Disquiet and Winter

Winter blew into Cleveland today. And with it, a strange melancholic day. It began when I woke up at 7AM in the pre-daylight-savings dark. I find it disorienting to wake up that way, and grumbled my way through my morning rituals.

My 9AM students entered exhausted and emotionally drained from a two-week run of a 3 hour show that just closed last Saturday night. For various reasons, most of them had slept less than 5 hours the night before and it created a strange vibe: some of them were obviously just trying to stay alert and get through the day, some were oddly withdrawn; but underneath their exhaustion there was a strange undercurrent of trying-to-keep-it-togetherness that made the whole 90 minutes feel like someone was going to explode at any second. Mired as they were in their own emotional states, I tried to handle the situation gently, but they were unaware of my tactics and why I chose them. I succeeded in fulfilling the class' objective and steering them away from a meltdown. But the meltdown was waiting, stalking an opportunity to happen.

I came home and read more of Siri Hustvedt's "The Sorrows of An American." It's a new novel, impeccably written (though I could quibble with the ending) about being middle-aged and lonely and trying to sort through your parents' lives and the pieces of their lives that have been withheld from their children. It's also about farm life in Minnesota during the Depression, which strikes a chord with me, as my mother grew up on a farm in North Dakota during that time (no central heat, no plumbing, snowed in for months, etc.)

By the time I finished the book, the Cleveland weather had changed to sheets of cold rain and grey skies that filled my house with gloom. I decided to get out for a movie. I chose "Rachel Getting Married" because I love Jonathan Demme's directing, and I had heard it was funny. I knew that it was filmed "documentary style," but I wasn't prepared for how it would affect me.

Basically, after the first few minutes, I began to feel like I was a guest of a family that was on the eve of a wedding, watching all the angst, joy, and hidden family issues burbling up to the surface. I sat at the table with them throughout the lengthy "toast" session during the rehearsal dinner, and was with them in their home as they sorted out details, while nearby the musicians/friends practiced a seeming never-ending pastiche of reedy, stringy autumnal compositions. Some of the family's issues are clear at the onset (it's no secret Rachel's sister Kym just got out of rehab), but the cinema-veretae style and the insidious needling family history and resentments felt like the characters became *my* family somehow (with apologies to my real family, all of whom, like me, are flawed, but not like the people in the movie). If that was Demme's intention, he succeeded with me.

I left the film feeling disquieted, as the rain continued to pour down. I thought about my garden, which I completely tore out yesterday, after hearing news of the impending snow. The snow arrived later in the afternoon, in crusty icy pellets with thunder and lightening; Zeus shaking off his frozen exterior.

I appeased my chilly mood by making beef stroganoff for dinner, the kind of meal that can warm me from the inside. I'll be getting out my down comforter tonight, which will warm me from the outside. And meanwhile, I'll ruminate on my story, the story I tell others, my family's stories, their stories of me, and how it's all muddled with false memories, lack of recollection, events skewed in the telling by my own point of view, and washed-over with left-over feelings and information that just isn't shared until it dies with us.

For this, I need a stretch of hibernation.