Astronomy Lesson
Running through the Ponds on Saturday I felt it: it came riding on the back of the supersaturated air, dripping from the trees and onto the smooth, easy-on-the-feet asphalt of the subdivision. The Ponds is the lushest of the subdivs near my parents' place – smaller houses of similarly claptrap construction, packed in tightly, but girdled with trees and miniature lakes, and knitted together with endearing little winding walks. The streets are all a confusing mess of W's -- Windward Lane, Wilimington Drive, Wildwood Way –you can traverse and retraverse its weaving of streets in loops that seem infinitely variable.
As I pushed my way through the humidity of a Virginia July, up paved hill and down manicured dale, all the cars meditating like calm beasts in their driveways, I felt myself pulled into the past, hijacked by the planetary pull of an invisible but powerful body. All of the frustrated selves of my teenage years, earnest and directionless, desperate for the ordinary world to burst into visionary fruit, seemed to be puffing along beside me. More: I could see – had to see – in fine-grained, hi-resolution detail, the landscape of my adolescent lust. A street name invoked a girl's name, her house, the whole scaffolding of obsession that my teenage self had constructed. I realized my inability – now or ever – to distinguish between the character of the milieu (the endless exurban sprawl) and memory of the time trapped there like a fly in a puddle of amaretto.
In the speech some callow jerk gave at my H.S. graduation (from one of the region's mammoth factories of academic quasicompetence), the speaker cheerfully invoked that "best years of our lives" cliché, and it was easy enough to dismiss at the time (nitwit, I thought) – I was heading off to college and finally, so I believed, into the face and form that would come to constitute my true self. The big truth of adolescence was that it was simply a waiting room for Life: and anyone nostalgic over it, as far as I was concerned, was welcome to hang around and read the magazines.
So what is this planet hidden inside me that draws me into its orbit? Not the Best Years of life, no – but the Densest: the Years of Gravity.
Posted by B T at July 09, 2001 10:49 AM