Residency

I call the university to ask about proving state residency and they direct me to a form on the registrar's website. I go to the registrar's office to pick up a copy but am informed it is available only online. I return home to print it but my printer is out of toner. I go to the library and print the form there. I fill in the form but don't understand some of the questions. I call the registrar's office but they are not open so I leave a message but never get a call back. I call again when they are open and the person who answers transfers me to the woman who handles residency applications. The call goes to voicemail, where her message instructs all students with questions about residency applications to send an email and allow five days for a reply. I send an email with four questions and wait ten days but there is no reply. I go back to the registrar's office and the man there answers some of my questions. When he reaches a question he cannot answer, he directs me to the real registrar's office, the existence of which I was unaware. Until now I had been visiting only an outpost of the real office. I go to the real office and discover that the woman who handles residency applications has a desk there, and office hours, and that, voicemail message to the contrary, the best way to get a question answered about residency is to visit her in person. Her office hours are happening now, but she is with another student and I must leave for work. I return another day and sit with her, and she answers more of my questions. Then she discovers that I am not currently attending class, that I intend to start in the fall. "Oh," she says, "then this is the wrong application for you. You need to go to the admissions office and use their application, because you are still an incoming student." She gives me the name and number of the woman in admissions who handles residency. I leave her office, almost toss the old application into a recycling bin, and go to the admissions office. The woman is at lunch. But it is fortunate that I kept the old application, because it is identical to the new application, save one page. I kneel at the desk and fill out the one page then and there, heedless of the offer of a chair in which to sit while I do so. I reluctantly entrust the paperwork to the receptionist to put into my file for safekeeping until within thirty days of my one-year anniversary of state residency, at which point I will return and officially submit my application to the woman currently at lunch and pray that the receptionist actually saved and correctly filed the copies of my taxes, driver's license, voter registration card, lease, and vehicle registration, which I had collected and copied and had notarized from various offices around the city.

Multiply this by federal taxes, by Montana taxes, by Georgia taxes, and by several other mundane and kafkaesque matters of paperwork that have entered my life. I awaken at 5:38 am to write a blog about it and the server nearly resets my entry to a blank screen when I attempt to publish the paragraph.

And I wonder where my time has gone.

Rain

It crawls over the horizon, sending promising filaments of white into the mountain pines at high altitude, then cedes to an hour of unforecast but familiar sun, which blasts cheerily into the valley. It makes happiness, of course, but buds and roots hunger for the gray edge in the west. Then the wind whips up and the temperature drops off, and the cloud pulls down over the peaks again, rushes down until the mountain is invisible, white only, and the air in the valley crackles with change. People lean into the wind. They walk faster, shop faster. The pace of business quickens as those in the store hurry to finish their missions of resupply, but few new customers come through the doors. Those who do dart through the aisles, hastily plucking three or four things to get them through the short term.

By the time it arrives, the rain finds an empty canvas in the parking lot. It spatters it with tiny uniform dots, testing, testing, then with medium ones, then large, now covers it completely, along with every surface under the sky, the whole valley subject to its brush, then its sponge, then its roller. For the first time in months rain falls in steady constancy, layer upon layer, filling every opening, crowding out air and loosing a smell of freshness, rebirth, ozone, energy, spring. Gravity pulls the rain to earth yet faster, as if water needs encouragement to sink, to penetrate, to fill every gap in concrete, dirt, or skin. The workers idle and watch it come, no longer workers but rainwatchers every one.

Reading

It has been a drought, reading only for information, clicking staring at the Latest Headlines tab from the BBC online, ticking off joyless strips on comics pages under bowls of soup consumed in short breaks in small rooms, reading self-improvement tomes and taking notes, wheedling a stubborn brain to shake free a little insight. There have been instruction manuals, cookbooks and guides to filling out the necessary forms. While striding in place on an elliptical trainer, a parade of vacuous magazines offer cliches and one-page profiles of success-oriented individuals. It's wise to sanitize afterward. A fat book of philosophy by the bedside, excellent but dense as a brick, provides three or four sentences of bushwhacking each night, then the forager falls off the cliff into sleep.

Then a book on the table. Left by a visitor for someone else to read, but after driving home through the rain and eating a long chain of crackers and peanut butter and falling into the couch while the intended someone else programs a computer, the book is there. Opened randomly in the middle, picked up and entered. And it's like diving into the ocean. Doesn't matter which story, which of the seven basic plots, only that it engulfs, eclipses, and one plunges in. Time is gone, and task, and the pages devour the reader and the reader the pages, waves of narrative and motif breaking over not only the brain but the being. Several hours later, much later than advisable for tomorrow's mood, spent but unfinished, rising from the trance, a slumbering thirst has been awakened and for the moment fulfilled. A tired joy endures, of existence beyond what's seen and merely informed.

Parting cloud

A wing unrolled from the cloud. The cloud continued its eastward drift, but its appendage did not. It stretched away from its source, angling toward nothing. The netting of water drops connecting cloud annex to cloud central thinned languidly, strands releasing and parting. The whiteness of connection disappeared bit by bit, though nothing changed: the water, still all there, the wind, still moving, the weight of the air, the sun striking it, the land below. And like that, the wing was off, and then it melted out of visibility entirely. Gone but there; there but gone. And the cloud itself unravelled into sky over the next while, so slowly that it would not be measured in time, only perhaps recorded in an unwritten book of events that are sure to happen nearly unnoticed for no particular reason in a way that changes nothing although afterwards, a very full emptiness drifts on.

Lists 3: Sucked under the belt at the grocery store.

(In order of increasing size.)

Stickers.
Dollar bills.
Deli meal tickets.
Coins.
Arguments made with eyes.
Packets of powdered Emergen-C.
Packets of seeds.
Focus.
Vacuum-packed bacon, 6 oz.
Portion of my palm.
Bunch of green onions in rubber band.
Weeks.

(Cell phones are unfortunately not yet thin enough to be sucked under.)

Sister

My sister is giving birth one thousand miles away. I lie awake, my oven on the self-cleaning cycle, cramps and sleeplessness and too much thought, while her oven has baked its bun brown and ready to pull out with burning hands. She lies awake feeling her insides glow orange and the bread rising, steaming. I bend to one side, hope to melt the cramp, and send my energy to her side. I charge toward sleep, for in dreams they will reach me: the faroff cries of new life.

To let a quiet man be

The man seated in the deli was motionless. There was no plate or cup before him, nor newspaper nor wallet. His head was bowed. I went round with my broom and pan to glance from the corner of my eye, pretending to sweep crumbs. Yes, he is asleep. Sleeping in the deli after sunset on St. Patrick's Day. I should tell a manager, I suppose, and do: "There's a man sleeping in the deli."

I expect action but she says, "Oh yes... he's been there since six, I think." She blinks. "He doesn't seem to be drunk and he isn't noisy, so we will let him stay."

I am glad and tell her. How hard was that? How hard to let a quiet man sleep, here in a place of commerce on a night known for wildness? So easy. An easy kindness. Why not? Who would be hurt? Yet so few I know would let him be.

In the dark before dawn

In the dark before dawn when you roll over in bed and discover that you are mostly awake
There is a space inside where you move about, even as you lie still and hope for more sleep
Sometimes you wander through glens of green flowers with yellow stems
Sometimes you follow the sound of crashing water, knowing once you arrive
You'll dissolve into the falls
But sometimes mind grabs control, and you become instead a dot matrix printer
Grinding out lists and points of contention and important things to remember
And it goes like this, wandering in place, until dawn.

The laugher

He's got the curse of drawing people, the curse of ants to honey, of rubber necks to car wrecks, but his is the smallest and most odd I've seen: it's a monumental laugh. Audible from fifty paces, a series of joyful barks as from a seal with an amp, from an otherwise nondescript man. When he lets loose, one can barely believe the din's coming from him. I admit, sometimes when I see him coming, I ramp up the schtick just to see if I can get him going. Awful, no? Some people attract others not by their real being, but by a surface beauty, or a stockpile of assets, or a viper of fame round their necks, and must filter true friends from the swarm of moths drawn to their flame. This fellow has only to sort out who's goofing him from true camaraderie, and who's goofing just to get their ears blown back.

You're all the ones I've been waiting for

It's you! At last! I've been here all evening, and finally it's you! Let's talk, let's smile, let me look into your eyes while we transact. You're the chosen one, you've won the lottery for delight. What's new with you? Tell me all about your life, then have a good night, a best night if you can. Enjoy your purchase, but don't be surprised that I'm just as excited for the one behind. There's something in my eye, a namaste you might say, so all I see is each chosen one in front of me. By morning it'll wear off, dissolve away, but as long as you're within range of my beaming, caught in this dream, let's laugh. What do you say?