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The Embodiment of Applause
As the weather raged, I journaled about a trip we’d taken to Camp Ocoee the week before. I had stayed in the car while Jim gassed up at Cherokee Corners, studying how the late-day sun had its way with the grassy fields; how it made the Queen Anne’s Lace at the road’s edge glow. I wanted to try to record that particular quality of light as the cloud towers built in the distance, raising their boiling heads toward heaven. While I studied the pebbled whiteness of the spindly plants, something called in the distance—a goose or a dog with an odd bark, maybe, or a man gone crazy with grief. Only the deepest pain would have made a human run out into the afternoon and scream at nature like a howling animal, I thought, realizing as this popped into my head that my imagination was growing overactive in my pursuit of material. As soon as the admonishment sprung to mind, it occurred to me that to make a judgment like that was ridiculous because using the imagination was the purpose of being creative, especially for a writer!
I was thinking about this as I drove along the beach road the next morning—protected from the suffocating humidity by the whirr of the air conditioner. The waves of heat radiating from the hood and the memory of Queen Anne’s Lace brought to mind another time when scorching temperatures and these leggy plants were fused in the experiential. A field of the “weeds,” as the United States Department of Agriculture classified them, had stretched out for about a quarter of a mile behind our house when I was a girl. I sometimes walked up to its edge and marveled that something considered a blight could produce such graceful Victorian-esque blooms.
I watched one day as they bowed their heads, wilting in the mid-day light right before my eyes. I understood—the air felt like a furnace as I turned away to trudge toward the library with my little sister in tow. When we reached the spot where the Hosely’s creek gurgled beneath the road, we looked longingly into the rushing water but knew we’d be in major trouble if we ruined our clothes so we kept moving, slogging on toward the elementary school to see what books were on the shelves. The antiquated air conditioning in the library provided little relief as we searched the rows of fiction for books to take home, and it wasn’t until we’d returned to the dark coolness of our house with all the shades drawn that we’d felt the relief of being chilled to the bone by air conditioning that actually made a difference. I recalled how the covers of the books we’d carried home were soaked with our perspiration as we tossed them onto the kitchen table. I liked this memory because it was one of my first recollections as to how much books had meant in my life. The sacrifice of making my way through stifling heat to find new inspiration had been well worth the effort.
On that hot Florida morning, I sat in the car lost in thoughts of that far-away time for only a few minutes after the air conditioning had quieted, the memories falling away as I realized I was suffocating. I roused myself from my reverie and hurried out of the car in order to begin closing the condo, as we would be relinquishing the oceanic air for that special brand of Chattanooga humidity. We were returning home that afternoon to prepare for our first trip to South Dakota, and I dreaded it, a fact that made me feel guilty and sad.
Once home, Chattanooga was living up to my memories and there was only one outdoor spot that afforded a dependable escape from the heat: the screened porch. I spent most of my mornings there and had decided it was the perfect place to entertain. We had invited our next-door neighbors for dinner, and they remarked that we’d found a great spot on the bluff as we settled into the comfortable furniture. As the breezes flowed up the mountain, the talk turned to our work in Costa Rica and South Dakota as it always did with people in our lives. Jim mentioned a mutual friend, a dentist, who had just returned from Haiti with a strain of incurable malaria. The conversation lulled for a few moments as Walter, a doctor, closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “I don’t think I can imagine doing that. I could not put myself in such a situation as I’d have to choose between myself and myself.”
The astuteness and raw honesty of his comment ricocheted through my brain. I spent a great deal of time thinking about this as the days rolled along, dawning murky most mornings as the sun sparred with fog to gain a foothold in our patch of sky. The dampness of those precious mornings made me hug my cup of coffee close to my chest as I stood at the edge of the screened porch watching the mist play with the leaves on the trees. They flapped like the rotor blades on helicopters, the constant movement reminding me of how applause would look if the sound were made physical. What would the leaves be applauding? I wondered. Certainly not the choices I’d made…
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See Her Way Into Daylight
We’d been mostly catching rides from people as we traveled between towns, and more times than not we suffered through vehicles like Donald’s. I wasn’t a car snob by any stretch of the imagination—the ugly brown-gold Vega I had in high school proof that I’d drive anything—but I did feel that penny-wise/pound-foolish treatment of a piece of transportation was just plain silly (Okay, I know that love affairs between guys and their cars are legendary but this is an altogether different subject!). If a vehicle was meant for getting one from point A to point B, shouldn’t it do so in a modicum of comfort and dependability regardless of its appearance? Apparently not in life according to Donald, who had recently had his truck repainted—a bright red color with a giant yellow and black zigzagging stripe taking over its body so grandly that the paintjob screamed, “My next life will be lived in Las Vegas!” In order to afford the makeover, he’d ignored the lack of padding in the seats, which meant the body took a beating careening along the bumpy roads. He had also ignored the engine that coughed and the clutch that stuck so unmercifully that the stick shift beneath the floorboard must have been worn down to the thickness of a swizzle stick. We were basically riding along in a very pretty tin can with a passenger-side door that would only open from the inside, and a driver’s side window that would not roll down. I suppose it won’t surprise you that he was gushingly proud of his ride!
As I contemplated what to do with my writing, the only other person around was a local laborer Jim had hired who spoke only Spanish. He had a bitter expression stamped on his face that made me slightly afraid of him so I ignored him as I massaged the material, hoping he would give me the same courtesy. Staring at the page with my scrawling handwriting on it, something occurred to me that I should have realized before but had not: I had a tendency toward personification in my writing. The notes I’d made in Panama City Beach were proof: “The sky presents a checkerboard this morning. Sections of dark and light march from the ocean as if a known pattern had been predetermined. Maybe there was a director just offshore, giving each parcel of sky its dancing orders so that the segments would prance and twirl in pretty order. This is the type of day I long to have tucked into my routine—a day when everything feels moist and beautiful; a day when I can sit on the sofa and read, and no one will think ill of me. The ocean knows how to escape the jouncing mental activity of life: she whispers it every day—her breathy foam cascading, the chorus one of dark and light, of wetness, of persistence, of murmuring hypnotic laziness. She sings to me that it’s okay. I want to sing back but I have no idea what to say.”
As I scratched out words and jotted ideas into the margins of the overly messy sheets of paper, I heard the crunch of tires on gravel. I didn’t think much of it until I heard Jim yell, “No!” as forcefully as he could. He jumped out of the truck so quickly I wondered if he’d remembered to put it into park. I followed his angry gaze and saw why he was so upset. The man he’d left laying block was sawing off the rebar that was protruding from the top block at the edge of a window opening. I guess it was the first time the laborer had seen rebar and he didn’t realize that if the stabilizing steel wasn’t running through the heart of the blocks, a strong earthquake could tumble them like they were children’s toys. Jim stood there with his arms akimbo, shaking his head while the man kept on sawing. Since no one within shouting distance spoke Spanish but the laborer, there was no way for Jim to get it across to him that he shouldn’t be removing the rebar. Yelling “no,” which he understood perfectly, mattered not for whatever reason as the spiteful man defiantly moved his blade rhythmically across the metal, each grating pass causing Jim to wince.
With the laborer’s ineptitude, Jim’s mood turned dark so I tried to stay out of his way. I did so that evening by losing myself in revisiting “Mornings at Lakeshore”—the series I’d started and then abandoned. I figured the writing would help me to feel closer to home and maybe—just maybe—at some point would gel into a collection of poems. But even if all I gained were a couple of hours for pleasing explorations, it would have been time well spent.
I sat at the kitchen table of our jungle house, positioning my notebook to catch as much light as I could from the bare bulb hanging from its socket in the ceiling, and remembered home where there was beauty at the edge of a vibrant lake:
• Her eyes sparkled yesterday like a satin dress of brilliant blue. She peeked at me from between the rooftops as I climbed the hill, her sunny sheen illuminating everything around her like a dazzling smile. She is dark now, as it is too early for her to show herself. The streetlights twinkle on her surface as if hinting at the glittering eyes she will use to see her way into daylight…
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
