A New Idea

Edinburgh

Richard Toon at Bridge House, South Bristol, Maine

The thing about Edinburgh is I know nothing about it. The same as getting together with Richard. Edinburgh is the Richard of cities. Nice looking, some sort of cobblestone history, foreign, open to visitors. No ghosts, no mirrors. In Edinburgh, we will be new, and we will begin again. How does this light switch work? Will we need adapters to charge our entire lives? I will be a person who has left home to think freely elsewhere, and maybe that will be a value to the place I have left.

Richard says, “You won’t understand anyone’s accent.” I say, “It will be easier than learning Italian.” He says, “No, it won’t.” I say, “Well, we can’t live in Italy, or Scandinavia, because neither of us is Italian or Scandinavian.” Richard says, “We speak Danish.” I say, “We learned one word from watching Borgen.” He says, “It was a good word.”

He’s reading Wittgenstein again. It happens every so often. To Wittgenstein, the statement “I can’t have someone else’s pain” does not express an emotional impossibility but a logical one. Each person exists in the limits of a body and that body’s pain can exist only inside that body. Wittgenstein meant that even if lions created a language with grammar, we wouldn’t understand the grammar of a lion because the grammar of a lion would form from being a lion.

We are going ahead with the renovations on our house the way we go hiking when we visit places we don’t live in. I mean, we’re living in the spirit of what’s around that curve in the trail. Richard likes to say, “That part of the trail will be exactly like this part of the trail.” I say, “There could be rocks we haven’t seen before.” And Kamala could win.

Maine Coastal Botanical Gardens. Garden of giant ferns named after Jewish women. Pictured: Fern Rosenbaum and Fern Goldstein-Horowitz.

For a few days last week we were in Maine, visiting a friend. We had almost none of our stuff with us, and we were happy. We drove to the Maine Coastal Botanical Gardens and spoke to the staff entomologist in the butterfly house. I said, “How did you get started with bugs?” He said, “As a kid, I turned over a log, and I was hooked.” I said, “How long do the butterflies in here live?” He said, “On average two weeks. Some live as long as four weeks.”

It makes you think about time the way the times we are living in make you think about exit strategies. If you live near a volcano, let’s say, and you hear rumblings and smell smoke, that could be the signal to pack up the matzahs and get out of Dodge. The entomologist named a moth that doesn't have a mouth and lives a week. I said, “That seems long enough.” He said there is also a species of moth that can live as long as a year. “In the winter, their bodies get cold like ice cream, not cold like an ice cube, so the cold doesn't injure the cells. They come back the way frogs come back.” Richard and I streamed a TV show we liked set in Edinburgh. There were a lot of steps. Up and down the steps the characters walked, and I could see how this would be good exercise for us. If lions had grammar, they would no longer be lions.

Edinburgh

On the way back from Maine, we spent a night in Concord, New Hampshire, visiting another friend. The people I’ve known a long time love Richard, and this makes life easier on everyone. Richard left the UK, hoping never to live there again. Why? Because of the class system. Because of ghosts and mirrors. Yesterday, when we were walking on Warren Street, he said, “There are friends in England I’d like to see again.” I said, “This time, I’ll be the foreigner.”  He said, “You’ll start talking with an English accent.” I said, “Like Madonna?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Then, please kill me.”

In order to leave for our trip to Maine, we had to relocate all the plants from the house outside to the gardens, so our beloved neighbor Mary could do the watering. It was hot while we were away. It also rained quite a bit, and she only had to come over once, she said. When we returned home, we had to clean all the pots and return them to their places in the house. Richard said, “We are the plant pots.”

We have a friend H we are hoping will live in our house while we’re away. In our minds, H will know Mary, and somehow H, Mary, and our beloved friend Bill, who mows our lawns and has helped us in a million ways over the years, somehow Mary and Bill will be resources for H, the way they have been for us. Is this how plans form? When has anything I imagined in the future turned out right?

Our friend in New Hampshire met us for breakfast the morning we left and gave me a present. This friend knows exactly what to buy for me, and she is exceedingly generous. I often wonder what it would be like to know her grammar, even though I am a lion. She gave me a box from Chanel that contained a bottle of Chanel N* 5 perfume. The thing we both love, too, this friend and I, is the packaging. I’m going to show you a picture of the box. Pretend it’s the next house we will live in. I will place the box on a shelf in my closet. How could you ever let go of a box like this? I will place the box on a shelf in my closet, and I will imagine it waiting for us all the time we are away.

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