Everyone in this coffee shop seems to be banging loudly on something for some reason. These two old men are playing cards. I can’t tell what game. Some Old Person Game like canasta or rummy, probably, I assume. Whenever the man whose face I can see shuffles, he bangs the deck hard on the edge of the round table, maybe to align their edges, or test their tensile durability. A good solid pack of cards is something you can hold in your hand and contain with three fingers and trust in completely. Of course any uncontained deck of cards can be scattered by the mere horizontal brush of an errant hand. A forceful exhalation of breath.
The barista empties the used cakes of ground espresso by banging the extractor on the sink. For another example.
I told myself I would write something worth posting tonight.
I have this memory of when I used to live in California. Because it’s a Californian memory, it means I can’t be older than four. My then-boyfriend, Joey A., is involved. (There were two Joeys in daycare. I don’t remember what the A was for. Anderson, maybe. Allen. Adler. No clue.) This episode is probably embellished heavily by 18 years of reminiscing and reimagining. But what I remember is a house in the middle of this vast field. Not a field. Whatever a huge amount of berry bushes is considered, if there is even a term for a certain quantity of berry bushes. So many rows that from even a marginal distance it all converges into a vast abstract pattern. Blackberry bushes. I should have mentioned that.
I don’t remember the picking, or the thorns, but I do remember the baskets of berries and the scrapes. At that age, nothing is knee-high, everything overtakes you. When you reach into a bush, there is no kneeling, there is no condescending attitude towards it. As an adult, you sink to the level of the bush, you understand the perils of putting your hand in there, there might be thorns or some sort of mostly harmless insect, but you’re not afraid of them because of your ability to preempt their existence and also because of your superior size, comparatively. But when you’re four, it’s different. I don’t need to explain how or why…you just have never, for example, touched a stove, so you don’t know that it’s hot and that you shouldn’t. And just because this bush is thorny doesn’t necessarily mean the next will be, and so on. And whereas when you’re older you approach things of nature with this intrinsically dominating attitude that comes from years of learning about evolution and food chains and how paper is made and so bushes, little thickets of wood and quaint berries, are plaintively seen as this thing that we really don’t even have to bother ourselves with but do on occasion on some nostalgic impulse or due to some stupid notion of purity relating to hunter-gatherers, our ancestors who ate food this way and knew where it came from and touched it themselves instead of choosing the most attractive basket on a shelf in a sterile grocery store where little overhead sprinklers mist the fruits and vegetables to keep away insects which were probably born and will probably die in that very store, totally alienating this picked and sorted fruit from its original state of dirt and falling on the ground and rotting and total physical connection to its environment–on a twig on a branch on a bush in the soil in a forest or field. Hand-picking blackberries is a pure act by way of being dirtier, a simple act by way of being much more time-consuming and complicated for the individual than the grocery store method. But children have no concept of returning to some state that can’t really even be described as the “natural” state anymore, they pick blackberries because they’re there and someone suggested it to them and told them how to apply pressure to the berry so it snaps off its branch but doesn’t burst and how to drop them in the basket on your arm and to keep doing this until you have a good amount. For children, there is just the doing of the act, and there is no meaning behind it. It is literal. And whereas adults have this pre-determined notion of what a blackberry bush means and is, what it used to mean and what it should mean, children conceive of them in a totally opposite manner, in a way that is both, again, extremely literal and extremely fanciful. The bush is a bush and the picking exists for itself, but who knows what else could be inside the bush besides slender wooden limbs and serrated leaves and fruit? It could be anything. In children’s stories, innocuous objects and locations are portals to surreal worlds, rabbit holes lead into Wonderland and wardrobes lead into Narnia etc. Wonderland and Narnia, just as examples, are both magical and perilous. Every one of Alice’s experiences present some existential drama or a confrontation with the absurd, which conceptually is terrifying in ways that children will not comprehend until their sophomore year of college, but on a more basic level how absolutely frightening is it to fall down a hole of unknown depth and then shrink almost to nonexistence and then nearly drown? Even Alice never seems to actually mind the pain and confusion of her journey, she is just fascinated by whatever is next. And to me that is what a blackberry bush is to a four-year-old girl and her male companion whom she will consider her first boyfriend. It’s an ellipsis followed by a question mark, a statement turned wryly into a question, a fact turned into an unknown.
Whenever I think about this memory, I find myself always focusing on the aesthetic elements of it. The indigo stain of burst berries all over small hands. Sunlight so intense that it saturates the air and makes everything solid seem like negative space cut out of a white sheet of paper maybe; brightness that pools around the silhouettes of things and eats away at their edges. Dry heat. It doesn’t feel like work but it doesn’t feel like play either.
And then stomping up unpainted wooden stairs, into a house, then a kitchen where two adult women are sitting, all huge and grandiose with this air of being aware of so much infinitely more than I am or Joey A. is or will ever be. A sense of approval exists now in the room. There are enough blackberries for whatever they’re intended to be in. There is the idea of pie…maybe there is one on the table or maybe the berries are going inside one. The way I remember this is almost as if the berries transform immediately into the pie; I look in the basket and there are the berries, then I look on the table and there they are inside of a pie that has been cooked. This is the most surreal element of this memory and makes me think I might have dreamed it instead of experienced it, but it’s so so far away that I’m not really sure that distinction matters at all.
After the idea of a pie is established, the cuts and scrapes become all at once apparent to me. I realize they’re the color of blood even though there is no blood really flowing and that scares me, I assume I’m in extreme pain even though I’m not so much, broken skin signifies fear and crying and so that is what I do, and the attitude of the two women is so glib, like what a childish thing to do, to cry over dozens of little breaks in my skin. In this memory or dream I feel betrayed by these women for letting me get hurt, for understanding that these bushes had thorns in them and that even little sticks can scrape the epidermis and for not telling me, for not stopping me from all that picking due to the fact that I would acquire these cuts all over, for treating it like some mundane thing. As if Alice came back from Wonderland still the size of an unlabeled tonic bottle and everyone thought it was the most natural thing. Please just notice this transformation I underwent. Please respond to it. Please care about it. Please anything.
