Tag: Friends

Of the Surface of Things

by Wallace Stevens (1879 –1955)

I

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
hills and a cloud.

Surface Chair

Years ago, my friend Tom and his partner were moving and downsizing, and he sold me a delicious olive green wing chair (which I foolishly gave away when I later moved to New York and I miss it still). On first seeing the chair, which was solid and plain, in my house, my friend Chuck remarked, “Now it just needs a couple of bright pillows!” When walking the shops of Fredericksburg, Virginia, I found two expensive hand-painted pillows, with an accent of that very olive green, that did just the trick. I thought of all this just now as I pulled down my bed covers and shifted one of those very pillows to the side so as not to crush it in my sleep.

So much of life and living is surface, a chair you buy and lose, the bright pillows you spend so much money on to decorate the chair, the casual remark that caused you to elevate your home decorating aesthetic beyond solid colors into bright patterns of possibility. All surface thoughts, yes, but more than the surface shifts. Doesn’t it?

II 

From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,
Reading where I have written,
“The spring is like a belle undressing.”

Surface Friend

Thursday afternoon, I texted my dear friend Cindy who lives on Maui to ask what was happening and if she and her family were safe, and they were, as the fires were not on her part of the island, but oh how she was grieving the loss of Lahaina. She then texted, “Did you know that Tammy [a fellow student and actor from Virginia Tech days in the 1980s] passed?” I did those things we do now: looked up Tammy’s obituary online; wrote a tribute memory; posted of her death in a social media alumni group. I really had only a surface relationship with Tammy, acting with her in a Summer Arts Festival production of Andre Gregory’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland the few months before I started my teaching career. We took to walking home together on the nights after rehearsals and performances, as neither of us had cars, and her place was my halfway point. She’d kiss my cheek, wish me “safe home,” a phrase I didn’t know. She graduated the year I was a freshman, and by the summer I got to know her had waitressed and auditioned in New York City for three years and lived with a Russian boyfriend named Roman who wouldn’t go down on her because he didn’t understand what “the magic button” was, which was not where women bleed and pee, and her favorite city memory was Roman pushing her around the East Village in an abandoned shopping cart in the cold wee hours after the bar where they worked closed for the night, her legs sticking up out of the cart while he spun her around on the deserted streets and she screamed and laughed. That’s what I know about Tammy. And can’t forget.

Surface memories as lasting as love.

III 

The gold tree is blue,
The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.
The moon is in the folds of the cloak.

Surface Life

Sometimes I think I have only ever known surfaces, surface friendships, surface news, surface travels, surface nature, surface career, surface artistry, surface feelings, surface disaster, surface stories. So of course I dread. I obsess over decorating a home, oddly, that almost no one sees, an art project for an audience of one, knowing it and I could be lost at any time, and it’s so much fog, really. I see spots I missed when I dusted today. And what should I have to show for all this care and attention? Is there anything inside me deeply affected by bright pillows on a muted chair? Is there anything that can emerge out of me that will deeply affect the world? And what of all this death?

Three or four memories and a cloud. Is there much more we can expect?

Sending love out to everyone who needs it, even from my surface, to help you absorb whatever was your loss in life this week.