Pleasures revised in daylight grammar

I am overcome with--if not happiness (a kind of spike in the familiar punch of life) per se, a contentment with various aspects achieved and stumbled upon lately. These are things I want to write about because they are too delightful to be forgotten tomorrow, or next month, or next year when I try to recall something specific about today, but fall short:

a) Water: when the tongue drags too saltily out of tiredness or longterm thirst, I cannot imagine a more beautiful feeling than drinking this to one's content.

b) Watermelon: even when bought in clunky slices stuck between unnatural packaging, it tastes like nothing else (except maybe cucumber, but what a pale comparison!)

c) Sponge Baths without Sponges or a Bath But Three Metal Mixing Bowls and a Facecloth:

My landlady slipped a note under my door while I was taking care of tedious university emails. I heard her coming up the stairs and all the exertion that entails. Before I read what is written, she calls me. The plumbing in this old, rambling house is dying and the plumber won't come till tomorrow. Could I just not take a shower till further notice?

Ordinarily, this would be a small bother, easy to shrug off. However, today at the invitation of J the Physicist (not be confused with R the Physicist), I went to my first wushu practice in months. He told me it would be much easier on the ageing body than the classes I'd come to dread at home in California (did I just write that my home was in California? Oh, my).

I enter a smallish square building that purportedly houses a pool. Astounding what stubborn people at classic universities can pull off. I get lost in the strangely choreographed hallways and climb many an unnecessary stair. I spot bouncing people on treadmills and lonely basketball games. Eventually, the long, low-ceiling room with the mirrors and the large window onto the famed pool below, in which bodies are swimming laps. There is some speculation as to whether they are all kids or whether they are all Asian. They move quickly through the water in the half-length pool. It must be cold. Many of them cross arms over their chests when shuffling to reenter a lane for the next drill.

There is a handful of people in the mirrored room. It is dim and I am dubious about the hasty cacophony of foods I took in before rushing here. Time had crept by while I was looking for some pedantic editions at the library and my stomach had long given up trying to net attention while I moved and removed stacks of yellowed volumes with dense library bindings.

Practice begins with a surprise assault on what felt like five sets of stairs. Three runs up and down, the first one step at a time, the second two at a time, and the third hopping on one leg at a time. In the interests of preserving the longevity of my knees, I run up with the others the first round, speed-walk two at a time the second, and briskly climb the third. At my age, I become more Daoist--preservation of the body (and by association, the mind?) becomes a foremost concern :P

It was mildly disappointing we didn't do all the moves I was used to in California, but it was refreshing to learn new sets. And magically, the jump-inside kick (in Boston, the Tornado), temperamental of late, was corrected quite instantaneously by one or two innocolous correctional remarks. Much better explained than W. Laoshi's expected "Jump faster! Kick faster! Faster, faster, faster!!!" Sometimes, I think he should add: “Kill pussycat, kill!” Does the man, too, begin to feel the meaninglessness of a word so oft repeated? Probably not. “Faster” is his life motto. Let your imagination run wild, as Fred Willard would say.

As a result of this evening's exercise, I was in need of a shower, but could not in good conscience take one, especially since I live directly above the landlady's flat. She suggested a sponge bath. Great idea! I'd be going back to my youth when Cousin Y and I, naked age 3 and 4, respectively, would get our turns in a giant wooden tub set in his mother’s yard. There were soft orange soda bottles we liked to fill up with the garden hose strewn about. I remember laughing. It must have been a happy time because his parents were young then, too, and in love, not yet greyed by life together, and my father was far away, leaving me well alone because he was afraid of my aunt's husband, a real man from the Northeast.

Now, my cousin is in Australia, living on English and foreign things.

I don't have a sponge at home. I have facecloths and three stainless steel mixing bowls. It's autumnally cool tonight. The water I put into the bowls is too hot. I carry them into the shower stall and a miracle happens. Despite the chilliness of the air and an inherent sense of irritation at old houses (vis a vis new apartments) and my own lethargy to wash right after coming home until I’d responded to those Urgent messages, as I dipped the facecloth into the largest bowl and began bathing, somewhere along the way--after the initial splashing, soaping, and shivering--I am joyous. Do crocodiles feel this way on a sunny day?

Pouring the remnants of the bowl down the back and over the sternum, life feels good. I feel clean and taken care of by modernity's conveniences--hot running water, indoor plumbing, a laundered bed of generous berth lit by electric lamps that don't burn the eyes with expired tallow or smoke up the ceiling. This isn't Iceland anymore.

d) Walking Around Town with a Sword in its Case:

As I wend from home to the eventuality of the mirrored room, I passed as I do every day many shops and restaurants with patrons dangling their legs and cigarettes outside in the evening air. On this occasion, I carried my long sword in its dark red lacquered case in the left hand, clutching the scabbard by the neck to prevent the blade from tilting, slipping out.

I love that when I pull out the sword, it makes a cinematic "schwiiing!" sound. Even more than that, I love carrying this thing around town because it makes one feel powerful, a personage in what must be an interesting drama. This is part of living in an urban setting. Whereas in villages (Midsomer ones, especially) one might want to avoid being particularly noticed, remarked upon, or sentenced notorious, part of the joy of living in a city is this mutual spectacle. I like looking at the people on the street looking at the sword.

e) Enjoying a Pot of Tea in the Morning While There is Sun Through Self-made Pink Curtains:

Yamamotoyama in a Chinatown teapot; bay windows, sheer pink gauze curtains that during daytime are not distractingly shiny, but pleasantly shimmery; the peace of one's own place, own perch in the world.

f) Boyfriend's Cosy Woollen Socks on a Cold Night:

When I first moved to B-town, I was looking for a flat and answered a girl's ad for a roommate. She'd signed on for a one-bedroom apartment whose living room was going to be converted into a second bedroom. I arrive for the interview and notice that though it was still mid-afternoon, the space had an unredeemably blue cast of light. It was a little cold though it was still high summer.

She introduced a tall, soft-looking boy (no doubt also a student at B-town) with a lazy, narrative flick of the wrist, a sort of bored Vanna White: "The Boyfriend". The Boyfriend? Was he a piece of the furniture like The Fridge, or The Bathtub? The poor guy.

But this is different: JN's commodious woollen socks are perfect for cold feet. They are like a little pair of tents with hearths of their own.

f) Clearing away the last of the packing debris, vacuuming a new studio, and putting up everything one wants to make it beautiful and homely. Or rather, discovering how to tease out ways to make a room with strange nooks and ridges more harmonious and habitable.

Aside from the slanted floor, which rules out home yoga and too much frolick when rocking out to ABBA and layering on the perfumes of one's levee, I am increasingly fond of my house. All that really remains is to place the photographs and the seminal "School of Athens" shipped from the Vatican Museum. All that waiting and heaving in human waves had been worth it, if only to identify for oneself the faces of Michelangelo, Dante Aligheri, and Raphael. Old common lore, to be sure, but it was something to see it in the flesh, so to speak. In the minor carryatid borders the masters wrought at the bottom of celebrated fescoes—the only patches accessible to the unaided human eye--one can still see the flowing current of brushwork and follow the confident hands of artists we’ve read about and dreamt about. Riveting.

This is in chiascuro to Gerome, whose final resting place I visited on a snowy Parisian afternoon in the crackling cold. It was a seldom paced place and even the pigeons seemed to have abandoned it for some place with more traffic and hence, grub. Perhaps the patrons of Chopin are more generous. In any case, Gerome
rather unkindly sought to erase all traces of his handiwork on his images so that they appear to be Perfect, Preformed Things of Truth. I love his photographic captures of Mid-East kingdoms he’d never been, nonetheless.

g) Pirrrate Scrrrabble on Talk Like a Pirrrate Day:

R and C invited me to their Pirate Scrabble Party where they'd made extra R's (worth 0 points, but enable nearly endless add-ons of pirate-themed ideas and spellings) from balsa wood WITHOUT a saw. Most impressive.

Some best words of the evening: skinpints (Nordic pirates made drinking implements from many body parts), findthor (again, Nordic pirates with a mission), yrrrrts (Mongolian pirates' crrribs though it's a landlocked country), toyraid (Santa is a famous victim), oozedie (to die from gangrene), groinee (the recipient of a dirty fighting tactic, to be "grioined"), bumwind (a real bum of a wind that leaves one stranded on a Puritanic island with no rum), chevrrr (what pirates who develop a taste for French delicacies end up stockpiling), and ewuzle (an online orgy of dolphins).

Most of these leapt from R's brain like a flock of purple-clad Athenians; I had the pleasurable task of explaining the mythology of their genesis.

I had never felt so free playing the game, where using up all of one's letters was commonplace and balderdashing of meanings was not only encouraged, but a necessary. That was surely the succulent part—drafting explanations for these peculiar homages to the English language.

On my way home, what had been a light rain became a downpour. The streets were so flooded when I emerged from the metro station that they had become a swiftly flowing river. I had worn a dress and didn't mind the legs' getting splashed. My shoes did not fare as well and look to be permanently darkened to a sick lime colour.

The next morning, there was no sign of the maelstrom, no water congregated anywhere, except exceptionally deep ditches that could have held anything, even Davy Jones' locker.

h) And finally, Edward Hopper's paintings.

More than many modern artists, Hopper uncannily creates a window onto a three-dimensional space most credible in its lighting and depth. I love looking up at my walls where I have set his picture-windows: I see into these deeper reaches of another room, another world and feel nested, soothed. The Matisses do not fulfill this role. They are flatter, decorative in the pure sense, and do not invite the viewer so much as keep him at bay--thou shalt not enter here--this is Matisse's dream and you may look at the skin of it, but not enter it.

But into Hopper's vignettes I could almost dip my hand. They are a deliverance from the ugly and the drab of the kitchen. Every time I look at my frigidaire, I am in South Carolina, scanning the sharp blue horizon atop the crop wilderness, and the wind lifting the curvaceous woman's red dress and hat brushes me by like the whisk of air exhaled when I open and shut its doors again.

All these are pleasures I have known here, lest I forget in a year's time.