Sunday, Aug. 01, 2004
Wisdom via Alice Walker and an eliptical machine, posted at 10:03 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com After work today ($44 for an 8-4:30 shift), I headed up to the Towson Bally's for my workout. On the way, I stopped at the new Giant on 33rd (nice) to grab dinner, and needed to let my dinner settle a bit before I got down to the business of squatting and curling and eliptical machining. So, I did what I always do when I go to the Towson Bally's - I parked in the lower level parking lot, and walk through Barnes & Noble. I needed something read, anyway, and had forgotten my copy of the enthralling The Corner at work.Usually when I'm in the mood for something simple to read at the gym, I'll grab a newspaper. But I hate Sunday papers. I find them wasteful and unwieldly. So I browsed the store, doublechecking for the 65th time this summer that my school's summer reading books were well-stocked (the books for the courses I'm teaching are Go Tell It On the Mountain and A Lesson Before Dying for 9th grade Honors, and The Island of Dr. Moreau for 11th grade). I've become fascinated with the summer reading tables at Barnes & Noble. Not only do I have the Towson branch's table memorized, that's the first thing I check out when I walk in to the one at the Inner Harbor or at White Marsh. When I went to Michigan, I checked out the summer reading table. Schools fax their summer lists over to B&N, or at least we do, so I like to keep my ear to the pavement and see what other schools are teaching.
Anyhow, finding nothing that interesting on the summer reading table (I've either read or plan to read because I've already bought everything on that table by now), I found myself sulking towards the Self-Improvement section. I've never really even mildly perused this section, and I don't really know why the unplanned visit came to me. Perhaps it's because my life seems to need some direction right now, as I wonder about buying a house this year in Balmore, 600 miles away from my ailing mother. I wonder about quitting my second job, when the money is nice and I would really like to continue to pay down my student loans with as much zeal as I did last year (not to mention get a digital camera and an I-Pod sometime soon). I wonder about how I'm still so utterly single (re: alone), how I wanted to see The Village tonight but didn't know who to call, and so it sits there, unseen, even though Signs is one of my favorite movies ever. I wonder about how I still cannot hear out of my left ear since I went swimming on Friday, and I guess that means I'll have to go to the doctor tomorrow, the fat, wheezy one (physician, heal thyself!) who didn't find it striking that I couldn't see out of my right eye last November and thus my detached retina went two and a half more weeks than necessary untreated before I had emergency surgery. I wonder about how, according to this website, I'm considered "severely overweight," despite the fact that I'm actually feeling pretty good about myself right now and my goal weight and thinnest weight ever is still considered "moderately overweight." I wonder why I choose the things I do to obsess over and am slowly letting myself turn thirty without much prospects for starting a family or a life of fulfillment beyond my job, which I love.
So, yeah, I guess there's some reasons for going to the self-improvement section - you know, anything that helps me get through the pity party that I find I start for myself after a weekend of working too much for too little and sacrificing too much (invites, connections) to do it. However, in browsing through the titles, there was nothing that screamed out "twentysomething guy seeks fulfillment in the big city," although there seemed to be 72 titles that screamed out for a twentysomething chick seeking fulfillment. I left, feeling silly for even looking, realizing that if I want some advice on this thing we call life, I should read Plato or something.
So I sauntered around some more, and I found myself staring at a bargain table. There on the table was Alice Walker's book The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart. Hard-cover, for $4.98. I picked it up and thought it might be a bit girly for me, but I read the first page and decided to get it. Alice Walker is one of my favorite writers. I haven't enjoyed everything she's done, but The Color Purple is the most influential book I've ever read, probably, and have always liked her poetry and essays. So I got it.
Anyhow, I blazed through about 50 pages on the eliptical machine. The book is imminently readable. And, wow. Sometimes, with Walker, I don't like it when she writes about Africa, or female gential mutilation, or even when she keeps reminding me about the struggles of black women in America. But, damn, when this woman writes about the south, or, for that matter, about relationships between human beings... well, let's just say that there's a truth there that I rarely encounter anywhere or at any time. She can surely turn a phrase or document a moment between two people. I found it very cathartic there on the machine, reading this book. Here I am, a 26-year old white guy in Baltimore in 2004, and I'm reading about this black woman reminiscing about her marriage to a jewish guy in the 1960s in the south, and reminiscing about it with her lesbian lover no less, and I'm feeling such connection and empathy and emotion while reading. I've felt the same hope and pain and hurt and love that the characters have felt, and immediately, I don't feel so isolated. Alone with the well-turned, beautiful, and wise phrases of Alice Walker and my own panting and sweating on a machine that manages to keep people apart from each other, I'm feeling an integral part of the human race. And I'm thinking that life is hard and lonely sometimes, but Walker has rared back and heaved her letter in a bottle and it's reached me, years and miles and cultures away, and has made my day, and my life, just a little bit better. And this is what life can be all about, how it can be lumpy at times, but if we can make the lumps go away for a moment for another human, and form a connection and make their life just a little bit better, then that's what's supposed to happen. That's a big part of the big plan. And we reach each other through these truths - and what are truths other than experiences that are shared by more than one person, agreed upon at least once in the world by different people, no matter how different?
I've met Alice Walker once and doubt I ever will again. But, tonight, she made me feel a lot better. And, as I finish this book tonight, if my eyes well up or my spine tingles, it won't be just because of her; it will be a cumulation of many things, and her prose will just be the catalyst. She's connected with me. And I with her. And I feel better.
I think the half deafness is making me loony. Tomorrow I'll be back to writing about softball games and cheap Miller Lite at Looney's Pub, where I'll be tomorrow after our game. Woo-hoo.