Every time I come home I realize how much the sound of the doors opening and closing evokes memories for me, particular ones with particular portals. My bedroom door; my parents bathroom door; the front door downstairs. Is it just me? Does everyone hold in their neurons sounds as precise as these? Sweep of wood against wood, click of metal knob, slide of latch? No taste of madeleines for me; not even my mother’s perfume is so powerful.

My mother and I were talking the other day, while Ross was driving us to our beginner’s birding excursion with the Massachusetts Audubon people (we had a great time and saw these many things; thank you for asking). I told her one of the binoculars we were taking was Maury’s old World War II pair, and she told me to be sure to bring that with us when we moved, because it was important to keep things that were full of so much memory.

I laughed and assured her we would, but then I said, “You know, mum, we can’t take everything with us. We’re going to have to get rid of a lot.” So we will. I already asked my father for his blessing in the agonizing decision to give away or sell his old 35mm cameras and lenses, the ones I learned to photograph on and whose clicks remind me of particular days, particular smells, particular qualities of light. It will break my heart a little bit not to have them with me, but there’s just too much stuff in this house. I can’t hold on to it all. I don’t want to carry the whole of my past that way, in boxes, saving it up for my old age. I have to trust that little things will be enough to remind me, and also that memory won’t be my only satisfaction then.

This afternoon I steeled myself and threw out a bagful of photos from the past four or five years. I have scanned copies of most of them, and most of the rest are rubbish anyway. I tucked away a few, mostly of people I love or used to love. Others I hung on to because they reminded me of particular days, particular smells, particular qualities of light.

There’s so much time left, and so much nostalgia left to create. I’m not worried about what I leave behind. I know I’ll keep just what I need.

Ross and I had a fight the other night about hair.

Oh, all right, if you want the truth then instead of Ross and I I ought to say just I, it might be more accurate to replace the word fight with the phrase hissy fit, and for hair read my hair and how much he did or didn’t like it during the year he helped me buzz-cut it to within an inch of its life every week.

What happened was that I said, “I’m thinking about cutting my hair short again when we move. Because it’ll be summer, and things will be kind of crazy, and it would be nice not to have to deal with it.”

Ross said “Short? How short?”

“Short,” I helpfully elaborated. “Like when we used to cut it with the clippers.”

“Oh.” And the faintest look of glumness passed across his face.

I pounced.

“Why? Would you not like that?”

“Well… not as much as, you know, the way it is now.”

“Why not?”

“I just… don’t… generally… like hair that’s that short, at least not compared to other styles. I prefer your hair when it’s a little longer.”

“But you helped me cut it.”

“Well, of course if you wanted to have it that short again I would totally support you.”

“But you said all kinds of nice things about it when I had it that way.”

“….”

“Were you just trying to be supportive? Did you not mean it when you said you liked it?”

“…”

And so on, for half an hour or so over a very chilly dinner.

We made up eventually, but not before I exhausted him so much with my accusations that he had to take a nap.

I suspect that this is a deep-seated hang-up from when I was 15 and my boyfriend broke up with me because I cut my hair short (or if not because of it, at least the day after). Have I already told you that story? I probably deserved it, since he was my best friend’s boy before he was mine and even at 15 I should have known better.

Anyway, if she still holds a grudge she can derive some satisfaction from the fact that the whole thing caused an evening’s worth of huffy paranoia on my part, 13 years later.

*******

I think the real proof that I am a (mini) grown up is the fact that an interval of 13 years does not actually seem shockingly epic to me anymore, and I am no longer surprised to think back that long and realize that I was very much already a prototype Meera then. ;-)

I grew up in a house whose rooms were filled above all with two very particular strains of music: the smooth, syncopated foot-tappings of jazz (Coltrane, Clapton, Davis; Billie, Brubeck, Ella) and the intricate architectures of classical harmonics (Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi; Mendelssohn, Mozart, Handel). Besides the records that made the speakers shiver, music also meant my father’s sharp, clear whistle angling through the space between his teeth, and my mother’s sweet voice quavering through the hymns of her heart. For many years music—though familiar and beloved, though a friend of mine, though calm and moving and inspiring and every good thing that it still is today—wasn’t really something I could choose, and therefore possess, for myself. All the paths to music I saw laid out before me were marked with the signposts of intellect (I was too childishly sensual), faith (I was too literal), or memory (my past was still the size of a pea underneath a pile of mattresses, and I was no princess).

Don’t get me wrong. I loved music, both as a listener and a producer of song. I was in organized choirs and funny little a cappella choruses with friends; I was obsessed with musicals; I hummed and warbled my way through my awkward years bolstered with the knowledge, some days, that my voice was the prettiest thing about me. But all that music was about other people, other worlds—adult worlds, usually, that were ordered and complete and beautifully, richly mature. Even the hottest jazz seemed that way to me as a kid, since I didn’t have the slightest idea what jazz was about. I didn’t get that music could be an instrument of rebellion. I didn’t get that it could be a secret you held close to your chest, or a bitter raging against the universe. That it could tell you in a single phrase who you always were, or suddenly show you the self you didn’t even know you wanted to be.

Then I became a teenager.

I now realize that I had a wholly ordinary teenage experience, as these things go—I was alternately cruel and passionately affectionate to my fellows, and they were the same to me. I shunned the idea of love and then fell in love with my best friend’s boy, and that was a whole mess. I felt the fear of embarrassment thrilling through every hair on my body during every single second. I turned my back on my parents. I suffered through painful epiphanies every other month. I had an inferiority complex; I had a superiority complex.

What can I say? It was the thing to do. :-)

But if those years held only one gift (and in truth they held many), it was music, music that opened up for me then with such emotional power that it was like a conflagration of exquisite aches. I started listening to the radio every moment I could. Soon I decided the radio was too vanilla for me. I read CD reviews in obscure British and American music magazines every week and delighted in purchasing albums without ever having heard a single track on them. As soon as I bought a new CD I locked my door and put it on, playing it over and over until the order of the songs on it had become as familiar as the thrum of my heart when I lay awake at night. I turned the volume up high. I screamed into my pillow in inchoate rages. I wept for heartbreaks I hadn’t even had properly. Music belonged to me, and I belonged to music, and thank god for all of it.

I was beautifully, irreparably, sixteen. There was no turning back.

*******

This entry brought to you by My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, whose album “Hit and Run Holiday” I listened to this afternoon while washing the dishes.

Despite not possessing an ounce of genuine talent, feeling thoroughly ill at ease with the idea of using my stiff, oddly angled adolescent body as an instrument of communication, and being prone to vast, secret embarrassment whenever anyone paid the slightest bit of attention to me, I spent six years of my teenage life involved in the theater. I still miss the delicious hours between call time and curtain, the adrenaline of an impending performance so like a drug that one evening it quite numbed me to the fact that three hours before the show a fellow actor had entirely broken my heart (by letter).

I don’t know why I ever thought I could act, though—these days I find I can’t even work up the facial plasticity to pretend good cheer when all I feel is boredom, frustration, and a powerful desire to pull out my little rolling suitcase and trundle out the door before anyone can stop me.

The afternoon I landed in Israel in 2000 I called Avi from the airport. “When you take a cab,” he said, “sit in the front seat. This is a democratic country.”

I wasn’t sure how the former followed from the latter, but in any case my driver decided to ferry a friend of his as well, so they chatted away in the front while I stared out the window at the palm trees and the yellow dust. I have no idea why I wasn’t nervous, not even a little, about what lay ahead. I’d never been anywhere in the Middle East before. I didn’t know a soul in the entire country except for Avi, who was going to be rather busy being a soldier most of the time. I’d had a year of Hebrew by then and I felt steadied by the words I held in my hat, but I’d never even read a book about Israel. It wasn’t much more than a name on the radio to me—a little, but not much. A thin thread of language, music and love was the only thing connecting me to the land that day. Shouldn’t I have been worried about whether that would be enough to anchor me over the next eight months? Shouldn’t I have wondered whether I was even going to like it there?

I cannot begin to tell you why, but I felt immeasurably confident. Wholly free. I knew I was going to like it. I just knew.

On the way into Jerusalem the sky broke open into a light storm, and my driver and his friend broke into delighted exclamations. “Maybe it’s not so nice for you on your first day, but we need the rain, you know?” they said, turning around to beam at me and make sure I understood why they were so happy. Maybe that was the beginning of it, their rich satisfaction over the rain. It felt like a door was opening, and behind it all that was good would be better. Whether or not that also meant all that was bad would be worse, I didn’t care. I twinkled back at them. The rain came down. And when I stepped out of the taxi, it was onto wet Jerusalem stone, slippery with promises.

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason; how infinite in faculties; in form and moving, how express and admirable; in action, how like an angel; in apprehension, how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

When I was eleven years old a friend of mine took a volunteer job at an aviary, and when I visited her I saw cages full of tiny baby mice, days old, in between the wild parrots and fledgling hawks. They were food for the birds. I don’t remember now if I asked her to do this or if she simply did it of her own accord after a cry of incoherent compassion escaped me, but for some reason she decided to ask the keeper who supervised her for permission to give me one of these doomed morsels of life.

“It’s very unlikely that it will survive,” she said as she placed it gently on a piece of cotton wool. “But you can keep it warm for a few days, and try feeding it milk with this eye dropper.”

So I did. It was an irrational act: the little pink comma was very small, and the odds against it very great. Its heart beat faintly inside its translucent skin; it was so light the whole of it was nothing but a faint tremble of possibility. Three or four days later, it died.

My parents were out, and my sister was in her room busy being fourteen. We still lived in our first house on the 8th floor of an apartment building, above a large green lawn of shared play space. I wrapped the dead baby mouse in tissue and took the elevator downstairs with it in my hands, careful not to crush its nothing body or its nothing little bones on the way. I walked as far across the grass as I could, until I reached a tree under which I was fairly certain no one could see me. I had no spade. I didn’t even have a spoon. I dug in the hard dirt with my hands and buried my bundle in a shallow grave.

I didn’t say anything. The mouse hadn’t been a pet, really; it hadn’t been much of anything. Not enough of anything to love, anyway. But my heart beat fast. It was a strange thrill to be burying a thing that yesterday had been alive and today was dead. I dusted my hands off on my pants and went upstairs.

Then, as sometimes happens when you are eleven, I found myself in the grip of an obsession I couldn’t shake, and twice before my parents came home I had to go back downstairs and dig up my tissue-wrapped mouse to see if it was still alive. It was an odd feeling that compelled me to do this, not really related to compassion or pity or fear. And it wasn’t hope, either—I didn’t want to discover that the pathetic little scrap of flesh had been reanimated.

I think I just conceived of the dead body, fragile and cold and unresponsive, as being extraordinarily bizarre. Lifelessness seemed like such an impossible property for a body to have that having buried the thing, I found that I just couldn’t be sure it would retain that property permanently. It was entirely possible—and indeed probable, I felt—that life would invade again.

I knew about death, of course, and I suppose I understood it, intellectually. I knew that everything died eventually. But what I think I must have felt that day was that life was the more powerful force, and that the mouse body simply didn’t make sense without it. A lump of matter that was supposed to be alive, and therefore qualitatively different from all the other lumps of matter in the world, was suddenly just the same: inanimate, insensate, incapable of protesting when you buried it beneath the earth. What a tremendously incomprehensible trespass of boundaries. Why wouldn’t I have been convinced that I might just have been imagining it?

In one way my feelings haven’t changed since I was eleven: seeing the dead human body on display, I feel in myself the same sense of odd displacement. These organs like paper flowers; these stretching muscles; this soft brain tissue; this strange fire of nerves; this skin flapping like paper; they are all fascinating, all beautiful in a way, even split open and stark—but cold, dead, preserved, none of them entirely makes sense.

Separated from the force of life, whatever that is, the body becomes nothing more than an oddly messy object. To be sure, it is an extraordinary object; an object of wonder and perhaps even of affection. But it is an object just the same. It is a bit of a crazy thing to stand staring into the eyes of a dead human being and realize that what you are feeling is not reverence or awe, but the same curiosity you feel when you see any other museum artifact.

I do wonder if Gunther von Hagen ever found himself tiptoeing back into his lab at night and poking his row of plastinated bodies one by one to see if life had, in fact, invaded again.