The Royal

It was mid-morning on a Thursday. The faceless meteorologist on my phone promised me that the past thirty-six hours of rain and gloom would come to an end, that it would be a nice sunny day. A nice day for strolling downtown. There was a cop parked in front of my building when I stepped out into the parking lot. I took the time to be nosey and it was clear by his annoyed facial expression that he could care less what anyone was doing. He simply did not want anyone to find him. I thought that was just fine. Nobody ever enjoys talking to them anyway. I pushed my car out of my neighborhood and crawled to a red light. I sat at the light with the windows down, staring off into the direction of my approaching left turn, and I wished that I was wearing something warmer than a thin hoodie. It was cold, it was windy, it was gray, and the gloom berated me with threats of more wetness. I moodily decided to stop checking the weather all together. It appeared that no one was getting it right.

I was melancholy, spared only by the excitement of a rare task I set for myself. The idea was to be the man with nothing to do and peruse the antique shops of downtown. The drive into downtown was a slow-paced and dreary one. I slopped through wet streets, smoking a cigarette, listening to the radio and driving a few numbers below the speed limit. Only a couple of motorists wanted to ride with me. I wanted to park my car and walk the sidewalks of the shops and restaurants in a dippy, lackadaisical manner that drives busy people crazy. I wanted to meet antiquaries selling vintage typewriters. I sure found one. The only one in town.

Husband and wife shop-owners living in the city over twenty years, selling rare and campy antiques even longer. The single-story shop sat on a busy two-lane intersection in the thick of downtown. The bar-stool-bound wife sat behind a small, square glass counter that was shelved with small jewelry. She greeted me with genuine cheer when I eased myself through the doorway fog of old, stuffy well-to-do ladies with too much money and not much of anything else. My inquiry was clearly a welcomed shakeup for the wife, and she hollered across the shop to her husband who was arranging beer steins in the sidewalk window. The husband was a well but slow-moving, thoughtful man of golden years. He was in no hurry to make my business final. He could afford to give me the once-over. It appeared everyone wanted his treasures.

He was curious about what I wanted, then interested in why I wanted it at all. I told him that I was looking for a vintage typewriter so I could write. There was to be nothing ornamental about it. The husband heaved a gesturing arm over his shoulder as he walked away from me, and we trundled through a busy adjoining room with racks of vintage clothing and accessories, and past a small nook of book shelves with stacks of dusty books with no jackets. At the end of the hall he took me into the last remaining room on the left. The room was a hodgepodge of every department in the store and there was only one other occupant, a nervous and confused middle-aged woman who was more than happy to let me take her place in there. There was not room for many in the room, and I supposed she felt I would have better luck in there finding a memory than she had.

On the floor, in the corner, with more than one sticky-note forbidding you to touch it, was a Royal typewriter. A Royal typewriter from the 1920's in stunning condition. What Paul Sheldon knew to be misery, an ancient typewriter in complete originality, functioning on mere paper and modern ink ribbons. It smells like bookstores and there is a careful craftsmanship to telling a story with it. I lugged the heavy steel up to my apartment and arranged it on the desk in the bedroom. The desk hangs on a generous window, overseeing a quiet piece of nature hidden away in the city. I wanted the Royal so I could practice more care in what I am saying. The words and letters freeze in the meticulous snapping of the cold metal keys. There is something so wonderfully tangible in the permanence of the pages.

The Royal offers expression without batteries, electric cords and wifi. There is only reverie with a view. The view is cloudy and wet with a guarantee of gloom. It never got any better outside. It is 102-degrees in Casablanca this afternoon. It is also six hours ahead into the evening there. Casablanca is an old-fashioned notion for an old-fashioned hobby. The Royal cements to its window like a tree stump and I will sit in the local color, and absorb the tone of the day. I wanted to write someone a letter. With each careful clack of metal, I slowly built the walls around me.

Anniversary

One year, three residences and a non-stop mixture of business and pleasure throughout Santa Barbara, Chicago, San Francisco, The Pacific Coast Highway, Ventura Beach and Nashville. The first chapter of an exciting new story quietly trails off, satisfying the need for wonderment in any good story, turning the page once again to Chicago — where the next year is born. 

Barreling through an entire year, stopping for nothing, satisfying a reckless gusto in an ever-changing setting where the calendar pages mirror the cluttered sheets of any entertainment magazine. A vivid parade of 365 consecutive days with only short-term, chaotic adventures throughout gives measure to the motivational jargon we read all the time — those gleeful pins that prompt us to live each and every day of our lives in absolute wingding.

Emphasis on a literal calendar year was crucial to the survival of the time. Moving every day together, sliding the days into the next with absolute purpose constructed a boxcar adventure that was crucial to the plot, and the significance of marking a calendar year served as the perfect framing device for such a story. When measured, and performed with tailored style, the significance of 365 days between two marks of time is powerful enough to lead your life into a completely foreign and unexpected world. A world worthy of starting a whole new chapter for.

That particular year introduced me to a growing counter-culture of thirty-somethings starting brand-new lives for themselves in brand-new worlds. Over the course of that year and across the country, it became commonplace to meet young, thirty-something guys and gals fresh in the beginning stages of their new-era lives. Sometimes, you meet the people who made major decisions at early stages in their lives; and other times, you meet people like me, people who had not made any decisions at all. Regardless of direction in the fork, any direction leading to this particular time period is drawing people of my age range to explore reinvention. It seems, in some degrees, the theory of "Thirty Is Twenty" is practiced in the reasoning that life can begin again in your thirties. If you are by far from being old, you are still pretty young, assuming. Excitability and passion are still hot enough to warm desire for anything new and imagined. Staying a course through the shaky unknown with courageous anxiety is the only way to give fate and new opportunities a fighting chance at all. For an entire year, I anxiously sifted socially, professionally, creatively, and unassumingly in my own participation of the wayward thirty. I was taking a chance at starting over again and I watched many others my age do the same. The movement did not seem to discriminate. I shared this social happening with single people, relationship people and parent people. This genre exists in our culture today and the common thread is merely an age demographic. Terrified participants take something monumental from it all. I learned that it is okay to want everything different. Initially, when I started this blog and set my sails to sea, the only thing I knew for certain was that by the time October came around again everything was going to be different. Nothing was going to be the way it was ever again and that was the only thing I was asking for. Excitable terror has permeated my life and now it is quietly slowing down, entering another October, ending that momentous first chapter of recalibration on the soggy banks of a gentle duck pond in the crisp autumn of the midwest. The next chapter calls for more settled stability, however, the stories for the coming seasons are the challenges that must keep the reader guessing and holding tight with fascination.

The new setting reveals a particular stillness. A stillness from the ponds and wildlife that reflects a permanence in the coming pages, where the characters and story plots grow on a scanty stage. The suspense and the uncertainty never staggers when re-sketching the bundle of blank pages that came with everything you asked for. The crisp air returns to where it was a year ago, this time autumn casts a grander spell, illuminating the shanty stage with the appropriate edge to delight just as well as any Second City scaffold. October will always mean something when it whispers with the leaves every year. The wingding carries on in the settled furnishings. The satirical euphemisms about it all are helpful in the processing of new beginnings. Believing that what you are doing is apart of some delirious adventure entices those dreamers and their dreams to live for the world to see. After all, the quaintest of settings tell surprising stories.

The sun is setting. The waters calm and the unruffled fowl nest before their reticent night swim. I join the mallards in nesting, actualizing the steadiness in the new, quiet ambience. Heavy rain and thunderstorms are predicted to oversee the twilight and follow midnight into the one-year anniversary. I sit in a recliner by the open french doors of the balcony. My mind is dizzy with relief and memories. I closed my eyes to remember more clearly. Nothing moved at all. I slept through the night.