hello all-thanks for reading! this was inspired by the lovely word paradise. enjoy and have an amazing weekend- i am signing off for a spa day of sorts tomorrow. paradise will be mine. again.
i want to give a shout out to my former professor and dept. head at Columbia's Teachers College. I am humbled to know he reads this thing i call a blog. he was brave enough to tell me. i am glad to be expanding my target audience- Aaron Pallas- sociologist i will always be. . .
Paradise. What was paradise yesterday is not my paradise today. My paradise before was a beachfront property in a miami style vice house. My paradise was falling in love with bloody marys. It was the first time we took a run on the dance floor of drinking. I loved them so much- I took the orders from all the family members- first one then multiplying until one day I had more glasses lined up in a row, bartender I had become. I tried to perfect it each time. More family members kept coming back for more. My cousin’s husband said my final one rivaled zeitgeist. I took a moment of silence. A comparison to a godfather of bloody mary makers. I only was in the ring for a week.
Paradise for me was waking up eating and coffee along the lake and then reading, swimming, and making a bloody mary for me and co. Then repeat again. And again. That was my paradise. Paradise was swimming in the lake so much it became my bath. I was a mermaid again on my back floating-my hair back and forth-the heaviness of the hair weighing me down and freeing me all at once. My childhood habit of being a mermaid still mine as I lay on my back floating and my head and the weight of it to and fro. It was my paradise to sit along the hot shore with a towel small or big and the waves crashing rhythmically as the screen doors opens and closes and opens and closes and opens and closes. I sat there by myself. I laid there and could have laid there forever sun beating on my irish german skin brown. I took off one of my 5 bikinis to see a tan line I hadn’t had in years. It was my paradise. Bloody marys and swimming and white bottoms and family and kids running around saying they are robots and wrestling on the damp grass.
It was my paradise until I came home. Home to a forgotten feeling of despair and anxiety. And after I was able to shake the familiar feeling away. I found paradise again. Again I did. Today while driving. I left my friends home in the richmond the fog melted away into the sun of the haight. As I drove, I saw two kids on their bikes on the corner bubbling with summer. I drove behind a person with a red party cup plastic type out the window. I slowed down. I saw a tall man walking a toddler across the street. Paradise again.
As I sat sitting in the sun no bloody mary but a espresso with spice. No beach but sun. And my companion the laptop. I sat and heard. Heard paradise again. I had saw paradise. But paradise was listening to three different people talk about boobs in unison. Paradise was talking to a man from cork. Paradise would be getting proper cocktails with friends and searching for sun tomorrow. I had left my paradise-my lake-my love but now I found home. Paradise all along. All long it was. I just had to drive to the sun and leave the fog. The fog that is.
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