Paula's House of Toast

Sic transit: across, beyond, through. Trans is a crucial little particle for the threshold creature, the liminalist, whose practice is Zeno's paradox. Out on the limitless limb of her asymptote, where she seems to have all the time in the world , she thinks, "I'm getting there," halving the distance once again. And again. And again.

She keeps hearing the old refrain: No trespassing.

Nonetheless, it occured to her one day that some kind of leap might be in order. It would not be the first leap. Just a leap. Not "of" anything. Over the years she'd found herself inside from time to time. She recalled how the actual moment of crossing over gets lost in a quantum blaze of de- and re- materializing. "This must be how Alice felt passing through -- transgressing -- the mirror's surface," she'd think, looking around, resheveling nervously, praying for invisibilty wherever she landed, zendo or cathedral, monastary chapel or church parlor.

The church was big. She'd chosen it partly for its size, hoping it would contain a crowd into which she could melt. It was also beautiful, a small cathedral of pale gray stone, with several tall, excellent windows. She'd deliberated a long time -- months ? years ? -- before choosing, pondering every aspect of the decision. She'd had her eye on several candidates and picked one partway between heaven's whitewashed Congregational anteroom and the shadowy godbox in which she would always be the scandal-tainted outsider.

The heavy side door was open; the shadowy vestibule was empty. It was now or never. She made her move. Leaped...


... across.

We cleaned the river walk today. It took a few dozen people just 2 hours to return the trash strewn pathside and riverbank to a pristine park-like state. It took much crawling through muck and thorny tangles, much crashing through stands of dead and hollow bamboo-like knotweed stalks with twigs grabbing at skin and hair -- but it was a lovely spring day with little white flowers and violets coming up and trees bursting into bloom and leaf, and everyone seemed, well, happy to be there, friendly strangers working together to right something that had been wronged. To care for a suffering and abused creature.

In the universe of moral trangressions, littering ranks among the lesser sins. Nonetheless, it's an ugly little act of violence, an epiphenomenon of greedy over-consumption and lack of reverence for the earth. It signifies a radical alienation from the fact of our inextricable connection with the environment for our air, water and food. It signifies a repudiation of our social dependence on and connection to one another. It signifies a culture that acquiesces to over-packaged, over-marketed, over-abundant poisonous cheap food. Greed and carelessness and ignorance all the way up and down the chain from the supersizing bottomlining CEO to the hungry ghost on the banks of the Charles desperate to pour another Dunkin Donuts down its pinhole piehole into the abyss of its unquenchable, wordless, thirst.

I was young, maybe seven or eight, and was at the shoe store with my parents. I'd already been measured by the tickly, corrugated-steel foot-sizing plate and the shoe clerk was in the back room, behind the grimy curtain, pulling boxes from the untidy stacks. He emerged, probably exuding boredom and tobacco fumes, but, to my small eyes, exuding authority. Shoe authority. He was The Shoe Man. I was in his thrall.

Saddle shoes had already, for parental reasons I can't remember, been vetoed. I tried on pair after pair of stiff, shiny, otherwise unmemorable shoes, rejecting them all, until, finally, out of the shoebox tissue, they emerged: a pair of magnificent blue shoes. It was love at first sight. They were big, solid, royal blue brogans. I put them on, walked around, peered at my feet in the low mirror as my parents looked on in horror.

"These." I said.

"Not those gunboats !" pronounced my dear father, Raul Stanati, presciently trying to rescue me from my first steps down the path of a life of fashion catastrophe.

He, of course, prevailed.

But even the most loving father can't save a hellbent daughter from disaster.