M.E. Breen

I’ve been listening to three albums a lot lately: High Violet by the National, The Suburbs by Arcade Fire, and Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Hardly sleeper hits, I know, but I have no ambition around music. You will never learn about anything new from me, or anything old and overlooked. I have a Pure Dork relationship to music. I know this because in third grade I had a tape of Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton singing “Islands in the Stream” and I wore that thing out. The Dream Machine on the un-earthquake-proof shelf above my bunkbed was permanently tuned to KSAN, Soft Country Favorites. I love the Cars and the Eagles and Puccini and Men at Work and the Bee Gees.

Late Bee Gees? My cousin asked once.

Totally.

I think I like those three albums so much because they all seem to be about how there is no real difference between being a child and being a teenager and being an adult. The terrors, hopes, mysteries and doldrums of childhood just sort of carry on. There are times when I want to ask and answer (or have someone else answer) the question, Did I have a happy childhood? But there’s something about that question that seems deliberately nostalgic and a cop-out. I have the same heart and lungs and stomach and spleen I had as a child. My arms and legs are the same. Only my hair and teeth are original to the later model. So why should my childhood, meaning the set of emotional and intellectual and physical experiences that constituted my life from birth to age twelve, remain distinct from my adolescence or adulthood, any more than my child’s body remains intact and distinct somewhere, boxed up along with my dolls?

This attempt to look at the past and make some sort of determination about it really feels like an effort to know what will happen in the future. By imagining a time when you were both yourself and a stranger, a distinct being, a character, about whom it is possible to conjecture, and assign feelings and motives, and whose fate you know, whose verdict you can read, what you really want to know is Will it be good? Will I be happy? Is there a future self I have yet to meet, an old self who is at peace? Will there be a time before I die when I will know, definitively, who I am and how I lived, and can accept the knowledge without longing or mourning?

I used to think of the past as a box I could open. I could examine the contents. I even touched things from time to time, moved them around to fit some idea I mistook for a memory. But I just spent the weekend with a beloved five year old. The whole time when I might have been thinking, You are just like I was at that age, I was thinking instead, I am just like you now. And then I had this thought like a brief, sweet transmission from the future: for all your sorrow and all your joy, little one, you will never be a stranger to yourself.

It’s been raining all day in a flat, unremitting, windless, helpless, dejected-Sky-God way. About ten thousand women spent the morning running through the rain outside my house. Truckstop and I went down to watch them.

Marathons always make me cry. Partly this is because of the people holding signs and cheering, which seems so loving and futile, and partly because I want to be running, too, and partly because everyone looks so incredibly tired. I also blame the guy standing on the bank of ice plants plucking his banjo like the last band member on the Titanic, and the runner who turned to him and said, Thank you. Thank you.

San Francisco has a major marathon problem. The race planners try to avoid hills, so they route the runners along the water, first the Embarcadero (the Bay side) and then up one unavoidable killer hill through the city and then down through Golden Gate Park and out to Ocean Beach. The problem is the flat highway along the beach just isn’t that long, so they make you run it twice, out and back. Today I watched the runners funnel into two lanes when they reached the end of the park. One lane, for the half marathoners, ended in a big pink Finish sign. The other lane, for the full marathoners, veered onto the beach highway. If you’re a full marathon chugger-alonger, first you get the fun of watching other people bounce across the finish line, and then you get the  greater fun of running for three miles down one lane of the highway while faster runners come toward you in the opposite lane. You’re on mile 16. They are on mile 23, and they are not the kind of runners who have to stop mid-course to reapply Vaseline to various fleshy points of contact.

The mixture of dogged and dog-tired expressions on the runners’ faces made me weirdly, wildly sad.  A few people had given up and started walking, and I wanted to grab them and say, Run! You came here to run! And at the same time I wanted to say, I forgive you! I forgive you for not knowing what you were getting into!

Their failure felt enormous, since the whole point of the run, unless you are a professional, is symbolic, and if you set out to run 26 miles just to show yourself you can do it, and then you can’t do it, how bitter! But I sort of envied them, too, and missed the naive purposefulness of my own running days. There is something so straightforward about running a race. The finish line just sits there and waits for you to arrive.

Yoga, by contrast, discourages Start to Finish thinking. The other day I took a class with a new teacher named Charu. She’s Brazilian, and she’s terrific. She talks like this: Straight your leg! Rise your spine! Ground the buttocks to the Mother Earth! I like to do yoga but I don’t like to talk about yoga or hear other people talk about yoga, except Charu. When she tells you to move beyond the polarity of Good and Bad, Success and Fail, you see the two poles in your mind like two towers of ice, and you do want to move to the tropical forest of the middle, where Charu lives.

But I am so the polarity. I do yoga but my heart bleeds for the runners. A marathon is a small, crappy mirror for life: your body starts out as the engine of everything and then it starts to hurt and let you down; the endeavor feels scary and exciting and difficult and abstract at the beginning, and by the middle all your attention has turned to the minute topography of the road. And at the end?

I ran two marathons, in 1998 and 1999. The first, in San Francisco, was a disaster. I burned through my youth and ran ten miles way too fast. The next 16 miles I spent trying not to die.  I didn’t cross the finish line so much as beach myself on it, and then I couldn’t find my mom and lay down in the grass at Kezar Stadium and cried. The second marathon was in New York. I kept it cool at the beginning and sailed across the finish line, thirty-five minutes faster than my San Francisco time. I ran the last six miles as fast as the first six. My friends found me instantly in the “B” finishers section and wrapped me in tinfoil and took me out to dinner.

But here’s the weird thing: after that San Francisco race, I was determined to do it again. The New York marathon was one of the best days of my life, and then I never ran another one. Maybe, if that was going to be the symbol, I wanted to wear it like a piece of amber around my neck. Or maybe that day felt like a dropped jewel on the sidewalk that I picked up and put on, something lovely, a moment of good fortune, but not really mine. But it was mine, I did all the training, I left my Goodwill sweats at the start and peed on the Verrazano-Narrows bridge like everyone else.  I don’t know. I don’t know what the fable of the race is. Instead of the tortoise or the hare, what I keep picturing is the answer to the riddle of the sphinx:

What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?

Three part man in his three part life: the crawling baby, the striding youth, the bent figure hobbling with a cane.

I fall squarely into the category of People Who Do Bad Things to Their Hair (PWDBTTH). A more generous name for our club might be People Who Take Creative Risks with Their Hair (PWTCRTH), but a) that name is inaccurate and b) its acronym lacks onomatopoetic appeal. PWDBTTH! is the very sound I make when I see what my hair actually looks like after First Shampoo. But let me go back to the beginning.

I was born with strictly anonymous hair. It is of no particular color or texture. My mom used to lament its lack of body, but I would take it a step further: my hair has no nature. It is no there there hair.

I mostly left it alone as a teenager, sensing quite rightly that my self-esteem was balanced on the thinnest high-wire and could not survive a strong breeze, let alone henna. I was also powerfully attracted to the idea of natural beauty, partly at the insistence of Seventeen magazine (to be achieved through the application of barely-there make-up), and partly because I went to prep school. A lot of the girls at my school wore a t-shirt with a black dog on it that they bought at Martha’s Vineyard. When they talked about their vacations they dropped poor Martha and just called it “The Vineyard,” and I remain convinced to this day that the fruit of that particular vineyard is not grapes but those girls themselves, lissome, shiny-haired, and really good at field hockey.

I was filled with craven longing for their effortlessness, their naturalness, their homogeneous and beautiful nature. Worse than the longing itself was the fear it would be detected, so though I tried out for field hockey the first week of freshman year, I maintained to myself and anyone who was interested (mom) that I acted purely for the love of sport, plus also the righteous challenge of mastering something new. (I later found rowing, even preppier in its way, but also a secret haven for tall uncoordinated longing-filled geeks.)

By the time I got to college my longing was no less intense but much less pure. I wasn’t sure I liked the thing I wanted, and I was pretty sure I didn’t admire it. To be more precise: I did admire it, but I also knew the thing I admired was other people’s luck, not their effort, and that smacked of jealousy, and that was depressing. So, I bleached my hair. I did it during a semester in London. It took three hours and I went straight from the salon to meet my classmates at a play. I think it was Coriolanus. I got there late, after the lights went down, and as I squeezed past their knees to my seat I had the sensation that my head had turned into a small sun, radiating light and heat. Don’t be dumb, I told myself. Everyone in London has crazy hair. No one is even looking at you.

One of my friends leaned in from two seats away. “Um. Your head is glowing.”

“It’s platinum blond,” I said.

“It’s Big Bird.”

A few applications of toner later I had achieved a more Marilyn look, which was better, but also less me. My own hair was like a wig, an awesome wig, but still a wig. It also sort of itched like a wig. I went on to dye my hair red, brown, black, and striped; I cut big bangs and minimal bangs; I wore it short and long and long-long. Recently I got a sort of choppy long highlighted shag that looked terrific when I left the salon but suburban and faintly purple after First Shampoo. I don’t leave the house without six bobby pins and my old friend jealousy, and together we bristle and moon over women with long-long hair like the kind I just lopped off.

The problem with all this is I cannot change what is in my heart. My heart is not glamorous or preppy. My heart is not a pixie or a zebra or Joni Mitchell. My heart is the heart of a seeker. My heart is PWDBTTH!

The project of my heart, my true nature, is to wonder. Who who who? How how how? Better better better? I set out to answer the question, I return with strange hair, I hope and try again. Always optimistic, often disappointed, immune to lessons. I will always want to know what it is to be someone other than me. I’m my own fiction, but only on my head. Hair we shed.

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.)

-George Orwell

A dead whale washed up on Ocean Beach a few blocks from where we live, so yesterday Truckstop and I went to check it out. I had never seen a whale before, not so much as a fin above the water. I had some idea that we would stroll by, the way we stroll by dead cormorants and gulls, pelicans, harbor seals, sea lions, crabs, jelly fish, a small shark, a small porpoise, even, after heavy rains, the occasional river-swept deer. But this death was an event. At least two dozen people were circling the body when we arrived. There were couples snapping photos, parents with little kids, parents with older kids they’d apparently pulled out of school to see the whale. I overheard a girl of 10 or 12 complaining to her mother that someone had left a footprint on the body.

“Well,” her mother said, “some people are just mean.”

“It’s so sad,” the girl said. “It makes me really sad. Also it really smells.”

Both those things were true. The whale was very dead. One whole side was in white tatters, chewed by sharks and beginning to decompose. But the other side, the side facing shore that you saw as you approached, was intact from flukes to jaws. The baleen were intact. The eye was cloudy but intact. The great lower lip stuck out, and you could see the thick white grooves on the throat.

Local scientists think the whale is either a fin whale or a sei whale, both endangered species that live only in the deep ocean. They don’t know how it died, except that it was dead when it washed up, and had at some point been struck by a boat. I don’t know if it was these same scientists who decided to bury the whale on the beach, but there were rangers milling around and workmen in neon vests and tractors parked on either side of a giant pit. Like everyone else, I ignored the yellow caution tape and walked to the edge of the pit and looked in. It was full of green seawater. It seemed like the right grave for a whale, though I have seen how much sand the ocean moves around from month to month and I have my doubts the whale will stay buried.

Since it washed up Monday, someone had found the time and motivation to tag the body with spray paint, but paint must not adhere well to whale skin and the message was already illegible. I felt this was a victory for the whale. Aside from that and the footprint, everyone I saw seemed infected by the same mix of intense curiosity, awe, and melancholy. The size of the animal — 47 feet — its rarity, the distinctness of its features, its irrefutable whale-ness, all made it seem as though we were witnessing the burial of a king, but a king from a strange land, a strange planet, on whom our rituals were wasted.

Sometimes I feel very sad.
Sometimes I feel very sad.
Sometimes I feel very sad.
I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.

-The Beach Boys

I don’t want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it—or without being sure of not doing so—although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths.

–Roland Barthes

The word on happiness these days is absorption. Pursuing happiness as a goal is sort of exhausting and defeating, since almost no one feels happy for unbroken days or years, and almost no one has a happy life, in the sense that no one has a life free from loss, trial, humiliation and disappointment. I, for one, live a life of nearly perpetual dread, since my constitution (chronically overwhelmed by black bile and blood and drastically short on phlegm) demands I dread what I cannot control, and, well, the future is full of surprises. But I’m happy a lot, too.  Sometimes this has to do with absorption in a task (writing, gardening) and sometimes it has to do with small acts of chance (a hummingbird flying in the kitchen window to investigate the purple flower on the sill) and sometimes it has to do with big life machinery that I help operate but do not control (J, my friends, my family).

The happiness I’m describing usually has two components present in varying amounts: sunny chest-burst happiness, and lean back in my chair, light my pipe, it’s-elementary-my-dear-Watson-the-world-is-in-order-happiness. The second component might be described as well-being, except it can be as fleeting and powerful as the other sort.

Still, Watson-happiness is more often the sort that endures, and it lasts longest at its lowest intensity, which brings us back to absorption. So: absorption + time = well being. Or, well being + time = absorption? Send me back to school.

Of course there is also sadness, against which absorption has proved my only reliable weapon. And as weapons go, writing is weak-ass compared to gardening. Writing is like a light-saber, except your own brain and will are required to generate the light. It follows that the light buzzes and flickers just when you need it most. But gardening is a cudgel. Remember in the first episode of the second season of Buffy, when she smashes the Master’s about-to-be-resurrected-bones to smithereens with that hammer? Gardening is like that.

Most of my gardening so far is destructive: errant vine-lopping, weed yanking, weird-prehistoric-looking-plant-matter-that-turned-out-to-be-the-neighbor’s-Agapanthus-bulb-eradicating. Nothing is so absorbing as destruction, let me tell you. And there is also the element of despotism. I get to decide what lives or dies, and death is swift and immediate. And then I bundle everything I’ve killed in brown paper and take it to the curb and it disappears. I haul rusted bicycle parts and rolls of rotten carpet and shattered tiles to the curb and they disappear too. All the relics of our ruined garden city, all the overgrowth, all the choking vines. Death, I am killing you.