Trolleys, bunnies, and Keats

Three inordinate affections of mine in one entry!

The trolley is decked out for Christmas. I have not mastered the art of photographing it, although I try every chance I get. But I think you can at least dimly sense how attractive it is.

About the bunny: the more I think about this adorable creature that will soon share my home, the less I can understand why anyone would ever want any other kind of animal. Bunnies seem to have all the merits and none of the drawbacks of pets in general. My friend cautioned me tonight—after I had mentioned how much I already missed having the bunny, and when I dismissed today’s woes by saying that everything would be better when I got a bunny—that maybe I needed to lower my expectations or risk serious disappointment. All I can say is, be prepared for Christmas cards with photos of me and the bunny next year. Maybe the best way to end one’s annoyance with pet-obsessed people is to become one.

Now I’m going to finally catch up with my reportage of Keatsmas. There’s no way I can write about it without writing about my friend the gorgon. I feel like an imposter, really, when people act like Keats is my specialty, because Medusa is the one who first loved Keats. I enjoy Keats, but I’m sure I’ve never understood him like she did.

Our little group of literature majors studying abroad one summer found no end of amusement at how seriously she took the dead poet. I must admit some embarrassment, some uncertainty about whether to lose track of the rest of the group or leave her behind as she trudged ever more slowly up Hampstead Heath to the house where Keats had stayed in his illness, muttering things like, “I’m not sure I can handle this.” The towering, brooding Greek with her long, dark waves of hair and the five-foot-two-inch Cockney poet, existential status aside, were an odd couple indeed.

Inside I was wholly charmed by her passionate spirit, her determination to care about things. The day we spent at Blenheim Palace—she, I, and the complete poems and letters of Keats that she insisted on reading entirely, no matter what the syllabus said—is one of the most perfect days of my life. I have no idea what I was reading or writing on that grassy bank overlooking the water, but I relished the frequent excerpts and reactions erupting by my side.

I have celebrated the high holy days pretty religiously, reciting “To Autumn” on October 31, his birthday, and eating only bread and water on February 23, the day of his death at 25. I’m pretty good at slavish rituals, even though for the last few years I thought Medusa had moved on. It has occurred to me that in venerating Keats maybe I have really been venerating my dear gorgon. It made me so happy, almost Blenheim-happy, when she e-mailed me this year and said we must celebrate together.

I never let myself have high expectations for Keatsmas—the only time we’ve celebrated it together in person, it went so dreadfully wrong that Medusa has forbidden me to ever speak of it.

This year I had two pleasant Keatsmas experiences. A few days early I recited “To Autumn” in a dugout for the first time, with an intensely poetic friend, someone who recites poetry better than anyone I’ve ever heard, as we gazed at barred clouds across the baseball diamond; and then that evening I recited it via cell phone to the gorgon as she was being rowed to her sailboat in a dinghy off the coast of Massachusetts. I’m sure she had never heard “To Autumn” in a dinghy.

I hate the double-minded,
but I love your law.
You are my hiding place and my shield;
I hope in your word.
Depart from me, you evildoers,
that I may keep the commandments of my God.
Uphold me according to your promise, that I may live,
and let me not be put to shame in my hope!
Hold me up, that I may be safe
and have regard for your statutes continually!
You spurn all who go astray from your statutes,
for their cunning is in vain.
All the wicked of the earth you discard like dross,
therefore I love your testimonies.
My flesh trembles for fear of you,
and I am afraid of your judgments.

On the bus today

I stumbled across the most fabulous blog with Blogger’s “next blog” feature. Someone is faithfully writing about their experiences riding the bus every day.

I love riding buses. There was a year in high school when I had to ride the bus through its entire first route around the other end of town after school (there weren’t enough buses, so many of them did two routes) and then the bus would pick up its second load of people and head for my neighborhood. It took a long time to get home. But I really liked it. In the days of wires and cords, you weren’t really expected to be doing six other things to maximize your time on the bus, and it was a very peaceful ride. I just like looking out the window.

This blogger chronicling the daily bus rides has a good sense of humor and detachment. I think it’s a grand idea. I thought about having a category of posts on this blog talking about our daily commutes, but that seems like it might be dangerous, since we are all so eminently stalkable.

Paying the toll

When I hear someone harping on a pet topic for the sixteenth time, I start wondering, What are the topics that I harp on? If someone who knows me well is sitting next to me, what subject matter fills them with dread when they hear it introduced, because they know precisely which pompous and self-satisfied words will pursue from my mouth?

I have a feeling my antipathy to cars is one of these pet topics. I can’t resist melodramatizing the harm they cause to society (you can see an example of this in the tangentially relevant post describing downtown Addison). A friend of mine has suggested I write a book about cars and the decline of civilization. We’ve even chosen a clever title: Paying the Toll.

Yet everything I experience reinforces my grief about cars. Lately I have been crossing town frequently to visit my watery boyfriend (pictured above at sunset). I make this journey by bike, usually in the dark and half-light of dawn. Well, I was driving along my route the other evening and realized something odd. Although I was driving this ponderous, powerful, multi-thousand-dollar engineering marvel, I had less control and less visibility than I did on my little human-powered shred of aluminum and rubber, at least at that time of day. My windshield was disastrously dirty, so if anything vaguely luminous faced me I was blinded. I was lower down, I couldn’t hear things outside the car, and these pedals couldn’t stop and start this machine as fast as my own two legs could operate the gears of my bicycle. The main superiority of my car was as a shield to me if my irresponsible driving did cause a collision. Forget any other people around.

These physical differences are not the only ones between driving and bicycling. I realized as I drove through the neighborhoods that an entirely different mental process is taking place. When I drive my car, I pay attention to an entirely different set of stimuli. I am behaving as if I am on a larger scale, trying to get from one point to another in the simplest trajectory, as if I am removed from the actual environment like a video game player. I look for large shapes and big moving objects. The streets are simplified. When I ride my bike, I can hear voices and birds and I can see little cats. I can hear whether any cars are coming before I reach an intersection. I have time to think and react to things.

Of course this is why motorists build expressways, to remove the things that might cross our paths, because we don’t have time for them when we’re getting from one place to another. We create an environment that is not suited to pedestrians. But in neighborhoods, cars are operating in an environment that is not suited for them. This is why neighborhoods have 20-mile-an-hour speed limits and speed bumps. Pedestrians in this environment have signs and bumps as protection against the handicapped operators of machines that can kill other people but not themselves.

Trees

I like what’s happening in Addison. I’m not sure how long the town has existed or if it has a historic downtown, but they’ve built an urban center called Addison Circle, with shops, cafes, and markets along the street and apartments and condos above. There are plenty of trees and numerous lovely park squares like you might see in London or Portland or another civilized, people-friendly city. You come out at noon and eat your lunch on a bench, in juniper-shady Bosque Park or along the central mall under rows of redbuds, while people walk around and fountains splash.

Even though it was 95-100 degrees during my lunches these past two days, I didn't sweat. I had my hat and the shade of trees. You only start to sweat when you get into your mobile gas-powered greenhouse and sit still in the sun surrounded by blazing concrete.

In a roundabout at the end of Addison Circle there is a vast blue sculpture. It’s shaped like the end of an elephant’s trunk or a snorkel, from a distance. It’s like a giant blue duct flaring out of the ground. You can see it from all around and it draws you towards this urban center. I can’t say I fully appreciate it, but I figure the fact that it’s blue is reason enough for it to be there. How nice that someone allowed someone to build it.

It looks sort of messy, but you work with what you have, I guess, when you are building gigantic tubular artwork. It seems to do quite well at what it does. It is a circle of big thick blue tubes flung upwards and outwards in exuberant curves, and the ends of them support tubular meshes with signs and figures attached to them. One way I thought about it was that they’re pieces of paper held up to the sky, kindergarten artwork held high in pride, the work of our hands presented for the approval of someone really tall.

I dreamed a few nights ago that I was in an old town of rickety buildings and creaky floors and secret entrances. There were giant owls inhabiting the land. When I finally glimpsed a few of their lower legs through a window, I was thrilled. In the dream, the fact that they were clearly giant people dressed up in ill-fitting brown flannel costumes did not compromise their grandeur. My heart leapt at the sight of these baggy stockings and quixotic hanging flaps of felt.

I saw them gathering outside on the sidewalk and waiting with the more ordinary citizens of the town for the king to come outside. He came out of the modest next-door apartment, and I stood in my musty room with its wooden floorboards, looking at the small crowd through the window, pondering the idea of these people’s allegiance to a king. People in my society would not feel comfortable showing reverence and obedience to such a man. But Giant Owls & Co. were clearly delighted to speak face-to-face with this humble-looking gentleman outside his front door.

Then I was in a big musty room with an old schoolmate waiting for the king to come in. We had written out an important declaration to present to him. He came in, and I knew how the neighborhood folks had felt. What a splendid feeling to be in his presence and to have his ear. I was just about to present my paper when I woke up, to my great disappointment.