Days ago, I spent a couple of hours emptying a closet in my old room at my mom’s house. It’s a room with high ceilings and two large north-East facing windows. My brother painted it, a kind of majestic pink. This was after it had been beige for some time, which I believe he might have painted as well. It’s one of the more attended-to rooms in the house. It has been a process getting me out of there, for sure. I haven’t actually lived in that room, probably for four or five years, but I did keep mostly books in one of the closets there. Since a new person will be staying in that room, I was urged quite fervently to remove my things.
As I looked through the books, packed roughly in large plastic cartons, I found quite a few by Alice Walker, including—I think Her Blue Body Everything We Know—Nalo Hopkinson, Colson Whitehead, and a couple of texts on writing by Annie Dillard. The Dillard texts stood out a bit to me because I kind of forgot that I had those books or had read them before. In fact, this week when I read an essay titled “Living Like Weasels” by Annie Dillard I thought that was the first Dillard text I had read since high school.
We are reading Dillard now in a workshop titled Writing from the Mundane, led by Heather Radke. Initially, we as incoming freshmen were assigned Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as we entered Northfield Mount Hermon School in western Massachusetts. It was likely part of a teacher’s lesson, or maybe it was, in fact, close reading, but I will always remember the phrase “the tree with holes in it,” which was how some of the newly sighted described trees upon viewing them for the first time. I remember how Dillard writes about the lover, and the scientist, and how in those states of intense attraction or connection to an object, one is able to offer a more true artistic rendering of that which they loved.
For this class, we are reading Dillard’s essay on weasels, the first line of which is, “A weasel is wild.” It took a third reading for me to fall into the rhythm of Dillard’s writing. The degree of naturalist detail is quite, shall I say, shocking. It is heartbreaking in the Alice Walker kind of way—the way in which, in breaking your heart, you open it at the same time.
Just before Dillard notices the weasel before her, she writes of where she has landed on the trunk of a tree, “ensconced in the lap of lichen.” She wonders wantonly: Could we live under the wild rose? At the end of the essay, she uses the word “yield” to describe the ways in which the weasel acquiesces in a real, habit-formed way to that which it needs. It must.
Yielding and stopping are just some of what John and I are are learning in our driving lessons, We’re both not quite up in age, but in many ways, we really should have learned much earlier in life. This has been on our agenda though: getting our drivers licenses. After receiving a recommendation from a family friend, we finally signed up for classes at a location in Washington Heights.
I grow curious about my driving instructor, young, no more than twenty-five or thirty, and his gentle but constant counting of “one, two, three” at each stop sign we approach. I learned the other day in my lesson from him that he learned to drive from his uncle at fifteen, that it took a year, and that he would love to go to Japan one day, and Italy, and Dubai, and Egypt. As I’m making turns and all that, trying to park and keeping the steering wheel steady, he murmurs almost to himself, we got this, you’re going to be all right, and so many other ways of quietly encouraging me.
His scolding—though I cannot really call it that because it invariably ends with “We got this”—comes in a whisper, as if it is someone else or some other part of him speaking; some other part of him noticing, always observing. Ultimately, some other part of him is always keeping the both of us safe.
I have enjoyed these classes with him. He’s a big guy, and though when I finish parallel parking he always opens the passenger door where he is sitting to check that I am two hands’ distance from the curb, and I always lean over attempting to view that spacing, but because he has steer-like thighs—large and wide—I don’t view much besides more of him—but I nod too and say, yes, we got this.
A few weeks back, a car sped past the Apollo Theater—world-renowned and famous—and struck delivery bikers, killing one and hitting a couple of pedestrians as well. Perhaps it’s because I’m learning to drive, and perhaps I’m also thinking of something John said, which is not to be afraid to have an accident, to which I responded, “Yes, I want to be afraid of an accident.”
But I thought back then, listening to the news, whether there was any chance that the drivers might have considered that that Thursday night would be their last. Did they cross themselves or pray in some way before mounting their bike?
Admittedly, I have been a biker myself, crossing the median of that grand street–factually, in this case, following my brother, reckless, speeding on a bike through Harlem. I mean, yes, Harlem moves fast, for sure. But to experience it by way of watching the velocity of the driver’s car was so strange.
The Apollo, after all, is a place where waiting and sauntering is a big part of being in its vicinity. I remember waiting to get inside one Wednesday for Amateur Night. I remember years later, driving past the Apollo with an elder in a cab, as we learned on the radio that Michael Jackson had passed. Later, I remember walking past and watching the MJ impersonators doing the moonwalk. So much of the Apollo, of Harlem, of 125th, was about the watch, the time, the passing of it, the observing of others. In many ways, Harlem defines the word stroll: broad boulevards, wide avenues. There’s so much space to see or be seen.
After the driver’s lesson, the bus—the one that never comes—slinks toward the curb and stops for me. Somewhere on the straddle of Harlem’s Edgecombe Avenue and the Heights of Amsterdam, I waver moments by. The quiet of our only home, mere blocks away, beckons.
We ride, then, the E to Jamaica Bay. Salt tears, songs for the road, flights to Lisbon remembered; My routine? Want of only home-like things. He, with near sea, rushing, please, against his tongue–Come, with me. Seated together, now warmth between us lay.
I ask how many stops left. “Two.” Then, none. He motions, making peace with his fingers. I look up, hissing, kiss? He brings his leaning tower before me; his pink-brown lips meet my open, waiting mouth.
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