Dust in the Wind

I was in my new coffee place early yesterday morning; well not “early” early, but it was early for me. I knew it was early because the music was completely different.

I can normally gauge how close to on time I will be getting to work by the song that's playing when I pour my coffee: Barenaked Ladies and I'm right in the groove, if they're playing Miley Cyrus, I'm going to be late because I have to go home and take a shower.

I go to this place because I got mad at my old place.

I'd been going there for years. It was my home away from home and, when I was unemployed, it became my office.

It was just like every other over-priced coffee boutique in terms of what it served, what made it different, what made it a place I could easily spend hours was the décor. It was an over-priced coffee boutique made to look like a cabin in the north woods. It had honey-colored pine logs on the walls and a stone fireplace. It reminded me of the place where I spent a lot of summers when I was a kid.

It stayed that way for more than a decade and, as time went by, became more and more lived in like the slippers you don't want to throw away even after the only thing holding them together is memory.

Sure, the leather chairs were ripped and the soft pine tables had been personalized with the initials of some bored teenager, but it was my place.

But the Corporate came for my slippers. They made over my place and made it their place; some place I can't ever go back to . They took my slippers and replaced them with new hard-soled shoes that pinch.

I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they pulled down my cabin in the woods coffee boutique and replaced it with one that looked just like every other over-priced coffee boutique.

Gone were the welcoming caramel tones and the comforting quality of the fireplace. They were replaced with drywall and wainscoting, creams, ebony and lots of neutrals. The half-logs had provided a measure of sound-deadening that made the place feel less like a cafe and more like a high-traffic family room. The hard, smooth walls now make the place sound like a cafeteria during lunchtime rush.

The other thing they did, in the interest of progress, was to replace the espresso machines. After many years of seeing them in other coffee places, my old place had finally got two machines that had the integrated coffee grinder. Previously, the person making my Americano would have to dispense coffee from the reservoir in the grinder. This has a very particular sound as the dispensing lever is drawn across the front of the grinder three times. It has always sounded to me like the spring that draws the lever back to the closed position was a little bit rusty because, in addition to the hard plastic-on-plastic sound there was a tiny squeaky noise in the background.

Once dispensed, the coffee is pressed firmly into the bowl and then the bowl is latched to the front of the espresso machine. And after the pressurized hot water is forced through the coffee and my drink is made, they remove the bowl and empty its contents into the trash by slamming the metal bowl against a rod that crosses the hole in the counter over the trash can.

And it's always three times: three times for dispensing coffee into the bowl and three times of striking it against the rod to empty the contents.

There is nothing else that sounds like that. If you spend time in places like this, it's familiar and even reassuring. When it was still my place and they upgraded to the new machines where everything from grinding to packing and unpacking the the coffee took place inside the machine it was a little unsettling and it took some time to get used to.

In the new place, they have gone back to the old, noisier arrangement and, with nothing to absorb the sounds of the clicking and the slamming, it was jarring and unpleasant. Now the noises collided with the conversations and bounced all over the store from hard surface to hard surface. They put caffeine in aspirin to cure tough headaches, I don't put caffeine in me to get one.

So, now I go to a new place where they call you “Hun” and “Dear” and “Darlin'.” It's the kind of place where the pastries don't so much have to be defrosted as released from their individual plastic wrapping. It's the kind of place where you can by gallon-sized drink containers and fill them with the soft drink of your choice while you fill your car.

So, my new coffee place is a gas station, okay?

My gas station is directly across the street from another gas station and both have multiple coffee urns serving a variety of blends. In fact, the other place is more popular, which is how I chose this place. I figured I could get in and get out quickly thereby increasing my chances of getting to work on time.

So, yesterday I'm in there and instead of hurry up, you'll be late for work music, they are playing “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas.

This is not get-stoked-to-go-to-work music, this is why-bother-roll-over-and-pull-the-covers-over-your-head-because-nothing-matters music. A strange choice for a Thursday morning. Mondays, you expect that kind of thing, Wednesdays definitely, but Thursdays?

It seems like every day we are learning about how memory is more plastic, more fluid than absolute. When you're young, you think of memory in binary terms: you know something or you don't, you had a specific experience, or you didn't. As you get older, you recognize how little control you really have over what you recall and what is lost. And, more importantly, how what once was lost can be found again when and where you least expect it.

When you're young, you hear the character name “Running Board” and immediately “Go Go Gophers” comes to mind. You know that and think you'll always know that. It's a fact, an absolute. But then you find that time has other plans for you and the day comes when you have to ask what “Go Go Gophers” was and who the characters were.

Memory is less a muscle you flex than something that gets triggered, like a porch light with a motion sensor, or an allergic reaction.

Memory can be comforting, but it can also be unsettling because you never know when, or where, it might go off.

So, there I was in the convenience store getting my coffee and worried about the questions I was going to ask in an early morning phone interview when “Dust in the Wind” comes on and stops me in my tracks. In an instant I am no longer thinking about food insecurity, but about Nathalie Feldman and a moment three minutes and twenty seconds long that happened thirty-six years ago.

I didn't have a lot of friends in high school and generally considered myself fortunate that anyone would want to spend any time around me. I didn't have a girlfriend in high school, but I did have crushes. Not the pervy raincoat kind of crushes, but the if-there-is-ever-anything-I can-do-for-you-please-let-me-know kind. I was the kid who would complain about his classmates being drunk on alcohol and hormones and yet seek out opportunities to be around them. I wore the fact that I would never get invited to the party as a badge of honor, but would always volunteer to work it.

As I write this, I cannot remember precisely how I met Tandy, or how we became friends, but I am certain it will come to me. She was a popular girl in the class behind mine and we spent time together to the point where I was her gay friend. She would talk to me about boys she was dating and about movies and a lot of other stuff I would listen and try to be helpful and sound insightful on subjects that I couldn't possibly know anything about. The more time I spent with her I think the less she saw me and the more I became obsessed with her.

Her parents liked me which should have told me more about where I stood than anything, but I was blissfully oblivious.

Tandy had a Sweet Sixteen party. I was invited and, like a glutton for punishment, I went. It was a celebration for a friend and so I should be there, but at the same time, I had a crush on her and she did not think of me that way and I both did not know how to change that and was afraid to try for fear of having it blow up in my face.

It was a formal affair, so I had to dress up in my dad's ill-fitting tux making me look all the more like a Maitre d'.

The party was at their house and they had transformed their two-car garage into a dance club with mirror ball and disco music. It was loud, it was close and it was totally alien to me. It was also very clear to me that I had no business being there, but I also couldn't leave. I was in one of those slow-motion car accidents and could not look away, could not pull out, could not protect myself.

The later it got, the more uncomfortable I got. I wanted to be happy for my my friend I was also heart-broken to watch her dance with her boyfriend knowing that would never, and could never, be me.

I got to a place where I couldn't take it any longer. I had to leave.

And then they changed the music.

I don't remember what was on before, but suddenly they were playing “Dust in the Wind.”

I liked the song. With it's “all we are is dust in the wind” fatalism, it spoke to my deep seventeen year-old soul in the same way that teenagers think they understand “Thunder Road” or “Hang On Sloopy.”

“All my dreams pass before my eyes with curiosity....” It made perfect sense to me when I first heard it and, in that moment, it seemed both a curious choice for a Sweet Sixteen and the only choice for my personal soundtrack.

And then Nathalie asked me to dance.

What?

Who?

Me?

Dance?

I don't know why she asked me and I don't know what made me say “Yes”.

I was hot, anxious and in no man's land. An awkward, sweaty, dough-boy of an adolescent dancing with a popular girl.

I say “dancing,” but it was more that awkward box step shuffle that you see at weddings and high school dances.

For the next three minutes and twenty seconds everything was transformed, the song, the garage, the night and even me. I say transformed, but it was something less than that. My state did not permanently change, but, for a little bit, my perspective did.

I saw things differently, I heard music differently, I saw possibility. I was able to forget I was in a garage. I was able to hear the song as hopeful, even optimistic. I felt part of something.

And almost four decades later, I felt all of that again standing between the Santa-shaped brownies and the tree-shaped donuts.

It may have looked like every other convenience store, but in that moment, it was a time machine, my time machine bridging the gaps in both memory and geography.

I admit that it is frustrating and more than a little disturbing to realize that you have misplaced a memory like a set of car keys, but it is also kind of exciting to rediscover it, to relive it. Memory is also a merry prankster seamlessly combining what was with what you hoped could have been and what , according to other people, actually happened.

* * *

Memory is a subject that gains currency as we gain birthdays and it is perhaps because of its whack-a-mole property of popping up when and where you least expect it.

Earlier this fall, I spent a week with my mother and her husband as they took a lap around parts of Atlantic Canada and some places that were familiar from their shared roots there.

The trip had a bittersweet quality not just because it was the fall and the leaves were changing color, but because they were changing too.  As they near the end of their eight decades on the planet, there was the tacit understanding that this was one of the last times, if not the last, that they could make such a trip.

For my step-father, who lives with dementia, it was not certain that he could be able to form lasting memories of these places, even as we visited them.

The changing colors of the leaves as they neared the end of their lives was beautiful and poignant and more than a little metaphorical. It was hard not to think about the forests of memories that we collect through our lives and what causes them to hang on and how they can so easily fall away even as they demand your attention.

At one point, my partner worked for the local chapter of the Alzheimer's Association and it was her job to educate the public and doctors about the disease.  I remember her speaking in terms of the mind only being able to work with long-term memory and this is how we might understand why an Alzheimer's patient would speak only in the Pennsylvania Dutch she learned as an infant and be no longer able to speak the English she had been obliged to learn later in life.  Like an onion, the outer, newer layers of memory are the most fragile and the first to leave.

Memory is subjective, it is fleeting and intoxicating and it is addictive.  Memory is emotion and it is far more art than science.  It is a powerful hallucinogen.  It can both inform your experience of the present and rob you of it.  It can be a sedative and a stimulant; a lens and a blindfold.

***

I take up my pen every year to write about Christmas because of memory and how I have been informed by it.  I write because there is some unfinished business and because I cannot acknowledge that other business was finished long ago.  I write because I, like that seventeen-year-old in that far-away garage, want more than is possible from the moment, because I want my version of the past and not somebody else's new and improved interpretation.

I write about Christmas because I am recognizing that, in the end, these memories are but leaves on a tree:  growing, changing, briefly vibrant, drying out and dying. Memory dies and memory is triggered, or regenerated, reborn.  Christmas, at least in spirit, dies and is regenerated every year.

So, we can imagine that Christmas is best understood as a memory, as having already happened and its meaning and value are to be re-discovered, re-membered.  There is no right answer, there is only the individual, the personal answer to what any of it means.

For me, for many more years than was rational, the meaning of the season, like the meaning of that long-ago, clumsy dance, was in possibility and potential, of a future that would never be, but that was liberating to imagine, if only for a moment.

So, as we pretend to wrap ourselves in hearth and home this month and try to remember what it is like, , let us try, if only for a moment, to remember what could be, before the music stops.