Leaves that are Green
Since my last entry, The Marxist has admitted to finding and reading my blog, and I have unfortunately had to admit to seeking out and reading his email. Thankfully these potentially disastrous situations only brought us closer together, right, Sylvester? Because I'm sure you're reading this, you bastard.
Things
have continued on much the same track. Days sunny and hot. Lots of
cooking, lots of eating, lots of dirty jokes. Last weekend we rode up
to Rome to see the last concert on Simon & Garfunkel's Old Friends
tour, which I saw in Miami's American Airlines Arena in December for an
exorbitant fee. This time there were about 600,000 more people between
me and Garfunkel (really), but behind him was the lit-up Coliseum, and
behind it was the full moon, rising, and above all of that
was a cavalcade of red balloons slowly vanishing into the leaven summer
night. Oh, and it was free.
Staying for the encores made us miss the
midnight train back to Lecce, so we wandered around Rome, downing
espressos every few hours until six in the morning, when we finally
passed out on the railway platform, sticky and ragged. Daytime Rome is
clogged with exhaust and Americans, but at night the city is balmy and
quiet, stately, at rest. We rambled aimlessly through its piazzas,
bought discounted roses off a merchant eager to go home and distributed
them to people sleeping on the streets, decorating the marble gods in
fountains with those that remained.
The concert was amazing and heartbreaking both at once. When they played, ostensibly for the last time ever, Leaves that are Green, I thought about the last time I heard it live, last December, with my family and 80,000 other post-hippie friends.
I was twenty-one when I wrote this song
I'm twenty-two now but I won't be for long
Time hurries on
And the leaves that are green turn to brown.
I was twenty-one then, and I'm twenty-two now. Time is
a bitch. But what's different--probably since graduation--is my lack of
consciousness of it, the sense of crawling on some fixed continuum
dissolved. Decades of methodical creep towards a zielpunkt, one minute
hop over a bureaucratic hurdle, and then--open space.
The fact
that it's now August came as a complete surprise to me and felt as
arbitrary as had the calendar read October, although in that case we'd
be eating not peaches and tomatoes but apples and rutabaga, or whatever
it is (guess I'll find out in October). For someone who got a tattoo on
her wrist because she was so sure of always wearing a watch she'd
always be able to cover it with, it's a big change. But quite
refreshing.
Laura has made it to Seattle on her bicycle. Tom is in
Rio. Lizzie, David, Jess, Sebastien and Matty are in New York. Judy and
Alex are still at the hagwon, but Mike left it to follow Phish one last
time. John just started his corporate climb. Rhoda's on the beach in
Wellfleet (oh, Rhoda.) Sheela's on the plane to India. Gordie's in
Guatemala with his boyfriend. Alisha and my sister are home, though not
for long. Amelie, who is currently on vacation with her father but whom
I'll see next week, just got three stitches in an Indonesian hospital
because a monkey bit her. Has it really only been two months?
But perhaps plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. The Marxist, who has lived in over sixty places in the past ten years, once mentioned that wherever he goes, no matter how he reinvents himself, people always make the same observations about him. Perhaps we are entities less flexible than we think. As I was pounding pesto in a mortar the other day he quipped, "here you go, doing what you do best--beating things into submission!" Am I really that transparent?
Tom, however, has finally gotten his Do You REALIZE? done. Sick of my passing out in the middle of movies, during Life of Brian the Marxist drew a big cross on my face in permanent marker ("I thought about making it a swastika," he said.) He does not KNOW what's in stock for his ass.
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