lingering feelings

Maybe just a quickie post. It's 6:30 p.m. and I've just poured myself a glass of wine after a 20-minute lie-down. Spent the day out at Mom's completing the estate accounting (all balanced, ready to be taken to lawyer to discuss how to present the information to the beneficiaries). She treated me to lunch, this time at the Lazy Bay cafe at Parkgate. The day was much cooler than yesterday, and overcast, with suggestions of raindrops every once in a while.

Just before lunch Mom had an errand at the North Shore Credit Union by Parkgate. I stood outside and waited by the parking-lot. I did a prose sketch:

FRI 22 JUL 2005 12:40 pm NSCU, MT. SEYMOUR PARKWAY

Cool, clouded-in summer day: smell of toasted bagels from the café next door; motor sounds of cars coming and going. They swish by on the parkway. Trees: planted not many years ago. Little ornamental maples in the beds by the parking lot, topiary mushroom caps. The box plants below cut into little spheres. Elderly man, tanned brow and white beard, munches at a table, chewing with the front of his mouth like a monkey. Man in kilt and sporran ambles out to his little 4x4 to drive away.

The brick pavers of the parking lot are oil-stained. Squad of young shaven-headed guys comes out of the café to clip up to get back on their bikes. There's a sun up there in that feathery white sky: it shines at me from the windshield of the Honda that just pulled in--a little nuclear-bright eye.

There you have it, the flavor of the moment.

This morning I came to as Kimmie switched on the radio. The song playing was "Linger" by the Cranberries. I was enchanted, taken back to the time I first heard it, which was one night while watching music videos, no doubt in 1993 when the song was released. I was mesmerized by the wistful melody and Dolores O'Riordan's waiflike, accented performance, and the black-and-white video. There I lay, yearning along with Dolores, feeling the distilled essence of a whole time, a whole phase of life, the locked chest of feeling opened to swirl up again like an aroma around my heart while the brief seconds evaporated away. So brief.

I got myself up, feeling keen pangs of love for my wife. Relationships, I now know, are not just one-way streets that start somewhere and wind down. They can surprise you--really surprise you.