Especially when you IM everyone with it. And the news is that I am starring as Charlie Brown in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” with the Bay Players in Northern Milwaukee.

My friend Tim made me this:

Movement. The word defines my life in this encapsulation of time. Not growth, though there may be some. Not acceleration as the speed seems constant. But there’s no pause. Just movement.

Tonight, I teach children how to use their bodies more than their words or faces to tell a story. We will use movement as a dramatic tool. When classified, it is not dance. But it is. A coordination of bodily movement to convey an emotion or story is dance, so this is dance. A parody of a deadly dance. Some of my students seem to understand this intrinsically. The others have no love for this, as it falls under the heading of education and education connotes stuffiness, even in this context.

Friday, I fly to New York City for my first ever visit. I planned an extra week of time to enjoy the city, but honestly, I do not know what I will do with myself. I imagine at least one or two days I will simply walk the streets and live the city for a few hours. I have not got as much money as I planned to have, but I will make do.

By the next Friday, I will be the student of movement. How to move and make others move as effective communication of pathos and drama. My being is beginning to expand and understand the expanse of what staged movement can be. Grace is only a component, coordination only a fundamental. There is much more than what I teach and purport expertise in. Oceans of human experience passed down to explore and incorporate into this creaky body. And yet it is all practical and as natural as breath.

Then, when I return, Clare will likely have moved herself to New York and into her new life as doctoral student. My house will be very empty for a short time before the new tenants begin to move their lives into it. All the comforts will be packed away to make space for their accoutrement. I will drift between dunes of my things and theirs and the separation, while distinct, will also become insignificant.

Until I move. All of the material representations of me will occupy new space, identical to other people’s storage of self. Flitting around my new singular division, I will attempt to personalize with objects suiting me. But really, it will all be transitive as a year becomes such a shallow cup of time before once again…

I move.