It takes me not back, not Home, But to a familiar but stranger Post office, bakery, The Movies
Not squeezed together But together still With room to breathe.
Houses, with their sloping roofs, solar panels now, Yard margins, square lot, Double-decker, still squat.
I picked her up in a Pontiac Grand Am And drove us to the sushi restaurant
And then we’ve rolled past.
It’s Backcast Partners - Middle Market Capital Now
Look after, in dark, look. Tonight. 10 pm, Eastern. You can, see there, see them. Unless you can't.
Is it the light?
It's the city lights, I guess.
It's the city lights, It's the city lights. Look, OK, Look, it's OK.
You can give up. We will go to Helsinki.
“I wither slowly... Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream The ever-silent spaces of the East, Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.” - “Tithonus”; Alfred, Lord Tennyson
I had always dreamt of owning a Jeep Wrangler. When I was in high school, I inherited the “practical” sedan that my brother received for his 16th birthday when he left it behind to go to college. I, also, eventually, left to go to college.
Well, I remember odd-jobbing and gigging my way through school, scraping together enough money to finally afford a banged-up TJ (model years 1996-2006) that I found on Craigslist. Even with its 125k+ miles on the odometer, it seemed the coolest car I'd ever seen. I e-mailed the poster. It was still available.
I remember riding out on the Metra commuter rail – the furthest I’d ever been from Chicago – to meet the owner with a literal duffel bag full of cash. We met in a parking lot in the suburbs, the car ran “fine”, the title and cash changed hands, and I owned a Jeep! I should have been terrified (now appalled): I’d never driven a standard transmission before then, but somehow I managed to make it all the way to Hyde Park, across an hour and a half of highways and through the start-stop herky-jerk traffic of the city. It's amazing that I didn’t stall out somewhere on the highway and get rear-ended at 85 mph.
Some of my best memories from Chicago happened in that Jeep: my friends packing in and driving across Chicagoland to go hiking, or to see The Great Galena Balloon Festival, or to spend Thanksgiving in Evanston with friends who’d grown up there and were (maybe) happy to have us over for a huge “extended family” affair. I picked up my first date since high school in that car, drove around the Great Lakes with my roommate in that car, piled everyone in to day trip to St. Louis and see the Gateway Arch in that car.
In the end, I sold the Wrangler before moving to New York. Maybe I should have kept it, driven cross-country and parked it wherever the hell I possible could find on 37th street. Maybe then I’d be hauling friends up to the Hudson River Valley on weekends, driving everyone out to Vermont to to see the Fall foliage, skiing out at American Dream or Hunter Mtn. every winter. Oh, well. It would've been expensive, especially for a broke grad student.
At some point I decided that hard science and research were more meaningful contributions than art. Even though I liked poetry – Victorian English, or W.C. Williams, or John Donne – and even though the cinema of the aughts had blown my mind with its storytelling. LML once wrote me: “I always wondered why you went to Chicago and went into a lab. ... I never saw you with lab glasses and a white coat (even more so with AC, MD scribbled across a pocket).”
Maybe I made a mistake, committing a decade and a half of my life to chemistry and physics. Those years were an uphill, a salmon-in-stream, struggle that in the end didn't work out and in retrospect never fit right. Maybe I was never the right person for it.
In a way, I think maybe poetry (I know, how erudite, how pedantic) saved my life. I've been hospitalized again and again as an adult, and each time it's been a book of poetry that’s gotten me through it. And some poems just stay with you. In Arcadia, Bernard says at one point:
“I cant think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Leave me out, I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.' There you are, he wrote it after coming home from a party.”
(Act II, Scene 5)
Before he left for college, my brother bought me a book of Yeats' poetry, and those poems (“I balanced all, brought all to mind” or “Banished heroic mother moon and vanished, and now ... I must endure the timid sun”) I carried through my teens. And Tennyson's “Ulysses” (“My purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the Western stars”) helped carry me through grad school.
Reminding me that others have felt the way I feel and struggled in the same ways. That I'm not alone, however alone I might feel. And to hold on, that maybe there are other experiences out there, too:
“The Earth, the Seas, the Light, the Day, the Skies, The Sun and Stars are mine; if those I prize.” (“The Salutation”, Thomas Traherne)
I ruv my bear beary much!
