Half Hour before Curtain

It was Friday night, and the curtain was scheduled to go up at 8.

From years of weekends with friends, I was acquainted with the feel of pre-theatre conversations, the customary alert given a waiter of a curtain to make, the advantage of a restaurant where the offerings are familiar and the ordering a comfortable routine. Sometimes there is a fellow playgoer’s story about parking to entertain the table. What others have read about the show becomes a convenient lead if there is a lull in talk in the group.

From years of weekends with friends, I was acquainted with the debate on how to divide the check, the nagging awareness that sometimes a number of people are paying for the extra drink that one or two people ordered. The exit from the restaurant is a bit of a bustle with restroom stops before the walk to the theatre.

In my experience, one rarely emerges from that pre-theatre experience with a quiet sense of gratitude for the conversation. One rarely emerges having been heard and affirmed and encouraged to keep talking about what is important in life. Well, there’s a show to get to!

Last week I had managed to get a single ticket for an opening night performance on Friday. I was going to be free, therefore, of most of the distractions of pre-theatre conversations, except those I might witness or overhear. At the table nearest mine, one older woman was talking with a friend, swearing by the Asian pesto sauce she had selected “once again” for her Shanghai whole wheat noodles with mixed vegetables and beef.

My dinner at the familiar restaurant lasted barely an hour. At meal’s end I walked down the street where the theatre was located. I knew there were benches a few blocks away on the edge of a university campus, and it was there I intended to spend the half hour or so before I took my seat in Row F.

When I have attended productions in this neighborhood in the past, I have seldom given myself permission simply to observe what was around me. If I got to these benches, it was to wait with others, and the social instinct took over. Instead of tuning one another to the surroundings, our talk became itself the diversion or – at times – a distraction from the waiting.

This past Friday it took me awhile to be aware that I was not initially at ease. Sitting on the bench, I was looking every which way until I caught myself. It was that familiar feeling of not wanting to wait. Or maybe this evening it was more not wanting to be waiting by myself.

Past experience had almost convinced me that there was nothing worth looking at or noticing or observing in these few blocks of city neighborhood. In getting attuned to how I was feeling, however, I became attuned as well to the landscape before me.

If I had seen it in a movie set in New York City, I would have thought it intriguing and distinctive. I would have woven stories about the people who lived in these old apartment buildings, ridden this trolley, walked to class under the branches of these city trees. I would have paid attention to what I was seeing and how I was responding to it. I would scarcely have been able to wait till the end of the film to turn to someone and say, “Look – over there – that set of windows! What would it be like to look out of them every morning and see a city before you?”



I woke up in that half hour before curtain.

Just before I got up from my bench to head to the theatre, I saw the older woman from the restaurant – the one who loved the Asian pesto sauce. She was smiling as she and her friend walked down the sidewalk in front of me, smiling as they talked, smiling as they talked. They knew, I was immediately convinced, what this neighborhood looked like.

My next theatre night I will order the Shanghai whole wheat noodles with mixed vegetables and beef and Asian pesto sauce.

Heart Puzzles

I am at that briefest of times in a reader’s life – right before the midpoint in a really good novel.

I will never again know just this much and no more about the main character in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn. In a short while I will have moved past page 117. In the remaining 145 pages, Eilis Lacey will develop in ways that I can certainly guess at. I prefer to hope, though, that my heart and my mind will be stilled or startled by what this author does with her.

If I weren’t writing, I would be reading on right now. It was what I was doing at 2:30 this morning when I could not go back to sleep after my BlackBerry vibrated a needless alert to email. Turning over felt a futile gesture, an inconsequential effort. Soon I was sitting with a mug of hot chocolate and reading about Christmas in 1950s Brooklyn.

If someone asked me about the draw of the character Eilis Lacey, I would have to explain situations where the circumstances of her life are about to change through the agency of other characters. More than once the moment shortly comes when Eilis entertains other explanations for the offers people are making to her – explanations other than the one that had first appeared plausible. She has to admit that people may know more than they are saying. Or they may not.

What her Irish heart is feeling and how open a role those feelings can or should play in her American life seems to be the puzzle for this intelligent young woman.

It takes a masterful writer to determine that just such a puzzle can be narrated – and ought to be.

Excuse me while I read.

Well Done

Years of schooling prepared me for the month of May.

Successful and happy as a student, I learned to enjoy the variety of ways I got the message “Well done!” The grade on a final examination, an average on my report card, the gold or silver card in a specific course, a medal at convocation or a plaque at graduation, the honors designation on a diploma – in typical ways I experienced and relished the month’s traditional affirmations.

And I needed affirmations that were dependable and uncomplicated and clear.

May meant that I heard my name and read my name in places and at times that lots of other people didn’t. Only September roll calls at the start of a new school year could possibly rival for me May’s sweet and steady litany of achievement and approval.

I confess I liked people’s listing my name, reading it in public, writing it in calligraphy.

A kind of healing seemed to issue from each new “John…” that I saw or heard.

Years later, seeing my name on bills and catalogs usually does not distract me. I am still new enough in this apartment, though, to be taken aback by the sight of my name topping a new address. Each piece of mail waiting on the floor inside my front door at the end of a May work day seems something of a diploma, a report card, a commendation.

If I am here, it’s because I have learned something.

I am relieved to hear yet again, in that friendly voice from deep within, “Well done...”

Moving

It was a week without Internet.

No virtual distances covered. Only real ones that sometimes required the careful setting of one foot in front of another, up steps, down hallways, even into basement corners.

Occasionally a camera found a view without packing boxes.

Friends stayed in contact.

New Door, New Windows

That's my new door. Not the one with the columns and the little classical tympanum overhanging it. The door nearer the back, disappearing into the side of the house.



When I took this photo weeks ago on a sunny March day, someone else regularly used that door to climb the stairs to her second-floor apartment.

This morning I walked for the first time through the rooms as legal tenant. Empty and sun-filled, the spaces filled me with peace. There will be room for lots of thinking there, lots of writing, lots of waking and falling asleep.



I am ready for the cheer.

I am moving a life.

Reading Poetry to Someone in a Restaurant

They hadn't noticed me. They did not know that I could hear them.



He read part of a poem to her. It was clear from the pacing of his voice that he was reading poetry. It was clear that he had probably done this before with her.

I waited for her response and wondered whether it would betray any touch of the self-conscious, the impatient, the dismissive.

On the contrary, her words -- low and admiring -- expressed appreciation. And appreciation not because he had read a poem aloud to her in a restaurant but because the poem deserved appreciation. It was part of a long conversation between them, I sensed, and a conversation that never relegated a meal out to a distraction or a diversion. No, it was the conversation that took them out. It was the conversation that took me in.

Easter Sunday Moments

The day started with 8 o'clock Mass. The setting, close to where I live, suited me.

Six hours later I was holding the newest member of the family. Here he is, napping with me on his first Easter afternoon.

Pause in Packing Boxes

After days of rain here in New England, the sun came out today and the temperatures rose through the afternoon. I went for a walk in a favorite place after work and surprised something inside stubbornly resisting the warmth and light that seemed determined to make a bouquet of this day.

What part of the universe dared bring me flowers in this guise?

Dared try to disarm me and nudge me into new happiness and an almost easy hope?

With each lungful of air, though, I felt myself giving way. With each sudden scent arising from the grasses and the trees, I recognized the age-old path. I could trust its turns. I could trust the urging of its progress through these April minutes making up my April hours.

I would end up somewhere good.

Washing the Crystal

When my brothers and I divided my parents' estate five years ago, my portion of the legacy included the wedding china that had been stored in a mahogony breakfront in their dining room. I did not inherit the breakfront, but I did receive a curio cabinet in which my mother used to display a collection of porcelain and bisque figurines in her living room.

Within that same year -- a sad year of deaths in my Louisiana family -- I received the wedding crystal that had belonged to a favorite aunt, who died a widow and childless sixth months after my mother. Transported to New England, my mother's curio cabinet became the new home to her own china as well as to what had survived of her sister's crystal.

It has been important to me the past two years to have those family pieces in my suite of rooms. Ready to move within a month to an apartment nearby, I took time this weekend to wash and pack the delicate contents of the cabinet.



It took a number of trips to carry everything down a hallway to the shared kitchen where I do dishes. A quieter weekend than usual in the house, I had space to lay things out. As I leaned over the sink and washed each saucer and soup bowl, each cordial and sherry glass, I remembered the small New Orleans homes where my mother and my aunt would have done the same thing.

No recent entertainments would have required this kind of washing on their part -- just the normal year-to-year care for what these two women had wanted on display from their suburban lives.

Most of the stories about losses and disappointments and nagging problems and habitual heartaches that punctuated their daily phone calls to one another have stopped being told by anyone. Silence descends more and more finally on what had been their discreet litany of sorrows.

I recall details but nothing that bears repeating or recording.

Their wedding china, their wedding crystal was what they wanted on display. A little elbow grease -- to use my mother's expression -- was all that was needed to make a life gleam again in someone's eyes.

These family pieces catch again the sun of a March sky this New England weekend. I can look forward to washing them all again in a new home a year from now.

The Pleasures of Travel

I have hunted maps of Venice, and I am fairly sure that it was Studium Libreria. The bookstore had suddenly emerged amid a row of shops in the shadow of San Marco. I had not expected a bookstore there, much less a bookstore that carried some titles in English. My only purchase at Studium Libreria, though, ended up a book in French.

It was startling for me, standing in those crowded midday aisles in 1996, to hold in my hands a book about Venice written in a French that I could understand. The author, Michel Mohrt, was a member of the Academie Francaise, and he had written a book about Italy. He was an Italophile. A French Italophile. I had not understood up to that moment that such a category of Venetian visitor could exist.

In the delight that comes from being able to read something that might hitherto have seemed inaccessible, I discovered something new about the pleasures of travel. Beyond memorable meals, beyond museums, beyond tours, each destination initiates you into a community of visitors whose minds and whose words deserve a Baedeker's all their own.

Exploration can take the form of memoir.

Investigation can occur in paragraph after fertile paragraph as well as in dogged footsteps.

I do not recall at what moment it occurred to me to search beyond English titles in my quest for verbal images of the Munich I would shortly find in my travels. A "Munich" search in Amazon.fr brought me up against the French translation of a collection of short stories by an Italian author, Giorgio Pressburger.

I read an excerpt from the short story that gives the book its title:

Ne pensez pas à la célèbre horloge de l'hôtel de ville de Munich, ce mécanisme qui, toutes les heures, fait défiler de gracieuses silhouettes, dans un carrousel très fidèle à l'esprit de coquettes villes allemandes du XVIe siècle.

Enjoying what I read, I thought of what I wanted to try. It did not take me long to pull out my credit card and arrange fairly inexpensively for a copy of the Pressburger book to be waiting for me at my hotel when I arrive in Munich next Friday morning.

I get to indulge a new kind of adventure. Like a scene from some old black-and-white movie, a hotel desk clerk will inform me that there is a package waiting for me. I will thank the receptionist, take the package into the hotel bar, and begin to read the French translation of an Italian short story named after the Glockenspiel that I had first seen during a Munich visit in 1974.

Does travel get much more fun than that?

Photo of Michel Mohrt from Revista Literaria Azul Arte

Photo of Giorgio Pressburger by Danilo de Marco