Uncloistered?

I think I have other posts about the phenomenon of self-forgetfulness. Nontheless, I write this one.

I was in NYC this weekend, which was scary and fun and bizarre and adventurous. I was visiting Maria, my dearest American friend from my semester in Ireland, and Gutter, The Brave and Beautiful, long-time acquaintance from El Victoir, friend for many a year now.

Friend. What a meaningless word. I'm also friends with the early morning T driver who smiles weakly at me when I nearly kill myself tripping up the steps. Also friends with my mother, whose calls and worries I dodge with increasing agility.

Gutter and I are friends like this: we know nothing about each other, really, except that we grew in the same fishbowl with similar attributes ignored or undernourished. We were cerebral, lonely, entertaining and unknowable. He loves my family and they him. They've adopted him, want to know him in and out, and his mother probably wouldn't know me from Marky Mark.

Ha. I almost forgot about forgetting. Here I am, back again on topic. My point about my visit and self-forgetfulness is this: I forgot how excellent, sweet and full I feel when I'm with Gutter and Maria. This is the feeling of being with an intellectual peer, an alive soul. I have friends in Boston, of course, and I love them dearly. I didn't know how much I was missing THIS, though.

The link above comes from Sunday's adventure at the Met's Cloisters (very near Gutter's apartment.) We walked steadily up a wooded path cut into a huge cliff, the city dwindling on one side, the river opening up below, the castle-like museum above. It was surreal and brought out a disorienting homesickness. I don't know exactly where that ache of nostalgia connected - it seemed to be a general sensitivity reaching out to a dozen memories of paths, quiet, lungs, views. I felt myself opening a little.

The Cloisters reminds me of the Isabella Stewart Gardner in that many an archway, sepulchre and tapestry has been artfully woven into the building itself in such a way that one feels she's happened upon a pre-existing marvel where everything within it was created there, in timelessness, one culture spiking deep into that place and making sense of itself. Of COURSE there are unicorn tapestries and moorish spanish triptychs glowing with saffron and cobalt. Perhaps it's a peculiarly American attitude on my part to feel like everything was supposed to be in that space. I like that Rockefeller and Gardner shared that same compulsion to tailor palaces for these artifacts they found fascinating. How could a person stand in Paris dumbfounded by the beauty of a medieval sculpture and say, "I dunno, I could find a better place for that." Such arrogance! And yet... the effect... I was wooed and won.

I wrote this, you nosey clamourer, while Gutter practiced piano. He decided to take lessons, bought himself a keyboard with all 88 keys, and has attained an alarming proficiency in a period of months. Did I mention he is a Favorite Person?