The Floors Could be Metaphors...

The best way I can describe where I’m living now is an intriguing hybrid between a construction site, an artists’ colony and a Jewish temple. My landlord is at least sixty, bald with a perpetually sweat soaked ruff of grey hair. He talks incessantly, about conspiracy theories, plans, beliefs, and keeping Kosher.

The house is massive, but still somehow homey. Musical instruments rattle and jangle in every corner; gongs thrash into a deafening roar any time of day or night.
More than anything the flooring fascinates me. The living room is honey colored wood that bleeds into the master bedroom, shiny and normal under the grime of indifference. Huge grey stones in a greenish mortar cover the floor in the dining room that opens into a huge office, lined with floor to ceiling windows. Dozens of cords from printers, computers, TVs and other blinking beeping office gadgets spiral across the grey stony floor.

The kitchen has linoleum, cream colored with spirals of brown, like a shepherdess’s hair, or a conservative paisley. There is another kitchen downstairs, but it has tiles instead of the lacy creamy linoleum. The constant building and digging for elaborate raised beds and steep steps outside cuts into red clay dirt, dirt like I saw once on a sleek race track in Kentucky. Here its deep clods, red and orange ground into the tan tiles in ever layered boot prints. This tile, under the orange and red treads marches into a bathroom, and down a hall ending sharply, as if shaking off the marching feet on its blank tan face.

At the end of this hall the room opens again with chip filled cement holding the room together. The room is tall window and a yellow too lovely to be mustard and too experienced to be buttercup. The floor sits there grey and stern, defying the cheerful red rug that smoothes its face, but confident that it is needed to keep the yellow and the windows from flying away.

My room is off this big room. The grey floor is comforting here, and a yarny red rug sits snuggly against its surface, sharing the load.

I already know I will be lonely here. My little bed, too short and flat reminds me. The grey of the floor reminds me. And my one lone window, long and dear the ceiling reminds me. But the rug hushes the floor. And a bright afghan and my nanny’s old feather pillow soften the bed. Pictures climb the walls beside posters that tell of memories and occasions still colorful. Books lean against each other on the yawning shelf, full of more to say and do.

An old woman lives beside the kitchen. Her husband lives there too, but he slips around like a shadow with many whispered thanks and welcomes almost drowned out by his wife’s breathing machines and the smell she drags with her. So far she watches CNN and eats canned peaches. She tells me I’m big, like I don’t already know. I want to tell her she smells like piss, but she must know, and she might do something dangerous with her yards of blue oxygen cord.

I’m sharing bathroom with a man for the first time in almost five years. I washed his towels today, and he was grateful. He has bottles of scent and lotion lining the countertop. He is a waiter, and he irons the same white shirt each morning. He tells me of his childhood in Romania, and offers me watermelon and Mexican beer. He has a little boy who beat me at checkers without saying a single word, then sat on the sofa, wrapped in a huge black and white checked blanket, staring out at me from behind round glasses.

Upstairs in one of the rooms with shining blonde wood a contractor lives. He grew up in San Francisco, and he comes home from working all day and walks through without his shirt, sawdust in his hair, and sticking to a pink scar on his side. I will ask him about it someday. I drove him downtown this evening, to meet a woman for a blind date. He drank two glasses of wine first, but he was still nervous and jumpy. He told me he was too old to be doing this kind of thing.

Everyone in the house is at least fifty years old. They have traveled been in love and seen things that the universe hasn’t yet led me too. They have all already told me I remind them of where they were once.

When I was unpacking I found my UTC course book. It made me think what I have been again, I should be picking my classes, running all over campus to see how much time I need to get from class to class, I should be tracking down the best book deals, and seeing which of my friends will be in classes with me so we can share the same book. I should be fighting with my boss over my changing schedule, and picking the perfect back to school outfit. This was going to be the best year, the best one yet. When I went to the writing lab I would sing in as “Hana Colvin, Major, Engl 2nd, Senior”. Instead I ‘m hearing about lives. His, hers, theirs, yours. I’m writing and reading, pretending to learn another language. I’m trying figure out where to do my Pilates, I’m catching lightening busy for the silent little boy with round glasses. I’m embroidering and watching pointless TV, I’m going on interviews for jobs I’m never called back to, and I’m polishing my resume like a diamond. And, I’m writing again. First draft by hand, at my favorite coffee house that is this city to me, writing it down in a notebook that I bought the other day, even though I already have dozens. I needed a clean, clear one, empty of Shakespeare notes or class schedules.

For a year I will be a bohemian. A learner, a transcendentalist, a dreamer, a horizon expander. And I will do this in my new home that has many floors.