Every once in a while, the fishhook of longing will catch me by surprise and yank me gasping towards the surface of some distant memory. The feeling is a little hard to describe. It’s a mix between envisioning some version of the future that I’d like to see come to pass and remembering some version of the past that once held promise (or influenced that vision of the future). Today, it was a few lines of poetry from the poem “Conversations with the Dust” by Greg Sevik (published in Rattle). It’s almost always a few lines of poetry.
The poem begins (ellipses mine) :
My grandmother wishes her ashes
could mix with my grandfather’s ashes.
Two bodies, one urn. The State of California says
No. Two bodies. Two urns. (…)
The poem continues:
(…) Now I keep my ashes to myself.
And I envy my grandmother, who just lost her husband
and moved into assisted living. The man
with whom she breakfasted every morning. Aromas
of toast and coffee. The kitchen radio playing NPR.
Linda Ronstadt. Steely Dan. Seventy years
of talking over breakfast. (…)
That’s all it took to set my mind adrift: a simple and sweet description of breakfast. Breakfast, for me, is and has been a solitary event. There was a time when it wasn’t. Reading the poem, I missed talking over breakfast. Such a simple, yet intimate way of sharing: space, food, aromas, conversation.
These are the things nobody lists on dating profiles: wanting someone to have toast and coffee with, someone to unwind with after work. These are the things, I think couples would do well to revisit in some of their trying moments – “hey, I still look forward to sharing breakfast in the morning – wouldn’t want to do it with anyone else.” And because so few people talk about the smaller, tender, inconsequential moments, their value begins to fade – from memory, from our aspirations, from our emotional toolbox used to shim and hammer together a loving and fulfilling life with someone else.
The problem I run up against is that I’ll read something like that and say, that sounds nice. And when I try to envision how it would play out in my own life, I can only envision how it has played out in my life (memory). The last time I somewhat consistently shared breakfast with someone else was when we were quasi-living together splitting our time between a city house and a suburb house. We’d have breakfast together on the weekends, on days when we skipped work to hang out, or on days when one of us could work remotely from the other person’s house. I liked the practice enough that I changed my eating habits from being someone who had to eat as soon as he woke up to being someone who would wait for when my partner was ready to eat. For me, the memory is bittersweet – worth holding on to and/or worth trying to replicate in some distant future.
I’m back to eating as soon as I get up. After which, I might sit on the sofa drinking my coffee, reading poetry, and envisioning a different life – one slightly out of reach and one that only briefly came to pass, both hazy and distant.