Out of Context

How I love these cool summer mornings, shushed by the marine layer, no sound outside but the hyphenated chatter of some morning birds. Today I get to set my own schedule, and I have quite a bit of work to do, but I can do it in pajamas if I want, and wander outside whenever I feel like, and explain myself to no one.

For the moment I have wrapped the morning around me like a shawl. I am drinking my coffee, now and then looking up at the white sky through the window, a bowl of lemons on the table, and a fragrant yellow rose in a small crystal vase.

I have been lazy. A few days ago I actually took a nap in the middle of the day and had that eerie sensation of waking up uncertain where I was, or when it was – - for a long moment or two, I was just a being floating there, completely out of context. My dreams had fled but I had not quite returned from wherever they had deposited me, and I felt myself suspended in a state of in-between, unable to place myself in time or location. I was awake but found no clues in the light or the view, and my thinking had not clicked into gear. Is this who I am when I am no one? It was disconcerting and exhilarating all in the same instant.

It’s a little bit like that now, a day out of context — no structure, no company, no roles or expectations to define me or remind me who I am. But maybe this is exactly when one discovers one’s true identity.

A memory, for no reason: When I was a child on Coney Island Avenue, there was an empty lot on the other side of the street a few blocks to the south, near the A & P, I think, not far from a mysteriously curtained store inhabited by gypsies. The lot was enclosed by tall buildings on each side and a wooden fence in front.  In the wooden fence I discovered a knothole through which, on tip-toes, I could peer, and through it I glimpsed what seemed a bit of heaven: ground of grass and earth, some flowering shrubs, a branchy tree where a robin perched, singing.

I suppose it was all just a scruffy bit of nature, a not-yet-built-upon city lot, but it called to me. I saw it as a secret garden, a fragment of the long ago that had broken off and remained intact, mysterious and lovely, hidden by a fence in the middle of a mundane street. I never passed without stopping to look through the knothole into that other world that seemed so magical to me.

When I look around at my life today, it is as though I have miraculously found my way to the other side of that fence. I am living on the inside, and it’s outside.

So I do hope I will fill this blank space of day constructively, but it suddenly seems that a walk is the best way to begin.

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