3rd House Journal

Heat and Dust, and Consequences

It appears that my condo simply will not sell with my tenants still in it, and not without a thorough painting and re-carpeting and a few other fixes. That's just to sell at around market value, maybe less. That's the straight talk I got from my realtor early yesterday morning when I went out to meet with him at the condo.

I realize that I'm lucky compared to people who are losing everything now, owing money after selling. I have equity after 20 years, though much less than I should have because of refinancing to survive during all my years of being a starving freelancer. I do have a line of credit to draw on to pay for renovations. I have no savings. After the tenants move out this summer - and for however long it takes to sell the place - I'll be paying the mortgage, etc. there while also paying full rent for my own place when I move out from living with K. Rents are very high here; things would have been tighter even without adding the condo to cover. Alternatively, I could continue to rent it out for another year (or two, or three) while the place slowly falls apart, opening up my wallet up whenever anything breaks. I'm disinclined to continue to be an absentee landlord. I'm also disinclined to share another apartment when I move. I'll be 50 this fall. Can I please now have my own place to myself?

---

I dragged myself out to a movie event last night, meeting people first at a local restaurant. I'm so glad I went. I forgot about everything else. We saw the 1983 movie Heat and Dust at the Harvard Film Archive, which has been running a series on Merchant Ivory Productions in India. James Ivory was there (he's about 80 now, and still producing and directing movies) and spoke before the film and answered questions afterwards. Like the movie itself, he took awhile to get warmed up during the question session, but he had some interesting things to say about how he came to shoot films in India (he and Ismael Merchant, who died in 2005, did several films in India), how he is written about as an English filmmaker (he's American), his collaborations with Merchant and the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and so forth. He said that he could never shoot films in India today (presumably, like the ones he has shot) because India has changed so much.

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Visiting the heat and dust of the film for two hours or so was a welcome little vacation from the freezing cold in Cambridge last night. The wind chill must have been in the single digits, this in the last few days of March. Sigh. At least we were fortified for our walk over to the HFA by the good hot, spicy food we had at Tanjore, chosen for its ability to accommodate a large table of people, but fortuitously Indian. Also by chance, I took with me on the T the novel I'm reading, Brick Lane, about Bengali immigrants living in London. It's more about the life of one Bangladeshi woman and her family and community than about culture clash (at least at halfway through), but the most similar theme between it and the movie is the status of women (see Roger Ebert's review), their romantic choices as acts of dissent, and the consequences of those choices.

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I woke this morning dreaming not of India but of my condo living room, filled with scaffolding, ladders, drop cloths, and dripping with paint. I could smell the latex.

Settling, thickly

[Intersection; 12:30pm, 1/27/08]

Emerging from the stupor of my cold virus this weekend, I had another wave of idiotic bliss in the midst of grimy urban/suburban life in all its glory. I drove to the grocery store Sunday in the slush-dirty snow -- my grocery store, where I now know where to find things, more or less, where I'm familiar with the quirky cashiers, where I know the unofficial cross/no-cross pedestrian rules of the parking lot. To get there, I first have to navigate the side streets in my neighborhood, which are really too narrow to park on and it's not allowed overnight, but come daylight people do park on the street, creating a slalom course or dodge-'ems ride to get through.

[Benches across from the grocery store]

I felt it again on my way to J's Sunday afternoon, just a couple of miles away through a bit of jostling Sunday traffic to the quiet snow-covered streets of her neighborhood. She had a nice party. J's daughter T and her adorable (and typically active) 3-year-old grandson were there, along with T's very tall and very handsome Turkish husband. T told me about visiting Istanbul and how much she loved it, her enjoyment of the Turkish women she met, how she'd move there in an instant if her husband wasn't so attached to Boston.

[J shares Ben & Jerry's Heath Bar Crunch with her grandson; 8pm, 1/27/08]

Although there was only the one small child at the party (3 years old but already as tall as a 5-year-old), something must have stuck in my brain. I woke this morning dreaming of many small boys playing a game to lodge themselves in my windowsills. Most were on the outside of the house, but I found a couple of them trying to fit into my inside windowsills and I had to shoo them out.

Dumbstruck

Waking between Nyquil-drugged sleep interludes, I find I've been traveling. The other night I visited Dave in Plummer's Hollow where he had some hilarious nonsense verse hanging in the air, but I couldn't salvage a word of it when I got back. Last night I visited someone I used to go out with and I wanted to express my feelings for him but all around his house were beautiful, creative things his new wife had decorated the place with, and he seemed happy, so I left and woke up happy too.

Which was very good, because yesterday I felt really lousy. I left work early and went to bed before dinner and soon again after. On the emailed advice of my Chinese medicine person, I began taking my regular homeopathic remedy in water, which may have helped because I felt much better today. I wore down by mid-afternoon, but at least I feel on the mend now. Still whispering all day, by 5:45pm I had to call my yoga teacher to say I wouldn't make it tonight and, lo and behold, I was able to produce enough sound from my inflamed vocal chords to be audible. He understood -- both my squeakings and why I couldn't make it yet again, having missed last week's class at the start of my cold. I'm shooting for Thursday night for a makeup class. I expect to be on speaking terms again by then.

From the 'Could be worse" files...

I dreamed last night that I began an illicit love affair with Javier Bardem. I presume this one needs no interpretation. :-)

Dreams of children and snakes

[Garter snake, Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary; 4/21/07]

People who are dying or who have lost a loved one often dream of snakes...

I dreamed of a child I had who had been estranged. She would need time to get familiar with me. I carried her around on my hip. Then I dreamed of a son who grew very tall but was still somehow a young boy. He killed a snake and gave it to me. He told me he was worried he wouldn't ever have a girlfriend. I told him not to worry. Then he was a dragonfly.

I've never dreamed I had children before. As for the snake, yah yah, I know what you're thinking. Besides that, snakes are associated with death, transition, healing and medicine. Who knows. Dragonflies are supposed to be messengers from the dream time. I woke feeling contented. Maybe it was just the bright sunlight this morning after yesterday's rain.

---

After lunch, I walked up to the wildlife sanctuary. The trees are finally beginning to turn, red and yellow at the tops against the bright blue sky. The squirrels and chipmunks are very active, and some get careless around humans in their obsessive nut gathering. Further up the trails in the fields, I heard rustling not like rodents, smoother. It was a garter snake, now stopped mid-slither, watching me, only its tongue flicking. Harmless. Cute, really. I turned and continued down the path.

Belch

A pair of long-buried men's pants flew out of my chest early this morning. But later I was disappointed that I really didn't feel any different.

--

Ah well, must go make my lunch and get ready for work...

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream...

I finally got the chance to hear him sing. Not bad. He was a little self-conscious, but I've had many musician and singer friends so it's no big deal to me. Later we talked and suddenly we were there in this moment, face to face, both resting our chins against a hand, close, intimate. I told him I'd found an apartment and it's...emphasizing with one hand on his arm, conscious of touching him...only a mile and a quarter from work can you believe it?... He smiled and we looked into each other eyes for a long delicious moment... That's when I woke up this morning, the moment visceral and lingering. Sigh.

---

I've been sleeping badly for awhile now, though last night I managed a good seven hours. It affords vivid dreams, unless I let anxious thoughts in to weave their rough burlap over them, quickly obscuring and muffling. Monday was a horrid day, utterly exhausted and yet the deadline-driven demands at work prodded and picked at me. By afternoon I was near tears trying to fashion a brief sentence from a couple of paragraphs of data. My management has been kind enough, despite my imperfect divination of the guess-what-I-want game the clients are playing; it's just bad timing to have these knotty issues now and I've felt hamstrung and unsatisfied.

But I had a reasonable amount of sleep last night and completed a couple of pressing pieces by this afternoon, working through lunch. I left at 5:00 and drove over to the apartment to unload a few things. Every time I walk in I'm happy with our find. It's a sunny and welcoming place, a good space to live in. I unpacked a dozen odd wine glasses and three lovely etched sherry glasses that had been my mother's, plus four tall thin drinking glasses painted with a giraffe, tiger, elephant, and monkey that I picked up somewhere a long time ago. I put them, still smudged with newsprint, into the built-in cabinet with windowed doors that's recessed between the kitchen and dining room. The large rug I bought for the living room last weekend looks like it belongs, though as yet unaccompanied by furniture.

There's much to do still, but today, having slept, having completed things, having perfect weather, all seems possible. Everything remains the same, whether I stress over it or not. And inevitably I will again.

3:15

There was construction going on and I stepped carefully around broken up asphalt and gravel. A guy in a hard hat showed me where to go. Peeking through, I said, "Is this like the 'way-back' machine?" He laughed. I stepped into the chute and slid through the dark, finding myself deposited on my butt in what appeared to be a mall. I asked the people eating at nearby tables what the local time was. "3:15," they told me. I looked at my watch. Ah, same time zone. Then I woke up. It was still very dark. After a moment or two I got up and stumbled to the bathroom without putting on my glasses and came back to bed. I thought the dream was funny, so I started memorizing the details. When I got to "3:15" it occurred to me to check the time. I bent over and turned my clock radio around. It read "3:15."

Terminal velocity

We turn onto the bridge and the sun is shining so I move to get a good view of the water and the city on the other side. But we're going way too fast. We hit the median and bounce hard off of it back towards the bridge railing, and then we are actually going over. I look at the cascades of water as we fall into them and draw a sharp breath. "Is this how I'm going to die?" I wake up.

I remembered this as I was writing a piece today about a terminally ill patient. An exercise - a caregiving wife is irritable, tired, and sad; the patient contemplates his regrets and disappointments; the nurse notices more pain and the doc considers a change of meds. Palliative care texts piled on my table. We are all on a slow descent one way or the other.

---> Update: See Modal Minority's linkage of posts on this theme.

Capture and Release

I slept for nine hours, more or less. I dreamed I changed the water in a vase of flowers and a small, plump fish poured out with the decaying muck. It took me two or three tries to gently grab it by its top fins and put it back in the vase with the fresh water. But what would it feed on? I was up early - when you go to bed at 9:00, how late can you stay in bed? I had breakfast and then went for a walk. Good to be out before the buzz of human activity starts in.

The cold night air that caught yesterday's thaws and held them captive in a film of ice overnight will release them all again by mid-day. The ground smells of wet soil. Worms must be slowing waking and stretching. Above ground, robins thrust out their proud chests, surveying their prospects.