Quelque chose de scintillant est dans votre avenir.
Sparkly. It's the word I use to describe a crush⎯the effervescent, fluttery feeling in your stomach, the extra boost of energy, the anticipation, the sense that your vision seems more vivid and crisp than it did yesterday. The world itself dazzles, becomes a place of hope.
I have a tendency to confuse inspiration and attraction. It all gets mixed up in the "sparkly" category. That's one of the reasons traveling to a new city is so exciting: the sense of limitless potential, the unfamiliarity that's intriguing, yet slightly frightening. Wanting—no, needing—to explore. To discover. It's like having a crush on a place.
Then there's conference travel, which involves converging on a single hotel with a couple thousand people who spend their days thinking about the kinds of things you do (e.g., the Renaissance Society of America). Only in such conditions can you fall into a conversation with a friendly lady on the Montreal city bus, only to learn that she studies Byzantine-era Cyprian altarpieces, and has a million ideas about the significance of Shakespeare setting Othello in Cyprus. (You happen to know a few things about Othello and Cyprus, too.) In your parallel reality, the one that only exists in your head⎯and in scattered North American cities a few weekends a year⎯riding the bus is always this magical.
The future can be sparkly, but the past has a way of taking on a crystalline quality, as well. I'm not talking about nostalgia, nothing so banal as that, but instead the realization that certain moments of your life could not have turned out any other way⎯moments that, even though you may have been too nervous or sad to notice it at the time, were perfect.
So, conferences, intellectual affinities, travel, and crushes. For me, the best one was another inaugural trip to a French-speaking city: New Orleans.
(Looking back now, I see that I had ranked the list exactly backwards. Gah.) So I kept the crush to myself, and simply felt grateful to them for bringing me back to life.
Around the same time, one of my best friends died. He was only forty-three years old. It was acute alcoholism that got him. He concealed it pretty well. I saw him growing frail, but he stayed his basic self⎯cracking wise, buying too much crap from QVC, zipping around the neighborhood in his white Mini. He rebuffed all inquiries about his health⎯"Never tell a gay man he's not looking well!" (He had long worn his louche lifestyle as a badge of honor. Several years earlier, he had completed the Minneapolis-Chicago AIDS ride with an ashtray Krazy Glued to his bike's top tube, chain-smoking all 400 miles.) God, how I loved him.
John bled out in his apartment⎯at night, in excruciating pain, alone.
All he could talk about in the last weeks was a vacation he was planning to New Orleans. The culminating event would be a dinner at Brigtsen's, his favorite restaurant. I must have heard a course-by-course exegesis of every Brigtsen's meal he'd ever enjoyed, until it assumed mythical status in my mind. He had called to announce his visit, he told us. The chef was expecting him.
He was already dead by the time his vacation week rolled around. I was going to be in New Orleans for a conference. Some of us decided to fly down and keep his dinner reservation.
Spring 2004. Even though it was early April, the night felt humid. The open streetcar provided a welcome breeze as we glided down St. Charles. A light evening rain glistened on the asphalt. Stray Mardis Gras beads from a few weeks before still hung from the magnolias lining the avenue. Our mood was a mix of revelry and grief, both for our departed friend. I had been in conference paper sessions all day. It had been completely cerebral⎯this bathwater night was purely physical.
At Brigtsen's, upon our explaining who we were and why we were there, the hostess gasped and ushered us back into the kitchen, where the chef wept for John and promised us a dinner worthy of his friend's memory. I glanced over to a framed photo on the wall. It was the twins⎯the ray of light in my recently dark life. More like a lightning bolt.
And just like that, we were their people, too. We belonged. The room was hardly big enough to hold all the love.
How to tie up all these connections into a neat conclusion? Not sure. But I can tell you, based on past experience: keep your eyes open. You may not see it coming, it may speed past you in a blur, but something sparkly is in your future.
Thank you for this, Rachel. I haven't been feeling like there is anything sparkly anywhere, and this brought some long-delayed tears.
This was special. Thank you for sharing.
Nothing to say but wow. I'm going to be re-reading this one all day long. Thank you, Rachel!
A friend and I used to use "sparkly", faute de mieux, to describe the ineffable quality we sought in romantic partners and rarely found. I've never found a really good way of talking about it, though AWB came close when we were discussing a thing we look for in friends: "they have to be able to riff." Winnicott might call it the ability to play. There's lots of it in this posting.
My early comment got hung up somewhere, so forgive me if this repeats, but all I could say was: scintillating. Thank you so much.
DU . . . !
Thanks for reawakening my crush on TGW.
Thanks, everyone. I miss you. In Montreal I was mostly by myself, and while that was special in its way, it would have been so much better with friends.
This was a lovely (and dare I say sparkly) piece. That must've been some dinner. I think your friend would have been overjoyed to know you kept his reservation: what a fitting way to honor his memory.
Oh, man, I just re-read this, and I'm all verklempt again. I love how it hangs together with an emotional, rather than intellectual, sense. Each event and period connects to all the others by how they make you feel.
This is lovely. What a wonderful way to catch up on TGW and my most sparkly friend.