Lots of down time these days spent flat on my back in the early dark in my bed, scrolling Facebook endlessly. It's my version of zoning out to television or whatever, with maybe a tad more interaction. A few days ago, the cold wave that came through LA coincided with my wall heater not working, so I had a couple days where I was super cold in my place. The maintenance man came by yesterday and showed me how to light the pilot on the ancient wall heater. Of course, when the heater fired up, the past year's dust and hair or whatever melted and made my smoke alarm go off. I was so desirous of nice, toasty warm surroundings that my solution to that was to take the smoke detector down off the ceiling. It'll go back up tomorrow, since a quick test indicated that the heater is still pushing off enough smoke to set the thing off. Meanwhile, a portable radiator I ordered arrived today and I will probably just switch that out for the wall heater altogether. The saga of an Arizona lightweight dealing with overnight lows in the low 40's and no heat.
One of the side trips I took on the interwebs last night was a visit to Airbnb, nostalgically searching for a couple of the places I stayed in Minneapolis and St. Paul when I would go there to visit. My first visit there was October, 2017, and I spent way too much money to stay at the Embassy Suites in downtown St. Paul, which has since been sold to another chain. The Embassy Suites was a strange property, with an open courtyard kind of arrangement and all of the rooms around it, and a glass elevator, and in the courtyard, a little koi pond and stream with a stone bridge one walked over to get through the lobby. The first time the person visited there, she brought her 2 year old, who was utterly fascinated by the glass elevator, magical little stream in the lobby, etc. The two year old also stole my earplugs and tried to hide them away, and I think was planning on taking them with her. Her mother mildly scolded her, and I said, "she can have them if she wants. But they've been jammed in my ears."
I went back in February, 2018, and stayed in an Airbnb apartment at Wabasha and 4th, with a great view of the Wabasha Street Bridge and a couple of snowstorms. I had not experienced much winter for years, since I was living in Arizona, and I loved being in the Twin Cities in February, oddly enough. The person and I watched Olympic figure skating on the huge TV there. It was one of the very few sort of normal moments we spent together, as if we were actually in a relationship. It's funny how those are the things one remembers sometimes. We also went out to dinner at the Gray Duck, in the lobby of the building (called The Lowry), and that too felt like we were a couple. The illusions of a secret affair are odd indeed, especially when there's a desire, as there was on my part, to have a real partnership, lived out on the mundane level, every day until my heart would stop.
I went back in April, 2018, and stayed at a wildly cool little apartment a block away from Minnehaha Falls. In spite of it being April, the falls were still surrounded by thick ice. In July 2018, two visits, with the Botany conference in Rochester MN in between, at the Wabasha apartment and the apartment near the falls.
I always carefully hid that wild skull painting away in the closet when I stayed there, haha.
The last time I visited, November, 2018, I stayed at a depressing place near the Turf Club, off Snelling Ave, and that visit was sad all around. The best part of that visit, the last time I ever saw the person in person, was the super blue collar restaurant, The Checkerboard, an Italian-American place with amazing spaghetti and 7 homemade donuts for like $4.
Anyway, I went in search of these places, and of course seeing photos triggered many memories, many things I had forgotten or hadn't thought of in a long time. The person's three year old daughter running around the Minnehaha apartment naked, while the person took a much needed nap, and, in particular, the daughter wanting to spin around and around and around in the office chair. "I wanna go round, I wanna go round" she yelled, gleefully, forever. It's wild how obsessed with super simple things kids can be.
Another whole set of memories came up for me of spending almost all of my time on these Twin Cities visits completely alone. I would go for four or five days and the person and I would maybe spend a total of 12 or 16 hours together, tops. The rest of the time, I would be on my own. This is one of the reasons that, when I went back, this past summer, it felt very familiar. I was of course alone the entire time, but it felt eerie, as if the person and I were going to convene at some point, somewhere, any minute. It's interesting to reflect that, when I was there in July, the person probably knew she was pregnant with kid #3, maybe had just found out, or was about to.
Sometimes my tendency to reinforce memories feels self-immolating, and other times, it feels like a strategy for integrating myself. This trip felt more integrative than destructive. There is a dangerous siren song quality to hiraeth that can be out of balance and unmanageable, but maybe some slight shifts are occurring in me, where mostly I just feel grateful for all of it, and stand in some degree of shock and amazement that I even let myself experience all of it, considering what I always, always knew to be the case, and how I always knew exactly where I stood. The entire affair now feels like a weird dream, that is only partly leaning toward nightmare, but mostly is a very happy dream indeed. I guess this unreality is to be expected, since about 90% of our relationship was secret, virtual, and compartmentalized in the extreme.
It's interesting to feel, now, that I would not do it all again, really, but I also would not trade having done it for anything in the world. Being a person who makes someone else's life tolerable for a short time, when you know they are going to choose that life and find a way to need you to make it better, is ill advised. I don't recommend that precarious position to anyone. Yet, as time continues to pass, the experience is much more gift than curse.
This morning, I noticed coincidentally that it was 11:11, on 11/11, and that reminded me of a song by an indie band that put out a few commercial failures in the 1990's, Ass Ponys. I only knew of this band because the band I was in opened for them at the Khyber Pass in Philly, in the spring of 1991. Anyway, they did a song called "Eleven Eleven," and I listened to it, and I listened to their whole first album, Mr. Superlove, and bought a used copy on Amazon. One of the tracks from that album, Thank You for the Roses, is very sweet and odd.
The featured image for this post, a lavender rose from Tempe AZ last year at this time. I remember asking the person, "what is your favorite color of rose?" very early on in our affair. Her reply was "today, it's lavender."