Coyotes and Handkerchiefs

22 February

An afternoon of steady light snowfall, a good fire snapping in the hearth, Caruso singing from the record player, and Ada sleeping soundly in her jumper. (One moment she's leaping for the moon, the next she's flopped over her saddlehorn snoozing like a drunk cowboy.)

Yesterday we went to see La Boheme at the Egyptian Theater – a surprisingly good show that had the tears soaking my shirt collar long before poor Mimi's death. The soprano who played her, a Greek with a clear light-filled voice who looked not unlike Maria Callas, had me reaching for my handkerchief with every aria. It's pathetic how often one cries at operas, if only because as drama they're so goofy on the surface. If you only read the librettos you'd find the stories lacking, unrealistic, maudlin, verbose, etc. But add the soaring music, the compressed experience of a theater house that reduces all the world to a single poignant drama, the beauty of the human voice shaping cathedrals in the air, the loss of yourself in that beauty, and before you know it tears are trembling from your lashes and emotions and memories long put away are tremmoring up to the surface. In a way opera is good therapy. Was it Sophocles who said great tragedy must be cathartic in the end?

Opera is so peculiar, what with all its silly yet effective artifices. The mere movement of acts is a lesson in story arc. I love how you'll hear some famous, bittersweet passage of music and what is actually being said onstage is “my feet hurt, take my shoes to the cobbler.” Or “the old man has stamina,” or some other sexual innuendo that Italians can't refrain from. You're reminded of who opera was really written for back in the day – not just the ladies and gentlemen in the box seats, but the poor sops in the back row reaching for their flasks and hankies.

1 March

More snow! We're making up for a scoreless first half of winter. Yesterday it dumped all morning, heavy as a down comforter thrown over the neighborhood, the black trees silhouetted in white and looking very Victorian.

Here's news: have been working a desk job, the first in my life. I'm a project manager for a certain green building company in town and for once I'm not sweating at hauling lumber or a fire pack. Strange to see the hours go by and nothing of material mounting in front of you. Oh, things are getting done, but they're like spiderwebs, intricate and invisible until you walk through them and gunk up the works. The spiderwebs are built of phone calls and emails and bids coming in from contractors and more phone calls and meetings with clients and the only time you get up from your chair is to lean over the plans or pace the office like a house cat watching the snow tumble down through the wrought iron limbs of the maple trees outside the window, hoping to catch sight of the mailman.

Not that I'm not liking the job. It's great, actually; fine people and a good opportunity to learn something new. Something so new that the change in duties is akin to an anthropological experiment. I figure by the age of forty everyone should have swung a hammer or worked with their hands somehow; so to be fair, the same life-criteria must go for having worked an office job. I simply never knew what it was like. There's that restless feeling of a school boy looking past his books out the window at the day outside, envious of the squirrels, the delivery man barreling past in his yellow truck. I can stand staring at a screen when writing only because when writing I'm somewhere else. I'm skiing with or putting on motives or pouring a drink for one of my characters. I am on the other side of that window, leaving the school books behind.

But office work doesn't leave much play for the imagination. It's numbers and hard lines of plans and none of that Byronic stuff that so distracts a dreamer. It's work, and one must work doing it, and I welcome the chance to test my strength at it. Though this is no ordinary office job: I'm working with people in the trades who are salty characters any writer would be glad to know; and we're building something quality, a house not some pyramid scheme, and once this big remodel gets rolling I'll be on site much of the day, back to using my back, surely cursing enough to clear my soul of the abstracted spiderwebs, refreshed for the comforts of the office again, where I can save my hurting knees for the slopes.

7 March

Why is it we constantly want what we don't have? When we get older and look back that want is called nostalgia. And when we're young with the world before us the urge is romantic. But when we're somewhere in the middle, with fire still in us but the woodpile lowering, when we see how certain things are playing out and must decide whether to accept them with some contentment, or to fight on at risk of overlooking the good things one does have in life – what do we call it then? Sentimentality? A heightened tendency to bawl at the opera house?

Speaking of romance, in the early hours the coyotes and horned owls can be heard calling and hooting for each other longingly across the hills. A yellow warbler pair hovering at the bird feeder. First spears of crocus appearing in the yard. A waft of warm weather from the south and like a good bird herself Ada refuses to stay indoors. Springtime is her favorite new word. Though I want is the champion phrase of the day. Can't say I blame her, considering the season, the near end of winter when the faintest smell of sunshine drives the bugs to hatching, the redwings to trilling, and every species of teenager to wearing short-shorts in mid-fifties weather. I want is what nature puts in us to roust us out of winter, the season and the stage. The photo of W.C. Williams as an old man smiling among the plum blossoms comes to mind. And the yank of Ada wanting me to quit writing comes to hand.