Procrastination

The moon is rising over the triple-decker next door, dinner needs to be started, and I ought to be doing this:

but instead I’m doing this:

Mississippi mud cake, appropriate for editing an essay on the St. Louis riverfront. There’s a lot to be done and I’m trying not to panic because that doesn’t do any good, only makes the work harder to accomplish. The grant will get done (somehow), the basement cleaned out at work (somehow), the M-B registered (somehow), the knitting of hats achieved (somehow)…mental lists are a dangerous thing.

Blah, blah, blah. Dr. Irony is traveling tomorrow, so I won’t see him until Tuesday. I still haven’t written up my homework, but I think I have an understanding of the fundamental problem, for which there is no solution.

I miss him. It is that simple. I will always miss him, probably, because for whatever reason, I loved him more than anyone else. I have come to terms with the fact that he probably loved me, too, and that in the end we lived curious parallel lives with ersatz others.

The sky deepens as the moon rises, a golden halo above the dark slant of roof. I think of winter roses, the cold smell of the streets, the wet damp of concrete as I walked home from school, and later the cold smell of an empty apartment when I drove home from work in the dark. Here I walk up to get Monkey from after-school, smell crushed Russian sage, peppery in the air above spitting diesel from a ramshackle truck. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

That is, in some ways, the hardest thing of all. I wouldn’t trade this life, even with this deep, deep regret. Perhaps this is how I come to terms, make a balance with the paradox.

Winter Sun

Rode in Swan Point yesterday, anxious to escape the house and the family and the way the city closes against us on holidays, when we’re trapped all together with the only escape alone, into one’s self. Strange and unnerving.

I just don’t like holidays much; I seem to come unglued with the thoughts of how much has changed and how much I can’t change. Families! So atomized, splintered, shattered. So relieved this is a normal day, when everything is open (mostly) and we’re home and working and being normal.

The cemetery was beautiful as always, my favorite escape. I look forward to it at Christmas, too, if can I only escape then and not be trapped in a chair with family, family, family.

Mother, mostly, father being absent. Mother who thinks I should not cycle so much, mother I can’t tell about so many things. Can’t tell her about Newport Review, didn’t tell her about Dirt Rag, will have to hide the Spot. Madness. At least I can tell her the Monkey can write…that she won’t mind.

A man I know

I think of a man I know, think of him at the end of his day as I reach the end of mine, aimless, a bit. I wonder how he is.

He’s a window into a world I don’t understand or experience: the world of men.

It’s fascinating to hear a man talk about his wife (if sometimes discomforting) when you are a wife, and sometimes behave the way he says his wife does, if only at home.

I think of him on a darkening holiday eve as I play at architecture, typing construction estimates into a spreadsheet, remember dark evenings many years ago when I also played at architecture, worked with men and wondered at them with less knowledge.

Don’t misunderstand: this is not about sex or romance or similar nonsense. It is about lenses intersecting briefly, as I think of where to buy beer on my way home and remember an afternoon when the man noticed a bar he’d not seen before and said, I think I’ll stop there this afternoon, when the day is over. It’s a Venn diagram of memory: in one set there are layers of fading light, in another, words about demolition and masonry and windows, and above them both, memories of a lost man.

I go back to this again and again, so useless: why do I miss the lost man? I understand why architecture makes me think of him, but why, what do I miss?

In the end, for all I have fought it, love matters.

Touch matters.

DSKM asked me today if I would go for a massage if she paid for one at the physical therapy office. I have had to explain—and this is not easy—that I do not like to be touched.

It is not about sex.

I crave it, crave physical contact and relish it. I love the feel of different materials (wool, silk, cotton) on my skin, love to move, to feel the pleasant pain of physical exertion. But I do not like to be touched; I stiffen and push away like a cat when people approach, react with the same fear and unease the feral cat shows when I hold her. Did I learn this from my mother, not very cuddly with me, who would not hold my son when he was a baby? Did I learn this in the long lonely months, the seasons when I was alone? It is a curious thing, this paradox, this irony.

The man makes me think of it, when he talks about his family.

He clearly loves his children, easily, with pride and buoyant happiness. His wife? It is not for me to say. What passes between any couple is mysterious, the shades and tints and hues of love and caring and habit. I have learned this in my own life, wondered about the shadows between love and inertia, the truth about dependence.

We stay: we stay in marriages for children, stay in jobs for children and marriages, keep the machine moving, oiled, fueled. This is funnier when the mechanics refuse to work on your car, and you begin to wonder if the therapist pushing for resolution sees your life, your marriage, the way your mechanics see your car.

I know why I stay, the good reasons and the bad; they are common reasons, the usual reasons. I flip this around sometimes, wonder what I would do if I was not the woman. Would I stay, would I go? Would I go if I had more friends, more of a sense of support? I lose friends easily, with spectacular talent, but once I had a life and knew people; I think this is part of what I miss when I miss the man who is lost.

Missing. The man I’m thinking of seems to be missing something in his life, and I wonder what would happen if he told his wife some of what he has told me. I wonder this not because I tell my husband all the things I should, but because of all the things I did not tell the man who is lost, and that I wish I had.

Then I wonder how much it matters what we say to our spouses when what does matter, it seems, is love. I thought this tamed and sensible love I have for my husband would do, that the mad passionate love I had for the man who is lost, the love I still feel like a phantom limb, I thought that kind of love was dangerous, flared up and died magnesium-bright and fast.

Perhaps the mistake was in not understanding the need for passion of that intensity to fuel the long marriages we live in now, a tender full of coal to ride these endless rails.

I have wrestled with this as long as I have known my husband. I have known through all of these years that he is not the man I love the most, and not the man whose touch I crave. But I loved him enough to marry him, and the man I’m thinking of loved his wife enough to marry her, to have children.

I choose to stay, he chooses to stay. Who can say what is right?

I once thought staying was right, do no harm, don’t hurt the child, the children.

This still is true. I know, too, that I will not love another man the way I loved and love the man who is lost.

The man I’m thinking of seems to have no such phantom limb. He has pride and honor and self-awareness, and what I hope for him most of all is a peace and a happiness with his life.

The dark corners of our minds must be borne, but they need not rule. There must be a way to peace with honesty. This I would wish for all of us.

Cruising to Nowhere

The Admiral excursion boat made her first cruise on Wednesday, June 12, 1940, carrying passengers on a scenic cruise of the St. Louis waterfront. Originally built in 1907 as the Vicksburg, Mississippi railroad ferry Albatross, the Admiral could carry 4,400 passengers; excursions were scheduled Wednesday through Sunday, with departures at 10:30 a.m. and 9:00 p.m.; a 2:30 cruise was added on Saturday afternoons. Except for the evening cruises, which were 3 hours, trips lasted about 4 hours.

After buying the Albatross in 1937, Streckfus Steamers spent 2 years (1938-40) and a great deal of money creating the stylish Art Deco side-wheeler.  Designed inside and out by Washington University School of Fine Arts graduate Mazie Krebs (1900-1993), almost everything aboard was custom-made. The mirrors in the Deanna Durbin Powder Room were tinted pink, to impart a healthy glow to the patrons; imported crystal graced the Sonja Henie Powder Room. In the ballroom, walls were covered in white leatherette; large zodiac symbols were painted onto the ceiling with luminous paint, interspersed with thousands of tiny electric lights to create an atmosphere of dancing “under the stars.” Krebs also designed the children’s Chocolate Milk Fountain, built around the character “Minnie Moo,” a mechanical cow that blinked her eyes and waved her tail. The Chocolate Milk Fountain’s success amazed the Streckfus people, selling 40 gallons— in the morning alone— on the first  cruise day.

The recent history of the Admiral has not been so rosy: in 1979, her hull was declared unsafe for cruising by the Coast Guard. In 1981, John Connelly, Pittsburgh millionaire and sometime-river operator purchased her; in 1982, 28 St. Louis businessmen raised more than  $2 million to buy back the Admiral and return her to St. Louis—though without her engines.  Since then, she has undergone several expensive renovations with varying success.  In the mid-1980s, local design firms, including HOK, oversaw a $36.9 million facelift intended to restore the Admiral to her former glory.  Art Deco-style lighting fixtures and faux-ostrich skin wall covering in the powder rooms couldn’t overcome the lack of interest in the “permanently moored entertainment vessel.”  Managed by Six Flags, and billed as a family entertainment center, the Admiral combined nightclubs, a theatre and an animatronic bird show to jazz, called “Birdland.”  With construction cost overruns of 25%, and $7.6 million of public money washed down river, by November 1988 the Admiral was closed for good—again.

Her most recent incarnation as the President Casino has been far more successful, whatever one’s opinion of legalized gambling. At a cost of $36.5 million, the interior was re-renovated; “we got rid of 80 percent of the first renovation,” boasted Gary Armentrout, the vice president who oversaw the work for President Riverboat Casinos.  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch described the inside—nothing was off the shelf, said Armentrout—with “shiny brass ceiling tiles, tons of white lights and three gigantic chandeliers—each adorned with playing card symbols.”  Filled with 1,500 slot machines and 60 gaming tables, the Admiral “sails” daily, with designated “cruise boardings” mimicking  actual cruise times to accommodate her empty engine rooms.

A success again, drawing local and regional visitors to the city,  the Admiral sits in a strange splendor,  a relic of days before the Gateway Arch, highway 55/70 and gambling boats. Whatever the gamblers are trying to capture—a good time, a hint of their own “glory days”—there will always be a small group dedicated to a time when the Admiral really sailed, and an on-board Sunday chicken dinner was all the entertainment anybody needed.