The Two of Us
Friday, February 27th, 2009
Attention at that hour is usually directed to the first light. Our window was open to the moment the clouds came into color and eventually relented to sunshine, but nothing was said about it. We sat with our backs to the open blinds while the brightness dulled the words on our monitors. We wrote with our shoulders warming in the heat that can be found from anything that sits in the sun long enough. The middle-week spring weather was faded. At 20 degrees, the traffic was breathing cold exhaust over the guard rails and cement barriers. And while this was the scene behind us, the thick glass kept the world corporate-silent, the only flaw in its protection being the far away train whistles that broke the see-through barrier.
Nothing disturbed me or this new person – the morning person who resembles me but is a much more gifted writer. He is a little more relaxed, he has the entire day ahead whether he writes into the late morning or early afternoon. He is more optimistic as long as he is pumped with coffee and his morning cereal. His fingers work across the keyboard the way they might guitar strings. His mind was on the scene, anything he can render beautiful, he does, from inanimate objects and landscapes to memories and women, love and obsession, put to paper delicately and with the senses so that you can feel the characters breathing.
Some life he has, waking to write and then returning to bed until the next morning. He lives only for the passion. His world is words and he doesn’t have to dwell in reality, but he does sometimes, coming to life in gardens and back porches, natural settings where a vine winding through a checked fence might take him to another garden, fly him away to a gazebo when he was married, another he saw in a film, another he drove past on next to a bed and breakfast on a forgotten highway. Those places might become a place in his stories some time. He may have written about it this morning:
About 100 steps off the road, near the houses back corner, the lower branches from the forest behind jut shadows on the pointed gazebo roof. The white paint stands out in the pattern against the dark backdrop and though it’s near traffic, it’s a world away. There’s a university nearby and red bricks in the roads that stretch past the library. Quiet house fronts with screen doors left open, fraternity and sorority houses painted the same color white as the gazebo and nearly lifeless in the day time, but alive with bodies and half-shaded bodies in the parking lots at night.
Up the street is the old downtown district – tall, slender old buildings with antique shops, a video store and pizza place that are far taller than they are wide. In the winter, the windows in them steam up at the edges, the lights seems to move to the center and families sit at small tables with paper napkins tucked in their laps in moments as warm as the eateries. Outside the shops are orange newspaper racks that match the university mascot, a jaguar, the likes of which are seldom seem scampering across the surrounding farm fields.
The town is almost a cliché with the towering trees overshadowing the narrow university streets, the feel of the academic buildings seemingly spilling across the street into the residential housing – big, broad houses with wide front porches and steps with flecking paint, bicycles leaning against house-sides, small tents that children staked the night before still up on the lawn, undisturbed as though the children suddenly vanished and a new set of stranger’s kids – maybe the ones being taken on a walk by their parents – could crawl into the sleeping bags and pretend to camp out. But it’s not cliché at all. In fact, it’s so lovely and gentle here that this town could be thought the first to be this way. The students are polite and studious, not buffoons, and they are here to learn, but they are social, too. They care little that 20 minutes away is the state’s largest university, one with athletic programs that regularly compete for national titles, and programs that battle cancer and turn out engineering whizzes and rocket scientists. Everything seems content here, even the squirrels that pass before bumpers on cars that slow down.
In a town this way, the gazebo is dead spot, a place that takes relaxation and manages to slow it down. Travelers are never destined to this place, but they stay at the bed and breakfast for a little more than the cost for the rustic motel a block away. Couples pull in the gravel drive, are greeted at the door and most come late, going directly to sleep, maybe catching breakfast at the fork and spoon across the road, and leave before the shops open. In the fall, there are some festivals that entice them to stay a full morning, but mostly their impressions about the whole town come from the inn’s country kitchen with ceramic roosters on the ledges, the folded afghans at the foot of the bed, and the wood floors that creak in sour-sounding whines that begin with sharp breaks.
The town, on weekends, is mostly good-natured students, visiting parents on occasion, the few locals who work in fast food restaurants and a few retail stores, all mixed in with tourists who’ve either lost their way or given in to their inclination to pull over before reaching where they really intend to go.
The inn keepers, Jason and Shelly, Henney, were an old married couple that had lived in smaller town before buying the cottage. Their arrival was like moving into a big city – big by way of the highway and the grocery store. They didn’t have to drive 40 minutes one way to reach one, and they didn’t have to rely solely on the food taken up from the ground or butchered in the back barn. Like anyone else in town, they could cross the street in decent weather or better and fill a cart with the supplies for the inn and to fill the cupboards for themselves, but they’d come to the age when the gazebo and the lives that the young couples who stayed with them were living appealed to them. They’s once thought they could live out there retirement here, but the stairs were too much for them both, the repairs – even rudimentary ones – were talking longer for Jason to complete, so they walked the first night in March that was warm enough to the nearest campus building, which was the science hall, climbed yet a few more stairs and posted a help wanted sign on the bulletin board next to scholarship offers and posters advertising a violin trio from the Netherlands and An Evening with Mark Twain to be put on by the local barn players.
