Ordinary Time

Which are the magic moments in ordinary time? All of them, for those who can see. That is what redemption means, I decide at the meeting. Then walk with David wearing his new Yale T-shirt and new long hair to 103. Leonard and Eileen come, too. Leonard wears a shark’s tooth on a chain around his neck and long blond hair. These days he’s the manager of Boots and Saddles (“Bras and Girdles,” my beloved Bobby used to say) and costumer for the Gay Cable Network’s Dating Game. One week the announcer is a rhinestone cowboy, sequin shirt and black fur chaps, the next a leatherman, etc. Eileen’s crewcut makes her face light up. Underneath our hairstyles, 23 years of sobriety, all told— the age of a girl who’s “not so young but not so very old,” wrote Berryman, who flew from his recovery with the force of a poet hitting bottom. It’s not the way I choose to go out of this restaurant or day today, and I have a choice. Wanda the comedian comes over to our table. “Call me wicked Wanda,” she smirks when we’re introduced. Why is New York City awash in stand-up comics at the least funny point in its history? Still, some things stay the same. People wonder what the people in their buildings would think if the ones who were wondering became incredibly famous, as famous as Madonna. Debby Harry lived in Eileen’s building in the Village in the early seventies, and she was just the shy girl in the band upstairs. Poets read the writing of their friends, and are happy when they like it thoroughly, when the work’s that good and the crippling sense of competition stays away. Trips get planned: David home to California, Eileen to New Mexico, Chris and I to France and Spain, on vectors which will spread out from a single point, like ribs of an umbrella. Then after the comfort of a wedge of blueberry peach pie and cup of Decaf, sober friends thread separate ways home through the maze of blankets on the sidewalk covered with the scraps of someone else’s life. Mine consists of understanding that the magic isn’t something that I make, but something that shines through the things I make and do and say the way a brooch or scrap of fabric shines from the detritus to catch Leonard’s eye and be of use for costumes, when I am fearless and thorough enough to give it room, all the room there is in ordinary time, which embraces all the people and events and hopes that choke the street tonight and still leaves room for everyone and everything and every other place, the undescribed and indescribable, more various and cacophonous than voice can tell or mind conceive, and for the sky’s vast depths from which they’re all a speck of light.