One can hope.
Lets begin with recent happenings: On Sunday, October tenth, in the year of our Lord 2010, a white flash hung in the air of our apartment. Moments afterward a low and progressive rumbling shook the floors of 204 W Emerson. I couldn't move, I was afraid. I've never been around lightning that shoves that much light into a space. The girls and I couldn't see each other for a moment - light filled the air like white paint covering a crack in woodwork.
I couldn't move, I was afraid.
Lightning really isn't the issue. I remember back to long days and nights in the backseat of my dad's pickup. Maddie would have her feet on bailey, her head on me (The perks of the eldest sister?) I remember the dark hanging heavy around us in the middle of no where. I would count the tree shadows as the radio stations fuzzed in and out. Sound is described sometimes as cutting through air, but this noise never did - it seeped through the speakers and sat heavy on my shoulders - John Tesh departing wisdom, Kenny Loggins singing stories. ( Luckily Maddie was asleep at this point. For the first 6 years of her life she would cry at any song in the minor key, a favorite Loggins musical tool.)
On one of these trips, somewhere between Idaho and Colorado, we drove in to a large thunderstorm. Desert hills stretched for miles and my eyes tried to meet the edges of the hemisphere: so much space. Strike after strike of lightning illuminated the hills. A realization that we were watching something otherworldy stopped my sisters and I in our backseat fights and grievances and we sat silently, staring. John Teshed buzzed on, unaware of the new setting to his voice.
And I wasn't afraid either.
Douglas Coupland, in his book "Life After God" says: I believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After
that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't
register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess
of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the
cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade."
It is a really, really good book. One that speaks things now and then five years later you find yourself thinking them all over again. His voices fuzzes through the speaker and sits on your shoulders heavy. It illuminates your surroundings with otherworldly clarity. I read it a while ago, and here I am sitting in my apartment in Seattle, thinking them all over again.
goodness.
