A window to the world
There is a lot to imagine as you look through the glass
Comments (...)(MCT) — Here comes the snow shoveler, looking for work, a wide blue shovel slung over his left shoulder. He buzzes at a house across the street from mine, then backs away from the door, as if he knows that standing too close would make him the bogeyman.
I watch him from my front window.
He stands at attention. No answer. He rings again, and again steps back.
In the dim hollow of the living room across the street, a shadow moves. Someone knows the shoveler’s there but prefers not to engage, so he heads on up the block.
From my winter window, I make up a story about him as he goes.
I spend a fair amount of time in any season looking out this window, inventing stories about the people passing by or pondering assorted mysteries, like why certain neighbors never open certain shades or how some leaves hang on to the trees all year or why I didn’t notice I parked so cockeyed until I saw my car through the window from above.
This pastime is particularly hypnotic when it snows, as it did Friday, solitary little flakes assembling into heaps — on branches, cars, curbs, roofs, dog manure — and changing the hard, dirty, angular city into something rounded, soft, briefly clean.
Ordinarily when I look out the window I don’t think about the fact of doing it, but I’d just read the poet Donald Hall’s current New Yorker magazine piece about what it is to be 83 and consigned to view the world through a pane of glass.
“I teeter when I walk,” he wrote. “I no longer drive, I look out the window.”
Hall’s reflection on looking out the window is also a rumination on getting old; the winter that he’s mulling from his chair is more than the current season. “Old age,” he writes, “is a ceremony of losses.”
One of those losses is the ability to move freely, which is no doubt why a lot of old people develop a special relationship with windows, often with a certain window. Windows become their path to action.
My mother spent her final months gazing out her backyard window, admiring the roses, the squirrels, the unknown cats that drifted past like hobos. She was the first person to get me thinking about how attached we can get to a window.
When we’re in school, we’re often told not to look out the window. Windows cultivate the sin of daydreaming.
I once worked in a windowless newspaper office built on that theory. Productivity, people! The only window we were supposed to look at was the computer screen.
I’ve heard of writers who hang thick black drapes over their windows to avoid the distractions of the world outside. (They’re probably the same ones buying the Freedom app, a computer application that locks you away from the Internet for up to eight hours so you can do your work.)
But the windows we love — and a lot of us have a window we love, gravitate toward, like to gaze out of — do more than distract us. They make us focus. They frame objects and time. They provide a fixed lens through which we can fascinate on the small, life-sustaining revelations.
From my window I’ve studied the curious habits of birds, of squirrels, of human beings who tear down old houses to make way for giant new ones. I’ve watched leaves vanish and reappear and disappear again. I’ve seen the tenacity of snow shovelers.
We all need a window that works like this, as a meditation device: Look here now.
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