One life to live
Much like my astrological sign, Pisces, showing two fish swimming in different directions I am locked between two, entirely contradictory, ways of seeing my life. At times I am the eternal traveler the one whose motto is “it is all about the journey”, an escapist lost in visions of faraway places. Other times I am utterly satisfied to spend hours on my couch, with a good book, across from the wood fire.
No matter where we are, or for how long, there is always that moment when I look around and with no prior warning there it is again, that old tug.“Time to go” it would whisper in my ear. “You stayed here long enough” it would smile at me from behind the mirror in the early morning hours. “Time is running out” a cold fist grabbing my heart in the middle of the night. From that moment on there is no turning back. The wheels are set in motion and I know it is just a matter of time before we get up one day, pack and leave.
The constant yearning for something or somewhere is forever at odds with my utter fascination by old houses and family traditions. I can get completely immersed in the fantasy of living in one place for generations. I can imagine maintaining the old homestead, while kids, grandkids and grand grandkids come every holiday, to rekindle the family ties. I am well aware of the irony and how these two, completely different outlooks of my life, our life, don’t match up.
So when I look into the future I ask myself, is it going to be the old homestead, the big white house with white columns decorating the formal entrance, overlooking rolling acres of green pasture. Big rooms faced with dark wood where pictures of dead relatives hang all over. A house filled with stillness interrupted only on weekend and holidays or an occasional phone, whose distant ring shatters the brittle quiet into million small pieces. I smile to myself as I pull these images from across the years. Images I had as a kid lying awake at night in my bedroom, in my parent’s small third floor apartment, wondering how people can live in these boxed in living quarters. I would close my eyes and envision the day I will have a house on the ground level, just mine. With a front door that opens directly into the yard where I will be able to feel the ground under my feet. I know I can have it now; this vision is within reach if I really want it.
But what about all the places awaiting me, the journeys not yet taken, how long will I be able to stay put in one place before the unrest will take over and the need to move on will make me feel imprisoned to my own dream house. It’s been over ten years since we left Israel on September 10th of 2001, we were heading to Alaska. For as long as I remember I wanted to go there, the final frontier, the aurora borealis, days that linger into the night and long nights that take over whatever little day light there is. A world that enchanted me by being so utterly different than anything I ever knew, I can do it now.
I often wondered if our choice, five years ago, to run a motel stemmed from this dichotomy. This way while entertaining other people travel stories and adventures we can keep the home fire going. I hoped that the transient aspect of this business will be ample to silence my inside qualms and keep me happy.
Only lately it started again. The constant nudge, the unrest, the gripping questions, what’s next is once again laying heavily on my mind. So torn between the forces that pull me back and hold me tight in place and the draw of the likely and may be, at times just as powerful, I keep probing and digging looking for the magical answer that will satisfy both needs.
I don’t know if past plus present equal future or maybe it is present minus past. Mathematics was never my strong attribute but since I’ve yet to posses the powers of prophesy I will have to satisfy myself with the diluted alternative; speculation. If past choices are any indicator of the future then submerging in them and reexamining what was, over and over again, might not be an entirely fruitless waste of time. The only thing that stops me dead in my tracks is the terrifying thought that it might be already too late.
Three and last :-)
ReplyDeleteI'll comment on this tomorrow, but tonight I am trying to imagine your flight west from Israel to Alaska on 9/10/01. Tel Aviv>NY? Arriving early morning 9/11? Or late on 9/10 with a flight the next day? Or a connector from NY>Alaska on 9/10, landing in Anchorage early morning 9/11. Or what?
ReplyDeleteI guess there is a comment here: if you want to distract your reader from your writing onto a sidetrack, there's a date to conjure with.
This and the last piece really fall into the category of closet meditations, recessive, only half-intended for public performance. The word popping into my mind is 'hermetic': airtight, sealed-off. I'm having the same difficulty commenting on this that I did on 'Parallel Universes'--and for the same reason, I think. It's more you writing for yourself than it is you writing for an audience--not that it's obscure; but it is an expansion of something very hard to communicate.
ReplyDeleteI'm not satisfied with my comments, know I'm repeating myself. Let me try again. If this is a freestanding piece, and it is, a reader coming to Ariela Zucker for the first time, would have very little help in entering this piece--essays are a dance between writer and reader, one leading, one following. Here you are out on the dance floor but we don't really know the dance you are doing, the Meditation Hop....
I understood your remarks on the first piece (parallel universes) even though I had a lot of fun writing it. A touch of fiction which I thought had the right to exist in a speculation type piece.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure about the third one. I see the “speculation” as a look at the future based on the “fact” which is who I am (past and present). Actually when I saw the assignment I saw two directions drollery, which I did and the self revelation (to a point) that I tried in the third.
Soooooooo, kind of lost in space here...
The date was unneeded you were right, just a distraction in spite of it being a fact.
A touch of fiction certainly has a right, maybe even an obligation, to appear in a speculative piece--that's not an issue. And you have definitely written a speculative piece here. YOu understand the assignment, and I understand that too.
ReplyDeleteBut the self-revelation...well, it's more about you than by you, in whatever deeper sense that last little preposition can offer. My opinion anyway--yours counts too, and your pleasure in writing is a a huge thing to counterbalance my petty pickiness and picky pettiness. The thing to remember about your present English teacher is that I am a concrete thinker, an inductive thinker, and not good with abstractions at all. It's a weakness, and it prejudices my readings unavoidably.
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ReplyDeleteI don't want you to misconstrue my comments on your pleasure and fun in writing. There are English teachers who are more interested in process than product, who want to somehow drag out writers' feelings and who make much of the writer's attitude toward her own work--that's not me. I want writers to give me work they like but generally don't care whether it was fun or agonizing to write it.
ReplyDeleteBut at a point you have long passed, we are ALL good writers. The questions then do become what do we good writers want from our writing, what can it do for us. And that's why taking pleasure from one's work is important when the elementary stuff is out of the way.