People think you’re weird if you spend too much time ‘taking it in’. We go to our locations, snap our pictures for instagram (if that’s what you’re into), and go home. But I remember when I was a child when I didn’t have the option to get up and leave. I remember I would be present where I was and take it in. I have a lot of memories and impressions where I don’t know exactly what they were from, but I believe they came from really sitting in the present and feeling them, whether it was a scene outside, a colonial poster from a book, or paintings on our walls.
When I was a child, there was one particular day when Mom took me to our local Toys R Us. The land the store was located on was elevated above the other stores in the area and was made of a tan stucco or concrete color with a vast parking lot. This was back in the 1990s when retailers more frequently placed products outside for display, and I remember the mood of the sun over the displays. I found a Crash Dummies toy I really wanted. I’ve always described the setting, how it felt, as if being at the edge of the world, but in a more dream-like way, as if being at the edge of forever. Above was the great void of the sky, and beyond the parking lot must surely have been the great void where the Earth dropped off. Between these voids was the light of the sun, warm on my arms and warm on the boxes and the plastic that sat on the shelves.
It’s entirely possible I’ve confused the details of that memory, but the feelings, now you never forget those. This scene and how it made me feel has been a key element for many of the stories I’ve wanted to write, and every now and then I come across it when the sun is beating down on suburbia, or when the zoo has those fake African huts made of stucco. Sometimes at the junk yard, or the flea market.
As I was snowshoeing today, I looked up a smooth, sloping hill to see a solid field of unbroken snow. The clouds above blew flurries up and over the mountaintops, and the sun shown down from above. And on the way back I paused here again to really take it in this time. The sun was going down, and through that frosty mist high above, you could, at times, see the disk of the sun. I felt that I could have spent hours there, taking it in, but somewhere inside, I almost felt like crying, because there’s so much we don’t, or even can’t, take in.
Sometimes I feel you better watch out. You could be laying in your bed, or your tent; you could be shopping at the mall or watching the rain, and you could turn right over and slip off the edge of forever.