Category Archives: post bucket

When I was young, I devoured books. The elementary school librarians, delighted, struggled to keep my backpack full enough before the weekend. As a teenager, still ravenous, I would take in anything printed that crossed my path. Readers Digest, Koontz and Clancy and Crichton, “age appropriate” Christian fiction that I cringe to remember now. My mother bought me a 500 page novel in anticipation of a trans-pacific flight when I was thirteen, and was furious when she discovered I’d read nearly the whole thing overnight before we left. My intake has slowed from the firehose of a child discovering story, my tastes eventually refined, the volume decreased to carefully selected volumes recommended by trusted friends, authors with track records, occasional golden discoveries from the bookshelves of others. But the last three years have been barren, the rigor of working through graduate school burning out the willingness to read anything extra, even treasured long-form journalism falling by the wayside.

The reignition has been slow. An article here, the start of a book there, a favorite chapter flipped through before bed. Fits and starts, but nothing substantial was taking hold. Until these last few weeks, when finally the hunger has become a fire in my belly. The distinctive, engrossing pleasure of a well crafted story, woven together with precision and subtlety after a too-long absence of narrative in my world has been unexpected in its intensity, and is so very, very welcome.

Every solstice, a reminder that the world circles back around. Light to dark to light. Losing balance, finding it, losing it again. What seems delicate and temporary and precarious is in fact built into the foundation of our solar orbit. Soak in the sunshine, bask in the warm summer starlight. Feel the pull of the inevitable not as gravity, but as a centrifuge, spinning, refining, coming around again.

Today I came home from work to discover that I had time to do everything on a long list begging to be done, and yet I would rather lay in bed and cuddle with the dogs and be entirely unproductive. But today, after work, despite being deeply committed to going for a run and doing some writing on a new project, despite having plenty of energy, despite having tons of daylight left, I found myself laying in bed and simply relishing being horizontal, not binging on netflix, not having the computer on my lap, just listening to the birds out the window and feeling the pups curled up at my feet (and hogging the space down there rather thoroughly). There will be time soon, once school ramps up again, when I will not have the luxury of this time. And I want to be able to drop the expectations I have of myself and just enjoy these moments of repose fully, without guilt, without regret.

Through so many dark periods, bed has been a refuge but also, for me, a symbol of not being able to face the world. Today, it is a place to enjoy a lazy evening without those dark clouds, and I am thankful for it. Sometimes it really is the simple things.

I have fond memories of riding the El in Chicago, heading downtown or north from Uptown to Rodger’s Park to get away from the craziness of my neighborhood for a while. The trains always seemed full, even if they weren’t packed. There was always one crazy person ranting to themselves and a handful of others avoiding eye contact. Most people had on earphones, some read books or newspapers. Every race and color and size and age was represented, no matter what time of day or night. It was a little taste of humanity, packed together in a loud rail car, trundling along three stories above the street, heading somewhere, together.

My experience with the Metro rail of Saint Paul has not not left me in quite as expansive a mood. Today, I walked through a gloriously cool and blustery morning, and missing the train by three minutes (I was still blocks away, but could see it fly past the intersection far ahead without me) I found myself on the platform alone. I waited around for the next train, killing time on my phone. I had paid a rush-hour fare with my new “GO” card, struggling to figure out how to activate a ride, not yet having figured out (as I did this afternoon) that if I am paying full fare anyway, there is no need for button pushing and fumbling around the fare kiosk. When the automated announcement alerted me to a pending arrival, I looked up and realized that, rush hour or no, I was still on the train platform alone. I hopped onto the train, headed downtown (granted this was at seven thirty in the morning) on a nearly empty train. I was one of three people in the large light-rail car. When I got off the train at the hospital, a few stops from downtown, I did so alone and the car was no more full than when I’d hopped on. I was left feeling rather alone and isolated, rather than a part of something bigger, as I always did when riding the El trains around Uptown.

I wonder if it is just that early morning ride that is so empty. I know that the trains must be packed as they head to Twins games in downtown Minneapolis on the weekends? Or are they? I remember choosing to walk back to Uptown rather than attempt to board among the writhing mass after a Cubs came in Wrigleyville. Is it just that this city is more commuter friendly, as my family’s native Houston? Built for cars and not for pedestrians and public transportation? Yet the city has fantastic, fast and clean public available. Do enough people even use it?

A quick google search establishes that the Metro green line transports over thirty two thousand individuals per week, and that the Metro Transit system gave over 81 million (!!) rides in the last year alone. Even if you account for commuters using the train every day, that is still nearly sixty five hundred riders a week as a low-ball, just through our neighborhood. That’s not a small amount of people, especially considering that the cities themselves where the trains sit don’t hold the mass of humanity that is the city of Chicago. Saint Paul herself doesn’t even have three hundred thousand people. But then look at Chicago. The annual rides given by the redline alone in 2012 was eight million. Ridership on all of Chicago’s trains were 229 million that year.

In the end what this comes down to is perspective, I suppose. After leaving Chicago for rural Alaska and then relatively rural Iowa and spending the last eleven years plying that lesser traffic, I have shifted somewhat in my ideas of what an urban landscape is. The twin cities are cities, no doubt. But they are small cities, in the scheme of things. Yet after my years in the woods and cornfields, I was was wowed by her big skyscrapers and fancy eateries and clean trains that I forget what being in a place like Chicago (or Jakarta) with millions on millions of people crammed, living and breathing and eating and sleeping, in such a small space feels like.

It does not feel like that here, this close to cornfields and lakes and woods. But it feels good to be among streets and people and urban life again, even if the light rail isn’t packed full at rush hour every day.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately, and how it seems to expand and contract so readily. Just like a watched pot never boils, a watched clock – for instance on a four hour airplane flight – only moves forward by one minute at each glance. And yet suddenly, the trip is over and the memory of the interminable minutes fades as quickly as the discomfort of trying to hold oneself into the micro-seats and not hog the armrest.

I drove to Seward from Fairbanks and back again, a nine hour drive one-way on a perfect day with no traffic or construction. However there was a lot of construction this year, especially around Denali – which added approximately two hours to the trip between slowed traffic and wait times. I broke up the drive on the way down, camping south of the park at a little campground by a lake that I’d passed dozens of times but never stopped in. It was raining, and the campground was nearly full – mostly of RVs – even in the middle of the week. I had been struggling to stay awake, and decided at the last moment to spring for a campsite instead of just sleeping in the back of my truck on the side of the road as I’d planned to do. I’m just getting too old for that, plus I figured I’d sleep better without trucks flying by inches from my head all night. The next day, the relatively short jaunt down to Anchorage seemed to take forever, and every time I glanced at the clock only a few minutes had gone by. By the time I was an hour away, I was frantic to pull over and take a break and ended up calling a friend to see if she could meet for lunch last-minute, instead of pushing on to Seward. I just couldn’t stand the thought of one more insanely long minute in the truck.

And just as suddenly, in my memory, I was in Seward, with the long two-day drive behind me. And without a second thought of having to repeat it in a few days. The drive back was just as much of rubber band, and I remember being so frustrated that the miles weren’t passing. I felt like a hamster in a wheel on that highway, and yet, just as suddenly, I was at the Parks Monument and then back in town and it was over with.

I know Radiolab did a piece on the expansion and contraction of time a few years ago, and I remember listening to it while I was running dogs in Goldstream. (Radiolab is fantastic for passing the time on long mushing runs!) It’s been years, and I don’t remember the crux of the piece, but I do remember a discussion of the phenomenon of one’s life passing before one’s eyes during a near-death experience. The expansion of those few seconds, and all the thoughts that can be contained in them, is in some ways beyond comprehension. And yet it is a common enough experience that the idea has its own phrase. The mind seems to be able to take time and bend it to its will (although that will may not be *our* will in moments that seem to stretch on).

The last three years in Iowa have passed slowly, and I can remember clearly sitting on the couch in Mason counting minutes as they went by. And yet those three years are gone, now seemingly in a blink. And yet somehow each minute was sixty seconds long, just like the last. I don’t feel like I’m writing very articulately about all this at the moment. But it’s been on my mind so much. I still have nearly two years of this program to pound out, and the future of being in school for that long seems almost incomprehensible. I was in Alaska for the last eleven days, and anticipated that trip with an intensity that I cannot put into words here.  The wait felt impossibly long. And now, a day from coming home, that time seems to have passed in a nanosecond.

How can I spend my time, these minutes and seconds that pass uniformly and yet expand and contract at will during their passing in in my anticipation and memory, well and fully. How can I be in the moment, even those moments that I don’t want to last, or the ones that pass too quickly, without wishing those moments away?