7 july 2009

today, i meet stan. and i know it will be good because i wake up to my father's voice: "you are making pie today". today is the day but first i must sit through this linguistics lecture, my second lecture of the day. the syntax fairy is disappointingly calm. i doodle mountains of nothing but straight, parallel lines on my page, waiting. waiting. finally we go and wait some more at the regular tuesday waiting spot until a small, bald, shaky man appears. he reminds me of a tortoise without his shell, perhaps shivering from the cold rather than the onset of parkinsons. almost a caricature, his eyes are glowing. "oh, she goes" he says and i immediately don't want him to die. i feel selfish, oh so selfish, but i can't help it. he has stories worth saying and things worth teaching. we make our way laughing and talking to a coffeeshop, i don't mind the weight of my f.scott fitzgerald books i bought greedily for fifty cents each. a ritual occurs during the ordering and buying and stirring of the coffee; there is some shifting of bodies involved. i do not partake or meddle in, but i can sense my very presence accounts for the marred execution this time. we decide on inside because stan has no circulation and no body fat and e.b.a. has no body fat and i have no circulation, so we make for quite the unconditioned trinity. sitting inside graces us with the presence of walking-talking teenage stereotypes that switch tables every twenty minutes or so when a new party arrives. e.b.a and i roll our eyes; stan waits patiently for them to finish the maneuver. at one point e.b.a. asks stan to do 'the chaucer thing' for me. and so he begins and we lean in closer and closer to hear until our three heads are almost touching and we must looking like a bunch of crazies plotting something. he begins to recite in middle english the prologue of canterbury tales, flawlessly from memory. it is enchanting, i am enchanted, for i can barely understand but his voice has our undivided attention and it happens again - my surroundings melt into air and i might as well be in edinburgh. he stops, not because memory doesn't serve but because we are interrupted and i am angry at our interrupter, a visitor from porlock, covered in sweat from head to toe, wiping his sweaty brow with his sweaty forearm. it's felix, no cat. uninvited, he drops his girth next to me and in a speech as sweaty as his person begins to tell us loudly about buffy the vampire slayer and the ongoings of the fringe festival. stan adapts seemlessly, molds and transforms six hundred years and theo also seems rather comfortable in this new company, disappointed but comfortable. meanwhile i'm still trying to catch the last syllables of the prologue, touching them with my mind and trying to make them linger on my tongue, to no avail. they are toned out by felix who has hogged all the space - physical and literal and mental - and continues to speak as though everyone were interested. or perhaps it's just me. it takes me a while to concede defeat and drag myself out of london of the 1400's into second cup 2009. felix wants to be a psychologist now. he's a journalist really, quite talented i hear, but insists on being a psychologist, tonight of all nights as well. the more he talks the more he realizes i have nothing to latch on to, there is no portal for me into his post-modern world, so he says: how have you managed to completely escape modern mass culture? i understand to miss a few obscure references, but to have somehow missed, on, the past twenty years or so is almost an admirable feat. i'm baffled. now he's got me he's got me and i'm exposed and i don't know what to say. guilty as charged, i resume my role as social sponge and quietly absorb the rest of their conversation about the talking heads (and then less talking and more head, how clever) and star wars and felix reaches to cover my ears with both his sweaty palms, which requires some hefty maneuvering on his part and i feel violated as if this was his only excuse to touch the single female at the table. all this because e.b.a. admitted to having seen every single star trek episode ever made, to which felix responded: we're not supposed to mention that to members of the opposite sex! and i am amused because secretly i am always amused and stan says, opposite to what? and we all laugh. they keep talking and i mustn't have been a very good sponge because i can't remember what it was they talked about anymore, until e.b.a and felix went for a smoke. left alone with stan, he says to me: about twenty years ago, i met a young woman who, like you, had somehow missed on an entire generation of social reference. she was raised in a very religious household and not until her twenties was given a chance to be exposed to the world and all its worldly wonders. i was there to witness her discover and experience these things for the first time and see them anew through her eyes. it was one of the most beautiful times of my life... i could do nothing but smile at his story and it was in such a state that e.b.a. and felix found us when they returned. and so the evening unfolded, stan dropping tiny bits of wisdom until felix had to go and then stan had to go and e.b.a. and i were left again across from each other, with eager, questioning eyes. he was beaming, absolutely beaming with all of stan's accomplishments that the man himself was so quiet and humble about himself. i knew now, i understood what he meant when he said this man is a teacher. i was grateful, ever so grateful to have met him. i told e.b.a. that and we walked off into the night.