Emerald City

I came back to Providence yesterday. By a circuitous route: night flight on New Year's Eve from Seattle to Burlington, Vermont; a day and a night at my sister's in Burlington, where I ate some Hoppin' John and collard greens for good luck in the new year; and then an all-day bus ride, Burlington to Providence.

Travel highlights: having my bags and my person searched in Boston's South Bay bus station. Whew! Another "event" wisely averted, thanks to vigilant luggage-searching of Greyhound passengers. It's so creepy to see this become normal, people pliantly submitting to searches by all variety of uniformed men and women.

Now that I've just come back here, I have the same weird and dislocated feeling I had there, on arrival in Seattle. It always seems to me that the threads of my life, my life of social ties and relationships, are so few and so tenuous. As if it takes all of half an hour to telephone all of my acquaintances, either to say hello I'm here or goodbye I'm leaving.

I named this blog "carceraglio"--well, for a number of reasons, not least because of a sense of living in exile while here in Providence. Yes, it's melodramatic, and maybe scandalously inappropriate for somebody attending an Ivy League university, but there it is. So the life in Providence is built on a notion of Seattle as "home," a notion that gets more and more fragile each time I go there, less and less believable.

Each time I arrive in either place, now, I'm momentarily gratified by some familiar sight, and then right away I'm devastated. This is it, this is my life? Is this all? --But in Seattle, after a while, certain things built up again over time, in the course of my ten days there. There were accidents, things I couldn't have foreseen while sitting in my temporary apartment, looking over the few phone numbers at my disposal.

This one thing, this is probably very sad to admit, but I was sitting at Septieme, waiting for a friend, when the waiter came by and said, "Are you Diana? Charles is delayed by the snow; he'll be here as soon as he can." --Now, I hope it's not simply the case that I'm that pathetic, that I'm so easily puffed up and so readily deflated, that a glimmer of recognition from even a waiter made my day…. OK, well, that level of pathetic-ness played into it, but there was something delightful about feeling enwrapped in a certain density of relatedness and the service economy and technology that could only come together in a city. And a modern city, at that, not a postmodern one. It was so delightfully anachronistic, because I don't have a cell phone. I felt I was in a nineteen-forties movie, and the waiter at a nightclub had just brought the telephone to my table, trailing its fifty feet of cord. There's something about the formality of that moment that's so pleasing. It's the impersonality of it, or the impersonal crossed with the personal.