Remembering to Look

Just before Thanksgiving, the International Club finally got around to taking us to what we’d seen on the Discovery Channel: the “Megastructure” formerly known as The Falkirk Wheel. And yes, it was as big an engineering geekfest as we’d dreamed. We got to play with mini models of the full scale wheel, which connects sixty-eight miles worth of canals and the Forth and Clyde, linking Glasgow to Edinburgh, east to west. We wandered through the interpretive displays, we craned our necks at the “double war hammer” as it slowly revolved to send boats up the loch to another waterway and back. When it was our turn, we lined up to settle into a long narrow boat which took its slow time to get into position and take us up that dramatic 100 feet in the air ourselves.

It was not quick. When they told us it would take an hour, we thought we’d be motoring up the canal a ways, but with the detailed safety protocol each boat has to undergo, and the generally relaxed air of the workmen, going UP, riding through the tiny section of canal, going down and turning around to go back the same way we came and down to the ground again took A FULL HOUR. We went no great distance forward, but the 100 feet or so into the air we went UP made it seem so.

Despite the gray slate color of the sky, it was a good day out for us. We realized we hadn’t been doing… anything lately. Nothing but working and worrying. Though we’ve gotten some good news — T. sold another manuscript, and D. is only two four papers away from ending the semester successfully — the idea of Thanksgiving away from loved ones dragged at our spirits. The change of pace presented by a day out even the iciest wind couldn’t dampen… until we got to Stirling.

We’re good with icy wind — we’ve gotten used to being cold as we walk. We hadn’t counted on rain, however, when the weather was in the low forties and the windchill factor made it seem like it was in the low thirties! We popped into a shoe store just to warm our faces, and the enthused sales women went on and on about how fabulous the snow would be this year.

We looked at each other. “Snow?” T. queried politely. “We were told it doesn’t snow that much in this elevation.”

“No? But it snows a bit every year, and this year — this year we’ll get tons,” we were told confidently. “And you’ll come back here to get your heavy boots,” the other clerk added.

Right.

It was at that point we decided that one more drafty castle was not on our agenda; we repaired immediately to a coffee shop to sip hot drinks and watch the sleety rain fall.

There is an office park next door to us and every morning, when D. leaves the building, T. leans out from five stories up to wave goodbye. The security guards from the other building watch this and sometimes smile. Various people hurrying to and from work glance up and look startled to see someone hanging their upper body from so far away, waving frantically. The ritual is its own little spot in the day and goes on every weekday morning and afternoon. Except when we forget to look.

It’s too easy to become distracted. Sometimes we are so busy cleaning and cooking
and putting away and thinking about what we are going to say to the realtor, the professor, the UPS guy, that we give each other a quick goodbye and go on about our duties. It never fails, however, that five minutes later it hits us — that we let the person we loved go back into their day without remembering to look at them and fix them in memory. It is such a balancing act to be in this life, and we are often too single-mindedly focused on meeting expectations and demands and due dates and doing well to remember to look at where we are and what we are doing and who we are with — and revel in it. We are consumed with busyness, from rewriting papers to revising novels, from reading tomes to writing book reviews. It’s easy to take the fact that we have more time in each other’s physical proximity for granted, and to take the idea of the person being “right there” as an excuse not to really see them. It’s easy to miss the people around us. It’s dangerously easy to neglect the frivolousness of dropping everything to lean out of a window, waving.

Remember to look. It’s a message leftover from the Spring, when we reveled in everything we saw; when almost everything was bright and colorful and filled with life. We looked, and felt ourselves blessed, and it is those images we now call up to take us through the darkness of winter.

Remember to look. Looking makes what’s in front of you worth seeing.

– D & T

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