Adieu, Claude

After several months of deliberation, I decided earlier this year that it was finally time to sell my car. And on Tuesday, following a week of typically nutjob Craigslist-facilitated interactions around this transaction (more on those in a moment), I watched the two sweet British guys who became the car's new owners drive it away.

It will sound odd or melodramatic or perhaps slightly crazy to say that, in that moment, my heart did something funny, but that's exactly what happened. I felt a sense of relief--this selling process had been, frankly, kind of a pain in the ass--and a wave of happiness as one of the guys said to me, "We'll send you a postcard when we make it to New York" (more on that in a minute, too). I also found myself in the crest of a wave of nostalgia, because this car--this slightly dinged and dented 1993 Toyota Corolla--had taken me so far.

It was my parents who'd found it originally, back in January of 1997, when I was in Boston. We were on the hunt for a car to replace the giant sky blue Buick I was then driving (word to the wise: Buick in Boston=bad idea), and the then-young Corolla was perfect. In honor of its significantly smaller size, we dubbed it Little Car, and somehow we wound up referring to it as "he."

So it was Little Car who accompanied me for my last few months in Boston, and he who allowed me to leave New England in mid-March and head west, first to Chicago to pick up Monique, and then down Route 66 to California. In Texas, after what felt like an endless stretch of road with nothing to offer by way of services, we drove into Claude, a little town where we gassed up and, at the local soda fountain (for real), got snacks and drinks to clear away the west Texas dryness. In gratitude, Little Car got his official name: Claude (pronounced the French way, just because).

Little Car took me up Highway 1 and into San Francisco 13 years ago this weekend. He went back and forth to Sonoma countless times in those early years, anytime a visitor came into town and anytime we could come up with a reasonable excuse for a day in wine country. In Little Car I went back and forth to Palo Alto, and then to Mountain View, sometimes alone, sometimes with Otis or Shayne or Daryl or Deb. On the days we didn't want to drive the whole way, we'd drive only to CalTrain, fueled by Peet's and speeding down (or attempting to speed down) 17th Street, entreating other drivers with Gooooooooooo!

It was in Little Car that my first Shanti client and I would take his two dogs out to Fort Funston each week, evidence of their fur and the sand they carried on their paws still popping up in various crevices in the car, numerous rounds of vacuuming and many years notwithstanding. With my current Shanti client, back and forth to the grocery store, to the food bank, to Mitchell's ice cream. A few weeks back, we drove Little Car to the top of Bernal Hill and marveled at the city below us.

Little Car transported a lot of beloved passengers, from boyfriends to family to friends. A select few even got to drive him; I would sit on the right side and marvel at the change in perspective.

When I traveled a lot for work and would drive to the airport, it was, of course, Little Car who'd be there waiting for me in the long-term parking lot when I returned. Seeing him there meant, simply, Home.

So it was that, when it came time to sell my sweet little vehicle, I hoped, a bit shmoopily, that he'd go to someone who'd be happy to have him. Posting the car to Craigslist got me a crazy number of replies, several of them claiming that they'd pay me whatever price I was asking in cash, no haggling, because they needed a car right away "to get to work/to school/to my band gigs." There were enough of these weird responses that I have to assume they're shorthand for something, though I don't know what.

On Monday, amid the flurry of calls I got (having grown tired of dealing with people by e-mail) was one from a guy in Pleasanton who told me his uncle would come to the city right away to pick up the car, full asking price guaranteed blah blah blah. Said "uncle" then called and brushed off my insistence that I was legally required to get the car smogged by telling me that I should save my money, because he was just going to export the car anyway.

As Export Dude made his way to the city, I got a call from Sweet British Boy #1, who arranged to come by with his friend and have a look. And then there they were, young and adorable and did I mention British. They told me they were in the States for about 3 more months and were looking for a car to take them around--to Yosemite later in the week, perhaps up to Vancouver at some point, maybe all the way to New York, from where they'd depart to go home.

Eureka.

After a test drive and a look under the "bonnet" and some very light negotiating, the three of us shook hands. I went to get the car smogged and, when I returned, found the "uncle" waiting. I told him I'd found another buyer, despite his protests now that he was not going to export the car, but was instead going to use it for himself. (Can anyone explain to me what's behind this type of scam, anyway?) After a while he gave up and went away.

Tuesday morning, I went out to meet with the Sweet British Boys and to hand over the keys. They met me on the street, all smiles, SBB #2 brandishing a Rand McNally road atlas. We walked to the garage, talked about their trip to Yosemite, American road laws, California drivers.

I backed the car out of the garage and pointed them in the direction they wanted to go. We all shook hands again. I wished them happy travels. They said they'd send photos from New York. Then I stood on the sidewalk and watched them drive to the light at Franklin Street, then turn left and drive away.

The Moment

Last Saturday, Cape Cod, dusk.

We're sitting around the fire pit in the yard of what was once my grandparents' house (now officially my aunt and uncle's), a fair chunk of the family. The day before we threw a surprise party for my grandmother's 90th birthday ("the biggest surprise of my life," she called it). Earlier on Saturday a clutch of us ran in the Brew Run, I with my cousin Sarah at my side the whole way--a delight on many levels--and then sat down to our annual clambake feast.

After dinner, my Uncle Bob built a fire, and by ones and twos we started congregating around it. Now, with night coming, we're swapping stories, laughing so hard we occasionally double over. We run back and forth to the food tent to fetch cake, and then, just to gild the lily, Aunt Char brings out a platter of cookies. (Later, Sarah will dip that gilded lily in glitter by bringing out the makings of s'mores, and Jess will root around in the dark until she comes up with a few suitable marshmallow roasting sticks.) We stick glass bottles of various colors and sizes into the coals to watch them slowly soften and collapse, then try to retrieve them, with varying degrees of success.

Uncle Eric points out the North Star. Someone points to the moon, heavy and huge, and asks, Waxing or waning? I guess waxing, not wanting to think of the fullness going (too soon, too soon). My niece sits on my mother's lap in her pj's, an earlier attempt at putting her down for nightnights having proved unsuccessful; now she watches the flames rapt, growing quiet and sleepy. The circle around the fire grows as more people drag chairs down to join us.

Pause here.

These few hours--these few days--have been so achingly perfect that for a while I forget that they won't last. Heather raises a toast to Twin Chimneys, the family "manse" (quotes intentional); this is the last summer we'll know it as we have for the past 35 years. Starting soon, it will get the renovation it so sorely needs, and in the process will be stripped to the studs. Starting even sooner, family members will start peeling off to return home, setting off our long succession of goodbyes. And starting even sooner still, people will turn in for the night, our circle like a waning moon, the fire beginning to die down.

But for a while we're all here. Bob throws more logs on the fire. Eric fishes a droopy bottle from the flames. The platter of sweets makes another round. The house glows from inside in the background, still standing. The North Star flickers. We laugh. We laugh. We're here.

Sinister

So, fine: there may have been a bit of vanity Googling happening earlier this evening. And there among the dozens of book-related links (or what I assume to be book-related links but cannot confirm as such, given that they're in a language other than English of French) and other work-related stuff were a few bits and bobs from Sinister.

Can I even begin to describe Sinister? There was a point when I had to try to do that fairly often, to explain how it was that I got to know JDS, how it was we came to decide we were compatible enough to spend several weeks traversing southern Europe together in the summer of 2002, in a car sans AC, en route to and returning from a music festival in Spain. The explanation would go something like this:

"Sinister? It's, um, a mailing list. About this band named Belle & Sebastian? They're Scottish."

And then whoever had been foolhardy enough to ask would more or less immediately find him- or herself sated, not wanting to know any more.

Sinister was (and still is) technically a mailing list devoted to all things B&S. But for several years running, roundabouts the turn of the century, it was much more. It was, for dozens of 20/30/40-something kids like me the world over, a sort of proto-blog. It was a place to post long, rambling messages crammed with literary allusions, news about indie bands, references back and forth to other posts, and more miscellaney than you could shake a stick at.

It was, for me, at least, an excellent procrastination tool: I can't imagine how many hours of Microsoft's time I spent reading and writing posts on Sinister. It was a connection to the UK (where vast swaths of Sinisterites resided), to other chunks of Europe; to J, first in Montana, then in Argentina, then in Slovenia; to sweet indie kids like Laura Llew (whom I found on Facebook but have not yet friended) here in the U.S. It was the source of much of the music I now can't imagine living without.

I read my Sinister posts now (find more, if you're truly a glutton for punishment, by searching the archives for my name) and feel a pang of something I can't entirely describe. There's a fascination in such a clear look back at my younger self, a little sigh at some particularly pungent memories, a bigger sigh at having moved beyond the substance of those memories. There's a sense of opening a time capsule and being able to fully identify the contents but not really having much idea of what to do with them other than hold them for a little bit and smile.

Once, I was in my late 20s, lived a very different life, didn't have to use eye cream every night, actually wrote in a journal, and found friendship and connection and sometimes solace in a random spot: among fans of a band I happened to love. That was Sinister.

We Are So Much What We've Come from: Part 1

I come east and, for a while, my world rockets backwards.

I.
Last Thursday we go to see Ian's jazz trio play at the local winery. (Not a typo--there are indeed wineries in Connecticut, and the one in question is actually quite good.) Ian is quite possibly the sweetest, kindest, happiest person I've ever had the luck to know. We were good friends in high school, and although I've seen him only sporadically in the ensuing years, every time I do, it's as if no time at all has passed. Years and miles collapse, and I'm as close to him as I ever was. We laugh, call each other E-N and M-A, say over and over, "It's so weird," referring to a Black Point night several worlds back, the full details of which have long since fallen away.

But this much about that night we remember: for a while we go along with someone's vaguely ridiculous idea and find ourselves in Old Black Point, on a road we don't know, probably searching in vain for whoever we were meant to meet out there, for whatever it is we were meant to do. We likely never meet who we're supposed to or get where we might've been going. Instead, the rest of the group goes ahead and Ian and I start talking--about my ill-advised tangles with Dave, probably, about the darkness of the road we're on, about the unfamiliarity of wherever it is we are. We deem it all weird. Our conversation is by turns profound and heartfelt, light and goofy. It's so weird, we keep saying. So weird.

There was something about that night, our walk, that discussion, those few inky hours--something that, as pat as this will sound, yanked Ian and I together in a way we hadn't been for the rest of the summer. I went home at the end of that long evening feeling like I knew him better than I ever had, and he me, despite our long years of friendship. So weird.

We were so far from that night last Thursday, and yet, as we hugged and talked after he finished his set, as he told me about his daughter and asked me about my business, as we kept up a stream of It's so weird! and It's so good to see you, it felt like there was so little separating then and now, as if, at any moment, Jeff or Jason or Chris might call to us from down the road--What's taking you guys?--and we would quicken our pace to reach them, agreeing with their claim that the night had been a wash rather than letting on--because how could we explain?--that it hadn't. Weirdly, it hadn't.

On Vassar, San Francisco, and film

From Following Sean

Several months back, my dear friend Ryan called from New York to tell me that he'd seen our names on the big screen, in the credits for Ralph Arlyck's film Following Sean. Ralph is a documentary filmmaker based in Poughkeepsie, New York--based, in fact, directly across the street from Vassar College, where Ry and I went to school. We were both active in the Film department there and made a few short pieces together (including Hershey: A Chocumentary and Postcards, both of which I'll digitize one of these days and post to YouTube, though the former piece is irreverent and silly enough to potentially piss off the Hershey powers that be; luckily, Ryan's a lawyer--but I digress). We both also held internships with Ralph at some point.

So I finally got around to renting Following Sean, which I found fascinating, not only because of the people who are the heart of the film, but also because it glides back and forth between San Francisco and Poughkeepsie. Now Ralph is on Haight Street; now he's shooting from his front door at home, with a view across Raymond Avenue to Chicago Hall, where his wife Elisabeth teaches (and, in fact, was my professor for a few French film classes). Now the sun is shining in the eternal springtime of Northern California; now snow is starting to fall in the Hudson Valley. It was exhilarating and poignant and curious to watch the film bounce between those two worlds, both of which I know so well.

And it was, of course, a delight to see my name on screen, though the film came out years after I'd graduated, moved out west, and given up the dream of attempting to subsist on the income of an independent filmmaker in the expensive world that was dot-com-era San Francisco, and though I now have only sketchy memories of working with Ralph. But my name there, the names of fellow film students, Steve Leiber's credit as Executive Producer (I also interned with Steve and his wife DeDe at the kick-ass Upstate Films in Rhinebeck)--all of it was a pleasant little trip back to those days when my life was so much celluloid. They seem such a long time gone.

(On a side note, the other movie I watched this week was The Squid and the Whale, which I'd forgotten was directed by Noah Baumbach, another Vassar alum. So it's been a sort of mini, unintentional VC Film Fest here in my house.)