In a way, it seems to me as if I can chronicle my memory by the windows I’ve looked out of. There are many windows during your life that you get to know. One particular view, probably seasonally changing, but still the same, becomes as important to the place as the place itself is. The world outside, that circumscribed bit of it – is defined by the view from the window; and the room is defined by its distinctness from the world. Life stops there, the place begins here.
When I was living in England, I used to stare out our back window a lot. Because we were the top flat, two of the windows – the one above the stairs and the one near my bed – were long, slanted panel windows cut directly into the roof. If you stood on the tiny couch that was next to my nightstand, you could lean comfortably and watch out of the biggest one. Not that anything exciting ever happened out it, but it was still there, and I liked to watch it. I knew the lights in the block of flats behind us, vaguely. I knew the assemblage of aerials on the roof next door, only partially viewable if you leaned your head out. I knew the tiny, ugly bit of slate-covered backyard you could see if you looked straight down. I knew the attractively rounded shingles that most London roofs use. And most of all I knew the sky, its alarming brightness at four a.m. on a summer morning, its sooty blackness by five p.m. in November. I felt so lonely there, but I remember thinking that if there was one place in London I felt comfortable looking at, it was the roofs. They seemed more accessible than the ground. They, at least, did not judge me for my inability to understand the level of ordinary life.
This morning, I was thinking of the view from my piano teacher’s big front window. She had a carefully kept lawn – often when I would come for lessons in the summer her husband Nathan would be out there mowing away. In front of the window was a line of evergreen bushes – holly, I think. To the right of the view was a dogwood, and across the broad, flat street was a little ditch and then more ranch-style houses of the same kind she lived in. I loved piano, and liked lessons, and loved Sally, but I also gazed out that window a lot when she would be talking to me. I was a dreamy, gazing sort of kid, I think, though I would have said so at the time. I frequently imagined the animals she said would come up to the window – little birds, a squirrel, a neighbor cat. They would infuriate her own monstrous animal, a desperately ugly and mean-tempered cat named Ebenezer, who would growl and hiss, flattening himself against the inside of the window with murderous rage.
The view from the allergist’s office, which I visited frequently from the ages of seven to fourteen, seemed to show me a different city than the one I was used to living in. For most of the time I saw him, my allergist had an office in one of Roanoke’s first real high-rise buildings, a beautiful forties-built edifice with careful black-and-white tile and a real elevator dial like the one you see in the movies. I did not like visiting the allergist at all, but gazing out of his small, off-white trimmed window, misty with age and imperfect glass, onto most of the oldest part of Roanoke, it seemed almost enjoyable. I always waited a long time there, and during that time I indulged a persistent fantasy that I had about having been, in a former life, a denizen of these upper rooms or ones like them when the were new, a childless woman who covered up the bitterness she could not admit by hosting party after party, playing the glittering hostess in a series of fancy dresses and golden shoes.
I remember the view from several hospital rooms to which I have paid awkward visits – mostly it is heavy, long slatted blinds, but you can also usually glimpse the endless concrete of a parking structure. Sometimes there are birds. Curiously, I don’t ever seem to have visited a hospital room where even this meager view would have been available to the person in the bed. The patient is reduced to the artificial window of the television, or of the door.
There are many others I could describe:
The point, though seems to be less the views than something that the window itself means for me. It is a way to put things in memory, I guess, even as they happen. I love to look from the outside, to analyze everything as if it were a view, a set, a chapter. I am rarely in my own life. Really, I am outside the window myself, gazing in at my own secretly circumscribed view. How many of us feel that way?
When I was living in England, I used to stare out our back window a lot. Because we were the top flat, two of the windows – the one above the stairs and the one near my bed – were long, slanted panel windows cut directly into the roof. If you stood on the tiny couch that was next to my nightstand, you could lean comfortably and watch out of the biggest one. Not that anything exciting ever happened out it, but it was still there, and I liked to watch it. I knew the lights in the block of flats behind us, vaguely. I knew the assemblage of aerials on the roof next door, only partially viewable if you leaned your head out. I knew the tiny, ugly bit of slate-covered backyard you could see if you looked straight down. I knew the attractively rounded shingles that most London roofs use. And most of all I knew the sky, its alarming brightness at four a.m. on a summer morning, its sooty blackness by five p.m. in November. I felt so lonely there, but I remember thinking that if there was one place in London I felt comfortable looking at, it was the roofs. They seemed more accessible than the ground. They, at least, did not judge me for my inability to understand the level of ordinary life.
This morning, I was thinking of the view from my piano teacher’s big front window. She had a carefully kept lawn – often when I would come for lessons in the summer her husband Nathan would be out there mowing away. In front of the window was a line of evergreen bushes – holly, I think. To the right of the view was a dogwood, and across the broad, flat street was a little ditch and then more ranch-style houses of the same kind she lived in. I loved piano, and liked lessons, and loved Sally, but I also gazed out that window a lot when she would be talking to me. I was a dreamy, gazing sort of kid, I think, though I would have said so at the time. I frequently imagined the animals she said would come up to the window – little birds, a squirrel, a neighbor cat. They would infuriate her own monstrous animal, a desperately ugly and mean-tempered cat named Ebenezer, who would growl and hiss, flattening himself against the inside of the window with murderous rage.
The view from the allergist’s office, which I visited frequently from the ages of seven to fourteen, seemed to show me a different city than the one I was used to living in. For most of the time I saw him, my allergist had an office in one of Roanoke’s first real high-rise buildings, a beautiful forties-built edifice with careful black-and-white tile and a real elevator dial like the one you see in the movies. I did not like visiting the allergist at all, but gazing out of his small, off-white trimmed window, misty with age and imperfect glass, onto most of the oldest part of Roanoke, it seemed almost enjoyable. I always waited a long time there, and during that time I indulged a persistent fantasy that I had about having been, in a former life, a denizen of these upper rooms or ones like them when the were new, a childless woman who covered up the bitterness she could not admit by hosting party after party, playing the glittering hostess in a series of fancy dresses and golden shoes.
I remember the view from several hospital rooms to which I have paid awkward visits – mostly it is heavy, long slatted blinds, but you can also usually glimpse the endless concrete of a parking structure. Sometimes there are birds. Curiously, I don’t ever seem to have visited a hospital room where even this meager view would have been available to the person in the bed. The patient is reduced to the artificial window of the television, or of the door.
There are many others I could describe:
- the window in the studio where I had acting workshops in high school, which seemed to show the promise of grown-up, metropolitan life, even though it was only an alley
- the window of my father’s office which, he ruefully explained to me when he first moved into it, shows only a dumpster and the side of the jail (I always thought of this as underscoring the importance of his job. Too important for views of the outside. Self-contained.)
- the front – suburban – and back – surprising, encompassing a yard in which I never once played – views from my paternal grandparents’ house
- secret views from the attic of the house where I grew up
- my very own window there, out of which a tall evergreen bush moves ceaselessly in every season, through which I can begin to hear the maple tree in the spring, aginst which the wind howls, through which I can see people approach the driveway, towards which I turn when thinking of school, or going away
- the window of my room in Staunton, out of which I would sometimes go to sit on the roof and look towards the Western State complex, for which I felt such fierce love and yearning
The point, though seems to be less the views than something that the window itself means for me. It is a way to put things in memory, I guess, even as they happen. I love to look from the outside, to analyze everything as if it were a view, a set, a chapter. I am rarely in my own life. Really, I am outside the window myself, gazing in at my own secretly circumscribed view. How many of us feel that way?
Labels: liminality, lonliness, memories, space
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