Today I meet my thesis partner for the first of what will
hopefully turn into successful writing sessions.
I openly admit that when she first proposes the notion of
shared work time, I suspect she might have dementia. After all, she is writing
an intricate research paper on Holocaust poets, and I'm crafting loose creative
nonfiction into some kind of gelatinous pile of goo. Every time we have taken
classes together, her tales have substance and detail, and mine are maniacal
rants that read like Rocky and
Bullwinkle's Fractured Fairy Tales. She seems to have faith in me, though,
so I decide to humor her. I'm quite certain after an hour or so she will be
disgusted by my lack of work ethic.
We make plans to meet in Newburyport at the newly opened
Atomic Café. I know Newburyport about as well as I know Boston. I'm reasonably
certain where I'm going, fairly assured I can find public parking, and
absolutely positive I won't drive off a pier into the Atlantic, but that's the
extent of it. I am armed with the street and door number for the Atomic Café,
and, according to their website, their shops seem funky and well-fronted. I am now completely pumped with inner
confidence that not only will my thesis partner survive this escapade, but that
I might not get lost in the process.
I ignore my GPS, which I have set to avoid the highway. The problem is that Billy (that's his name;
my GPS channels Scottish comedian Billy Connelly) thinks I only mean 495. He fails to register that I also mean
95. I live in the Great Northeastern
Intersect, where 495 and 93 cross, and where I am a stone's throw to 95, 128,
2, 3, 90, and 290, most of which are the same roads at multiple points. Don't ask why - we don't know and we don't
care because it helps us get out of tickets:
COP: "Your
honor, I clocked Heliand doing 95 on 93…"
ME: "No, you're
honor, I was doing 93 on 95, but it was actually 128 at the moment."
JUDGE: "Ma'am, you were going 128 miles per hour?"
ME: "No, your
honor, it was 3."
COP: "3?! Maybe in the breakdown lane."
ME: "No, sir,
route 3."
JUDGE: "North or
south?"
ME: "At
93."
JUDGE: "So it
was 95?"
COP: "Yes, she
was doing 95 on 93."
ME: "Or maybe it
was 495."
COP: "Miles per
hour?!"
JUDGE (holding forehead in hands): "Case dismissed!"
I decide to take the back roads into Newburyport, and I've
charted myself a new route: 125 through Haverhill to 113 through Groveland.
This should take me right up to Newburyport High School, where I was once
forced to sit through weeks of teaching observations and hours of holding my
breath in the back of the room while the oblivious instructor in the front of
the room ignored students leaning far out the giant, screenless windows of the
third floor, playing chicken as to who might fall to the pavement first. Maybe the teacher just didn't care. After a
few weeks of the shenanigans, I didn't care, either. As I pass by the old
stomping ground, I salute NHS and continue on my way into town.
It's an easy find, and I bypass route 1 for the more
eclectic one-way streets (alleys). Atomic Café is #52 State Street. State
Street is one of the main streets of shops and tourist traps, and it's right
off the main square by Waterfront Park and the Custom House Maritime Museum.
Newburyport is largely a summer town, and it is early on a wintery, drizzly
Saturday morning, so I am thinking that I might be able to get a spot in front
of the café. As I turn up State Street, though, it's obvious that no one told
all of these people that I am planning on parking. I search for the familiar
awnings that mark other Atomic Cafes at other locations, but I see none.
Quickly and with detective-like precision, I scan both sides of the street for
the shop's location. I see the Mexican restaurant where I drank margaritas, the
little shop where I ate chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, and the store
where I almost bought a throw-back-to-the-70's mood ring the last time I was
here. I see nothing that resembles a
coffee shop, though.
I do see a blue parking sign, so I bang a right onto Pleasant
Street then another sharp right onto Unicorn Street and park in the lot behind
the Unitarian Church. I can park for
three hours here. Street parking,
although available here in the hidden catacombs, is limited to one and two
hours. I've no idea how long my friend
will be able to put up with me, but I figure even if I walk down to look at the
ocean, I can crank out three hours here.
I pay my buck-fifty, slide the ticket onto the dashboard, and walk back
toward what I hope is still State Street.
I mark my parking bearings by the bookstore on the corner.
No matter how lost I might be, I can always find solace with the bookstore, and
it is halfway up State Street. I have a 50/50 chance of finding where I need to
be. I turn right and start walking up the street since I didn't see the café on
my way to the parking lot. I find #70 and decide to walk back the way I have
already come. I pass the book store and continue down the street. There are stores and nooks and alleys and
walkways, and then there's door #20.
Ooops. Perhaps I wrote the number down wrong. Perhaps the café is on the other side of
State Street. Perhaps it's #53 and I
screwed it up somehow. At this point, my
thesis buddy calls me to say she is five minutes out. Perfect. I tell her that
I will wait for her inside, assuming that she has been here before and relieved
that she cannot see me wandering around like the Flying Dutchman in search of a
coffee house stool. Finding a crosswalk, I head to the other side of the road.
Up I go all the way until I am two blocks past anything that resembles
downtown. Back I go all the way to Waterfront Park, where I turn around and
cruise back up again, stopping, studying.
Oh, shit, I start
panicking, what if it's not even on State
Street? What if I totally screwed this up?
I am alone on the sidewalk except for one woman and her
brood. She is pushing a carriage with a baby in it, and she has three older
boys in tow, all about the ages of two, four, and six. I smile at them when the
middle boy points out a spelling variation on one of the signs. Smart little
buggah. That is until his little brother walks into him and falls over on the
sidewalk, wailing like he has lost a limb. The mother, who missed the sequence
of events, starts yelling at the oldest, telling him she will punish him and
take away privileges. Oh, for the good old days when a swift and well-delivered
public slap did the trick of a thousand threats.
In the midst of her tirade, I politely ask her if she might
know where the Atomic Café is that is supposed to be on State Street. She
smiles, apparently happy for adult conversation that doesn't involve poopy
pants or booger-wiping, and points directly across the street to an unmarked
set of windows … connected directly to the bookstore, my initial point of
reference. I thank her profusely and leave her to the screaming child whose
soggy bottom is now soggier for sitting on the wet brick walkway.
It's no wonder I passed by the place. The word Atomic is
written with black marker in big, clear, see-through block letters, one letter
on each pane, and it is a dark and dreary day.
I cannot even see this until I am inside. I decide I had better watch
for Michaela (yes, I used your name, I outed you as my friend, so now you have
to pretend you really are), because she is probably going to do the same exact
dance routine I did to find the place unless she has been here before.
There is a brown leather chair by the front door, so I
settle in and wait. In the few minutes I sit there, I observe a woman in her
workout clothes sitting in a car with all the windows rolled up, sucking
unhealthily on a lit cigarette; a woman in yoga clothing struts by with a
coffee in one hand and a dog leash in the other, her only exercise apparently
is being dragged up the street by a massive four-legged hairball; a young woman
wearing jeans and hiking boots passes in front of the window with a yoga mat
tucked under her arm. A man paces by with a determined gait only to stop
jarringly, look around absurdly, then step backward because he, too, missed the
Atomic Café and must backtrack. As if
joining our silent camaraderie, a woman in a down coat does a perfect imitation
of his fake-out miss-the-door move, spins around, and heads back into the café.
After watching a Prius owner attempt to parallel park (she
does a decent job, only needs three tries, and checks her curb distance when
she gets out), I see my thesis buddy across the street, doing the exact Crap-Where-Is-This-Place drill I pulled
earlier, so I open the door and wave her over.
We smile, we hug, we bond over coffee, tea, a scone, and a muffin, and
since she insists on paying, it will be my turn next time, so there must be a
next time or I will forever roam the Earth knowing I owe someone a debt of
gratitude. After getting our food and
drinks all prepped, we realize there aren't any tables to be had, so we set up
in the window ledge on bar stools. We
chat, we eat, we get our literary bearings, we get distracted (okay, I get
distracted) watching people attempt to parallel park.
Suddenly Michaela taps me, "Table!" she exclaims.
I pop off the stool and throw my coat into the booth,
holding it for our own until we can maneuver her laptop and my writing
notebooks into the space. We decide to try writing for fifteen minutes and see
where we are. Both of us dive in to our work. She is adding more to her paper's
section about Nelly Sachs, and I am editing several short works while taking
quick notes about more unilateral organizational changes to my thesis. Neither
of us surfaces again for an hour. We realize that our worst fear has been
defeated and our greatest hope has been realized: Getting out and committing to working on our theses really is something
we can do. We truly are attacking our
capstone projects.
We exchange papers. I take her laptop and she takes my
notebook, and we start reading through each other's work. I don't know anything
at all about the poets Michaela has chosen nor the project she is attempting,
and she directs me to a part of her research paper she would like me to
read. And I'm scared. I admit it.
I am scared shitless. I am a
little scared of what she might think of my writing, but she has heard it
before; we have taken classes together before.
The thought that scares me is that maybe I am too dumb to make any kind
of commentary that will be constructive or helpful. I have flashbacks to ENG725, our first
course, the one we had to pass to get in to the program, the course that was so
hard and so full of philosophical pablum that I feared my brains might leak out
of my ears and render me a perpetual moron.
I worry for nothing.
Michaela's writing is eloquent, fluid, entertaining, and
beautiful. Yes, I said beautiful -- it is grammatically precise and
syntactically perfect; to a writer like me, that makes it better than
beautiful; it's magnificent. I am
mesmerized by her style and subject matter and only abandon reading because if
I don't get to my car in the next six minutes, I'm going to get a ticket, and
she has to pick up her daughter from a slumber party. Even our hang time is in sync.
By the time we pack up and head out, the rain has become
large snow flakes that plop down on us and stick to our clothes, making up look
like polka dot people. We hug and
promise to do this again, and I mean it -- I will if she’ll have me. That is the most productive few hours I've
had in a very long time, and both of us are under the gun for the end of
April. April. APRIL. As in, a few
short weeks from now. Both of us are teachers, parents, professionals, and
graduate students on the verge of making or breaking our second Master's
degrees. We can do this. We will
do this.
My ride home starts out scenic, becomes a bit slippery, and
is downright harrowing by the time I reach home an hour later.
The snow is falling at a fast clip, huge
tissue-sized clumps of white sputtering against the windows with the pffffts of
distant snare drums.
It has been a very
long time since I've seen flakes this large, and the sky seems to be inundated
with hundreds of thousands of ice-white paratroopers, snowy kamikazes
smashing
gently into the windshield as I struggle to stay in the lane rounding corner
after corner.
Still, though, I do not
regret avoiding the highway.
The snowfall,
like Michaela's writing, is beautiful, magnificent, and mesmerizing.
I snap a few pictures with my cell phone while I am driving,
mostly at stop lights, but a couple I take errantly with my right hand while
looking forward and steering with my left hand.
I won’t know what I have pictures of until I get home, but I know the
snow will be there because it's all around me.
I tuck the phone away in Haverhill and do not take it out again until I
am safely in my own driveway, because I don't need to get pulled over or cause
an accident. I can see it now:
COP: "You were
going 25 in a 40 mph speed zone."
ME: "But,
officer, the roads are bad. No one has
sanded, and I didn't want to drive on the highway."
COP: "Which
highway?"
ME: "95 or
495."
COP: "You were
doing 95 on 495?"
ME: "No, sir,
I'm on 113. You see, I could go 133, but
then I might have to go 95, and I'm not a fan of 110 because that will also
take me to 95 but at 495, and 107 is off of 1, but 1A is too close to the
coast, so I also avoided 286. Once I hit 125 I will be fine until I cross
28…"
(COP runs like hell to his cruiser, backing away quickly
until he fades into the white tissues of snow.)
And to think people say writing a thesis isn't fun. Bah.
