Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I considered what it meant to be sixty-six. The same number as the original American
highway, the celebrated Mother Road that George Maharis, as Buz Murdock, took as he
tooled across the country in his Corvette, working on oil rigs and trawlers, breaking
hearts and freeing junkies. Sixty-six, I thought, what the hell. I could feel my
chronology mounting, snow approaching. I could feel the moon, but I could not see it.
The sky was veiled with a heavy mist illuminated by the perpetual city lights. When I
was a girl the night sky was a great map of constellations, a cornucopia spilling the
crystalline dust of the Milky Way across its ebony expanse, layers of stars that I would
deftly unfold in my mind. I noticed the threads on my dungarees straining across my
protruding knees. Im still the same person, I thought, with all my flaws intact, same old
bony knees
[]
The phone was ringing, a birthday wish from an old friend reaching from far away. As I
said good-bye I realized I missed that particular version of me, the one who was
feverish, impious. She has flown, thats for sure.
In a sentiment reminiscent of Virginia Woolfs thoughts on the fluidity of past and
present, Smith considers what real time is:
Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Are our thoughts nothing but
passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by massive posters with
repeating images? Catching a fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from
the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real
time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I
write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time?
Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of
memory. I looked out into the street and noticed the light changing. Perhaps the sun had
slipped behind a cloud. Perhaps time had slipped away.
This dance with change on the precipice of past and present is perhaps why the weather
plays such a recurring role throughout the book weather changes are the most
universally palpable of transformations, and at their most acute they augur loss. Smith
writes about storms with a kind of primal awe the blizzard that strikes as she and her
husband leave the theater after seeing an Akira Kurosawa film on her fortieth birthday,
having entered it under clear and sunny skies; the raging thunderstorm through which
she returns home alone after her husband dies in a Detroit hospital, forty-five years after
he was born in the midst of an electrical storm in his grandparents kitchen; Hurricane
Sandy, which devastates the Far Rockaways just as she has fallen in love with the
community and purchased a ramshackle bungalow as her newfound sanctuary.
Recalling visiting her beloved Rockaways after the Sandy devastation, Smith captures
the piercing impermanence that storms swirl us into contact with:
The great storm surges that flooded the streets had killed most of the vegetation. I
inspected all that there was to see. The mildewed pasteboard walls forming small rooms
had been gutted, opening onto a large room with the century-old vaulted ceiling intact,
and rotted floors were being removed. I could feel progress and left with a bit of
optimism. I sat on the makeshift step of what would be my refurbished porch and
envisioned a yard with wildflowers. Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to
be reminded how temporal permanency is.
Nothing encodes this temporal permanency more palpably than our treasured objects,
imbued with memories and haunted by former versions of ourselves, and there is
nothing we imbue with memory more intimately than the worn stories of our clothes.
Like life itself, these wearable micro-museums of memory are woven of both love and
loss. Smith captures this beautifully in the story of one such cherished possession:
I had a black coat. A poet gave it to me some years ago on my fifty-seventh birthday. It
had been his an ill-fitting, unlined Comme des Garons overcoat that I secretly
coveted. On the morning of my birthday he told me he had no gift for me.
I dont need a gift, I said.
But I want to give you something, whatever you wish for.
Then I would like your black coat, I said.
And he smiled and gave it to me without hesitation or regret. Every time I put it on I felt
like myself. The moths liked it as well and it was riddled with small holes along the
hem, but I didnt mind. The pockets had come unstitched at the seam and I lost
everything I absentmindedly slipped into their holy caves. Every morning I got up, put
on my coat and watch cap, grabbed my pen and notebook, and headed across Sixth
Avenue to my caf. I loved my coat and the caf and my morning routine. It was the
clearest and simplest expression of my solitary identity. But in this current run of harsh
weather, I favored another coat to keep me warm and protect me from the wind. My
black coat, more suitable for spring and fall, fell from my consciousness, and in this
relatively short span it disappeared.
Smiths husband, Fred, believed that when such beloved possessions disappear, they
enter the Valley of Lost Things. When he was a child, his favorite toy a red plastic
cowboy he had named Reddy suffered a similar fate after Freds mother, dusting the
bookcase, inadvertently knocked Reddy into domestic neverland. But he miraculously
reappeared some years later, emerging from the floor when boards had to be replaced.
When Reddy returned, Fred proudly placed him on the bookcase in the couples
bedroom.
Smith reflects on this dance of disappearances, which so aggrieves us precisely because
objects concretize our longing for permanence:
Some things are called back from the Valley. I believe Reddy called out to Fred. I
believe Fred heard. I believe in their mutual jubilance. Some things are not lost but
sacrificed. I saw my black coat in the Valley of the Lost on a random mound being
picked over by desperate urchins. Someone good will get it, I told myself, the Billy
Pilgrim of the lot.
Do our lost possessions mourn us? Do electric sheep dream of Roy Batty? Will my coat,
riddled with holes, remember the rich hours of our companionship? Asleep on buses
from Vienna to Prague, nights at the opera, walks by the sea, the grave of Swinburne in
the Isle of Wight, the arcades of Paris, the caverns of Luray, the cafs of Buenos Aires.
Human experience bound in its threads. How many poems bleeding from its ragged
sleeves? I averted my eyes just for a moment, drawn by another coat that was warmer
and softer, but that I did not love. Why is it that we lose the things we love, and things
cavalier cling to us and will be the measure of our worth after were gone?
Then it occurred to me. Perhaps I absorbed my coat.
Smith examines this question of what is lost and what is redeemed in recounting a rather
allegorical experience she had while journeying to a picturesque canyon in Mexico:
It was breathtaking though dangerous place, but we felt nothing but awe. I said a prayer
to the lime-dusted mountain, then was drawn to a small rectangular light some twenty
feet away. It was a white stone. Actually more tablet than stone, the color of foolscap, as
if waiting for another commandment to be etched on its polished surface. I walked over
and without hesitation picked it up and put it in my coat pocket as if it were written to
do so.
I had thought to bring the strength of the mountain to my little house. I felt an
instantaneous affection for it and kept my hand in my pocket in order to touch it, a
missal of stone. It was not until later at the airport, as a customs inspector confiscated it,
that I realized I had not asked the mountain whether or not I could have it. Hubris, I
mourned, sheer hubris. The inspector firmly explained it could be deemed a weapon. Its
a holy stone, I told him, and begged him not to toss it away, which he did without
flinching. It bothered me deeply. I had taken a beautiful object, formed by nature, out of
its habitat to be thrown into a sack of security rubble.
[]
I took the stone from the mountain and it was taken from me. A kind of moral balance, I
well understood.
The book is, above all, a reminder that love and loss always hang in such a balance
perhaps not a moral one, for morality presumes meaning and some losses are senseless,
dealt out by a universe impervious to human concerns and conceits, but a balance
nonetheless. Smith captures this devastating and transcendent truth in recounting the
days following Freds death:
My brother stayed with me through the days that followed. He promised the children he
would be there for them always and would return after the holidays. But exactly a
month later he had a massive stroke while wrapping Christmas presents for his
daughter. The sudden death of Todd, so soon after Freds passing, seemed unbearable.
The shock left me numb. I spent hours sitting in Freds favorite chair, dreading my own
imagination. I rose and performed small tasks with the mute concentration of one
imprisoned in ice.
Eventually I left Michigan and returned to New York with our children. One afternoon
while crossing the street I noticed I was crying. But I could not identify the source of
my tears. I felt a heat containing the colors of autumn. The dark stone in my heart
pulsed quietly, igniting like a coal in a hearth. Who is in my heart? I wondered.