Nights are spent in twitching wakefulness – sleep far away. Peaceful thoughts would be welcome but instead there’s a perpetual oscillation – rolling left and right in bed, inexplicably. For beauty? For understanding? To hide what I’ve become?
VR is elsewhere and I hate that. I rise, sit on the
bedside, embattled by the dark. Go downstairs, swig from a one-litre bottle
of San Pellegrino, the chill and fizz cutting my throat like a
knife. Impressions flit by; might they be trapped? There’s a ring-back exercise
book (It opens up flat.) available. The trick being to write in pencil; when one's lying in bed a
ball-point’s ink must flow upwards.
Warmed by the duvet here’s temporary quiet. Bedside light
on, scribbling, worrying whether I'll be be legible. Never mind, I’m no
longer thrashing like a landed trout. And I may travel.
Fifty years ago, in Dormont a Pittsburgh suburb, Mrs G,
widow, nurse at the hospital, sole earner for two daughters and her resident
mother, proved to be an unexpected neighbour. Fortyish and cheerful she fits
none of the US stereotypes I envisaged
when I crossed the Atlantic.
Innocent yet self-sufficient she never appears in US movies or in US novels. A quintessential suburbanite, but strong with it.
She welcomed our four-year-old daughter. A fleeting character on my life’s
video. A comforting remembrance.
It’s 3 am. Done with writing, I turn off the light and become
cocooned. Sleep? Perhaps.
4 am. More San Pellegrino. Thereafter? Presumably sleep.
A good description of those 2:00 am awakenings. When I wake at that hour, which is quite often these days, I don't get out of bed or reach for a pen and paper. I try to remember long forgotten things. A trip across country, a conversation that did not end well, a life goal now covered with dust. Maybe I should try writing something down, but then I'd have to turn on the light, and really I'd never go back to sleep.
ReplyDeleterobin andrea: I don't usually resort to pencil and paper but in this case my thoughts, if not peaceful were vivid. In particular I found myself recalling Mrs G. in a way that was unique and worth preserving. Once I'd crystallised her to my own satisfaction (not necessarily to anyone else's) I was more relaxed and less feverish. Eventually I slept.
DeleteWell, now I wonder what happened to Mrs G? Did you keep up with her after you left? Pittsburgh must have been a rough and smelly industrial city in the 1960's. They've cleaned it up since it lost it's industrial edge in the 70s and 80s. In 2015, Pittsburgh was listed among the "eleven most livable cities in the world" by The Economist (magazine). Who would have guessed?
ReplyDeleteColette: I've every hope that her life continued in the way I suspect she would have preferred: calmly and without drama. I didn't maintain contact and were she to read what I've written (unlikely; she was at least ten years older than me) I suspect she would have been surprised I singled her out for comment. My characterisation (ie, as the quintessential surburbanite) might be considered uncomplimentary but that wasn't my intention. I first met her in Dormont, where I rented my first US apartment, and found that suburb to have a special tranquillity, a sort of completeness, which - compared with London - was positively exotic. I doubt any American would have reacted the same way. Let me put it slightly differently: if Dormont's normality made it seem exotic, perhaps her normality as a typical feature of Dormont might also have seemed slightly exotic. Or, if you like, different from what I was accustomed to.
DeleteBy the time I arrived in Pittrbugh $60m had already been spent on cleaning up the city. I've known squalid cities in my time and Pittsbugh was comparatively civilised. I still have a soft spot for it, especially when I compare it with Philly where I spent a year, disliking its pretensions.
The further east you go in the U.S., the more pretentious people become. Whoops, did I say that out loud? Remember I spent nearly 40 years living in New York State. So I get to say that. But I was born in raised in South Bend, Indiana - since made acceptable in the States because of Pete Buttigieg. South Bend would have been similar to Pittsburg in spirit, though not in size.
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