Month: March 2011

A Little Spittle

I’m riding home on the train as usual: head bobbing, checking e-mail on the iPhone, reading a book until drowsiness sets in and the terror of missing my stop brings me to abrupt attention. I take inventory of my fellow passengers. The neck of the Cordon Bleu-uniformed chef-in-training strains at a crazy angle, his head bobbing in sleep. A couple and their four young kids occupy two booths, the kids sprawled in sleep, their dozing father’s mouth hanging agape, framed by a dark goatee.

The fellow facing me, sitting one row ahead, works his laptop computer and phone intermittently. Something glistening on his lower lip draws my attention. Gradually, the glistening stuff grows, forming a tiny pond of bubbles where the top and bottom lips meet.

Then he inhales. The tiny bubbles disappear.

He exhales, and the pond of white bubbly froth grows again, this time larger. Stealthily, I watch as the glistening glob threatens to grow large enough to descend from lip to chin and splash upon his computer’s screen. Surely, he knows of the threat; he’s not even asleep!

He again sucks in his breath. The spittle disappears in a tug-of-war against gravity. For thirty minutes, the battle rages unabated.

I steal a photograph, diverting his attention by imitating video game maneuvers on my iPhone. But it’s tough capturing moving spit on a bounding train while ducking the occasional roving eye of The Spittle King. I capture the mere glisten of the froth.

It all seems so normal to him, this spit-balancing act. Is he unaware of the gag-inducing display? A wedding band encircles his finger. Surely his spouse has attempted to set aright this dismaying demonstration of salivary locomotion!

It’s my train stop. No need to leave the show; it’s also The Spittle King’s stop. I wait for him to exit the train before me. I follow him, examining the pavement for wet, glistening bubbles in his trail.

As I turn toward home, I wonder what sort of King I myself might be. My own ingrained habits are invisible to me. But to the neighbors in my life, they glisten, distract and annoy.

Time to start the inventory.

Webs

I happened by this stairwell walking through a college campus near my home.

I’ve been here before. The restroom at the top of the stairs has on occasion provided me very welcome relief during my two-mile hikes to and from my commuter trains each weekday.

On a previous dark morning visit, I had just taken relief at this facility. At the top of the stairs, I startled a landscape maintenance worker who had expected to encounter nobody else at that early hour. His name is Joe, and now, some two years later, we still eagerly look for each other, encouraging one other to make the best of the day as we pass–me, hiking to the train, and he, riding his tiny orange maintenance vehicle into the dark. By varying our routines by one or two minutes, we will miss one another entirely.

A slight change in schedule would also cause me to miss the tall woman dressed in black who vigorously walks a trail around a small park. If our trajectories coincide, we pass one another at just the right spot, each simultaneously tossing out a good-morning-greeting before plunging back into our individual worlds.

If I leave the house a few minutes earlier or later, I will also miss the woman wearing a fluorescent orange jumpsuit, silently doing her early morning tai chi ballet-like routines while focusing on a water fountain. I’m sure she misses her friends, who are performing their tai chi exercises in the company of other comrades half a word away. I greet her quietly to avoid breaking her concentration and move along.

Similar small early morning webs of interactions between onetime strangers occur around me without my knowledge, all captured in their own world of routine and circumstance, all governed by moments of the clock. Move the hands of the clock slightly, and the world of our relationships change.

Back to the stairway.

For this occasion of my visit, someone had used fishing line to create an intricate geometric pattern by tying each tiny thread to the handrail. The resulting weave created a spider web that continued up the entire height of the stairwell, fastening to the ceiling itself.

I’m guessing college students pulled this off; college students can do weird things. For me, this thing was both a weird and a wonderful thing.

The intricate geometric weave is like the web that surrounds us as we travel to the train and through time. Each strand has a name: Joe, and the tall woman walker dressed in black, the orange jump-suited tai chi-performing woman.

On my next visit to the stairwell, the web was gone. But in the distance, I heard Joe calling my name.

Strategic Reserves

The stretch of beach is strewn with large rocks, not the sort of place that invites sandal-shodden strolls. Contrasting color divides the scene. On one side, rough rocks protect the underlying sand from erosion. On the other side, crazy algae splashes the sand like streaks of fashionably dyed green swaths in an edgy contemporary hair coiffure. With each fall of the tide, the algae gleams green at sun, sand and shore as if it were its last appearance on stage. It is at home, abandoned to the forces of the elements. The riot of color catches the eye and the heart.

A coastal oil spill would play havoc with this bright green outcropping. Oil is our lifeblood, so we keep strategic reserves secure in deep underground salt domes. Dark, still, ancient, lifeless reserves harbored in salt domes. Very dreary.

At face value, we know the oil is far more important to us than this patch of green. It plies a place of security since it provides untold improvements in our lives. We need it. We keep it secure.

The poor algae knows no better than to play with wild abandon, shunning the dull brown rocks for the small stretch of sand. Unprotected and prone to the elements, its time may be short.

Still, our hearts belong to the algae. It is yet alive. It provides us an antidote for an otherwise drab scene.

We walk on, as we eventually must, and we are left to wonder. In the ebb and flow of our own life events, is there enough gaudy bright green to offset the cold, dark reserves that gather with age?

Swimming Sideways

The rainy, blustery weekend finally yielded to an azure sky during a recent camping trip, though camping is hardly the word. Gargantuan recreational vehicles, buses commandeered by graying couples and their miniature pooches, dwarfed our tiny fold-up trailer, which disappeared into their neighboring shadows. But we were living the high life: full connections to water and electricity—and a porta potty.

When the sun eventually broke through, we headed for the hot tub, where I soaked until my wrinkled skin steamed. Then it was off to the pool to attack a few of the exercise laps I had deferred for years.

As I descended the steps into the water, an elderly man bisected my anticipated lap lane. He was swimming sideways, across my lane. Not only that, the lane stripe was painted across the pool. But why?

Adjusting to the altered terrain, I heaved my trunks, and me with them, to join the sideways-swimmer. With my crosswise laps accomplished, my curiosity wouldn’t subside. So I paced, or rather bounced along the bottom of the pool, measuring the length and width of the pool with my stride. I discovered the pool was actually perfectly square. The rest was optical illusion. The lane stripe could have been painted either direction with equal merit. Which direction to swim? Lengthwise, at right angles to the older guy, or with him, across the pool? It didn’t matter. Same distance.

The illusion gave voice to a struggle that had been rising all weekend: what was a youngish guy like me doing hanging around this generation of RV-commandeering oldsters? The pool lanes described my dilemma. I was out for a brisk, youthful pool-length lap workout. Instead, an old guy drifted lazily, blocking my swimming lane, and I fell in behind him. Where were the high-energy folks my age that I could hang with? Our youthful, tiny trailer was buried amid hulking, slow-moving diesels with scarcely a non-wrinkly face within sight.

That evening, on our way to the restroom, we paused to view the RV resort’s neighboring meeting room, reserved for social gatherings. It was packed with oldsters, chatting convivially around tables bedecked with emptying wine bottles. One of the partygoers beckoned us to come in. Warily, we cracked open the door.

“Come on in!” she invited. “It’s a birthday party! For all of us! None of us wants to admit our birthday anymore, so it’s a birthday for nobody and everybody!”

Oldsters again. Where were the hip RV’ers our own age? We couldn’t get away. We seated ourselves beside the couple that invited us in. The wine bottles emptied as the guests intermittently nibbled on chocolate birthday cake soaked with melting vanilla ice cream.

We exchanged pleasantries with the older couple that invited us in. Where were they from? Where did they meet? Where did they go to college? Gradually, our swapped stories filled in the details of our lives.

Within minutes, lightning struck. In one of those rare lifetime moments you experience with someone you’ve never met, we realized our lives intersected. With a start, I discovered that I was talking to the sister of a girl I went to college with! In Chicago, in the 1970s.

And that meant that the older-looking woman I was speaking with, along with a good many other folks in the room were roughly—my own age!

In some ways, we will always miss our past, our youth. But we also know that we really don’t want to live that uncertainty and stress all over again.

We don’t belong there, but we’re not sure we belong here, either: older, among these older people. Is this really who we have become? At moments like these, we’re not sure how to go forward. Can we muster the courage to become like these people?

Ah, yes, I realize…I already am one of “these people.”

Maybe all of us are most comfortable when we reckon ourselves neither young nor old. Someone’s always behind, but someone else is also ahead of us. We’re always just arriving, always capable of, and ready for–change.

So which way do we swim the laps in the pool? Lengthwise, as we did since we were young? Or sideways, joining the older generation?

It turns out that they’re the same distance. Remember, the pool is square.

I think I’ll swim the diagonal.