Tuesday, September 30, 2014

A Seattle Minute

It’s been over a year since I’d been back in this town, yet so much has changed. Things feel different here; or maybe it’s that I’ve been given a new space and the old one’s gone, but I walked to this café like a ghost thinking— “I loved that park once, that café, that restaurant, that view, this crosswalk…” Life is fast just as much as I have changed and checked my demons, so have the people that surround. This morning I met with G and her baby buckled to an eco-friendly carseat in the back of her Prius. The fact that her life had changed forever dawned on me. Baby. E. I touched his little hands and his little feet. He blew me kisses and held my fingers. Skype did none of this justice. We visited the house she and her husband are building at the top of one of Seattle’s seven hills. She pulled out the blueprints on her laptop. It was as if our life together had gotten up, grown legs, and walked off without me.

Soon after I arrived in town, an onslaught of friends and colleagues ignited my phone. I love seeing every one of them. I am who I am because of them. But amid the clanking of silverware, between bites of autumn squash frittata, boon, or salted cod, above the din of old conversations finding new— I remember I also love Seattle for moments like this: moments alone.


There is a man in his early thirties sitting across from me, tall and bearded, donned in a proper nylon rain jacket, dirty jeans, and noise-canceling headphones that seal him off from the world. He is drinking a beer before noon and reading a thin novel with no title on its cover. His chalice says, “La Fin Du Monde.” I remember sitting with E on a bus as the sun was setting deep in South London where she remarked,


- I've been seeing that everywhere recently.


- Seeing what?


She pointed to the pub sign, “La Fin Du Monde,”


- That phrase, “the end of the world.”


She mused on about Stephen Fry, or was it Zadie? I hadn’t thought about that memory until today (six years later!) when I saw this man drinking from a cup with the same insignia, that single, empty chalice on the worn, wooden table across from mine. He caught my eye as I read him, and it’s as if he said,


“This is the end of the world. Where we are today. We are born to die. We live on the edge of life at all times— it’s a terrifying but reassuring idea. It frees us from the ideas that constrain us—the fears; of the unknown, the future, and humanity— it makes us bare to our desires.”


His expression is one of complete arrest, far more intense than the generally gentle gypsies of this town. It reminds me of a professor I once knew. Actually, the professor had said all of those thoughts. In reality, this man sitting here is probably only bothered by my shamelessness. Rudeness is the worst offense here, just the way laziness is in New York. We are upstairs in my used-to-be usual corner. There is a couple downstairs: two elderly women talking a bit too loudly about a special they saw on PBS. Nazi life post World War II. The man on his laptop behind them looks slightly perturbed. He’s got a weathered murse to match his weathered face. I glance at his screen from above. He is coding. Only in Seattle would you find a man in his 50s, coding.

I worked for a judge once that told me a story of one of the first computers built in Seattle. His clerk was on maternity leave, and his secretary was at lunch. Sitting there in chambers, surrounded by windows, ancient wood and paraphernalia from his clients from around the world, I had tiptoed in to set a motion on his desk. When I asked him about his family portrait, he got talking about his family and then his wife, and then her fixation with a machine. “This machine,” she had told him as a late teen, “is going to change the life of every human on this planet.” I told him that I could see why he married her. He sunk in his leather cloud from behind the giant oak desk, robes off before his next case. His aging face lit up the dark, gray sky.


I came to town for a wedding, a cosmopolitan love affair that traipses all kinds of continents, years and life circumstances. The wedding was beautiful, mainly because the couple was so beautiful—radiating life and happiness. The bride was clothed in her constant joyous composure, the groom in his ever flippant anti-cajolery, and they were surrounded by proud family, friends and a magnanimous view of the Sound (the eighth wonder of the world). Someday, I hope when they are old and gray, they will let me write their story of young love. But for now I am off again to lunch with dear C. She is back from a year in India with her own stories of travel, love and new chapters. 




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