CAR TROUBLE
I sent a letter the other day. Not one of the ones with a stamp and an envelope spritzed with No.5. It was sent by email and was an eleventh-hour offer of a love affair. I didn’t expect a reply, but one came anyway. I knew what it was going to say, but I hadn’t anticipated reading it in a bereft moonscape somewhere in North St. Louis.
But it wasn’t completely terrible; I like the way the moon looks – its pale powderiness, the spherical Saint-Exupériness of how – if you walk a little ways over there – you tip off into darkness.
And I never imagined that when I received my TBNT, I’d be on my way to the car pound because Willy had fallen asleep at the wheel, blown through a stop sign and hit the curb inches from someone pulling weeds. Willy can be so drowsy that way! But I hate midday and I don’t like sunshine. People attribute it to my drizzly origins.
“Ah, well, you’re from London,” they say, all-knowing. But it isn’t as simple as that.
I’ve decided, after years of thought about this contrarian trait of mine, that it may have something to do with pathetic fallacy. In other words, a self-concerned need to have the weather mirror my inner tumult. Never mind that the picnic’s on Saturday.
In other words, I wanted Orkney in North St. Louis that day; I didn’t want Ibiza. I didn’t want sun slicing off razor wire, or plain old barbed wire snagging the brazen noonday light as sheep’s wool on a twig.
No, I didn’t want it. I’d have felt far better if rain had come to meet me, and my wipers had had to whip. I wanted those lachrymose dramatics as I sat there beneath that mean, categorically blue sky. But rain would have been too easy, a little too comfortable.
Up until then, I’d been alone – turning left and right in my bougie little Jeep, sore-thumbing my nervy-white-person way on things I wish I could call ‘roads,’ and past woefully erstwhile structures (schools etc.) strangled back to the Ooze by muscular creeper.
But then I turned a corner and came upon a traffic jam. Up ahead, a train was inching by, groaning and clanking on heat-buckled tracks like some purgatorial Reaper in chains. And that’s when my phone dinged and hope (typically and cruelly eternal) dashed to the tip-top of some completely and utterly obsolete grain elevator, and started dinging rocks off my bonnet.
But then, as my scalp peeled back and I was wriggling from my skin, Eric Fromm popped to mind, and so did Pat. Those two pretty much said the same thing. Fromm: “Sparing oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.” And Pat, a little crisper: “Sit in the feeling.”
I think dear old Pat was eventually awarded the Medal of Honor and Sufferance for her part in my journey, for sitting quite still on a chintz chair as I tried to undo the knots of my past ie. the unexamined motivations driving me around and around the same track, avoiding – yes, at all cost – anything that didn’t feel good.
So, thanks to her, “Sit in the feeling” is as common a parlance in my house as “Don’t pee on the seat.” Because – I tell my kids – it’s a contract; a symbiotic, fluid agreement. Feel one, feel the other, feel one, feel the other. Or else, feel nothing. Purgatory again.
AB - 30.9.23