Fragile
“On and on the rain will say/ How fragile we are how fragile we are/ How fragile we are/ how fragile we are”
“Fragile” -Sting
In “One Art,” Bishop, among the many cataloged losses, makes mention of “…the fluster of lost door keys.”
This whole week has been such a “fluster.” And yes, even more than one key went misplaced.
Among the many small mishaps, I put in an order for fried polenta instead of fried calamari for a couple on their first date, I reversed two table numbers and rang a pricey Brunello on Table 54, not 44, and then yesterday, left the house, stopped at Trader Joe’s, and caught the bus I usually take home, when I wasn’t actually aiming to go home, but heading to work in the exact opposite direction.
The night before last, I came home from work, realized that I had failed to notice that both Kim Deal AND Kim Gordon had released new music, and almost started crying hysterically over my unintentional slight towards Gordon.
All of this is to say I just lost another very important person in my life to the great inevitability of death this week, and apparently, this isn’t an experience that becomes more manageable with practice.
This latest blow to whatever’s left of my “youthful optimism,” comes in the context of my entirely justiable fear my partner may lose his much needed Medicaid coverage, or my Father his Social Security check someday sooner than later, and the looting of our entire government by the worst and stupidest people imaginable.
My developed habits of working precisely, showing up early and doing more than asked to do are no protection against a wounded vagueness that has left me unable to reliably handle the basics of life right at the moment.
On Monday when I received the news, I thought I had cried enough on the number 8 bus to nominally function at work, but then not just one bagpiper, but an entire bagpipe band, showed up to help celebrate St. Patrick’s Day at my workplace.
Doubled over in tears between the Brunellos and the Sicilian reds, keening and snuffling, my only consolation in my glass-enclosed office was that most eyes still remained on the bagpipers. People have little to no notion of what Sommeliers do, so if anyone saw me weeping profusely, perhaps they thought it was over a vintage change or some other imaginary Sommelier coded trauma.
As the bagpipers finally decamped to the third floor, the ticker for wine orders went off. Sure enough, a table on the third floor needed a bottle of wine, and I was going to have to follow them upstairs.
My friend used to bring a bagpiper to play in the garden for his wife’s birthday every year. When I reached the third floor with the bottle, they were inexplicably singing “Happy Birthday” to the folks on the third floor. They followed this up with “Oh When the Saints Go Marching In” on bagpipe.
First I froze, and then proceeded to take a short video of them performing. Documenting this surreal confluence seemed necessary to even believe it.
So much of our society is predicated on denial of our essential mental and physical fragility, but this is a willful occlusion of reality. We are porous beings, and our bodies and minds inevitably develop until they inevitably begin to decay.
As the LCD Soundsystem lyric from ”Someone Great” goes:
”And it keeps coming/Till the day it stops.”
A friend from work gave me a promotional sweatshirt for a brand of Irish Whiskey in my size on Monday before I left work, and I took off my radio, blazer, buttondown and tie, and put it on over my undershirt for the bus ride home. The inside was new sweatshirt fleecy soft, and I cocooned in it, and put on my headphones and listened to The Trout Quintet.
I hope an actual weekend spent in a space of relative quiet, having made tea and chicken soup already, might bring me enough peace to get back to doing the normal things normally next week, not because I want to fend off grief, but because that is what is required.
When I was younger, I believed the most important thing you could offer a human connection was to hold onto a person in your life no matter what, without really grasping that as people in the course of living, we grow and change, and regress and start over again, and that actually, the most important thing in any relationship is to try to imperfectly acknowledge, in the actual impermanent window of time we brush lives with each other, that whatever amount of time we can hold on to each other in gratitude is the actual gift. And more pointedly, that that space between us where we meet and nurture each other is never merely transitory, because authentic connection is inevitably transformative, and we will remain transformed by having known each other regardless of when or how we part.
Those people who matter never leave, because we have been remade by knowing them.
I remember being asleep in the guest bedroom many years ago, and being woken up by my friend playing viola in the morning. He liked to brag that he didn’t practice, but no one plays that well without practicing. I was warm under the covers, morning sunlight was streaming through the window, and hands that had played concert halls around the world were playing for an audience of me. I met the world that morning with much gratitude.