Lughnasa College Moon
After taking a rug into American Rug Laundry in Minneapolis, I drove back through the campus of the University of Minnesota. It was move in day. Trucks with back doors thrown open, mattresses being handled through door-ways. Clutches of stunned looking freshmen, on campus and on their own, gathered at street lights. Now what?
It felt good to see that moment, relive my own and feel renewed as a cultural ritual continues, looking much the same as when I did it myself back in 1965.
That was the morning. In the late afternoon I drove over to Maple Grove, to Biaggi’s and met Tom Crane, Bill Schmidt and Warren Wolfe for our Woolly first Monday restaurant meal.
Warren closed on the sale of his second house in Minnesota last Friday and was in a celebratory mood. Bill had come from playing cards with friends, happy to be. Tom had an off work weekend beard and spoke of cleaning the garage floor in anticipation of guests soon to arrive.
The ease of our conversation, the common reference points, so many now, was in its fluidity, healing. (not, I should say, from recent pain or anguish, but from the deeper burden of life lived fundamentally alone) Seeing and being seen is the essence of human interaction yet it is so often blurred by wanting something from the other, or anticipating something else. This evening, as so often with the Woollys (though not always), we were with each other, there, at that table.
One profound question arose, how can we live until we die? This dips into the existential reality of bodies going infirm-Warren and I have glaucoma, Tom’s thumb, Frank’s heart and back, Ode’s knee. It also, and I think more profoundly, raises the question of self-hood, of what makes us who we are. What is necessary? Is walking necessary? Sight? The lack of serious, even terminal illness? What is indispensable?
Perhaps a clue came to us in the person of Cheryl, our waitress. When she drove north from Santa Rosa to San Francisco to see her father, she would drive through Gilroy, the garlic capital of the U.S. She wound crank her windows down and enjoy the aroma. Some of her friends thought her eccentric. No, she was Cheryl, taking in what she could as she had the opportunity.
That is, I would guess, a secret to living until we die.
