Thetic args

This morning I woke up and my room smelled like my parents’ old house near the beach. It happens every now and then, often at this time of year. I live just close enough to the ocean that if the wind is blowing the right way and the humidity is high, I can lie in bed and imagine I’m on the stretch of white sand that I’ve been visiting since childhood. This morning’s fantasy was bolstered by the sound of a Carolina wren.

I inhaled slowly and listened. And felt a little homesick. It’s a place I can’t go back to anymore, not just because my parents have moved away, but because it doesn’t really exist anymore. I’ve been there a few times in recent years and I still love pieces of it, but it’s been taken over by people with an entirely different fantasy. All that’s left for me is the smell and the sounds and the beach at early morning and the view from the fire tower which is maybe my favorite place on this earth.

It’s a loss, but after the year we’ve had, it’s a small one. I settle for memories as meditation and not the real thing that is no longer real. But things rise to view and disappear again and then sometimes appear again when you don’t expect it—a carefully aligned breeze, a bird passing through—and you discover that you’ve found something you thought you had lost.

* * * * *

AJ is home from college, not for long but I’ll take it. He is tall and smiling and seems more comfortable in his skin. In a month he heads back to move into the house he’ll be sharing through the next academic year, going back to a job he’s just started at a bakery. He is discovering the things he’d temporarily lost too, although I suspect he’s finding them not quite the same as when he left them. His relationship to his room has changed. Objects are not where he left them and look a little different than he remembered. I hope he’s happy to be here for a while. I’m happy to have him while we can.

He is holed up in his room writing one more paper while all his worldy possessions teeter precariously in my front hall and food disappears from the kitchen at an alarming rate.

* * * * *

At the Toy Factory, I read a lot, often 600-800 pages a week of complicated texts about complicated ideas and budgets with arcane descriptions, and make fast decisions. It could be easy to miss things at the speed of travel, but if you do this a lot, a surprising number of things jump out at you like as if they were painted pink and lit with neon. This morning it was “thetic args,” in the middle of some erudite philosophizing. “Thetic args” was a mispresentation of “thematic arcs,” but I found it appealing as is. Thetic args sounds like a psychedelic pop band. Or maybe a childbirth technique. Or possibly just the result of trying to meditate your way out of a pandemic.

But this week has been largely free of args, thetic or otherwise. Nearly two months into my job, I got to write my first ranty email about a stupid bureaucratic process and I feel like I should get a badge. The first ranty email is a milestone in a job that says both you have been around enough to really care about something and also you suspect you may finally know what you are talking about (whether you actually do know what you are talking about is beside the point). And then a big project met an actual major milestone and built some actual confidence and now on to the next thing. My schedule has been dialed back from EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE to THERE IS A LOT TO DO and also it is 82 and sunny and Mister Softee is on my block and the forthcoming long weekend is the rest for the wicked to which I aspire.