11 JAN 07
[guest blogger: Max]
When we'd said good-bye and she went inside, I started walking away but waited down at the end of the platform until the last of the conductors had stepped into the 10:24 and it was pulling out. Just to be sure. Then I turned and ran down the stairs, through the tunnel, and over to the truck. I thought she might look out her window. Drove home listening to James Brown telling me what I already knew.
"Power trouble," she said, half an hour later, phoning from the unmoving train. Stopped en route. Delay of unpredicted length. The vagaries of power. We almost never talk on the phone anymore. (Happily, the occasion doesn't arise.) But when we do, Kate's voice through the receiver always reminds me of our courtship. That 64 miles between us needed to be eliminated. Our long distance phone bills were unbelievable. Why did we eventually have to be together all the time? Being apart was just too costly. In every sense.
After an interval, a second call: "We've gotten rolling." I keep her on an extra minute, making small talk, not mentioning how strange the house feels without her around. Even though we separate every morning (she goes out to her studio), the atmosphere is distinctly different when she is actually away, even for a day. She's meeting a friend in the city, going to see the Brice Marden exhibit.
I have something else that needs doing today--my mother's 90th birthday is coming up and I'm building her a little present. My mother is the person I've known the longest. I think of her as the various people she has been during the past half century, all at once. I don't return to one era by default, the way I do with some people. Who we were when I saw her last summer is in the forefront of my mind.
But if you asked me to hand you 12 snapshots of my mother--you know, memory snapshots--I'd probably start with one that's something like this:
Fresh sawdust on the barn floor. I don't know for certain which cow that is. It's later, after my mother acquired those green coveralls to wear when she milked. I would've been in junior high or high school then, so she was a little older than I am now. No cats in the shot--they keep away from the cow's feet but they're definitely nearby, waiting for warm milk to be poured into a worn bowl. I'd be hanging around too (it's my memory), though my brother David took this photograph. The angle isn't mine. I might be sitting to the left of the frame, on baled hay or on feed sacks. It looks like a picture of solitary labor. (She started and ended nearly every day this way.) But the memory it represents is of conversation. "How was your day?"
It's almost the moment for me to head back to the station. I've added to this from time to time through the afternoon. When Kate's third call came, the noise before she spoke sounded like messages that are often left on our machine, a few accidental seconds of talking in the background--a room (I imagine) where there are many telemarketers of some sort, wearing headsets. A room of one side of conversations. It's similar to that "party" sound in songs when I was a kid. I was listening to it, kind of enjoying it, not expecting anything to happen, then she said hello.
If I'm lucky, she won't encounter any "power trouble" on the ride south. My work went pretty well--though I hoped I'd get further, the way we always do.
Driving K to the train this morning, I asked if she had a post ready. (Today's the day--she does it every other day, as the name suggests.) She said she'd started something early this morning, but it hadn't turned into anything yet. I've been stopping by her chair--not really assuming this would become the post, but thinking it'd be a pleasant greeting for her to find when she sits down at her screen again later.
. . .
