How to Love a Wolf: March 21, 2020

How to Love a Wolf: Saturday.

A truck passes. The rain is falling, still, as it was an hour ago, hard on the roof above my home office.

A stillness grows in me, too. One I recognize from my childhood, and even days I don’t recall as my childhood. Until now. Days when I felt my age coming onto me like skin building layers and layers; a pre-mature maturity; scars and strengths of small traumas; accumulating when I was not quite ready, built up into melancholic tendencies.

Within all of that, even, a stillness grew; one I now recognize as my friend; and perhaps even, me. A me I love.

I remember spring break in my early years of high school at Detroit Country Day School, where I, a Detroiter, was on a scholarship for “English and the Performing Arts” and for the most part socially (geographically and otherwise) removed from my peers until the later years when friends had cars and socializing in packs was more my speed. I was a loner, but I was friendly and pretty and available. (That’s a different story).

But in those first two early years I remember the winter and spring breaks as times of soft, mundane, melancholic wonder. I remember simply “going outside.” As if to say, “I’m going outside now,” as if this was enough. And it was.

Sometimes I would walk long distances. Sometimes I would check out the nascent action in an untended garden in our back yard, or hang on the swing under the maple tree, sensing my weight (yes, that’s all), listening for dogs barking, doors slamming, and the soft then loud then soft roar of a car stereo bleeding from cracked windows of automobiles biding time in 80s Detroit.

And I remember walking, just walking. To the park maybe, Rosedale, or maybe just a distance gauged on foot away from home and back again; a meander. Our spring breaks didn’t align with the Detroit public schools that my brother and sister and their friends attended.

As I walked I felt lonely, and yet deeply connected to something. Perhaps my aloneness. Now, it feels familiar. It is: my familiar.

I feel that now, too, starting again, beginning in this unrequested time-out. The comfort—time, space, aloneness—it gives me in jolts—in moments, punctuating fear and listlessness, these more than thirty five years later—is profound.

We didn’t use the tv much, my family, and it was never just “on.” When music played it was from a record player and our small collection of records. Sometimes I would replay “tapes” I’d made from the radio. But mostly the sounds were of me, us, living. Occasionally the telephone would ring. Sometimes this gave me a sudden surge of hope that a friend, or a boy, was calling for me. Sometimes the sound disturbed me from reverie, and, awakening me to series of questions (how are you? Do you want to see a movie? etc.) took me from my quiet, keen self-knowing.

The day is grey. The rain has increased. A wet rain. It’s rushing down the drive in shiny dark brown rivers; mud is forming in the indentations where Uber drivers have missed the pavement and rolled onto winter-wounded grass.

Now I realize that the rain is not on the roof above me, but on the roof above the front porch, just ahead of where I’m sitting. Another car rushes; and then another; a spray of wet arcs marks their speed.

Yesterday I worried about the hours passing. I felt twisted by reminders and demands for productivity, many coming from my desire to “take advantage” of this time. Today, less than twenty-four hours later, I see the gift I’ve been given, and the choice that is always there to pay attention to the sound of rain, to let time spent on reading be ...

Several days have passed. It’s Saturday night and the traffic on the road has slowed down.

It’s tenaciously grey now, and the feeling of spring that was so present with me just a couple days ago has subsided. It could be March and it could be November. 10am and 7pm look the same.

I’m sitting on my porch in a black wicker rocking chair. I’m wearing the sweatshirt I’ve had on all day, and sweatpants with pockets. Just now I threw on the fake mink coat and I’m working a very Edie vibe. I’m slowly pressing my feet into the floor of the porch, slanted toward the mulch-y garden plot that I have left untended since moving in, with Salmonella poisoning, in August. I’m rocking back-and-forth. I feel the cold on my face; icy. When I breathe I see steam just in front of my body. I think, “every Saturday night of my high school life prepared me for this.“ I want to laugh, and I see the nostalgic delight in the connection. It also makes me sad, and I want to wrap that child up in the same warmth of this faux fur coat.

I am alone.

We are alone.

I relish my aloneness. I fear it. I pray to it. I beseech it. And bow to it.

It is, when all is said and done, my connection, this aloneness. It it my link. My bridge. My missive. My conduit.

My warmth and the chill of my eternal rain.