Sitting in Athena’s old cafe, having escaped one dentist’s poor prognosis for a new and improved second opinion, I am on the whole feeling good, teeth intact. It feels right to be there and now back, like the place-name, Berkeley, Calif., is almost itself enough of a force of reorganization to put me back together. I turn thirty this year, and it will be all well and good to be closer to a piece of my own history than it will to be out there on my own, a minor character in somebody else’s story. I wonder if it would make sense to rewrite my first manuscript, about Berkeley English, from where I stand now; what form it now would take. It is a daunting prospect and I am reluctant to touch it. Being back makes me consider putting the edits on it for the third time, however. I’m led to remember my favorite author while an undergraduate, Virginia Woolf; how she deplored publishing anything before thirty. And Toni Morrison, releasing her first novel, The Bluest Eye, at thirty-nine. As if the third decade, measured out across memories gathered for the sunning, would impart to me the keys to some unspoken writerly rite of passage—with none of the fanfare of sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one. One necessary, in any case, for the writing to be any good at all. (Serena told me in an indoor voice, a message to a sea-green bottle, that she had prophesied her death before thirty; it will take some rewriting to properly convey the scene of the crime, all of its small nonsenses, but for that matter, I am glad we all are living longer and that there will be time to mete out.)
If my Buy Mode history is an indication, this upcoming decade for me seems to signify long skirts with a sweep, secondhand Issey Miyake bags, small press poetry and home inventory. I purchased two quality chairs yesterday, and an imitation Noguchi lantern is coming in the mail. It’s amazing how prolonged time researching images of people’s furniture will imbue these used articles with color and verve. They are the receptacles of an else’s history, an other’s. Tim and I lay across the reclaimed blue and taupe MUJI beanbags yesterday and talked about our housewarming party to come. He filled the cabinet with his glassware, and I burrowed deeper into my cushion, a meadow mouse. Bringing us back, as seasonal cycles do, to Cat Logic.
Danielle Shi 