Reading: J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

Moving: ...

Listening: NPR

Watching: CNN and "Freaks and Geeks"

14 November 2000: Drive my car into the ocean

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go--so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his boot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

But I cannot even recite this about my missing the ocean, because I have no tide to want it by.

Today on my lunch hour I took the 83 to CCN and Larry's Shoes to explore the idea of Dr Martens. My pumps, which I can stand and walk and run in, are still heels, still shorten my stride, still have to be packed in my knapsack to walk to work. (In fairness, so did my flat sandals, because Tevas are easier to walk in.) I wanted shoes I could walk in and work in, flat and functional. I thought of Dr Martens because people do wear skirts and dresses with them, and they're indestructible.

I stood in Larry's Shoes with a salesman who obviously didn't care about the justness of the vote or the representation of individuals as long as Bush got into office, in Docs and the long straight black skirt I wear two or three days a week in the winter, looking at myself in the mirror and realizing I'm not hip enough. I'm past hip. No, hip is way past me. I cannot pull off a long black skirt, however expressionless and basic and plain it might be, with clunky chunky funky shoes. So much for that.

I still want those boots though, the flat-soled, no center seam, lustrous black leather boots I saw a coworker wear, upon which I fell demanding to know where she found them. Nordstrom. They're probably higher quality than the Nine West ones CLH bought for me for Christmas 1991. Okay, I wore them all the time, but that hole that popped open between the sole and the upper in February 1995, just over three years later, really disappointed me. (Slight against Nine West, not my sister.)

After a brief trip to Europtics, whose glasses frames I liked until I found out they average over $300 a pair, I waited for the return bus. An older woman joined me, saying hadn't the day turned out well.
I turned to smile at her, agreeing that yes, it was lovely and hadn't it warmed up nicely (into the 40s).
"And the air smells so fresh!" she said, which it did further from the street than where we stood.
"And doesn't the sun feel wonderful!" because it did, heating me thoroughly through my heat-conducting black woolen overcoat, dark chenille sweater, and long black skirt.
"That's our state," she sighed happily.
"Yes, I've got so addicted to our sunshine I don't know if I ever could live anywhere else."
"I haven't been much of anywhere else, but I've heard about other places." Oh my, thought I. "None of them seem as nice as Denver." She told me about a friend of hers, "an older lady like me," who had just gone to the ocean, "wherever the ocean is, on the East Coast somewhere," for the first time, spent her vacation on the beach, "and now she misses it. Isn't it strange, to think of missing the ocean?" She herself apparently had never seen it.
"I miss it. I'm from the coast, grew up on the beach, and I miss the ocean every day."
"You do? Can you go there for vacation?"
As my bus mercifully pulled up I told her yes, and we exchanged pleasantries about "nice talking to you," and I got on the bus.

I didn't cry on the bus, but I was close. The current entry of Dora's when I began to read her had that Edna St. Vincent Millay poem in it (her site's down), and it really struck me--that's how I immediately knew that here was a journal I needed to read, a journaler I needed to know. It's one that I memorized during my heartbroken period. There's no one like Millay for heartwrenching grief.

I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

"Where the Streets Have No Name" still puts me back in the Hartford Civic Center eight years after I last saw U2. "Question" puts me slap-dab in the middle of Jones Beach with ASZ, seeing the Moody Blues. I cannot read The Grapes of Wrath without thinking of tenth grade English or see Robert B. Parker's name on books without thinking of PSA. I cannot read that sonnet without thinking of the summer of 1991 and the following schoolyear. But I have no tide, and that's what makes me sad right now (besides my lack of hipness).

I don't dwell on missing the ocean, because to do so would make me consciously miserable. I do miss it, always. All the time, low-level, also with occasional peaks, like when an old woman native to Denver who's never even seen it ever at all in her whole life expresses surprise that as an entity it could be missed.