what I want to do, is I want to clean toilets for a living. All I want to do after all these years is clean up other peoples’ shit!”
(b.) Georgeta is Romanian, & is blonde with bangs, a waif in the same way Audrey Hepburn was described as a waif. Her voice is deep & it stretches wide when she speaks, her syllables sometimes rolling into each other clumsily. Georgeta is, I think, thirty years old, the permanent worker who is closest to my own age here. At thirty, she has just escaped her twenties. I have known countless people who are thirtysomething. I can relate to Georgeta, maybe she & I will know something of the same generation, can speak of the same topics. But she is Romanian, does not know very much of this historical culture, does not always understand references, pop culture, or the like. In the break room one morning, we are eating crackers with peanut butter & drinking coffee & Georgeta is talking about her dreams. Her English is understandable, but comically incorrect, the tenses mixed & the ends of sentences sometimes rising, as if she were asking a question. “Last night I dream I was in Romania? And I was running in the street where I used to live before I move to America, & there is a house on my street that is on fire. I mean, it is a very big, big fire. And there are people in the street, everywhere they are screaming. And I am stand in front of the house? And I know that I am about to run inside, but then just before I do, I am waking up. Will told me I am shouting in my sleep.” We all laugh a little because we do not know really how to respond to a story like that. But we are eating & we have the day ahead of us & so we laugh a little bit.
(c.) There is also the time Gail was showing me where all the freshly washed linens go, & we exchanged medical horror stories. We had not known each other very well, but as we walked she described breaking her wrist on the job. Her story is non-descript, & she is walking to a steady, incredibly quick beat that no one else hears but her. The way she tells it, the hardest thing to do as a housekeeper with a broken wrist is put a pillow inside a pillowcase. You have to stuff the pillow inside & shake it down all with one hand, is what Gail tells me. She is able to laugh at it now, but I doubt she was able to laugh so readily then. Naturally, I describe in detail for the one millionth time in the past fourteen months the way my left lung spontaneously shrunk in on itself my freshman year of college. I describe the hospital room, the color & weight I lost, the way my mother had had to scrub my knotted & scabbed head in the bathroom sink. I describe the way it feels to have your lung collapse two times in two weeks with no rhyme or reason. Right when I am telling Gail the part about the staples inside my body & the incisions & the scars & how it feels to spend Valentine’s Day in a hospital bed, I think that maybe Gail is wishing she had told a better story. I consider giving her a second chance, but by then we are finished walking & we go our separate ways.
~~
Playing housekeeper yields no great obstacles or triumphs. I clean the rooms better & quicker than even I was expecting, but it is a one-day deal & at lunch Gail tells me I might as well finish the room I am doing & head home early. I do not finish my lunch I am so pleased by this idea of Gail’s.
~~
Quickly, a side road to provide balance to my story & introduce possible new themes:
Some days I discover a self-satisfying tendency to slip into the bedroom they keep for me here just to listen to a song that has been stuck in my head all day. Some days I discover this song is something I can stand just singing to myself as I work without having to listen to the actual song itself, but some days I discover my work suffers to an unnecessary degree unless I just listen to the damn thing once & get it over with. Most days I discover this song is either “Carrying the Banner” from the musical Newsies or “Three to Get Ready” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, which is kind of funny because the latter is a jazz song. The way this one usually works is that the opening piano line, the one the rest of the song plays off of in alternating improvisations & linear patterns, is one that I whistle everywhere I go, at all times.
In May, almost two months ago, I had volunteered for a week at Mar-Lu-Ridge, a summer camp in Maryland, where I had been employed as a photographer last year & where one of my equally newest & closest friends Andrew works as Associate Director. Each day I would do various jobs of mid-level physical labor. These jobs included but were in no way limited to mowing the grass, edging the grass, & blowing leaves off of the grass. At night, Andrew & I would meet up & go out on the town to partake in various activities of low-level importance or energy. These nights included but were in no way limited to going to a church barbecue for “young families & singles,” eating Mexican food on Cinco de Mayo, & playing an exhausting, giddy game of tag with the Executive Director, his wife, & his two young daughters.
Because Andrew is twenty-four & not in his forties, fifties, or sixties, & because he watches movies & is good at video games & has a cat named Tom Clancy & eagerly swaps music with me, he is a breath of fresh air even in memory. Andrew’s beard is full but patchy, his house is a mess, & his iPod plays “It Was a Good Day” at top volume. For all these reasons, I know that Andrew’s generation is the generation I belong to, the generation of smilers & laughers & book readers & thinkers thinking thoughts besides those of skirts or what is underneath them.
During the week when I worked at camp last May, there is a night Andrew & I go to a minor league baseball game. The game is supposed to be a sure thing, & the home team is so confident that tonight is their night that they assure their audience that each ticket can be re-used at a later date if at the end of the night they have not won. Whether or not they win (they do not) does not matter so much as the game I play with Andrew as we watch the baseball fly here & there with only half interest. The game goes like this:
“DA. Da-da-da-da. Da-da-da-da. Da-da-da-da…dadadadada.”
“AC/DC – ‘Back in Black!’”
“Yea! Nice. Okay, your turn.”
“Duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh DUH.”
“Wait wait…shit I know this one. Um…wait, shit. Iron Butterfly is the band. Um…Oh duh. ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.’”
“You got it you got it.”
“Okay wait these are too easy. Try this one: deh deh deh deh DUH duh duh deh deh duh deh duh duh da.”
“Those were too easy? Dude. ‘Superstition,’ Stevie Wonder.”
We then proceed to play air drums & sing the song at top volume, intoning the trumpet parts where necessary, our hands splayed out in front of our faces in full air trumpet formation. This is our game & though it is not too hard we are still champions. Until:
“Wait, what’s that really famous Brubeck song?”
“‘Take Five.’”
“Yea right right right. How does that go again? Shit.”
We both think about it, riding the same wavelength with the same song one half of a centimeter off of the tips of our tongues. We know there is a long drum solo. We know it starts with the piano, then the clarinet comes in. We know how it goes. We just have no clue how it goes. You would think if you saw us, me with my hands over my face, pushing the heels into my eyes & Andrew stroking his full patchy beard, eyebrows dipping low in the middle, you would think we were fascinated by the ball game. But if you know how a song goes, but have no clue how it really goes, could not remember how it really goes if someone had a gun to your head, then you know what it is like.
After the baseball game we go to Wal-Mart because I have already stopped caring about the trend to boycott Wal-Mart & am in desperate need of Hot Pockets for tomorrow’s lunch, & the next day’s. Andrew disappears somewhere while I peruse possible potato chip options. In the check-out line, my food is being scanned by the blip-blip-blip machine, & Andrew re-appears from behind the row of candy bars, in the adjoining lane.
“Da da, da da, da da. Da da, da da, da da.”
“YES! Aaaaah, yessss.”
I come in with the clarinet part, resisting the urge to put my hands down by my ribcage in full air clarinet position. Soon enough, Andrew & I are basking in the glory of remembering a single song as if it were a long-winded memory of a childhood we never shared. Andrew & I, we are young & lively, we are twentysomethings in a Wal-Mart check-out lane reenacting, to the extreme awe of anyone & everyone around, the entire Dave Brubeck Quartet. Between the two of us, we are far too much for the world to take, & oh my God don’t we know it.
A lot of this blog tends to deal with Christianity & spirituality, as is sometimes a little self-evident. I do this because my fascination with Christianity in America is a very big part of the way I view media of all kinds. As someone who is often completely floored at the idea of adhering to any one specific religious doctrine for an entire lifetime, I am fascinated more than anything else by this generation of mine & its separation into the extremes of faith. It seems to me that we have two clearly divided sides pitted against one another: those who are devoted to their God to the point of hatred & sometimes even violence, & those who see this side & associate it with the entirety of Christianity’s long long long history & immediately denounce spirituality of any kind.
I think it is fair to say that very few things have such an eternal & unbreakable connection with all things spiritual than music. At its most rooted, basic moments, music was the fruit of the religious womb, so to say. It began in the steeples, with songs of devotion & praise & mourning. The dawn of man is itself very deeply entrenched in religion, & truly it does not surprise me in the least that music would follow in that route quite closely. Thus, for me to say that I am going to devote one blog post to the historical connection of the spiritual & the musical…that is just too ludicrous for me to think about. Instead, this post - part 2 in the 3-part series of religion’s influences & structures in three separate media - is going to focus on the current spaces that religion occupies in the musical world. Touching for just a little while on an old devotional/spiritual number (& that is only because I love it & you deserve to hear it), this is mostly going to be about modern Christian-influenced artists & song structures.
