Manservant

This becomes my name as I scurry around the two-tiered deck that, a day ago, I finished painting. Tonight, I am opening wine bottles with one eye, letting the other linger at the oven over the creamy artichoke wantons and its neighboring hors d'ouvres. I've come to serve, and I am doing so in the most traditional sense of the word, topping off glasses and refilling plates at the farewell party for my dad's much-beloved coworker who has left his department with an awesome promotion. Turns out my parents have wanted to have dad's small team over for a while, but couldn't do so until they had someone to help clean the house. Ta-dah!

Yet, in all of the preparation for the evening, I find that I can so easily escape from the gloominess of the house and the never-ending demands of cleaning by hopping on my dad's bike and cycling off into abundant life. I think the challenge of being here is the overall sameness of it, especially when working in the house or novelizing my play, my latest endeavor to re-enliven a four year-old script that's still not done. Nothing really changes here, a sense of constancy that probably really helped me growing up: heading home from work, for example, and knowing that one won't bump into a protest and have to take a different route; or, in a daily sense, if one has a car, one can drive everywhere, be in control at all times, never have to deal with the random conversations while killing time at the bus stop.

At this point in my life, I don't want the constancy. I want a place to lay my head, and I want a task to perform, but I want to be held up by the Burmese monks going to protest in front of the White House, I'll even say I like seeing older, white people walking around with tea bags dangling from their hats, because that's poetic material one can sink one's teeth into. A crowded subway is simply oozing with characters for plays, several different people, on one stage, having one shared experience. Here I am left to my own devices, to think up these characters on my own, to have little outward stimuli except for the study of film and books. I feel much more actualized on a subway reading poetry, or with the wind whipping by me on my bike, than in the car, bumper-to-bumper, as the radio puts on another commercial.

Conversely, there's something to be said for the business partners laughing and cajoling over a bottle of wine and good steaks, lifted up above the wetland scene of our backyard on the white deck. In an era when we let culture isolate us more and more, when we turn to our TVs for interaction instead of our neighbors, this sort of shared experience is, in fact, countercultural. And in the middle of all of this is Sarah, these people's old coworker--and a twentysomething--smiling and laughing like a wedding day, as a bunch of people take time to sit with her and tell her what a blessing she's been to them.