junkmail for blankets

this ring is a symbol

The bare-bones outline of a 50+ page chronicle I'm working on this summer for part of my thesis.

::

Thursday

Gate 32, Spokane (WA) International Airport

I feel hopeful. My plane to Denver is on time, I’m here with room to spare, and there appear to be a few attractive girls in the waiting area. I have about 30 minutes before boarding, so there’s time to pick one—this is a game I play.

I came close to winning a few years ago on a return flight from Boston to St. Louis. I’d been in Boston spending time with a girl I’d met at a conference on my campus in St. Louis. At the conference, we’d talked movies, theology, and music, and I’d offered to send thoughts and songs and “I’d like that, yeah,” she’d said, and she did, implying as much in the thick, deep, wide letters she’d send back. We wrote back and forth for weeks, but it turned out that she was just in love with words and sound, interested primarily in the music and dialogue, the inherent virtue of exchange, that the hours of walking and talking downtown and the coffee and the all-night music and storytelling and into-the-next-morning conversations leading to the first kiss and a life together that I’d read between the lines in her letters had been a mistake. I call her the Boston-mistake-girl.

In the waiting area in the Boston airport, I spotted a girl wearing headphones, staring out the window overlooking the tarmac. Two or three minutes she stared, chewing on a pencil, her head bobbing, gently, before looking down into her lap and filling in a word on her crossword puzzle. Dear God, let me sit next to her on the plane.

I do not know what God thinks about such prayers.

I sat next to her on the plane.

She was beautiful. We shared our love for crossword puzzles, made jokes about peanuts, talked for over an hour before she told me about her girlfriend.

That’s the closest I’ve ever come. Somehow, I’ve convinced myself that I’m going to meet the girl of my dreams in the air, on the way to somewhere. Today, I’m on the way to St. Louis to see my dear friend Paul get married. I’m in seat 5E. I’ve made my choice.

Seat 5E, Frontier Flight 4307, Spokane to Denver

The only thing between me and the sky is a window. The window is, as far as I can see, just two panes of thick, transparent polymer sealed on the inside and the outside. Between the panes, where there should be only stale air, lies a bug, on its back, legs curled in, looking wistfully at the clouds, wondering how he ended up this way.

The flange around the air nozzle above me is falling off. The kid in the seat behind me is pretending to be a ninja, but I know that he’ll never make it—he clearly has trouble submitting to authority, in this case his father, quietly ordering him to quit kicking my seat.

The girl I picked out in the lobby stares through her window two rows in front of me as the kid behind me keeps kicking.

Thirty minutes into the flight and the lady in front of me is fast asleep. She’d been reading a book called Houses of Stone. It’s fallen off her lap and onto her armrest. The back cover makes an attempt at summary: “Fear and desire entwined in the shadows of the past.”

Gate D24, Denver International Airport

I’ve had just enough time during the layover to go outside for a smoke, which I needed.

I chain-smoked, as much from necessity as nerves. Having given up my matches at the airport in Spokane, I was without a light, so I checked the ashtrays until I found a discarded cigarette, burning just enough to light my own off of. I smoked three cigarettes, lighting each from the previous, and on my way back in to the airport, I noticed a guy about my age approaching me. Before he could say anything, I held out my cigarette: “Light?”

“How’d you know?” he asked.

“I can tell when a guy needs a light,” I said.

I wonder now if he did the same for someone else, wonder whether the cigarette I found to light mine had itself been lit off another. If I could trace the flame back to its source, how far back might it go?

I was last in this airport just over a year ago. I’d come out here to spend time with a girl I was dating. She knew me first through my writing, and we began our relationship in print, sending letters and e-mails for months before meeting. Before meeting, she’d liked me for my words, and I’d liked her, probably, for her interest in my words. But when we met in-person for the first time, she ceased to be a blank page, a salutation, and became real to me: flesh, silence, patience, breath. A painter, she taught me color and texture. I read to her and played music for her. When we first kissed, she stopped and said, “I don’t think I’m very good at this.” I thought I’d fall in love.

Two months later, I said goodbye to her in this airport, and I knew that it was more than a valedictory, and I’m still not exactly sure why I decided to say goodbye, though I do know that it’s but one in a chain of events, a chain that reaches back at least five years to another airport, to another goodbye, to the girl I still look for in airports and on city sidewalks.

Friday

Meshuggah Coffeehouse, St. Louis, MO

My friend Michael, who’s delivering the charge at the wedding tomorrow morning, is here with me, but he’s busy preparing. Nate is busy this weekend preparing for his own wedding, two weeks away. Bo is at work and Tirzah is figuring out logistics for the wedding reception. Andy is being ordained Sunday, so he’s got stuff to do, and Duff’s in a meeting. I’m beginning to feel a bit unproductive. I’ve been here for three hours now; I’ve finished my coffee and bagel and crossword puzzle, and I want to spend time with these friends of mine, these people who know and love me.

Last night, we guys got together for drinks. After a couple of hours of beer and narrative, Paul, the groom-to-be, looked around the table and said, “I could just sit here with you guys for months.” I appreciated the sentiment, but I couldn’t imagine sitting across the table from and talking with the same people for that long.

I’m sitting here now, wanting someone to hang out with, partly because the Friday NY Times crossword took less time this morning than it usually does:

30A: “A winner . . . almost”—closebutnocigar
35A: “Familiar”—onintimateterms
20D: “Some fellow travelers”—seatmates
51A: “Natural”—unstagy

After finishing, I interrupted Michael from his preparation and told him that if he didn’t hang out with me, I might have to look up an old flame, laughing as I threatened. He didn’t look up from his papers, but said only, “Getting close.”

Blueberry Hill Restaurant and Bar

After the wedding this weekend, my friend Duff will be, with me, one of the few remaining unmarried. We joke about being here 50 years from now with our strollers and catheter bags, drinking half a beer each, trying to throw darts, and congratulating ourselves for never having settled for a loveless relationship, which would have kept us from having so much fun drinking beer and throwing darts all those years.

For now, though, at 30 years old, meeting for beer and darts with a friend seems good, the kind of thing you see in movie friendships. In between food and drink and rounds of cricket, we’ve told stories and laughed. At one point, Duff suggested that he thought the waitress “liked me,” a phrase I hadn’t heard since high school and one I’d always been quick to dismiss, not only because I’m not the kind of guy that attracts people on a physical basis, but also because I’d never know how to respond—my knowledge of these things is limited to celluloid.

I look at Duff, picture him with grey hair, pissing his pants and complaining out-loud, to himself, about the food, and grab a pen. On the back of my bill, I leave the waitress a note. I tell her that I’ll be at the coffeeshop tomorrow morning, that I’ll be sitting outside, working on the crossword puzzle; I tell her, in between self-consciously witty and meta-narrated remarks about guys who leave waitresses notes, that I’d like to sit and talk for a few minutes, if only long enough to drink a cup of coffee.

Saturday

Meshuggah Coffeehouse

10:00

The crossword puzzle is not going well. The difficulty about the Saturday crossword is that the clues are so vague and the answers are so long. The clue “guarded,” a participle, could mean either the kind of person who is guarded or what someone did in the act of guarding. I recall now that on the note, I wrote only that I’d be here “in the morning.”

11:00

Duff has come to the coffeeshop and joined me. As with all of those close to me, I’m friends with Duff for a number of reasons, one of which is that we’re comfortable around each other; I find it both easy to talk and comfortable not to talk. I’ve often considered what it would be like to watch a movie composed entirely of the moments between people directly after the stimulating conversation. There are not enough awkward silences in movies.

Usually, I’d be glad for the company, but right now I want Duff to leave. How will the waitress know which one of us left the note? I don’t say as much, but Duff can tell I’m not my normal self, and we sit in silence, awkward, waiting.

12:00

A kid at the table next to me is playing with his drink. A few minutes ago, he said aloud, “Look at me, I’m Moses” before blowing through his straw down the middle of his cup of tea. Now, he’s claiming to be Jesus, making his straw float on the top.

I often console myself by recalling that Jesus was single at my age, but I have only three more years to be able to say that. And is this really what Christians have in mind when they admonish someone to be Christ-like?

12:00, the sun has risen, she is not coming, and I’m as much relieved as disappointed. What would I have done, invite her to the wedding this afternoon?

Grace and Peace Church

My friend Michael is up front delivering the charge, looking as much at me while he speaks as at the bride and groom. Duff is on the other end of the pew, and my other close friends are scattered around the church. Everyone is well-dressed and quiet, silence but for the promises to be made.

If I were ever to get married, I’d like to scour the city before the service and invite the homeless, the drunk, the strung-up, the lonely, the beaten-down and broken-hearted.

On the way in to the service, I watched an old man lean against the garbage bin on the sidewalk in front of the church, picking beer cans from the trash and emptying them into a jug. I sat on the steps and smoked, watching him. Not one drop ignored, not one word wasted in apology to the well-groomed and happy preparing to witness the promise of companionship during sickness and health, good times and bad, plenty and want.

Sunday

Meshuggah Coffeehouse

One more of my friends is now married. He’ll wake this morning and feel a new weight on his finger. It will take some time to get used to. I’ll have to call now before visiting.

55D: “Give a ring”—makesolemnvows; talkonthephone

Finn, the last girl I dated while living in St. Louis, came to the coffeeshop this morning. We’d spent a lot of time together before I moved to Spokane for school two years ago. She was passionate, intelligent, heady, beautiful. I was preparing to leave town for a degree in creative writing. We agreed that it probably wouldn’t work.

When she saw me sitting outside this morning, her eyes creased, the both of us smiling quietly. She nodded to the guy at her side, who went inside for coffee. The two of us talked for a moment, wishing we had time and occasion to sit and answer questions. She gave me her phone number, told me to call before I leave town tomorrow.

Monday

Lambert St. Louis International Airport

The airport is quiet tonight. My gate is at the end of the concourse, and no one is here yet. Half the gates have been shut down for refurbishing. The sun is setting on the tarmac, quiet and waiting. The air in here is stale, recycled, the sun illuminating the dust sinking into the seats. I have half of today’s unfinished crossword puzzle in my bag, but I’m not in the mood. My boarding pass is in my pocket, and Finn’s phone number is in my left hand. I have two quarters and an hour and a half before boarding. There is no one here to pick but myself. I have time to make a decision.

Posted by ghetto monk at June 3, 2005 04:44 PM | TrackBack