"The sky is red, and the world is on fire, and the corn is taller than me
And the dog is tied to a wagon of rain, and the road is wet as the sea
And sometimes the music from a dance will carry across the plains
And the places that I'm dreaming of, do they dream only of me?"
Tom Waits & Kathleen Brennen Waits Whistle Down the Wind
My last post was about a neighborhood tragedy--one where, within months of each other, a mother and a father both killed themselves, leaving two young teens behind. Like the Wisconsin Death Trip book and movie, the mundane-ness of our surroundings somehow foregrounds the small signals of tragedy. Examples of this heart-rending everyday-ness include her use of the tub to try and keep the disaster tidy and his trip to the nearby lake with his kids and a bag of Long John Silvers fish just 24 hours before those same kids found his body. Something about the domesticity of the tub, the fish 'n chips fast food at the lakeside evokes a pathos that seems unbearable.
Despite the sensationalism of these losses, I am actually more interested in the surrounding "mundane." The mundane is the opening--the one plain book amongst the others; but when we notice it, when it is touched, the door to a secret passageway swings open, the sharp air of what was hidden in plain sight waking us up. Mundus--the Latin root for mundane--means world.
The antonyms for mundane (per Merriam-Webster) are "heavenly, non-temportal, unearthly....." I object. It's not the definition I object to but rather the allusions in how we use it. When we label something "mundane" it has a whiff of debasement about it, of the rote--that which is not worth deep consideration. Boring, actually, the mundane is boring--like doing the dishes. Indeed, it is the chore of washing dishes that is presented in the Merriam-Webster as an illustration of "mundane." The domestic, as ever, holds sway as the exemplar of what is trite, not allied with spirit (heavenly), entwined with time...Perhaps we are so ambivalent because it is bound to time--ticking us towards our mortality.
For if no one does those dishes, well then, suddenly the world is not quite so mundane, is it? We get insect problems, critters, perhaps even officials called in to deem a household unfit for habitation. The daily, mundane chores are the stitches that hold the garment of daily life together. And the seamstress is so often female. Take away the mundane and beneath we have crisis. Is the mundane a mask? Or is it something more, something holy or heavenly after all?
I am sorry to say I did not hear about Susie's suicide until just last month, 2 months after the fact. It created a crisis for me, to know that someone I cared about had taken her life and I didn't even know it. She and I were nodding neighbors. We all nod to each other as we drive up and down the street, here. A wave is best, sometime just a lift of the finger from the steering wheel. There's a elaborate system of manners about pulling over to let each other through: the road is so narrow that most times two cars simply cannot pass.
Susie and I talked and plotted at one point to get rumble strips on the two lane main road that drivers--despite vicious twists and turns--seem to view as a highway. Our children crossed that road to get to their school bus. And our neighborhood road's juncture with this county road is a blind one--we gamble out lives everytime we pull out. So, we thought maybe folks rushing through needed to be alerted: They might round the corner to a dead stop, a line of kids crossing in front of them like some many ducks in a carnvial game.
After our successful calls to the county, Susie and I always had a little smile for each other in addition to the nod. But the "do not disturb" field around her was strong. I always had a sense that her home life was not sweet. I glimpsed the kids' father all of about 4 times in 17 years. Susie did all the yard work, all the transporation, all of the visible child and pet care. She hung the laundry out to dry year 'round--a raw job in our damp winters. A gal I knew who lived next to them said he had some crazy ideas--something to do with alien abduction. What I saw from my passing-by was a woman living a suppressed life--a woman not allowed to say much or do much. But this is a strong "live and let live" neighborhood.. Like that laundry hung close in the vast wind, our little string of homes line up against open rural space, exaggerating our sense of frontier. So here in Sanders, the careful distance between our lives never seemed that strange. It's bad manners to pry. Now I wish I had.
Susie's family owned the turn of the century limestone gas/grocery building at the corner of our street. Though the building is throughly shuttered, the vintage gas pumps are still embedded out front. With the architectural lines of a rum-runner's Buick, these pumps were once artfully rusted to a soft blush of sepia. One day, a few years ago, they were suddenly painted in bright strips of red, blue and white--some sort of effort to restore them? Perhaps a 9/11 patriotic gesture? Frankly, to me, the effect was hideous. But such is the aesthetic of Sanders folk. I never took a poll, but I'm betting I'd lose out in my assessment of improvement/not improvement.
Though I never saw her at it, I've alwasy been certain it was Susie's doing to paint those pumps with present-day paint. Maybe she wanted to cheer the busstop. I kind of think that paint represented a claim on time--she was pulling on the thread of the past, a past where her family's patriach was the prinicpal just up the streeet, a past where neighbors talked a bit more, walked a bit more, (probably fought a bit more), stopped by the store for some bread and a pack of smokes.
It's the little details that we dismiss that, in the end, break our hearts--telling the small story of lives: A sunset echoing anguish, a crumpled fast food bag, the dog held in place by the weight of rain, the music drifting from a place we can't quite reach, ancient gas pumps translated through paint. We dream our dreams separately. And yet, we all seem to dream.
After the paint job, I kept watching for something else to happen around those pumps, maybe the station doors to get glass on them again. Flower pots on the steps, maybe. Despite the impossible reuse regulations, I've always dreamed of it being renewed into a little neighborhood store--coffee for tired neighbors, candy for clamoring kids, gossip gently traded. Now the house is empty, too. Fallen off the porch are two big pots of mums turned dark brown and lying on the ground, side by side. Something in me sobs at that simple sight and mundanely wonders who bought them and why. Did she have one last hope of making things nice before the holidays came? Before she climbed into that plain tub on Christmas eve, pulling the trigger on the year, on time, ending it for once and all?
For a closing, you can give a listen to the song below, closing your eyes to nod with me one last time to Susie--leaving the husband, the children, the busstop, the laundry, the lot of us....to whistle down the wind.
Tom Waits (click to link to the song)
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