Window in the west facade of the Lutheran Fishermen’s Church in Born auf dem Darß, Germany. Photograph by Radomianin, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Workers are installing sliding glass doors on the mudroom. Can you hear the drilling and hammering? I love when you can’t tell what season it is. Tables and chairs, usually on the deck, are sitting around the grounds, and I can’t do the things with the garden you’re supposed to do in the fall. I’m upstairs. Around my shoulders is the down comforter I bought at a yard sale in Scottsdale. Richard misses the warmth of Arizona, which to him was anywhere but cold, damp England, where he lived without central heating. Yesterday, I walked with a friend I’ve known almost all my life, and another friend I’ve known even longer sent me an email. Another friend got in touch, too. This third friend’s email was the place where train tracks switch and your life takes a different course, and I could see why the novel mistakes for meaning the beautiful patterns that form in a life.
When you break a dish, sweep it up quickly and throw away the pieces. Sweep the floor where it broke and run your hand along the surface. When you buy a house, walk through the walls. When you meet a stranger, you are replacing the lost dish. When you think about friends who are out of reach, imagine yourself in a line of text, moving across a page, and each of the letters is a person you know, walking along briskly with you.
A while back, I spritzed room scent on my wrist, thinking it was perfume. No one knows what to do in Hudson. It’s Who cares there all the time. I held my wrist to my nose and then to Richard’s nose. I said, “It has an undertone. The musk of an animal, maybe?” He said, “A dachshund?”
I worried about carrying the scent of dachshund into the food market where we were heading. I bought small pieces of chicken Milanese to eat while we walked and to save some for Richard. I like eating on the street. Richard is, Really? I’m, It reminds me of New York.
Around this time—and just as I was thinking Richard wouldn’t leave me—an owl flew away from the Central Park Zoo. During the year the owl lived, people posted pictures of him, looking happy on a branch here and there. Richard said he hoped I wouldn’t “go off him” as time went by. We were more interested in freedom for the owl than in freedom inside our relationship. The natural state of an owl is to fly off in one bright flash of love.
The other night, we watched Lawrence of Arabia, a movie without even one woman in it. There are a few female corpses when Turks are slaughtered by Arabs on their way to Damascus. In every frame, you can see Peter O’Toole thinking, and you can’t look away for even a second. In 1916, before setting off on a diplomatic assignment to meet King Faisal, T. E. Lawrence was a lost man looking to become a person. The way to turn lostness into a person is to enter a desert.
O’Toole as Lawrence looks beautiful in his flowing white robes, and you wonder how you would look in that gear, and how fashion and sex fantasy move people through the garden of forking paths. Richard mentioned that O’Toole had grown up very poor and working class in Leeds and had shed his Yorkshire accent at RADA. How did he know his body would move him into the world? It must have been remarked on that he was very beautiful.
After World War I, Lawrence returned to England and during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 he tried to help King Faisal gain independent authority over Syria. Faisal was outplayed by the French in a deal they’d made with the British to maintain a French military presence in the region.
After we watched Lawrence of Arabia, I said to Richard, “I wish we could live another hundred years.” He said, “We’ll only be a foot tall.” I said, “Why?” He said, “You get smaller. We won’t be able to get up on the couch.” I said, “We’ll need one of those cat ramps.” He said, “Maybe we should build one now.”
October 4 was our anniversary. We have been together for eighteen years. That is the number of years my dog lived. In dog years, we have been together all our lives.
Richard’s reading a book about fakes. He likes being confused about whether something could be said to be a genuine anything. The best thoughts are love affairs you can dip in and out of until they become words.
I love to sit on a bench and watch the world of Warren Street float by. Richard is pretty sure it means we have entered the alter kakers portion of our program. I don’t care. A woman passed us on Warren Street once, sitting on this bench, and she took this picture.
Photograph courtesy of Laurie Stone.
The picture was taken when spring was becoming summer. The woman said we looked happy. We are happy on Warren Street. We walk hand in hand or I link my arm through his. When I first met him, I tried walking with my arm around his waist, and he didn’t like it. He felt twisted up and demonstrated the feeling in a wrestling hold. He said, “Can you walk like this?” I still miss that way of walking.
Today in bed, as we were having tea, he said, “Every day with us is a mitzvah.” I first laid eyes on him, there was more brown in his hair. He was wearing a different pair of very cool glasses. That and the English accent and the adorable face and the sleek body and a brain that is a dachshund, sniffing around at everything, were immediately appealing.
He’s a witch, so after eighteen years he doesn’t look that different. Never mind about me. October 4, 2006, was the luckiest day of my life. Everything changed. Everything that is good in my life became possible. I was sixty years old, and he was fifty-six. Life stretched out before us, not as more life but as a different life. If we act like teenagers, you know why.
Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening, which was long-listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes the Streaming Now column for LIBER: A Feminist Review, and her Substack is Everything Is Personal.
