Glass ceilings

I have an upstairs neighbor, a new concept: actuality and sometimes a despair. Nice person, but walks with a heavy tread; or the condo is lightly built with skimpy structure and widely spaced stringers. I have not had upstairs neighbors for over 30 years, and sometimes feel that I have moved back into an apartment. I love my place, it is easy access and in the forest improbably in the middle of the settled hills in my city. It has light, trees, deer, and is 6 minutes from dining.

But it has an upstairs, and there she goes again, walking, sliding the doors, flushing, bathing, showering.... Tromp, tromp, I can see her walking overhead in the glass ceiling of my mind. Whenever I see her in public, she is wearing Dansk clogs, and I don't think she takes them off. Clomp clomp, right now she is walking into the kitchen.

I don't know if she hears me walk. When she complained about the dogs two weeks ago, I slammed, and walked and played music loud. Maybe she does. Maybe she hears me in my bedroom also. Thumps, slides, radio, shower and everything else.

But this is about my glass ceiling. Hitchcock pioneered the stage where in one scene, the protagonist of the suspense movie imagines he hears the murderer overhead. The glass ceiling he contrived had the character look up and actually seem to SEE the man walking, pacing, contemplating homicide. Heavy oxfords, the bottom of furniture legs, he showed it as a literal metaphor of the character's increasing paranoia of his homicidal neighbor.

I sometimes feel that way, and then think in reverse. What if there was a glass floor? What if she could look down on me? Not wearing clothes as I check my mail at 3 am for insomnia reasons? In the shower. Eating, trudging around the vacuum, entertaining publicly and privately? How would that be?

This leads me to think of other glass ceilings and floors. The bottom of a glass boat, showing in the increasing depths, the inhabitants of the ocean. Dark shapes, the deeper the more mysterious, and devoid of color. How am I a floor in a glass boat? I am one sometimes, in my mind, or my past, as I skim over the surface of my placid day today. My own denizens lie below, with distance and time the colors fade. Or, the reverse, under the water, looking up at the boat of my last year, lures dangling over for me to grab. Lines thrown out by competitors as a feint for friendship, shiny attractive bait for engagement which I ignored. Fish like, I swam through and under that lake, and came back onto land, my terra of choice; I really do not like water.

Glass, I have been told, is actually a non-solid state in physics. Measurements of the thickness of cathedral glass several hundred years old shows a thickening at the bottom as the glass molecules ooze to the bottom of the window. I kind of like that, imagining the cathedral windows subtly shifting as theology and culture moves along. Or, the great pyramid of light by architect IM Pei smack in the center of the Louvre courtyard. Perched like a beached pyramid, its transparency hints at social currents, art, and the whole history of French art under the revolutionary bloodstained cobblestones of it's doomed palace.

In the 60's or 70's, I don't know when it was forged, the term glass ceiling meant the transparent barrier that stopped women from moving up into being masculine success figures, the CEO's and leaders of industry. The implication was it was only a ceiling, glass is breakable, and women were to burst forward through that ceiling to success, like the pyramid in the Louvre. Impaled upon some of those shards as they tried, many women sank back below those depths under the ceiling, under the boat.

I have melted glass, fused it in kilns, slumped it into molds, and cut it to make stained glass windows. I am more anxious around glass than I am my chef knives, plasma torches, or welding. I have cast bronze, done blacksmithing, and many things with fire melting and forming metal. But glass is an amoeba, a dangerous shape-shifter of my past and certainly future. I am more careful around something that will hurt me when it is not made to, shards are of something broken, my knives are supposed to cut. Shark-like, spears of glass in my ceiling, in my floor, and on my walls have no conscience, they hover in my consciousness just out of sight like the sharks circling in the aquarium at the beach. And those also swim under a glass floor that gives me the creeps to walk upon. Give me sand, give me ice, but not glass to walk on.

So, at night the world can look into the large windows where I sit at my keyboard. Unless I pull the drapes, which is not often, approachers, strangers and friends alike, can see into my home. My life is not that transparent, or is it? I keep some things close to my heart, but there are a few recently who have pointed out what parts of my life I wear on my sleeve, on my ceiling, and on my floor. As the saying goes, people who live in glass houses shouldn't cast stones, so I don't to my walls. But, I wish that some sort of net, some curtain, could shield me from the overhead noise and feeling that Hitchcock was on to something.

My own glass ceiling of recticence, of holding back, is breaking. This is good, it is dangerous, and it is shape-shifting. But, it is not transparent.