Hunting The Muse

The rain had been toying

The rain had been toying with me. I was trying to increase my motivation and my physical activity levels, and the rain was getting cocky. I got up one day to drive my pickup to the arboretum - a beautiful, sunny drive on the way - and then a huge cloud covered the sun and there was a downpour just as I got out of the truck. I hung out for a while, gave up, drove back down the hill. The rain stopped, the sun came out. I refused to be beaten - I drove back up, parked, and had a good walk. But the rain bothered me. It was tormenting me.

Realizing that I was anthropomorphizing a meteorological event, I knew I needed a break. So I went to Florida.

My grandmother lives in Florida now. She lives in a retirement village - a very upscale one. My parents have recently bought a condo in the area, their "second place". It's new, and they just furnished it. It's weird to realize I am now from the families that have "second places". Funny, I don't feel overpriveleged. I hadn't seen my grandmother for twelve years. She offered to fly me out. So I got the ticket.

I took the Max to the airport. It was the first time I had done public transportation here in Portland. The first time is always a big thing to me. Now it's no big deal, of course - but I really did have a feeling of Portland opening up to me. It's so easy, I realized, to go to the mall, to go to The Rose Garde, to go to the Irish Pub downtown. And I got to the airport quicker than if I had driven.

Hours later we were getting ready to land in Fort Myers. The sun was setting and it was very low in the sky. We banked away from the sun, and the sun shone off the underside of our plane - I could see the ultrabright reflection shining onto the ground - a concentrated beam of light moving across houses and lakes. I wondered if this was the sort of thing people reported as possible UFOs. I didn't envy the job of the person that takes the UFO sighting calls. Then it got darker, and strangely, the light only reflected onto the tops of low-hanging clouds and fog banks. It didn't reflect onto streets or houses or fields - just fog. It must have been the moisture. I was entranced.

I bought a Tom Clancy book, stayed up late at night reading it. I practiced defensive reading - deliberately skipping entire plotlines that I saw as irrelevant to the reading experience *I* wanted to have. They all eventually fold back in together anyway, and then you find out the short version - that person x investigated y and found out z. Good enough for me. Using such strategies I was able to finish the 1100-page book in three nights.

The first day was great - so much sun. My body felt like it was just drinking it in. My dad had just bought a small boat, and we went motoring around the canals and channels. My parents didn't really know all of what they were doing, but they liked using their GPS, maps, and fishfinder. In water there are colored buoys and strange traffic rules that tell you what side of the buoy you should be boating on - rules that flip-flop to the opposite once you are a couple of miles away from shore. Very confusing and we were often on the wrong side.

Halfway through the door we were slowly maneuvering our way through a shipyard full of shrimp boats. I found out that the schedule of shrimp boats is dictated by the moon - since the moon was full, all of the boats were home, because shrimp don't move when the moon is full. It's too bright out. So we were passing by all these nearly-identically structured shrimp boats. There was a shrimp boat titled "The Eliminator", right next door to an identical one titled "Baby Girl".

There are restaurants on the water in Florida. We got to take our boat to a restaurant, dock it, go in, have some lunch, and then get back in our boat and go back to the condo. That was cool.

That evening we had dinner at the retirement community. Old people don't scare me as much as they did when I was a kid, but there are still times when it is depressing. The level of vitality varies so much from person to person - you can sense personal histories, written out and wide open, displayed obviously on the faces, postures, and bearings of the people. Struggles never overcome, coping mechanisms tenaciously held on to, and stubborn, attractive optimism in their tones of voice. My grandmother's face is less set than it used to be - she is shorter, she has trouble getting out of her chair... it was a bit unsettling at first. But she is so funny, so endearing.

Fifteen or twenty years ago I was with my parents and grandmother in North Carolina. We were at a mountain lodge, and my parents saw it had an upright piano. They wanted me to play piano for my grandmother because I never had before. I wasn't ready - I hadn't practiced my pieces for weeks and felt very unsure of myself. They insisted, along with another guest we barely knew - she was quite overbearing about it. I sat down to play Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu - my emotions constricted into the equivalent of tunnel vision, I felt far away from my fingers, stopped after the first few seconds and started crying. Angry at my parents, I didn't play and never got a chance to again.

So for the previous two weeks I had been working up Fantasie- Impromptu and a Debussy piece - "Reflets dans l'eau". After dinner we walked through the lobby and I noticed the Yamaha grand piano. Most people had emptied out the lobby and they invited me to sit down. I played Fantasie-Impromptu all the way through - a few mistakes like normal but overall a passable job. My parents told me later that they could tell it meant a lot to my grandmother. My mother had also gone to get the music I had brought, and then I played through the Debussy, with the music. I am still working on it, so I had a couple of pseudo-stops (I faked through them). The emotional narrative wasn't really there because my mental process was more along the lines of "okay, hit this arpeggio! oh man, watch that hand position... ack, what's that chord??" and not the purely emotional channeling of evolution, foreshadowing, culmination. But it came off well - after I stopped, I looked up and saw about ten or twelve other old people standing around the lobby watching and smiling and then clapping. They were a really warm appreciative audience, all chatting with me afterward. It was really nice. I'm glad I got to play for her.

Over the next couple of days Florida started to feel kind of annoying. For some reason the sunlight there starts to feel kind of harsh - energetically the city felt like a house whose paint was peeling. The pastel colors were bugging me. I noticed that my parents decorating choices were what I equated as "old people choices" - floral print upholstery and the like. I realized later that it's not "old people decorating", it's "Florida decorating" - and probably the only reason I equated it that way was because of how my grandparents-from-Florida always decorated the same way.

It is very difficult to eat vegetarian in Florida. I pretty much ate seafood the entire time. The times I attempted to be a bit more healthy I was surprised in other ways. I ordered a meal of baked mushrooms stuffed with cheese and lobster meat, and it ended up being absolutely drowned in a soup/stew of mozzerella and ricotta cheeses. It was as close to the infamous "Pizza In A Cup" (in consistency) that I have ever experienced.

My father and I played a game of chess that will never exactly face the possibility of being written up in literature. I took his rook almost immediately - my queen ran straight into his bishop... it ended up with me with a king and pawns, and him with a king, pawns, and a knight - and then I somehow won. We both played very badly.

Soon it was time to return to Portland. On the flight on the way back, I sat next to a gentleman a couple years younger than myself. For the first half of the trip he read a book called "Five Minutes With Jesus", with helpful tips on rejoicing and prayer. For the second half of the trip he read a shooting magazine with helpful techniques on bagging elk and many many ads on powerful guns. Jesus and guns, Jesus and guns. I was caught between feeling like it made no sense and feeling it made perfect sense. I also mused briefly about how this man and I probably were not even capable of understanding each other, not at this point in our lives, where I am not sure of my place and he is probably even less sure of his. But it made me feel stronger to realize that I *have* already chosen a path somewhere along the line, just as he has - and that maybe, eventually, after we've accomplished more "training" in each of our paths, we can both still be good people, able to help each other.

I am back in Portland now. The rain no longer torments me. Posted by Curt at December 3, 2001 09:41 PM