Turbulent on a quiet sea

Originally written last week on a date I could possibly count backward to.

Wednesday morning, I tried desperately to think of a word when writing an e-mail to a friend. The perfect word, I could describe the word to you in paragraphs and talk about feelings and emotions this one word stirred. But not the word; I couldn’t think it at all.

A Germanic root word, two words put together. Archaic grammatical structure. Uncommon in contemporary usage. Nautical. But the word. What was the word?

Tonight: “Matthew, will you bring me the new William Gibson novel?” Of course he did. I married some crazy angel who thinks I’m ginchy.

I began Pattern Recognition, knowing I’d be in for the best read I’ve had in a while, but Gibson stopped me cold by page ten. He used the word. The word. In a sentence. In a paragraph. In a book. Did this mean I couldn’t use the word now because I’d be ripping off Gibson? Did Gibson own the word by his right of having gotten to it first?

“No,” I finally persuaded myself. Gibson can write as masterfully as he chooses, but no one owns each individual word. I can use it too. So, deep breath, here it is … becalmed.

We’ve been in St. Augustine a year now. My career path didn’t exactly trip lightly through the sun-dappled forest like I had imagined it would once I arrived here, and it’s taken me that year to find a groove, and discover new areas of my life that can be stimulating outside of work. In that year was the heartache of the never-ending broken leg, but then hoola hooping through the pain, and starting make hoola hoops for others filled a niche in my heart that had been aching.

In still better news, I was offered a chance at leg redemption through surgery. I jumped on one leg at the chance to get repaired at long last. But then the leaking. All that synovial fluid that just didn’t want to stop, remember that? All hope felt lost. The synovial fluid quit leaking, and I was given the go-ahead to hoop my heart out since it was great physical therapy and would help my recovery. Excellent!

News improved even more. My hoops caught the college intramural director’s eye, and he saw possibility. He wanted me to do a hoop dance demo to raise interest and for me to teach students hoop dance basics. Not only would I get paid to do something I’ve been giving out for free at the farmer’s market, but I’d be given the chance to offer hoops for sale to students. My heart’s hobby looked like it might be sprouting golden fleece to reward my days of tedium.

Now, I am a sailor, becalmed.

“Becalm.” Almost seems like such a lovely, fetching word. “Calm.” Sounds like “palm.” Which makes me think of “palm trees.” “Calm palm trees” sounds like a meditative place of perfection formed in one’s mind in utter peace. “Becalm” nautically means the palm trees are a little too calm. It means one’s boat is trapped—hopefully temporarily—by some uncontrollable sea force that has stopped one’s progress.

I am becalmed. The intramural director brought so much more hope into my creeping little life, and I could just see the good work I’d be doing and the happy place from within myself where it would grow. I made detailed lesson plans. I put together hoop dance workout music sets for different phases in the workout and for different sessions. I made fifteen hoola hoops from scratch with only a scant prayer that they return on their investment—all for this beacon. I was willing to give it my all, and I have been doing so.

I mentioned the hoop dance demonstration. I haven’t really hooped in a year, not since breaking my leg. Getting back up with the hoop and expecting my body to remember how to move was apparently more than I should have asked for. I’ve had to gradually rekindle the body memory of each new old move, syncopated, and coax them into transitions enough to consider dance. So I took my bag of the few moves I had time to pick back up, mixed them up, added some good music, and I’ve been rehearsing for my big hoop demo ever since learning about it a month ago.

“Go ahead,” more than one doctor said, “there’s nothing you can do to hurt your leg at this point.”

They were wrong. Tonight I started leaking synovial fluid again. Six days from my big campus debut, and I’m leaking. Again. I am, truly, becalmed.

I feel like a twitchy sailor trapped in an unreal bubble of inaction. What is the ocean but action? Yet, when becalmed, the sea becomes a glassine place where no one can act because of nature’s lethargy, all while you know that just outside that entrapped dome life zooms on. I feel angry, resentful, restless—anything that makes you want to lean overboard and just scream at the top of your lungs at the sea. No words, just primeval screaming at the height of human frustration.

Finding my sea voyage at last, I am becalmed. “Becalm” itself may be the perfect word. “Be calm.” Isn’t that what you say when the theatre catches fire?