Notes On Another New Life #11

Home Movies

“Our Pan figure buried up to his waist in the snowstorm of the century du jour!” Photo by Richard Toon

I am making videos of Richard and me walking in Hudson. We walk on Warren Street instead of on the farm road where we live because we need streets and the possibility of strangers. We’ve been at this for two years, so we’ve met just about everyone in town who makes an appearance at, say, the coffee place called Rev, or the coffee place called Supernatural Coffee, or the fancy-dancy Talbot & Arding, where we write in our notebooks and I resent the cost of the cheese.

Sometimes, on Warren Street, we sit on a green bench near another coffee place we don’t go into, and we watch the world pass by. People we know will wander along and sit with us for a while. It’s like having an office on the street, and it makes me feel I exist.

I thought of making the short videos when I got my new phone. My old iPhone 6 needed to be plugged in all the time. It couldn’t hold a charge for five minutes. I used it for as long as it didn’t make me entirely crazy, and in this clinging I could see the shape of my not wanting things to change.

Is this true? Is it built into our species? Once we have a good thing going, do we imagine time as a perpetual motion machine and ourselves, like an iPhone 6, never dying? I can see how the illusion of time as an unbroken line would have roused our primate ancestors to walk each day on the savanna, looking for bones to gnaw and signs of predators. Once human beings learned to grow food and make pottery, they never went back to hunting and gathering.

Have I ever really changed? There are home movies of me, starting at two weeks old—I’m still wearing a wide bandage across my belly button. At six months old, I’m on the floor with my sister under the blazing yellow lights my father has set up in the living room. My sister is playing a toy flute, and I’m rearing up, laughing as I try to snatch it away from her. I can’t walk, so I fall back, still laughing my head off. On my first birthday, I’m sitting before a whipped cream cake. I glance at the camera for a moment before grabbing a hunk of cake and shoving it in my mouth. There is whipped cream all along my arm, and no one cares. This is still who I am.

My schemes for getting along better with other people have mostly failed. Do I really want to? Yes! Do I prefer saying what’s on my mind? Yes! Here are some examples. At restaurants, I’ve taken to asking wait people, in a not particularly gentle way, to refrain from saying, “What would you ladies like to have?” I say, “Could you please not use the word, ladies.” The wait people are mostly younger women, and they look stunned and sad as a gray cloud lowers over their eyes.

The other day I had an appointment to see the eye doctor in town, and when I checked in the receptionist said the schedule was on time. I was kept waiting for 30 minutes, and when I was called into an office, the very friendly technician said to me, “Thanks for your patience.” I said, “I wasn’t patient. And for what it’s worth, it doesn’t do women any favors to assume they’re patient. No one waits patiently. We wait because we’re trapped.” The technician said, “I prefer to thank people, anyway.” She thought it generated an atmosphere of warmth. I thought about how the world works on one fake understanding after the next, and then the technician and I exchanged endearments, as I followed her through the maze-like office from one machine to the next.

Have I accomplished any sort of change? In my early twenties, I began swimming a mile a day in the pool at Columbia University. At that time, it was easier to stick to a physical routine than learn to write. Now, it’s the opposite, and I’m wondering if I can recover the body I used to have. I think this is about as likely as grabbing the flute away from my sister, but fantasy, we know, is a great motivator.

Speaking of fantasy, way to go, Calvin Klein, for choosing Jeremy Allen White for your new underwear campaign! Jeremy is not about what he can do for you. Jeremy is all about, “Take me.” Look at the drifty expression on his face. Look at his poses, draped over furniture or flashing his cut physique. I think that even if you are a log left out in the rain for a couple of years or a lump of coal lying beside a train track, if you are a carbon based life form or have laid next to one or are even a silicon based life form (as I am), when you look at Jeremy, you become a body that wants things. Also, the erotic male body that has no meaning other than as a smear of sex under your nose isn't celebrated enough, isn't offered enough for all kinds of fucked up reasons about what a male body is supposed to be and supposed to do. So, thank you.

To “recover the body I used to have,” I’ve begun using a phone-app that presents a daily routine of walking exercises, accompanied by jaunty electronic music and a video of a thin woman and a fat woman performing the movements. I love it. It’s easy. It will change nothing. Let’s wait and see.

Jeremy Allen White in an ad campaign for Calvin Klein Underwear.

Richard encouraged me to exchange my iPhone 6 for an iPhone 15, because he thought the camera was superior. Hence, the videos I am making of us walking and talking. The camera faces out to the street, and as we talk you see the sidewalk, passersby, and shops we comment on. In these conversations, I ask Richard a question. He answers, and I laugh. My laughter is genuine. I have a great laugh. It’s the same laugh I had at six months old.

You may wonder as we have often wondered what there is to find amusing in a person you live with and while, at the same time, you hardly see anyone else. How is it possible still to have things to talk about?

The key phrase is “things to talk about.” We’ll talk about anything, and the thing everyone appreciates about Richard is he is a man who talks. Some men spend their lives in the sweat lodge exchanging grunts. Some men are Willy in the Beckett play Happy Days. Willie sits inert and almost without expression beside Winnie, who talks about the happiness of life as in act one she’s buried in sand up to her waist and in act two she’s buried up to her neck. Richard is especially talky with strangers. I think he wants to make a good impression and spread the sort of empty but meaningful good cheer noted by the technician at the eye doctor’s office.

Yesterday, we talked about the pending snowstorm. Every household needs a snow preparedness Marshall and a person who is basically the pilot fish on a shark or the oxpecker bird that rides the backs of zebras. Richard was concerned we'd lose power. We need power to pump water from our well. No matter what happens, he told me, he'd prepared us for making tea.

He’d filled gallon jugs with water and moved the outdoor grill to the garage, where, with a small canister of propane, he can produce a stovetop. He'd also charged every device in the house, including little lamps you can read by sent to us by a friend. This friend once told me that a biologist in Canada has spliced spider genes into goats. The goats produce spider silk in their milk, and this material, braided into cable, is strong enough to hold up buildings. I told her I once had a dog with the emotional inner life of Cary Grant. The dog was a Capricorn and had starred in several great films. I also told her something that was true, which is one night I’d slept in the room where, at forty-seven, Edith Wharton had finally experienced ecstatic sex with a young man named Morton Fullerton.

My approach to extreme weather is to look out the window and say, “Oh, it's snowing. How pretty.” We have a generator in the garden shed we're too shy to use. We've had lessons in how to use it. By “we,” I mean the snow preparedness martial. So far the lights are still on.

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Read the whole series. Laurie Stone writes the Substack Everything is Personal.

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