Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Quarter Back: The Solo Version
Some of the best moments happen so fast that no one else sees them - still, they linger in memory with a sweetness that brightens difficult times in a way that feels at once superficial and penetrating, at once outwardly empowering and inwardly harmonious. I refer, once again, of course, to the catching of a quarter. But this time, it was personal.
It was an era of my life marked by an intensity of focus so all-encompassing as to overshadow my own sense of individuality, along with that of my 300 peers. It was law school, second year, first semester - the bloom was off the rose, but harvest was unimaginably far away; which is to say, we’d all long since grown inured to the questionable joys of legal study, but were so far from graduation and professional practice as to render that ultimate goal beyond practical envisionment. We read; we cowered in lecture halls praying for invisibility; we consigned nights and weekends to the dryest and least entertaining of pursuits. We slogged. Everything in college had been so visceral - even book learning felt like a process happening physically to my body; but in law school it was all so terribly abstract and abstracted. We existed solely among the onionskin pages of casebooks that were filled with red herrings and dry rot. Sometimes this disembodiment was a pleasure, but more usually I felt divorced from myself and from reality. My brain was tired and my body was disengaged. I hungered, though I couldn’t articulate it, for something real.
The campus had been designed to echo an agora, the greek marketplace where ideas were as much an article of commerce as olives, cheese and slaves. But I viewed it on the roman model, myself - less the agora than the tri-via, the roman crossroads where the exchange of pointless gossip gave us our word for, well, pointless gossip. The architecture was simple but evocative: a big staircase floated down out of the broad formal face of the main building; an oldenberg ladder toppled permanently in the quad amidst small temples and truncated columns. The physcial space seemed to flow and eddy. In spite of this spatial flow, however, I felt stultified - so much so that I usually didn’t even notice anymore.
I was in line at the cafeteria, an underdesigned space, utilitarian and bland, with bare white walls and a plain white lino floor. The room was set up to move us through it efficiently, and move through it we did: students, faculty and staff shuffled along past the steam tables and salad bar like sheep for the fatting. On this particular day I stood back for a moment, gauging my appetite against my stamina against my remaining funds: how hungry was I; how long would I have to stay awake; how long till I ate again; and, oh yes, how much money do I have? The questions challenged my hypercerebration with their simplicity; my overwrought brain was grappling with the most quotidian of realities, and I was caught in a riptide between them.
I pulled my hand out of my pocket to count my crumpled wad of bills; with it, out popped an errant quarter. It leapt from my trousers with quicksilver slickness, making a geometrically perfect arc from my waistline up to the height of my heart, then falling down again to the floor directly in front of me.
I watched it with a sense of anticipated satisfaction. The quarter struck the floor edge on, a perfect landing, perpendicular and clean. Because of the angle of impact, it immediately bounced straight up again with surprising force, rising perpendicularly as high as my shoulder. I reached out casually and let the quarter loft into my open hand; it placed itself gently in my palm as if it had been hanging in midair. I didn’t even need to bend over.
No one else saw it happen; if I hadn’t been there I might not have believed it myself. Regardless, there it lay in my hand like a mottled mirror, silvered in the sour overhead illumination. I’d dropped it, essentially, up, into my own fingers. The motion of releasing and retreiving it had been so smooth and natural as to have evaded all conscious thought or any of the mental exercise of which I was so tired as to have forgotten my exhaustion. But those two bits in the palm of my hand brought it back to me. Thinking wasn’t everything. Sometimes the chips fall just where they’re supposed to. Sometimes being in the right place and doing the right thing are more a function of natural flow than conscious choice.
I think I got a burrito; they were a good value. I spent the quarter. I kept the change.
