rockin
My friends got married on a boat. It smelled like the sea and like gardenias, and the bride wore blue that blended in with the sky. Ty came from Florida and Talley came from Pennsylvania and John came from California and when the groom gave a toast about how lucky he was, I thought you and every one of us.
Sometimes I wish I could gather up all the people I love and plant them here. That way we could meet for coffee on a whim, and I could hold the babies I know in Richmond and Los Angeles and Austin and smell their baby smell and feel them growing bigger. That way we wouldn’t have time-zone-complicated phone tag sessions that span the seasons.
But it sure is nice when a few of us end up around a table together. My technical family is tiny – two parents, no siblings or grandparents, a few aunts and uncles with three kids amongst them. So the number of good people in my life seems impossible.
Kay Ryan was just made Poet Laureate, and when I was about to post my favorite poem of hers in celebration I remembered that I put it up here already, a year and a half ago, when I was new to Portland. At that time I would say it out loud as an admonition and a reprimand, like what the fuck am I waiting for?
And now a while later it’s more like a rally. Sometimes you take the walls down months before you’re ready to put up new ones. Sometimes you yell the Ramones off-key in a smoky seaside karaoke bar of strangers. Sometimes your family from way east and your family from way west get together on a tiny boat, and you hardly even speak the same language. And there’s everyone, with their hair blowing in the wind, holding on with you.
this is the time
I used to love Billy Joel. He was the first non-classical music I was introduced to after the Beach Boys, and I bought every album and learned every word. Billy Joel got me through several mid-teen years, before the inevitable late-teen switch to the Indigo Girls and Ani Difranco. I would play Vienna and rewind the tape and play it again and repeat.
I would request If I Only Had the Words from a local radio station call-in show (I think it was about a red headed boy named Matt), and blast Movin’ Out in Jenifer Smtih’s car when she first got her license. Laura and I put An Innocent Man – and nothing else, to make the point extra clear – on a cassette that we sent to the camp counselor she had a crush on. New York State of Mind was my first answering machine message in college. And do you remember that feeling of a song you loved when you were fourteen?
That feeling is the feeling I get when I get off an airplane somewhere far away. It’s the feeling I think some people get when they bike a hundred miles or close a real estate deal. It’s almost like being in love. It’s probably some of the same chemicals. It’s the sort of feeling people fuck up their whole lives for.
So this morning I decided, after a ten year hiatus, to Bring Billy Back. I came across his name in a New York Times article and now, a few clicks later, I have Travelin Prayer and Summer Highland Falls and You May Be Right looping in my ears.
My life in Portland needs a little Billy. First it needed calm, and then it needed roots, and now it needs some volume. Otherwise every email from some friend headed for a foreign country is going to send me spiraling, the way one did earlier this week. This is what I’ve picked for right now, I remind myself, and so I might as well Do It. I’ve been doing a lot of coasting lately, and it doesn’t much suit me. Maybe I just need a new soundtrack.
why we stay here through all that rain
horizontal
The truth is, I sleep on the floor.
More accurately I sleep on a down comforter draped over a twin-size piece of camping foam, all sort of mushed into a fitted sheet, on the floor.
Aesthetically I’ve never liked big beds with headboards and clunky feet, and practically they’re a pain in the ass to move. Since leaving my parent’s house fourteen years ago, I’ve never owned a bed. I’ve slept on dorm beds and air mattresses and the trusty foam pad. Twice I’ve splurged on low-end frameless futons, and twice I’ve lost them to breakups.
My foam pad rolls up for moving in five seconds, and it weighs five pounds, and it’s worth about five dollars. It serves my needs, mostly.
But sometimes not. Since I started a desk job, for example, I’ve been noticing the decline of my already mediocre posture. Sleeping on my side on a thin mat isn’t helping. And sharing such a small sleeping space has its challenges. Plus the down makes me sneeze.
So I decided, at thirty one, that it’s time for a big girl bed. I started looking around for something suited to my low-maintenance sensibilities. Something close to the floor. Something simple. Something unlikely to have been made in a nastyass factory. Something I wouldn’t have to hire people to move. Half of the planet sleeps on reed mats, for God’s sake.
And since a substantial piece of my new house battle has been trying not to accumulate the piles of crap that the world somehow wills you to accumulate once you have a place to keep it, I was looking for something that didn’t feel like a big fucking Thing. A heavy, overengineered Thing that I’d feel obligated to guard and care for, the way people suddenly find themselves saying things like Don’t Eat On That Sofa!
What I ended up finding was latex. Latex is tapped from trees in Southeast Asia and can be transformed, via a rather old process, into a very resilient foam that makes an excellent mattress. It doesn’t grow mold or harbor dust mites. It doesn’t involve wood frames and metal springs and chemically-treated stuffing. You end up with something that looks a lot like my foam camping mat, except no petroleum products were involved. It costs a lot more but it lasts about thirty years with no flipping necessary, and in the end when you throw it away there’s still nothing toxic about it.
Latex has started to become trendy with the whole Green wave, so now they’re making artificial versions and injecting it into the middle of conventional mattresses, mostly for marketing. Since I just wanted a big block of the real stuff, I started looking online. And then it got weird.
Because there are about half a dozen websites from which you can order latex mattresses – sites that cater to allergy sufferers and green living. And then there is one site for the only company that exclusively manufactures natural latex mattresses and nothing else, and has been doing this for decades. And it’s thirty blocks from my house.
You’d never know it was there, because it’s just a tiny “showroom” with one sample bed, and lots of cool machines where the covers get sewn. They get sewn by a guy named Gary. He’s been making mattresses for forty five years. He makes them out of latex because that’s how his dad did it, and because he thinks they’re the best.
So Gary’s making me a bed. It'll be ready in a week. I’m not allowed to put it on the floor, because latex likes to breathe. But four inches would do it. Movin’ on up.
