6 February 1998: Behold the Sea

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Behold the Sea

My various entrapments overwhelmed me on Friday and I chose to label them city living. So I walked what passes for my country stroll, on our local stretch of nature slash bike trail. Why did I type the word "slash" instead of the punctuation mark /? I took along the Waterboys, This is the Sea and Fisherman's Blues. I love the Waterboys. Listening to birds--starlings, I think--chatter and trill and practice their scales was a blessing too, and I paused beside a cottonwoodful or two to listen. However, I also found sustenance in the lyrics to "This is the Sea."

These things you keep, you'd better throw them away You want to turn your back on your soul-lost days Once you were tethered, now you are free That was the river This is the sea Now if you're feeling weary If you've been alone too long Or maybe you've been suffering from a few too many plans that have gone wrong And you're trying to remember how fine your life used to be Running around banging your drum like it's 1973 Well that was the river, this is the sea Now you say you got troubles You say you got pain You say you got nothing to believe in, nothing to hold on to Nothing to trust nothing but chains You've been scouring your conscience Rake into your memory But that was the river, this is the sea Now I see you're wavering As you try to decide You've got war in your head And it's tearing you up inside You're trying to make sense Of something you just don't see Trying to make sense now And you know that you once held the key But that was the river, this is the sea Now here is a train It's coming on down the line It's yours if you hurry You've got still enough time And you don't need no ticket and you don't pay no fee Because that was the river and this is the sea That was the river, this is the sea That was the river, this is the sea And this is the sea Sea mm-hmm Sea, yeah Behold the sea

So I listened to that, and cried, and felt better. I am glad that, however stressed or depressed I get, I know a few tricks to wrench myself up and away again. Usually.

I walked, and listened to the Waterboys and to birdsong, and watched the sunset light glow red against the winter cottonwoods, and brought myself back to peace.

We received my father's Christmas check, which shall embody itself in a bookcase. What we shall do when we fill up this one I don't know. We'll have to move. Already RDC's temporary, i.e. library, books, live in whatever floor space they can commandeer; my library books--altogether fewer--live on my nightstand. And it seems criminal to give up the piles of The New York Review of Books and The Nation, which is an excellent reason not to subscribe to additional magazines. MacWorld accumulates anywhere. Anyway. People who keep stuff other than books in their bookcases amuse me. I can't imagine having surplus shelf footage or such a surfeit of dust-collectors that I'd sacrifice to them anything more than whatever horizontal space happens not to fit books. Like the tops of bookcases when I don't have bookends. Anyway. A new bookcase soon.

RDC and I went out to dinner at a Vietnamese place called Little Saigon in Cherry Creek North. I wanted to wear my new dress, although it's really more a summer dress, and the only shoes I have for it that aren't my summer staple of sandals are my wedding shoes. The linen shoes I bought for my interview suit are stained, irretrievably so after my mother's wedding photographs, so I have the Dupioni linen ones I bought for my wedding. I know I bought them in the morning, which you're not supposed to do because your feet swell later in the day, and also I suspect that my feet grew immediately I was married.

(Not that I wore them much that day either: they were absolutely the last thing I put on before I went downstairs with CLH to join the rest of the party (six people including the officiant altogether), and outside about thirty feet to where the ceremony happened, and for a much longer time of receiving and another of photographs. After that, I took off shoes and stockings; TJZ has a photograph of that happening.)

So I wasn't comfortable walking, but that was my own fault.

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Last modified 13 February 1998

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