Centuries in October

It is suddenly new timing, and a new season.   The fireplace in my little apartment is on, and I have waited for this.  I dreamed of this scene a few months ago, in the heat of the summer, when new hopes came to me that I didn’t yet know about fall in a new location.  The fireplace is a pretty posh expression of this change, obviously.  But I am loving it.  Loving it.  Starting the morning in pajamas with books all around me and coffee and silence and this blazing fire feels like the most perfect thing.  Or one of them. 

 I have been thinking of a great many things in life these days, and trying to make sense of where to place it all in the midst of a busy schedule.  A quote by Emerson comes to mind. 

‘I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred.  I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.’

 It sums up the feel of life.  Mine is happily full.  I tend to prefer this though because I have always longed for life to feel this grandiose.  And for my life, lately in October, this has been true. It makes now feels like a good time to think ‘vantage point’.   What has been, and what might come, while still staying very present in this day.   This weekend was time with family, some of it planned and some of it unexpected, life aside from teaching, a time to sleep and rebuild.  The coziest feeling of home while sitting in the pews at Hiawatha.  This is a great place for me to learn, learn, learn.  I love the people there too. 



Then there was the deep deep song, an old hymn sung in a new way, which brought me back, once again, to Jesus.  A walk through city neighborhoods, and lunch at a café in the sun with Jamie.  (What is better?)  Colors, burnished by this season, everywhere.   Prep time.  Not for lessons.  For a trip to New York, which will, surreally enough, be happening in a few short days. 

Early in the morning on Thursday, I will be going to the airport (with everyone else in the Twin Cities area, or so it might seem, because of MEA), headed to New York City.  With a best friend.  For the first time.  I believe I will either be completely in love with the place or completely overwhelmed by it.  Knowing myself as clearly as I do, it is already confirmed that it will be both.  Whenever I go to cities, I still mostly long for parks.  And I think Central Park, in all of its unique and wide spaces, will not disappoint.  Nothing like Minneapolis parks, but something East Coast and older and ‘meant for other people, but just for today, you too’.  This is one thing we will be doing.  One of many. 

We will of course be tourists.  If we utter the word ‘Minnesota’ once at all, we will be instantly pegged for the Midwestern travelers that we are.  But of course, this IS what we are.  When I went to Connecticut last year, I spent a morning in this little town by the sea.  And when I looked at the people, and spent time in their world, I could tell that their history was built by the water.  And mine, very obviously so, was built in farmland.  The kind of family I come from was built in farming.  I didn’t see the difference so obviously until I went to this little town by the sea. 

But I also think knowing some people in Brooklyn and NOT attending every major tourist attraction set apart for those in the world who go to New York, will make it feel like our own kind of thing.   

Whenever I travel, I look at people in the world in a far off way, very unlike the people in my latitudes and longitudes at home.  I wonder about people and I am not responsible for them or related to them or in a community with them.  This affords different conversation about humanity. 

That I love this sort of thing is already known about me, based on other experiences recounted in this blog.  I tend to have, at least sometimes, interesting conversations with people on planes.  Tattoo artists and grungy smelling snowboarders and former science teachers and rock climbers and people who own their own businesses and those who miss their children and…  Who knows?  This week it might be like that, or maybe we will just sit comfortably by each other, content to live inside of our own books.  I am not ever a fan of NOT reading a crowd. 

Some plane conversations just shouldn’t happen.  I think we all know those….we are unfortunately required to listen to them, at their top decibels, for the duration of our time together.  But we did not ask for it.  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.   This is an important distinction, especially in such a tight knit, ‘still foreign to each other’ group that becomes a crowd on an airplane.  It’s a lot of things at once.

This is what else I know.  Inevitably, I will think about a lot of different things as we travel by plane.  Every time, these winding thoughts run through my mind.  Not anxiously, but they’re there. The bit by Louis CK about our generation and how we deal with air travel, and the Wright brothers and their first few seconds in flight, and how our world has changed since 9/11 and how Annie Walker believed there was a colonial woman on the wing of the plane, churning butter.  And about how different it would feel to have a plane be your work space, instead of something that I know, like textbooks and classrooms.  And how this time I won’t have to be cleaning up throw up like the last time I was on a plane and was in charge of other peoples’ children. 

And of course I will take a moment to look at the Sky Mall catalog and wonder about who writes the descriptions for the products.  And why things like end tables that are also dog kennels happen to be $400.00.  And then, why people by them.  Which then, inevitably, brings me to the idea of people who are hoarders.  And then the people who have told me stories about hoarders in their family.  And then I think about material things in general, and how excessive we are about our lives sometimes for very small reasons.  And my mind goes and goes and goes.  And that’s usually when Sky Mall gets closed right up.

In short, I like airplanes.  For all of the back and forth and up and down with the airlines in the last few years since 9/11, I think deep down, I still really like it.  Being up in the air in a plane is really amazing.  It is interesting to see where people are going and imagine what they are up to.  These people are veritable book characters in every single direction.  And I can manage the lack of charm that comes with a $4.00 bottle of water for the sheer excitement of wondering about the possibility of what interesting new person will be coming around the corner.