October 24, 2006
St. Petersburg; unattended
For evidence of attendance: Visit Flickr
The Bob Graham Sunshine Skyway Bridge
I 275 laid sleeping like a snake in the sun on the The Bob Graham Sunshine Skyway Bridge.
But there was no sun.
It was 4:30 in the morning.
We drove in a rental car on the road over Tampa Bay. It severed the water like a hairline crack in a solid slab of onyx, the break noticeable only in the faintest shifts of reflection in the moonlight over the still water.
The darkness spread out both windows like a velvet carpet on a painter's vacant still life. The emptiness unrolled beyond both edges of my peripheral into the middle of the night. I looked south out the window towards the mouth of the bay. there were no lights from the retirement homes, condominiums, docks and keys to separate the sky from the water. The horizon disappeared giving the illusion of the water floating away then wrapping back overhead again; of me being at once above and under water.
My father was driving and my mother was in the passenger seat. The car was silent, The night was dark. The water was black.
The present situation, in the back seat of a rental car while driving over The Bob Graham Sunshine Skyway Bridge at 4:30 a.m. might have very well been like my entire lifetime, i suspected; the metaphor perhaps becoming clear only in retrospect:
I sat silent and struggled to gain a sense of place. I searched for what existed above and below me; and difference between them. I overlooked and under appreciated the great construction made by previous men which afforded me the luxury not to need to navigate nor to think. I should have well enjoyed the convenience albeit separation from the space I was speeding right through; the path so clearly built and safely prescribed, to get me across the bay in the fastest and straightest path, the path my father was driving steadily down right between the lines.
Yet despite it all, my attention was drawn to the darkness beyond the guard rails.
And I had no clue how far it was to the other side.
October 11, 2006
Thrift Store Shopping
We walked into the thrift store. the afternoon light sifted through the curtains like flour falling through a sifter, dusting everything with yellow air.
The smell of someone else's life from someone else's time filled the store. upholstered arm chairs and oil paintings sat as if they forgot to die when their owners did. Veneer tables and ceramic desk lamps sat ambivalent to fashion trends and popular culture, as if right there in front of me was the inverse proof that being out of someone's sight and out of someone's mind only adds them into mine.
Einstein's equation that energy never dies but only changes forms holds true in a thrift store. Only in thrift stores, junk never dies, it just changes owners.
From behind the counter a woman stood, leaning against the glass counter that used to sell watches or fashionable perfume and jewelry in a department store somewhere else. The small sterling chains that hung from the corner of her bifocals and draped behind her neck swayed as she jotted notes on a ledger sheet with a ball point pen. She was talking on the telephone.
I don't know who she was talking to.
I don't know what she was talking about.
As she stood there behind the counter in the thrift store, talking into the telephone. Quite confidently, as if for the person on the other end, and the whole world to hear, she said –
"Well, if it isn't fun, then it isn't the right thing to do. Because if it doesn't feel good it isn't right anyways."
My head rang like a bell tower at midnight. Her words shook the dust off of corners of my mind and and brought things that were out of sight back into my mind. The words felt like they were shouted into my head with a megaphone, swirling like helicopter rotors and garbage disposals.
I continued to walk past the front desk and into the store. I stared at wooden cabinetry and stainless steel cutlery and mason jars with red tags hanging from their corners.
I wondered what she meant.
I walked past chests of drawers and ironing boards and matchbox cars with little white tags tied to them.
I ran through every scenario i could remember in my life to see how many proved true to her words and how many proved contrary. I wondered if happiness is righteousness, or if righteousness is happiness. I thought about the enormity of the differences between those two statements. I wondered if anyone else had ever walked through a thrift store and truly found what they were looking for. I stood surrounded by things other people didn't want, and like a little boy lost in a department store, I was looking for a truth.
We search for meaning in empty drawers and in found keys that fit locks we imagine exist. We search for answers in words written in books and in melting icicles and in butterflies dying on kitchen window sills. We see signs in half eaten slices of cheese toast and in shadows cast by halogen lights. We expect meaning in good fortune and equally in bad; when bombs are dropped and when flags are raised in foreign lands. and we decide coincidences and overheard telephone conversations are harbingers of evidence to prove the existence of ideas we still wouldn't understand.
I stood beside a baby crib and wondered if everyone wanted everything in their lives to mean something.
Or even more – I wondered if everyone wanted everything in their lives to verify something.
She found a hand painted flower pot to plant a fower in, to give to my parents for their anniversary. We took it to the counter. The woman was no longer on the phone.
"What do the red tags mean?" She asked the lady behind the counter on the way out. "Does that mean they are on sale?
"No, I just ran out of red ones. So i just used what else I had." the lady said looking up from her bifocals. And then looked back down at her calculator and pushed the buttons with her black ball point pen to add up the sale.
Perhaps life, like a thrift store shopping, is searching for happiness. Perhaps life, like thrift store shopping is searching for righteousness. Perhaps life, like a thrift store shopping, is searching for meaning.
Perhaps there is no difference; we just walk though them both looking for what we seek, and make due with what we find.
