The Style Award

I got my hair cut today at the salon I've gone to for the last several years.  The salon is in the L.A. suburb where I used to live with Mr. Ex and one of his partner's wives goes there, too. Turns out that a week or so ago the partner's wife told her stylist that her husband will soon turn into her own Mr. Ex. He cheated on her and dropped the big D-I-V-O-R-C-E bomb on her right before Christmas. They have three little kids.  Honestly, most of the partners in this firm should get some kind of an Oscar for best performance as cheaters and liars.  It's a style thing. This is what they do. And they do it well. Speak into the microphone, guys. Let's hear that acceptance speech. Who ya gonna thank?

Who Gets the Angels?

"I gave San Francisco to a woman," my ride from the airport says.  I like it that he understands what I mean when I tell him I've had trouble being in L.A.  "It's a problem when a freeway exit sign represents a person and the experiences you've had with that person," he says.  He really gets it, I think as the 110 curves through downtown. "There's Mr. Ex's building," I say as the damn thing looms over us in the urban glow like a monolith that maybe has a mind of its own and just might want to tip over right now and crush us.  He looks over at me and nods.  This guy isn't a taxi driver.  He's a Match. com guy and the ride from the airport is date #3.  We've been emailing the whole while I've been away--not obsessively--just very few days or so and I like him even better than I did when I left.  But the only thing I know about where our relationship is headed is simply that he's giving me a ride home from the airport.  One date at a time.  It's all I can manage. 

I panicked in the jetway.  What if I didn't recognize him? That last time I saw him, we'd sat in the dark at a dance concert.  What if he didn't recognize me?  Airport fluorescent isn't my best look.  What if he recognized me and pretended he didn't and walked away?  But when the escalator delivered me to the hallway outside of baggage claim he was there at the bottom--pretending to hold up a sign.

I had a fantasy for months after the marriage ended.  Whenever I came back from a trip, I'd imagine Mr. Ex had changed his mind and there he was at the airport waiting for me.  He was holding a sign and it said, Take Me Back or I'm Your Vehicle, Baby, a line from a Chicago song he'd always quote if he gave me a ride somewhere. Mr. Ex never showed up.

But now here I am in a car with a guy that did show up and we're driving through my past in the City of Angels.

The Incredible Lighted-ness of Being in St. Paul

There must be a city ordinance that requires all trees within downtown St. Paul to be festooned with lights. Deciduous trees, stories-high evergreens, thigh-high shrubs in pots--all of these trees are bedecked in the blocks surrounding the St.Paul Hotel. White lights, red, green, purpleandredandgreen together. The effect is breathtaking. The days are short here in the dark middle of winter-- and maybe it's a mental health issue. Maybe some repected mental health professional has insisted that there be light. All I know is that the lights come on at dusk and are still on when I open my eyes in the 6:00 a.m. pre-dawn darkness.

Imagine this in a forest of light:

You are waiting for the bus and you hear sleighbells. It's a throaty ring--the baritone in the choir of bells and you have no idea where the sound is coming from. Then you see it. Silver, the size of a golfball, attached to the loop of a young woman's backpack. The bell rings because she is stamping her feet to keep warm on the packed carpet of snow next to the bus stop. Her hands are in her pockets and the fur-trimmed hood of her parka is pulled tight around her face, but still, she looks cold.  A young man standing a few feet away from her had searched for the source of the sleighbellls just like you and now he looks up from his phone and smiles.  He takes a couple of steps toward her. "Rudolph?" he says. She laughs and doesn't back away. "Guide my sleigh tonight?" he asks, emboldened.  They've turned to face one another now, and she laughs again.  He bows his head  a little and shakes it--laughing perhaps at his own wit.  He looks like a deer showing off his antlers.  

This could be the beginning of something, you think, here at the bus stop in a city burning with light.

I leave Nebraska in the morning.  The MFA residency is over.  My relationship with Nebraska is not.  Mr. Ex grew up here and I chose this MFA program when we were still married.  It would be nice to have midwestern connections if we retired here, I thought.

I was drifting off to sleep when I heard the whistle of a train going through Nebraska City. More than a hundred trains per day go through the small town  a couple of hours away from here where Mr. Ex's mother lives and I have 32 years of memories of visiting her there.  A few days each visit...that's  9,600 or so  train whistles and I can't hear that sound without thinking of Mr. Ex--and train whistles are inherently a sad sound.  When I heard the whistle tonight, a question for him formed on my lips.  Are you happy? I asked him as I lay in bed here alone-- and if this were a few months ago I would have emailed this question directly to him. And then I would have gotten in a bad kind of groove and emailed him 50 more questions. But I don't do that anymore. I don't need to because I'm taking Mr. Ex's homeland for my own. These brown branches are mine, the dirty snow, and the last of the berries hanging from the trees.  This is where we loved each other, where one of our daughters was conceived, and I claim each dry stalk of cut bean and grain as mine. I claim the rivers and the wind, his brother, his brother’s wife and his  mother and everyone else in his family. I claim the trains and their lonesome whistles, the Willa-Cather-beauty of this state and every word I write here as mine alone.