Sometimes. . . .

Originally Posted Thursday, July 4, 2013

I am profoundly alone tonight in an unusual way.  The rain outside is torrential, unreal.  I have been reading Salter's book that has remained unfinished.  I have to confess that I have read a great deal less than I should have in the past few years.  It used to be an obsession.  Things change.  It is physically more difficult now than it once was.  My eyes are a blur in ways that almost none of you can understand.  I've written about it, but if it hasn't happened to you, as with so many things in life, you can't begin to know.  But tonight, world weary and almost forlorn, I took to my bed with a book.  Joy.  I had forgotten what succor lie there. 

The words on the page came into sharp focus.  I could barely remember the characters as I began the book so long ago, but that did not matter much to me.  It was the words on the page, not the plot, the atmosphere and the mood that mattered most.  And at that, Salter is champion.  On those pages lay all the sad set directions, cocktails and flowers and houses full of books.  There was subtle beauty and appropriate attire, not ostentatious but not too understated, either.  Here were people who knew people. They were not the people themselves, but replications of a good life.  I remembered so much and so suddenly living that dream, of people with good names and country clubs and good restaurants and of making love on high thread count sheets with women whose lives had been beautiful but just this much too sheltered, enough to make someone like me seem dangerously sweet, like peering into the Grand Canyon over the edge of a radical cliff while being tethered to a boulder at a safe distance. 

Try it sometime.  It is still quite thrilling. 

And perhaps I was, too.  I can't know.  I can only report the tremendous fun I had in those fabulous interiors while traveling summers in Spain, Mexico, Italy, France, Peru, Ecuador. . . etc.  It was all that mattered to me.  Life was a travelogue written by Don Juan or Casanova. 

Travel is sex says Salter somewhere back in memory.  It is about possibility. 

But now my garden is more than untended.  The furnishings in the house are what is left over from a long-ago divorce.  Where once it was a showpiece worthy of a section in House and Garden, it is just. . . ignored.  Salter reminds me of that.  He reminds me of everything tonight.  My life rushes back to me in gigantic starts and fits.  There is so much to remember, too much to tell. 

Sorry for leaking here, but what else is there to do?  I have begun to repair and shall now enhance what remains of my silly, imagined life.  It is a matter of the way the light falls, the way it is filtered into a room.  It is the sound of the sea in the near distance and the taste of champagne after a moonlight swim.  It is the potential of love and the first thrilling touch of lips and bare skin.  It is the way the day ends and the night falls, the sound of the owls in the closeness of the night.  Old moon, old pal, and a sailboat I used to own.  There is so much to do and so little time.  It all comes back with the beautiful prose. . . flooding back like a forgotten memory.  I love. . . I love. . . .