Science says that amongst friends the topic of conversation shifts every seven minutes. Think about this for a moment. Your dialogic life twisting in a series of hairpins, undertows of unfocus, altering the latent language and feeling pent up in your brain.
And, of course, the conversations with yourself are even more a labyrinth.
You consider watching the new Ken Burns documentary on country music. You consider why you are thinking about watching this documentary. Because you are driving country roads on a bright and cold autumn morning, sunlight filtering through the trees in flickering patterns? Because you are driving this old truck, which is still new to you, this being a person who drives an old truck? Because you caught a few minutes of the Fresh Air interview with Burns last week while you were on the way to pick up sesame oil and beansprouts from the Asian market on Liberty Street?
You consider asking your suddenly elderly grandfather to teach you how to call hoedowns as he did in the late 1950s when he met your grandmother. You trouble out how to ask him, this stoic, plodding dairy farmer turned relentless doer-of-things-that-must-be-done. No time for frivolity as long as you’ve known him. At eighty-four, he still goes to work six days a week.
Yet when you try, it is possible to see him as a young man, playing his records over and over, thin disks spinning and marrying the needle to the grooves of human longing. His willful self-study permits him to learn synchronous steps from diagrams in a book containing constellations of small shapes that represent girls twirling in Sunday dresses and slack-shouldered boys in polished work boots.
You worry there isn’t enough time to learn from him what you need to. For example: how to grease a ball bearing, transplant strawberries, build a smokehouse, speak a few choice phrases in Pennsylvania Dutch, save every spare nut, screw, and bolt.
More mysteriously, you are sure there is no way to ask him about the other things that you’ve tried to learn by watching him these three brief decades: how to steady yourself against restlessness, how to believe in the future, how to reach across the distance from one person to another. But who is to say that any of us know?
Eliot Paul White is a writer and teacher from Lancaster, PA. He organizes and hosts a monthly reading series called The Turning Wheel at DogStar Books, which he has been doing since 2015. His writing has appeared in SundogLit, Fledgling Rag, The Skinny Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.