Are we there yet? I mean, is it time yet to stop waiting for the right time to be here, and just get on with living? The birds gave up years ago. The rivers gave up years ago. The trains – well, no one pays attention to the trains, so who knows what they’re feeling about anything, and whether, Amtrak after Amtrak, those empty dinosaurs think about anything at all? From Tuckerbox, watching the Nor'easter rumble in, brontosaurusly. There is no one inside. It slides by. Are we there yet? The river says, What? Because to a river neither there nor yet make any sense. We it can get behind. We, the otters, and their fish. We, the homeless seeking refuge along shady banks, we the children swimming and the teenagers flinging themselves off trestle bridges into mostly deep-enough pools. We is fine, and makes sense. We, made of rain and springwater. We, filtered through sewer systems and shitty septic tanks. We, peed by labradoodles and old men, squirrels and mayflies. We. Are we there yet? There’s a quality of being, present in the body at all times, that lets this question free fall down through the middle of the earth, and come out the other side, free falling up into the sky. It’s there in your elbows, and it’s there in the warmth of your throat, sipping sweet milky tea. It’s there in your feet on the ground, in your cranky back, in the picnic table, and in the sticky soda splotches interspersed with sap rising through the paint. There is no place it’s not, which is precisely why me-mind doesn’t want to hear about it. If all beings then, why the fuck do we think it’s okay to raise pigs and cows in boxes? If all beings then, what kind of a story is schools funded by property tax? If all beings then, tell me again about national borders and their critical importance to protecting the safety and economic interests of our good citizens? Are we there yet? I look at a photograph of Hillary Clinton, and see a vulnerable older person. Not an idea, not a voice that causes me to run to the suspended television in the airport, hoping by some chance They have left some discernible off-switch accessible. A person, with There Yet, There Already and Always There, in her bones, her heart, her stoic and cunning mind. Are we there yet? We stumble barefoot through the woods, hoping to find a way down to Lake Sunapee, so that we can swim out of our wedding clothes. We never find a way, but we do find release in leaving the lawn, the great house, and the somehow disappointing buffet behind us, and padding along where red squirrels and porcupines exude their atmosphere of purposefully aimless wandering. The oaks can’t even move, for fuck’s sake! How are they going to care about a question like Are we there yet? Yes, we're here, they say, rooted more and more deeply, exactly where we are. The squirrel is rummaging in dry knotweed leaves for the sandwich she knows she left there just last night. The freight train thrums across the river, squealing metal on metal. A farty motorcycle. The leaves’ shadows dancing on the notebook page. There is, in this writing, the quality of time passing consciously, and there is also the effort not to slip back into forty-minute mind. I am looking for the squirrel-sandwich urgency, the sense of it’s right here somewhere! But not the kind of impatience that dismisses being late, or being early, or fiddling around with words in a composition book. Do they even still make those anymore? Are we there yet? When I was eight years old, my parents drove from Fresno to Atlanta, stopping off in Houston to drop my brother and I off at the airport, so we could fly to Paris, and meet my grandfather. By the time we got there, the workers in France had been on strike for so long that garbage had gathered waist-high in the Barbarella space-tubes that connected the different parts of the concourse. Anyway, I lay in the back of the caramel-colored Chevy Malibu station wagon, reading and humming songs to the engine, until, in the middle of Death Valley, I barfed everywhere. Cool. Now I can imagine what that was like, for my parents: We’re in Death Valley! We don’t have much water, and yet, there’s no way we’re driving around breathing in ham-sandwich puke until we hit Phoenix. Are we there yet?
After that, I couldn’t read in the car anymore, which left My Boat Comes to You, Filled with A though Z Assorted Goods, played in the round as a family. My boat comes to you filled with Electric Tape! It left sleeping, and singing songs to the engine with my head up, so I could look out the window, which wasn’t nearly as good, because then the engine could hardly hear me. I think this was too early for cassette tapes, so we didn’t even have Kenny Rogers or Pavarotti’s Greatest Hits to smooth us over the desert. We were not there yet. |
AuthorJulie Püttgen is an artist, expressive arts therapist, and meditation teacher. Archives
November 2019
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