I’m picking up again with my reluctant essays on the metaphysical, that have been so surprisingly warmly received.
I shared in the essay “Things I Feared Most to Write, Part Three” some creepy experiences that Brian and I had with a realm that seemed — well — ghostly. Again: I don’t seek out these experiences, I don’t want to believe in them, I don’t want them around. And yet it seems these days that a dimension is, or perhaps many dimensions at once are, merging into us and descending upon us and manifesting among us — good ones and bad ones and plain old unnerving ones.
It often feels these days like that moment when the optician tries your right eye with the left one blocked, then tries the left eye with the right one blocked, and finally pulls away both eyeshades to show you your new ability to focus with both eyes with new sharpness in three dimensions.
Facing the Beast: Cour...
Best Price: $2.96
Buy New $5.60
(as of 11:31 UTC - Details)
Everything every day becomes more and more different than it has been, for better and for worse.
A few months ago I went to Washington, DC, to stop for some meetings on my way to visit friends in Virginia. I checked into the Omni Hotel, on Connecticut Avenue, which is a familiar street to me. I was back in what had once, long ago, been my neighborhood.
When I was a young bride, in the early 1990s, and when my then-husband was one of President Clinton’s speechwriters, we used to live in an elegant, famously haunted, art-deco masterpiece: an apartment complex called the Kennedy-Warren, right next door to the National Zoo.
Our apartment at that time was on the first floor, which was below the street grade: so the windows looked out to the rear of the complex, into the fresh green foliage of Rock Creek Park.
At night, from somewhere across the ravine, you could hear the zoo elephants trumpeting. In the morning, you heard the screech of the cheetahs and the chatter of monkeys. Nothing was visible from our windows at that time but waving, billowing leaves, as far as the eye could see. It was like living in a glamorous 1930s-era treehouse.
Our then-baby daughter learned to crawl on the gold-and-grey medallions of the deep carpet on the hallways of the Kennedy Warren. And when she was four or five months old, she had a little wheeled baby-scooter in which could sit and push herself with her feet; though she could not yet walk, she would go zooming down the long hallways, racing with a manic grin past the doorways of retired Cold War-era spies and retired Vietnam-era policy wonks. We called her contraption, ‘the Maserati.’
Decades later, long after that young marriage had ended, and by the time that then-racing-baby was a young woman, and her brother, not yet then born, was a young man, I found myself in the Kennedy Warren again.
This time, I was with Brian, the man who would become my second husband, and with whom I was in the process of falling deeply in love.
Brian had looked for a place to live after his own marriage had ended, and he had found the right apartment for him, and for his shared custody of his then five-year-old son, at — the Kennedy-Warren.
This time, the apartment in which he lived, and in which I visited him, was on the fourth floor, not on the first.
But this apartment too looked out over the same ravine as the one I had overlooked 27 years previously. There were the same green treetops, only this time seen from a higher perspective.
I had the surreal experience of waking nearly three decades later next to a different man, but in the same green light as that in which I had awakened decades before, to the same imponderable sounds of the roar of elephants, and the shrieking chatter of monkeys.
When I checked in at the front desk, this time around, some of the staff were the same as when I had lived there in the 1990s. I had the bizarre experience of going with Brian into the gilded, old-school clubroom — it hadn’t been there in the Clinton era — and being greeted by some of my former neighbors from that time; people now elderly and slow-moving, who recognized me, and who were just as gossipy as before.
At one point I followed five-year-old Alex, Brian’s son, down the long carpeted hallway, and he started to race with joy. I ran after him exactly the way I had once run after my little baby daughter, and I felt nearly vertiginous with the sense of deja vu.
What a surprise to find a little person in my life again — and myself as a participant in a new little constellation; but somehow in the same place as the last time I had raced after a tiny person down these same hallways in this same elegant art-deco structure.
The Pfizer Papers: Pfi...
Best Price: $32.00
Buy New $31.60
(as of 09:46 UTC - Details)
I had the otherworldly feeling at that moment, that time was not a line but a spiral. Perhaps it was even a circle.
Why was I back, starting a new role as a stepmom, exactly where I had begun when I started my new role as a mom? I felt as if I was being recycled. I did have lots more ‘motherishness’ in me left, to give, it was true. But did the universe work this way? Did the universe — know that? Did Alex and Brian and Brian’s wish for me to be there with them, magnetize me somehow physically, back to the Kennedy Warren?
Do our needs and desires magnetize others always, perhaps, and maybe even magically draw events and places, toward us?
It was like a “Sliding Doors” episode in my life. It felt more symbolic than coincidental.
It made no rational sense at all; but also, it made a kind of poetic sense.
