Fake and True

Dog walk, November 13

Walking Patsy on these autumn-dark evenings, I’ve already seen two Christmas trees in windows—the first on Monday, November 12, the second on Tuesday. Nothing last night, though Au Bon Pain was playing Christmas music yesterday at lunchtime. Tomorrow, November 16 (I checked), that radio station will start playing my least favorite kind of holiday music 24/7 through December 25. Just hear those sleigh bells ringin’.

There’s still some gold and rust and green jittering on the trees this afternoon, and the sky has unfurled a tightly woven blanket over the sun. I biked to work today despite the turn toward cold. It’s not even late fall, let alone Christmas—it’s just fall.

On Saturday my brother and sister and some of their family members will come for dinner at D’s house, as he and I will be in London next week. (Fortuitously enough, I happened upon a vegan restaurant hosting a Thanksgiving dinner on the 22nd—who knew?—so that's where you'll find us.) 

Saturday's party here will be our Fakesgiving—a term I learned yesterday, and love—with veggie pot pies, baby-kale salad, baked apples with mincemeat, and some other surprises in the works. This will be the first Thanksgiving since Dad’s death, and though he hadn’t attended in at least a couple of years anyway, I wanted to facilitate some sort of coming-together of kin. It’s a chance to say, in a way that in fact can be more celebratory than mournful: This is what it’s like now.

Christmas-creep is the opposite of now. 

 

Acceptance

Vladimir: "I'm glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever."

Estragon: "Me too." -- Waiting for Godot

Today D. finally e-mailed me this photo he took of us last May in London as we waited to see a production of Waiting for Godot starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. It's one of my favorite pictures of the two of us (I'm on the right).

I show it for no other reason than I need an anchor for my mind, which tonight refuses to alight on any single idea -- as it has refused for the last couple of weeks.

I just frittered away a couple of hours -- a fire burning and then dying in the fireplace, my dog sleeping and then waking beside me (breath in, breath out) -- trying to gain entry into coherent thoughts about friends falling away, relationships shifting, once-common interests diverging. Without planning to, I found myself Googling names and images, here and there coming across someone's familiar but drastically changed (or not at all drastically changed) appearance -- and, when I did, feeling little more than mild surprise or amusement, tempered by a curious sort of spongy distance from whichever potential This Is Your Life panelist it happened to be.

It is this detachment, among other things, that has kept me from joining Facebook: I believe that it's a rare, rare case where an old, lost friendship can be revived beyond the superficial level. What's more, my antipathy toward small talk is such that I'm reluctant to invite more of it into my life.

My long-held attitude toward organized reunions (i.e., that you should attend any and all that you have the chance to) is even changing, much to my surprise. My high school had an all-class reunion last spring that I was planning to attend, until I lost interest as the date approached. I haven't even considered going to this year's edition.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about a friend of almost 30 years with whom I currently seem to be on pause. We've had no contact for the last six months (possibly the longest we've ever gone) -- this after a perfectly pleasant evening with her and her husband and two little girls in which nothing untoward happened other than the fact that it became starkly apparent to me (and, I'm convinced, to her) that we were, figuratively, gazing in almost completely non-intersecting directions.

This is the friend who introduced me to Joni Mitchell's album Blue, the two of us sitting on a cold linoleum dorm-room floor, listening to it over and over again: I remember that time that you told me, you said love is touching souls . . .

Tonight I don't even quite know where I am. I feel a bit reclusive, a bit wistful yet non-sentimental, a bit at a loss for words.

D. leaves for a few days in LA tomorrow, a trip to see friends. I'm going to the theater on Thursday to see a new play with a friend of my own. He's a more recent friend than those I was Googling tonight. Someone who has helped see me through -- helped see me -- these last several years of change and reorientation.

So there you have it -- my bookends for this directionless and confused musing: nights at the theater. A curtain parting, a curtain closing, ideas to contemplate as I make my way back home.