Hello darling, how are you? I hope you're having a fine whatever time of day it is wherever you are, and wherever you are I'm always game to take a stroll down that lovely garden path with you, or as cedars do, hold hands and dance the night away.
I thought of your visit a couple of years ago (so long ago!) when I stirred together yeast and water and bread flour today for pizza dough, I have fond memories of that day (well, maybe mixed, because it seemed to hold promise - unrelated to you - that didn't pan out) and it's amazing to recollect my impressions of you that day and how all this time later my feelings have detonated, shifted, changed. I confess that I shed a couple of tears of frustration this afternoon, kicking myself for my own lack of foresight - how could I have known then, when you were in my clutches dearest marmoset! - that I would feel this way now all this time later, and for a while now? Ah, that is cruelty, all that back-cutting backward & forward in life... a variation of 'if I'd known then what I know now' - but that's not what's usually meant by that formulation, a spelling of regret, of a misstep taken in innocence or ignorance, seniority looking askance back at youth. No, I mean it in a more dynamic fashion - ah, one of the few times I've encountered you - and I didn't know, wasn't to know til much later what you would come to mean to me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez does such formulations extremely well darling, crosscutting across time, as in the opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano BuendÃa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.Today at the farmstand, as I selected round white onions with long spent stems umbilically still attached, I settled on the notion of making pissalediere, and stopped by the supermarket expressly for anchovies, I already have olives in the fridge, and at home stirred together dough for a pizza rather than high-fat pastry base, and I thought back to that summer day when in all innocence because I had no idea you all were coming I went about my daily revolutions, some days more active than others and had actually managed to clean the house and to set fresh flowers about and to dust and to stir together pizza dough, when all of a sudden the phone rings most unexpectedly because with dialup our number is nearly always busy (and so how was it that the call even got through? strange kismet, even that much was a surprise at the time).
I didn't know then what I know now, when you came over and all I could do - besides trying to be a champion hostess, show you a good time because I was happy to see you all - was to marvel OMG - I'm so glad I cleaned the bathrooms yesterday! That was a relief, because honestly that pop-quiz visit - I am not the most fastidious housekeeper.
But all that is a lot of scampering through thick jungle vines & weeds of irrelevant detail, darling, because the lingering effect, the most important part of it, took place without my direct notice, as usual sideways, aslant, recognized only in retrospect, the quiet stillness surrounding you, the deep center of gravity - who I assume too, had no idea at that moment that the little party was in the slightest bit significant, in any way other than 'how nice that we can all get together' -
and there you were, and I remember you now, and go over that scene in my mind's eye - replay that little movie - as if it were a movie, of the sort I can now take (as it turns out) with my new camera - but I never will, not like that, not getting at what seemed an aside at the time, becoming more central...
well, darling, I'm just going on as usual - my typing on keys being the 3-D coded standin for putting my arms around you, with the promise if we're up for it - of pneumatic bliss
many many kisses darling
What M. Redon saw the other day -
now the very first snapshot from my new camera
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