Discussed:
Since, MCA Recordings, 1998
The Hill, Overcoat Reordings, 2000
Impasse , Overcoat Recordings, 2002
Meadow, Merge, 2006
Thesis: You can’t hold a thing at the level of disarray you like best.


That sense of young adulthood–which is about striving and getting seriously wrecked for the first times and never-feeling-quite-there-yet, resides, for many of us, in our twenties. And if this is true, then it’s no surprise that the music of Richard Buckner grabbed ahold of and destroyed me again and again that decade. But, pulling out old cds this week and listening to them again, I felt more drawn to the enormous loss that permeates every note on Buckner’s albums.


I. The Ode.
Richard Buckner’s voice is a clear baritone with crackly edges that’s easy to sing along to one octave up. His chord progressions are idiosyncratically his. His sound is sort of a ragged—dare-I-say-it—Americana. What so many artists, it seems, try to be, his sound just is: Music writers have gotten in the habit of late of saying that certain performers sound like they’ve crawled out of an Edgar Lee Masters poem or an early 20th-century piece of woodwork, but with the best Buckner songs, you can check the Shaker joints, and they’re solid. They’re good, while so many new upstarts sound a bit pasteboard to me. If you want to feel haunted by ghosts, check out The Hill, one of Buckner’s best, an album in which he sets Masters’ Spoon River Anthology to music. The thing about Richard Buckner though, is that he’s not, by any stretch, trying to be old-timey. His songs, even those with electric guitars, just sound deep and rough. Singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards is a fan of his; they toured together once, and I hear traces of him in her early work, too: in the drive, the weariness, the casual/heartbreaking delivery of disappointing truths.

In Buckner’s work, there’s a lot about lack of satisfaction too, but in his best songs, it’s highlighted and sometimes underscored by these silvery flecks of light as the narrator is felled by the beauty of a moment or a woman or a dream. His songs, as well as their tone and their aesthetic to my mind, are all very Nothing gold can stay. The beloved shines for just a moment in the mind’s eye of the listener even as the nature of the vision is never exactly clear—as his lyrics, in his prime, were so weird, so sparse, so abstract; these songs tend to end abruptly, as if they’re fed up or know when to cut and run, or they’ve just run plum out of steam all at once.

Once I interviewed him for the arts section of Wilmington, North Carolina’s newspaper. He said to me, “I hate little crafty songs: verse, chorus, verse, you know: ‘Here comes that train again.’ I want a nice surprise. I want to hear something new.” Still, for all its little surprises, his best music is also tuneful and hella-cathartic, if not catchy in the pop sense. It sticks with you. Or with me, at least.

a Showboat Motel, Casper night. The river’s high and losing/
I’ll watch her flaming figure fly & burn on out at your ruins
as Felt belts out a warning of some Spanish house I’ve known; cut to the bone: quick to the que.
-from “Ocean Cliff Clearing” Richard Buckner, Since

The same cannot be said of his lyrics. I realized again the other day how, although I can sit here and hum every single note of Richard Buckner’s seminal album, Since, I can’t sing a single one of its songs from start to finish. They are all so melodic that they beguile me into forgetting that I don’t really know them, not the way I imagine I do, even as I’m listening, and by now, that’s been dozens and dozens of times. I fancy Buckner’s music to be my companion, but although I need it from time to time, I’ve never owned it completely: I’ll be on a road trip and put on Since or Impasse and try to sing along anyway, the sound turned up so loud I don’t notice how often I’m going, “Dahhhhh-dahh-dahhhm,” over top of some charging or wistful melody.


II. The Shows.
Here’s another mystery: The first time I saw him play, I didn’t know and still don’t know what on earth he was doing there. Why play a show in Wilmington, North Carolina? Nobody came to Wilmington. It’s a coastal town three hours from anywhere across swampy scrublands. (Chapel Hill way to the west, and Myrtle Beach way to the south are the nearest towns.) The small club that hosted him did very little to advertise his show. I’d simply seen his name in a flyer a month before and begged my editor to do the story. The crowd there that night was small. After he played, he got up and walked back through the crowd, acknowledging no one, out into the night, and was gone. It made no sense.

I had napped right up until show time, through the opener and everything. I remember getting up, turning off the window unit and its liquid slosh when I did, the aftersmell of Freon. Walking through my darkened efficiency apartment, down the carpeted, padded steps, outside into the muggy dark of the summer, alone, always alone that summer. Richard Buckner didn’t mean what it once had to me. Since had once meant the big troubled Us of a former relationship, but by then, the relationship was a memory and the album’s music had come to be mine alone. No one I came into contact anymore knew it or him.

Buckner was touring for an album three albums later; it was okay and I found myself listening to it lots in that old efficiency, or driving to or from the grocery store or the beach, gearing myself up for the phone interview my editor had approved. I had been nervous that Buckner would be harsh on the phone since he had a rep for bitterness after a storied conflict with RCA, which recorded Since, that beautiful album, then promptly swept it under the rug. During our phone conversation, he was firm and decisive, but not rude. This—interviews with arts papers—was just part of the job, just like touring. He did both out of simple duty.

The muddy flat river smell rising up through the old streets as I walked down to the club and bought a Newcastle, chatted with my editor from the paper, then stood alone with my second beer and drunkenly listened, listing as Buckner played, as he paid no one in the sparse crowd any attention. I was just drunk enough and he was good enough that it was religious for me. The North Carolina show was one long song, a legato stream of the tunes I knew, played without pause and largely without acknowledgement of the audience—but I could recognize the songs; and I walked home that night from that small town show, satisfied.


III. The Ruin.
But as time went on, so did the entropy of Richard Buckner’s sound, and two years later, in Atlanta, things had changed. By then, he had morphed the renditions of what he played into one, long, shambling thing interjected with muttered, unintelligible lyrics and some looping synth or other. Standing there in the slurry of sound, I felt annoyed and yes, bored. The performance reminded me one of those houses whose inhabitants keep building rooms without regard to building codes, appearance, or comfort. I’d had the tunes of his songs to cling to and care about, and now those tunes were gone and only the cryptic play of words, muttered at will, remained.

The songs I had once known or at least had been able to pick out were just gone—had fallen far past any resemblance. His voice now, too, was such a vague mutter now, and his disregard of the small crowd of mostly middle-aged men was so complete that it occurred to me that we were an annoyance to him. “A way to pay the bills,” he’d told me in the phone interview back in North Carolina. Now, as in that state, he finished the show and left the room with just a small nod to those of us who stood there.

You can hear the endings in the beginnings if you listen hard enough, and Buckner’s earliest album, Bloomed, is mostly standard, unsurprising alt country, but its lyrics already suggest the bright spark and autumnal ruin that would characterize his later work. His last album, by contrast, features lyrics so sparse that each line seems a placeholder for some entire chapter left undrawn; to me as a listener, it’s too sketchy. Truthfully, I can’t get much from it.

So I stick to those middle albums, the ones that contained that interplay of wreckage and light, of bitterness and hope. It’s this balance of these elements that made them beautiful, not-quite-scrutable lyrics and all. As I said earlier, these were albums originally paired with a relationship I had in my twenties that often felt about to keel right off its own rockers, too. It was my first crushing blow when it finally did. I couldn’t hold it together.

But when I listen now, I am incapable of feeling much about that time anymore except a faint wistfulness. I listen for the music itself, and that wreckage/light, bitterness/hope thing that beats with every note.

What disheartens me with the man today is that it’s the former of both pairings that seem to have won out. And I don’t know that things could have turned out any differently. Now when I listen, sometimes, I just hear sadness. But I can’t stop listening.

You listen, too.
“Ocean Cliff Clearing”
“Slept”
From The Hill

And for the past few days, this is how I think to tell people I’m marrying Marshall. So far, I’ve resisted that urge. Instead of singing about the chapel of love, I say I’m getting hitched, because I love the way that sounds. But really, I’m getting married. I’m going to be a wife, and Marshall’s going to be my husband. Further, as he poked fun at me on Saturday morning when he realized it, I’m gonna be a “Mrs.” “Mrs.” stands for “Missus,” and look at that word, spelled out. It’s right up these with “moist” on the grossness scale. It makes me want to run for my doctorate and zip from “Mrs.” to “Dr.” faster than you can say, “You bet I do.”
Nor are we going to the chapel.
Nor will I have bridesmaids.
And no tossing of bouquets, garters, or anything else that forces guests into group-activities and makes predictions about people’s marital statuses.
And no dj who dictates our reception’s activities. I don’t want to put lovevd ones who’ve traveled from near and far at the risk of The Macarena or a forced and utterly confounding “Piano Man” singalong at the end of the night. (See: My sister’s wedding, last year. And granted, we were tipsy enough and just-plain-happy enough to get a kick out of the fact that the dj forced remaining guests into a circle to sing a tune that’s waaay up there in the top-ten of Most Depressing, Ever. But it’s not for me.)

Finally, I’m not spending hundreds of dollars on a gown. I’m not wearing a gown; I’m not Cinderella.

Family, yes. Friends, yes. We will have a pithy ceremony outdoors…somewhere. I kind of want to wear one of those pretty mantilla-things in my hair. That might not be what they’re called. There will be dancing. There will be good food, and copious wine and beer. Then we will travel.

We know all this even though we haven’t yet started to plan anything. Marshall asked me to marry him Friday afternoon, in a car, in a rainstorm. I’d picked him up after he’d gotten caught with his bike in the downpour on the way home from work. I’d just taken our dog to play outside and she and I left muddy prints all over the floor. When I’d left the house to get Marshall, she’d begun whining. When he asked, I didn’t yet have my foot off the clutch. It was perfect. I just want to think about that for a while—how I want every day to be like that. We’ll get to caterers later.

Postscript.
Also? I write this from Pittsburgh, where my father is watching Cash Cab in the other room. Why don’t they have Cash Subway, or Cash? It Looks Like You’re Hoofing It for folks can’t afford to take taxis everywhere all the time—and to get some of that dinero into slightly more deserving hands? Hands of people who could use it…to, say, plan an affordable wedding? Just an idea.

More like this.

As it turns out, a bit of a scaredy-cat

Saturday, I took her to the fancy-dancy pet store in Virginia Highlands, where, it has been my experience in the past, you can blow your week’s earnings on a single organic chew toy and collar. And dogs love it there! Everyone’s tossing them treats. They get lots of admiring comments; they meet other dogs. So, I was psyched to bring Lula there for the very first time before our first walk in Piedmont Park.

Then we arrived.

The nice, bearded guy behind the counter praised her good door manners. Then he tossed her a treat. Her tail plunged, from a tentative top-wobble, straight between her legs. She leaned against me, cowering, and emitted a low growl. Then another man—unbearded—tried to toss her another treat. Her growl turned into a fierce bark I’d never heard, and she rested her entire 44-pound bodily weight against my knees. She barked and snapped. As I tried to maneuver us over to the treats and portable water bowls, she slunk about my ankles, whining and growling. She barked at every man we saw. It was hard to go anywhere in the store, she was so clingy. And I was just…floored.

So I ended up just kind of standing there. “This is new,” I said vaguely to the two guys working, not knowing what else to say. What had happened to my sweet girl? Who was this man-fearing, slinking, growling dog?

The guys started right in exhorting me to take her to the store’s five-million dollar training class. “You want this to be the next 14 years of your life?” said the one guy, all tough-love knowing. I wanted to punch him. If he’d let me talk, I would have told him that yes, I know the five-million-dollar trainer is amazing; I’d taken my old dog to his training classes years ago and yes, I knew the value of training and had been planning to train her anyway—somewhere significantly less expensive.

Because—let’s review. The expenses of a new dog:

• Adoption fee: $200
• Crate: $100
• Identification tag: $9.99
• 1 bag/fancydancy dog food she’s used to: $25
• Food/water bowls, leash, collar, chew toys: ~$45
• Treats for trainin’: $3.95
• More expensive, non copious-diarrhea-causing treats: $7.95
• 3 Months’ heartworm preventative: $40
• 3 Months’ flea and tick preventative: $67
• 1 Car-seat protector, purchased at discount, online: $25
• Second identification tag, for microchip: $9.00

The night before, on a walk, I’d gotten to talking about getting a choke-chain and a clicker for training, and Marshall, who was full of affection for Lula and 100% onboard for all of the above expenses—but who had, all the same, reviewed his own bank account the night before—burst out, “Jesus. All this just seems like it could be a bottomless pit of dog expenses.” And I couldn’t really say anything to that. Because he was right. But we also needed a choke-chain and a clicker.

But moreover, at that moment in the pet store, I was shocked and upset not at all because of the money, but because this sweet creature I’d just spent an intense two days getting to know, had all at once, turned into a different dog–and it was shocking. Lula had showed nothing but doting affection for Marshall since Day 1. So, what was it about these five men in the pet store—and come to think of it, the bearded friend of ours we’d had over for dinner the night before?

The pet shop boys’ dueling lecture on rescue animals flew by me at a rapid clip. They enjoined me not to give up or think Lula was a bad dog, but I just stood there and waited for them to stop. I already knew all this. No way was I going to give up. It was just getting used to this new idea of a dog with Issues that had me riveted, silent, to the floor in the middle of the pet store. That, and said-dog’s butt, pressed fiercely against my shins, preventing me from taking even a step forward without just stepping over her.

So, I was not quite in my right mind when I finally moved laterally over to the counter and picked out an overpriced, poorly-designed portable dog water bottle and a six-dollar organic rawhide stick that would take Lula exactly one hour to consume. The thing was, driving to the park, glancing back to see her lying down, content, in the back seat, chewing the stick, I regretted nothing.

I was looking for some sort of “man-hating-hah-hah” pic to go with this post, but quickly changed my mind–because, of course, that whole equation of feminists with “man-hating” is just so tired. Besides, Lula’s just scared of ‘em. Still, this is pretty funny, huh?

It’s gotten to the point that I’ve been dreaming of having found my dream dog; these ridiculous, “Oh, there you are,” dreams involving some mutt presenting itself as my dear long-lost—the way we sometimes dream of people we love who’ve died. I have these post-work phonecalls about dinner groceries with Marshall in which these long pauses occur on my end, signaling him to say, “Okay, where’s the dog, Katy?” Because I’ll be at a stoplight and a Sweet Dog has just crossed with its owner in front of me, or it’s romping in the park I’m driving by. And this moment has neatly erased whatever I’d been about to say.


From Looking to Leaping.
I’ve spent so many months saying things about our clear lack of time and money that this refrain, of “Not-right-now.-Not yet.” had worn a rut in our days. Once you change your mind and make the decision to do it, to get a dog, those lack-of-time-and-money facts just seem like lazy excuses of a person Refusing to Live. Why, you think now, a lot of people have dogs just wander into their lives, and look at them! They’re fine!

Yes, I’m aware of the parallel this is striking: that this is just the kind of thing some women say about babies. Displacement, shhishplacement. Your toddler is cute and all, but I know I want a dog.

So, the night I came home from the yoga and it was Marshall—feline-and-calm-life-loving Marshall, not me—who was combing through the online dog listings, I tried to play it cool. But by the end of the night, after we’d agreed that there were a few good candidates out there we wanted to see about, it was I who stayed up long after he’d fallen asleep reading on the couch—click, click, clicking and sighing.

By the weekend, we had two chief candidates that fulfilled our specifications, which were:

1. a mutt

2. Not too big, not too small: 30-40 pounds

3. Not a puppy

4. Not too damn smart. We didn’t have the time to constantly divert some genius Collie who constantly needed to be working and solving and doing.

5. Indifferent to cats, specifically, to our two cats

Marshall added (6.) Had to like playing with a tennis ball, since his main goal, dogwise, was to have a fetch partner

Candidate #1, Cosmo, loooved cats, according to his online description. A 30-lb mutt so mutt-y they had no idea what to say he was, Cosmo loved playing with tennis balls and was really well trained. Mainly, his photos were just so gosh-darn cute that it was Marshall, not me, who insisted that we had to go see him.

Then there was #2. Cooper fit all our specifications eerily. A medium-sized lab mix, he was “just as happy jogging in the park and playing with other dogs as he was lazing on the couch.” His foster home had three cats and he didn’t give a rat’s ass about ‘em. I think the wording for that was a bit different, but his description, along with the photo of a sweet-looking lab lying on a sofa had me emailing the rescue group faster than you can say, “Sit.”

Saturday: Brother, can you spare a treat?
We drove waaay up I-75, north of the city to meet Cosmo, who’d be at a Petsmart there as part of his rescue group’s weekly sidewalk sale operation. This–after I sprang out of bed at the crack of dawn, all Christmas morning-y in my soul. I grabbed all my old dog training books from their dusty old lower-shelf perch, brought them back to bed, and began reading certain fascinating facts about positive reinforcement, clicker training, and primate body signals to Marshall. He grunted in response and asked if I could, pretty please, put the coffee on.

When we got to Petsmart, they were still unloading the dogs and their crates. My heart leapt when I was sure I spotted Cosmo in the mix. Marshall stopped the car and let me out, and I trotted over, full of single-minded mission.

It turned out the dog in question was not Cosmo, but another, older dog. After a few minutes, Marshall joined me and I asked a volunteer if she knew which dog was Cosmo. “Oh. Stan’s walking him this way now. That’s his foster dad,” she said, and we followed her gaze: to a very small dog, leaping and prancing and tugging forward and back on a leash. The foster man smiled up at us as another, older couple closed in. “Is that Cosmo?” they asked. “We came out to see him, too,” they informed us, and for the next few minutes, the four of us stood around the wriggly dog, asking questions and trying to avoid an air of competition. The foster man would say, “He just loves other dogs and romping,” and the couple would say, “We have two playful labs and a half-acre backyard at home,” and then shrug, unassuming, at Marshall and me.

To me, Cosmo was not quite the dog he had seemed in the photo, although I couldn’t say why. His eyes weren’t as sweet—or maybe it was the way he seemed more interested in leaping at the dogs barking from their crates than in sniffing any of us. I turned to Marshall, but he’d already lost interest and moved on.

It turned out there were two animal rescue groups side-by-side that day. And as they kept unloading, this translated to dozens—and dozens-of dogs, all barking or wrestling or lying, defeated in the noonday heat, in various crates and crate-like wire set-ups there outside the store. It was like a Hooverville for dogs.

One of the groups was run by a no-nonsense woman who reminded me of the jaunty lesbian dog trainer lady in the movie Best in Show. I’d ask her about a dog that seemed appealing to me, and she’d veto each one, all pert and matter-of-fact. “Nope. That one’s bitten three children.” “Nope. That one’s got too much energy for you.” “Nope. That one needs to live with other dogs.” “That one’s the best dog that was ever born, but he’s got an incurable illness and needs to take medication every day of his life.”

We met Baby, a sweet, ancient lab who hobbled on the leash, her tale between her legs, avoiding our hands as we reached out to let her sniff us. “If you want one with soul, that’s your girl,” said the woman. “But don’t expect to bond with her today.”

There was the basset hound who’d just given birth to ten puppies. (“She’s not nearly as old as she looks.”) We attempted walking the basset through the store, but she was so profoundly un-interested in this exercise that it quickly turned into our dragging her, belly-down, across the shiny floor. It began to seem as if every one of these dogs—and perhaps every dog available for adoption in all the world–was too much for us or just warped beyond repair.

Someone placed one of the basset puppies in my arms. It was warm and extremely sweet. “No one ever adopts the black dogs,” whispered its young foster mother, a teenager who had painted the older basset’s claws fluorescent pink. I stood, staring into the tiny basset’s eyes. Maybe this was right. I pet the little black dog. It needed a rescuer. “You are doing such a good thing, rescuing a dog,” the lead woman had told me. Maybe this dog needed me. I looked into its face and saw a sweet, passive blank slate, but I wasn’t excited. Marshall and I exchanged a long, silent look. Then we left, dogless.

When we got home, I opened an email about Dog #2, Cooper. It opened with the same ultra-positive sort of greeting used by all dog rescue groups to potential adopters. “Hi there, Kate! We are so glad about your interest in Cooper! He’s such a great boy!!” Unfortunately, the writer went on, he had also developed extremely aggressive tendencies in the past week. He was working with a trainer, but she could understand if I was no longer interested. My heart sank as I responded: No.

Later that night, another missive from Cooper’s agency: She’d talked with another foster about us, and thought she had just the dog for us: a lab mutt named Bindi. Bindi would be at a different Petsmart the next day, Sunday. We’d be there, I wrote back.

Falling asleep that night, I envisioned the hundreds of chain pet stores across Atlanta as seen from some cartoonish aerial view. All teemed with dark specks. Zooming in, you could see these were puppies and dogs, hundreds, then thousands spilling out into concrete strip mall parking lots and coloring it all black, the color no one wants. Then I thought back to the conversation I’d had over dinner with a couple I’d just met. “The right dog will choose you,” they had said.

Sunday
Sunday morning we took it easy. We cleaned the house. Made phonecalls and ran errands.

Driving down the hill on Ponce de Leon Ave that drops you into the gulley where the strip mall sits, across from City Hall East on your left, you are granted a clear view of the large sky. Today, an angry block of dark slate clouds took up the exact half the sky not occupied by blue sky and stubborn summer heat. “Uh, oh,” said Marshall.

Just one rescue group was there on this Petsmart sidewalk. I asked a volunteer about Bindi and mentioned my email exchange with—someone—and she brightened up. “Oh, you! Yes! I’ll…” and then she disappeared off to secure crates for three dogs who had just arrived. As we waited, we looked around. I could have been wrong, or maybe just better prepared after the day before, but these mutts seemed calmer. They all seemed to sit at attention, looking at the volunteers and fosters, waiting for something good to happen. I pet a cute brindle while Marshall stared through the bars at a black lab with giant moon eyes. Just then, the first sheet of rain hit. Everyone scrambled to move the crates further under the overhang. I pet the small brindle some more as Marshall and I huddled against the wet gusts.
“I’m cold,” he said.
“Ah, but we’ll remember this day forever,” I responded, glancing down at the brindle mutt. Just then, I felt a different dog licking my ankle. I turned around and saw: sweet dog eyes. A long dog tail waving like a fan behind her white and tan body. I leaned down and pet her and she leaned on me through the bars.
“Who is this?” said Marshall, his voice getting warm and gooey–something I had not heard from him once yet during these two days.
I turned the card on the crate over: “This is…Bindi,” I said. “This is that dog.” And after four joyous laps with her around the pet store, Marshall agreed.

The four-page adoption application took ten minutes to fill out; it included questions about our house, our other pets, and what we would do in various hypothetical dog situations. Then we shook hands with Bindi’s foster and reluctantly saw her back to the crate.


Waiting.
In the next few days, we repaired the fence in the backyard and picked our shoes and socks up off the bedroom floor, in preparation for Lula’s arrival. (During our walk through the store, we’d decided that she was no Bindi. “I think she’s a Lula,” Marshall said, and, as is usual about these sorts of things, he was absolutely right.) A few days later, a volunteer from the group came over to inspect out house. She posed more hypothetical situations: a dog that repeatedly runs away. A dog that chews up everything you own. A dog that growls at your mother. A dog that gets old and starts peeing everywhere. “Under what circumstances,” she asked, “would you get rid of the dog?” I knew the answer. I was in this for the long-haul. We signed the adoption papers and forked over the check.

Then we had a week to wait. We were going out of town. I went on a cleaning and organizing spree that made no sense. What does a dog care about a clean bathtub? A tidy closet? Displacement, shish—oh, fine.

Then, like that, the long, long week of waiting was over.


And I want to show you something.


This: A doodle Marshall drew two weeks ago when envisioning his ideal dog, “a dog-dog,” he said.

Marshall's Dream Dog

Sweet as pie.

Illustration from The Little House, Virginia Lee Burton, 1942

II
Meanwhile, up in Brookhaven, there’s this family trying to save their house. It’s been in the family since the 19th century, since before the Civil War, since the road it was on—one Peachtree Street—was still a dirt path in a lot of places. One acre remains of what was hundreds. From the road, I’ve been told, you don’t see any evidence of a farmhouse; only the giant grey block of an Extended Stay (which brings to mind for me, evacuees from Katrina a few years ago, a whole army of people with their own Home issues).

The family whose name the house carries cannot afford to pay the taxes on their property anymore. It’s zoned commercially, and from what I’ve read, it seems they’ve exhausted just about every option to get some sort of historic protection. They’re selling. They have no choice, and they’re terrified that the buyers, whoever they may be, will raze the place or take crummy care of it, so that sooner or later, the end result will be the same: the house will be gone.

This has gone on for years now. I imagine they must just be so tired. What happens when Home becomes, not just your everyday experience, and not just your personal feeling, memory, and attachment, but the weight of generations of your own family who’ve become legend not just to you, but to your city? The weight of History. What happens when all of this becomes your responsibility to save? What complicated resentments arise?

And this question: Where to place your heart. Where does Zen Buddhism place it? I think of all those walkers-away again, those people leaving the keys to their castles with their banks. Empty pockets. Empty hands. The problem with zen, to me, is its emphasis on emptiness. What about your heart and what about your heart? I want to ask.

III
This weekend, visiting Beach Town, a friend and I were eating Mexican food, and I mentioned wanting to leave Atlanta at some point. “I just don’t want to settle down there,” I said, faltering in my tone even as I spoke, for this is a top cliché for Atlanta residents (one that I’ve fallen prey to, time and time again): to say, for years and years and years, that we don’t want to settle down here, even as we settle right on in.
He caught the hesitation. “Why not?”
And I spoke the old litany about car culture, etcetera, etcetera, but even in my response, I wound back around to our house and our happy domesticity. The garden. The porch. The yard for a dog soon/someday. All the painting we’ve done. Our neighborhood. The farmers’ market and drive-in.

And Marshall and I have all these rules:
1. I don’t want to live somewhere cloudy.
2. Marshall doesn’t want to live somewhere very cold.
3. I don’t want to live somewhere that people are less friendly and open.
4. I don’t want to live somewhere significantly less green.

“It sounds like you’ve made your decision,” said my friend.
“For now,” I said, and smiled.

I know that this means that people are abandoning their houses that are, as news puts it, “underwater,” i.e., worth less than people owe the banks for them. But I never hear that term, “underwater,” without imagining these houses’ interiors in some slow watery light. As if their inhabitants one day land their feet on the floor by the bed with a splish, which soon becomes a deeper ploosh. Before they know it, they are paddling to and from the refrigerator; they are reading the New York Times floating from room to room on rafts. But then it becomes too much. Seaweed springs from the corners of the banisters they paid way too much money for, the banisters which, when they stop and think of it, they don’t even really own yet, huh. And the koi—so beautiful in the late afternoon, swimming around in the light of that gorgeous western exposure! But when the catfish move in, those bottomfeeders, taking up residence on the hardwood floors their own feet no longer ever touch, they know it’s time to go. It’s all underwater now. And humans cannot live this way.

As the news puts it, they are “walking away from their homes.” That nostalgic spin in word choice: “their homes.” There they go, locking the door with their worldly possessions still inside—I picture photos of grandparents and books and family relics, all locked within. They turn the key, walk to a nearby bank and drop it in the deposit shoot. Then—they just walk away. Away from it all—some generation of zen masters. Not just walking away from worldly possessions, but walking away from Home, from the idea of it. A simple, somnambulant move, only everyone here is alert and focused. There’s a whole herd of them, calmly leaving their wedding-gift Kitchenaid mixers, their basements full of paint cans and winter clothes, their garden shovels and scrapbooks and every dream and disillusionment they once had for the banks to sort out. Heading blankly, serenely, for the horizon.

Knees scraped, I stood and grinned at my friends. “Now it’s a vacation,” I said.

Weekend in beachtown. A kapow punch that makes you realize you’ve gone waaaay too far in one direction. There is danger in associating a place with all that is good, with all that works in your favor, because it simply isn’t ever true; when I lived here, I had my share of misadventure, my share of angst and dread mostly of my own invention. But a vacation here reminds me of what should be. At the risk of sounding…

—I want to write some sentence starting with those words. To apologize for the hackneyed form these constructions take, coming out of so rusty an instrument. (There’s nothing worse, after all, than knowing what quality is and the ability to recognize your own distance from it, but not yet knowing what to do to bridge that gulf. That knowledge, it paralyzes. That knowledge is the very worst thing.)

But I’m tired of thinking, “At the risk of sounding” anything. So, what’s needed is: More yoga, less Facebook. More music playing, less applying for jobs I don’t even really want. More writing. Fewer status updates. More writing. Less networking. More friendships. Perhaps a little less coffee. More time in this world as it is. Less thinking about its artifice.

And us? We live for the life we want. For me those are the fleeting moments with the dear students I have this semester or producing stories at my interim radio job. In free daylight moments, there’s a sensation of want as I scour the internet for jobs and collect rejections from agents who say the writing’s good but the subject matter’s not this or not that. In this striving, nothing fits. So we make popcorn. So we coast the beautiful springtime trail on our bicycles; we eat some rich brand of oatmeal cookie and bake popovers at a friend’s house. Fresh rosemary from the yard. Dreaming of the dish to come as I rake free its sticky spines with my fingers.

At my niece’s Girl Scout bridging ceremony, we cheer her on. We are louder than any of the other prim parents. But then I spot a pair of suede sandals on her classmate, decide I must have the adult equivalent, and the next morning I hunt down and purchase a pair on the internet. The shoes are hopelessly trendy; I would never have wanted them last year. But now there is no question.
I am all gratification where I can have it. I do what I have to and leave the rest. There’s a big pile of notebooks and folders and forms gathering tumbleweeds of cat hair beside this chair. It’s all so fleeting. I have gained five pounds. I sleep till eleven on Saturday. I sing as I cook. I imagine those shoes taking me down some sidewalk next year at this time, but when I try to lift my mind’s eye above the concrete, the scene will not come into focus.