Minutiae

Somehow the beach finds its way
into every fold and recess of the head of lettuce,
bugchewed, limp with weather,
which you bought for dinner
from the farmers market.

This sand in my mouth
takes me to our old hot home;
I see the imps cavorting there
and wonder how their forks can
from time to time still reach me.

Bureaucracitus and Other Afflictions

As shaken as C. and I have been during our first few weeks of residing in Providence, we can certainly say this: it is no Tucson. Admittedly, we remain somewhat nonplussed and beleaguered, our latest misadventure being my presently unsuccessful mission to render my car legal for the streets of Rhode Island. A daunting prospect it has proven; Rhode Island has not only one of the most gratuitously byzantine motor vehicle registries ^1, but also some of the most stringent and exacting vehicle safety standards in the nation. Submitted to inspection were my windshield wiper blades, wheel alignment (more on these two in a moment), brake master cylinder, engine light, and many more items that could conceivably endanger both other motorists and me. My car, mind you, while indeed somewhat long in the grille, has only 79,000 miles on it and has been regularly maintained -- and I failed the inspection! The nature and extent of my car's perilous disrepair? A breached CV boot, worn wiper blades, and window tinting (my car spent its early years in Arizona).

This news, coming some five hours after having brought the car to the state-certified repair shop, was quite a shock, because I had just come from a state where a safety inspection consists of a DMV functionary looking to see if one's headlamps, directional, parking and reverse lights work. I authorized a the CV boot repair, which added $250.00 to the $37.00 inspection tally and another two hours of loitering in a tire showroom watching what seemed like eighty turns of the CNN news carousel on a 70s-vintage faux-credenza widescreen TV that had serious tint problems in the form of a dramatic shift to the red which made the talking heads of CNN look like burn victims.

Later I came home and began, in a thunderstorm that came suddenly, the exasperating task of peeling tinted laminate from all four windows and the rear windshield of my car.

This experience, one in a litany of other patience-trying experiences here in P-town has somehow managed to radicalize C. into some sort of Republican with a Libertarian bent, because she believes that such hassles result from the putatively progressive policies of blue-state mandarins, which result only in bloated bureaucracy, graft, till-skimming, and cronyism. I suggested to her various points west, namely, Rapid City, South Dakota or Northern Idaho, as places she should look to eventually settling.

More follies and pitfalls await, I'm sure.




1. If you think my words here an exaggeration, know that I at one point actually had to scribble down on the back of a photocopied form an impromptu sworn statement averring that my stepmother and father were indeed my stepmother and father, my stepmother and father's signing the title over to me and "selling" the car to me for one dollar being deemed insufficient evidence of both my parentage and my rightful possession of the auto in question, as was the fact that I bear my father's name -- first, middle and last.

Providence Harbor

Ah love,
If we could just fit our mouths
Around the winking loaves of tide
We would know ourselves to be giants
And, mindful of this,
Save the world from its smallness.

A Ghost's Ghost

What is in the end to be despoiled,
Begins by being first richly endowed.

Lao Tzu

Here in Providence I confront my utter insignificance. Here I am a stranger to brush past, to shoulder aside, to step around. I see myself skim frictionlessly over the curve of the cosmos like a drop of oil over a lettuce leaf.

In Tucson, the same things go on, only now without me -- as if I ever truly were crucial to their functioning. The same people drive, shop, eat, fight and fuck. And she and he are still there, the latter doubtless counting his money, the former biding her time. I hope she strikes, and soon. Pitilessly, completely lacking gratitude or a sense of reciprocity -- as she did me.

But this sequel will go unviewed, unsavored. It will tumble dumbly down steep slopes to silence and I will always be as I am: far, far away.

I wish I could have been to her for one day -- one hour -- too beautiful to forsake.

Overheard: An Intersection Somewhere in Elmwood, R. I.

Goddamnit, Andre!
Always actin' the muthafuckin' fool.
I'm sick of it!
Fuh real.
And I haven't even been outta jail twenty-four hours

To think, the best and worst of us dream...

Darkness Visible

A week expires here in Rhode Island, our inaugural week, and I feel as if I am a splinter lodged under prickly New-English skin. I am wracked with doubt, with fear. I despair of making a life here, quaint though it may be, because I find my temperament dissonant with what appears to be the prevailing spirit of Providence -- impatience and haste. The Portuguese inhabitants of Fox Point have been warm and engaging; Arizonans to them are exotic. The roadways are, however, not nearly so. They are sphincter-tightening, hair-whitening. And it seems that my car has become a bone of contention among the other residents of our apartment building. Though I was assured a parking spot -- Providence has this senseless statute, apparently intended to reduce crime, prohibiting motor vehicles from parking on the street overnight -- I have been given a pseudo-spot against a fence separating the alley behind the wine shop I live above and the residence behind, creating a situation where the other residents, believing my car to be blocking the only convenient egress from their parking spaces, come knocking on my front door or ringing my doorbell from the street below at strange hours with the request (more like a demand) that I move my car to the street. I have become, it seems, the de facto valet of the building, a predicament I find ennervating in the extreme.

Also ennervating has been the weather, which can only be described as "soupy": fifty-plus percent relative humidity and lowering skies. Our apartment, not equipped with air-conditioning, which is obviously some decadent luxury on the east coast, becomes stifling when one wanders away from either of the two fans we have. The net effect of my presence in Providence heretofore has thrown me into a black despair, and I sleep many more hours than I should -- often until three or four in the afternoon. Then I give C. an earful of bitter reflections born of the horrible anomie I feel. I have had several times to resist the urge to jump in my Honda and drive as far as my credit cards will allow -- far from here ... oh so far from there in Tucson which, while dirty and hateful and maddening, was at least familiar. There at least my fear and loathing was specific and itemized.

Saturday night and the natives are restless. Rap music churning from open car windows mixes with the shouts of rowdies into the streets below. Never did a place so singularly threaten to thwart contemplation. Dumb beer-fueled mayhem floods like a tide, and I am as if lashed to a pylon, forced to gulp and hold my breath.

Rhode Island ... Providence -- R.I.P., E.

Eo Ipso

in a corner,
the husk of a gnat
an eyelash
some cigarette ash
and a tiny iris of dust
made by a tear.

Providential Deliverance

I re-emerge, the interstates of this nation having spat me out in New England, after many hours behind the wheel of a graceless truck whose cab housed bugbit travelers, courtesy of that raunchy Clovis motel, drugged, maudlin cats, and surprisingly gamesome rats.

I managed to avoid the sort of nutritionless roadside fare that atrophies truckers, turning them into chainsmoking effigies fashioned, as it seems, from a potato and toothpicks. There were fireworks (Viva la revolucion!), days of constipation, nerves frazzled and pinched, near-misses and hard-brakes, and, finally, the gray-brown shores of Rhode Island, where I, pilgrim from the shiny post-industrial West to the post-agrarian East, will soon settle into a new routine, a new groove -- a happier life (God willing) than I knew in that festering vale of dust and tears.

Dateline: Clovis

So, reader, your E. is now at large -- in Clovis, New Mexico to be exact. I write this from the Motel 7 on Highway 70, just a stone's throw from Texas, which was formerly a Motel 6 of fond remembrance. Interesting that under its new ownership its guiding powers should increase it one integer to the number of God. I should add that the sign beckoning to weary travelers is now a shamrock, instead of the rather nondescript red, white and blue that the nabobs of the central Motel 6 office selected for this motel in its original inception. The shamrock, which, as every Catholic child knows, St. Patrick used to instruct the Irish on the finer points of the doctrine of the Trinity.

The the shamrocked inn on the way to Providence. Are we guided by some unseen hand? Best not to inquire into it too closely.

I must retire now, suffering as I am from "white line fever," in order to "put the hammer down" in a push for the gateway city.

It looks like we've got ourselves a convoy. . .