Timmy's In the Well

This is Madeleine. Madeleine is a costly Norfolk Terrier who resides in Chelsea. She likes long walks on 8th Ave, other small dogs, and cat poo. (This last one is a nasty habit we're trying to break).

Madeleine came into my life because my boyfriend is a dog walker, or rather dog whisperer--D can calm the worst canine Cirque du Soleil with just his pinky. I was first introduced to D while he was holding Madeleine. She caught my eye immediately, and only later did I realize her leash was attached to someone. Madeleine is an urban replica of my childhood terrier, Flipper. They even share the same bad breath: a mixture of squirrel sewet, dead vole, and red pepper jelly. In other words, North Carolina.

One of the perks of dating a dog-walker is the high of having an affair without all that cheating and burdensome guilt. You receive calls like "Hurry, meet me at the corner of 7th and 21st," and you show up wearing sunglasses and a blowsy scarf, and you kiss like the woman and the sailor from that WWII Times Square photograph--you even lift your heel a little--and then you're instructed to "wait outside" in mock dog command because you aren't really suppose to be at this apartment, God forbid the doorman suspect anything. You get a little excited at the day's prospects: Dodger, Otis, Rusty, Madeleine. You find yourself wondering: Where next? Will we be seen?

About a week and a half ago--I suppose I should be more specific since I'm charting the exactitude of coincidence, but I'm new to this--D and I had an afternoon assignation in Chelsea. It's fun to grope in front of Gym as a straight couple, especially a straight couple carting around a rich person's dog. Just try it. Anyway, we'd finished walking Madeleine to 10th Ave and back, and D had just hotly commanded me to "Stay" while he took her back into her feng shui chateau, when I heard a familiar voice call my name. I turned around and it was Taylor.

Now we're getting into the thick of CORK. Taylor is an ex-boyfriend I hadn't seen in about two years. We May-Decembered it for a summer--I was 26, he was a barely turned 22--but in September his classical guitar took him to Amsterdam, where, aside from one drug induced international call from a payphone, I never heard from him. Taylor neither lives in Chelsea nor ever really goes there. He just happened to be picking up something from a fellow musician in the apartment nextdoor to Madeleine's, and he just happened to be leaving at the exact moment David and I were dropping her off. He stumbled through small talk and landed somewhere between "good to see you" and "I still have that Rilke you gave me."

Seeing Taylor was shocking because much of our relationship was built around MY dog walking. That summer I had just landed Harry--a brown poodle on the Upper West Side--and Taylor frequently accompanied me. We even fooled around in Harry's posh apartment, probably a bad idea, since poodles are smart. But even more that that, when Taylor appeared in Chelsea, D and I had just been discussing emotional vulnerability and what it means to feel at trusting ease since we've both... been around the block, to use a dog walking phrase. So what brought about this reunion?

I've included the exposition on Madeleine, rather than launching right into Taylor, because I suspect she features prominently in CORK, maybe as a Lassie leading me to old lovers? Who knows. I do think dogs intuit their way through the world. Maybe it's about sniffing out connections. Maybe I should take slower breaths, pull deeper from the diaphram.

A few days ago D woke me from a dream I was having about airport city codes (this is what happens when you're a travel agent). "I was trying to get a man to MAD," I said. "That's Madrid. But then he also wanted to go to LLN. I've never sent anyone there before. I don't know anything about LLN."

"MAD LLN. Madeleine," D said.

(LLN, by the way, is Kelila Indonesia.)

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Have fate in your life? Running into the past at unlikely moments? Have valuable interpretations of my CORK? Please report it in my comments!

Welcome to CORK

CORK--which stands for Coincidence, Or Rebecca's Kismet--is a year long online attempt at recording and making sense of the seemingly random occurences in one woman's New York City life. I wanted to do this blog for several reasons. The first, because I turn 30 next June, and aside from the easy standby of growing out my hair and then whacking it, I needed a mile marker. The second, because I'll be finishing my thesis this fall, and like all good poets, I'm obsessed with love and death. But I didn't want another late-twenties account of heartbreaks and tragic fallings off. I wanted to explore the closest thing I know to religion: those magical moments when space and time didactically allign. When the marrionnette strings pull. When the chessboard looms.

Here's the simple story behind CORK. Last Sunday, I was walking on the outskirts of Central Park with my boyfriend. All week I had been fantasizing about buying a cork board so I could display my birthday cards and start organizing my poems on my wall, strategizing my thesis, ordering sections. I just couldn't find the time after work to get the stupid thing. So there we were, out on a post-pizza evening stroll, pausing to catch the sweet iambic strains of a Shakespeare performance, when what doth we spot on the bench: unused, still wrapped cork. The ideal cork. The cork I had been contemplating.

This isn't the same as, say, needing a pen and then finding one under your chair. CORK is about creepy. CORK is about the specific in the unexpected, an attention to personal detail that renders said detail as destiny. It's also hugely about time. You can have a cork board on a bench, but in order to have CORK, you have to have me passing by that bench at that exact second. CORK and clock are inseperable. If I had even been a minute late, I might have ended up at Office Depot.

I think CORK has moral implications as well. There's an ethical, karmic aspect to it, or at least that's my hypothesis. I just saw An Inconvenient Truth, and along with my unhealthy devotion to Lost, I think I'm mentally primed to document minutiae and its tipping power. If a polar ice cap controls the climatic future of Europe, what block of ice is keeping my bitch mood at bay? If Sawyer really met Jack's father in a Sydney bar, who's travel am I booking that I will end up with on an island later? CORK is like a cross between 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon and Kierkegaard. I sort of doubt I can prove any of this but I still have faith in the findings. And I think, especially in New York City, that we anesthetize ourselves to survive and coexist in kindness. The constant sensory overload forces us to shut down and suspend reflection, or we stress and snap--but what happens when we DO pay atention to the details, when we decide to play Silvia Brown and investigate coincidence? It should make the subway more exciting. Or me more angry.

Finally--and I hate to bring up the Holocaust, but here goes--I've been reading Sophie's Choice for about two months now. Styron mentions George Steiner and his struggle to reconcile time relation, the idea that one person could be having sex or making a sandwich while another person, miles away, is undergoing Nazi torture. Here's what Styron quotes of Steiner:

"The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox--Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be--that I puzzle over time. Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation impy, different species of time in the same world, 'good time' and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of damnation?"

I suspect CORK is about this, too, but more on that later.

Is time linear? Are some minutes more moral than others? Can I grow my hair past a stubby pony-tail? These are the questions of my 29th year. Welcome to CORK.