Ephemera, Ephemeral

This title (illustrated here with a collage of scanned paper ephemera) has been kicking around in my head for a day or two. Also this one: Words and pictures.

Life consists of nothing but millions of moments. Each marked from our perspective with ephemeral thoughts or actual ephemera (a ticket stub, disposibile drip catcher, label, a piece of currency). Even the most substantial things eventually flee us...or we them.

Moments are marked by ambient sounds (I happen to be listening to Jeff Lofton's jazz trumpet on his WEB site as I type this), the light, the disappearing coffee in your cup. If you follow something like Twitter or Facebook feeds you can follow the beat of your friends' moments. There's you, wasting a moment, watching others waste a moment. [I stopped here to get another coffee from my Capresso Jura E8. I also thought "I wonder if I'll mention that I heard Jeff Lofton's quartet at Belmont last night after getting some free premium Crown Royals at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse bar. I wonder if I'll remember what we did last night next year or even next week."]

Making it all add up, looking back (looking forward is so much harder) is the stuff of memoir. If I ever write a memoir, please consider it less than accurate. Because...

Yesterday I was reading scribbled notes in an old journal, trying to see if there was anything worth capturing before I did something with the journal. (It's a pretty one with lovely paper, made in Florence with scenes of that same city reproduced in a watercolor on the cover.) I immediately fell into a curiosity about what I was doing at the time I wrote the notes (six years ago, 2003). I could see that we were getting ready for a trip to New York. I was confused as to why. I was only slightly less confused after reading pieces of a pretty comprehensive online journal. All of which made me think that I wasn't writing enough journal entries of the type filled with 'then we did this, then I did that, then I showered and put on blue jeans.' Moments lost.

Besides minutes ago FFP came in from his Pilates class and dug around in the drawer for our tickets to a ballet tonight and a musical performance at the Paramount tomorrow night and I was thinking how much less attractive and interesting the computer-printed and bar-coded tickets were than some tickets I saved in my ephemera boxes. I was thinking I probably wouldn't save them nor write about seeing Ballet Austin's "Hamlet" and Ramsey Lewis and Ann Hampton-Calloway in any coherent way that I could ever find again and associate with this Valentine's weekend in 2009. And that made me a little sad but that's life. How many moments do we spend trying to recapture moments as we hurtle forward through another day, another 86,400 seconds (some spent sleeping...did I mention I had interesting dreams last night now forgotten and unrecorded?). We can collect ephermera, words and pictures. But the past is running away to a speck in the distance, each moment an emepheron, souvenirs of same notwithstanding.

I love this forward motion, but something in me wants to capture it even while understanding that I will never succeed. Hence words and pictures to recall if not recapture.

Overheated Nostalgia

The picture is from last June which, it seems to me, was not as hot. In any case, it was provided by a junk shop on South Lamar.

I have spent the last twenty-four hours or so at the old house, Shoal Creek manor, the burbs. It reminds me of my younger days of drifting around, making lots of use of other people's couches and spare rooms and hospitality; of sometimes being left alone in a space not exactly mine (maybe the parents' house, an aunt's, my sister's, maybe a friend's place) and being welcomed to use, consume, read anything I liked. Last night Forrest and I sorted through some food that was left here and found an unopened package of mild cheddar and some Saltines. I made coffee with the one cup French press, boiling water in the tea kettle I retrieved from the condo. When I flipped on the flame, I thought, "pretty soon you won't be cooking with gas." We found a couple of frozen entrées in the old refrigerator's freezer and had them for dinner. I found a bit of small batch bourbon in the bottom of a bottle to go with mine.

Today I'm goofing off around two areas of the house while the floor guy works diligently on the old 1951 floors. I should be doing something useful. I took a box labeled 'sort!' into the big room at the back of the house. I watched some Wimbledon, snacked on some Boursin I found in the frig unopened (barely beyond its 'best by' date) and got interested in an article in an old New Yorker that was in that box. Also in the box was an abacus I bought in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1966 along with the crudely translated guide to using it. (The latter still had its price tag: twenty-five cents. "You can be sure...........if you've got ABACUS You don't need a paper or pencil. It releives you of intricacy of tedious ciphering.) The summer of 1966 my sister and I took a languid trip west to Sacramento where she left me with some people who were parents of a friend of hers and took my VW Beetle off to visit with her husband at his temporary duty station at some Air Force Base. I welcomed the solitude, really. The couple seemed lonely as their daughter was grown. They went to work each day, but left lots of snacks and they treated us to that trip to San Francisco, I think. I would go out in the backyard and 'work on my tan' for a while, reading. Then I'd sit in the AC and watch TV and eat snacks. (Those little Goldfish crackers were a favorite that summer.) I taught myself to add long columns of numbers on the abacus. I never bothered to master multiplication but I could fly through adding up a big sum. I walked around the neighborhood and took what I thought were artsy pictures of houses and cars. I wrote long letters to my friends and, if I remember correctly, got some answers while I stayed there.

That staying around my own house of thirty years now gives me this feeling of scrounging, of life put on hold but full of possibility, is, I think, amusing.

I worked out today in the gym at my club. Back to the house to check on things, I pondered which place to take a shower in. I feel dislocated, distant and yet wonderfully able to concentrate on my old abacus and remember that old self, seeking adventures in the junk of a Chinese souvenir shop. It was impossibly exciting in its own way.

The guy doing the floors has been marveling at the accumulated gunk that has built up in fifty-seven years (we don't think they've EVER been refinished). There is some of that gunk in my brain, too, and I keep hoping that cycling through the junk again and again will finally sand it down and I'll find the person I'm supposed to be in my seventh decade on earth. It won't be a moment too soon to figure this out.

Rules

Yesterday on the tennis court one of my companions was wearing a T-Shirt that said 'Bahrain.' My other companion (there were only three of us at that moment although someone came along later to play true doubles with us) asked "Have you been to Bahrain?" I answered for her: "She has rules. In bed every night by 8:30 and she'd never wear a T-Shirt if she hadn't been there." She agreed that those were indeed rules of hers. As we continued playing I was thinking that I had that rule about T-Shirts, too. But I was puzzling over something, some rule I had, that someone had found very amusing. Ah, yes, the postcard thing.

I always tried to only send postcards that showed things I actually saw, preferably from an angle at which I observed them and in the right weather and season. I know. Silly rule. And not always possible if you want to actually buy and send a postcard. Nevertheless. My friend Maggie of Cape Town took me in 1997 to Addo Elephant Park. We stayed in the park in a fenced area with a little shop, a restaurant, a bird hide and a swimming pool. We went on day and night trail rides and saw elephants, antelopes and eland, took a swim in the pool, saw beautiful little red birds (Cape Bishops) in the hide. In the gift shop, my friend Maggie picked up a postcard that was one of those collages of the sights of the place. She checked them off with her index finger...the Cape Bishop, the elephant, the swimming pool, etc. "You can buy this," she said. "You've seen them all!" I did. My friend Maggie, rest her soul, had a good sense of humor and of my rules.

The postcard here breaks my rule in many ways. It's just an image stolen from ebay long ago however. It's Houston, a long time ago with a blimp flying over. Weird, huh? But I wasn't going to send the image to someone with a 'wish you were here' greeting. If I'd wanted to do that (for Houston?) I would have wanted the picture to look like, you know, where I was! I can't remember the last time I was in Houston although I've been to Katy a couple of times in the last year or so. I used to go on a pretty regular basis when I worked and FFP and I have enjoyed some fun times there doing museums and restaurants and some performances.

One Little Thing

Sometimes I sit at my desk and I'm overwhelmed at all the stuff on the desk waiting to be dealt with (business cards, receipts, little notebooks with 'to do' lists or notes that need transcribing, bills, postcards, souvenirs, etc.) When I was cleaning out a file cabinet I came across a folder labeled 'Wimbledon' and inside were some souvenirs. This was a credential from my visit in 1984. This got you into some lounge and we had a Center Court ticket, too. Unfortunately there were four of us so we stood in a miles-long line to get grounds passes and then took turns seeing a few games on Center Court and also saw lots of tennis on the outside courts. The souvenirs got scanned, saved and safely filed away and cataloged.

The desk is still messy and cluttered. But with a few less things.

That Old Self

Going through my closets and sorting every single thing, trying to reduce, reduce, reduce has resulted in rather too much nostalgia. And I'm not even close to done. I've been reading things I wrote in the '70's and '80's and '90's. And postcards and letters from other people and ones I wrote myself and got back from the recipient. And pictures. This one I haven't actually physically touched in a while. I scanned it into the computer a long time ago. It was probably displayed on a journal but maybe not. Scanning and transcribing things into the computer is one way to let go of the physical thing. Not that I would give up this Polaroid of FFP and I on our 13th anniversary. If I could actually find the actual picture, I mean. I have no idea where it is at the moment. As we get older we have more and more past and less and less room to keep it all, I think.

The picture is a Polaroid taken by the owner of a restaurant in New Braunfels where we celebrated our anniversary. Ignoring the oversized glasses (what were we thinking?), notice the lack of gray hair.

Nostalgia can choke you with its dust and over important poignancy after a while. Just looking at one old hand-written journal or photo can be fun. Stacks of them? Overwhelming. Sad.