Blankets, Apples, Walkmen

Cold day. Not long, but weighty. Shakespeare this morning, then a meeting with Charles. Stephanie tells me it's the first day of spring, but nothing in my mood or the weather agrees.

More reading tonight, which is probably much less exciting to read about here than it is to actually do. Well, maybe not much less. But it is suggestive - and the lingering winter seems to obscure the suggestions that might usually be made by the real world. In particular, Cohn's book on Medieval millenarianism has regularly prompted a slew of creative musings, much of them finding synthesis in the (growing) outline/scrapbook for the novel I'm writing. At Swim, Two Boys is equally inspiring, though along a more humanist line. Doyler, the poorer of the boys in O'Neill's novel, has had me thinking these past couple days of the relationships I've formed - mostly as a child - across class lines. There's a number of them, actually, throughout my life, but their tendency to encompass gross difference has decreased with age.

Growing up in Johnson City, New York, on an extremely tired road named Baldwin Street, I spent much of my early youth around children and families that were often struggling to get by. There were a large number of Laotian immigrants: families of four or more living in small two-bedroom apartments on the north end of the block. Closer to my house, there was a large and incongruous edifice (my brother and I called it "the blue building") that consisted of numerous small public housing apartments in which a gaggle of young and often dirty children lived. Worst of all, however, was "the White House," a public eyesore that looked as if it would collapse in the event of a severe wind- or snowstorm. The families living there succeeded each other with quick regularity, but each one brought with it a plethora of small children and a great of deal of trash that soon found itself strewn acorss the yard in which they played.

I don't know what children make of distinctions in class, but I know that they're aware of them, and understand them in a more sophisticated fashion than we typically credit them. I've wrangled my memory of my first schoolfriend Corey into my novel (see The Library's Grain #103), but I didn't finish the story there: Eventually, I began to see the things that I found - even then - so attractive in Corey - his rough English, his endless need to move, his messy and dirty hair that pointed always at odd angles - as evidence of a lack in him that I couldn't name but knew was bad. I slowly but unequivacally began to shun him, and a year later he disappeared (as was common for the poor children in my school) and I never saw him again.

What can I make of this memory, and the memories that follow it? Friendships with the children around me - Vien Phet who avoided me (six years old) after I appeared, unannounced, at the door of her apartment to ask her to play; Zachary, who lived with his father (an alcoholic) in a tiny attic two-bedroom and who would not sleep over for fear of wetting the bed; Sarah, who teased and threatened me, as I spurned other friendships to spare her the practical jokes of our wealthier classmates. What to make of all this; and what lingers of it today?

These children were in and out of my house as a child; they ran in our yard, knocked at the door timidly to ask if they could play on our piano. My mother gave them rides and food and little toys when they moved away, but mostly, as she told me on the phone Sunday evening, she tried to give them a moment or two in which they could feel safe. It is a feeling I have had for every day of my life, and a feeling that not until recently could I imagine someone else not having.

I don't know how to place Corey now: my first love, as it were. These days, I rule out romantic interests with no hesitation for being too uncultured, too uneducated, too unable to think and feel as I do. It's hard to imagine doing otherwise. The professors I am trained to emulate have, for the most part, partners who are also professors - and, when not, who are doctors or lawyers or curaters. Again, it's hard to imagine otherwise. But I still thrill to the eyes and hands of boys with less. Not a fetishization of the working class, but a feeling that it is I who am lacking when compared with them. Lacking what, I can't determine, but I have lacked it always, and saw it right there at the beginning in Corey's nervous smile.

And today? Some years ago, a friend Madelaine took me to McGlinchey's on my twenty-first birthday. There at the bar, sat a young man with dark hair, the beginnings of a moustache, and a sullen look that he kept in silence. He was Brian, Madelaine told me, and she thought the two of us would be "perfect together." I watched him closely that evening, but he never (that I could tell) looked back. Weeks or months later - I don't remember - I saw him there again, in the same spot, smoking and drinking a beer. WIth courage unusual for me, I approached him, introduced myself as a friend of Madelaine and tried - with little success - to make smalltalk. Eventually, he asked (in a threatening tone), what I "did." And after I told him, he replied, looking firmly into his beer glass: "I work in a grocery store." I was at a loss for how to respond and he knew it, seemed even to enjoy it. "Cool," I said, unable to think of anything better. And his answer: "No, it's not." He took a long drink from his glass, leaned over to the bartender to order another, and repositioned himself in his chair, so as to signal to me that our conversation was over.