It Was a Small World This Year. It Was a Fine World This Year
I was reflecting on the tagline this blog has had for a full decade now: Explore. Write. Photograph. When I slapped that on the Abu Halen masthead I had darker hair and tighter skin and life felt urgent, like every place I didn't see would disappear if I didn't experience it. As if I were the spark and every place was dark until I came throwing light.
I thought to my myself recently, maybe I don't believe in that tagline as as much as I used to. I'm not the middle of the cosmos, or anything else for that matter. For nearly the past year I’ve lived with my family a typical American life in a small northern Virginia apartment. We flew home to the West for Christmas and rented cars for a long weekend in New York City and a quick rock concert in Cleveland. Apart from that though, without owning a vehicle, the extent of our world has been limited to the lengths of the subway lines. And I’ve rather liked it this way.
Hero and sidekick survey their domain. But which is the hero and which is the sidekick?
That masthead features a stick figure with a suitcase, implying that exploring, and writing about it and taking pictures of it, requires an airplane, or at least a long enough journey that you need luggage. This of course is untrue. It is so obviously untrue that most of us forget it’s false. That is a funny thing, and also perhaps a sad thing. It is a sad thing if you miss the warmth of the sunshine over your hometown, the cool, blunt prick of raindrops falling on your arms and plinking against your bedroom windows, or the sweet updrafts of humanness rising from the people you pass on those streets that you know because you cross them all the time, the same way you cross your heart.
But although the world has been smaller for me in the past year, and I haven’t explored much of the globe, I have strolled all over my wide, wide mind. I’ve written hundreds of pages about it in personal journals. I’ve taken a billion photographs with my eyes and ears and heart. I’m believing in the tagline, even if I haven’t needed a suitcase to do it. Soon, we will pack up and plant ourselves on the other side of the world again. The world will once more feel big and beguiling. I will feel wonder. It will feel sweet. But exploring the little world around my home for the past year yielded lots of sweetness and wonder too.
There’s a long pedestrian walkway that tunnels beneath Highway 50. I pass through it every morning as I walk to work. It smells like chipped concrete and urine. Once, for a few days, the lights on the tunnel wall shorted out. On a glum and dark rainy morning I plodded inside lost in thought. I was a little ways in before I noticed the darkness. I stopped. Stale blackness swept over my arms and face. The far-off tunnel exit was just a smudge, the color of a gloomy cloud.
This was not frightening. It felt like maybe I was lost, but in the distance was a speck of some home I’d never been to and could just barely see. Weak light fading out behind me, before me either heaven or oblivion. You can’t be sure until you go. It was like seeing through glass darkly, to paraphrase Saul. He stared at God and saw everything and then nothing. Even when as Paul his blindness finally broke he admitted he still couldn’t see that clearly. His vision was still blurry at best, and that was as good as it was going to get.
Later, they fixed the tunnel lights, and I felt a little sad. It seems we sometimes mistake seeing for knowing, so that seeing everything clearly is its own kind of blindness. Maybe life is just seeing through glass darkly. There’s something comforting about that.
Winning!
A parked and dented Honda Civic leans against the curb like an old man resting for a spell. It’s a silver color that used to be pretty but now looks homeless. I walk past and think how this car is as far from the center of the universe as you can get. Through the soiled windows I see trash tossed around the seats, greasy fast food bags, papers, dirty clothing. The dashboard is dotted with sugary soda stains. And also a 5x7 photo stuck right above the broken CD player. It’s a school picture of a smiling grade schooler with missing front teeth, soft dark hair, and brown eyes so deep that they’re bright. My insides smile. Who cares about the dents and the paint and the trash can interior. Nobody drives this beater anywhere without remembering where the center of the universe is. That’s called winning.
Cool wind cuts its teeth on autumn afternoons, biting just a little bit, growing into winter gales that can peel the skin off the backs of your hands. I’m out walking in the angled sunlight of a November afternoon and I come upon an angled man. Across the street he glides down the sidewalk. He leans slightly into the wind, his hands behind his back, a baby blue Pakistani shalwar kameez wrapping itself around his skinny shoulders and shins, showing the sharpness of the bones. It looks like he’s trust falling without anyone to catch him. Just the wind. And sometimes that’s enough.
The sentry of this street corner is a towering, leafy oak tree, and an old picnic table huddles beneath it. I walk past this corner every day, and on most days a man sits barefoot at the picnic table, smoking a joint and watching the world turn through squinting eyes. The end of the roll between his fingers burns and smokes down into his lungs. The drifting smoke refracts and scatters the sunlight. The drifting smoke bends his brain and bends the sunshine.
The intoxicated man with bloodshot eyes put off his shoes from off his feet, he sits and pulls on this smoldering stick of herbs and chemicals and it flares like a burning bush. The smoke wanders upward like a sin praying, disappears like a prayer answered. Devil and angel, the two heads of every heart. Heaven or oblivion. You can’t be sure until you go.
“Is this cool? I don’t see a problem with this.”
