Sweeping

This year I wished for boredom after last year when I wished for adventure. So whenever something boring is going on, I think, yes! what a bore! My wish is coming true. Sometimes I get so excited that my wish is coming true that my whole body gets hot.

Back when I was younger and I didn’t know what to wish for, I worked in a bagel shop. One time a monk came to visit me there. He said, there’s no such thing as a good kitchen, only a clean kitchen. I was very glad that I didn’t show him around the kitchen. Under the oven, there were gloopy piles of bacon grease covered in poppy and sesame seeds. I bet he would have noticed that right away. At the end of my shift when I would sweep some of the seeds around, my boss would say, this is a seedy business.

I remember that boiling the bagels was exciting, making sure they didn’t burn in the oven was exciting, talking to the hot clammer guys who came in at 6 am was exciting, but sweeping was boring. Sweeping was boring and I didn’t care for it. I rushed the chore and the floor stayed gross, the business stayed seedy, and the monk was disappointed. I figured, you know, cooking doesn’t happen on the floor. Who cares? And my boss never noticed or complained. He had this cadence, this North Shore cadence. His chief concern was the day’s temperature, he wrote it on the chalk board for the customers to see. He would also walk over to the window to see the red sunrise. He wasn’t sure if climate change was real. Everyone said that our bagels tasted more like bread than bagels, and they were right.

That was six years ago now. I keep remembering when the monk came to visit. I gave him a bagel and we walked together up a hill. We walked past a circle of thin redwoods in front of the G. F. Swain Summer Estate. We walked to the Daniel Boone park up at the top of Bayberry Hill. We sat on a bench that sloped backwards and looked at the small pond. He talked to me about attachment and I had no idea what he was talking about. I was fixated on the fact that I had given him a bagel, and I had worked so hard at getting good at making bagels, but I hadn’t really swept the floor. I kept wanting to say, I’m so sorry, you didn’t see it but the floor was covered in seeds and it’s all my fault. But he ate the bagel quietly, he didn’t say anything about whether it was good or bad.

I wish I could remember what he said about attachment, it was probably really wise.

Last year I wished for adventure and that wish came true too. Turns out that some adventures are so boring. I lived in a castle but I never swept the floors. It was all too thrilling, I’m not ready to remember. In quiet moments now I remember a point on the marsh where a piping plover protected her nest. The path curved there. When I remember, I cry, and then I feel the sensation of the tears on my cheeks. The cycle continues, the tears come like the tidal flow.

Over the course of that adventurous year, I walked many miles into town. I had to climb over a gate and walk down a private road to get to town. A billionaire asked if I was a poet and then he asked me to play tennis, I said no to both. I saw swans and great blue herons and the marsh was always beautiful. It was horrible what happened in the rose garden.

-

Maggie asked me what kind of birthday cake I wanted. We were looking out at the lake. Norma was eating tinned fish, I was eating eggs that I hadn’t boiled long enough. What did I say, Maggie? Something like chocolates and figs and jammy persimmons.

The cake was a triumph. Ava sliced it. We distributed pieces to my friends, who just moments before had been quiet with me while I was wishing and blowing.

It’s like a joke, for boredom to be luxurious. Just corners to sweep, silence in the sky, except for birds sometimes first thing in the morning.

Give me a broom and nothing to look forward to. Give me no hope. How about this day and then another one. Everything that was once on the floor is now in the dustpan. And now what was in the dustpan is in the trash. I’m walking barefoot on the frozen floor to notice what I’ve done. I’m looking at a piece of popcorn beside the chair and it’s like, of course this is where the cooking happens. The day is like a windstorm, whatever happened is strewn everywhere. I’m sweeping not to turn back time or erase anything, not to clean or please the monk. I’m making my wishes come true.

It never occurred to me until this storm-day, while singing in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not extensive ones, it is true; but our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings — many of them not so much.

John Muir ~

(what I was reading six years ago when I was restless, before I learned to sweep.)