One Ring to Rule Them All Part Deux

Behold! Last weekend my mother & I flew to Seattle to pick up the ring (and see Z, of course). This is it. It looks even better in person and more at home on my finger than I imagined. Though I have had no trouble committing to Z, the thought of wearing the same ring for the rest of my life made me feel a little queasy. I like rings. Quirky rings. Weird rings. Sundance-y rings. So how do you find a ring that fits all of those moods?

Answer: you don't. But like a good man, when the right ring comes along....

Amber at Greenlake Jewelery Works did an amazing job figuring out what I wanted and finding the perfect stones and putting it all into a package that makes me smile every time I look at it. I felt a little sick when we went to pick it up because I feared the finished product wouldn't make me happy and though they swear they'll work with you until you are satisfied, I am a woman who is often NOT satisfied with purchases once in my possession, so the odds in favor of me being content were slim. When I saw it there, nestled in this gorgeous little oval box, I almost cried. Other than needing a quick size adjustment, the thing felt right at home on my finger, as if we'd been waiting for each other all these years. I'm sure it's wrong to compare seeing this ring for the first time to seeing Z for the first time or the stories my friends have shared about seeing their babies for the first time, but...well...it was on the verge of that good.

And I don't feel a bit like Gollum, though I suspect the next 48 hours were trying for Mom & Z, as I insisted every fifteen minutes or so that they admire the ring, and God help the people at work who have been tortured with me stopping to admire my own finger and then shoving the Blue Jewel under their noses and demanding that they sing its praises. My productivity level has gone way down since I got it.

I'm on my way to meet Z in Chicago for a conference and then on to Seattle for five weeks, where there is a whole host of people I can demand look at the thing.

One Ring to Rule Them

I’m in a plane, zooming from Maine, where I just had my second, ten-day MFA residency, to Seattle to spend a few days with Z before the semester starts. The residency this time was in a Hilton instead of a dorm-room, which improved my disposition from last summer markedly. Not only were there the fresh, travel-size toiletries each day (which, in the end, cost me money because I had to check an extra bag and Northwest has ludicrous baggage charges) but every evening when we would get “home” there would be fresh cookies waiting on us. The peanut butter cookies were my favorite. Also, every night you could go downstairs with your friends and have supper or a cocktail and charge it right to your room, so it was almost like free.

(Regional note of interest, I suggested to a friend that we have “supper” and she laughed her head off. Apparently “supper” is quaint and I should have asked if she wanted “dinner.”)

The ten days were so packed full of information and activities (and drinks after the hard work of the day), that they are all a blur in my mind. We workshopped. We went to presentations. We went to readings. We trudged through the Maine snow. At night, we staggered down the Hilton hallways, looking for booze-soaked camaraderie in the rooms of friends, where we would dissect the day’s events, talk about our writing, and essentially behave like irreverent college students though more than a few of us haven’t been in college for over a decade.

I had been meaning to apply to this program the year before I actually did, and as if the universe needed to make a point of how I must never question my initial gut instincts, it turns out the people I click with and care about the most in this program graduated during this residency—when I would have graduated if I had not hemmed and hawed and put the application back in a drawer for a year. So it was also an emotional week. I found myself getting teary-eyed at readings and full-out weepy at the graduation ceremony, and it was no easier yesterday saying goodbye as each person lugged their suitcases out of the hotel’s automatic doors until the residency dwindled down to nothing but a memory (and a suitcase full of travel-size soap). If I were younger, I’d think it was just the beginning and we’ll always be friends and isn’t the future exciting, but I know the likelihood is that in a few year’s time we’ll just be names on our friends list on Facebook and we won’t REALLY know each other anymore. Hopefully not.

Instead of worrying about the future, I’ll focus on this residency and how thankful I am that I didn’t leave that application in a drawer for another year, missing the chance to know these people at all. On Tuesday, I went to the “Commune” where they all gathered—adjoining rooms—and they leapt out with silly string and balloons and shouted “Happy Birthday” and put a tiara (another tiara!) on my head and fed me cake (and homemade booze). Later, one of them forced the faculty and students to sing happy birthday to me.

Semester Two begins and the writing should have commenced about four hours ago. Next residency: Dingle, Ireland in July.

And so now I am in Seattle where I am supposed to pick out stones for my engagement ring, but decision-making has never been something I excel at. I’ve created a ring journal with sketches of my favorite rings and I’ve created a weblog at Greenlake Jewelry in Seattle (a wonderful place with big leather couches and designers in blue jeans who make me feel I’m in good hands) with images of rings I like, and still, I can’t make up my mind. This should be the most fun thing I’ve ever done—I love rings! I love Z!—but instead, I’m turning it into a torturefest. What if I get the “wrong” ring, hate it two days after slipping it on my finger, and then have to look at it for the rest of my life and hide the grimace? What if I get white gold and then realize gold is the only metal I really like (or vice versa)? What if get a colored stone instead of a diamond and then everyone else starts shunning diamonds so it seems like a trendy choice instead of a thoughtful one? What if I get a natural stone and am suddenly awash in guilt that someone had to climb down into a miserable hole to dig up a rock for me to wear? What if I get a “created” stone and one day look at it and think, “fake”? It goes on and on and on.

The residency was like an engagement-ring orgy and ice-breaker. I’d walk up to women I’d never spoken to before and demand to see their rings and then have ten minute discussions on how they made their choices (if they made their choices) and what they now wish was different. Initially, I’d vowed that I would not talk about rings or weddings because I have friends both at the residency and in my “real” life who aren’t afforded the right in this country to marry and it seems the equivalent of telling an African American in the 1954 how good the view is from the front of the bus, and also, because talking about rings and weddings makes a person seem, maybe, too shallow to be taken seriously as a writer. But I am like a magpie and so I’d see someone’s ring sparkle in the light and without even thinking about the political or professional ramifications, I would scoop the woman's left hand up in my right one, and examine yet another ring from every angle. I was like a woman possessed. Sadly, all that hard work did not pay off as I’m still no closer to a decision now than I was in November when Z and I got engaged. I must try to remember to go with my first and strongest gut instinct, though unfortunately my first and best instinct over Thanksgiving was huge and $16,000. Perhaps my first, smaller and appropriate, instinct would be best.

What Happens in Vegas . . . Pretty Much Goes in My Blog

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m bad. I haven’t posted. I’ve forsaken my three loyal readers. So to get you up to speed, here is what I’ve done since last we spoke:

• Started the teaching semester (5 classes).
• Submitted five packets of writing to my mentor for the MFA program I’m enrolled in.
• Put on a student reading at work.
• Attended two family funerals.
• Took my mother to Seattle.
• Went to the Washington coast.
• Baked Z a 40th Birthday Cake accidentally shaped like a flying saucer.
• Did countless loads of laundry.
• Loved up Z.
• Went to Seattle for Thanksgiving
• And, oh, yeah, I got engaged. I’m going to be Mrs. Dr. Z.


The week before Thanksgiving, I flew out to Seattle with a suitcase full of winter-wear, and when I got there Z had a package wrapped up in his recycled birthday paper waiting for me on the bed. It looked like maybe it held a sheet of notebook paper and when I asked him what it was, he said, “Maybe nothing.” It wasn’t nothing. It was an itinerary for a surprise trip to Las Vegas that started the next morning at something like 4:00 a.m. For a while we’ve wanted to go there for the fun of it, but after a few minutes of squealing with surprise, I started stressing about what I would wear. I had wool sweaters, fleecy jackets, silk long johns, blue jeans, a few sweatshirts, and, of course, a rain coat. None of it is what I might have packed if I’d known we were going to Las Vegas. My rhinestones, push-up bra, and heels were all back in Indiana. (I don’t actually own any of those three things, by the way.)

It turns out Las Vegas is in a desert. Fortunately, it was balmy during the day and cool at night, so I could justify my Notre Dame sweatshirt, though I’m not certain the Mickey Mouse Crocs were regulation Caesar’s Palace. As it turned out, none of it mattered. About five minutes after we checked into the Luxor, Z could contain himself no longer, got down on one knee, and asked me to marry him. (I said yes, in case you were wondering.) I think I was in shock for a good long while, and even more so when I discovered he had called my mother, his family, and his friends to alert them as to his intentions. I did not burst into sobs or screech, the way the women do on television, but it was perfect and lovely. Z had thought it through carefully and knew I would not want skywriting or even a restaurant proposal because, despite a blog to the contrary, I am a private person.

The man surprised me. People have said, “Oh, but you must have been expecting it. You’ve been together for awhile,” and I kind of want to smack them with my green suede Dansko. No. I wasn’t expecting it. I wasn’t expecting anything. Nothing about this relationship has been expected, starting with how a person from Indiana and a person from Zimbabwe would ever even meet in the first place, let alone fall in love, and ending with how if I’d paid any attention to that stupid He’s Just Not that into You book (or my shrink or several of my well-meaning friends and family) instead of a feeling in my gut and a vision, this relationship would have had zero chance of happening. So no—there weren’t expectations. Just getting to love him and being loved by him on any given day feels like . . . well, I’ve got no metaphor. It’s so damn good that I hadn’t really been thinking too hard about ways that goodness could be multiplied because that would have just made me greedy.

Of course, I have spoken at times of a point in the future when we might share a living space, and, I confess, because he has been SO adamant about not going up in the Space Needle I had thought once that if ever he DID ask me to marry him, it would probably be there with Mt. Rainier looking on approvingly in the distance, but I was not tapping my foot impatiently. (It turns out that Z just really, REALLY does not want to go to the top of the Space Needle.)

While it was still fresh in my mind, I wanted to make sure I would remember the moment forever, so a few times throughout the weekend, I asked Z to re-enact it for me, there in our Egyptian-style Luxor room with the sarcophagus armoire and flat-screen TV stand. The minute he asked me, it was as if one of those Glenda the Good Witch of the North bubbles surrounded us and we were pretty much completely unaware of everything around us (except for the drunk girl on the Luxor-Mandalay Bay-Excalibur tram who kept telling us how drunk she was and we feared she’d throw up on my Crocs with the holes in them). It was that kind of magical. Even the guys handing out the cards for “live girls now” didn’t bother me because I kept thinking, I’m not threatened by the hot, naked whores with the perfect plastic boobs because Z and I are going to get married. If he wanted, he could have a hot naked whore, but instead, he wants me.

Oh, I could go on and on. I could. But you, like the drunk tram girl, would just want to throw up when faced with our happiness and our canoodling and our need to refer to each other as fiancé whenever possible. We can’t help ourselves. The problem with 40somethings getting engaged is that they don’t realize they’re 40somethings. When I got back home and told my students the news, a few of them got this look on their faces like, Oh, please God, tell me it isn’t true that people that old think they can be in love.

Vegas, unlike Z, I cannot pretend to understand. It shouldn’t exist, but because it does, it calls to us like the sirens at Treasure Island and we must go put quarters in the slots and eat at the buffets and pay a hundred dollars to see Jay Leno or Mama Mia! even though we could see Jay for free every night at home and Mama Mia for $3.99 at Blockbuster, and for some reason, we must buy overpriced merchandise at the m&m store and $16 neon, fruity drinks out of huge bong-like glasses. I found the muchness overwhelming—all the glitter and fakeness and the neon and the brides with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths as they march through the Bellagio casino, grooms tagging behind. It’s seedy and crowded and the best example of American excess. So, I could look at this as perhaps the worst possible place to begin our future as a couple because of the inappropriate spur of the moment marriages in Elvis chapels and the live nude girls and the dashed dreams at the Black Jack table. But instead, I will focus on the optimistic. No matter how unlikely, Las Vegas is a city of hopefulness and the belief in something better: whether it is the big win, the 'til death do us part, or even that the Hoover Dam will keep holding back all that water and making Las Vegas possible.

When we arrived, Z had brought with us all of the change he had collected in the last two years, and this was our gambling fund. We played penny slots for three days on it and when the $95 in change whittled down to nothing, we each chipped some of our own cash in, so when we left the Luxor, we were a total of $130 in the hole. We had fun and this didn’t seem too horrible a loss since it was change from a jar mostly. Then, while we were at the airport waiting to board our flight, Z put his last dollar into a quarter slot machine and won $150, so we left $20 in the black.

I take it as a good omen.

Flawless

I may be going to some sort of hell where feminists send other feminists when they misbehave. Yesterday, for a belated birthday present, I took Leibovitz’s eleven-year-old daughter to the Clinique counter for a make-over. While she looks older than your average Chinese Olympic gymnast, she is, after all, still a girl. Eleven is not a milestone birthday and so did not deserve this premature ushering into womanhood, and even if it were a milestone birthday, I should have done something more empowering like rock-climbing or chemistry experiments or volunteering the two of us for a day of nail hammering for Habitat for Humanity. But I didn’t do these better things. Instead, I led a fresh-faced lamb of a child to the slaughter-house so she could start obsessing now about flaws she does not have. This is the legacy of womanhood I have willingly chosen to pass down.

And the reasons I did it are more shameful than the act itself. The reasons I did it were because I was too lazy to think of something substantive and, more importantly, because I wanted to be cool.

To a ‘tween.

In my defense, it wasn’t even my idea. It was her mother’s. And in my further defense—in case Leibovitz had gone momentarily off the rails because it is the end of summer and she’s ready for the kids to go back to school—I called the Clinique counter to make sure this was an accepted practice. The Clinique woman assured me it was done often and she scheduled an appointment with Amanda, the Clinique Make-over Expert. So my conscience was clear. For awhile.

When I handed my protégée over, a look of horror swept across Amanda’s face. “A makeover? On her?!” she asked. I told her I’d been assured by the voice on the phone that they do this all of the time, and Amanda said in a near wail, “I’ve never done one on an eleven-year-old.” I looked at Little Leib, who looked back at me as if to say, Are you going to make her give me my birthday present or what? I set my mouth and raised an eyebrow. Amanda straightened her faux lab coat and directed us to the make-over station while she fussed with cotton balls, Q-tips and her composure. Still, she questioned me. Was I sure we wanted to do this? It was only just that the child’s skin was so beautiful, and what if she had a reaction (even though Clinique products are hypo-allergenic, she was quick to add). I questioned Little Leib about what make-up of her mother’s she had played with.
“Pretty much all of it,” she said.
I nodded at Amanda and said, “She’ll be fine.”
Amanda set her mouth, as if I’d asked her to pierce the child’s eyebrow, and opened some powder.
“Well go with a natural look,” she said. And the make-over began.

To Amanda’s credit, once we chatted a bit and she discovered that this was just for some fun, that I was absolutely not going to be driving the child to auditions for a remake of Pretty Baby, and I would be buying a few Clinique products for myself, she relaxed, and did the thing I did not do. That is, she did some good. Virtually everything she applied she explained to Little Leib that she really didn’t need it because she had such beautiful skin, such pretty eyes, such nice lips, and because Amanda is probably only 22, she knew exactly how to say these things without sounding like an adult trying to dissuade a girl from starting down a path that could end up looking like Joan Rivers (which is probably exactly where Leibovitz and I are going to end up because we’re a little worried about our eyes and age spots and are thinking maybe some treatment is needed).

Little Leib did look very nice when Amanda tossed her last cottonball in the waste bin. She had not been transformed into a Lindsay or a Britney, but was very tastefully highlighted. It seemed to put an extra spring in her step to be a little closer to womanhood, though I can't say if I gained any cool points. I bought her some pink translucent lip color that I’m pretty sure she’ll have smacked off before anyone notices given the veracity with which she chews gum. Amanda threw in a trial-size mascara but withheld the bag for a moment and reminded us that it was “just to play with.” Little Leib nodded solemnly and no doubt made a mental note to apply it during lunch break on the first day of sixth grade next week.

Maybe I’m gong to feminist hell. Probably not. The kid would have gotten her fingers into the bronzer pot with or without me. But I do feel a little guilty. Her naked face reminds me of her baby face that was a force to be reckoned with about six seconds after she was born, and I really don’t want her to ever feel she has to hide it behind a layer of powder and sparkle to make it more acceptable to the rest of the world. For that matter, I hope Leibovitz and I can withstand the siren song of the Botox needle for the exact same reasons.

Girls Gone Wild

Here’s a question: when you are supposed to write 25 pages + every four weeks to send off to your mentor, when exactly are you supposed to blog? Bigger question: if you blog, will you give away your good ideas and send your mentor 25 pages of crap?

I survived the ten-day residency, but not without some serious teeth gnashing. Who knew Maine in July does not look and feel like the Christmas cover of the L.L. Bean catalog? I knew there wouldn’t be snow, but I think I was expecting reindeer and the need for crewneck sweaters and wool socks. Instead, what I got was heat and humidity and a dorm room without AC that was on the first floor, so if I opened the windows the smoke from various nicotine addicts (poets, mostly) wafted into my room.

Also, it turns out when you are middle aged the cozy, good times of dorm life feel a bit more like prison, including the 1” foam mattress and communal showers. I did get compliments on making my room extra cozy with cardboard fold up iPod speakers, postcards pinned to the bulletin board for artwork, a scarf stretched across the jail house bed, and Petey, the stuffed parrot that Z won for me in Oregon last month, resting patiently on my pillow. This decorating was not because I’m a Martha Stewart wannabe, so much as it was that I was miserable for the first four days and thought making the space mine might help deal with the homesickness. It turns out, the room still looked like something from “Oz” (Unit B, not Em City) and it didn’t help much.

Basically, I felt like I was in prison for the first three days because of the digs and having virtually every moment of my day structured. So to survive, I had long phone conversations with friends, my mother, and Z, who is in Zimbabwe, and was so busy whining and being miserable and giving in to crying jags in the privacy of my cell that I failed to notice a lot of first semester students were miserable too. I also didn’t take in to account the beauty that surrounded me and the excellent opportunity for learning and communion with other writers that I’d paid good money to experience. I’d like to tell you that I had an epiphany that led me to some Zen-like, be-here-now state, but what I had that made it okay is this: a lot of stout and a tequila shot.

That’s right. I graduated from college without one drunken episode to my name, which had more to do with my not really liking the taste of alcohol (when compared with, say, Coke and Pop-tarts) than it did the temperance oath I signed when entering my alma mater. And then at 41 I discovered that the secret to surviving dorm life and new-experience social anxiety is to get drunk with some people in your “major”, go to a talent show, drink some more, hug people you just met like they are long lost friends, sing Stevie Nicks songs in the women’s room with two poets, some novelists, an essayist, and an erotica writer, and then stagger off to bed.

If only I had known this in 1985.

Aside from reliving a youth I never had, the program ended up feeling like a perfect fit for me. There is warmth but nobody will be blowing sunshine up my nether regions. The faculty appears to be supportive and is focused on practical matters like publishing as much as they are “Art.” My contemporaries feel like just that—most of us are coming in on equal footing, with a variety of strengths and weaknesses.

It’s going to be a lot of work. It’s going to cost a lot of money. It’s going to be the genesis for some angst-ridden blogs. But I think it will be good, and in January I’ll get to find out if Maine in winter lives up to those L.L. Bean covers when I return for my second residency as a seasoned pro.

Best of all, in January I’ll be in a hotel and not in a jail cell.

What Not to Wear

I’m on my way to Maine to begin a low-residency MFA program in nonfiction. I’m not what you would call a person who plans ahead (hence my antiquated age when finding true, excellent love and deciding I needed a more substantial degree to support my career), so it’s hard for me to fathom the next ten days here, let alone the five semesters it will take before I can add the F to my earlier M and A. Last night, however, I was planning ahead. I planned ahead for the rough, industrial sheets I’d be warned would be on the bed in the dorm I’ll be sleeping in for 9 nights. I planned ahead for the possible muggy, breezeless weather with a sexy little red mini fan. I planned ahead for a tight schedule and wrote up reading assessments on evaluations forms I’ll be expected to complete at the end of the sessions I attend.

I also planned my outfit for today. Celery cropped pants and an apple green sweater. It seemed like the right mix of I’m-not-a-total-slob and I’m-too-buys-with-my-writing-to-be-a-fashionista. I felt quite good in it until I caught a glimpse of the mirror in the airport women’s room and realized the look I’d accomplished was really just good old Midwestern Jolly Green Giant.

And so the journey begins.

Greed

In the last six weeks this is what I have had:

--Z’s love
--a negative result on a test for lymphoma
--a trip to Alaska with Z
--a trip to the Oregon coast with Z
--five weeks in Seattle with Z
--a week in Indiana with Z at my love nest/Scottie dog house
--a stimulus check from George W. Bush

This is what I’m feeling today on the occasion of Z’s departure: greed. I’ve had everything I could want, but I want more.