this morning i put on josh groban's new cd "closer" and got stuck on track 10: "remember when it rained" . .playing it at least a dozen times with tears wet on my face. the lyric: "remember when it rained/i felt the ground and looked up high and called your name/ooooh remember when it rained/in the water i remain/running down."
i went to visit my mother tonight. she was so angry when i put up a tabletop christmas tree for her. it seemed as though she didn't want to be reminded of the holiday this year. i don't understand her denial right now. "i'm just going to have to put all that clutter away anyway" she shouted at me from the kitchen. and in a way, none of it seemed right: the wind up santa playing "the beer barrel polka," the half melted headless angel candles, the chipped creche with the missing st. joseph. i drove home and got stuck behind two salt trucks that pelted my car with briney hailstones.
it seems i'm seeking a gentle spirit that seems to elude me right now. is it a sad wanting for nostalgia? or is it simply that i long to feel i am inhabited by a presence that is conscious. knowing. truly present.
thirteen days of numbness and forced cheerfulness have passed. everyone around me a rushed blur. still i feel hollow, mechanical, puppet-like. not even an old rerun of "a bing crosby christmas" can make me feel lighter. "if i can just hold on until solstice," i keep saying to myself. in the meantime, i try and avoid my suburban shopping malls. i drink quarts of unspiked egg nog. i stare at the strings of blue blinking lights wrapped around the evergreen trees in my cul de sac.
i think about paris in wintertime. i think about writing josh groban a love letter. i think about a time when things seem quieter, with the pace of a slow foreign movie you don't want to end, a soundtrack of cellos and soft celestial violins. not rushed. not brash and coarse. but kind of gauzy and tender. remember tender? like 1985 was. like then.
