I caught a fragment of the funeral this morning: a black hearse at a slow march on a green field, a bell tolling and drums, bystanders watching through their cellphones. It is not really that the jokes about the Queen celebrating her cybernetic jubilee—Charles having expired of frustration in the interim—were more plausible than the fact of her death in the course of mortal time, but why else do we believe in fisher kings? I hadn't known she was married in a dress embroidered with ears of wheat, as though spelling for fertility. One of the commentators spoke of seasons of death and renewal, as if all the newly televised pageantry were some enormous mummers' play. I don't think I am used to seeing ritual on such a scale; that is the point of it. I keep thinking about people as links in time, as memory palaces. I wish it did not come so automatically paired with the thought of unmoored futures. Far enough down that way lies trying to glue time in place, to hold back the earthquake.
2022-09-20
For our twelfth anniversary observed, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks and I drove to Revere Beach. His phone claimed to be routing us efficiently through Cambridge and Charlestown, but on the other side of much traffic and the Tobin Bridge we agreed that it would have been just as timely and far less stupid just to have retraced to Route 16. The tide was out when we arrived, the sky as grey as the stiff ribbons of the seaweed-tangled sand, the beach itself not quite deserted after the end of the season. We ordered fried shrimp and what turned out to equal a three-person portion of whole-bellied clams from Kelly's and took them over to the nearest of the cast-iron pavilions that were built in the late nineteenth century, when the nation's first public beach was formally designed. Except for the usual sea-kibitzers, we had it to ourselves. A herring gull screamed territorially at us from the low cement wall; Rush commented that he hadn't known he needed to bring his air horn. He had brought dessert instead in the form of cider donuts, acquired by nineweaving from the farmer's market in Harvard Square. Our drive home was marred slightly by an unintended detour to Newton when I failed to change lanes in time coming out of the Sumner Tunnel and we ended up on the Pike at a rush-hour crawl, but fortunately he knew how to route us back via Nonantum which turns into Soldier's Field Road. We had driven past so much construction on the tracks that parallel I-90, we were stunned to discover from the Globe that the Orange Line has even warily reopened. It was not a year when we could chase the water all night, but we had the blink of canals and the loops of rivers, the salt smell and tumble of the sea. My back held off on imploding until I no longer had to drive. My sea-witnessed husband, many more.
rushthatspeaks and I drove to Revere Beach. His phone claimed to be routing us efficiently through Cambridge and Charlestown, but on the other side of much traffic and the Tobin Bridge we agreed that it would have been just as timely and far less stupid just to have retraced to Route 16. The tide was out when we arrived, the sky as grey as the stiff ribbons of the seaweed-tangled sand, the beach itself not quite deserted after the end of the season. We ordered fried shrimp and what turned out to equal a three-person portion of whole-bellied clams from Kelly's and took them over to the nearest of the cast-iron pavilions that were built in the late nineteenth century, when the nation's first public beach was formally designed. Except for the usual sea-kibitzers, we had it to ourselves. A herring gull screamed territorially at us from the low cement wall; Rush commented that he hadn't known he needed to bring his air horn. He had brought dessert instead in the form of cider donuts, acquired by nineweaving from the farmer's market in Harvard Square. Our drive home was marred slightly by an unintended detour to Newton when I failed to change lanes in time coming out of the Sumner Tunnel and we ended up on the Pike at a rush-hour crawl, but fortunately he knew how to route us back via Nonantum which turns into Soldier's Field Road. We had driven past so much construction on the tracks that parallel I-90, we were stunned to discover from the Globe that the Orange Line has even warily reopened. It was not a year when we could chase the water all night, but we had the blink of canals and the loops of rivers, the salt smell and tumble of the sea. My back held off on imploding until I no longer had to drive. My sea-witnessed husband, many more.