I’ve noticed that in life there are stopping places, yet no one stops there:
You are experiencing your life, moment by moment, and you are having chicken dinner with your family, or you are doing homework with your child, or you are at some social gathering and there it is! The moment that will be one of the most vivid to you for the rest of your life!
And it simply goes by. Only later and sometimes , much later, upon referring to that time in memory do you realize that that one moment stands above the others. And it is not only vivid, and salient, but also that awful word: precious.
Three years ago, in June, my husband Stephen and I went to the older more interesting part of the town of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico to take a much needed vacation and do some work on writings. He was sitting on the veranda which faces the fast sea with his mini-laptop open before him, staring into it. I wasn’t looking directly at him, but at his reflection in the window behind his incongruously baseball -hatted head. In that pane was only himself and sky, which was pale orange this time of day with two long palm trees side by side and black against the luminous view. He was concentrating hard and didn’t know I was watching him. His late afternoon growth of beard, his thick dark brows, his distant gaze into his own imagination – those sea blue eyes - I loved him so much at that moment I could have stayed there, just stayed, looking at this captured afternoon for an infinity of time.
2 comments:
I love your writing!! Your words make such beautiful images in my mind. I almost cried when I read that. I often have moments like you described when I look in on my mom teaching a class. It's routine, but she becomes the most beautiful moving art you could ever imagine. She's a brilliant dancer; the way she moves herself is mesmerizing. It's as if all her insides turn to water and she just flows from place to place yet with a strength that I wish I had your writing talents to describe. She gets a big smile on her face, her eyes sparkle and her passion for dance becomes almost tangible. When I see her like that I wish I could freeze time.
A moment in your work that is incredibly striking is part of Gypsy 83 when you're looking out the window. Although it lasted only a matter of seconds, the expression on your face was so intensely heartbreaking that I'll remember it forever.
I hope everybody can relate to these frozen moments. I find I have them more and more as I get older, sudden snapshots that bring on an emotion stronger than usual, sometimes of things I haven't thought about in years.
I wonder why? I think life would be a little bleak without those snapshots.
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