Today was warm, wet, muddy—winter wearing its spring coat. We opened the window in the kitchen a few inches while we were cooking, and I picked Zheli up in my arms to let her sniff the breeze that stole in. She nosed it like someone meeting a friend she wasn’t sure she recognized, quiet and curious and a little bit, I don’t know how to explain it exactly, like a child. I decided to move the jars of lentils and chillies and seeds off to the right of the sill, so that she’d have room to hop up on it if she wanted, and not a moment later there she was, head so far under the edge of the window that she was on the verge of getting wedged in. For half an hour or so she sat on the sill, watching and smelling that vast March night on the other side of the gap, not tense with excitement as she so often is, but deeply calm; she could have been hypnotized. Every now and then she turned around to call softly at me, a tiny mew full of wonder and uncertainty, like Have you smelled this? When she did so I could see that there was a smudge of dirt on the tip of her nose from the dirty sill. She looked very like a stray cast member from a stage production of Oliver Twist.

The other night I had a dream that three short essays I submitted to a literary journal were summarily rejected by email; the editor, whose tone was outraged, called them “cruel and degrading.” In the dream I understood this to mean not that their content was sordid, but that they were so wretchedly badly written as to render him mortified. I have not, as it happens, submitted anything to a literary journal lately, but when I awoke I knew why I had had that dream. I am working, as ever, to fulfill some kind of promise. Some days it is hard to tell whether it is a promise I made to myself, or one that was made to me. Either way, it is taking far longer than I had anticipated, and it is easy to grow discouraged.

On the other hand, the simple act of opening a window and making a little room for a cat on the sill is far more gratifying than anyone (but me) will ever tell you.

A witch flying through the chambers of a creaky house; a ghost weeping in a Japanese temple; a mad prophet careening through the streets spilling his visions like blood.

This week I ran after an armful of threads I’d thrown out into the world last week. Trying to pull my way along each one to its far flung destination has left me feeling a little divided. Happy, but divided. And therefore, largely in lieu of a proper post, here is one of the many birds that has come into my life of late.

There you go.

My dad is in my thoughts tonight: he’s been dizzy ever since he contracted a virus last week, and he had to have an MRI a few days ago to rule out anything major (all was well; his brain is apparently clear as a bell). Although he sounded healthy and cheerful on the phone and I know he does not want me to worry, who is he kidding? So here I am, thinking of my dad. Over the years I have probably mentioned to one or another of you how phenomenal a memory my father has, and bemoaned my own leaky sieve—here, friends, is just how memorious he is. Having been slid into the MRI machine on Friday morning, says my dad, he—supine and sedated—suddenly recalled a particular newspaper article about Michael Jackson that he read 16 years ago.

The story was printed during a visit everyone’s favorite illustrious lunatic was making to our fair island (for a concert that I totally attended and shouted myself quite hoarse at; don’t even try to make me feel embarrassed, because I won’t). My dad remembered it because, he explained, it was about how good old MJ was rushed to a local hospital not once, but twice that day so many years ago, in order to undergo two emergency MRIs that showed absolutely nothing was wrong with his brain (riiiight). Why all the fuss? Mr. Jackson had a headache. Ever the socialist, my father recalls wondering—as he turned the inky page over his morning tea—how on earth the great man’s insurance was willing to pay for such a thing.

Birds; brains; I’m beat. See y’all soon.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve been tagged six* times to do this meme that’s floating around the Internet where you make a list of twenty five things you want people to know about you. I thought I might as well say, for future reference, that I’m not going to do it no matter how many times I get tagged—because frankly, I feel that I have done plenty of that kind of sharing here, among other places. If you read me here, you know as much about me as I want you to.

But I am very much enjoying reading what my friends have been choosing to share, and one of them (a dearer heart the universe could not have made) ended her list with the following words: “If I have ever loved you,” she declared, “I still do.”

If I have ever loved you, I still do.

I felt lucky to know that. The love of a girl like that is well cherished. I’m afraid I can’t say that the same is true of me. I have adored many people in my life, quite sincerely and deeply and for long periods of time, whom I no longer love.

But I thought about what I could say, and searching through the swirl of memory and change I found that this, instead, was true: If I have ever loved you, you are with me still. I remember your face. I remember your voice. And I remember what you taught me.

*As of two minutes after I made this post, seven times.

Listen, I know it has been quiet here lately, but I have started building something that I have been planning to build for two years now. It isn’t ready to share with you yet, but I’m very excited to say that I think it will be soon, hopefully some time in my (now rapidly approaching) birthday month. I will need a lot of inspiration and perspiration to continue its construction, though, so wish me luck. And thank you, so much, for the sweet support I know you will give me when the time comes (because you guys rock).

I am also terribly pleased because I visited the Field Museum today and received the most marvelous possible tour of the Bird Division’s specimen preparation room. I do not think I need to tell you how incredibly cool it was to be invited into the room where tiny black beetles eat the flesh off various small-to-medium sized carcasses.

Wait, do I?

P.S. Ross and I are going to get our drivers’ licenses converted tomorrow and—since we have to take a written test—we have just spent two eyeball-drying hours studying the astonishingly badly written Illinois state drivers’ manual. I leave this process with so many questions. To wit: Why, DMV writers, do you include six impressively redundant diagrams and two pages of bulleted lists to illustrate the many ways in which it is right and proper to turn from one lane into another, and then go and toss around the snazzy term “hydroplaning” without explanation? Why is it that after three pages of photographs and text, I am still not clear on whether you are or aren’t required to stop when coming upon a school bus unloading children (like screaming offerings unto the world) in a roadway with four or more lanes? And finally, do you think it would be possible for me to meet and shake the hand of the singularly brilliant individual who came up with the term “aggravated fleeing”?

That is all. Luck, my friends.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

When I was seventeen, I wrote an essay about The Tempest in which I said, of this slight, wonderful bit of verse that happens to be a bejeweled lie, that it was a form of magic because it created a “self-sufficient actuality.” I know this because 1) I have had the phrase “sea change” sloshing gently against the shores of my mind for the past thirteen years; 2) as a result of this long-lived ear-worm, I stole those words two months ago and used them in the title of a Utata project I manage; and 3) when I finally took a photo to submit to the Utata project page, I was reminded of my essay—and during the time it took to scan my Polaroid, I dug it out of a box containing bits of academic ephemera so that I could unearth the precise tone of my early pretension.

I share this with you because 1) I still love the phrase “sea change;” 2) I cherish the tremendous sense of assurance with which I always used to write, and I hope it has not faded too much; and 3) there are things gently bubbling beneath the surface of this year that make me feel I too am becoming—slowly— something rich and strange.

I wasn’t in the best of moods when I left the house late yesterday afternoon, because I was heading out to do something I didn’t particularly want to do, and I had to travel a long way in order to do it (see previous entry, but listen, it’s complicated: the specific act was not desired, yet it was part of a larger, desired, goal. Also, I agreed to do it before the start of 2009. What would you have done?).

But there is a beguiling romance about looking out the window of an El train on a winter evening, alone, when the city lights cut through the charcoal sky and a light snow draws a veil over every ugly thing. And I was listening to a man’s quiet, reasonable, slightly sarcastic voice reading the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which, so far, I liked very much. After a few minutes I had so absorbed myself in the sound of the words traveling into my ears that I quite forgot where I was, and had to look up to situate myself.

For a moment—probably not long enough to measure on an ordinary watch—I felt myself slip through time and space. The whitening roads beyond the glass, the buildings whose daytime frenzy was quietened by the coming of dusk, the people below me making their heavy way home, could have been anywhere I’d ever been, even just for a night once, long ago, on the way from one place to another. I myself could have been any age: Seven, head on my mother’s shoulder, going home (no matter that it does not snow in Singapore and we never took the train home at night); twenty-one, on a bus that traversed the dark sands of the Negev; twenty-four, riding back to my apartment in Allston during a snowstorm, after the worst day of teaching I’d had so far; forty, perhaps, driving back to a warm dinner table somewhere where the morning would bring the smell of jasmine.

I smiled. Things seemed malleable. My brain, my mood, myself, the universe. If memories could merge so with each other, and with fantasy, what could not be changed? My reverie lasted longer than the moment that birthed it, and soon I had lost the thread of Toru Okada’s life, just as I had lost the thread of my own.

Luckily, his could be easily rewound to the place where I had slipped away.