Jessica Greenbaum Biography

I was listening to a book on tape while driving
and when the author said, "Those days I delighted in everything,"
I pulled over and found a pencil and a parking ticket stub
because surely there was a passage of life where I thought
"These days I delight in everything," right there in the
present, because they almost all feel like that now,
memory having markered only the outline while evaporating
the inner anxieties of earlier times. Did I not disparage
my body for years on end, for instance, although, in contrast
that younger one now strikes me as near-Olympian?
And the crushing preoccupations of that same younger self
might seem magically diluted, as though a dictator
in hindsight, had only been an overboard character — 
but not so. Where went the fear, dense as the sudden
dark in the woods, of being alone, or the bruise of 3:30 pm
in a silent apartment, when the disenfranchised live
only with the sunlight through the blinds, just prey
caught betwixt and between, and also heartbreak, and
again, heartbreak. I didn't have whatever that time of life
then demanded — a book, a wedding band, a baby — 
but the present, like the lie of "fair and balanced" news reporting
where creationists are granted air time with the scientists,
the present might have me believe that "in those days
I delighted in everything." But to be ... fair and balanced ...
I do trust the strict part of memory, the only archivist
to have savored a passage of time and have preserved it
with the translucent green hinges licked by stamp collectors,
attaching it without hurting it, so I wanted the quote
exactly, and go back to hunt and tag those months where I
delighted in everything — then I couldn't find the ticket stub.
I rummaged through the recycling but no luck, and I
couldn't go back to find the passage on tape, and then I realized
I had bought the book for my husband, so I started leafing through it,
not wanting to start too far back, and not wanting
my eyes to fall on a passage in the future, the one where
she realizes that "Those days I delighted in everything,"
but it was never to happen again, just the present, from here on in.
...

I only have a moment so let me tell you the shortest story,
about arriving at a long loved place, the house of friends in Maine,
their lawn of wildflowers, their grandfather clock and candid
portraits, their gabled attic rooms, and woodstove in the kitchen,
all accessories of the genuine summer years before, when I was
their son's girlfriend and tied an apron behind my neck, beneath
my braids, and took from their garden the harvest for a dinner
I would make alone and serve at their big table with the gladness
of the found, and loved. The eggplant shone like polished wood,
the tomatoes smelled like their furred collars, the dozen zucchini
lined up on the counter like placid troops with the onions, their
minions, and I even remember the garlic, each clove from its airmail
envelope brought to the cutting board, ready for my instruction.
And in this very slight story, a decade later, I came by myself,
having been dropped by the airport cab, and waited for the family
to arrive home from work. I walked into the lawn, waist-high
in the swaying, purple lupines, the subject of   June's afternoon light
as I had never been addressed — a displaced young woman with
cropped hair, no place to which I wished to return, and no one
to gather me in his arms. That day the lupines received me,
and I was in love with them, because they were all I had left,
and in that same manner I have loved much of the world since then,
and who is to say there is more of a reason, or more to love?
...

Of course there is a jackhammer. And a view, like Hopper,
but happier. Of course there is the newspaper—the daily
herald of our powerlessness. Easy go, easy come: thwash,
the next day another, an example of everything that gets done
in the dark. Like the initiative of the crocuses from a snow
that was, as it works out, warming them. Or in this case,
the strange October weather warming them. There were the
conclusions we jumped to. To which we jumped. There was
pain, and then there was suffering. Of course there was my
ambition to offer you the world, but one that I have rearranged
to make sense. Here are all the sensations of being alive
at the turn of the twenty-first century, here's how they ring out
against each other, here's how one brings out the sense of
another, here is the yellow next to the fathomless blue.
...

As you told it to me — our clearest, most reflective conversations
so often then and there, in the middle of the night, staring into
the darkness from wherever the mind has perched in its wanderings — 
you left your mother and the home aide upstairs, and went down
into your father's basement workroom to look for the right
size screws; in her own wanderings, she has tugged off the front
door lock. Paneled in warped wood and abandoned like a mine,
you find the string for the light in the middle of the room, as he
must have known how to find it in the dark, and again you see
the pegboard walls covered with constellations of polishing tools,
the larger buffers hooked onto the paneling like fuzzy planets,
the smaller ones stuck in a Lucite block he customized to hold them
like the varied moons those hanging planets might need, or a
miniature copse of fantastical trees. So, too, the see-through brick
in which he drilled holes for the array of drill bits themselves,
their swirled metal tops imitating a skyline of onion domes and
tapered gothic towers. The room's order had been disturbed
by time, and the band saw, jigsaw, the sander, and free-standing
machines, the sized wrenches, pliers, picks, awls, and extra parts
still hanging in their packages, the staple gun, lamps, brushes,
gooseneck magnifying glass, soldering wire, conversion charts,
the hundreds of other disordered tools, they might have been words
in an encyclopedia before you could read more than a few words,
and for you they were part of your father's speech, or maybe
more like your mother's now, jumbled, rarely creating a sentence.
With these tools he had sculpted a perfect cluster of grapes,
still on their vine and still with their leaves; a wave, and a school
of dolphins breaching; a formal replica of the Brooklyn Bridge
with all its cabling; a bouquet of flowers — surfaces so smooth
and rounded, objects so like their living counterparts we had no
choice but to understand the power of creation running through
the mind then tools and hands like a current. You looked around
for the right size screws and came upon a small box marked
Green Permanent. And when you opened it you saw small tubes
of paint, now just mud without his attention, you said, holding both
the power of what we do, and the sadness that it has to end.
...

before iced coffee came to town, a sump from which I've fished
many a memory of regret and loneliness and whose misery
I now understand came less from my pocked nature than from
the chokehold of blue laws, and from my broken-willed Eeyore
of a used car which liked to stop stubbornly in Sealy, halfway to
Hill Country, and always one day after the insurance ran out,
and from the paucity of public space so that we drove (locally)
from shopping strip to balding park, once to a leech-infested pond;
and owing also to the blinding afternoons that made invisible,
to the unpracticed eye, micro-lands of existing urban hip, or just a bench
on which to read the paper, the scarce sense from city planners
that those residents without garden-crusted homes held their own set
of municipal needs which might take the form of some kind of . . .
beauty; together with the impossibility of finding deep
shade or hearing wind flash through trees, the abundance of short
rain storms or hurricanes, both of which, equally, caused water to boil
out of the sewers and flood the car (which wouldn't, then, even be
starting out to break down in Sealy without borrowing again
to fix it): and the living rooms' glass sliders opening without apology
onto the apartments' walkway and courtyard, motel-style,
furthering the shallow sense of experience; and all this witnessed
by two small universities whose meek students made no protest
that their third-largest city in the United States—a town sporting more
soft-food cafeterias than all the chipped-beef eaters in the world
could possibly attend at once—offered but two art cinemas
and nearly nowhere to wander or peruse, nowhere to make peace
with the simple fact of your twenties; and on such a day as this,
the one I walked through this morning in late June, on such a day
we would have gathered those friends we could draw from their corners,
their condos, their garage apartments humming to beat the cicadas,
and we would meet in one driveway with a particular lock-and-key
of desperation-and-relief I have been lucky enough not to feel since,
a collective village slamming the doors on our town, plugging in
a tape as we took off for Galveston because if it was going to be endlessly
flat it might as well be on a beach regardless of the soupy knee-high water
or the thwapping mullets jumping out of it, and we might as well be
together on a blanket in the middle of the desert drinking something
cool enough to slake one of all our many raging, hissing thirsts.
...