MINE #29
Jem Golson
I was an intruder here. No matter how often the driftwood animal sculptures around campus invited me to come sit next to them, to eat with them—certainly equivalent to the cool-kids table in my mind—it still felt illicit. I would accept; yet I’d sit loosely, an outsider in and out.
On warm enough days, a storm-paled horse (she/her) became my unlikely crone. Life-sized, but not quite large nor magical enough to hide me inside her creaking ribcage. She would see me, see through me, through her sand-dollar eyes, and she or the nearby fountain would cast a peaceful mist toward me as I set about the necessary deconstruction of my sack lunch.
“Here” was a private women’s college: Idyllic, brilliant, but ill-fitted as a gem on a toe-ring—an amethyst riding atop this jaundiced, thickest cut of the upstate.
Of course, my main reason for not belonging here was that I was not a student. I was a woman, of age and life-stage to be pursuing whatever MFA or greater might have been on-offer here. But I could just sometimes afford gas to drive Phineas the 10 minutes to and from campus. I never attempted to enroll.
My main reason for being here anyway was need (not what I called it then). I’m only beginning to fathom this now, 20 years later.
My ’89 Honda Accord (he/him)—named for A Separate Peace’s Phineas—was a louder companion than driftwood steeds, but for all his resourcefulness, a comfortable workspace he did not make. And every early winter morning, I had to shovel him out from snowbanks, repark him against the opposite curb to avoid $70 snowplow-blocking fines.
He earned his keep. Once I’d offed my second alarm and a cup or two of black coffee, Phin would give me a lift to campus where I would wave at the friendly wind-bleached animalia and get to work.
(Phineas served me amiably for years until, one night during a white-out blizzard, he veered and shuddered from a gallop to a trot, lost all power, and allowed me to steer him with great dignity and finality straight into a snowbank.)
Before carrel #29, I found leasable office space in a white mansion on a hill surrounded by pines. I’d landed States-side after a year teaching in France, a year frankensteining my finances. French stipend to cover local living expenses, late nights editing to keep up with heftier American bills. Returned to the Midwest without seeing a single one of my 29th birthday’s wishes granted. Rented a bedroom with a twin mattress on the floor of a house along with four other friends also-bound by fate and law to dig out their aging vehicles daily.
We took turns with the shovel in the mornings; and in the evenings, took turns cooking. Watched seasons and seasons of NCIS together over dinners. Five women, still-single against quite the spread of odds, given so many birthday candles among us. We retained our probie roseate dispositions, cheered if not steeled by faithy truisms and rom-commy wishfulness. Not that we weren’t forensically saddled with our respective infirmities and tragedies, in turns.
Some of us were more or less noticeably able or not to keep on getting out of our mattresses season after season. We mapped our ways to escape that house—its creeping mold, the icy roads, credit card debt. We would marry rich and/or handsome, accept promotions, own property, get fit, evacuate southward.
Perhaps I ought to have thought bigger—sought capacity and magic enough to accommodate all of me. By next winter, I longed to be teamed with someone stronger than myself, someone willing to wield a shovel in my stead in the freezing dark. Were that a no-go, I’d move.
(I moved. Eventually. Before the snow arrived, to an apartment with private parking, then deeper out and down to blazing Atlanta.)
The only single-occupancy lease available at the time in the white mansion was an opalescent gable-roofed studio with a skylight and French doors. The rest of the mansion's style was voluptuous elite-leisure, too Ralph Lauren for my taste, but this beaming 10’x10’-approximate portion of it, this literal prism was all mine for as long as I could afford it. It would have cost me slightly more to have sprung for another master’s degree, but only slightly. Neither the shiny degree nor the dream studio were attainable long-term. I lasted, refracted happily there, a few bright months.
I occupied a compact corner table at Starbucks for a fall, editing photos, editing books, editing my heart out. Hourly, to avoid siphoning table-time from other paying customers, I’d order another no-foam caffè breve (not what they call it there). Sweet weed-jovialized baristas competed to make me the caffè breve with the bare-minimum number of bubbles, the zero-most sum of foam.
They demanded I document their flattest triumphs—photographing their heart-hands encircling the whorling marbled matte medallion that was the surface of my next drink. Like Saturn’s rings, only with Saturn itself (not what they call it there) ladled out.
Caffeine and camaraderie flowed free, forming habits—but the kind that did me good. Shreds of black-out poems procumbent on my heart’s floor began a halting upward lilt, hovered for a meek instant, then surged unstoppable to the top, reverse-lacquering endocardium and beyond with inverted tattoos, embodying statements that were and were not of my own making.
From a purely fiscal perspective, however, 8+ cups of coffee/day was the kind of habit that did me in. Got to be too much. I gave them all up.
Scarcity is a human construct— a figment, a farce. But we do need to need. Annie Dillard called on readers to “cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity.” To understand first how it feels to grasp at every penny from the sidewalk out of desperate need, to feel that burst of joy and gratitude over tiny needed gifts, before we can learn to hide-and-seek for fun, before we can become the kind of people for whom the smallest things make our day.
Healthy poverty guided my pilgrimage to carrel #29. Healthy irony, too: Frozen in a silent sunlit aisle between bays, I discovered Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, read its 2nd chapter, “Seeing,” for the first time. The sun stood still next to me, almost as dazzling as the dullest penny that you stumbled upon the very moment you most needed anything at all.
Desperate need rendered me joyful for that library loophole access (never checked out a book, never had to show a student ID). I’d arrive after first-hour classes began, avoiding eye contact with faculty or staff, legitimate students—worried they might detect my unauthorized presence and eructate me as violently as a big fish discovering that a bothersome clod of hypocritic bigot has been living inside it rent-free. Debris that must be expelled tout de suite.
(Were there any giant Trojan sperm whales among the driftwood menagerie who could've swallowed me, if needed?)
Underclassmen, interlopers alike were required to stop at the library reception desk to reserve a carrel. Among 77, I adopted favorites, exulting to see #5 open, #42, #76, #11, especially #29.
These carrels were not thin chintzy Micatin panels interlocked in a cubicular parody of Barrel of Monkeys, but a sistered, stalwart presence to be reckoned with, disciplined, indominable. They queued seamlessly and immutably from end to end of the library’s upper levels, broad oaken desktops affixed to the dark bricks, mirroring one another with perfect posture, sentinels standing flush against the wall and yet somehow also expanding to encompass each little "plot of land"—before, behind, beside you. Not much larger than the hobbitish dimensions of Tolkien's desk, and so therefore plenty of ground from which to germinate and extrapolate countless elaborate new worlds, whole other languages and lifelines.
Tall blackframe windows floated at intervals above the row of carrels, like colossal doorways casting dust-glittered light-bows overhead, arching across aisles, flying and buttressing their way into the unsuspecting stacks.
Any windows that were not portals into other worlds instead opened up the view to the library’s natural tweedy habitat: Evergreens, fresh-mown grass, distant copper glints, the odd twiggy tangle of zoological effigy.
As timeless as everything outdoors was, everything about the library's interior seemed outdated, yet satisfyingly so—giving Mid-Century Modern Loft vs. Moldy Fluorescent-lit Basement Closet.
Among all of the seventy and seven carrels, #29 truly had it all: The exact right amount of sunlight at angles outsmarting the shadows or glares which obfuscate laptop screens; optimal distance from echoing stairwells and study groups; cozy-cave ambience; infinite interdimensional possibilities to one side of your desktop; 100,000+ volumes shelved on your other side; power outlets; miniature but mighty lamps.
I learned seeing there. I learned to see with a kind of double vision, to look beyond—across space and time—past, present, future. I learned to imagine forth countless scenarios, to perceive the realities behind façades and the façades superimposed upon realities. I learned to seek and find from carrel #29.
When my eyes were teary or tired, when they were tempted to covet what was never fit for them while overlooking what would bring them exponentially better returns, when they felt as blind as sand dollars or dying headlights in a blizzard—I was still learning to use them rightly. I learned to notice with dawning joy, and how to receive and to give away again—from the magic confines of that wooden alcove—with never-setting gratitude.
I imagine I could have learned those same lessons elsewhere. Technically, carrel #29 was not so far removed (figuratively nor literally) from Phineas' back bumper or a snowbank; from my twin mattress on the floor of that house full of strong and wistful women; from the no-foam, anxiety-fraught mornings rushing to reserve the best spot at Starbucks; from the luxurious but trop cher French-doored leased office suite; or any number of other feasible, if not ideal, milieus in which to learn. Carrel #29 was never mine; I never held any rights to it.
But for me, what belonged to me about carrel #29 was its very embodiment of provision. The part of it that met me at the point of my need was something that could never be taken away. It brought about and simultaneously brought an end to my seasons of healthy poverty: A secret garden, a hidden treasure; a gift that flagged me down, that singled me out every single day, that invited me to come sit and eat and learn to see with newly opened and generous eyes. Whenever I would settle into carrel #29 to study or work or read or weep, it was not necessarily into a prism, but neither was it into a cage.
Decades later, I sometimes need to need again. Is it a brief life that scares me? Or a mere life? Mediocrity. That kind of settling. Not so much death, but pain. What puts the fear in me? Failure? Or looking stupid? Starving? Bankruptcy? -Isms? Or loneliness, change, getting caught, becoming cruel myself? From what am I hiding?
A matchless teller of true myths (figuratively and literally) opened up one other-worldly view this creatively nonfictitious way: The kingdom of heaven (not what we call it here) is like something priceless got buried out of sight on someone else’s property, and all at once, it surfaces. It is discovered somehow; someone stumbles upon it. She sees it, truly, for the first time, the best bonus penny she has ever encountered. She becomes progressively aware of what it could mean for her…IF.
IF someone were to strike oil deep beneath a field that doesn’t belong to her, a field where she doesn’t belong, IF she is afraid but refuses to make decisions out of fear (so she’s also courageous and wise), then of course she will rush away to sell off her belongings. She will sacrifice it all—for joy—to buy that land legitimately, then to stake the grander claim. If she wasn't born into a trust fund, it might take her a little longer to put together the money from what she did have to sell, but she will. She is coming back for the whole field, ASAP.
When she does return with enough, with cash in hand, that place, everything in it, and everything that everything in it could buy—prisms to palantirs, signed first editions of Pulitzer prize-winners to a custom-designed studio brimming with hygge; pennies planted to a lifetime supply of “a lifetime of days”—it will all be all hers, for as long she needs.
Jem Golson
Jem Golson is an American currently living near Tbilisi, Sakartvelo (Republic of Georgia), where she and her husband assist refugees and asylum-seekers to start their own businesses and contribute positively within their new communities.