Author: Bekki

Autumnal

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The city has been reluctant to let go of summer.  The subway tunnels are mid-July stifling, and the trains and busses are still running the AC.  Even the weather cooperated this past weekend, giving us one last chance at shorts and tank tops.  But the trees along my block are starting to shed their leaves, and the mercury has dropped back into the 50’s. The only saving grace is that the shorter days mean more afternoon sun spilling in through my office windows.

It doesn’t feel like I’ve been here a year.  I’ve barely gotten to know my own neighborhood, let alone the city.  And while I can blame some of that on the hours I work, and some of it on the immensity if the city itself, for the most part I’ve been lazy about exploring what’s out there.

I don’t want this to be my city, you see.  I don’t want to claim any sort of ownership over the cracked and bleeding streets, the masses that jostle and shove into subways and busses and office buildings.  When I come back from vacation I want it to be to a city that missed me, not one that flicks its cigarette butt in my direction and mutters “so you’re back again are you,” out of the corner of its mouth.

But it is here that we have landed, among the sirens and the helicopters and the occasional Mexican preacher, all blending together into the white noise that is the closest New York comes to silence.  It is almost home.

The Resort That Time Forgot

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My husband’s parents gave us a week of their time share for a wedding gift, but by the time we’d settled on a week and a place, all the upscale resorts were booked.  Instead of the all inclusive, on-the-beach resort on Nassau, we ended up at a Tiki lounge in Grand Bahama.

I’m fairly certain that this was the place to be around 1987. Now, though, the tourists have fled the island.  There is no restaurant here, no bar, no snack shack.  Instead they drive us to the grocery store three times a week.

imageThere are only two other groups here:  a family of about eight doctors from Chicago, and two older ladies – one of whom has been coming here for about the last twenty years.

It’s the perfect setting for an Agatha Christie type novel.  One of the Chicagoans would be the victim – probably the older gentleman.  The lady who’s been coming here forever would be the amateur detective, of course, with her friend helping out.  My husband and I would complain that we weren’t allowed to leave the premises to go out to the nightclubs in Lucaya and be otherwise useless.

The murderer?  I’ll let you figure that out.  First one to guess gets a cookie.

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Down a winding path

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The city seemed preternaturally quiet today, almost like an indrawn breath.  The news oscillated between a live feed of the world trade center and a live feed of the floods in Jersey.  I suspect it will be like this until Monday, at least.

I’ve been tracing the labyrinth in the mornings.  An old girlfriend sent it as a wedding gift, which I thought at first was a bit of a statement on how far apart we’d fallen.  (I’d brought her to the one in Pass-a-Grille years ago, back when I was still in Florida.)  The last time I went to a labyrinth, I was living in Oakland and had just had my heart broken.  Suffice it to say that was a long time ago, before Kincaid’s, before law school.

When I opened her present I looked at it and wondered that the memory of a pink church on the beach had stuck, and placed it in the dresser for lack of anywhere else to put it.  Where it promptly became buried under a pile of clothing.

And then one day a few weeks ago I took it out from under the clothing and sat down to let my fingers trace out the path.  The wood is varnished, shiny and almost sticky at times, and as I run my fingers along it I can’t help but think of the day it will be smooth and shiny, the varnish rubbed out and replaced by the oil of my fingers.

Arial

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I don’t remember exactly when I learned to be afraid of heights.  AS a child I was fearless.  My mother tells stories about the time I decided the fastest way down the slide at the playground was to jump off the platform at the top and my father did a running dive to catch me, tucking me into his stomach like a football.  My father tells about the time we were at the playground in Oklahoma, the one with a metal pole about 50 feet high that had a rope netting attached at the top and to the ground, like a big rope teepee.  The kind you would never find on a playground now because of lawsuits and lawyers and liabilities.  Which may be the right call, because at two years old I saw that rope netting and went straight for the top, nevermind that the holes were almost as large as I was.  My father had to rescue me from that one, too.

And then I grew up, and realized I could fall, and stopped racing to the top of every climbable object.  I’d get that odd, swirling feeling in the pit of my stomach when I went up to the top of the hill in a roller coaster or stood near the edge of a roof deck.

It was about the same feeling I had last weekend as I climbed up a rickety ladder to a 25 foot platform and then leaned out over the edge holding onto a metal bar.  As soon as I jumped and started swinging, though, my monkey brain kicked in and remembered we liked swinging through the trees, liked swinging upside down with our knees, liked the weightless fall into the net.  Even better the moment, just an instant, really, of flying through space before being caught, and then the drop back into the net and groundside.

Which is why, despite the soreness that lasted four straight days, I would not be surprised to find myself back there again.

Heavy Lidded

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I have a great talent for knocking things over.  Most often my mug of tea at work.  I put it within reach of where I’m working and then lean over to grab the phone or pick up a stack of cases and next thing I know I’m running to the pantry for paper towels and laying my mouse pad across the air vents to dry out.

Tonight it was the glass of water by the bed.  I do this often enough that I try to use a plastic glass.  Less chance of breakage.  And I usually try not to full it very full either.  Less to clean up when I reach over and spill at 3 am.  Tonight, of course, it was an almost full pint glass, so I ended up having to take the fabric off the speaker I use as an end table and sop the water off.

Husband came in and asked if I wanted a new glass.  I told him no, I’d probably spill it.  He came back with bottled water, set it on the denuded speaker, and said, “I brought you one with a lid.”