The Weekly Screed (#639)

Something in the air
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — From place to place, the air is always different.

Or so it seems.

Most of us, if we sense this at all, register these shades of difference not palpably or knowingly, but in the region beneath perception, perhaps where the soul resides.

The notion hadn’t occurred to me, consciously, until last night as I strolled toward home with a box of leftover pizza. I was in Greenbush, one of this town’s historic neighborhoods, and I’d been mellowing out with a friend in an old brick building that housed, upstairs, the Italian Workingmen’s Club, with a tavern in the cellar. Here was a part of the city that feels to me like home, which is perhaps why my antennae were a little keener.

It hit me as I walked along the old railroad right-of-way. It’s not a smell, and it isn’t carried on the breeze. You don’t feel it exactly. You absolutely don’t see it. It’s more of whispering you can’t hear, even while it engages and saturates every sense.

It ushered in a sweeping rush of memory, reminding me of a thousand days before, insinuating that the air here — in an unbordered realm that includes Wisconsin — this air is different from anywhere else. Here, the air surrounds and braces you, fills and quenches you as it does nowhere on earth.

As the feeling held me, I looked around, strangely thrilled but slightly bewildered. It was a clear night, a light overcast above, like probably a third of all Wisconsin evenings. Neither hot nor cold, there was a crispness abroad, not damp nor humid, nor even moist — but fluid.

More than anything, the air felt green. Not the juicy, sensual near-chartreuse that comes with spring, nor the dusty verdure of autumn, edged with brown and redolent of death, but a middle green — like linden leaves and lily pads. I had wandered, somehow, into a moment when the air was verdant with life so rich that it rode invisible filaments of chlorophyll, drifting into my lungs and from there refreshing my welcoming blood like lime ice on a hot day.

It also seemed that this was an uncommon moment rare in its purity, that the air — like all of us — struggles for an ideal balance, a moment of clarity and peace amidst a thousand daily disturbances. It cannot hold for long, nor can it spread very far, but when it comes and while it lingers, you understand exactly where you are and why there is, somehow, nowhere — no air — quite like this.

New York, where I lived recently, has a whole different air, certainly more complicated. Its description escapes me (I wasn’t there long enough), but it can never be cleansed entirely of its oils and asphalt, just as the air of Tokyo (I was there longer) is inextricable from the pungency of fish grilled in shoyu.

I remember a February day in Paris when that city’s air virtually appeared before me and etched its image in remembrance. In the winter, Paris’ famous light arrives at a sharp angle which somehow expands its surface, absorbing the wetness from the glowering sky and lead-colored Seine. One sees through this grainy density as through a mist, or the sort of soft-focus lens that Hollywood often trained on June Allyson or Deborah Kerr, edging their beauty with a ghostly blur.

That day, it came to me that Monet, perhaps, was not so near-sighted as we’re told, but had somehow learned how to see the very air of Paris and filter his every impression through its flattering vagueness.

Last night, as I struggled to catch a glimpse of the whispering Wisconsin air, I was surprised at myself, that I noticed its subtle, sudden lucidity, but surprised even more that I recognized its effect. It felt familiar, comfortable and timeless. This was the same air that nourished me, growing up, in a town not far from here. It’s the atmosphere in which, long ago, at twilight on the Miller School sandlot, I fought against the descending night to squeeze in one more inning of baseball with brother Bill and my cousins, the fabulous Friedl boys.

Here was the same air I had breathed and felt 50 years ago. Last night, I might have been heading home finally down Hollister Avenue and right on Pearl, in twilight too deep for baseball, bat over my shoulder, glove looped on my bat and a taped-up ball flicking lazily among me and Bill, Danny and Bobby.

Last night, I could wish now was then. I could feel then as vividly as now. But, as I wished, I remembered Einstein — what he said about time being neither a sequence nor a flow. I said, oh yeah. Al, you were right: Time is everywhere, every moment, past, present and yet-to-come. It’s in the air.

Last evening, before the moment fled and the air lost its perfection, I closed my eyes and watched as my then — captured in the air — invaded my now.

Bobby’s up now, waving our only bat menacingly. Danny’s at shortstop, my brother Bill’s in the outfield, peering mole-ishly into the swift-darkening dusk. And on the mound, Monet winds up and fires the ball toward the flattened tomato can that served as our home plate…

…which looks to him, vaguely, like a lily pad.