hitting the high note

I was worried about moving to a big city like Philadelphia. It seemed so impersonal; center city and the art museum, the places I knew best before moving to Philadelphia, seemed disjunct, confusing, highly commercial, and I knew I’d miss the sense of familiarity of my New Jersey semi-home town.  

It was isolating and disorienting for the first couple of months. While the ascending left-right pattern of street numbers made sense, I was confused about the names of the streets, and why people would tell me to walk north or south of Market, as if that had any bearing on where I was at the moment and where I needed to be going. There’s also a sense, in a big city, that you can get lost in the shuffle: one more or less red-headed girl traversing the streets doesn’t necessarily make a difference. And while, at times, I like to revel in my anonymity, it gets lonely, not knowing anyone, drifting through the city and feeling completely separate from each human being who passes by.

And then, things started to change, as things usually do. I was looking for a father’s day present in a neighborhood shop, and brought a friend along.  My friend insisted that we grab our filled coffee mugs, and venture down to the shop, mugs in tow to search for a present.  I walked into the shop, nervous to be bringing coffee into a store, but the owner, a very lovely gentleman, was tickled pink that we’d brought our coffee along, brewed himself some tea, and started talking to us.

That was the moment that Philadelphia became Philly, and the neighborhood became that much friendlier. The shop owner still smiles at me and chats every time I walk by, and will occasionally put an even bigger grin on my face by telling me I look cute today, or that he’s never seen a better smile. And I’ve expanded my neighborhood to include the corner beer and food store across the street, where the guys who work behind the counter recognize me as the girl who will come in every so often to buy essential food, but almost never the beer for which they’re known.  The coffee shop two doors down has become a part of my routine, featuring itself as an extension of my living room, and the friendly baristas recommending things they know I’d like, based on the coffee-chocolate combos they’ve seen me order. 

And so, in this impersonal city, I’ve found a friendly neighborhood, a community of people who recognize and acknowledge each other.  This place has become an intimate small town where the inhabitants keep a nosy, cozy eye out for each other, and I watch with amazement and gratitude as my habitat extends to the living rooms and kitchens and store fronts of my neighborhood. 

A person’s past is a funny place. Visiting your past is a frequent topic of literature; rarely, however, does one get to experience this visitation in actuality, except…

Yesterday, I brought my boyfriend to a place of my past, Mercer County Community College, a place I hadn’t been since high school, where I’d taken chemistry classes and danced and sung in the choruses of several community musical theater productions; a place I was bringing my boyfriend to relive my past by auditioning for a show. Odd as it was to bring my boyfriend to my high school stomping ground, it only became stranger as I bumped into people I’d known during college, auditioning for the same show. Gravity shifted as the past ten years of my life met in a bizarre conglomeration of places and faces.

The chance meetings were surreal, but were only topped off by seeing people I’d known during high school, people I’d done multiple performances with, had danced next to, and hugged at auditions and at the end of the shows… and having not a single person recognize me. 

I felt incognito in my own skin, a fly on the wall by just being myself, observing these people who had no idea that I knew them. Knew who’d been dating whom, who’d moved in with a girlfriend, and who’d had a baby just a few months earlier. 

These people were almost unchanged by the ten-year intermission from when last I’d seen them. It was the same people, auditioning for the same leading roles, going to the same callbacks, in the same building. While I had gotten three degrees, lived in different cities, had countless conversations with friends, and the requisite growing pains of being in my late teens, and early-and-mid-twenties, these people were suspended, unaltered, in the time capsule of my memories of ten years ago. How odd to come back to this place, and find that the humans frozen in my memory had been revived exactly as if no time had passed since the last time I’d exited the theater doors a decade before.

And now? They go back into my memory, exactly the same. While I keep growing up, my memories and the humans they contain remain impervious to the wearing passage of time: a reminder of the high school girl I was, illuminating the adult I’ve become. 

What is our fascination with things that happen on the other side of the glass? 

Sitting in my coffee shop, I was typing an email, and was startled out of my writing reverie by several pairs of eyes. As they sauntered by, a group of friends was staring at me, watching their very own reality show of my life in this plant and computer-filled coffee shop. But it wasn’t just those friends who stopped and stared… over the last twenty minutes, I’ve seen a biker slow down as he drove past, students on their way to parties, older couples, holding hands, out for their evening jaunt, and a peaceful-faced woman with grizzled gray hair carrying a covered half-pie. Linking all these people is the simple fact that whenever I stare into their eyes, they stare back for a second, look away, and then return my gaze again, unabashedly watching me type this, as I look curiously back at them. 

Spying on someone’s unknown “real-life” is intoxicating. When I’m out walking around Philadelphia, I love the occasional glimpse into other peoples’ windows. My voyeuristic tendencies are fairly innocent; I’m interested in how they’ve decorated their living room, what color their walls are, and why they chose that weird rooster lamp in an otherwise tastefully appointed living room. But as soon as someone glances up from their book or computer, I’m embarrassed at being caught snooping in their window, plainly wondering about their life.

Despite the moment of embarrassment when caught, we are so very curious about the snapshots of life that we glean by staring through a window. We can create whatever fantasy we please about the people behind the glass, the people who might never know we peered into their lives for a split second, as inquisitiveness got the better of us, and we mischievously scorned social convention to score a peek at how a stranger fashioned their life. 

Maybe that’s why the people walking by stare at me with inscrutable, bright eyes: they are creating the fantasy that they’d like my life to be.  Through their eyes, as they sum up the endless, unknowable possibilities of my past, present, and future with a glance, I become the transient canvas on which their stories are projected. 

Life is always a little more mysterious on the other side of the window.

Petrichor. [PET-ri-kohr] The pleasant smell after a dry spell when rain has finally fallen. 

I used to subscribe to a-word-a-day email list, and this one word has stuck with me for the past five years or so. It’s such a poetic concept for a word; the idea that rejuvenated earth and life has a smell so distinct that it’s worthy of being defined in those three syllables. 

“After the rain” is such a distinct occurrence that I think it involves the senses beyond smell. The feeling after a rainfall, after the heat, and the dust, and the arid earth have absorbed sustenance, is a sensation of renewal, of a clean slate and the ability to go onward in life, mistakes erased or lessened by the cleansing power of the rain.

This evening, my beau, who shall remain mostly anonymous, sparked that recognition of the beauty of the feeling after the rain: he took a deep breath in, and calm came over his features as he experienced the air.  And I do mean “experienced” : it wasn’t only the smell that appealed to him, but the joy of being outside and sensing this age-old, simple cycle of heat and then the cooling, calming rain.

The heat over the past few weeks has been punishing, particularly in this city, where layers of cars, streets, businesses, apartments, and pedestrians radiating sweat formed a cocoon, trapped the heat, and roasted the inhabitants. The rain, occasionally torrential, occasionally light and sweet, has provided the longed-for natural counterpoint to a sweltering, sweating city. And with the broken heat comes the sense that everything is again right with the world, as the clean, new smell of rain hitting a too-dry pavement and browning foliage wafts up into the smiling nostrils of a parched populace. 

All that in a pretty little word. The pleasure of the rain after it vivifies a thirsty earth.

My neighborhood coffee shop is haunted by a psychic.  On Saturdays, a woman with wild, curly red hair inhabits an almost private table close to a front window, latte in hand and sign in tow:

“Psychic Readings: 15 minutes for $20”

There is almost nothing innately appealing about the woman or the sign… and yet, every Saturday that I’ve seen her there, I’ve been overcome with the urge to have my fortune told. 

What is it that draws us to the easy way out on knowing our future? Is it like those instant weight loss programs that seem so inherently appealing, yet are empty promises? Why are we so quick to get to the end point? 

And yet, it still appeals to me, that knowledge of what my future might hold. Maybe it’s the idea that perhaps my choices in life could be confirmed as the “right” ones, or the thought that maybe, the psychic will tell me I’m on the “right” path… or, maybe, try to steer me in a different direction. Somehow, life is uncertain enough to a point that I’d like the independent confirmation that my choices are all right, that I’m heading in the right direction, and not totally screwing up my time on earth.

The instant confirmation or denial of my life choices would be such an easy path… an instant, supposedly irrefutable answer to life’s mysteries.  And yet…

Every week, it attracts me, but I never quite get to walking up to the table, plunking down the money, and having the answers spelled out for me. Somehow, I think knowing the answers would suck out some of the fun of the journey.  If life is already mapped out, what happens to our impulses to make diverging choices?

So, I’ll sit and wonder, daydreaming on my own about what my future will be as the mystery of each day is spread out before me in the dawn.