Shelf Life
There is a Post It on the dash of my car that reads, a little sloppily, “all emotions are questions that have not yet found words. Every question articulates a body’s beliefs.”
Of course, it would be dangerous to scribble Post Its while driving. I pull over, generally. Mostly.
A work buddy told me a story that involved Post Its, just yesterday. She was caring for a friend for the several days post op a hip replacement. Moral and context, here: it is good to have friends who will live with you for a few days when you are vulnerable, good to have someone you can argue hotly with all the while loving each other the harder. The story is her friend, dopey and gimped up, wanted to go for a neighborhood walk. My work buddy said she couldn’t go alone, and they escalated at each other until there were tears and a bit of a wrestling match in the doorway. My work buddy tells stories with incredible animation, and there was something about her friend’s wild unbrushed hair and her braless boobs falling out the arm pit of her tank top, so I was already laughing. My work buddy said to her friend: “You can’t. You’re a mess. Have you looked in your bag? You’ve got opioids, two maxi pads, Post-Its and a banana peel in there.”
“My kinda fun,” I said. My work buddy and I are both in recovery, so we can make these kind of jokes.
“Anyway,” she said while slicing a box open with the cutter, “she was trying to run me over with her walker and answered” “when do you ever not need post-its?!”
“So true,” I said.
“And the end of the fight was her saying “I ate the banana for you!” Meaning, I suppose, that my former nurse work buddy had pressed nutrition on her recuperating friend, and the friend was bouncing the ‘you’re basically a crazy person right now’ accusation off the pot who’d called the kettle. At which point the tears took on laughter and the fight was over.
My buddy and I tell each other stories and make crude jokes and ridicule our own selves endlessly in the back room with the loading dock. Our minds go down dark paths and come out snort laughing. I’ve realized that she and I have a certain kind of thinking, and that other folks don’t necessarily have it. It’s a bleakness turned give-a-damn. A kind of well this is a shitty situation, I’ll do my best underpinning. An on with it ness rather than a whining or blaming or procrastinating. I figure a lot of this has to do with our recoveries, but is not to say somebody needs to go through addiction and recovery to have it. We’ve both looked in the mirror with absolute disgust and yet not turned away, and somehow this ends up hilarious. It has occurred to me that she and I are the happiest of the lot, at work. Oddly, neither of us take the work as terribly important, either. We do a good job but don’t think the job is who we are.
Anyway. There are Post Its in my glovebox, if you need them.
I’ve worked at the bookshop for a year now. I’ve been promoted twice. Now I have a new job title with an acronym nobody outside the company would understand. I have a laptop and work with 12 local stores, occasionally the whole national chain as an organism. I’m in charge of ordering books and teaching booksellers - which really means the managers of the different stores, so that they can teach the booksellers - how to think about books.
Just last week, my yoga website and all the affiliated apps and storage and email lists and video conferencing hit their cancel date. They disappeared from the internet.
I know somebody who knows somebody whose wife is opening a yoga studio. The somebodies have suggested she talk to me. Others have paused and said “does she do that anymore? Would she do that?” ‘That’ is is left undefined. Teach a class, maybe. Run a teacher training. Give some advice.
Whatever it is: no.
Other somebodies, knowing I’ve been working retail for a year, have cautiously and gently wondered whether I still like it. Dubiously. With a tone of sympathy. “Yes,” I’ve said. I hear how miserable other people are at work all the time, and mumble with a little wonder (gratitude, compassion) “I really like my job.”
Of the lady opening a yoga studio, the somebodies have said to me “She knows exactly who you are.”
Which is a funny thing to say. It implies that I am - or should we say was - SomeBody.
I wonder, only half seriously, exactly how long my reputation will last. Like a sound in the air. This is a very Buddhist kinda thought: Somebodies are nobodies; nobodies are always some body. We are all lightening quick expendable, and yet we ought to take it with a serious sense of responsibility.
The thing about Post Its is how I crumple them up in my pockets, and toss them in the trash at the end of the day. Or days later find them while doing laundry, or years later tucked in between the pages of some book and can’t recall the thought entire. I stand there with my jeans in one hand and an esoteric half sentence on a scrap of paper in the other, or the book’s plot dropped and the note taken up with confusion. On a day that lacks Post Its, I’ll wail inside about a thought that was lost. Some idea I had, that I can almost but not quite recall to language.
Like the silence after a sound has gone into the air.
“Hello Mr. Anderson!” I say smiling into the phone. Most caller ID-s at work are vague ‘wireless callers’ or names I don’t know. Mr. Anderson calls once or twice a week. He orders books or tells us he’s outside the store, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, to pick the books up. Somebody goes outside to take his credit card from him, comes inside and runs the transaction, and goes back outside to hand him a bag of books and his credit card through the car window. I spoke to Mr. Anderson on the phone a dozen times or so before I was the one who answered when he was outside to pick them up. None of us know what, exactly, disables him from coming into the store or driving himself. I know he is retired, but I don’t know from what. I know he’s a lovely man who reads history and social commentary like I do, and plows through several books a week, and that he always says thank you and pats your hand as he takes his credit card back.
On the phone and before meeting him IRL, he’d started to tell me about what he’d read, and I’d comment on things I’d read. Then he started asking if anything had come in I thought he might like. I’d lean my hip on the counter and look across the floor to the new non-fiction display, thinking. I mention something about Mary Beard, the shock of the old, on classics. “Go ahead,” he says. “Might as well throw it in there with the others.” Mr. Anderson and I have talked about various historians of Rome, the art of Weimar Germany, and the politics of the French Commune. I’ve told him about my Dante thing. He wants to hear which translation I choose as best. Since there are 129 extant English translations, and a rough 2 more a year being pumped out, this will take me awhile. “Should we talk about the Odyssey movie?” I whispered into the phone. I wonder if he goes to movies but I don’t ask because I don’t know how. We’ve talked about Emily Wilson before, and I’d like to talk with him about her scathing editorial about the film in the Guardian. “You go. Tell me about it later.” “Colson Whitehead,” I say. We end the call with my interrupting him mid sentence, and apologizing; the store is a getting busy. I’ve never heard anybody else so graciously excuse themselves. He mutters okay okay you go back to your work kind of phrases, but they feel sweet and large and erudite. It feels as though he can do this partially because he is at root a very kind man, but partially because we both know we’ll talk again in a few days time.
Considering the expendability of people, and old men specifically, and how things go even in my own life, I know this isn’t ultimately true. I scribble Mr. Anderson Odyssey onto a Post It and scrunch it in my pocket.
One must eat this week’s peaches standing over the sink, or out of doors. The juices run down a forearm to the elbow and then drip. One might be excused for licking one’s own arm.
I scribbled something about how they are the mottled color of dawn clouds, and how the particular thing your mouth does over their tang is pretty much the same thing as a smile. The dog watches me lick myself and cocks her head, believing if I’m eating it she should too.
“All feelings are questions that haven’t reached language,” I tell her and she plops her butt down demonstratively, being Good for Treats. “The answer is no,” I say, and scratch her ear. No is not a cruelty, but my knowing she is not one of those dogs who likes fruit or vegetables. She mouths them and spits them out, looking at me like I betrayed her. Or am half mad myself. She believes she would in fact like it, very much.