COMINGS AND GOINGS
25 February 2012
We woke up late this morning, having both had meltdowns yesterday over deadlines for our Provence book. Really, we were like over-stimulated 2 year-olds before naptime. I actually put my head in my hands while sitting at my desk and wailed “I hate this f—king book!” All this because my editor had sent me the final layout for any last minute changes. I was going to say that wasn’t the reason for my meltdown, but rather that she emailed it to me in a format I wasn’t familiar with and it just looked unfathomable to me; I really thought I couldn’t do it and went into full Sarah Bernhardt mode. Joel, meanwhile, was flapping around like a frantic chicken saying he couldn’t help me because he was “freaking out.” Joel never freaks out.
An hour later I not only had the format figured out, but had notated the dozen or so changes: small things like; delete “different” insert “assorted.” Add “y” to “fair” and a couple of rhythm changes. And then it was all over and I’m thinking, oh, yes, that was the real reason behind the meltdown. It’s all over. And I don’t want it to be.
When we woke up this morning the Hudson River was a choppy sea on an incoming tide, the river racing northward as if desperate to return to it source. We made porridge and ate it in bed listening to a collection of Adagios. This music was my first gift to Joel, some 21 years ago. Then it was in cassette form and I had already been listening to it for a few months. I wrapped it in the little silk scarf I’d been wearing the evening we met, just 5 days earlier, and sprinkled the silk with my perfume before tying the whole thing up with seaweed. We made our Tuscany book to that music, sailing through the Italian landscape to its slow, loping rhythm. A couple of years ago I had the tape transferred to a CD and last year, during our months in Provence, we once again travelled along to its poignant music in search of that which remains.
When I finished the revision yesterday and hit “send,” I felt both relief and enormous loss. Who knows if we’ll ever make another book together?
On Wednesday we leave for Europe…almost one year to the day since we left for Provence to start work on the book. A whole year: a year of letting go and leaping off; a year of discovering a new land, of standing side-by-side in fields and gorges, of walking down back streets in ancient towns. A year of searching not only for material that would make an interesting book, but searching, really, for that which has the most value to us as individuals and as a couple. Searching for the light, for a certain kind of space, for chocolate truffles, for the right words in our meager French. Searching for authenticity, tradition, for the best baguette, for firewood. Searching for a doctor when Joel severely burned his hand, for Arnica for my stubbed toe. Searching for a connection to strangers and for me, the eternal search for the specificity of language that will best describe the link between the personal and the universal.
After breakfast this morning, I went out to do some of the last minute errands necessary for our imminent trip. Fast-moving clouds acted like a strobe light, covering and uncovering the sunlight in dramatic bursts that made me feel as if I, and everyone else, were moving in a staccato rhythm. The wind, which started during the night where the rain left off, was smacking us all in the face, strewing the streets with twigs blown up from Riverside Park. The necessary bits and bobs purchased, I hurried further down Broadway in search of a baguette for tomorrow’s breakfast and duly armed, returned home.
The wind settles for a while and a blast of sun lights-up the couch and so we sit there, side-by-side and slowly go through the 130 photographs that will be in the book. For half and hour we’re in Provence again: there’s the River in Tourrettes-sur-Loup; the Gorge Verdon, a rainy street in Grasse, the beach in St.Tropez, the lavender fields and vineyards of the Luberon, a carousel in Aix. Look, there’s Van Gogh’s room in the asylum, an outcropping of wild thyme. On and on we travel, a silent adagio through memory.
Photo by Maggie Barrett
I look out the window now to the Hudson. The wind is furious again and whips the river into whitecaps. The tide is on the turn, caught for a moment as if in indecision as to which way to go, it goes in both directions at once, before the out-going tide has its way, taking the great river out to sea once again.
Photo by Maggie Barrett