Parsing the details. Assigning value to daily experiences. I eat hotel bacon for breakfast. No meaning for me in the hotel bacon. No meaning in the eggs, the yogurt, the bottle of water, or the view of men washing windows on the adjacent building. No meaning in breakfast at all, a meal I often forgo.
There's meaning in pastry, though. I'll get there.
But first.
I'm on vacation with my family in Seattle. We eat. We have fun. We nap. In the time I find for myself, I look for other people to hold my attention.
A man I met on the elevator in my brother's building had a Shiba Inu on a leash. I knew the breed, but I didn't say so when the other person in the elevator, my mother, asked the man what kind of dog it was. The Shiba Inu, like my breakfast, is not a meaningful personal symbol. It's the man, of course. The man holding the leash. The first Seattleite I met when I arrived and I didn't say a word to him. I let him tell my mother about his dog. We parted. Mom and I took a car down the hill home. Well, hotel home.
I realize now, at this age, it's people. People hold the most meaning. I can't write another story about someone looking at a deer or a snake or a spider, I swear. I'm writing stories where people look at each other.
Late one night, the man from the elevator found me on the, uh, Internet. And that's all I'll say about that. You figure it out. He didn't remember me from the elevator, but I remembered him. There's no value to be found in the social media mechanics beyond the obvious power of a kind of omniscience. Whatever you like is out there and easy to find. Even though you search, what you search for seems more like it searches for you. No, really, I won't say any more about it.
Magic.
I believed in magic for a while. I believe in magic now, but a few years ago I believed magic had meaning, that it floated around and changed the world all on its own. Well, no. The truth is you, the person, are the initiator of magic. All I'm saying is if a random event seems to happen like magic, it's invaluable to me. Even if I know better. There's a reason adults still love fairy tales. The cruel are punished. The virtuous are valued. Change is mourned at first, celebrated later.
Give it time.
Pastry seems to require magic. But really, it just requires time. The places I find to hold my attention, the places away in Seattle for a moment alone, are bakeries. Not even coffee intrudes. Only me, the occasional cute clerk, and sugar, butter, and flour. I eat. I don't eat alone. Don't ask me to explain that. I drank expensive ginger beer down by the water three times, and every time I was lonely. Countless pastries, though, and I've been content. Sugar, I bet. There's science there, but let's not dirty happiness with science.
More magic.
I spent a few minutes visiting a man who has the same rectangle forearm tattoo I have. Mine is red. His is black. We met on the Internet, too. The daily experience. The tiny details of interaction. I knew I had to meet this guy or I'd regret it. In the end, there's not much meaning there either. He was nice. I was nice. I walked two miles to the home he shares with his husband and their dog. The man greeted me at a charming gate. He gave me a glass of water. We talked. I sweated. We hugged. I left. I thought maybe I'd assign the experience something more. A story or a feeling. Instead, it lives in the place small twists of the narrative often live. Neat. Cool. Fun. A moment in the woods, per Sondheim.
What else? The trip continues. My mother mourns the inevitable departure. My brother, like myself, is a rational statue. We would be punished in the fairy tale version of this trip. It would be up to the third brother, the youngest one, the stupidest one, to marry the princess, to inherit the kingdom, to tie the story with a bow.
No such brother exists. The fairy tale isn't the one written for us; it's the one we write. Why assign meaning at all? The older I get, the bigger the picture grows, and yet, all I want to see are the detail shots, the close-ups. The big picture is too chaotic and meaningless to behold. The details soothe and distract from the inevitable departure. The only animals I've seen on this trip are dogs, cats, and people.
I look closely.
I work with what I have.