saturday, may 26

•••    I sat next to an old woman on the bus who was wearing a long red coat draped over her shoulders and silver barettes in her crinkly grey hair. she was carrying two bright glossy-blue paper bags in her lap, the kind that come from expensive department stores and have reinforced handles, full to brimming with cut asters and zinnias, all in yellow and purple and green heaps. by the time we reached my stop I had come up with a story for every single one of them, and for once in my life I had nowhere to write them down.
5:29 PM

friday, may 25

•••    (everything I write is stupid. and I'm working on something -- lots of things, actually. but I'm still here. you can be patient with me if I can be patient with myself, yes? and I'm working on that, too.)
1:23 PM

thursday, may 24

•••    in harvard square today there was a blue toyota corolla with the first and last stanzas of edna st. vincent millay's poem travel painted in yellow on the back window. there was also a tiny little train heading off towards the corner of the window, and three old wrinkled people inside the car reading a chinese restaurant menu.

my heart is warm with the friends I make,
and better friends I'll not be knowing,
yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
no matter where it's going.

which is funny, because I was on the train with friends tonight, and then I got off and walked home by myself, in the rain.
2:00 AM

wednesday, may 23

•••    okay. when I start getting cryptic and evasive, that's evidence that I'm writing in the wrong place. let's refocus.

sitting on our kitchen table is a letter that my brother brought home from school, one of those photocopied, mass-distributed things, with the city of cambridge seal decorating the top and the principal's signature decorating the bottom.

dear parents/families,
today, we had discussions with students about our parent coordinator. we have told students that she is very, very, very ill with cancer. she's at home now and is being taken are of by her doctors. she is getting the very best of medical care and everything that can be done for her is being done. some children have asked if she is dying. our response has been that she is very, very, very ill. cancer can kill people but not all people who have cancer die of cancer. we want you to know this so you can respond appropriately to your children. it is very difficult to talk with children about this and you need to listen and talk sensitively and factually. these discussions raise a lot of anxiety and fears in children...

my brother is in fourth grade. there was one day when I was in fourth grade, ten and a half years ago, when we got to school and everything was funny. the fifth graders, who were the oldest kids in the school, had been telling rumors; the rest of us had been denying them. we got to our classroom and our teacher was crying. he was a sweet, skinny man with a bandage on his hand where he had injured it trying to remodel his bathroom, but he was still a man who hauled around bits of plumbing on the weekends, and it was freaky seeing him cry. he didn't even pretend he wasn't.

our seats were arranged in four parallel rows of eight desks each, and I was sandwiched near the end of the second row between two people I didn't know very well. normally I would never have said anything to them beyond "hello," but that morning everyone was whispering to each other, so we whispered too. is it true? I kept shaking my head. it must be something else. what then?

we shut up when our teacher got in front of the class to talk to us. I know he must have talked for a good five minutes, but there's only one sentence I remember: mr. a died last night.

mr. a was our principal, mr. archambault, and everyone loved him because it had never occurred to anyone to do otherwise. he was big and round with a beard and a ridiculously ambitious vision for our little, underfunded, overpopulated school. he had handpicked all our teachers himself, and he knew the name of every student. he got up in front of everyone at assemblies and sang and danced with us. he helped us plant rhododendrons. he had promised to shave his beard off if we reached our fundraising goal that fall.

there were details, but I didn't really know how to absorb them. he was diabetic. he had a seizure. something something. totally unexpected. I couldn't figure it out. mr. a died last night. it was a strange strange strange day, an alternate universe day.

my mother came to pick us up after school. I was running out the center doors, and I saw my sister running out another door, closer to my mother. but I was bigger and faster, so we reached her at the exact same time, saying in unison, "mr. a died!" and for the first time then, when I saw her face register shock before it crumpled around the edges, I understood the gravity of those words. mr. a died.

(later I imagined I had approached her calmly and quietly, trying to prepare her the way our teacher had prepared us. in my imagination I said mom, I have something to tell you. it's pretty sad, but don't worry, I was sad all day too. last night... and then my little sister dashed out the door and interrupted me, destroying all my attempts to be gentle and sensitive. I was a pretty nice kid, in my imagination. in reality I just wanted to be first. also later, my mother told us she thought we were going to say "mr. a shaved his beard!" which I only wish had been the case.)

my dad wrote a column about what a great guy mr. a was. I had no black clothes, so I wore my prettiest blue dress to his funeral. one of our teachers sang a song that I think was about god but sounded just as much like it could have been about mr. a. I wanted to look in the casket but no one would let me. the fire station where he had been a volunteer firefighter played its sirens in mourning. I still didn't understand what the heck diabetes was or why it could kill someone.

we got a new principal. our teacher never cried again. the rhododendrons bloomed. my brother was born. years later, we were watching pbs together, and barney came on, singing and laughing and doing that ridiculous jump-around dance of his. my brother laughed. my mother sighed and said, "barney makes me sad. he always reminds me of mr. a."

I blinked, because I had forgotten I was supposed to be sad about that. mr. a made me happy.
2:40 PM

•••    things are confusing me today --

it took me six restarts to get my computer to behave normally, believing finally that it was connected to a modem instead of the swarthmore network; ironic, really, since for four weeks this spring it absolutely refused to believe my network card was working.

my best friend, who looked at me in absolute bafflement when I tried to explain my philosophy about veganism to her, has turned into an accidental vegetarian after living with some new vegan friends for a semester. maybe I didn't try hard enough.

I have a unix account at harvard now. harrrrvarrrrd. you could email me there, if I told you how, but I'm not going to because I don't think I'm the kind of person who is supposed to have a reply-to address with harvard in it. I'm too little and unimportant for that. swattie. who knows what a swattie is anyway?

the lava lamp was meant to go in storage, but I changed my mind and ended up bringing it home anyway. and it's very pretty, and trippy and all that, but sitting here watching it do its blobby dance and listening to emerson hart sing about how your future says run but you can't even walk, I feel as if I'm trying to be someplace else. having such a strong echoic memory is a double-edged sword, and right now the side against my skin feels awfully sharp. if not for the calendar on the wall I would truly believe it was the year two thousand, still.

after dinner someone gave my brother a sip of sour mash bourbon and he spent five minutes with his mouth under the kitchen faucet, trying to wash it out. one of my cousins is here, and for the first time tonight I think I really realized that he is just as close in age to my parents as he is to my siblings. when we were little, my sister and I used to drink juice out of shot glasses. now she drinks screw-cap champagne straight out of the bottle.

I am becoming nocturnal again. I miss the sunrise.
2:28 AM

monday, may 21

•••    of course, it isn't just my house and my family that change. today on my way to harvard square I passed the new halfway-built grocery store that's filling up what used to be an empty lot, and I couldn't sing along to the songs on the radio because boston is always about three months ahead of philly in the popular music world, so I didn't know the words. I saw people who were freshmen the last time I was in high school driving cars, and I saw a boy who was in my graduating class sitting in the subway station next to the inbound track and singing gospel songs. I no longer get fifteen cents back in change when I ride the train, and a wild raspberry bush has grown over the shortcut I take through a community garden. there are still a few thorns trapped in the fabric around my ankles.

in a few days this will all settle out and I will no longer feel like I'm living in the wrong world, because I'm not. tonight I picked my brother up from soccer and we went out to eat together, and when I got home I had a lovely phone conversation with my favorite five year old (remember?) about 747s. funny how the kids I love are the things change the most but still manage to make me feel like I belong here.
10:23 PM

•••    home. home? here. whatever.

every time I come back to cambridge I'm surprised by how much things have changed during my semester-long absence. walls and towels and things are different colors; there are different pictures on the walls; new furniture has appeared from somewhere; the number of animals populating my house has changed; people have grown up or old or both. that last one I should have expected, I suppose, but I don't remember the superficial bits changing so much when I lived here. and even my family seems to have undergone a disproportionate amount of adjustment and redefining: my father's book is being published; my mother wears earrings and is a deacon at the church that I have set foot in only once before; my brother, the sweet sensitive gentle one, is going to play football. was I the ball and chain holding them back? did my presence keep them from being who they are? now there are fuzzy blue and white things in the bathroom, and a matching shower curtain that replaced one with stars and moons, and the whole affair reminds me so much of my grandparents that I have to look very hard at the tile pattern on the floor. the guinea pigs are gone. in the basement there is a digital cable box with too damn many channels (but still no cable modem! when will these people get their priorities straight?) occupying one of the slots of a large shelf-system-thing that I fear could accurately be described as an entertainment center. and with all my stuff sitting unplugged on the floor of my little room, we now have three televisions and six computers between the five of us. I don't understand how any of this came out of the threesome I remember in new york city, where we had no television at all and my father built all my furniture himself, from scratch. not that it's bad change, necessarily, but it confuses me. I always forget how strange this feels until I am back.
1:32 AM

sunday, may 20

•••    I suck at knowing what to do first, but I'm good at knowing what to do last. and so we have come to the final act of my packing madness, and here goes the ethernet cable. see you in massachusetts.
12:33 PM