writing hasn’t been happening much lately which has a direct correlation with my state of unrest. summer is coming and i’m leaving paris soon right at the moment when i gave my first completely unselfish hug. i watched a lecture today about living forever and the developing the technology to do it. and people asked, “wouldn’t it be boring?” and out of all the things life is, i don’t know that i will ever again find it boring. arthur, the nine-year-old, says often the same thing in the morning when I tell him he can’t play the computer before school. he says, “but it’s so boring here.” and i don’t get it, with the books on the shelves, the light coming in through the windows, my own two feet on the ground, bones, muscles, standing up, lying down, sitting and waiting and watching. yet for me, living forever, or at least, for another hundred years requires a garden. and odd to me still how things grow. i don’t grow with sunshine and water and i don’t know why.
it’s a few days into spring and i feel like summer is coming soon. and that’s a big deal.
kate used to talk about legitimacy. “i want to achieve legitimacy,” she’d say. or maybe she never really said it that way. and i once thought that the only way to obtain that was through world travel and a constant melancholy and thought that somehow, happiness was a lesser emotion. i had hemingway’s “happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing i know,” in my head.
and now, no. happiness is happiness, and it feels good. it’s worth chasing. it’s worth forgetting things over. it’s worth letting rest anxieties and fears to let happen. and melancholy, too, is worth those moments of reflection, looking out at how it all is, and thinking that either it is here to stay, or that you are quickly losing it.
i just know for now, i am leaving Paris. i am disquieted and comforted. there will be more projects and more stories, so many more stories to come.
i have an assignment to sleep under a texas sky. i have an assignment to start a lemonade stand outside a chicago subway. i have an assignment to jump into a murky pond near the abraham lincoln memorial museum in southern illinois. i have an assignment to hike through southern colorado to a place that makes more sense to both of us, wherever that is. and new york, the upper east side to brooklyn, and chocolate, and long white white hair with big eyes. i have an assignment to grow some eggplant, to sundry some tomatoes.
jeremy said today that we’ll pitch a tent in our new living room.
and i’m going to love hard and breathe and eat lots and lots of bitter greens,
nice hearty ones, the greens i mean.
America in Short 