Notes From the Hamlet

I was picking up the clan's mail yesterday at the Social Club (yes, the sign over the door seems to indicate to the rest of the world that the building is indeed the Post Office, but in a rural town with no home delivery, it is the hub of the community) and I ran into my piano teacher. This woman is one of the adults who shepherded me through those awkward adolescent years with deep patience and understanding (besides playing for her, I remember talking non-stop). I went to her house every Thursday afternoon with my sister. We both had a half hour lesson and while I was waiting, I got to read her collection of The New Yorker and look at all the cool things on her shelves that she had picked up on her world travels.

We had a nice chat and she told me about an article she wrote about Egon Petri, the piano teacher who taught her teacher.

Notes From Limbo

Many well-meaning people have been asking me what I am doing and where I live. To both questions, the answer is still unresolved.

The KB cleared out a second drawer in her vanity for me to put my clothes away in. The strange thing is, I am starting to get used to it. I feel like a large adolescent with a car and a few bills. I feel guilty when I am out past ten. I want to be home by five so I don't miss dinner. My mom washes my sheets. I have to ask my dad if I can borrow his computer.

The job search is going rather dismally. I have been putting off looking for a house because the various people who have wanted to get a place with me have had delays and I feel like a fool looking for a place without having anything to put in the "employer" line.

The Hamlet is beautiful, though. The morning mist clings to the cypresses. The sound of the waves breaking penetrates the windows at night. The mountain is as lovely as a prayer, even when you can't see the top. The KB is always up to somthing. I am half-afraid of getting to comfortable. I don't think that is going to happen though. I miss my old, grown-up life too much.

Hamlet, Part 2

View of the Hamlet, originally uploaded by camille94019.

The fog rolled away this afternoon for the first time in two weeks and I took the KB swimming in the very pool I learned how to swim in. I think the lifeguards were the same-- tanned, slightly ditzy blondes with big sunglasses, paying more attention to the lummoxy swim jocks that to the children. Maybe they are just the Universal Lifeguards. The kids smelled just like they did when I was their age, a combination of little farts and strong detergent. They even had the same faces. It was very surreal, as if 25 years really hadn't passed. I was the only person that had changed. Even the loose gravel on the potholed parking lot was just where I left it.

My time is running out. More later.

The Hamlet

Montara, originally uploaded by camille94019.

The KB is typing this blog entery for me. She is sitting on my lap and I am whispering the words one at a time into her ear.

Life at the Manse is settling down into a routine as I continue to look for a life.

Gazatteer: The Hamlet

the view from the foot of the Mountain

History

The Hamlet started off as an artist's colony in the early part of the twentieth century. The planners envisioned a community made up of artists and musicians living and working in little, low-rent cottages next to the sea. The City was just a short trip away on the coast train. The houses they built were simple, with a bedroom, a living room, enclosed gardens and studios. As with most of the romantic speculation that happened on the coast, it ended up being a disaster. Only a few cottages survive, and the dream of an artist colony never found purchase.


the ubiquitous Monterey Pines

Primordial Associations

When I was tiny, my mother drove me to the Grammar School for ballet lessons. The auditorium was always drafty (and the faded velvet curtains always musty), but 500 lb Esther-at-the-piano played waltzes for the exercises, and her great bulk was enough to heat the room with music. Built in 1915, the Grammar School seemed to ooze magical erudition, from its tower to its forbidden basements. Even the symmetrical flights of stairs were loaded with symbolism, winging the humble pedestrian from the ground to the heights of learning.

When I was older, my mother drove me to the same neighborhood for piano lessons. I poured my heated adolescent energy into mastering Brahms. I thought I was a great player, and I loved the loudness of a real piano (oooh, that square yard of vibrating wood, mine, all mine!).


The Manse, the Old Highway, the KB and more Monterey Pines

My parents bought The Manse in the early nineties, a rancher built in the fifties by a retired naval doctor who didn't want to stray far from the ocean (it was complete with a root cellar and a garbage burner). By that time I was on my way to college, but I did have the chance to play the piano while watching the waves crash on the cliffs below. If you look carefully over the door of the basement, you can see the words "leave hope behind, all ye who enter here" scrawled in pencil. I don't know who wrote it, it was there when we moved in.

The Monterey Pines

They don't look like pine trees, to an uneducated observer they might look like cypresses. They are the dramatic thespians of the landscape and they have completely overrun The Hamlet. Its nearly impossible to find a corner where they haven't sunk their twisted roots deep into the dirt. When they cling to the edge of the cliffs they are in the throes of wrestling with the wind. When they settle inland, they reign like kings, cloaking their kingdoms in endless twilight.

The Crows

If the Monterey Pines dominate the space between the sky and the ground, then it is the crows who are reign supreme in the air. The air roils with their calls. Sometimes hundreds of them sit, cackling madly, in a single Monterey Pine. Their black feathers blend into the blue-green shadows of the piney foliage. My mother confessed once that they talk to her when she hoes the artichokes, and, even more shockingly, she talks back to them.

The Weather

The Bronte sisters never visited The Hamlet, but they understood its atmosphere well, from the wind-blasted heaths, to the sodden gray fields and the oppressive gray skies. Its not green enough to be the Northwest, nor is its disposition sunny enough to be included with the rest of the state. It is the silent, blue-eyed, calvinist great-uncle, with his knobby blue-veined feet in the freezing waters, looking north, and dreaming of faeries.

The Present

Unimaginative people have since built a lot of ugly houses, but they are easy to ignore once the traveler finds her way into the dusky heart of the foothills where on some street corners, it is still 1915. The Hamlet currently doesn't have any big box stores, a cathedral, a freeway offramp, an airport, a taqueria or even an affordable DSL connection. Since it sports its own lighthouse, one could approach it via the ocean but approach is all the sailor would be able to do, as there is no place to dock a boat.