I am very tired. I have not been without people for days, and I fell asleep in the skimmed-off, post-dawn light that feels like afterimages, but last night I watched the sun set over Cape Cod Bay in an incredible, tropical flare of scarlet and hibiscus and a kind of glass-molten pink, threaded through the shale-banks of cloud like a lava flow by night. The sky's reflections made the sand look hand-tinted, like an old postcard and impossibly artistic—some small shorebirds hop and skirt where the tide has drawn out to a smooth piece of silk, except for the little arrowhead backwashes left to ruck darkly against the watercolor gleam. I couldn't have gotten it with a camera, although I was still sorry I had forgotten mine. I picked up a piece of soft, reddish-purple stone with a hairline inclusion of quartz, taffy-pulled into a good shape for fingers. I put my hand into the sea, although I know that it does not reach back for me, and realized when I got up that I was washing my hands with it, making sure I had salt on me before I went back through the field where the cars were parked and up to the house.
(This will be my primary memory of the party, although I also drank some really peat-burnt whiskey, read the novelization of WarGames (1983) and most of Kipling's collected verse in an edition pre-war enough—1927, which I think makes it the third—to retain the swastika on the title page, and sang with an assortment of people, including the host of the party and someone who had had the foresight to bring a guitar. I think I've learned all the lyrics to Old Crow Medicine Show's "Wagon Wheel," although the original will sound weird if it doesn't really have that many people harmonizing on the vocal. I knew I knew all the lyrics to "Tangled Up in Blue," but I didn't expect to be performing them as a tenor, because that's where the accompaniment ended up. It was kind of awesome. I stayed the night in Woods Hole, at the house of a friend's father that reminded me suddenly, in smell, maybe the wood-damp and the nearness of the sea, of my grandparents' house in Portland. The same yellow and dark-grey fiberglass chairs in one of the bedrooms, too; we have them downstairs in the summer kitchen, there's an example in the MFA. Lox and bagels in the morning. Not quite ghosts, but memories that don't make themselves known until, without telling you, they do. If they had had a blue-and-white-checked tablecloth, I would have been afraid.)
This afternoon, I sat on a little jetty made of toast-colored, black-flecked granite boulders and watched the Vineyard Sound under mare's-tail twists of overcast, the heavy glass-weight of the water folding back and forth over the rusty sallows of bladderwrack and maiden's hair, blurring the drop-off with baize green. Jeff pointed out Martha's Vineyard, where I am not sure I have ever been. I was humming something, but neither of us could identify it. Some swimmers went by on surfboards as if in an Egyptian frieze of reed boats, poling upright; I wanted the camera again a few minutes later, not for their sake, but for the clusters of Indian pipe pushing up from the leaf litter at the roadside, translucent as ghosts, a stiffening curl of spirit photography, and the half-dozen slugs the color of orange peel gliding purposefully over the twigs and bark-debris among them. We got through the end-of-weekend traffic on Dave Parry and Hypnotic Clambake. Next time I'm near the sea, I'm going in it.
And going through boxes of old photographs, my mother has discovered some she took during her 1968 trip to Europe in which David Hemmings, Warren Beatty, and a fair-haired author she can't identify—Neil something—are being interviewed for the BBC by a boyfriend-of-a-friend who turns out to have been Pete Myers. ("He has dark hair and a wonderful face and we were in his apartment. Why were we there?") I may try to scan and post them, if only because they are rather wonderful pictures. They were only people when she took them, but now they look like time.
(This will be my primary memory of the party, although I also drank some really peat-burnt whiskey, read the novelization of WarGames (1983) and most of Kipling's collected verse in an edition pre-war enough—1927, which I think makes it the third—to retain the swastika on the title page, and sang with an assortment of people, including the host of the party and someone who had had the foresight to bring a guitar. I think I've learned all the lyrics to Old Crow Medicine Show's "Wagon Wheel," although the original will sound weird if it doesn't really have that many people harmonizing on the vocal. I knew I knew all the lyrics to "Tangled Up in Blue," but I didn't expect to be performing them as a tenor, because that's where the accompaniment ended up. It was kind of awesome. I stayed the night in Woods Hole, at the house of a friend's father that reminded me suddenly, in smell, maybe the wood-damp and the nearness of the sea, of my grandparents' house in Portland. The same yellow and dark-grey fiberglass chairs in one of the bedrooms, too; we have them downstairs in the summer kitchen, there's an example in the MFA. Lox and bagels in the morning. Not quite ghosts, but memories that don't make themselves known until, without telling you, they do. If they had had a blue-and-white-checked tablecloth, I would have been afraid.)
This afternoon, I sat on a little jetty made of toast-colored, black-flecked granite boulders and watched the Vineyard Sound under mare's-tail twists of overcast, the heavy glass-weight of the water folding back and forth over the rusty sallows of bladderwrack and maiden's hair, blurring the drop-off with baize green. Jeff pointed out Martha's Vineyard, where I am not sure I have ever been. I was humming something, but neither of us could identify it. Some swimmers went by on surfboards as if in an Egyptian frieze of reed boats, poling upright; I wanted the camera again a few minutes later, not for their sake, but for the clusters of Indian pipe pushing up from the leaf litter at the roadside, translucent as ghosts, a stiffening curl of spirit photography, and the half-dozen slugs the color of orange peel gliding purposefully over the twigs and bark-debris among them. We got through the end-of-weekend traffic on Dave Parry and Hypnotic Clambake. Next time I'm near the sea, I'm going in it.
And going through boxes of old photographs, my mother has discovered some she took during her 1968 trip to Europe in which David Hemmings, Warren Beatty, and a fair-haired author she can't identify—Neil something—are being interviewed for the BBC by a boyfriend-of-a-friend who turns out to have been Pete Myers. ("He has dark hair and a wonderful face and we were in his apartment. Why were we there?") I may try to scan and post them, if only because they are rather wonderful pictures. They were only people when she took them, but now they look like time.
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