MY MORNING OFFICE is full of rain. The way the whole world goes dark when the sky unleashes feels like getting under a blanket and though I’m awake and at my desk, I’m asleep in the rumbling folds of this rain. I could rest all day in the Eden of an early summer storm, to borrow Merton’s words.
Time passes, memory fades, says Didion, but I’m back in my childhood home, excused from the task of remembering. All I have to do is look around and remember where the enormous round metal tank once sat rusted out in the backyard from years of exposure to cruel midwestern winters. For a summer or two I remember swimming in that tank—and then it just stank of sitting water and layer upon layer of rotting leaves.
Why remember a useless pool used once by pigs in Michigan?
This is what the rain asked me to remember this morning, and I told myself I’d get out of my own way to convey that which appears on the surface of my consciousness, asking for time with an audience. If I think about the tank pool, I also think about the garage with windows that looked like two sad eyes, the peeling paint, like fat white tears. And the rhubarb plants nearby, how once upon a time, my mom liked to boil the rhubarb to make tart pies.
The night office has been closed for a while now. I used to stay up all night and dip into those silent pools to see what words might come out to play. But I’m too tired these days to stay up that long and have essentially surrendered my nights to light tasks like washing dishes and sweeping.
My daddy used to work long hours in the night office—practicing chords on the electric piano that sounded like bubbles floating up the stairs to our bedroom with the purple carpet. He stayed up all night for many nights until his last, shuffling from room to room to organize his notes and play his songs. I still hear him sometimes in the hallways.
This morning, I turn on my white glass mushroom light at my desk, listen to the swoosh of cars passing by, try to make peace with another Monday. On my desk, a vintage measuring tape, a stamp with my home address on it, made when sending out hundreds of bat mitzvah invites in the 1980s, and we still have it, and I’m still a Lichtenstein, and I’m still at this address.
This is not exactly where I imagined I might find myself at fifty, but it’s a fascinating perch from which to lurch toward my future, clocking in the morning hours in my morning office with the morning rain as my trusted colleague.
Time passes, memory fades, says Didion, but I’m back in my childhood home, excused from the task of remembering. All I have to do is look around and remember where the enormous round metal tank once sat rusted out in the backyard from years of exposure to cruel midwestern winters. For a summer or two I remember swimming in that tank—and then it just stank of sitting water and layer upon layer of rotting leaves.
Why remember a useless pool used once by pigs in Michigan?
This is what the rain asked me to remember this morning, and I told myself I’d get out of my own way to convey that which appears on the surface of my consciousness, asking for time with an audience. If I think about the tank pool, I also think about the garage with windows that looked like two sad eyes, the peeling paint, like fat white tears. And the rhubarb plants nearby, how once upon a time, my mom liked to boil the rhubarb to make tart pies.
The night office has been closed for a while now. I used to stay up all night and dip into those silent pools to see what words might come out to play. But I’m too tired these days to stay up that long and have essentially surrendered my nights to light tasks like washing dishes and sweeping.
My daddy used to work long hours in the night office—practicing chords on the electric piano that sounded like bubbles floating up the stairs to our bedroom with the purple carpet. He stayed up all night for many nights until his last, shuffling from room to room to organize his notes and play his songs. I still hear him sometimes in the hallways.
This morning, I turn on my white glass mushroom light at my desk, listen to the swoosh of cars passing by, try to make peace with another Monday. On my desk, a vintage measuring tape, a stamp with my home address on it, made when sending out hundreds of bat mitzvah invites in the 1980s, and we still have it, and I’m still a Lichtenstein, and I’m still at this address.
This is not exactly where I imagined I might find myself at fifty, but it’s a fascinating perch from which to lurch toward my future, clocking in the morning hours in my morning office with the morning rain as my trusted colleague.
