This Magic Moment
I started a new job where I sell expensive clothes to people who can afford expensive clothes. In other words, I am a shop girl. Maybe it is my demeanor or maybe there is an unspoken intimacy that gets shared between myself and the people spending too much money on sweaters that gets established. One morning a man, on the latter side of his fifties, approached me at the counter. He had the cologne of stale cigarettes, a Robert Redford mop of hair, and wore red tinted aviators. He came in to make a return. He placed a navy cashmere crewneck on the counter and told me, “I am going through a divorce and decided to return this before I have to.” Some hours later an older woman came in. She carefully peaked at blouses on a hanging rack and asked to try on a jacket. She refused to go into a fitting room as she was only in here for a minute while her grandson and son were across the street. “I have lived in 10 states, and California is my favorite,” she told me. “My husband and I were married for 58 years. It is a bit of a tragic story really,” she reached for her sunglasses and put them on. “The last time I was here in San Francisco, it was eight years ago. My husband suddenly died and this is my first time back. It has been very emotional.” She walked out of the store and I had to fold sweaters in the space that was holding onto the reverence for this stranger’s late husband. A few days later a middle aged woman came in. She was familiar with the store, saying that it is worth the trip from Saulsalito. Her husband came in shortly after and she showed him a blouse, “That is very girly,” he said to her laughing. The wife shot me a blushing smile from across the room. “You are a girly girl,” the husband said to the wife. “And that is why I married you.” The couple held each other’s hands and started walking out the door. The wife turned her head to say to me, “We have been married for thirty five years.”
Somewhere in between the divorcee returning a sweater, the widow trying on a jacket, and the happy couple from Sausalito there seemed to be a clear depiction of what life is.
The other day my friend and I watched David Lynch’s Lost Highway. There was one scene in particular that I kept thinking about from the plotless Lynchian overdrive that lasted two hours too long. A woman and a man make eye contact and the scene falls into a slow motion montage while Lou Reed sings “This Magic Moment.” I suppose in life the best is always yet to come because that is just how time works. There are all these magic moments, like hearing a song for the first time or laughing so hard you cannot breathe. And then there are the other moments, divorce, death, and taxes. My friend Joe told me a few years ago that life is fragile. The last time I was in Alaska a woman in a trailer park told me that life is a good place too. A funny phrase that makes life a physical noun that you can plant your feet on. My life has been feeling hazy and aimless and maybe that is symptomatic of a foggy summer. Friends of mine seem to be living in the place of life that is in between one magic moment from the next. One friend wants to fall in love, while one is falling out of it altogether. One friend wants to move to a new city, while another is happy to stay. There are so many more points of discovery to be made so that one day we can either end up divorced, widowed, or happily ever after.
On my day off I went for a walk and ended up on the Golden Gate Bridge. Tourists walked horizontally and low clouds began to erase the tops of the bridge. I pulled over and leaned against the railing staring at the skyline, whitecaps, and cargo ships. One thing was permanent and fixed, the others temperamentally liminal. The bridge vibrated with forty five mile an hour velocity. The life of mine was on this steel bridge and it would be with me when I go to bed. It will be there when I wake up in the morning and forget to take the trash out. It will get filled with things and moments that make it matter and worth being inconvenienced for. I think of the conversations I have had that have made my life feel worthy of something more than being someone’s daughter, friend, or girlfriend. A life is the sum of its parts, much like a view of a skyline, whitecaped ocean swells, and cargo ships. Each existing independently, however when presented together it is a kind of cacophony that makes sense to whoever cares to look.
This magic moment, so different and so new
…
And then it happened
It took me by surprise
