I got in a town car this morning at 3:30am. I hadn't slept in almost 20 hours, after a week of moderate sleep-deprivation (less than five hours a night on average) and more than its share of drinking. Soft jazz played on the radio. The streets were dark and empty. I stared out the window, mutely watching the reflection of colored lights slip over the windows.
After about fifteen minutes, the sound dropped to silence unexpectedly, and the bent and elderly man behind the wheel spoke for the first time.
"Last night I was watching a movie with John Denver and George Burns. I'd never seen it. Burns plays God, and Denver is a man who has lost his faith. Burns comes to him and tells him he has to go around and share the word with others."
"At first Burns is just a voice, then later he appears bodily to Denver. God tells Denver he can look or sound like anybody. God says he appears as the person Denver was most likely to listen to, but if Denver wanted, God could look like anything."
"Denver starts going around and telling people that God is speaking to him, that he has found faith. His wife and family think he's crazy. He doesn't care. He does it anyway." FN1.
Then he adjusted the rear view mirror to met my befuddled gaze in the backseat. "I didn't tell you before. My name is Joe."
While I tend to use this space occasionally for fiction writing, I swear that in this particular case, this is exactly what happened to me. And this town car driver intervention of David Lynchian proportions is a pretty solid analogy for the weirdness of the last ten days of my life.In some ways, it has been a terrible and disappointing week, both personally and for the collective us. In some ways, it has been a surprisingly wonderful week, far exceeding even my best expectations. Overall, though, it's felt overwhelming full of conflicted potential.
Once, a few years ago, a road trip with my very own the Kate, we were driving across Indiana in winter in the early morning, and she hit a patch of black ice. The car began to spin, and she overcorrected, then overcorrected again. FN2. We glided across the road, the car turning in circles, then continued to spin across the grassy strip separating us from traffic traveling in the opposite direction.
As we crossed the center divide, I honestly wasn't sure we were going to stop. I was pretty sure we were about to spin uncontrollably into oncoming traffic, with my side facing their ominous headlights. I remember clearly thinking, "Wow. If this keeps going, there's a pretty good chance I'm going to die."
A very long moment or two later, we ground out a little over halfway across the esplanade. There was a deep trench in it, and the car's wheels finally lost contact with the frozen ground, wedging us perpendicular to the highway. We were stuck and needed a tow to get the car unwedged, but the car were otherwise fine. Eventually we got pulled out and continued down the highway, passing an eight vehicle pile-up including a tanker truck where several people had been severely injured less than a half mile ahead of us. Had we not slipped into our own vortex, we might have been caught up in it.
I was trying to figure out how to explain the emotional impact of this week, the personal joys and sorrows, the steps forward and back, pressed up against the public horrors heaped on women and people of color by what we laughingly refer to as justice and democracy. I've been trying to figure out to describe the shock and pain I feel personally, how it has strangely rubbed like sandpaper against the contours of an already out-of-context week where the past, present, and future seemed extremely loud and incredibly close.
That moment on the black ice is as close as I can come. This week feels like the moment that unmoored us in the darkness that night, the one we never saw coming until it was too late. The split second out of step, just before everything slips back into place, for better or worse. It is out of sync with the rest of my life, and when the momentum of movement grinds to a halt, I wonder which direction I will be facing: forward, backward, parallel to my regularly scheduled life? Will I find myself miraculously only a little worse for the wear, and continue down the road I was headed as if nothing significant has happened? Will this all fade into a strange memory that seems more like a dream than something that actually happened? Or has the entire thing -- the pain, the disappointment, the surprising happiness -- changed my destination?
I don't know.
And yes, I know this entire piece has been an incredibly non-specific, self-indulgent piece of navel gazing, but the details of my personal frictions, proverbial black ice, barely avoided disasters, and moments of feeling strangely alive? They really aren't significant in and of themselves. Nothing that happened to me directly in the last ten days is all that remarkable or even noteworthy. In a vacuum, they would make for terribly boring stories, really.
The way a very public trial in Florida, a routine trial in D.C., a bill in Texas, a trip to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, and a conversation with a drunk Eastern European man who lives in France about justice, social activism, and my past makes me question my career choices isn't all that interesting in and of itself. Just like reliving some of the best and worst parts of high school while stuck in a dorm in Boston at a week-long company retreat, full of the kind of giddy highs and lows one only really has at sleep away camp when you're twelve and your real life is so far away it is easy to envision mountains where there are only mole hills, doesn't make for an epicly told tale at the end of the day. Neither does the way receiving bad news in a particular moment lessen the sting, only to find the poison of the forgotten embedded stinger slushing around inside bring on the full necrotic blow the next day.
But, in the moment of unknowing, that feeling? The feeling I had crossing the black ice, or when the driver seemed to be strangely trying to tell me, with the borrowed voice of God, to wake up and pay attention because this was one of those moments that if I didn't stop and look around, I might be missing my life speeding by me? That is worth telling. It is worth noting those moments that unhinge you a little, driving you to question things about how others perceive you, how you see yourself, and what you should be doing with your life. It's easy, in the day to day, to forget the miracle of having a life at all can be. It's easy to coast along in your routine and never question the assumptions of your values, the correctness of your choices.
"Keep your distance; I haven't got a thing to say.
Where's the exit? What time is it, anyway?
You said I would like it here, but I don't feel a thing.
Where's this happening -- in your head?
But my mother said
Smile like they want you.
Smile like you're in control.
Smile like you mean it.
Smile, baby, you're on a roll.
Smile, smile, smile…."
"Smile," Cristina FN3.
________________
FN1. The movie, it turns out, is Oh, God!, released in 1977.
FN2. I feel compelled to mention here that Kate is a very good driver who has never had an accident. This incident was the closest she has ever come to being in one. It was a fluke thing.
FN3. A playlist for this week, so I remember:
1. Smile - Cristina
2. You Better You Bet - The Who
3. Nervous Lonely Night - Jessica Lea Mayfield
4. What Was It You Wanted - Bob Dylan
5. Hold On, Hold On - Neko Case
6. You Are What You Love - Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins
7. For K, Part 2 - Lana Del Rey
8. They Never Taught Us That In School - Gayle Harris
9. A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off - The Magnetic Fields
10. Throw It All Away - Brandi Carlile
11. In Between Days - The Cure
12. Use Me - Bill Withers
13. He Was Really Sayin' Somethin' - The Velvelettes
14. Wild Ones - Flo-rida feat. Sia
15. Girls Like You - The Young and Famous
16. Never Let Me Go - Florence + The Machine
17. Hide & Seek - Imogene Heap
18. Hang with Me (Acoustic) - Robyn
19. Someday? - Concrete Blonde
