It’s rather an intriguing contraption, that Appalachian trunk.  Many peculiar lost personal possessions have emerged from within it over the years. Each time I open it, something else is in there that was never there before. Each time, it contains some little something of mine that I lost or misplaced long, long ago.

When I first discovered this phenomenon, I opened the doll trunk several times a day. But experience has revealed that the trunk prefers a little privacy of fermentation, and the longer I leave it tucked away, the more phenomenal the resulting phenomenon.

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The best I can theorize is that when I lose possessions outside my own domain – on a cafe table, or within a hotel desk, or alongside a train track – the trunk retrieves them for me. However, many of the losses took place before the trunk found me. And why does the trunk choose today to bring me my old reading glasses?

Of all the resplendent enigmas of the Tennessee doll trunk, the most outstanding mystery is the nature of the passage of time within its lid.

These little reading spectacles vanished nearly ten years ago, somewhere along the streets of San Francisco. Positively evaporated. And at that time, the doll’s trunk had not even come into my possession. INCIDENT #1: The year 2000, ten years ago, the glasses disappear, and begin a secret adventure. INCIDENT #2: In 2005, five years into their adventure, their original owner (me) acquires an arcane box from the woods of Appalachia. The box spends five years retrieving the glasses from wherever they had journeyed, and today, INCIDENT #3, in 2010, the glasses appear.

Clearly, the chronology is rather intriguing.

In these years of miracle and mystery, what have my glasses seen through their lid-less lenses?

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They began their life in the possession of a gaggle of shopkeepers in the Castro in San Francisco. These queer purveyors of image were gifted in revising the fundamental nature of human existence through the varied selection of deeply transfiguring eyewear.

I was in graduate school, and three of us – all story-blinded writers – buttressed ourselves with freshly-disbursed student loan checks and embarked upon on a Vision Quest, a two-week odyssey of dilation and disorientation through the streets of SF.

Eventually, girded with glasses, we each blinked our new eyes to unfamiliar vistas –  allthe tangled streets of the city that marked our way back to our writing garrets through.  We navigated and maneuvered along MUNI and streetcar and pavement, some of us delighted and others dismayed at the alarming new level of detail that greeted our gaze.

I was the dismayed one, I confess.

Neither far-sighted nor near-sighted, my eyes as perfectly as possible collect the world’s data, but the touch of astigmatism that warps my eyeballs twists it all together. What is straight becomes crooked. What is north becomes northwest. What is West becomes south-east.

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Turns out I love the world a little more when it’s intimately twisted. I take in the uncorrected view through the imperfect windows of my soul.

One of my most absolute tremendous joys in life is to escape language comprehension – to travel to a place (or time) where I cannot understand what is spoken and what is written. To exist within a world of language that evades me. My mind relaxes, and I gather the gist. I see the gestures, and the colors, and the shapes and the smiles and frowns, the skittering and dwelling of the eyes and subtle patterns of body and behavior that must be relied upon to provide meaning and context. Something quiets, and something else awakens.

I also love to escape vision comprehension. To be unable to process what is seen and observed.

To exist within a world of color and shape whose meanings evade signifiers. The mind relaxes, and one listens. One hears the words, the sounds, the language and the sighs and cries and the sounds of crabs scuttling along the beds of distant seas. The tightening of a throat. The constricting of a tongue, snapping and popping against the slippery corrugated roof of a mouth.

Something awakens, as something else quiets down.

The trick is to dismiss all sense of fear.

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When I was a child very near to the middle of nowhere Tennessee, I operated a small cottage industry peddling pints of homegrown cherry tomatoes to the folks who lived closest to our land (sometimes known as  neighbors).

I had a little toy printing press with wood and rubber block letters and manufactured a host of highly irregularly-printed and largely pointless publicity materials to support my enterprise. This was the rainy day part of my business, the hide-inside part of my business, the house part. Behind closed doors, behind glass, inside windows.

But sooner or later the telephone would ring near suppertime and I would have to go harvest my goods.

In Tennessee in the summer, the air is nearly solid. Going outside – much less into a cultivated field – requires a fortitude perhaps known only to a sperm.

Poised at the doorway, one must select a strategy for movement.

Sometimes folks stand there forever in the south – leaning gape-eyed against some backwoods doorway.

It’s because they have seen what’s out there, and are looking for a path. They don’t want to be the fool. They’re waiting for an opening through the air. They believe if they stand there and wait long enough, some suggestion of passage will emerge.

It doesn’t. It hasn’t. It never will. Go, watch for them. But don’t start to lean.

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In the South, there’s another common method for coping with the air.

In the south you also see the skinny-rickets, hell-for-leather, hill-and-hollows run – a pelting prison-yard chain-gang escape from the back door out into the woods. Taken on with the wild-eyed shriek of hope and fear. This is the rebel yell. The person who – faced with that opacity – makes a run for it. Applies the pell-mell bolt, where the calculated risk of getting through it quickly entails a commitment to endure the unexpected, such as swallowing the lion’s share of a hornet’s nest. In this strategy, the key is speed: cover ground. Run more rapidly than the others can slither or crawl or fly. I had seen other children in our neighborhood carried far up into the sky by entire families of mosquitos or dragged off into limestone sinkholes by a rare confederation of copperheads and rattlesnakes, leaving only two tiny human shoes behind for the survivors to gather up and sell.

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The other strategy is to stand at the doorway, gaze into the haze, plot coordinates, and then begin.

There is a single trick to this: know where you are, and know where you want to go. Then trust. Accept it. Don’t expect air to be clear. Don’t expect to be alone. In the summer in the woods in Tennessee, I learned not to panic when movement through obstacle seems impossible.

Poised at the back door, garden basket in hand, I felt out my own coordinate of doorway, lintel, stair. Here I am. I am here.

Next, I felt out the destination. There. There. I will go there.

Then – enter.

Blinded by the blur of birds and aphids and dust and pollen and spiders and cloud and bees and flies and dirt and seed, I listened for the color of the tomatoes. Through the opacity of air lay the cows, and then the heat-crazed horses shoeless beneath the maple trees, then the Brown Recluse Wood Pile, then the silent delicacy of the Bird Cemetery, the Black Widow Spider Web, then the manure pile – a metropolis – then over the doll’s creek with its Rattlesnake Rocks, and a plunge into the garden: through the rows of peavines, cornstalks, beets, cucumbers, zucchini, carrots, turnips. To the tomatoes, to the tomatoes, the tomatoes with their soft spiky down, and the screaming murmur of their seeds.

Put your ear up to a tomato on its vine and listen, next time you are in a garden in the midst of dirt and sun.

Each of those seeds has a sound, and if you don’t know where a garden of dirt and sun may be, put your ear up to the window and look: you might see.

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This morning, I put the glasses on my nose and they still seem to work – the squiggles become lines, the blur becomes clear, the compass points predictably again. Along the bridge the comfort of some smudges, a whorled and oily artifact of myself: a fingerprint from 1999.

This shard of personal archeology momentarily obscures my view of the bookshelf. Through the blur, I go back in time. In a moment, I surface for air, and it is 2010, and I have cleaned the glasses.

I’m looking for Virginia Woolf’s diary, Volume One, 1915-1917. It’s on the shelf. The characters on the spine read clearly, startling me, so well-rendered with these lenses.

Many mornings, I miss Virginia Woolf tremendously. And on those mornings, I go to her diary and ask her to tell me something. This morning, she says to me:

“I may say that I’m rejected by the Times”. To rub this sore point sorer, L. has 2 books from the Nation.
It’s the second week of my rejection; & it has the result of making me write my novel at an astonishing speed.
If I continue dismissed, I shall finish within a month or two. It becomes very absorbing.”

With my glasses curbing my astigmatism, her words snake their way into my brain as the letters march onward inky across the shabby newsprint, stalwart and precise despite adverse conditions.

Their import is overwhelming.

I reached down to take a bracing sip of hot tea, to fortify -

steam -

which fogged the glasses

and the world vanished

air again opaque

language of the page obscured

all in a fog

… but I know where I am, and I know where I’m headed, and her words swirl.

Perhaps the best part about eyeglasses are the times when you can’t see through them at all, and you are rendered entirely internal.

A shift of vision. A going inside.

For a moment, a pause, a stillness, a quiet.

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