Most people learn how to swim when they are young. It’s easier for children because they haven’t become as aware of their mortality as adults have. They may be afraid of water, but they aren’t afraid of drowning to death, like some adults are. I was in my late twenties when I took my first swim lesson.
A couple of years ago, a writer friend of mine told me about one of his old high school English teachers who owned a lethal pair of personalized rubber stamps. One read “So what?” and the other, “Who cares?” Ouch… Harsh? Perhaps.
Some members of the Hippocampus staff reflect on 2011 and share what they plan to do better in 2012. What are your goals for this new year? And what did you learn in 2011?
This postage stamp-sized district—Golden Gai, it’s called—has a reputation for being bohemian, a magnet for artists and intellectuals. Whether that’s true, I couldn’t tell you. It’s a Friday night, but except for my husband and me, the streets are completely deserted.
In his collection of essays, Confessions of a Left-Handed Man, Peter Selgin unabashedly delves into some of the most intimate and often humiliating moments of his left-handed life. Selgin’s essays describe the difficulty of being a first-generation Italian-American twin in a small hat factory town in Connecticut.
Greg and I were Going Out. In high school, that was a big deal. Anyone could date, but Going Out was serious. It meant passing cryptic and affectionate notes to each other in class. It meant slowly and unconsciously beginning to dress like each other. It meant sharing friends, having comfortable dinners with each other’s families, and loyal monogamy. And it meant making out.
That Thursday in late September, our basement trips were restricted to fetching supplies. Hurricane Gloria was rushing up the East Coast, and as the radio blared the song by the same name, the sky darkened, the wind picked up, the electricity flickered, then failed. We lit candles.
My mother and I are working our way down to Moab, where I will be leaving her in the care of my brother. A road trip with her is a risky thing; in motion, she can become as unmoored as any poor creature in the universe, and as desperate. Thus, I have put Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion in the tape deck, thinking it will sooth her and, if our luck holds, buy us a hundred or so miles of calm. It’s worked. For a long time we have been mostly silent, caught in a spell of organ and strings.
He works in mathematical algorithms; I work in failed utterances. In the borders of what language can’t or won’t or shouldn’t say, but does. And vice versa. Sometimes I wish I could explain why this leads to sleepless nights, or how it feels to be overcome by that frustrating yet oh so exhilarating, even sexy, burning fire to simply express.
Like the House of Cadmus—the doomed royal family of Oedipus and Antigone—the gods cursed my family. No, we’re not doomed to marry one another and gouge our eyes out with stickpins. Instead, the gods constructed our bodies like those wooden puppets one finds in old time toy shops—those rigid little soldiers or scarecrows who stand erect on cylindrical pedestals, but who, with the press of a small button, instantly dissolve into a crumpled jumble of limbs.
