monoceros blogsIt's incredibly annoying trying to find something and not succeeding. Instead, I come across things that I was looking for weeks or years ago, like three pairs of gloves. Three pairs! I couldn't even find one in time for my trip to Japan. Too, I recently unearthed a skirt that I'd been missing for the past two years.
Yesterday, I was hunting for a canvas book tote that I use on train rides. I'm sure it'll re-appear one day, though I hope sooner rather than later. I can remember the novel inside - Charles Baxter's Saul and Patsy - but not the location. What I want is neither the book nor the bag; it's a photograph that I left inside the front pocket of the book tote.
I should've remembered that a person can spend a long time waiting for something, despair of the waiting, and then unexpectedly, and often at a very wrong time, it turns up. Thinking about this reminded me a little of Linda Pastan's "Waiting for My Life," which, thankfully, I could find on my shelf with no trouble at all (in any case, this seems to be a week for Linda Pastan poems).
"I waited for my life to start
for years, standing at bus stops
looking into the curved distance
thinking each bus was the wrong bus;
or lost in books where I would travel
without luggage from one page
to another; where the only breeze
was the rustle of pages turning,
and lives rose and set
in the violent colors of suns.
Sometimes my life coughed and coughed:
a stalled car about to catch,
and I would hold someone in my arms,
though it was always someone else I wanted.
Or I would board any bus, jostled
by thighs and elbows that knew
where they were going; collecting scraps
of talk, setting them down like birdsong
in my notebook, where someday I would go
prospecting for my life."