Time Fades Away: Snowstorm Preparation

I woke up and with reports of a snowstorm on the way decided to go outside to sweep up the remaining leaves in the front yard. There's something depressing about shoveling snow when you turn it over and there are a bunch of rotting leaves mixed up in it, so I wanted to avoid that to the extent possible.

On the way out of the apartment building, I felt the melancholy of sparse Christmas decorations.

The sky was not exactly the flat gray I typically associate with an impending snowstorm, but was still dramatic through the barren tree branches.

I stopped in to the hardware store on the corner to buy salt.

Someone on Broadway preemptively covered the sidewalk, which I thought was a bit extreme given that the storefront is under scaffolding.

At the house I began to sweep up the leaves and dust from the front yard, and as I did so, I remembered my old friend S___. We lived together for several years both in and after graduating from college, and when we moved to Park Slope in 1992 bought the above broom from the hardware store on Seventh Avenue. We used the broom the entire time we lived at the apartment (with at least 100 other people), and I remembered S saying to me once how he would always associate the broom with me, because it was very functional and reliable, which I thought was a nice compliment.

At some point S went to graduate school but we remained friends after he moved back to Brooklyn. But then I moved to Washington Heights and we drifted apart; the last time I saw him was at an art opening many years ago at which he was exhibiting some work, where I could tell that his father (whom I had met several times over the years) felt very uncomfortable talking to an openly non-heterosexual person such as myself, which obv did not comport with his memory of me. Or perhaps I was projecting my own discomfort. In any case, the last contact I had with S was around the same time, when I sent him a draft of my first novel after he asked to read it. He never wrote back, however, nor did he ever respond to the periodic e-mails I sent when I happened to listen to the Meat Puppets, a band he introduced me to and remains one of my favorites from the early 1980s, or when I wrote to tell him that Stephen and I had adopted cats, which he had always maintained were superior to dogs as pets during the years we lived together.

Friendships are difficult to maintain under the best of circumstances, and they become even less tenable when one person (in this case me) becomes a very different person than the one who existed during the period when you actively shared interests or activities or an aesthetic viewpoint. Given that the other person has also changed (just by virtue of being alive), the memories that can serve to fuel a sense of fondness or nostalgia have been tainted by a sense of repulsion or embarrassment that almost never overcomes the inconvenience of arranging a mutually convenient time to meet, and so the friendship dies. (Circumstances may contrive to resurrect the friendship, but this is the exception to the rule.)

I tried to express my feelings about my old friendships -- for S is far from the only person to have faded completely from my life -- by writing on the lid of the garbage can, but knew that my irreverence was rooted in a larger ambivalence for these people from the past, along with the realization that the world has an infinite supply of ppl, some of whom can be expected to replace those who have been lost. Because we have suffered the loss of old friendships, this process is more difficult than when we are younger, but is nevertheless feasible, and -- despite the effort involved in terms of emotional risk and wasted time -- can offer some consolation for the past, along with rewards of a different type, i.e., the association with someone who more closely reflects a vision of our 'truer' self, which we have ideally arrived at by virtue of dispensing with the 'untrue' parts over the passage of time.

Inside the house, I admired a glass vase that once belonged to my father's mother.

In the garden, some of the bricks were breaking apart where water had frozen in the cracks. Far from being concerned, however, I felt that these flaws -- if that's even the right word -- added a certain beauty that would not exist in a new path.

Upstairs, a lone poinsettia seemed to wait for the storm. 

At the end of the block, an apartment palace glared at the sky, as if daring it to destroy what has already lasted close to 100 years.

Comments

[Rottin' in Denmark]

I'm looking forward to pictures of the storm!

[Matthew Gallaway]

Thanks, Rottin -- will do!

[cat]

i love this.

[Matthew Gallaway]

Thanks, cat!