It’s a shit season to be a resident of the United States, but it’s a good day to be a public school teacher, who has the day off for weather. Happy Epiphany, and let’s pretend Trump isn’t about to pardon all the January 6th criminals.
Let’s say a public school teacher attended a funeral, and (unrelated) visited heavily with dozens of loved ones over the American high holidays, and she has need of rest.
Let’s say while eating Indian lentils and basmati rice, a friend told about someone who smuggled lizards by taping the lizards to his body. Let’s say this was a comforting story, one that connects well with her reading about the success of bacteria and, as she thought, we all carry with us a veritable zoo at all times. Because she likes zoos, though the animals are incarcerated and possibly it’s terrible, but at the same time it’s mind-expanding, like a drug, to be physically close to a Great Pacific Octopus, it feels spiritually close, like he’s a consciousness, too, isn’t he? (It is he: the octopuses of Kansas City are Charles and Arthur.)
Then after she had installed herself into her palatial six room apartment (oh the comforts of having left The City), with its indeed endless stream of picture/sound content from all over the earth, the sky fell in ices and then snows that hardly seemed a problem to one who had no need to go, in fact no desire to go.
Indeed she listened to a talk on eastern spiritual thought, made journal notes, lists, threw out bird seed and waited, alongside her faithful cat, for birds to come, and yes, also, guiltily, let picture/sound content ramble on and on and on.
It takes a few days of picture/sound comfort to settle quieter into books.
Books are noble, now, though in their early days they were smut and pollution. Today it is picture/sound that is smut and pollution. Mind candy is rated.
Silence is best.
Creation, next.
Everything is graded, though she seems to care little for grades.
Puritanical urges overwhelm, even after the picture/sound of “Maria,” on Maria Callas swanning Paris with gowns and curls and googly eyeglasses and a thinness unhealthy and so many heavy fabrics, drapes, rugs, Chanel skirt suit weights, only the silk scarf over the hair being impossibly Angelina Jolie, anyone else would look like a crone feeding the birds.
Which is, after all, what we are doing, and loving it.
The honor and holiness of the snowday does not exist in The City.
Well, it did, once. I remember making it four blocks over from home to the New Orleans themed bar, ordering warm food and a coffee, and feeling ennobled by accomplishing this, there is no satisfaction like braving terrible weather for no reason other than to experience the love and care and tastiness of those who open doors to their beautiful bars and coffeehouses and restaurants, and thanking them profusely and tipping them well. It was lovely, and also I was painfully lonely, as in Kansas City I would have gotten joyfully drunk with friends, and in New York, I had my books and my poetry to protect me. Probably I also had wine.
Isn’t it terrible that now the government wants to tell us wine hurts us? It’s terrible.
Wine is a quality of life issue, though, of course. Balancing it might encourage cancer with you might get hit by a bus anyway and isn’t wine lovely? Didn’t it give your ancestors the strength to get up and do what needed to be done?
At the funeral, three nurses dressed in old-fashioned nurse uniforms hold a lamp and a triangle, and they say a prayer and call for the nurse three times, and then tell the nurse who has died that she is off duty, and though most of us had had a midwestern experience of grief so far, the woman carrying around the kleenex suddenly gets my ire because where is she we are all sniffling and wiping eyes, WHOA.
I did think, it’s lovely how we humans, when one of us dies, all gather up and treat the person’s body so sweetly, and behave so properly, and talk a bit, and have a bit of music. Death such a horror, for thousands of years we’ve come up with some ceremony to process it, soften it, limit the decision-making of the mourners, and create some aesthetic touches: fresh flowers in January.
“You’re a vegetarian?” the nephew, a hunter says.
“Yeah.”
“Would you eat a deer if I killed it for you?”
“Uh, no. It just sounds yucky to me now.” I think maybe I should have explained, were we on desert island starving, I would eat that deer, I feel sure.
My cousin’s daughter wants to go in the backyard during the wedding shower. She walks up to the concrete deer in the yard. “Turkey!” she says.
Her father, with a nice ball cap and a nice brown beard, says, “She knows that’s not a turkey. It’s a deer. Remember when all you ate was deer that I got?”
The child is undeterred, patting the concrete doe on the head. “Turkey!”
I lift her up so she can sit astride it. She throws her arms up and down happily.
“Now you’re riding it!” I say.
“Turkey!”
“She’s just doing that to get to me,” the dad laughs, and I laugh.
Image: Utagawa Hiroshige, “Asukayama in Evening Snow,” ca. 1838.
Going On 