Turtle Journals

Call of the Thrift

2010-09-13T17:23:00.002-05:00

It’s fall in Seattle. We got in on Friday and in Indiana it was still summer, so I didn’t feel bad about wearing white capris, even though it was after Labor Day. But then I looked around and people were in jeans. And sweaters. And UGG boots. So summer is over here for sure and I need to try to remember where I packed the woolens.

We’re still in the unpacking stage. Everything other than the CDs is out of boxes, but only about half of the items have told me yet where they’d like to live, so there is some chaos. Last night, some of my books insisted they wanted to live on one shelf and then, just as I settled into another project, they started chattering and insisting I move them to the other side of the room. They are very indecisive and self-involved.

This morning I had to drop off our rental car, where Tor, the manager, always greets me by name and makes me feel special. (I have close personal relationships with at least two of downtown Seattle’s car rental agents. Tor is the more sophisticated of the two. The other is called Johnny and looks and acts like Denis Leary if Denis Leary had jailhouse tattoos on his hands and rings on every finger.) There’s no story here. I share this description only for texture.

Before I took the car back, I stopped at the thrift store to drop off two bags of detritus that we don’t want but that seemed just this side of too good to throw away. When I got there, the store wasn’t open yet, so I pulled into the tiny lot and waited. Next to me was an old Toyota that had a Japanese man and his aged father-in-law in the front seat and the man’s wife in the back with a huge cardboard box. An eager older man with a sporty backpack stood at the door peering in. Periodically, someone would walk up, try the door, read the sign, and then back off sheepishly, as if they’d been tricked. I sat staring at the other sign reminding me that it is illegal to dump items and wondering if it would still be illegal when clearly the thrift workers had already arrived and so I wouldn’t technically be abandoning anything.

I had what I thought was déjà vu until I realized I was simply remembering waiting in line in the wee small hours outside of a Ticketmaster purveyor in the days before online ticket purchasing. Oh, the anxiety that came before those doors would open up. What if they never opened? What if someone tried to butt in line? Or, in the case of the Ticketmaster on my college campus, what if when the shade went up on the window the woman with only one arm was standing behind it? She was remarkably fast, typing with that one hand, but in a world where a single keystroke could make the difference between second or tenth row, we all desperately hoped it would be another two-handed someone taking our orders. The people outside this particular Capitol Hill thrift had that same desperate, slightly crazed look on their faces.

I had no real need to go inside and buy a set of mismatched plates or a globe on which half the countries have been renamed in the forty years since it was sold, but the agitation of the door-watchers led me to believe that something truly amazing had to be going on inside that shop today. When the door was finally unlocked, the ten or so people who had been waiting, rushed inside, including the ancient Japanese man who was propping himself up with a cane in one hand and his daughter’s arm in the other. I walked in and handed over my donation and perused the perimeter of the store, trying to see what everyone was so excited about. It looked exactly like it always does: a whole lot of dusty VHS tapes, banged up furniture circa 1980, some seriously worn out shoes, and a tangle of electronic equipment. Today, there was a table with some unopened bottles of peroxide for some reason, but other than that, nothing unusual. I poked at the handbags and considered one until I thought about how it used to belong to someone else and then I got kind of icked out and started toward the door. The guy at the counter thanked me for the donation and because he seemed friendly, I asked what the hubbub was about. Turns out, every Monday is like that because that’s the day the prices drop. I looked up just in time to see the ancient Japanese man pushing his new (old, dented, and dusty) wheeled walker. He had a massive smile on his face, like that single item had been calling to him earlier through that locked door. I can’t say why, but seeing his joy made me terribly happy.

Freedom Trail

2010-07-21T04:30:00.003-05:00

After the speediest MFA residency ever, I graduated on Saturday. Z snapped pictures, my friend Meghan waved the arm(s) of the giant, fluffy starfish she got me to celebrate, my mentor cried a little and gave me a huge hug, and then I woke up the next morning exhausted, hung over, realizing I’d failed to say goodbye to at least six people, and wondering what exactly is next. Seriously? What next? I’ve been so busy reading, writing annotations, writing essays, sending in packets, revising, writing a critical thesis, a creative thesis, presenting my work, reading my writing publicly, that I realize belatedly, I have no post MFA plans in place. I mean, I was a writer before I started the Great MFA Experiment, but now I either have to REALLY be one (discipline, production, revision, submission Submission SUBMISSION.) Or I have to admit that I’m too lazy or easily distractible to produce. There’s a huge part of me that wanted to leave the residency, set up my new writing studio in Seattle, and write my heart out before the fall teaching semester starts. But Z and I had travel plans, so what I’m doing right now will have to be classified as field research. Here are my notes so far:

• Don’t travel with an over-sized, congratulatory Smiley face balloon because it will wriggle out of its restraints and make its way to the front of the car, blocking the driver’s vision.
• Celebratory hydrangeas and irises (a gift from Z) do not like to travel down the coast of Maine in the summer.
• Wait staff will offer lobster-eating pointers if needed.
• US 1 is not unlike US 40 in that it seems to be made up of a series of dilapidated buildings, closed businesses, fruit stands, and Check-n-Goes. It could be the Midwest minus the occasional glimpses of the sea.
• Not all in-door dining establishments and gas stations have restrooms.
• Probably the air conditioning in your hotel room will give you a cold. Resign yourself to it and buy a big box of Puffs.
• Don’t even try to play the license plate game in Maine. All the plates you’ll pass are from New England. And you can tell because of the way they hoot you, change lanes rapidly in front of you without signaling, and generally have their own system of driving that was not covered in your driver’s ed class in 1983.
• Boston may be in the U.S., but the city planners were European. You will never know where you are. You will be hot, you will be crabby, you will hate Boston. And then when you are back in the cool, sneeze-inducing hotel room, you will start to remember it differently, as a city that you might actually want to visit again.
• The red line connecting the historical sites on the Freedom Trail disappears, so don’t get too used to it.
• The swan boats you’ve heard about your whole life are not built for two, but for an entire, extended family. Way less romantic than you imagined.
• Boston Common isn’t so huge, so don’t expect Central Park, Kensington Park, or St. Stephen’s Green.
• For every forty-five historical sites you visit, one will mention that a woman was involved in shaping the country’s early history. (They really dropped the ball, those Ladies of Antiquity, who were apparently just sitting on their asses, eating bonbons, while their husbands did all of the hard, hard work of nation building.)
• Harvard looks surprisingly like the college in Ohio where you got your M.A. so it should probably get over itself.
• Au Bon Pain has restrooms. They aren’t always clean. But the toilets flush.
• Even though as a child you loved the Bewitched episode when Samantha visits Old Salem and is followed around by an enchanted bedwarmer, your husband will likely not see this as a reason to drive an hour in the wrong direction.
• When Z’s friend’s wife looks over the tops of her four year old twins’ heads and mouths that you might only want to eat half a cupcake, don’t be greedy. Listen to the woman. The children helped make the delicacies and while she was out of the room added ingredients that may only have been extra baking powder but could have included copper sulfate.
• You don’t know why, but seeing the place where the Declaration of Independence was first read does not make much of an impression (you are thirsty and tired and would gladly give up a little independence for a Hop-on-Hop-Off Trolley tour at this point), but the Old North Chapel chokes you up.

Two if by sea, baby. Two if by sea.

Shakin' It

2010-07-09T15:00:00.000-05:00

On the three day journey to Maine for my final MFA residency and graduation, Z and I stopped in New Hampshire at the Canterbury Shaker Village where we had lunch and visited the gift shop. The meal was served family style, and we were lucky that we were seated with a couple from Brooklyn, who were chatty, and a local couple in their late seventies who were trying the restaurant out for the first time. The wife was obsessed with finding a short cut home, because she hadn't appreciated the bumpy route they'd taken in.

As a child, I went to the Shaker village in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, twice and was taught to see the beauty in the craftsmanship and simplicity of the furniture. (Always, I felt relief that I was not Shaker as their dedication to hard work seemed like something at which I was destined to fail.) As a young adult, I learned to appreciate some of their more feminist principles and commitment to a belief system, and if I did think about their celibacy, it was only in a romantic way--I wondered about the Shakers who were unable to resist temptation and imagined tumultuous, secret meetings in hay mows and pastures, bonnets hanging on fence posts, flat brooms cast aside. As a bride, I smiled wryly as Z and I marched down the aisle to "Simple Gifts" because the rest of the evening was a testament to excess and kitsch--once you put zebras and polka dots on your wedding cake, all attempts at plainness and simplicity have been abandoned.

Since I was a teenager, I've had recurring nightmares about accidentally joining the army or a cloistered convent, and then having to live out my days on someone else's schedule, doing the jobs assigned to me by some overseer. To the best of my knowledge, Shakers weren't big evangelizers, and even if they had been, given their abstinent lifestyle, you can count the number of Shakers still living on one hand. Even so, I worry about things like accidentally becoming Shaker and having to abandon my current way of life. So I stood looking over these tidy buildings and manicured lawns and considered the married couples who joined the Shaker communities and dissolved their unions--their families--because they were so committed to their beliefs. When I was a child (and later, a single adult), I never considered the wrench and pull of moving away from a couple and into a collective, but this time--as Z ushered me away from a $700 sofa table in the gift shop and towards my MFA destiny—it seemed unfathomable to un-tether the self from a beloved familiar. Would a fellow Shaker remind me to take my Prilosec each morning or tell me that I’m excellent during moments of self-doubt? Would he or she buy me surprise candy bars or do the laundry solo when I have a writing deadline? (Would a Shaker sister or brother have the spare time to do such a thing even if he or she were so inclined?)

As I slid into the too-warm seat beside Z and our car crept along the gravel road, the village got smaller in the rearview mirror. It somehow felt like a narrow escape. Give or take a century and a little geography.

Next stop: Maine.

Viscosity

2010-07-03T12:33:00.002-05:00

This is a just a warm-up, to see if the engine still has life.

Z and I just opened what is likely our last wedding gift, and I’ve written the last thank you note, so I’ve got no more excuses for this blog sabbatical.

I never meant to be gone so long, but it turns out getting married is exhausting. I had all of these big plans to blog about the months, weeks, and days leading up to the big event, but in the end, I was doing well to remember to leave the house with shoes jammed on my feet. In the end, did you really need to read about me scouring the countryside for the perfect cake, worrying about whether the chicken parmesan would end up down the front of my dress, begging a DJ to play an African-Irish mélange of music instead of the soft jazz he kept insisting would be a hit, or fretting about how my tea-totaling relatives would react when they discovered that Zimbabweans (and Zimbabwean brides) like to drink? Nah, not really. It all seemed terribly important seven months ago, but now, not so much. No doubt this is why people kept telling me to relax and enjoy the experience (and then I would look at them like, are you kidding me?) It’s over in a blink.

What you need to know is this: minus the light-dusting of snow that Z and I had requested, his pants being approximately six sizes too big and in need of serious safety pinning, a momentary short-term memory lapse that left me confused about my vows, and an over-zealous uncle who cut in on our first dance, the evening was perfection. It was an auspicious beginning to this union. Yay!

Z and I are packing up for five weeks “back east,” where I’ll finish my MFA program, we’ll visit some traveling Zimbabwean relatives, and pack up my worldly Hoosier goods for the movers, and see my family. Probably the new juicer is going to miss us.

The engine has caught and now seems to be idling just fine. Let’s see how much mileage this blog can get out of it in the next two months. If it doesn't get past the first turn, then it might be time to junk it.

The Daily Post

2009-10-09T10:27:00.005-05:00

I should probably change the name here to “The Dormant Blog.” It has a certain ring, doesn’t it? Like “The French Gourmet” or “The Flying Dutchman.”

I’ve been busy with my degree and wedding planning, but I have had a wealth of material to write about since May, including living in Seattle for six weeks and trying to cope with the noise of sleeping between a major thoroughfare and the Virginia Mason ER; Z’s getting a tenure track job; taking a trip to Portland where Z & I saw a parade of naked bike riders; a trip to Ireland for my degree and then ten day tour with my American cousins and a visit with my Irish ones, during which I was fairly certain I was having a heart attack; a visit to a nurse practitioner once I was back home only to be assured that you don’t have heart attacks for three weeks solid and here, why don’t you try these nerve-calming pills because your bridal nerves are all jangled; Z’s joyful return from Zimbabwe with a “more better” visa; meeting the 14 year old pastor who will both counsel and marry us, despite his looking like Opie Taylor and my certainty that at some point he’s going to call for his Aunt Bea and Pa to come assist with the counseling; the beginning of my blissful semester-long sabbatical; three weeks back in Seattle where Z and I picked up the rings we’ll wear for the rest of our lives (a commitment to Z I can fathom, but a commitment to a single piece of jewelry is a bit more difficult for me to wrap my mind around); a chat on the phone with one of my favorite authors, Jeanne Marie Laskas, who graciously agreed to help me figure out my thesis; a reuniting with my Scottie god dog who is practicing being a groomsman; various wedding tasks.

Today I am writing because last night my mother and I slapped stamps (very expensive stamps) onto the invitations she block-printed and slaved over while I was off on my various summer adventures. I love them. Love the verses on them. Love that they do not say anywhere “Today I will marry my friend” (even if that is the truth), love that they do not have hearts, doves, wedding rings, or a cursive font. Love that they are on brown paper instead of fine Italian linen stationery. But oh, what a struggle they have been.

Several years ago I fell in love with a wedding invitation of a family friend. He and his wife-to-be were artists and had artist friends make the invitations, and it was the first time I’d seen anything so unique. It was a block print with some verse from rural antiquity that started, “Marry me why don’t you?” and was, essentially, a list of reasons from a farmer to his darling explaining why she should give up her single life and come live with him and his cows. It was so sweet.

For months I poked around looking for “the thing” that would be unique and clever enough, because surely the quality of our love would be judged by everyone if I ordered a box of invitations that looked like every other set. One day I glanced at a plaque on my wall that I’d bought in Ireland in 2001, two months before I met Z, and I realized it was the thing. It is a representation of an old Irish carving of a man and a woman meeting under a tree with various bits of scrollwork around the happy pair. When I bought it, I was attracted to the plaque because of the verses that were attached to the back about the mystical way some people are destined to meet. I had been single for too long and was feeling ready for love, and then, voila, there was Z in front of me and the certain knowledge that he was my guy.

Because one of the verses was attributed to Emerson and because I’m supposed to be a good scholar, I spent days trying to find the quote—I wrote to my old college professors, asked colleagues, googled Emerson—and what I came up with was nothing much. Maybe it was Emerson; maybe it was someone who worked for Hallmark Ireland who had penned the sentiment. Then I googled the image itself to make sure we wouldn’t be flagrantly breaking copyright laws, and sure enough, it was fair game—a carving on a rock from an ancient site in Ireland, and it was called the Marigold stone. The “tree” the happy couple stand under was really some sort of giant flower. How quirky and fun, I thought.

My mother and I tried to ink up the plaque and use it as a sort of block print, but it didn’t work. She decided she could probably carve a version of it. While she carved, I searched Seattle for stationery to put it on. Z and I made what felt like two hundred trips to the Bellevue Paper Source in an attempt to find the quality of paper needed for the prints and complimentary envelopes. On the first trip he pointed out brightly colored envelopes that were marked down and I turned my nose up at them. On something like the tenth trip, I “discovered” the clearance envelopes and declared them perfect. (Poor Z, never getting credit where it is due.)

Mom sent different versions of the block print for us to choose from. “I tried to make the one look more like a girl,” she said, because the two figures did look suspiciously similar and suspiciously androgynous. “Also,” she added. “I had to give her a nose job. She looked kind of Egyptian instead of Irish.” I showed the samples to Z and he said, “They both look kind of Egyptian to me.” I assured him they were 100% Irish, and googled the Marigold stone to show him how very ancient and Irishy-y they were.

I don’t know why I hadn’t bothered to read about the Marigold stone earlier. First, I should say, no one really knows for sure what it represents, but what the historians speculate is that it is not a man and a woman under a tree so much as it is St. Peter and St. Paul, meeting under a flabellum to discuss, I don’t know, how in another few centuries God will plant St. Patick in Ireland to drive out snakes and make Irish people feel guilty. Apparently, flabellums were sort of fans attached to long poles that were used in ancient Egypt, but also in early Christian times, to keep flies from landing on the Host. What Mom had spent days carving--instead of a perfect visual depiction of Z and my magical journey of love—was actually a couple of Egyptian-inspired apostles of Christ waving flies off of some communion wafers.

Z and I couldn’t quit laughing. Tears rolled down our cheeks. We called Mom and told her, and though at first bewildered by our howls, she too cracked up. And then we found we were kind of in love with the thing because it was so ridiculous. Plus, we’d gotten engaged at the Luxor in Las Vegas, and what better testament to our beginnings as an official couple than something with roots in Egypt? So Mom printed them up, and then she pasted down the invitation bits, and then she stamped verses on them that may or may not be by Emerson, and then she addressed them in her beautiful calligraphy to people who are scattered across the U.S and in ten different countries, of different faiths and political ideologies and understandings of flabellums and Emerson.

And now it’s time to drop them in the mail. Farewell, my single life. Hello destiny.

One Ring to Rule Them All Part Deux

2009-05-21T07:13:00.004-05:00

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

2009-01-12T12:17:00.001-05:00

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

2008-12-04T16:23:00.001-05:00

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

2008-08-15T14:33:00.000-05:00

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

2008-07-19T01:49:00.002-05:00

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

2008-07-06T23:18:00.000-05:00

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

2008-06-28T16:17:00.000-05:00

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.

Recipe from a Domestic Goddess

2008-06-04T13:08:00.001-05:00

For years I have watched my mother cook big portions of Midwestern meals with annoyance. She is not one of those women who enjoys time spent in the kitchen or who delights in feeding the masses. I’m fairly certain when she thinks about the Adam and Eve story it is not just the pain of childbirth that Eve is cursed with for canoodling with that serpent, but also the agony of the kitchen.

Mom is a good cook but she would rather be reading. I don’t blame her. At a wedding shower several years ago, the guests were given an index card and were instructed to write down their favorite recipe to give to the bride. Mine was for the World’s Best Cheeseburger. 1. Get in car. 2. Drive to McDonald’s. 3. Order Cheeseburger. 4. Pay 5. Serve in wrapper. Seriously, why slave away in a kitchen for hours when there are fine dining establishments and a grocer’s freezer full of delectable meals?

And so it happens that I am 41 and I do not know how to cook. Even macaroni is problematic. The water shows no sign of boiling, so I start reading my book, and the next thing I know the water has boiled over or if I remembered to pour the macaroni in, it has burned to the bottom of the pan. I scramble eggs at the highest possible temperature because I see no reason not to treat the stove like the microwave. It could be because I’m absent-minded, but I prefer to think of it as my own silent, feminist protest. For awhile I really wanted that T-shirt with the 1950s woman on it that said, Don’t assume I cook.

So, I have mixed emotions about the fact that I cooked my first ever pot roast for Z this week. While he was at work I marched myself down to the market with my Baggu bags like a real, environmentally conscience gourmet, and I bought a hunk of meat that was too big for two people, some carrots, some potatoes, some Lipton soup, some Kerry Gold butter (because potatoes without Irish butter are a sin), and a bottle of red “Mad Housewife” wine. I came back to the flat where I discovered that roast comes from an actual, bloody, dead animal, which was a shock to my system. Also, I discovered that Z did not have a lovely Faberware roast pan like Moms, but instead a 2 quart Pyrex baking dish meant for cheesecakes and casseroles instead of roasting. I could not find his paring knife (end table with last night’s peach), so had to peel the potatoes and carrots with a giant blade meant for chopping vegetables Benny Hana style. I imagined Z coming home at 6:00 only to find me in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor because I’d sliced open my carotid artery. (I brought the portable phone into the kitchen just in case I needed to call 911 with the stub of what might be left of my dialing finger.) I arranged the potatoes artfully and popped the thing in the oven, praying for the best, expecting the worst.

My sense of accomplishment for what my mother assures me “is not rocket science” caused me some stress. I felt good about being a ‘real’ woman, about surprising Z with an actual (hopefully edible) meal when he came in from his hard day at work. I took a shower while the pot roasted and had phrases from 1950s marriage manuals for women going through my head about always making sure when your husband arrives home that you are “fresh” and have brushed your hair and have wiped the children’s faces and instructed them to play quietly while Daddy unwinds and while you, the good housewife, listen and do not bother him with your petty frustrations of the day out of respect for the hard day he has had, working to provide for you and the children. And then I felt really annoyed with myself for falling into the cooking trap that I have so carefully avoided for over four decades. Even more annoyed that it had pleased me more than a little to have finally done something like a “normal” woman for once in my life.

But then the pot roast started smelling good and Z was coming home soon and I forgot about my feminist ideals. Despite cooking an hour longer than it needed to while Z distracted me upon his arrival, the roast came out tender and juicy and just the right amount of doneness.

It’s a slippery slope now. If he starts expecting big meals awaiting him when he comes home from work, I’ll have no one but myself to blame.

2008-05-13T16:19:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I heard on NPR that the Irish writer Nuala O’Faolain died Friday at 68 of lung cancer, and my first thought was, “Why didn’t she tell me that she was was sick?!” This was followed quickly with the realization that though I did have a very brief conversation with her in 2005 during the Aspen Summer Words Writers’ Conference, I don’t actually know her. Then I did the next logical thing, which was burst into tears.

Terri Gross played a 2001 interview with her and I cried a bit harder. I’m not sure what it is about her writing that makes readers (some readers; this reader) feel that they not only know her but are good friends, but I suspect it has to do with the honest, unvarnished way she dishes up servings from her life. Hearing her responses on Fresh Air made me feel as if I’d just gotten a phone call from a friend, and so of course that made me cry a little harder.

Other authors I have adored have died, and though I might have a moment of sadness, I generally do not feel compelled to go into a period of mourning or a desire to send the family a floral tribute. But there was something about Nuala that made this feel like MY loss.

Possibly, my reaction is simply because her books are rich and smart and talk about a country that feels like my own home though it is not, and it is sad to know there will be no more of her words. It could be a sadness that so many of her “issues” appear to have gone unresolved. On a personal level, the fact that most of the attendees at Summer Words fell a little in love with her intelligence, wicked wit, and warmth. She did have a way of making you feel you’d known her your whole life, so perhaps that is why I was momentarily annoyed with her for not phoning to say she had terminal lung cancer so I could prepare myself and take her some chicken soup.

I have been drawn again and again to My Dream of You, her novel about a writer at middle age who, while researching a court case during the Famine, discovers more about herself, her country, women of her culture, and humanity than she does about the case’s outcome. The central mystery she tries to solve (aside from the one she is researching), is how a middle aged woman without a husband and, more importantly, without children, defines her purpose. During the Fresh Air interview, she speaks candidly about this, and how what all humans want is some sense of why they were put on this earth. She says to Terri Gross, What am I for?

For most people, the simplest answer (though there may be other answers as well) involves propagating the species, catapulting their own genetics a little further into the future, so in the face of personal annihilation, there is the hope that some little cluster of genes directly connected to them will see the next decade, the next century, etc. And also, there is the day-to-day sense of purpose. If a person has a baby that needs feeding or a five year old who needs reminding not to play in the street or a sixteen year old with a hand out for gas money, there is purpose. It may not be inventing a light bulb (or discovering a cure for the lung cancer), but you have contributed something that should last beyond you. This is a persistent theme in O’Faolain's writing, and even in the interview she gave on RTE just a few weeks before her death she comes back to the issue of what she has NOT done with her life, of who will mourn her, of who will not.

This is, I think, why I briefly considered wearing black today. In a world where women have stronger and more often heard voices than possibly any other time in history, there are not enough voices like this one. I could easily go to a bookstore and find books written by young women wondering about love and what sort of lives they might create for themselves, I can easily find authors who will tell a glamorous Sex and the City version of what it is to be single in their mid-30s. There are more than enough books about what it is to be a mother, both the frustrations and joys at all the different stages. But to find a woman towards the end of middle-age speaking candidly about choices and circumstances she made that affect her daily? It’s hard to come by. And it’s going to be even harder now that one of those few voices have been silenced.

Addendum

2008-04-18T16:07:00.001-05:00

Z, ZiMa, and I are in Minnesota, where we met up so she could see the places Z haunted as an undergrad and graduate student, as well as meet his friends. She still seems lovely, still seems to like me, but when we are alone in our room, Z says something like, “I’m afraid I’ve discovered something that will add to your mortification.” It seems the ancient suitcase I loaned ZiMa when hers fell apart, and which Z has used to cart his belongings to Minnesota, had its own secrets. Z can’t be sure if his mother discovered them or not, but in its recesses were some maxi pads, one unwrapped (!) tampon, and two colored condoms that expired in 1999. It’s bad enough that Z knows about the latter items, but his mother! Oh, woe is me.

Z might have kept this information to himself to save me the embarrassment. Obviously, I have no need of expired condoms or unwrapped tampons or pads that were made back when they had the thickness of futons for Barbie dolls. He can’t help himself though. Last year he accidentally read an email from my mother that said something about the two of us together, and the knowledge that he had read it embarrassed me so severely I had to hide myself under my coat as we walked down Madison Avenue in Seattle. It delighted him to see me acting like a schoolgirl, and I know in sharing this information he is just hoping for a repeat performance.

The wages of sin are sometimes paid on the installment plan.

A Hope for Small Mercies

2008-03-26T23:01:00.006-05:00

I have a friend whose mother-in-law once judged her harshly for using plastic hangers. Another was called into question for using pre-peeled baby carrots instead of real (dirty) ones. A third friend’s mother-in-law may have hired a private investigator to spy on her, though there is no real way to know. Is it any wonder that I’m a nervous wreck about ZiMa’s recent arrival and all the ways I’m sure she’s going to decide I’m unworthy of her youngest son?

She seemed lovely enough when she got off the plane. She’s very pleasant and happy and kind, and I can see how such a person might have a created someone as excellent as Z. She even seemed like she might sort of like me. But right now she is in my house, sleeping in my Heavenly Bed (she needed a step stool to get into it—frivolous) and so I worry.

Hopefully she is sleeping and not rifling through my drawers where she will no doubt find further evidence proving that this girl is not fabulous enough for her boy, though she probably needn’t open a single drawer. It could be the ratty underpants (slovenliness), a ridiculous number of rings (greed and vanity), a too dusty Bible (general sinfulness), the art hanging on the walls (possible blasphemy), a not well hidden copy of Sex Tips from a Gay Guy to a Straight Girl (sexual immorality), my journals from 1989 through 2006 (all of the above sins plus some others). Who knows what she could uncover. I like to think the appreciation that Z and ZiMa have for Law and Order has more to do with justice being served than mysteries being solved, in which case my secrets are safe. I am of the other school, which explains why, possibly, Z’s drawers were once ransacked when I was trying to unlock the secrets of his heart. With luck, this will not be a karma moment, a do unto others moment where I get paid back for past misdeeds.

I find Al Capone’s epitaph on my lips: My Jesus, mercy.

Every Silver Lining....

2008-03-13T02:41:00.000-05:00

There is some sort of Midwestern superstition afflicting me that makes it difficult to enjoy things until I’ve run thru a catalog of all the ways either the thing will be a disappointment, will cause its own set of problems in an each action has an equal and opposite reaction kind of way, or will fall through. I used to think it was some genetic problem of mine but my doctor told me once that he had to learn how to interpret feedback he’d get from his Midwestern patients because they’d never admit to feeling good. Instead, they’d say, “Not too bad today.” He attributed it to farmer superstitions—that a farmer never wants to crow too loudly about how well the crops are doing or how favorable the weather has been because it could all change.

So yesterday when I found out I’d been accepted into a low-residency MFA program it took me awhile to circle around all the potential problems (where will the money come from? how will I juggle my job and this program? how many days of summer love will I lose? what if it wrecks my writing?) before I could venture into a celebratory mood. Every silver lining has a cloud, threatening thunderstorms, has been my motto since birth.

I didn’t realize I was happy until yesterday. Even the sun was shining. One of my students wrote an assessment note on his paper that said it was clear I loved my job and that made the class interesting. (A for him.) M was thrilled when I bequeathed her my little magnetic “Mr. Right” with changeable messages. (My favorie: It’s not your fault; it’s mine. M’s favorite: You look thinner. Have you lost weight?) My own real-life Mr. Right does not need magnets, and I am lucky in that. Even when a postcard I had up about the repealing the Global Gag Order was ripped in two and thrown on the floor by my office door, I felt a certain amount of glee as I taped it together and then taped it to the Bill of Rights so if someone wants to make a political statement with my door flair, they’ll have to shred a document they typically like to cling to when writing tedious papers about gun control. Also, it was the first day since I got the news that Z wasn’t being considered for a job at my school that I’ve released the bitterness and hate.

(Well, most of it. I still reserve the right to glare occasionally at those I hold responsible for this injustice. And if any of them asks after him, I will definitely snort loudly and turn my head.)

Anyhow, that’s the news. I’m still having moments of fear—the first manuscript is due in just over a month and suddenly I feel as if I’ve forgotten how to write—but I think maybe I’ll chose to live in optimism on this one, and not wait for failure and abject misery to rain down.

A Mile in Her Moccasins

2008-03-03T10:25:00.001-05:00

By the end of the first day of the conference my new Dansko Professional clogs are scuffed beyond recognition and I’m annoyed. I should be grateful that I found a conference geographically close to Z that work would pay for, but all I can focus on are the angry-looking scuffs across both toes and the fact that I do not want to be listening to anymore motivational speaking about writing, but would rather be back at the gorgeous little almost-beach-front carriage house that Z and I have rented for three nights while I’m at the Whidbey Island Writers Conference. He is back there in relaxi-pants, sitting on the balcony, watching the revelry of Coupeland’s Penn Cove Mussel Festival, and I am stuck with a chirpy woman who pulls plastic swords and giant eyeglasses from a bag and commands me to be a brave and observant conference goer.

I attend conferences alone. I like this. Not being there with friends and colleagues gives me the freedom to be the bad student I am at heart. For instance, on the first day of the conference, I answered work emails while editors and agents talked about what they do and don’t like. I listened to them, but some I had already rejected as having pinched faces or liking only cookbooks, which meant during their talks I was free to do work I should have done before I ever got on the plane headed for the Pacific Northwest. I realize this is the faulty logic my students use when they text during lectures they’ve already decided are beneath them, and it’s probably going to bring a heap of bad karma on my head.

The conference is nice. I’ve been to Aspen’s Summer Words a few times, and since that is the Sundance Film Festival of writing conferences, I am perhaps a bit too judgmental of this one. For instance, I feel mildly annoyed that day one is in a church and that the pastor speaks and that his music minister comes out with a guitar to lead a sing. I’m not anti-church, but I do have a tendency to get mentally oppositional when I’m inside of one. Also, I’m put off by one of two featured speakers, a story teller in a long, multi-colored coat and white gloves, who tells a long story about a grandfather and a grandson and fishing net. I’m bored and lost and feel cynical because I’m a writer but storytellers always seem like they need way more attention than any human person should need.

I’m also critical of the motivational speaker they’ve brought in with a big bag of props to encourage us to be better conference attendees. Also, the older man with braids all over his head. And the woman in the strange teapot-shaped hat. Who ARE these people? Also, what am I supposed to do with the very thin directions I’ve received to the afternoon “chat house,” which is in someone’s actual home—and I imagine it will be a small home with lots of cats and soup-whiff. Would it be wrong to escape so early into a conference that my university has paid for me to attend? Could I maybe justify the positive spin my writing and teaching will take if I get to spend more time with Z? I think about how he stood on the balcony, waving me off this morning, and I just want to be with him. This is not a professional attitude.

I find it mysterious and comforting that despite my aloneness at any conference, I am never alone for long. Somebody, usually someone who is more socially gregarious than I am, finds me after the first session—almost as if we already had an arranged appointment—and then I spend the rest of the day with them, hearing their stories. Frequently, they are people who need an empty vessel to pour their own stories into. Other times, they end up being friends. On the first day when I sit down alone in the cafeteria, I think, “Well, I wonder when she’ll be here.” She has no first name, but I know she’ll come. Sure enough, within two minutes a woman in her thirties and what can only be described as pirate boots, sits down and starts talking. I like her instantly and am happy later when she acts as my navigator to the “chat house” where various writers visit us and chat.

I need a navigator. The house is, apparently located in the back of beyond. Pirate Girl and I drive and drive and drive, and as we drive we speculate about what kind of house we’ve been sent to. At first, we think a bungalow near town, but then the further out we go into the pines, we assume a cabin. And then we turn into a subdivision reminiscent of The Brady Bunch and our romantic hopes are dashed. Between direction announcements, Pirate Girl tells me the story of her life. It’s an interesting one and actually does involve life on sea-going vessels as a ship’s cook. I have no doubt that the book she was pitching at the conference will get picked up and we’ll all be talking about it next year. She and I drive some more and see Tsunami Zone warning signs and finally, our destination: a gorgeous, expensive-looking house with two walls of windows overlooking Puget Sound, a mere three feet away from the house. The waves crash.

We kick off our shoes at the door, and settle in to listen. Erik Larson, the author of one of my favorite non-fiction books—Devil in the White City, is the keynote speaker at this chat house. He is funny and humble and inspiring. He has a house on Whidbey Island, I like the way his jeans and cotton shirt make it seem like he’s just popped in to hang out with us and be friends.

The authors who follow him are fine—one offers depressing information about our prospects of being able to make a living from writing, and another is a resident hippy who has gorgeous illustrated journals and who is living out of the back of her truck. I’m sure they are both lovely people, but the views compete for my attention, the sofa I am sitting on is that kind you get enveloped in, and I’m beginning to champ at the bit to get back to Z. When we are released, Pirate Girl and I cram our feet into our footwear, hop into the car, and follow the Tsunami Escape Route signs to higher ground. We say goodbye when I drop her at her car and promise to meet up the next day, though I’m fairly certain we’ll never see each other again. She is newly pregnant and tired and the temptations of Z coupled with my own rebellious streak will likely mean the few sessions we do attend the next day will not be at the same time. We don’t exchange last names or email, so unless Oprah picks her book and it does become a bestseller, I have no hope of ever talking to Pirate Girl again.

I return to Z and we stroll around the town, have a drink in a bar that promises a clientele of crusty fishermen, and then we go back to our carriage house and play a card game. Z is used to living without electricity and the distractions of the internet or television. I, on the other hand, have to warm to our low-tech evening. I’ve been plugged in too long.

At some point between the chat house and going to bed, I come to a horrible realization: the shoes on my feet do not belong to me. They are black. They are Danskos. They are the correct size. But they wobble the wrong way. My feet slip in them more than they should. Also, there is no way my new pair of shoes could be so scuffed and worn.

I’m horrified. There is something so inherently personal about shoes that I am as icked out as if I’d accidentally come home in someone else’s underpants. I begin to obsess about how I can get my pristine new shoes back and then my thoughts turn dark and I harbor paranoid thoughts about the person who stole my shoes. My money is on the woman living in the truck. Clearly her shoes have been on her feet for a decade and the temptations of a new pair were too much to resist. I even, momentarily, blame Pirate Girl for distracting me at a crucial shoe-collecting moment from my own footwear because of my fascination with her boots. This is irrational. I was likely the culprit. I live in a land where no one wears comfortable Danish shoes, and I probably jammed my feet into the first pair of Danskos available.

Z tries to console me. They are just shoes. Nobody is going to keep a pair of shoes that are not their own, he says. I can collect mine the next day. Somehow, his words soothe me.

Only the next day, no one has returned my shoes. Because Z had me convinced, I’ve worn the offending clogs so sure am I that I can make an easy trade at the reception desk. I have even imagined the laughter I will share with the other person as we slip out of each other’s shoes and into our own. Instead, I feel a little dirty as I sit in someone else's shoes, dejectedly listening to Christopher Vogler’s talk on the writer and the hero’s journey. Suddenly, I begin to wonder what journey my shoes are now on. Somehow, it is this idea—my shoes not as things but as entities with a their own life—that suddenly makes this mishap okay. In fact, I start to suspect the shoes are going to be living a more interesting life than I could ever have given them. I even kind of hope they are living with the woman in the truck.

Prison Stories

2008-02-19T02:17:00.005-05:00

Tonight I am looking through the Indiana Department of Correction’s website trying to find an address for a student who will be a guest of the state for the next 90 days and can’t finish my class. You’d think I’d be doing something more productive, but no, J.R. is on my mind and I’d like to be able to write a note to my own personal convict who was a good writer and conscientious student and who will be missed in Composition II.

Though I’ve read the statistics on injustice in the US justice system and how poor people are something like 14 trillion times more likely to go to jail than the middle and upper classes, I’m still surprised. Apparently everything I learned from Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking is true. I punch in the names of boys I knew at my low-income elementary school in my hometown and a surprising number of them have done time, even one of my early crushes (whose name, despite being common, I recognize by both the middle initial and birth date, two pieces of info stored on a brain cell since 1976—no wonder I can’t remember my online banking password). None of these guys are in for violent crimes—all are drug or burglary (drug) related. Then I punch in the names of the most likely offenders at my nice country high school or the boys from elementary whose fingernails were always clean and whose mothers packed them name brand snacks in new Six Million Dollar Man lunchboxes. There is no evidence that any of them have had trouble with the law.

If any of the girls have done time, their last names have changed—it seems there are a variety of systems in which people can get lost.

It’s not like I ever doubted those stats about the number of poor people in jail, but to be able to put a face and name to those statistics makes me feel a little wobbly inside. It also makes me think of Mrs. Murray and my first grade field trip to the local police station. Maybe she knew half the boys were going to end up locked up and she was trying to scare them early. Maybe it was just a cheap way to entertain kids at an underfunded school. I was a good kid and the likelihood that I'd end up in jail was probably pretty slim despite my statistical vulnerability as a kid from a single-parent household living somewhere below the poverty line.

Yet in my mind, I attribute my succesful avoidance of a life of crime to a scorching case of diarrhea.

I had a stomach bug that day and was dying to get myself to a restroom but was too shy to ask a police officer if I could use the facilities. The school had dressed us in orange, mildewed rain ponchos, the smell of which only enhanced the level of my need for porcelain. Just when I thought I was going to die for sure, the police officer/tour guide herded us into the jail cell and locked the door so we’d know what awaited us if we failed to be law-abiding citizens. All I could think was that I was going to have to use that little seat-less toilet in front of my classmates. I suspect this was the genesis for what has become a life-long recurring nightmare in which I am wrongfully imprisoned.

This weekend I keep thinking of J.R. and wonder how the prison experience is going. It’s “only” 90 days, but when I think how long those 60 seconds were for me in first grade, I have to assume time is dragging.

The Ice Queen

2008-02-13T19:03:00.003-05:00

One of my best friends was watching the Super Tuesday returns a couple of weeks ago and her five year old daughter would periodically pop into the room and say, “Is the girl winning?” J would tell her daughter how to pronounce Hillary Clinton’s name, ask her to repeat it, and then ten minutes later the child would come back into the room and say, “The girl is on TV!! Did she win?!”

During the course of this historic primary I’ve been perplexed about who I would vote for. For awhile I comforted myself with the knowledge that since Indiana’s primary comes so late, it was a rhetorical question at best. But now that we’re talking super delegates it seems like the responsible thing to do is to make a choice.

I’ve read the debates that have been waged about how a feminist should vote, and I don’t really fall into the school that says a feminist must vote for whoever holds the XX chromosomes. On the other hand, I love the idea that for this five year old it is completely possible for “the girl” to win. In another eight years, when she’s beginning to get self-conscious and, if we are to believe the studies, ‘dumb down’ so she’ll be more attractive to men, she might not think it is a possibility (or care). So I keep thinking. Fortunately, I have until May to come to some conclusion.

There is the possibility that I shouldn’t even consider myself a feminist. Yesterday there was an ugly ice storm here, and because I am housesitting and because that house is down in a hole with a steep drive, I had fears that I wouldn’t be able to get out this morning for work and get myself to the airport this evening to pick Z up for our Valentine’s Day celebration. As my brain played out four or five different scenarios ranging from my being stuck in the house until Spring to me being dead in a ditch, I found myself wishing that he were already here so he could handle this—navigate the drive, dig the car out if it slid into a ditch, just, you know, be a man and figure it out. Now, keep in mind that Z rarely drives in America and he is from Africa where there may be snow on Kilimanjaro but there isn’t any in his little hunk of Zimbabwe. Why would I so quickly assume I couldn’t handle it but he could? I wasn’t raised with a man around and Z doesn’t make any similar assumptions about my capabilities. Yet still, there it was: let the man fix it.

Oh, it’s shameful to realize how far you are from the feminist ideal. Tonight I’ll pick up some kitty litter and a car-sized shovel and use my Girl Scout training to ensure that I am prepared for every possibility.

Money Laundering

2008-01-09T14:02:00.000-05:00

I just did the laundry and found at the bottom of the washer one million, four hundred thousand dollars. Unfortunately, it was Zim dollars, and as such, worth less than a loaf of bread, but it was a heady moment when I first looked down and saw all that green. We’re rich, I thought.

Other areas where I am optimistic this week:

1) My Sunday Seattle departure date will not arrive (Superman will reverse the rotation of the earth to give me more Z time, seems the most likely scenario).
2) Elves will write my syllabus for me.
3) Elves will write my Monday lesson plans for me.
4) Elves will write my annual review for me.
5) Elves will go to the gym for me.
6) The Fairy of Healthy Eating will sprinkle pixie dust on my taste buds so raw vegetables taste better to me than high fructose corn syrup.

With the only thing standing between me and the achievement of said goals being the cooperation of fictional supernatural beings, nothing can stop me.

Epiphany

2008-01-06T01:06:00.000-05:00

Some how, I got so worked up about turning 40 last year that it never occurred to me that—barring unforeseen acts of God—I’d turn 41. This is perhaps the single most disturbing realization I’ve come to in, well, 41 years. In fact, I’m beginning to suspect that this is the age I will stop at and will simply refer to myself as 40 henceforth. Even when I’m 70.

It helps that I am in Seattle with Z, who had a bottle of champagne waiting on me when I arrived on New Year’s Eve, as well as a living room tricked out with all sorts of Christmas lights and garland that he put up before he went home for the holiday, just to please me. Our flights arrived at SEATAC within ten minutes of each other, and so far, everything about this trip has been smoother sailing than last year when he slept a day away and then I ended up in the ER. Except, you know, the part where we woke up New Year’s Eve at 12:03 a.m. because we both fell asleep before the stroke of midnight and also the part about how I’m no longer forty, but instead, in my forties, which seems like a whole different ball game.

On the bright side, the fireworks at the Space Needle were delayed, so we didn’t miss a thing.

Wild Animal Safari

2007-12-18T01:32:00.000-05:00

Given the last blog entry, perhaps it’s not so surprising that earlier this week I found myself hiding in the aisles of the toy store, clutching plastic animals to my chest and wondering how to escape without being seen by a particularly annoying student. Most people, if they have moments like this, do it for something more dramatic: ex lovers, estranged husbands, bill collectors. But not me.

In my defense, I’ve had a bad week, involving a lot of university politics, a rejected sabbatical proposal, and failed attempts to dial internationally so I can say hello to Z, who has gone to his native land for the holiday. And also, “Jeffie” is on the list of top ten most annoying students ever. He failed the class last semester, but even with his prior knowledge of how my classroom operates, he still manages to hand in virtually every assignment late with a host of excuses, comes to class late, contributes excessively to discussions about readings he has not done, and always, always relies on his dumbness as if it is the key element in his arsenal of charm. Maybe it works with some people (some really drunk people, perhaps?), but it doesn’t work with me. His latest sin is that he SWEARS he handed two papers in via email that I never got. I don’t believe him, but I also want him to pass the class so I never have to see him again.

I’ve been trying to figure out why he gets under my skin, when any given semester provides at least two students with similar characteristics. The best I can come up with is that he has come to represent everything that is wrong with the United States: a) the thought that being “dumb” is an admirable characteristic b) the thought that every opinion matters no matter how ignorant and uninformed c) that an untested/unquestioned belief system makes passing judgment on other people okay as long as a pastor says its okay e) that it is acceptable for a grown man to refer to himself with the nickname an aunty gave him when he was still wearing diapers.

And yes, yes I am passing judgment on Jeffie but it is not uninformed or untested and is therefore valid.

When I saw him, I was already stressed out because I was buying animals for Leibovitz’s seven year old and I couldn’t remember the differences between Indian and African elephants and somehow I felt my choosing the wrong (i.e. Indian) elephant would disappoint Z, though he will likely never see it. Also, I felt stressed because I couldn’t justify buying any single animal, but had to buy in pairs, Noah style, since I attribute human emotions to virtually every inanimate object, including lumps of molded plastic, and I knew an elephant alone would be a sad, miserable elephant. Ditto the zebra and giraffe. I had just made my final selections when I turned around and saw Jeffie talking to someone, and I almost did a Starsky & Hutch style roll into an adjoining aisle because I did NOT want to have a conversation with him about whether I would accept those papers and I did not want to hear again all the reasons why the papers didn’t come thru as attachments when the real reason they didn’t come thru is they weren’t written yet. I hunkered down so he couldn’t see the top of my head, and lest the store clerk think I’d gone mental, I pretended to be really interested in a magic set on the lower shelf. Finally, when I was brave enough to peek around the shelving unit to see if Jeffie had moved on, I saw the back of his head and had the strongest urge to pelt him with the animals clutched in my hand. Oh, it would have been the perfect ending to my semester, if only it wouldn’t have resulted in my arrest and subsequent community service. Also, terribly unfair to the animals.

Holiday Spirit

2007-12-12T16:31:00.000-05:00

It’s that time of year where I should be full of love for my fellow humans, but instead what I am is feeling heaps of loathing for my students. Not all of them. Just the ones who handed their papers in late, which forces me into three days of soul-searching while I try to figure out how important deadlines are in the grand scheme of things. Am I teaching them survival skills when I refuse papers after 6:00 p.m. on deadline day or am I just being a bitch? (The polls are still open.) I’ve been teaching 13 years now, so I shouldn’t let that slackers and procrastinators put me thru these paces every year, but I do.

I’m thinking I should write a book for beginning college students called What Your College Instructor Really Thinks When You Say Your Paper is Finished But Your Hard Drive Exploded. The only thing holding me back is that I know the students who need it wouldn’t read it. Also, there could be legal action.

Feels Like the First Time

2007-11-25T00:04:00.000-05:00

Z and I may have reached a new threshold of familiarity this week while I was spending a lengthy Thanksgiving holiday with him. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I found myself in his bathroom with only one Sheryl Crowe approved square of toilet tissue when what I needed was something more along the lines of 43 squares. For space saving reasons, the “loo paper” is kept in a kitchen cabinet, which is thru the living room where the blinds were up. So I put my pride aside, stuck my head out the bathroom door, and sent a distress signal to Z, who rescued me.

It was a visit of firsts. Though I make no bones about how much I hate theatre (philistine that I am) and though just two weeks ago I called Z begging him to figure out a way for me to escape the second half of “Wicked”, Z and I decided to go see a play in a little theatre near his apartment. I was convinced because it was written by the Alan Ball, who created “Six Feet Under” and also because it was about bridesmaids, a topic about which I am an expert, having served my time in the bridesmaid corp on no less than four overly floral tours of duty.

If we were in New York, we would have been so far off Broadway we would have been in New Jersey. We scoped out the place before the show to figure out how long it would take us to get there before the curtain went up. “If there IS a curtain,” I said to Z. And then he joked about how we’d probably be sitting on folding chairs. Sure enough, when we arrived, we were ushered into a big room with no curtain and we found our place on two of the thirty folding chairs. Over head, we could hear the cast of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” racing around in the other “theatre.” At this point, my heart was racing. What if this was some sort of avant garde production wherein audience participation would be required. We could hardly escape during the performance without hurting someone’s feelings. I was ready to bolt, but then the lights came down and the not curtain went up, and the play began.

It was instantly engaging. The casting was nicely done (not a lot of “arm acting”) and the dialogue was good. The first half zipped by, though I warned Z at intermission that the second half was going to stink. It just felt like it was probably going to suddenly get really preachy, and sure enough, by the time it was over, a bevy of social issues had been covered including drug abuse, sexual abuse, homosexuality, evangelical intolerance, and bad parenting. Since half of it was good, we decided it was not a failed experiment, though Z concluded that his favorite part of the whole evening had been intermission, when the ticket taker arrived with a little wheeled cabinet that had refreshment for sale. (He bought me a Coke.) I doubt if that’s what Alan Ball or the director had in mind.

Other firsts: my first Thanksgiving with Z. The two Thanksgivings he lived in my hometown were frought with angst for me. For both of them, a gaggle of his female friends from St. Paul were in town visiting, which meant I did not get to see him. I was in love with him, he was oblivious, and I admit I was sure he was sleeping with at least one, possibly all of those girls, and I HATED them, particularly during the second visit when I made the ill-advised choice to go to Meijer on a day when I had not washed my hair or put on make-up and was wearing relaxi pants to accommodate my turkey-filled stomach. And of course he was there with these temptresses who were dressed and had clean hair and looked smug and satisfied. Yes, I really hated them that day. (For the record, I’ve met half of them since, and they are lovely people and the hatred has been rescinded.)

Aside from getting homesick the night before because you cannot buy a box mix of gingerbread in all of King County, it was a perfect Thanksgiving. We ate with friends of Z’s, in what seemed to be a real Norman Rockwell celebration, at their beautiful home in Everett overlooking Puget Sound. The turkey was free-range, hormone free, and my sugar crème pie was not too burned to serve. The company was good. I even met the now 21 year old version of the two year old who made Z swear he never wanted to kids. She was charming.

The next morning, I went to my first ever Macy’s (post) Thanksgiving Day parade and also my first ever parade with a man. Z knew I wanted to see it, so set the alarm and insisted we go, though my inclination was to sleep in. It was a treat. Instead of giant balloon floats like we would have seen the day before in Manhattan, the floats were made of tiny balloons. We behaved like a couple of kids, elbowing our way to the front, snatching candy as it was thrown to the crowd, and clapping. (Extra loud claps for the Scottie dog float.)

And another first, while Z was putting money in the parking meter for Groovy Grey, our rental car du jour, a woman came up to him and asked if I was pregnant. Since I was sitting in the car and was only visible from the steering wheel up, I assume she wasn’t offering commentary on this year’s turkey-filled stomach, but I was still indignant the rest of the day, hrmmphing periodically. Z kept insisting that she was a mental case, but then I started wondering if perhaps she was one of those people who appears on the surface to be mental but is really gifted with the second sight, so I spent the rest of the week trying to determine if I was nauseous from too much food at the Cheesecake Factory or if it was something else.

(It was the cheesecake. And the fried macaroni. And the queso dip.)

Seattle has itself gussied up for the holidays, and it’s been fun to see the lights and what appears to be a giant version of the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree at Westlake Center. And though my natural inclination is to feel a little blue because I won’t BE with Z at Christmas in Seattle, Zimbabwe, or anywhere else, he’s starting to wear off on me so I’m looking on the bright side. If the U.S. had Thanksgiving when Canada does, the decorations wouldn’t be up yet and I couldn’t pretend I’m also getting to have my first ever Christmas with him too.

The Wiz

2007-11-15T07:12:00.000-05:00

Seriously. How does my hair know I’m on my way to Seattle? It has been fluffy enough for weeks, and today it is hanging in flat, greasy hanks even though I washed it two hours ago.

Z reports that he is sick with a sore throat, so this might not be the twelve-day lovefest I’d been imagining. Oh well. I bought him fleecey pajama bottoms and a robe for his belated birthday, so maybe this will be the visit of loungewear and medicinal cocktails.

I’m at the airport, looking at the Indianapolis skyline, popping its collective head up like a tenacious prairie dog. It’s funny how the size of Indy shifts depending on where I’ve been. If I haven’t been anywhere for awhile, it seems like the big city. But in the last month I’ve been to St. Paul, New York City, and Chicago, so it sort of looks like a miniature golf course today.

To celebrate her birthday, my mother and I went to New York a couple of weeks ago. Other than rain and blistered feet, it was a near perfect trip. She hadn’t been since 1979, so it was like visiting a completely different place. Clean, for instance. Mary Poppins and Spamalot tickets on sale in Times Square instead of cocaine and sex. iPods thrumming quietly thru earphones instead of ghetto blasters the size of VW Beetles hoisted on the shoulders of passersby. A lot has been written about the Disneyfication of New York, both good and bad, and I was ever so briefly nostalgic for the sense that the City could eat a person whole and not even bother to belch up the bones yet here was I, fearlessly leading my mother around like a pro. But there’s a lot to be said for clean and safe and not hostile to tourists when you are a hayseed from Indiana who wants to feel like a native. Within our first hour there we were meandering thru the park on our way to meet a former colleague of mine for lunch just like we do that sort of thing all the time. Except the Cannon Elph getting whipped out every ten paces to take photos of Alice in Wonderland and Hans Christian Andersen and the horse drawn carriages and the skyline probably blew our cover.

What I’ve discovered about going to New York is that no matter what you saw or what you did, when you get back the only thing anybody will ask you is what shows you saw. Nobody cares that we strolled around the market at Union Square munching on the best apples ever grown or that we watched dogs frolic at two different dog parks or that I tricked Mom into going to Ground Zero though she had made me promise not to drag her there simply because I felt the need to see the space before it is filled in and up or that in a weak moment we decided it would be “fun” to go to the Sex Museum on Fifth Avenue. No sir. All people want to know is if we saw Jersey Boys or Clueless. And when you say, “No, I don’t really like theatre,” there’s this look you see flicker across the eyes that indicates your stock as a sophisticated person has just plummeted.

The only thing I hate worse than theatre is musical theatre, but given the negative response to not having taken advantage of Broadway, I agreed to go see Wicked in Chicago last week with my oldest friend, the Annie Leibovitz of Eastern Indiana. I was optimistic going in. People love the show. I like The Wizard of Oz. Also, they were selling necklaces that said “Oz” but the “Z” was the prominent thing, and I was sure when the show was over, I’d be more than willing to plunk down whatever ridiculous price they were charging for it in honor of my non-emerald Z.

Five minutes in, I was in agony from all the projecting and enunciating. The costumes and lights and what I’ve come to think of as “arm acting” distracted me from the story. The theatre was hot and the woman sitting next to me was a leg jiggler and the girl behind me sang all the songs with gusto, not at all embarrassed. It seemed a complete impossibility to me that Leibovitz wasn’t as miserable as I was, so at half-time, er, intermission, I looked at her expectantly, assuming we would be blowing the place in lieu of a couple of hours browsing thru books and sipping cocoa in the Borders overlooking the Water Tower. Instead, she nodded her head happily and said, “It’s goooood, isn’t it?” So I escaped to the restroom, called Z, and begged him to call in a threat of some sort, but even he let me down and said he was afraid such an action would have a negative impact on his visa. So I suffered thru. I dozed. I pretended to care about the plight of the anti-hero, all the while wondering if there was some sort of Clinque product that could reduce her green pallor, and when the house lights came up, I nearly wept with relief. Thank goodness no precious New York minutes were wasted on Broadway.

(And no, I did not buy the commemorative Oz necklace.)

Plane is boarding. I’m off to see the sore-throated but otherwise Great and Powerful Z.

Podiatrist Aesthetics

2007-11-08T11:39:00.000-05:00

Today I saw my podiatrist. It pains me to say I have a podiatrist because it makes me sound older than I feel, but I’ve been seeing my old podiatrist since I was twenty-two. Not for any particular issue, but for a variety—troublesome toenails, heel spurs, and the occasional fight with a screen door or vacuum cleaner that ends with late night stitches and a season of wound abrading.

The old podiatrist was talkative. You might go in for an ingrown toenail but while there, you would talk about Star Trek, car shows, war, and relationships. You never knew what you’d get, but it definitely wouldn’t be foot talk and it would always be something a bit odd. It harkened back to some bygone era that I sometimes crave, when doctors knew you for longer than the three minutes they spend with you and when, if times were hard, you could pay with a chicken. So I was a little sad when my old podiatrist sold his practice to a whipper snapper, and I worry that if I have another late night entanglement with the sharp edge of a small home appliance, the new guy won’t get himself out of bed to stitch me up and I will have to go to the ER (a.k.a. The Barber Shop) where I will most likely end up with a staph infection or some other completely avoidable complication.

One thing that has always been problematic though was the décor of the office. The old podiatrist had a thing for bad clown art (though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen good clown art). In fact, not just bad clown art, but bad hobo clown art: cartoony in nature, neon in color, and all clowns with giant feet, usually with toes poking out of the fronts of raggedy shoes. I never could reconcile how a doctor so smart and sure of himself could have such horrendous taste.

It wouldn’t hurt to note that I hate clowns. Possibly I’ve mentioned this before. I feel a little guilty about it because my great grandfather was a clown, ran away and joined the circus—the whole deal. My grandmother grew up playing with his clown make-up and wearing his clown clothes. But it doesn’t change my intense dislike for people who draw their emotions on their faces and then expect audience members to ooh and aah at madcap pantomime. When I first discovered there were devout Christians in the world who had clown ministries I was horrified, so far from God are clowns in my mind.

When the new guy started, I assumed the clown art would be the first to go. However, it remained. This led me to wonder if perhaps podiatrists universally have a thing for clowns. Maybe it has something to do with the giant feet. The new doctor didn’t share many other characteristics with the old doctor. He’s friendly enough. He is helpful enough. He always asks where I’ve recently traveled to, but I know his question comes from a Post-It note in my chart reminding him this is my thing so it establishes a doctor-patient relationship that really doesn’t exist. This is fine though—I prefer that he read medical foot journals in his spare time in lieu of memorizing patient names and hobbies.

It was a shock today, though, to walk in and discover that not only were the clowns gone but the good fairy of tasteful interior decorating had made a visit. The neon is gone and in its place, sage walls. The Early American furniture haunting doctor’s office across America for the past 40 years is gone, and in its place, tasteful, clean-lined chairs, tables, and lamps from Ikea. And the clowns are just gone. I was so shocked by their absence that I didn’t even notice what replaced them.

After the good doctor asked how my gout was and asked where I’d traveled to (nodding his head and saying “good good” before I ever answered), I commended him on the absence of clowns. He thanked me and said the shocking thing was that my old doctor asked if he could have the clown art back. I asked why he hadn’t just taken the art when the practice sold, and the new doctor said, “I think he thought I would like it.” He grimaced and we laughed.

I felt a little closer to the new doctor after this exchange, though I also felt something else. I won’t say I missed the clowns, because that would be a lie. There should be legislations banning clown art, statuary, and let’s face it, clowns themselves. But what I missed is the kooky uniqueness of my old doctor, who was not only certain that his peculiar décor would appeal to his patients, but he was also certain his younger, hipper successor would love it too. It’s not hard to decorate tastefully—all you need is a credit card and a Pottery Barn catalog. But to decorate so hideously and with pride…there is something admirable in that.

Of Hope and Despair and Inferior Lodging

2007-10-14T10:46:00.000-05:00

Priceline has treated me well in the past, allowing me to stay in hotels I could never afford, lathering my body with soaps and lotions better than the buy-one-get-one-free specials in my own bathroom, and sleeping on sheets of thread counts higher than my bank balance.

But not this weekend, when Z and I were treating ourselves to a rendezvous in the Twin Cities. Despite our best bidding strategies, instead of a four-star hotel in downtown St. Paul or Minneapolis, we ended up in Roseville. In a motel sandwiched between the interstate and the mall.

When our cab driver dropped us off he asked if we were there for business or if we were going to spend the weekend “kickin’ it in Roseville” and that sort of set the tone for what was in store for us. Namely, waiting until the exact check-in time before we were allowed to check in (though others checked in before us), getting two double-beds instead of a king because “that’s how it is when you book online” (never mind in another instance with a friend I didn’t want to share a bed with, I was told the same thing when I was given a king bed unless I forked over an additional $20 dollars for two fulls), there was no mini fridge, our room looked out over the parking lot, the power went out for a bit, and the video games ate Z’s tokens.

Also, apologies to Garrison Keelor and the fine people at “Prairie Home Companion” but the Sleep Number Bed blows.

It was a good weekend. We visited with his old friends. We walked along the Mississippi. We saw various points of interest from Z’s undergrad and grad school days. We went to the St. Paul Cathedral. We visited my favorite Irish shop, where I bought my favorite Irish crisps and a couple of CDs. We ate some good food, had some good drinks, and listened to some good Irish music.

On the drive to the hotel from the airport, our cab driver took us past the ill-fated 35W bridge, and it was surprising to see how gone it was. I don't know what I expected--a sign hanging in the air pointing to it that said "former bridge" or "site of tragedy." Instead, it just looked like a place where the road stopped. Which, I guess, is exactly what it was for some of the people who were on it that day. I always expect things to be frozen in time--sites of tragedy or historical events, my old college campus or places of some personal importance to me, city skylines. Possibly, my belief that this will be the case stems from a childhood interest in Pompeii and how the victims of Vesuvius's eruption were frozen in time as a testament to the tragedy that befell the residents there.

There is also the possibility that I'm only drawing the Pompeii connection because we visited the Pompeii exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota on this trip, but I'm just going to run with it because the metaphor works.

The exhibit was interesting. We learned not only how the citizens of Pomepeii died, but also how they lived, and they lived well. (Well, some of them--the slaves, not so much.) Their houses were palatial and appeared to have good chi, their decor and jewelry was classic and intricate, their society was sophisticated. The single most disturbing piece of information for me (aside from the volcano thing) was that the commercial laundry used urine to get the clothes clean, and becaucse they did A LOT of laundry, they needed A LOT of urine, so had big jugs sitting outside the laundry where passers by could uriante. Definitely better for the environment than my beloved bottles of Purex and Downey, but ick.

While looking at the plaster casts of the victims, I realized that I'd grown up with a misguided sense that the residents didn’t really know what hit them—that they’d been frozen in time eating their dinner and tending livestock and playing on hillsides when they were stopped, surprise, dead. Sort of how Samantha on Bewitched would wiggle her nose and Larry and Darren would be frozen in the midst of a high-powered advertising deal so she could fix whatever misunderstanding was about to unfold.

It turns out, however, that despite lack of cable television and radios and emergency alert sirens, the Pompeiians knew what was about to befall them. Some—the wealthier ones—got out quickly. Others, did not and knew there was no chance of survival. The casts illustrated how keenly aware they were, as they huddled together, covered their faces, and cried out. The one that moved me most was of a man who was found in a gymnasium, leaning against a wall, knees pulled up to his chin, head in his hands. He could have been covering his face from the heat, cupping his last breaths of oxygen. Or he could have been praying to whoever the god of volcano traffic control was, but it looked more like the complete absence of hope. Like someone who two hours before had been working out, thinking about the evening's plans to sit on the hillside with his date and watch sparks fly from the lip of Vesuvius but who had then heard some rumbling and suddenly had the realization, oh shit, I really should have left town sooner--I thought I'd have more time.

Well, when you look in the face of despair--even if it is covered and from a few millenia ago--you can hardly complain about lost video game tokens or inferior quality towels. Instead, you say a prayer of thanksgiving that at this very moment the bridges of Minnesota are possibly safer than they have ever been, that the horizon is volcano free, and that your excellent boyfriend is in a full-sized Sleep Number Bed with you. And while you respect the fleeting nature of life, you cross your fingers that you'll be granted the later check-out time--preferably when you are together. And 102.

A Day in the Life

2007-10-07T01:06:00.000-05:00

Aside from Global Warming, I’m thinking Planet Earth has a more pressing problem, and that is this: time is speeding up. What used to be a day is now a week, what used to be a week is now a month. A year is three months long, tops. I seriously thought I could start writing blogs three or four times a week, but instead, I’m not even managing one a month. Why? I don’t have a real house, a real husband and children or real pets, and my real job is not one of those jobs where you have to work eighteen hour days just to avoid being fired. (You can work eighteen hour days if you want, but it isn’t a requirement.) So where does my time go?

It’s Saturday. Here is where it went today:

Wake up at 10:15.
Sit and stare and plan day: main goal is to grade papers.
Go to gym during last 60 minutes gym is open.
Go to grocery for foods that pretty much render pointless the last 60 minutes at gym.
Unload groceries.
Eat some of groceries.
Sit and stare.
Shuffle papers to be graded.
E-mail Z.
E-mail old friend who accidentally got pregnant for Baby #3.
Read some of novel, Mammoth Cheese, and vow to grade papers after two chapters.
Talk on phone.
Sit and stare.
Prod pile of papers with toe.
Read article about Nicole Kidman in new Vanity Fair.
Sit and stare and think about Nicole Kidman and how she seems like a nice person and how hope she really is happy and not just pretending.
Sort clothes to do laundry.
Read more of Mammoth Cheese.
Nap.
Wake up surprised it is two hours later.
Notice papers have not miraculously been graded by elves while sleeping.
Lament false sense of reality gotten from childhood spent reading fairy tales.
Eat supper.
Sit and stare.
Speculate papers could be graded most efficiently between ten and midnight.
Talk on phone.
Decide too hot to do laundry.
Read forward to book on Joseph Cornell.
Check web to see where most of Joseph Cornell’s art is.
E-mail Z to see if he would consider taking a break from next week’s dirty weekend activities in order to go to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis to see Cornell work there.
Sit and think about next weekend’s rendezvous with Z in Minnesota.
Wonder if will regret choice of hotel in suburbs instead of one in downtown Minneapolis or St. Paul.
Read Z’s reply in which he agrees to go see the art.
Eat ice cream.
Watch last half of Blood Diamond and critique both Leonardo’s supposed Zimbabwean accent and the diamond industry.
Read the news, berate self for being more interested in celebrity news than world events (no wonder world falling apart in manner of Blood Diamond when people care more about what Britney has done today than what peoples are being oppressed in the Third World).
Eat popcorn to drown concerns about lack of civic engagement and global activism.
E-mail Indiana Jones style friend who leaves Tuesday for new life in Sweden.
Read more Mammoth Cheese.
Talk to Z on phone about day’s events. (His: papers graded. Mine: papers not graded.)
Play with iPod.
Decide too late to grade papers.
Write blog.

Does Phizer have a drug for procrastination?

The Wet Spot

2007-09-15T23:55:00.000-05:00

This is the story of Z, the Hero.

The Dog House was cursed by angry gods of water and sewage at some point, and now whenever I am here, there is . . . wetness.

On my watch, the finished basement has flooded three times, the ice maker has sprung a leak and flooded the kitchen and living room twice (for which the previous Scottie was soundly chastised until I realized no matter how full his little bladder, he could not have made a mess that covered so much square footage), the outside water faucet has gone wonky once and backed water into the guest bathroom, the garbage disposal has broken twice, the city sewer has threatened to fill the house, the fountain that aerates the pond has broken multiple times, and all three toilets at one time or another have had issues. It is uncommon for me to stay here and NOT have to get out the wet vac, so you’d think I’d be prepared.

But no. Very late last night Z and I were up wet vaccing the master bedroom, bath, as well as the basement underneath these rooms because the toilet overflowed while we slept.

I was rendered completely useless, like one of those idiot women in the movies who wrings her hands and moans “ooooo…..oooooo” while a burglar pummels the husband. She could whack the burglar with a frying pan, but no, she stands, quaking, and saying oooooooooo. I’ve been staying in this house since I was in high school, yet suddenly I had no earthly idea how to attack this problem. I momentarily considered grabbing the dog, locking the door behind us, and spending the rest of the next two weeks at a dog-friendly motel.

Z though, he was amazing. He immediately leapt out of bed and came up with a plan. He knew the practical things to do, like turn the water off, and also the clever things like where the wet vac was because two years ago he was here when there was another water crisis. He exerted the majority of the strength needed to move the giant dresser. While I was wringing my hands and toe-dabbing at a small duck pond with a hand towel, he did the wet vaccing and managed to keep up a steady stream of dog-directed conversation. Hello you. What are we doing up in the middle of the night making all this racket and interrupting your sleep, eh? Eh? And all of this while wearing his underpants and a pair of the owner’s paint-splattered cowboy boots.

I don’t mind telling you I discovered whole new ways that I love him last night. He worked up a sweat, scrubbing and emptying wet vac buckets, and I stood there, toe-dabbing the carpet and staring at these excellent legs and strong back and capable hands and I felt a little like I’d woken up in someone else’s life. Who was this man who could take care of business and how did he come to be in my life?

It would be nice if I could report that after an hour of this work we tumbled into bed and all was right with the world. As it turns out, though, the dinner party we planned for tonight very nearly had to be canceled because at five minutes to five (you know, when the plumbers are just clocking out) the city sewer was thinking seriously about backing into the house. Toilets gurgled and made the dog bark in Amityville Horror style and though the water was clean, it was only a matter of time before it got ugly. This was beyond even Z’s scope of plan-making and problem-fixing, so the big dogs had to be called in and paid overtime to flip a little valve that turned the tide.

The party was excellent. Z and I and the Scottie made good hosts in our fake house and our guests were entertaining and none the wiser that just a few hours before we'd considered telling them they'd have to drive up the road to use the facilities at McDonald's if they needed to. For most of the night, I had this desire to flood the bathroom again just so I could see Z in his underpants and cowboy boots, slaving away and affording me the strange joy of hand-wringing.

Z Minus Eighteen

2007-09-07T12:48:00.000-05:00

It has been a long, hot summer, and I don’t mean that in a sexy kind of way, or even a melodramatic, Tennessee Williams kind of way. No. I mean it in the It’s not so much the heat as the humidity kind of way. It’s been miserable for the last two months and with some kind of protective shield around my section of Wayne County that has left us impervious to rain. The reservoir is nearly empty, the flowers look like they’ve just barely survived some holocaust, and everywhere Grapes of Wrath style clouds get kicked up by the teensiest of movements.

I’ve been having my own internal Dust Bowl as well, as evidenced by the lack of blog entries, lack of ready-to-publish fiction and essays, and lack of completed creative projects of the knitting, drawing, and gluing persuasion. I’ve been busy going places and seeing people and teaching students, but it’s always a little disappointing at the end of the summer to see all of the things not accomplished in what previously seemed like a vast expanse of time.

The Scottie dog is back from his cowboy adventure out west, and since his parents are gone on yet another trip, we’re figuring out how to deal with the heat together. Since we’re both of Celtic lineage, we don’t LIKE the heat. He seems to have complete confidence in my ability to turn down the thermostat, which is unfortunate. To make us both more comfortable, I decided that we’d start walking in the early morning instead of the late afternoon. The squirrels are much juicier and unsuspecting in the morning, and it has made the Scottie dog quite happy. The only problem is he still expects his afternoon walk and keeps giving me these meaningful looks in attempt to remind me that walking should take place at 7:00 p.m., not 7:00 a.m.

Z is in transit after two and a half months in Zimbabwe, where he has been dealing with astronomical inflation, food shortages, petrol shortages, power outages, water outages, telephone outages, and crap television programming. To celebrate his imminent return, I went out today and bought new underwear, three tops, and a new set of jersey knit sheets in Shrek green. The closer South African Air Flight 207 gets to America’s shores, the more sure I am that the drought is about over. The sky is clouding up as I write this, and it’s a welcome sight.

Heredity

2007-08-26T19:35:00.000-05:00

What might be wrong with me:

Brain tumor
Stroke
Heart attack
Multiple Sclerosis
Alzheimers
Diabetes
Blood clot
Arthritis
Cataracts
Deafness
Spinal Stenosis
Pulmonary Fibrosis
Chronic Pulmonary Lung Disease
Leukemia
Lung Cancer
Skin Cancer
Breast Cancer
Ovarian Cancer
Cervical Cancer
Uterine Cancer
Esophageal Cancer
Tonsil Cancer
Mitro Valve Prolapse
Lou Gehrig’s Disease

What’s really wrong with me:

Headache
Heartburn
Hangnail
General Malaise

Wild Mouse

2007-08-21T17:20:00.000-05:00

For something like twenty-five years D.B. and I have been taking trips together that usually have an amusement park destination. Sure, we’d like to see Graceland and the Grand Canyon and Mt. Rushmore, but if we can’t find a thrill ride within an hour’s drive, we make other plans.

We both attribute this obsession to our divorced childhoods and our divorced fathers who took us to King’s Island once a year. (Though technically, D.B. went with both parents and while he and his little brother ran wild thru the park, the parents argued and hollered and discussed the terms of their impending separation and subsequent divorce.) Also, The Brady Bunch filmed an episode there, and to this day, if either of us sees that it’s on, we call the other, shrieking, and we watch as the family races from one side of the park to the other, not riding rides, no, but trying to track down Mr. Brady’s blueprints that Jan misplaced. We watch from beginning to end and wonder why Jan wasn’t just sold to the gypsies because she was a hindrance to good times for everyone, including Alice.

There is no rollercoaster too terrifying for us. We like them big and we are not purists who insist on wood or thrill-seekers who only want the insane gymnastics that steel can provide. Mostly though, the higher and faster and more certain the death, the happier we are.

Only here’s the thing: I really only like the little ones now, the ones that kids under 48” are allowed to ride. There are several possibilities for what caused my change of heart, but here are the most likely culprits:

1. I rode Mission Space at Epcot three years ago and my life flashed before my eyes as Gary Senese narrated my few seconds of supposed weightlessness.
2. I turned 40.
3. I am suggestible now that I’m middle aged, and those warning signs about back trouble, heart trouble, high blood pressure, and pregnancy convince me that I have all four conditions and should walk myself immediately to First Aid and rest on a cot.
4. I’m not really keen to die now that I’m in love. (For the record, as far as D.B. is concerned, it’s all about Mission Space and my age. If he thought I let a man come between me and our good rollercoaster times, he’d never forgive me. He’s barely forgiven me for becoming a part of a couple.)

It has been difficult to hide this recent development from D.B. Last year, when I was just beginning to lose my bottle, our schedules didn’t allow for a trip, so he was none the wiser. This year, I carefully planned a trip to a city with only a teeeeeeny amusement park that I knew I could handle: Rochester’s Sea Breeze.

Sea Breeze is cute and historical and not really a thrill park. It sits on the edge of Lake Ontario and is adorable. How could historical or adorable be scary? Well, to a normal person it wouldn’t be, but to a 40 year old hypochondriac lover of Z who once nearly had to use a Mission: Space barf bag, it’s all scary now. The wooden bobsleds were the tamest and even those seemed like they could hurtle me into the lake. The old out-and-back jack rabbit coaster that was smaller than the kiddie rollercoaster at King’s Island jiggled my brain around in its casing so severely that I was sure brain damage was a possibility, and the tricked-out wild mouse that spins and loops and twists, well dear reader, it scared me so much I couldn’t even get on it. Do you hear this: I, rider of standy uppy and hangy downy and steepest and twistiest coasters all over the country was scared away from a wild mouse.

The end of an era is upon me. I will now be forced to divide my life into two neat halves: before and after the wild mouse. From this point on, it’s just museums and garden shows and watching, I don’t know, birds. The horror.

Barrista

2007-08-01T00:03:00.001-05:00

I’m dogsitting without the dog. He’s on a cowboy vacation in Montana with his parents. This morning some impertinent neighbor called to demand to speak to the owners about something. She can’t be a good neighbor, or she would have known they were gone. She insisted I give her their phone number and then asked if I cleaned houses because she needs someone. I don’t know why this last question irked me so much. It’s not that I’m above housecleaning (though certainly I do it rarely enough) and I think being a house cleaner or maid is a worthy enough job. But there was something about the superior tone in her voice that set the mood of my day. I’ve been wondering if I can isolate which neighbor it is and then leave a flaming bag of dryer lint on her front stoop.

Because the owners’ housecleaner was here this morning and because I have something like 400 papers to grade, I decided to go to my town’s only real coffee bar. I know as a writer and lover of literature and free thinking I’m supposed to embrace the idea of the coffee bar as if it were a country where everything is good and pure and where you do not need a passport. But here’s the thing: I kind of hate them. Other than the wireless access, I don’t really get them. The wares are overpriced and I hate being confronted by those insufferable tip jars, begging money for extra slow, snooty service. There are flies buzzing around the two-day old baked goods, no matter how upscale the coffee bar in question. The furniture, though cozy, is always stained and looks like it had a life somewhere else (in the Merchant Marines, perhaps) before becoming a coffee bar sofa or chair. It is, inevitably either jazz or Ani di Franco on the sound system, and both unnerve me.

And also, I have no use for coffee. It shames me, as a writer, not to be a smoker, a real drinker or a lover of the java--fatty and sugary foods are as good a vice as any, but they are not literary. To me, coffee is a poor substitute for a delicious carbonated, high fructose corn syrup soda. But if you order one of those in a coffee bar— heaven help you. Judging from the curl of the barrista’s lip it is clearly the equivalent of public urination. In fact, I suspect public urination would be more acceptable as it would seem somehow French, and thus sophisticated in its own way.

Today was no exception to my bad coffee house experience. First, the person behind the till was a former student. He’s a talented writer and has a wicked sense of humor, but he hasn’t been to school for two years and was lamenting the frustrations of the life he is stuck in because of bad blood between himself and Sallie Mae. I wasn’t in counseling mode, but I did my best job of suggesting possibilities for finding his way back to school, but he clearly only wanted to lament the state of his life and wasn’t interested in problem-solving.

I ordered a bagel and a Coke. He grimaced. Ugh. “Do you not like latte?” he asked. I confessed I’d never HAD a latte, but that I didn’t like coffee. “I’m making you a latte and you’ll like it,” he said. This seems to be standard operating procedure. I am Sam I Am and the barrista is determined to get me to like whatever potion he or she has created--in a box with a fox, and on a train in the rain. He charged me for the bagel and the Coke, and while he was going thru the complicated motions of making a complimentary drink I didn’t want, I filled up my plastic cup with the sweet nectar that is Coca-Cola. Only it was just carbonation with no cola syrup. I mentioned this to him and he said that oh, yeah, he needed to change the tanks. So I took my drink and pretended that latte was indeed the perfect drink, though for me, it is only something I could tolerate at dinner party where I didn’t want to be rude. It IS better than coffee, but what I wanted was my morning Coke. My former student made no move to change the Coke tank and started a conversation with another person. I took my empty Coke cup, my latte, and my bagel (flies already hovering) to a table and started working. I could just tell there was no way those tanks were ever going to get changed and they didn’t, though I was there an hour and half.

Then a mother arrived with two ill-behaved children with giant bows in their hair, and they were met by another mother with two only slightly less ill-behaved children, one with a giant bow in her hair, and the crying and whining began. It occurred to me that I might actually learn to LIKE coffee bars if they were like REAL bars and there was an age limit on who could enter. I’m not anti child. I love children. Somedays I even want a small quiet one of my own, but these bow-laden princesses pretty much put an end to the grading and the latte drinking. I never did figure out if their shrieks were of joy or pain, though when I took my last drink of latte and nodded my thanks to the barrista, I nearly joined them.

Wages of Sin

2007-06-09T12:17:00.000-05:00

Lord, I am heartily sorry.

I have been shamed. Not more than twenty minutes ago, I was clutching a book to my chest and having a cry because the book in question seemed so good and true. The shame part comes in because I’ve spent the better part of the last two weeks publicly decrying the author as superior and unkind to her townsfolk and completely unable to string together a satisfying non-fiction narrative. And this after five years of being more silently contemptuous of her, in no small part because she was writing about Indiana during my era and she had the gall to have a nickname too close to one I had.

Also, I once went to a workshop she led and was annoyed beyond repair by the way people gushed over her when she was a mediocre teacher at best. So talented, so clever, so unique, they said. Bleh. I began to loathe her. I began to feel she had stolen away some title I deserved. The fact that I have not written a memoir of my Indiana girlhood for critics and readers to gush over did not alter my sense of injustice. The fact that I loved her fiction did not strike me as being a contradiction when I would curl my lip if someone dared mention the name Zippy to me.

So anyhow, I was fairly surprised when I slammed shut She Got Up Off the Couch and promptly burst into tears. All I can figure is Haven Kimmel got something right—some alchemy of description of a blizzardy Hoosier winter or growing up in the 70s or loving common items shrunk down to miniature size—that made my heart shift positions and not turn so bitterly against her.

I feel much better now that I have confessed that sin.

Other things that have been disturbing me today: I think Paris Hilton is robbing me of quality time with Z.

Since Z, I have a laundry list in my head of things to tick off until I see him again. In fact, when he was here last month, healing me of terminal hypochondria, I even happily ticked off his departure because I knew that meant I would see him all the sooner.

My shrink would say, “Why do you think you are this powerful—to speed up time?” and I’m not sure why except that my maternal grandmother soundly chastised me once for
wishing away my life, something I should never do, even if it was for a truly good thing, such as I wish summer vacation were here. (That one, I still contend, is not bad because life in the confines of the public school system was not worth living.) My grandmother’s belief that I had the power to fast-forward thru my life must have made an impression, because I do. I do honestly believe that when I see Z on Tuesday morning at the airport, it will be in no small part because I thought so long and hard on how to get through the minutes more quickly until I could see him again.

But then there is this: not only have I been wishing away my life, but it occurs to me, I’ve also been, with my desire for speedier clocks and quicker reunions, wishing away other people’s lives—Z’s, my mother’s, my aunt who dreads the passing of time because it removes her further from her recently departed husband, my other aunt who is now—with no thanks to me—down to about nine thousand heart ticks of her own—and so on and so forth. I’m pretty sure this makes me a selfish, bad person.

And the wages of such a sin is this: this flagrant speeding up of time that I have caused means that at the end of those paltry few days I’ll have in Seattle with Z, he flies off to Zimbabwe for…oh, I keep hoping there will be some papal dispensation that will make this untrue!…two months. No nightly phone calls; no reliable, multiple-times-a-day e-mails; no possibility of a mid-way weekend meeting place if the Travelocity deals are superior. Just me, my suitcase of abandonment issues and the void sprinkled with occasional emails when he has electrical power and occasional phone calls when I can manage to punch in the international codes correctly and the phones on his end are actually working, and daily news reports of how things in his homeland have slid so far past “pear-shaped” that they aren’t even in the fruit category anymore. That’s what I have to look forward to for not taking heed when Grandma told me to stop wishing.

No. I must require of myself and insist that others—including Paris Hilton who is no doubt in a hurry to get out of the L.A. County jail—QUIT WISHING THE DAYS AWAY. I believe if we are all united on this front time can be slowed to a crawl and Z will never leave my shores for his native ones. I’m not sure what the pay off will be for Paris or how she can be convinced to cooperate, but I’m working on it. Her money, power, and connections give her an unfair advantage in persuading the earth to rotate a bit faster, so I’m hoping she’ll see reason & find peace in her current unfortunate circumstances.

Signs and Wonders

2007-05-28T23:44:00.000-05:00

Two weeks ago I saw my father, which in and of itself isn’t odd, except for the fact that he’s been dead six years. When I saw him, sitting in the garage of my step-mother and her new husband on the occasion of her 60th birthday, I thought, “Oh. Good. Dad is here. I haven’t seen him for awhile.” On closer inspection, the balding head, supporting the reading glasses, the golf clothes—including the shirt with “Firestone” emblazoned on it, which is where my father worked when I was a small child—these elements did not add up to Dad. Instead, the details belonged to a minor player in my step-mother’s new family, and as it turns out, I was the only person who thought he momentarily resembled Dad. In fact, I seem to be the only person who recognized the man was even there. No one spoke to him. He sat, sipping a drink, and looking benignly at the May sky. He was a breathing ghost.

Because I’m a little bit of hypochondriac, who feels pains and finds lumps on a weekly basis, I feared Dad’s presence was some indication that I was going to be visiting him sooner rather than later on that great golf course in the sky. Then Z came for a long weekend of bliss, which miraculously caused the aches and swelling nodules to disappear. He’s magic, my African. The Great and Powerful oZ.

When I see the unbelievable, or even just the remarkable, I need to assign meaning, though sometimes I get it wrong. Six years ago, on the way to the hospital for the lung resection that was meant to give my father more time, I saw a turtle in the middle of the road. A road where there have never been turtles before. I took it as a positive sign—his recovery would be slow-going, but he would make it and we could bond in ways we had never previously managed.

Three hours later he was dead.

What to do with that turtle? I didn’t know, but other turtles kept popping up in unexpected places as I grieved, as I traveled alone through Ireland, when I met and said goodbye forever to Z (even though I didn’t believe it was really that kind of a goodbye). Here a turtle, there a turtle. I had to reassign meaning, and what the turtle began to mean when I would see one is this: You are exactly in the place you are supposed to be; quit borrowing future pain. You are at home in the world.

This weekend the Scottie dog and I hosted a Memorial Day party for my paternal side of the family. Cousins have come in from the Great Lakes, from Kentucky, from Ohio. We’ve spent time feeding our stomachs and our inclination to connect. None of us grew up together nor do we have many shared childhood memories. We were all raised very differently in different towns, but in our young adulthoods when the first round of weddings and funerals brought us together, we discovered similar interests and deep affection for each other.

The cousins all come together happily and fall into and out of conversations and group photos and long-standing jokes like a litter of middle-aged puppies, but the dwindling older generation cannot do the same. The stress of having everyone together makes them behave irrationally and sometimes badly, fretting about the exact time of dinner and what “out law” is in attendance, and which of the 40something children has misbehaved, looks unhappy, or has generally disappointed. We, their offspring, get questioned as if by Interpol, and we know no matter how carefully we answer that the information given will be used later, or sooner, to add kindling to some grievance that will be publicly aired or disseminated through the grapevine.

Maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe it’s too emotional for my father’s generation to see the family as the upper tiers peel away and fly up to heaven, making way for new babies and new sets of out laws, and so other little mini-dramas must be constructed. Maybe it was some injustice done to them during their post-war childhoods. I try not to judge too harshly. After all, I don’t know what it is like to lose a husband, through a heart that has gone bad physically or emotionally, thru treachery or inertia. I don’t know what it is like to get the diagnosis that your own heart has about twelve thousand ticks left in it and this is probably your last family party. So the Scottie dog and I leave them to their outbursts and hope the grandkids tumbling into the creek or putting on a play or the happiness of their own children in concert with their cousins will soothe those demons.

Before the party started, I got a disgruntled phone call from an aunt. Something was upsetting to her, and because this party was for her and her faulty heart, I was upset because I wasn’t delivering the perfect party, conceivably her last. At that moment, I was ready to call the whole thing off. Who needed the strife? Have your own party if the potato salad here is not to your liking and so on and so forth.

My mood did not improve when I drove out of the driveway, right past a snake. I hate snakes. HATE. I, who believe serial killers and child molesters should not get the death penalty, want all snakes to die horrible, painful deaths. No amount of debate can convince me they aren’t bent on evil or that the planet would not be in better shape without their presence.

I drove past that snake and was filled with rage. How dare this snake sun himself (reptiles are always male in my book) on MY borrowed driveway, as he plotted some sort of trespass against me? (How dare my aunt be annoyed at me when I was offering up my borrowed house for HER party.) I looked him in the snakey eye and I said out loud, “You, you little bastard, will die if I get back and you are still here.” I went on to the grocery and shopped angrily and was probably rude to the check-out girl whose red, white, and blue fingernails disturbed me. I was still angry as I drove back up the driveway, and I was determined to deal justice to that snake with my Goodyear tires.

He was not there. He’d slithered off to make some other person’s blood run cold. What was in his place? Yeah, that’s right, a turtle. Just sitting there and, I SWEAR, sniffing flowers. Not only that, but he paused and looked at me with his wizened face—combination dinosaur and Dali Lama—and I think he said, “Chill out. It’s all good.”

And it was.

Lucky Duck

2007-03-25T23:22:00.000-05:00

New ways I’ve embarrassed myself: In a moment of panic two minutes before the taxi came to carry me away to the airport, I scrawled a love note to Z on the back of a rent-a-car scratch-and-dent checklist and shoved it under his pillow when he wasn’t looking. Surely this is not behavior befitting a middle-aged woman. What if he’s repulsed by its cartoonish sentiment?

And so here I am at the Seattle Airport, undoing all of the steps that brought me here ten days ago, a sort of unwilling reverse time-traveler. Despite my bad attitude about having to leave, I don’t hate the people surrounding me and like to think that if the winkdog lady was here—even WITH her winkdogs—that I wouldn’t hate her either. This is what ten days in the love bubble with Z does for me.

Seattle has a pattern of celebrating my departure with good weather. I try not to take it personally. Today, there was plenty of time before my late-night flight to soak it up. Z and I walked down to Pike Place Market and ate at Lowell’s, which overlooks Puget Sound. Because it was Sunday, the place was crawling with tourists and crowds of people that made it more exciting, though I was secretly loathing them all, sure that they were in Seattle for more than the next six hours. Other people I loathed: couples walking dogs and/or babies because there is a good chance they live in the same zip code. Z doesn’t understand this quality in me—this melancholy how-can-I-enjoy-the-present-when-the-immediate-future-is-not-to-my-liking. I am thinking that if he doesn’t understand my sadness at leaving that I must remember to never tell him about how the only time I was ever happy in 1979-1980 was Friday evenings because it was the only point on the weekly calendar at which I was furthest from phys. ed with a woman known as Ms. Hitler-man. He’d never understand that by Saturday evening I was mournful at the thought of having to tug on my embarrassing red-and-white striped gymsuit on Monday morning, like some sort of junior high convict.

What he does get, however, and what always surprises me because not many other people do, is the way my brain works. We took a walk on his campus today, where a pair of mallard ducks has taken up residence in the chapel reflecting pool. All week I’d been hoping to see them, but they never made an appearance and Z speculated that they’d moved on to fancier, duckier digs. While we were walking this afternoon, I was in a particularly forlorn (okay, okay, pouty) state re: my impending departure, the nature of long-distance relationships, how us together is too good to be true and hence too depressing to leave, blah blah blah, but as soon we approached the pool and I saw them I brightened a little, and Z said, “See. There you go. A sign. Everything will be okay.” He didn’t actually know I was in a complete funk. He definitely didn’t know that I’ve taken particular comfort in waterfowl sightings ever since he left my world permanently five years ago & on the day of his departure I stopped at one of our haunts to collect myself before going to work when seventeen or so Canadian geese and goslings waddled right past me, as if to let me know everything would be fine. But he knew a couple of displaced city ducks would mean something to me. I find this condition of being known so surprising and welcome, even if it does mean I can no longer hide behind a blank façade.

So anyhow, here I am in the airport, surrounded by people who don’t know me and who will likely elbow me and nudge me into a corner so they have more room on the sardine can of a plane I’m about to get on, but it’s okay. I’m sad, but it’s okay. I’ve had a good ten days, Z knows me, and planes fly both directions.

Dilettante

2007-03-24T15:21:00.000-05:00

Maybe it’s because I’m here with Z—cocooned in layers of affection, far away from real-life frustrations like the 82 annotated bibliographies that will be waiting for me when I get home—but it is so much easier to enjoy the small things in this city. Like for instance, I helped Z pick out table service for four at the thrift shop and we were both quite pleased with how much six dollars will buy when you aren’t at Macy’s. Buying a newspaper seems like an event. At home I would drive around a parking lot six times looking for the spot closest to the front door, but here I think nothing of walking twelve (or twenty) blocks to get a cup of hot chocolate.

Today I can feel sadness trying to lap at my shores, but I’m not having it. I’m not wasting one day with Z because I’m sad that I don’t get more time with him when the time I have had has been so delicious. I’ll be sad tomorrow and I won’t be able to keep the tide at bay, but today I. WILL. NOT. GIVE. IN.

It’s a nothing of a day. We get out of bed late, we eat breakfast late, we wander around a grocery buying nothing in particular, we stop in another bookshop that I wish I would have discovered earlier. Eventually we end up at Dilettante, a little wine bar of place that sells chocolate instead of vino. It is decorated in dark, chocolaty colors and I’m instantly sure that this is the place I wanted to come five minutes after Chocolat was over the first time I saw it. We both have versions of hot chocolate—Z’s is sweeter than mine, both come with cups of teeny chocolate chips. Surely nothing ever tastes this good at home.

No, it might, but at home I would be in such hurry to get to my next thing that I’d never enjoy licking the cream off of my lip or listening to the hushed conversations that are taking place around us. Instead, I’d go zip-bang from my hot chocolate to whatever was waiting for me next. I want to stay here, drinking chocolate and sitting with Z, forever, pretending this is my place of habitation, but knowing if it were, I wouldn’t be enjoying the simple things half so much.

Where the Streets are Paved with Mold

2007-03-23T23:20:00.000-05:00

Crawling thru rat-infested sewers didn’t sound like a good time but the guidebooks said Seattle’s Underground Tour was worth the eleven bucks, so we went. It takes place in the oldest part of Seattle,--an area called Pioneer Square where many buildings are now on the National Historic Register, and which has been so nicely restored that it doesn’t feel like the rest of the city. It is shady and bricky and trendy. The best independent bookstore I have possibly ever been in, Elliott Bay Book Company, is there, and there is a clog store. Nothing inside but clogs. Big clogs, Little clogs. Red clogs, Blue clogs. Even used clogs. It, coupled with the bookstore across the street, is like my (and Dr. Seuss’s) dream shopping experience.

What’s even more interesting to me is that all this splendor is on Skid Row. Literally. This is where the term was coined. Logs used to skid down one of the big hills toward the lumber mill at the base, which was a good thing during the Boom, but when the Boom went bust, the area became derelict. There are a few remnants of what the place was like before the revitalization of the 1980s and 1990s. For instance, the Bread of Life mission is still there, advertised with neon lights that give Jesus an eerie glow and makes the place look more fun than it probably is. Across the street there is still a hotel sign that advertises rooms for 75 cents. (I assume those rooms weren’t en suite either.)

The tour took us underground into a series of dusty tunnels where we were told we were walking on what used to be the main streets of Seattle. The city burned (like all good city’s did back then) and it was decided that ground level needed to be raised, but since that would take awhile, business owners were encouraged to go ahead and rebuild at the original, lower level and add a door on the second story where ground level would eventually be. As we winded thru the tunnels we looked through archways and doorways that would have been the front doors and windows of the shops and banks that are now above ground. Of course there were also ghost stories and 4th grade sewer jokes and a gift shop at the end that the tour spills out into, but it was all good.

At the end of the tour, we both signed the guest book, and our tour guide was suddenly agitated about what we’d written. I assumed that there would follow a conversation about Zimbabwe and how did Z get here from there and aren’t things bad there right now, etc. This happens sometimes and I’m always amazed at how Z acts like it’s the first time he’s ever had to explain his origins.

Instead of conversations about Africa, Ed the Tour Guide said the name of my town and exclaimed that he is from just up the road, that he went to college in town, and so we talk. He was in The Sound of Music at the local community theater with my aunt when I was just a kid. He cautioned me that his 98 year old grandmother was still driving and that I should be careful on the roads. It was good fun to run into a paisano on the other side of the country. I should have asked him if he found the geography in the Pacific Northwest difficult to navigate and if he had an inclination like Cousin #3 to root for Indiana basketball teams.

Island Girl

2007-03-21T15:19:00.000-05:00

Here’s a tip: when you find a deal for a cheap room in an historic inn on the San Juan Islands, make sure the room has a bathroom included and that you aren’t expected to share with other guests.

The ferry ride on Monday from Anacortes to San Juan Island was beautiful but cold. We wended our way between islands and Z and I made periodic dashes outside to stand on the bow for a cold but unobstructed view. We guessed about what islands we were passing, and as is typical of me, I feared we were passing better islands than the one we had made arrangements to be on. In a little less than an hour we had docked in Friday Harbor—the “city” by island standards—and made our way up to Friday’s Historic Inn, where we were cordially greeted and given a key to our room. That’s when we discovered that despite beautiful antique furnishings and a harbor view, we would have to go downstairs for the shower and toilet. I’m not a princess, but I am an introvert with certain hygiene requirements, and I was not prepared to spend my two-night un-honeymoon in the hallway of Friday’s Inn making small talk with hair-shedding, toilet-seat-leaving-up tourists while I waited my turn. No, it wouldn’t do.
The desk clerk didn’t seem surprised at all when I came lumbering back down the stairs with my credit card in hand and was directed to a slightly pricier suite with private bath and Jacuzzi.

I don’t know if I’m cut out for island life. The San Juan Islands are beautiful and the views are breathtaking. The people are friendly and the pace is very laid back. But there is this tiny panic in my core—what if I need to go to Wal-mart at two in the morning for nail polish remover? There is no Wal-mart unless you go back to the mainland, and there is no ferry at 2:00 a.m. WHAT DO YOU DO IF YOU HAVE A LATE NIGHT NAIL POLISH REMOVER EMERGENCY??? I’m reminded of my last visit to the much less inhabited and much more rustic Inisbofin off the western coast of Ireland, when the electricity was shut off for the entire day while they did upgrades on power supply from the mainland and I had this sudden, crazed desire to plug something in.

But mostly I am able to keep the dogs of anxiety from barking. Z is good for that. We have tame adventures, driving around the island, having an impromptu picnic on the doc in front of the Hiro Hotel where Teddy Roosevelt stayed a couple of times. We walk on the beach and pick up driftwood for a shelf Z hopes to build (but fears will stay driftwood on his kitchen floor). We look for whales and see them with every crest of wave, only to discover a log or a shadow instead. We look at a seal/sea lion and try to remember how you can tell one from the other before it swims away. We drive past Pelendaba Lavender Farm after buying lavender from their shop in town, where Z impressed me terribly with his internationalness and asked the clerk what the South African connection was because he recognized the name as Zulu. (I can’t remember what it means now, but think it is “please do not gag while eating our lavender-flavored chocolates.”) We visit baby alpaca's and I consider buying $75 alpaca slippers and say a silent prayer of thanks when they do not fit. It's a good life, this island one.

There is a lot to be said for a few days of relaxation on vacation instead of the style of tourism I usually sign up for, which involves packing as much activity into as little time as possible so I can say I’ve done it all. They say Friday Harbor is hopping during high season, and if that is so, I’m glad we came in March when the roads weren’t crowded, their were no waits in restaurants, and we had our pick of rooms that were en suite. We both agree that it is a place we would return to, though I know as the ferry takes us back to Anacortes I’m going to wonder if next time we shouldn’t visit one of the other islands to see what it has to offer.

Crimes Against Humanity

2007-03-18T22:09:00.000-05:00

We meant to see a movie downtown, but somehow we ended up in the middle of a war protest instead. Z and I were killing time before our movie started when we saw some picket signs, some barricades, and heard the bullhorns. If we’d watched the news the night before instead of celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, we might have known to avoid the area, but we quickly got caught up in it and I had a sudden vision of Helene Hanff accidentally getting arrested in 84 Charing Cross Road in a protest.

There were all sorts of people there: old hippies, mothers of sons in Iraq, children, and even a little beagle who proudly wore a dog-sized sandwich board outlining this administration's sins. The downtown square was packed full of people with anti-war T-shirts and signs. There were a few anti-protestors (surely there’s a better term) on the fringes, but even so, it was a very civilized gathering. The police outlined the group on motorcycles and horses, but they didn’t look too worried that violence was going to break out. One of my favorites was a grizzled old guy in a tie-dyed shirt who was doing some sort of spinning scarf dance for peace.

Z and I are both observers—he’s a bit more scientific about it than I am because all I’m looking for is good story material whereas he has en eye peeled for crimes against reason and sound rhetoric. Another difference between us is that Z easily moves from observer to engager, so when he went up to a woman holding a banner that read “Give Peace a Chance” I skittered off to the sidelines with the homeless people and street musicians and, I’ll admit it, pretended I didn’t know him all that well. I could say it was because I felt it was wrong to harass someone who had strong political convictions—stronger than mine since my main concern was would this dalliance with the politically active make me late for the 2:00 showing of Wild Hogs, but truthfully, it was just that I like for everyone to get along and I don’t think it’s nice to add to someone’s distress by pointing out to them that peace isn’t really on the table. Troops out now, sure, Try Bush and Cheney for war crimes, why not, but it will be a long, long time before peace is an option.

Mostly though I didn’t want Z engaging the protestors because I feared a scene. You can put a Midwestern WASP in the middle of the apocalypse and her primary concern will be fretting about whether someone is causing a scene just because the rivers are running with blood. This isn’t really a characteristic about myself that I like, but it has its advantages. For instance, I’ve never had a black eye for provoking a war protestor.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to look oblivious to a person and simultaneously watch him out of the corner of your eye because you want to make sure he doesn’t get strangled with a bed sheet spray painted with Quaker slogans? I was relieved when he finished his debate and suggested I go buy a disposable camera and snap some photos. And I was even more relieved when Quaker Bed Sheet Lady stopped during the parade so we could take her photo—an indication that whatever Z had said to her, she had no hard feelings. I shouldn’t have doubted him. He is not without charm, not without compassion, and of course he wouldn’t have caused a scene. I should have had a little faith.

My favorite part of the day, post protest and post movie, was when we stopped in a little park and sat amongst the daffodils and tulips while eating $6 cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory. So peaceful. No confrontation. Delicious.

Remembrance of Things Past

2007-03-17T23:50:00.000-05:00

The geography here confuses this Midwesterner, who is used to her wide-open spaces, her linear roads that occasionally curve softly around a creek or gorge. Today, we drove to Bremerton to see my cousin and his family, and I had a hard time with the notion that if Puget Sound had been frozen over, we could have driven straight there in less than 30 minutes, but since it wasn’t and since we didn’t want to fork out the money for the ferry ride, we drove down to Tacoma and up the other side of the Sound.

My youth was spent with Cousin #3, playing Frankenstein on my grandparents’ farm and attending weekly UMYF meetings together. But we grew up and he joined the navy and had a family and I went to college and misplaced my religion. We haven’t kept in touch, so I was nervous about the visit. I didn’t know what I’d find, what I might be inflicting on Z, or how long it might take the two of us to remember that we used to eat Fudgecicles together.

I worried needlessly. He looked the same, though older and a bit more like my grandfather. His wife was friendly, and though his three year old was cranky and his daughters looked at us with detachment (If you were that important we would have met you by now seemed to be the sentiment), it was an easy afternoon, catching up on family and former classmates, and hearing about his life in the Pacific Northwest. When we were kids he had been a serious, bright kid who was tormented a little by his older brothers, so I was happy to see him grown up and not harboring any grudges for the summer they called him “Waffle Pants” because of an unfortunate incident with a too-hot register.

He’s a practical guy and this is his life out here where the roads are not straight, but I got a hint from him of what it would be like to leave the Midwest for a different geography. He’s obsessed with Hoosier basketball and any team for any sport that is from Indiana. He longs for the quieter pace of what he remembers of Midwestern life. He laments that airfare from here to “home” is steep for a family of five, so visits with relatives are few and far between. In fact, other than his mother and brother, I am the only other family member who has made the visit and witnessed where he lives his life.

I wonder how long it would take me, if I lived where he does, to realize that the closest distance between two points is not the direction you point your car when you are ready to make a journey. Do you get used to circuitous routes or do you always hanker for an open road and a clear horizon?

He took us to the naval base where he works, and we had to show ID before we were allowed access. Z’s ID gave the guard pause, and I had a sudden vision of all of us being stripped searched. To my mind, Z is not a shifty looking character, but in a world where old women get flagged at airports for security checks, it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Luckily, we were given the nod and so got to see the base where Cousin #3 was stationed when he first joined the navy, see a hint of the work he is doing there, the PX, the base McDonald’s, the bowling alley, and then, for some reason the part that fascinated me most, the area where the tired, old ships are “mothballed.” To me, it looked like something out of a horror movie: the amusement park after hours, the empty school gymnasium, the meat-packing plant after the last shift has gone home for the weekend. The ships look like ghosts of themselves, their names and identifying numbers have been painted over and some of their parts have been salvaged. I kept asking what would happen to the ships because I couldn’t imagine that they’d just have to sit there for the rest of forever, like they are in some sort of boat nursing home. But that’s the plan. I stared at them and felt like if we were very quiet we could have heard the voices and sounds of the life that used to be on them. Should we should bring them flowers, bake them cookies, set up televisions so they can at least watch “The Price is Right” as they wile away the days in familiar geography but with no place to go and no one who would recognize them anyhow?

Eternal-ish City

2007-03-16T14:51:00.000-05:00

When I was in Rome two years ago, I met a friend of the cousin I’d gone to see who was resident director for some American college students who were staying in the university’s hotel/dorm. She was in her early twenties, small and perky, and she was climbing onto the back of a motorcycle with a handsome Italian man. They even said ciao as they sped away into the night. God help me, I was jealous. I was jealous because I was no longer twentysomething. I was jealous because when I was twentysomething not only was I not living in Rome, but I was in Indiana not riding motorcycles with handsome foreign men. I was jealous because I imagined their ride would end somewhere romantic, outside the Pantheon, on the banks of the Tibor, near the Trevi fountain, and then at some point they would get back on that bike and go somewhere private to have loud, hot, sweaty, Italian sex. While Puccini played in the background.

I really kind of hated that girl and I only knew her about three minutes.

Today, I was in Seattle, which is not as sexy as Rome. I was walking in army green Crocs (not sexy leather boots) instead of riding on the back of a sexy motorcycle. My hair was it’s typical Seattle, Meredith Grey unsexy. Instead of looking at ancient, sexy lifelike sculptures carved into Italian marble, I was looking at abstract cubes and giant typerwriter erasers in the Olympic Sculpture Park. But I was with Z, who smelled so good and held my hand so well and who occasionally molested me in little, welcome ways behind particularly big sculptures. I thought about that girl and realized young, young her could not have been half as content, half as giddy, half as sexed up as I was, standing next to my 50% Italian as we tried to figure out what in the world a series of rusted shapes could possibly mean, as we laughed at the sometimes pretentious explanations of the hulking heaps of metal, as we noticed a young mother who was breastfeeding her baby on one of the works of million dollar art. The sky was clear, the Olympic Mountains were in the distance, the waters of Elliott Bay were calm.

Yeah, I feel a little guilty about that hate now.

Ciao!

Flying Alone

2007-03-15T14:47:00.000-05:00

The main reason I shouldn’t fly alone is this: I hate people. When I fly with another person, I’m usually too engaged in conversation to notice that despite a sea of empty chairs at the Indianapolis airport, two different sets of people have decided to bookend me. I loathe them instantly for crowding me, and even though I know it is the airport that smells of dirty feet and not my new neighbors, I blame them just the same. The lady next to me just flopped down a red and white L.L. Bean tote that has “winkdogs” embroidered on the side. There’s no telling what a winkdog is, but I’m pretty sure I don’t like them either.

Anyhow, this is one of my character flaws. When it is 6:30 in the morning and I’ve been up since 3:00 a.m. and I had to drive thru the Spring rains Central Indiana to get to the airport, I just don’t want to be bothered. Add to this that it isn’t even the REAL 6:30 but the imposter 6:30 the governor imposed on us when he made us adopt Daylight Savings Time. My jeans are soaked to the knee from the walk from the car to the shuttle stop and back to the car to retrieve my iPod, which, it turns out, was actually in my pocket, and then back to the shuttle.

But I’m not complaining. So far my flight is on time and Z is on the other end of it waiting on me. (Well, technically Z is asleep, but if he were awake, he would be waiting on me.) I must learn to embrace my co-travelers and their winkdogs.

February Harvest

2007-02-22T16:47:00.000-05:00

Here’s what not to do when one of your major uncles dies and you are minutes from going to the visitation at the funeral home: do not try out new waterproof mascara with microfiber. In fact, make it a policy to never even use waterproof mascara, particularly when it has ingredients commonly found in raincoats.

I can’t decide if I look more like a four year old who got into her mother’s make-up stash or if I look like a mime. Either way, it is not good, though possibly the freaky quality of my eyelashes might distract the bereaved throngs from their grief for fifteen seconds while they speculate about what manner of insect has crawled onto both of my eyes.

This major uncle was a farmer with a love of history, conspiracy theories, and the farm where he grew up and then grew his own family. He was moody and given to loud outbursts of displeasure when something was not to his liking, but he was also personable and funny and handsome. He had things he believed in: rules, lines you didn’t cross, respect you paid. He was the last of the older generation of males in my life to call me by the childhood version of my name, and I liked that. There might not have always been displays of affection or even acknowledged appreciation between us, but hearing him say that softer version of my name somehow always made me feel connected.

Of course he also called me Nose Picker with some regularity, but we won’t speak of that.

In that way that when I hear the word “house” I picture something white with a picket fence, when I hear “farmer” I picture him: shock of hair sticking out of the back of a seed cap, overalls, ruddy weather-creased face, thick, strong hands.

His farm was the backdrop for some of my happier days. Though the outdoors makes me sneeze, it is where I romped in hay mows, rubbed my face on the fur of livestock and barn cats alike, and where I learned that hamburgers and Green Giant corn do not miraculously appear in my grocer’s freezer but actually come from a farm somewhere. One July I was with him and his oldest son in their pick-up, surveying corn not quite ripe for picking, and he said with great pride to my cousin, “Look at that. That’s ours,” and it clicked for me, those hours they spent on the tractor, in the farm lot, testing corn at the kitchen table, plowing, planting, harvesting, hauling--all of it adding up to a job you could be proud of, that you could own because it meant something. It was tangible. You could taste it.

And so now my spider eyes and I are off to say goodbye to him and to try to offer comfort to my aunt and cousins, though there is no comfort for this unexpected loss. Instead, like with any death, there are now just memories and photos and the stories that will be told to remember what the dash between 1947 and 2007 stood for. There is also the very real possibility that for my aunt, my cousins, his grandchildren, and those of us who grew used to August sacks full of his season’s yield, that corn will never again taste so sweet.

The Shining

2007-02-14T23:08:00.000-05:00

The Scottie and I are housebound after the big snowstorm that blanketed most of the Midwest yesterday, so it’s a quiet kind of Valentine’s Day. Earlier today, the two of us went out and trudged a heart-shape into the snow, took a picture, and sent it to Z. Technically, the Scottie watched from a place where the snow was not higher than he is, but he did bark encouragement.

There’s something wrong, possibly, with a 40-year-old woman who still watches school closings on the news with the same hopefulness of a second grader. I have colleagues who are annoyed by snow days because they interrupt the learning process and mess up the schedule and are not productive. But I am of the belief that they are good for the soul. There is something delicious about wandering around, well past the hour of decency, in your pajamas because you know no one, not even the mail carrier, is going to stop by.

That said, after two days of being housebound, either me or the dog is likely to turn into Jack Nicholson in The Shining. My money is on the dog. He wants his walk despite his wooded lot with pond and seemed unnecessarily disappointed in me yesterday when I wouldn’t turn the snow off.

Z and I were sickening this weekend. It was a perfect weekend, the details of which I will keep between me, Z, and the Scottie dog, though there was a moment in McDonald’s when we kissed while waiting to place our orders, and some young guy looked like he had lost his appetite. I may feel like a sixteen year old, but I forget that what the rest of the world is seeing is someone middle aged (and in this instance, decked out in the wintery-est weather gear) who should not be allowed legally to kiss her boyfriend in public. Particularly after a four-day lovefest, which has left both participants looking hollow-eyed and shrunken, like the Mer-people under Ursula the Sea Witch’s evil spell in The Little Mermaid. In fact, I’m amazed legislation hasn’t been passed to public displays of affection in anyone over 35. If I weren’t me, I’d be thinking, “Yeah, yeah—move it on home to your Craft-matic adjustable bed, you old fogeys.” But we were on the way to the airport, and so I felt entitled, bewitched Mer person or not.

One detail I will share is that the Kama Sutra chocolates were well received, though given that neither Z nor I are particularly good at yoga or gymnastics, we opted not to try out the scenes depicted there on. There was some concern that the TSA might flag him if they saw this contraband in his suitcase however.

It’s interesting the new paths I find myself cutting these days. Historically, this has been the one day of the year when I felt entitled to be extra cynical and dismissive of sappy greeting card sentiment and Kaye Jeweler commercials, and now, here I am, out in 15 degree weather, marching around in a foot and a half of snow making heart shapes. Heart shapes.

Lowered Expectations

2007-02-08T09:50:00.001-05:00

Last week, a precocious kindergartner at the school where my mother works began a conversation with her teacher in that way you do when you assume the person to whom you are speaking has had exactly the same experience as you. The conversation starter was this: “You know when you poop your pants on purpose and your grandma gets mad….”

This delights me (mostly because I am not the grandmother, I suspect). I love the lack of self-awareness, the belief that of course EVERYONE has done just this thing and understands the repercussions.

And so I begin this blog….

You know when you buy a pair of low-rise jeans, even though you know you shouldn’t….”

It is typical of me to finally buy into a fashion trend when it is on its way out, and while I know my body is not suited to it from various aesthetically displeasing experiences in dressing rooms across America, I found a cheap pair of jeans I liked and they just happened to be low-rise, and now I have become one of the those Midwestern-shaped women who spends her day hiking up her pants. . . . while shopping, while teaching, while talking to the Vice Chancellor of Information Technology. I don’t know what I was thinking. I am a child of the 80s and as such jeans belong somewhere right at or slightly above the navel. I am not a mother, but I am most comfortable in Mom Jeans.

And we won’t even speak of the ill-advised underwear I bought to accompany the jeans. No we won’t.

Z is in the air, winging his way toward me for a long Valentine’s weekend, though come Sunday it will seem like the shortest weekend in history. He has already been delayed by a couple of hours, and I’m annoyed that an airline snafu is cutting into my time with him. I’m half-tempted to call Northwest and say, “Work with me people!!!”

As luck would have it, I’m at the Dog House for the rest of the month, babysitting, while my Scottie’s parents are off on a cruise of South America. My fantasies of putting the house to good romantic use have already been dashed. The nice thick white carpet in front of the fireplace that would be good for a picnic--or let’s be honest, making out--has been ripped up and replaced with very trendy hardwood and no area rugs. The hot tub is broken. It’s 3 degrees out, so the sweet walks on our old, friendship-only stomping ground cannot be re-dedicated to this new incarnation of us unless we bundle ourselves up like the little brother in A Christmas Story. I’m beginning to suspect the Scottie Dog is not going to approve of the two of us in a romantic relationship, and I’ve already begun envisioning all the ways he will try to break us up, kind of like Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills did to Brian Keith and their potential new step-mother in The Parent Trap. He’s a good dog, but he is an only child.

Also, you know when you order a box of chocolates from England for your sweetheart that depict various acts from The Kama Sutra and then you start to second guess yourself and wonder if what initially seemed funny and mildly naughty is really just in poor taste, reeks of desperation and might make the object of your affection go off you completely? Yeah, well. . . .

That’s it. I am officially lowering my expectations for the weekend.

But I am NOT wearing the low-rise jeans.

Skintuition

2007-01-28T04:39:00.000-05:00

One advantage to having a boyfriend, it turns out, is that they can see things you cannot. For instance, your back.

One night while I was in Seattle, Z was rubbing my back and discovered this thing that he thought I should have checked by a dermatologist. He didn’t technically discover it as I had already made an appointment to have it removed, and maybe I sounded a little defensive when I told him this because the next thing he discovered on my back he kept to himself for several days. One night he couldn’t stand it any longer and finally said, “What IS that?” He peeled up my shirt and discovered a price tag for $19.99 plastered between my shoulder blades. For days, he’d thought I’d had some deformity about which I might be self-conscious. Despite being mortified that the evidence pointed to bad hygiene on my part, I laughed with him about it and felt a little warm that he cared enough not to verbally note my every flaw.

My dermatologist, on the other hand, has no problem pointing out the flaws. She’s a bit flakey on a good day, but when I had the non-price tag removed she was in rare form. I hadn’t seen her for two years when I’d had a little thing sliced off of the side of my nose, so it struck me as odd that she shuffled in, looked at my face and said, ‘Oh, it looks good!’ Only what she was examining was not the two-year-old healed place but instead a chickenpox scar I’ve had since 1974. She complimented her own handiwork and then suggested that I let their new cosmotologist micro-dermabrase my face to smooth out the remnants of what she thought was her scar. She went on to tell me how this amazing cosmotologist would fix all manner of problems and could even wax eyebrows. When she saw I wasn’t signing up for a makeover, she went on to announce that she was trying to drum up business for the woman because nobody in my town seems interested in spending money to look better. I suspect it’s just that people here are accustomed to having their eyebrows done at a salon and not at a doctor’s office. Isn’t it a bit like going to the dentist and having her try to sell you lipstick? I suppose I’d appreciate it if my hair stylist noticed something on my head (a price tag perhaps) and suggested I go to the doctor to have it removed, but somehow when a doctor does it, it smacks of a snake oil selling. Do I NEED microdermabrasion for some medical reason? Are my eyebrows going to cause me long-term health problems if not cosmotologically altered?

And now, on to a skin of a different color.

I’m a fairly intuitive person, so why does it surprise me that when I do some dumb thing an inner voice tells me not to do, it doesn’t turn out well? More importantly, why don’t I just listen to myself? I’ve come to the conclusion that either I am slightly mentally retarded or I have a dual personality: one of a benevolent, intuitive parent and the other of a petulant, rebellious child.

I’ll spare you the details, but bottom line, despite a niggling voice telling me I was about to make a mistake, I violated the pricey iSkin—a Shrek-green condom that protects my iPod from all manner of bumps and spills—in the interest of its fitting into a stereo dock more efficiently. It didn’t work, and furthermore, within 60 seconds of making the last snip, I discovered another way to attach the iPod to the stereo that won’t affect the skin at all.

Because I do not like to cry over spilled beverages, I opted to fix the situation by gluing the silicon sheath back together with nail glue, which on any other day could be used to reattach previously conjoined twins. I frequently glue my fingers together when using it, so when the little niggling voice told me this experiment would also fail, I told it to hush because I know all about nail glue.

Maybe they taught this kind of helpful stuff in high school science classes on a day I was absent, but it turns out that quick-drying nail glue does not dry so quickly when applied to silicon. Instead, it makes a sticky mess. Despite both my intuition’s best attempt to save me from myself and despite my own resolution to be more frugal in 2007, there is now another Shrek-green iSkin on my Visa. I considered not buying a replacement, but the niggling voice said, “Your iPod needs to be protected from people like you.”

With Z and my intuition watching out for me, all I have to fear is, um, myself.

The Other Side of 40

2007-01-16T12:05:00.000-05:00

It seemed like a good idea to just go ahead and get the cold and sore throat from Z this weekend. Our minutes together were ticking down quickly and it felt as if one of us (me, probably, since I was the one with the plane ticket and penchant for over-the-top comparisons) was on death row waiting for a pardon from the governor that wasn’t going to come, so why not? But now classes start in three hours, the cold has lost all of its romantic appeal, and I’m wondering how my students will hear my scratchy voice today.

Other things you should know: security has been breached and Z has discovered the blog. I spent a day at DEFCON 1, re-reading all previous posts to see what secrets he’d learned. My face would turn red when he would reference something, like, “Apparently my laugh should be made a ring tone.”

I’d be a bad secret agent. For instance, if I didn’t really want him to read the blog, why would I have told him I kept one? And once I told him, why would I give him breadcrumbs big enough to find his way to it? This is one of the great mysteries of being me, the shy exhibitionist.

So this is me on the other side of 40. When I started this, I never would have guessed how delicious the flavor of life is on this side of the great divide. Had I known, I would have turned 40 years ago.

The day itself was perfect (and I’m not just saying this because the Object of My Affection will probably read this). In the history of birthdays, this one couldn’t be improved upon. It started with an apartment festively decorated by Z, a phone call from my mother, and excellent presents opened in bed. From there, we moved the party to downtown Seattle where we ate at the Cheesecake Factory, and via the Monorail, we visited the Experience Music Project. The building itself is more fascinating than the exhibits inside, though we did produce sound effects to accompany a Disney cartoon and learn to play “Louie, Louie” on the guitar. We had artfully decorated hot chocolate at a café across from Pike Place Market, and then went to see “Borat.” Z treated me to a delicious steak at Ruth’s Chris’s. Eventually, we ended up at Kell’s, an Irish pub in Post Alley where all of Seattle was celebrating the Seahawk’s victory and (short-lived) promise of glory in the play-offs, though I pretended all were celebrating my birthday. Though the majority of people at the bar were in their 20s, it did not make me feel old, just lucky to be with Z and listening to music I love. When we got back to the flat, we shot off confetti bottle poppers and decadently drank champagne in bed. I’ll stop with the narration there in the interest of modesty. To recap, it is the first birthday ever (including all childhood birthdays—I was a weird kid), where I did not lament the passage of time. Though I am unwilling to share Z with friends and others turning 40 this year, my advice to them for a similarly happy birthday is to be with a person who makes their teeth itch with desire and do exactly what they want to do, all day long, even if the neighbors complain.

The days following my birthday are a blur of happiness and general contentment. We saw some movies, ate some meals, took some walks, and did some shopping. I can’t help but think the residents of Seattle are glad I’ve left. Z and I behaved in ways that would have made me throw up just three months ago. We held hands walking down the street and made other people walk around us. We kissed at stoplights and grinned at each other stupidly for no reason other than we were happy to be in the same zip code for a few days. After one kiss while waiting for a light to change, Z said, “I hate people like us.” I felt only marginally apologetic for our public displays of affection, though it did cross my mind that perhaps I should have been handing out the suppositories I’d been given for nausea at the beginning of the trip to all who were forced to look at us.

I’m paying the price now. I cough. I blow my nose. I try to remember that less than 48 hours ago I was delighting in the simple things in life like a $5 dollar bottle of champagne or Z’s new-used and slightly hideous sofa from Craig’s List or the way my Thermolite mitten fits perfectly in the palm of his Darth Vader-style glove. Instead of beautiful cups of cocoa, I must content myself with mugs of gritty Swiss Miss, warm memories of a decade started right, and potent cough syrup.

Bridget Jones Goes Bad

2007-01-05T22:34:00.000-05:00

Z and I just got back from seeing Notes on a Scandal. We knew nothing of it and picked it only because of torrential rains and winds, and because Judi Dench is a favorite of Z’s. It was good. Tight writing. Strong characters. Stellar acting. Interesting throughout. Somewhere around the midpoint, however, I started to get a bit uncomfortable because I realized that despite the beautiful Cait Blanchett’s character’s ill-advised affair with her fifteen year old student, the aged spinster would be the “baddie.” Not the woman with loving husband and fairly decent home-life who decides to stray with her art student for no real reason other than minor dissatisfaction. No, Cait remains sympathetic throughout. It is the spinters we must beware. Judi Dench’s character keeps a meticulous journal (complete with gold stars and other bits of ephemera—the sort of journal that normally makes me feel warm inside), while judging others harshly, and having only one meaningful relationship: with her ailing cat, Portia. This let’s us know right away that this is a person to be judged and found lacking. Pitied, possibly, but mostly reviled.

Probably because Z was sitting next to me, with promises to take me home and love me, it took longer than normal for my spinster sensitivities to ratchet up to 10. I’ve never been able to truly enjoy Fatal Attraction and it hurt a bit to see what the world thinks Bridget Jones’s future might hold if Mark Darcy gives her the brush-off. On the other hand, as a writer, I know that sometimes there are bad __________ (fill in stereotype here) and they must be written about. The key is writing about them in such a way that you believe the character and forget the stereotype. This writing was good, but ultimately, it still seemed like a cautionary tale for any 40 year old woman who thinks maybe it will be okay to live out the remainder of her days in a single kind of way.

I don’t like cautionary tales. But still, see the movie.

Tonight is my last night of being 39. Z is off at Bartell’s buying me last minute birthday trimmings and so I am in the flat, reflecting. Am I sorry my 30s are over? Nah. I’m sorry I didn’t live my 20s better, but my 30s have been good. I’ve been some places, met some people, written some things. I have found the love of a good dog and the affection of a good man (whose keys are jangling in the lock as I write this). I’m healthier than I was three days ago, and that’s something to be happy about too. Two days of Jell-O and broth eating was not what I envisioned for this trip to Seattle. Today's lunch at the Pink Door in Post Alley was delicious--my first real meal--though I was sorry that the tarot readers and trapeze artists weren't there. Apparently that sort of dining entertainment is only appropriate in the evening.

So, goodbye 30s. Hello 40s. Let’s see what’s on your horizon.

Rip VanWinkle and the Gastritis Queen

2007-01-03T14:33:00.001-05:00

I made it to Seattle before the clock struck 12. Just barely. Z and my luggage were both waiting on me, so I felt welcomed. We took a taxi back to his flat, where he had New Year’s champagne waiting as well as those little confetti bottle poppers. By the time we got back there was precious little time to get anywhere fun for midnight, so we watched the Space Needle fireworks display on television. It’s weird to be one of the last places on the planet to experience the New Year. I kept waiting to see Dick Clark, but he’d been in bed for three hours—2007 was already old news by the time it hit the Pacific Northwest.

Don’t judge me harshly, but I’m a little superstitious. It’s haphazard superstition. I’d walk under a ladder, but I don’t like a candle in my house with an unburned wick. The whole black cat thing annoys me because it smacks of feline racism. One of my superstitions is that however you spend New Year’s Day will pretty much determine the shape of your year. It’s not looking good for us. Z was still horribly jetlagged, so he slept until 6 p.m. on January 1st. Once he was up, we walked to his office so he could take care of some things before classes started and then decided to eat at our (formerly) favorite Mexican place. It was not so good as we remembered, and by 3 a.m. I was up with “gastrointestinal distress.” By the time I woke up the next morning, I was achy and still making regular trips to the bathroom. Between my marathon bathroom visits, we lounged in bed watching Gerald Ford’s funeral. Not really the honeymoon-ette I was planning.

Also, my hair has gone from Meredith Grey to Slobodan Milosevic. Who knew it could get worse?

Z went to work and left me alone with my ailments. He called and suggested I go to the ER around the corner if I felt too bad. I laughed at this. It’s just the flu. We hung up. And then I started thinking about all the symptoms of toxic shock syndrome, read up on it on the internet and discovered I had every symptom except a sunburn-like rash. Hmmm. Intuition told me this was an unlikely diagnosis, but the big warning at the bottom Seek medical attention immediately scared me. I weighed the evidence. These really were the worst flu-like symptoms I’d ever felt. And would I be achy if it was Mexican food poisoning.

If you ever have to go to an ER, try to go to one in Seattle. I’m not a regular ER visitor, but based on my experience at my local one in August, I can see a vast difference. I was treated kindly, I was given warm blankets, I was clucked at and reassured. No one made me feel as if I had no business being there. The doctor looked like someone who would turn the heads of both McDreamy and McSteamy’s. She was kind. Kind and beautiful and smart. Imagine.

Z came and entertained me, though I kept dozing off from the IV they’d given me for dehydration. The bloodwork indicated that it was “just” gastritis, so they gave me some drugs, some instructions, and sent me on my way.

So it definitely isn’t the start of 2007 with Z that I was anticipating. He’s been a wonderful care-giver though. I awoke this morning to Post-it notes all over the apartment with well-wishes and numbers where he can be reached and two cans of chicken noodle soup that he had gone out last night in the rain to buy for me. I feel better. The sun is out. My fingers are crossed that he won’t get sick and that the rest of my stay will be good. And also, that my hair will start looking more like mine and less like Hollywood stars and now-dead foreign leaders.

Ring Out the Old

2006-12-31T18:52:00.001-05:00

I’ve already failed the first test of a long distance relationship. I had a little, almost tearful, freak-out. United had a bit of a problem, so I was late landing in Chicago and missed my connecting flight to Seattle. As did, apparently, everyone else in a 500 mile radius. I had been assured that United really takes good care of their people and that they’d have it all sorted for me and have me on the next flight by the time we landed at O’Hare.

Hardy har har.

Once in O’Hare, I stood in line for a half hour and then gave up because it was clear that if I continued to wait, all flights to Seattle would have departed. Then I waited on the customer service line for 40 minutes, and the situation got more and more desperate. Finally, the customer service representative told me that she could get me out in TWO DAYS. She said this cheerfully, as if this is all just part of their friendly service. As if I would like the whole Tom Hanks “The Terminal” experience for myself. Because it was weather related (rumor has it that it wasn’t technically weather but that United had run out of de-icer), there would be no compensation, no nice hotel. Just me, wandering around O’Hare for two days, buying travel pillows at Brookstone and covering myself with McDonald’s sacks.

So I did what any normal girl does. I called my boyfriend and almost, but not quite, cried. You would have thought I’d just missed the last helicopter out of Saigon. It was as if this meant I would NEVER see him again. The end.

He is a world traveler and thus was not as disturbed and had a variety of suggestions, all of which meant me standing in long lines, talking on a crappy cell connection to strangers, and, as he put it, “being firm.” What I could see that he could not was that this was hopeless. There were 60 people ahead of me for a flight out the next day.

“You must be firm,” he said. “That’s the only way to get anything done.”

This is one of our bigger differences, Z and me. In the world of Fight and Flight, he is the Fighter and I am the Flighter. (Only today my wings were clipped by de-icer.) What I wanted to do was quick book another ticket on Alaska Air for a thousand bucks and run away to him. Do I have a thousand bucks? Uh, no. But I do have plastic and this seemed like an emergency. I told him I had to go because I feared the crying and I’d like to save tears for something really important.

I wandered around, stood in line, felt hopeless, called my cousin in South Bend to see if perhaps I could spend two days with her. (She wasn’t home.) And then Z called. He’d found a flight out of Midway if I wanted to book it. “It’s pricey,” he said. How much? Half the cost of what I secretly paid to get to him on New Year’s Eve so we could start the year right. I told him I was being punished for greed and he laughed when he found out how much I paid because of my own impatience, and that made it all okay. Z’s laugh should be made a ringtone.

I had time to kill in the Loop so I made my way downtown on the El with all the TSA workers whose shift had ended, so I felt very safe and very much like I was just one of them. Someone asked for directions, and I was pleased that I could (sort of) answer them. Chicago always comes back to me like, well, what? Riding a bicycle?

It’s still Christmassy and Chicago is a great city for Christmas. I went to the former Marshall Field and was disturbed by how Macy’s has made it, somehow, more tacky, less grand, and just like every other store at the holiday. The Christmas windows were still good with animatronic Mary Poppinses, but the inside decorations could have been JC Penny. Carson, Pirie, Scott, the other former staple of downtown Chicago shopping,it turns out is going out of business. In the past, their window displays have rivaled (and frequently surpassed) Marshall Field's, but this year the displays were just of things you could get inside for 40% off. I decided to run over to the Midwestern-Sized Woman Store on Wabash to buy something to sleep in in case my suitcase doesn’t catch up with me tonight. (It supposedly caught the next flight to Seattle—the one I wasn’t allowed to catch!) Only there is just a shell of a building where it used to be, and next to it at the Champlaign Building where I spent many hours lurking in the lounges of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is also a shell. The sign proclaimed that a new skyscraper will be built there that will change the skyline.

I can hardly wait. Don’t people know the world as I knew and loved it is meant to be laminated?

So I bought some haircare products (Meredith Grey hair has begun in anticipation of Seattle, it would seem), gave money to some homeless people because they were full of New Year spirit, and I marveled at how I must have lost a lot of weight in the last two months with all of my difficult gym work because my pants were really bagging in the seat. Some more people asked for directions. I cruised around my favorite streets. Then I hopped the Orange Line to Midway, checked in, bought an oversized Chicago T-shirt just in case, and then went thru security. The TSA officers suggested I should have a happy new year, but also, perhaps I should zip my fly. My pants felt huge because they were unzipped and my giant cotton turquoise underwear was greeting tourist and native a like.

Now I am at the gate, waiting for the plane to get here to whisk me off (please God) and as I look around at my fellow travelers I wonder how many of them saw my underwear earlier.

To recap, 2006 has ended with flight woes, flat hair, and underpants flashing. Here’s hoping for a brighter, “fuller bodied," well-zipped new year.

The Horse Latitudes

2006-12-28T03:48:00.000-05:00

I’ve been stuck. How to write a blog about being an almost 40-something (ten days and counting) spinster when you suddenly have a Man of Some Significance in your life? Also, how to write a blog about your own life when suddenly your own life intertwines more tightly with another someone’s, a someone who does not suffer from exhibitionist tendencies? The answer is you just stew around for two months while you try to figure it out and wonder if you should rename your blog Spinster No More, which then leads you to thoughts of developing some sort of spray or gel that could be liberally applied to spinsters and then hawked on late night TV by that loud, OxyClean guy. And then you lose the urge to write because you start wondering why that guy’s voice is so loud and if he really believes in those products.

Right now I’m in the Horse Latitudes of the calendar year…that week between Christmas and New Year when nothing feels quite normal because there are still calorie-laden treats on trays and the decorations are still up and the ball in Times Square has not yet dropped signaling the return to regular programming. Also, I’m in lover limbo. The distance between Z and me has shifted hemispheres since he went home to Africa for the holiday. Add to this that he has slipped even further into the void by going camping for a few days with his family in a place where there is no phone service, no email access, and, it turns out, a rogue elephant who is stealing food from campers. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine a scenario for myself in which I would say to a man, “Honey, while you are gone be careful not to get trampled by elephants.”

So he is there and I am here. I leave New Year’s Eve to go be with him in Seattle for two weeks before classes start, but I don’t want to wish my days away, my thirties away, my holiday with my own family away. It’s a curious place to be, this no man’s land. I’ve been spending my time making lists of potential resolutions, reading the new “Not What to Wear” book I got for Christmas in hopes of being more visually appealing, scouring a new Lou Paget book in hopes of being a sex goddess by Sunday, listening to Gwen Stefani at the gym in hopes of tightening something and looking at all of my excess and wondering how to scale it back for more frugality and a healthier bank account in 2007.

In all likelihood, I’m setting my sights too high. My resolutions should be less lofty, in the manner of organize sock drawer, get photos put into photo boxes, and moisturize daily.

Or maybe just blog thrice weekly.

I’ll get myself sorted by January 1st. There should be wind under my sails by then.

Bridget Jones in Middle Earth

2006-11-07T08:58:00.000-05:00

On the way home from Seattle, I started channeling Bridget Jones. It was the only way I could process what had taken place in the previous 24 hours. My Bridget Jones voice went something like this:
Hooray! Am walking thru airport, talking on cell phone to actual boyfriend in manner of normal person. Have become person typically despised by solo, singleton travelers—standing still on moveable sidewalk thingy blocking passage to others because so busy talking to boyfriend about important boyfriend things like where his pictures have been hung and what he had for lunch and how my flight was. Hooray. Am part of couple. No longer destined to be spinster, eaten by own dogs. Joy!

Boyfriend? you ask. Yes. It sounds strange to me as well.

In light of my previous post, I don’t really expect you to believe me when I say I wasn’t looking for love. It’s true, but if I were you, I wouldn’t believe me. I’d given up on this man. When I met him five years ago I drove straight to my oldest friend’s house and said, “I just met the man I’m going to marry.” I meant it, sincerely, though it was a statement I knew I could revoke later when I found out he was gay or an axe murderer. But for the record, those words did come out of my mouth the night I met him at a faculty party and thus began a five year journey of love and heartache, 99% of which took place only in my own head and in late night phone calls to friends who care about me and didn’t want to see me miserable. If I’d taken the advice in that awful He’s Just Not That Into You book, I wouldn’t have been walking thru the airport, talking on the cell. To my boyfriend.

It is true I shaved my legs and moisturized before I went to visit him. I bought new underwear. So an argument could be made that I knew, but I did not. I told people at home I was going to Seattle to seduce him, but there was no chance of it happening and my friends knew it. I have the seduction skills of an otter, and I have been making the same claims for the five years I’ve known him with no headway. He was a fortress; my love crashed against his foundations without making so much as a chink. He would remain on his egg crate mattress in the living room. The end.

Only, maybe not. It turns out my love was wearing away his resolve. It turns out I’m now in a relationship. It turns out I have everything I’ve wanted.

I am happy. I couldn’t be happier. I had, however, forgotten about how approximately three minutes after a man confesses his feelings for you, girl brain kicks in. Girl brain has made it impossible for me to really enjoy my happiness. I can’t concentrate on teaching or grading or committee work. My mother tells me stories and I hear the capital letter at the beginning of the opening sentence and the period at the end of the final one, and that’s it. Meanwhile, Z is in his office, plugging away at work, functioning like a grown-up person, and I have become Sibyl, with at least five distinct personalities, two of whom are normal, functioning adult women and three of whom are different variations on the most anxiety-ridden girlies in all of Christendom.

One minute I am Realistic Feminist Woman (“This is good. Let’s see what happens!”). The next minute I am High School Chick who, in lieu of planning her prom, has turned to thinking about what dishes she and the object of her desire might eat off of one day in some shared living space. Three minutes in I am Anxious Lady (“Why hasn’t he called? Has he been hit by a car or mugged?”), and then from there it is an easy slide into Catastrophe Girl (“That’s it! He’s changed his mind! He’s decided he made a horrible mistake,”), and with a little luck, I waft into my Faithful self, who sings two or three choruses of "It is Well with My Soul" and who, for fifteen minute increments, can actually think about other things like the war and whether she should worry about the trans fat in crackers because she believes so completely in this new thing.

But it is hard. There are grooves of disappointment etched so deeply in my brain from previous experience that I am waiting to hear the thud of the other shoe dropping. The long distance nature of this relationship contributes to this. Is he coming here for Thanksgiving? Is he annoyed that I left two personal item thingies in his very orderly, minimalist apartment? Did he wake up Monday and see all the other, hotter women who might have been available to him if only he weren’t tied to me, the Old Ball and Chain? When I suggested a January visit was he just being polite when he said it sounded like a good idea?

On at least six separate occasions I have nearly called him and told him I need more feedback, more reassurance, more love. Despite the fact that a week and a half ago I was a semi-confident creature who was not dependent on anyone else for happiness or sense of self, I now feel like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. I feel greedy and like a bottomless pit of need. I have no doubt that Z can sense me, standing in the dark, rubbing my slimy hands together, and saying, “Precious...”

How sexy is that? I suppose if Z were one of those Lord of the Rings nuts, it might be kind of a turn on, and if the other shoe does drop (please God, no), then perhaps I can find a Middle Earth dating service and search for a man who finds Gollum dead sexy.

This is a sad state of affairs when you begin your blog with Bridget Jones and end it with Gollum . I need to re-channel Bridget. She’s surely not too far out of reach.

Am happy in manner of happy, confident person. Have found perfect love with handsome, international man of mystery. Will be ravished by him soon.

Yes, that’s better.

Precious.

Secret World

2006-10-25T13:24:00.000-05:00

There’s a reason why Meredith Grey’s hair is so flat and lifeless on Grey’s Anatomy. It turns out, everyone’s hair, especially mine, is flat and lifeless here. I assume it is the weather (rainy with a chance of rain), yet it seems like that would lend itself to frizz.

I’m here visiting my Zimbabwean. I like saying that. It makes me feel like Meryl Streep in Out of Africa when she refers to the people she makes work on her farm as my Kikuyu. He’s teaching here, and I am in his bed. Before you get notions of me, spent from a night of international passion, you should know that while I was in his bed, he was on the an egg-crate mattress on the floor of his living room.

I ruin all the best romantic scenarios I create for you by telling the truth.

My best friend emailed that her eleven year old son came home from school yesterday and said, “"I'm just starting to realize that girls have their own secret world, and it's FREAKY!" The Zimbabwean and I laughed and laughed over that last night when I read it aloud, but I could tell he has no idea. No idea despite advanced academic degrees that we women have secret communication-interpretation skills no Navajo code-breaker could ever crack. So when you open his refrigerator and see he has two Cokes and a package of Dubliner cheese, just for you, you swoon a little even though you’ve sworn off swooning over this particular man. When you lament how awful and Meredith Grey-y your hair looks and he says, “I don’t think so” it is, after several mental contortions, the equivalent of his saying, “Your hair is as the sun shining on the Zambezi, and I wish to spend my days basking in both the glow and beauty of it.” When he refers to his apartment as “our apartment” it is as if he has said, “I want to share my living space for the rest of my days with no one but you.” When he says, “I took off the roll of scratchy toilet paper and bought you the kind that those bears use” it’s as if he said, “I love you so profoundly that I want only the very best—softness, absorbency, and four-ply bathroom experiences—for you.” In this sick, sad world, even his choosing to sleep on egg crates instead of in his own bed with you seems like a declaration of love.

Poor eleven year old boy. How can he ever learn to cope in a world where half the population is this indirect, this given to fancy. . . this freaky?

So, Seattle. We walked over half the city last night and so I’m reserving judgment until we rent a car tomorrow and investigate it when my feet don’t hurt. It’s nice. Lots of coffee. The people are friendly. Somehow I had in my head that it would look and feel like Vancouver, but it turns out it’s a whole different place. Yesterday, my Zimbabwean took me to Pike Place Market. While I don’t like fish and do not like to smell them, eat them, watch them, or see them manhandled by the stall vendors, it was a unique experience. Also, there is a lot there that is not fish. Like huge bundles of fresh flowers for $4, and hippies selling art, and little dogs in plaid raincoats and jam sampling and fudge sampling and street musicians singing protest songs (just protesting in general, with an undertone of “This war is unconscionable” and “George Bush sucks” thrown in for good measure.), and all sorts of useless crap you don’t need like Oscar Wilde action figures, “Aunt Flo’s Tampon Case,” and cardboard cutouts of William Shatner. From there, we went to Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe, where you can buy other useless things and see oddities like mummified human remains and a stuffed two-headed calf. We took a bus to the Space Needle but opted not to go up because it cost $14 and was cloudy. My cousin G suggested I go up not because the views are spectacular or because it is a piece of post-Populuxe history, but because she didn’t go up and apparently that is the only thing people ask you when they hear you visited Seattle. I will wait for a sunny day. Or at least a day when there is a chance of sun.

Last night we walked up a San Francisco style hill to see his university. He wanted decorating suggestions for his office as some big wigs are coming in today, but it is a hopeless cause. I suggested he buy a plant and an Edgar Allen Poe action figure from Pike Market, but other than adding some doo-dads like that, it is a hopeless sea of glass and giant industrial office furniture. While there, I met the man who hired him, who tried to entice me to their wine and cheese reception this afternoon. I will, instead, be buying a birthday card and maybe a cake or some gift-ish for Z’s birthday. Extroverts never seem to get that the invitation to spend three hours with total strangers whom you will never see again is like a prison sentence.

After that, we walked up Broadway in search of food and so I could see, as Z put it, “the freak show.” Sadly, the freaks were not out, either because it was too early in the evening or two middle-of-the-week. I will have to save those human oddities for another day, though clearly I’ve got my own little freakshow happening right inside my head and don’t have to walk up any hills to get a front row seat.

The Rules of Engagement

2006-10-16T14:24:00.000-05:00

The Rules of Engagement

I’ve been thinking about the rules of attracting a mate lately. You know the ones. Some are probably holdovers from the days of courtly love. I’m talking about the ones no one really teaches us, but we can quote them more quickly and accurately than we can the First Amendment or the Ten Commandments. (Pick your politics.) They are:

1) Love comes when you least expect it.
2) Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
3) You must love yourself before love will find you.
4) Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free.

There are variations of the above but all fit comfortably in one of the four above groups. For instance, if you’ve read enough self-help books or watched movies like Runaway Bride, you’ll recognize a combination of 1 and 3. That is, you might love someone, but until you quit being devoted to your love of them and learn to make hideous lampshade art on your own like Julia Roberts almost always does in whatever movie she is in, you will not find true love. A variation of 4 that I prefer because I am mildly lactose intolerant is that you must withhold your love if you expect the object of your affection to return your warm feelings.

I’ve followed most of these rules, off and on, with some regularity, and I can’t say that any of them work. For me. That’s fine. Single is okay, so don’t think this is a blog of self-pity. It is not. For instance, I had a flash last night of all the horrible décor I’d be forced to live with if some of my former loves had come to a point of cohabitation: dogs playing poker, posters of Johnny Cash, farm implements as art, eagle blankets as window treatments….

It annoys me when people explain their newly found love by relying on these platitudes, usually because they are not true. You cannot believe anyone who says they weren’t looking for or expecting love. They were. Okay. They were. We all are. If you are between the ages of 12 and dead and you spend more than 15 minutes a day watching television or listening to non-talk radio, then you are expecting at some time to be “surprised” by love. If you weren’t expecting to be surprised by love, you wouldn’t have the good underwear and you would never shave your legs. Don’t kid yourself and don’t try to kid me. You might not have been expecting it today between 12:00 and 12:15, but you were expecting it eventually.

What annoys me even more than this, though, is when someone willingly breaks one of these rules and finds true love in spite of it. For instance, I know a woman who loved a man who did not love her back, even though they had sex regularly. By all accounting with Price Waterhouse, this relationship was doomed, she was being used, he would never respect her, and thus she would never win his love, no matter what acrobatics were involved. It’s the cautionary tale every young girl hears from her mother or Sunday school teacher. Yet after a year of this FREE and FLAGRANT milk giving, the guy realized he loved her and couldn’t live without her. They are now married and have matching tattoos celebrating their eternal love. Not only this, but the power balance has shifted and his own mother refers to him as “whipped.” When you have been a rule follower your whole life, this is one of the jaggedest little pills to have to swallow: rule breakers win; rule breakers do not necessarily go straight to hell. (Though this is a young marriage, and so the verdict is still out on that one. Hell has many manifestations.)

What is the MOST annoying, however, is when someone willfully breaks the rules but presents her story of love as if she were adhering to the above. Recently, my mother befriended the wife of the first boy I loved, grades K thru 3. He was cute, smart, skilled at kickball, and was regularly awarded the title of “Good Citizen.” His wife (an excellent and good person by all accounts) tells the story of how she was not interested in dating anyone and told the friends who set her up with him that she wasn’t. She told him she wasn’t interested in him repeatedly on that first non-date, and three days later she moved in with him and they’ve been blissfully happy ever since. She followed those rules of courtly love and rejected him multiple times, but still, she went on the non-date. Still, she answered the phone after the non-date when he was calling to tell her he wanted to see her again. And when, later that same night, he drove through the country looking for her house so he could kiss her soundly and show her that there was something between them, she told him how to get to her house.

So, at cocktail parties, she can tell people that she wasn’t looking for love and in fact discouraged love, but even so, she gave it directions.

I just hate that.

My luck with absence making the heart grow founder has been no better. It can make the heart grow fonder, but only in people who weren’t into you enough in the first place to realize they should stay put. Them joining the military and then realizing they really miss you is not really a testament to how lovable you are so much as it is a testament to how miserable it is in a desert. Or Duluth. People have had good, long marriages based on this absent, fond heart mythology, so perhaps I should not judge it so harshly. But I do, primarily because I am the kind of person who feels that the separation by just a two- mile stretch of road is too great a separation. I do not need to go to Duluth to realize I am in love.

Also, statistically speaking, what absence does is make people unfaithful. They’re lonely, Van Morrison gets played on the jukebox, and they bump up against another lonely some body.

Am I too cynical? Bitter? Frustrated? A case could be built for any of these. But I don’t think so. I’m just wondering, that’s all. How is it that other people know when to follow the rules, when to break them, when to break them but pretend they didn’t? How is that whatever I do seems like exactly the wrong thing to do, but then if I switch to the exact opposite tactic, it immediately seems like the inferior one?

These are rhetorical questions, you understand. I’m beginning to suspect the truth is that no one knows anything, and the platitudes we rely on and untruths we tell are simply needed because it is an unbearable thought that our lives and loves are a crapshoot, that it is, at it’s very basest level, just an issue of timing: who was available at 12:15 on a Monday afternoon.

No, this version is even less satisfying than the lies. I find myself once again in the precarious position of needing to quote Fleetwood Mac: Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.

Uniformity

2006-08-19T10:36:00.000-05:00

Sometimes when you’ve been dizzy for a week and when you get so dizzy you think you might pass out and when you mention it to a wise friend who had a similar experience and discovered when she went to the hospital that she needed potassium STAT, well, sometimes you end up in the E.R. at midnight.

If you can help it, avoid this.

I miss the days of nurses in starched white uniforms with hats balanced on their heads. I only just barely remember it from my childhood, but there’s something about the current nurse style of smocks with puppy dogs on them and big white athletic shoes that always makes me think perhaps they should be grooming dogs instead of taking my blood pressure. I don’t trust their authority or their expertise. It’s judgmental of me. I’ve taught many fine nursing students who no doubt have a variety of scrubs covered in woodland creatures and cartoon characters, and I’d trust them to take care of me. But still, there was something comforting about those days when people dressed in the uniform of their profession. The reason UPS men look kind of hot now is because uniform wearing is really down to them and the “crew” at McDonald’s.

Also, on the list of things you shouldn’t have to see in a hospital ER: a doctor who appears to be a 12 year old paper boy and who wears, as God as my witness, a shark tooth surrounded by shell beads on a leather cord. I seriously felt as if I’d fallen out of the Midwestern ER waiting room full of Hoosiers with reflux and tattoos and into an examining room in the O.C. If this hospital wasn’t situated at one of the furthest points inland you can be from either coast, I would assume he was going to go surfing as soon as his shift ended.

I’m not ready to be a woman who talks about how young the doctors and cops look. I don’t want to have a prejudice against youth. And yet. And yet. I want a doctor, male or female, with understated jewelry and no beach ware.

Things you should know about your ER visit:
1) Do not tell the doctor what you think your problem might be. Doctors do not like this. Doctors will order the test you think you need but will tell you they are certain you don’t need it and when the results come back negative, they gloat. In this respect, I think doctors also long for a simpler time before their patients had access to WebMD.

2) When the technician comes in to administer an EKG and he is reading the manual, it won’t be done right. He will be pleasant (and mildly cute, so you won’t mind exposing your chest to him so much), but eventually, a woman in a puppy dog smock is going to come in with the same piece of equipment and do the whole thing over again, only more quickly and with more authority. In all likelihood, your results will be normal.

3) Do not assume that you will leave with any sort of sense of what is wrong with you. If you are not having a heart attack or stroke, you will not be admitted. If you are not a baby with pink eye, you will not be given drugs.

4) Do be prepared for looks from the doctor and nurses that indicate you DO NOT BELONG in the ER and that you are WASTING THEIR TIME.

I have sense seen my “regular hours” doctor and he doesn’t know what’s wrong with me either. He said he “prefers to think it’s an inner ear thing” and that my body is overreacting to the dizziness. He has a look in his eye that indicates he thinks, perhaps, I am having an anxiety attack. Any maybe I am. Because, honestly, I’m pretty anxious about becoming 40 in five months and having health care professionals treat me as if I am an over-reacting, hypochondriac middle-aged woman. It’s a downward slide from here.

Youth is wasted on the young. Middle-aged people are wise enough to know that shark teeth make for bad jewelry.

Lost and Found

2006-08-16T21:13:00.000-05:00

Okay. Okay. Summer is over. I'm back to work.

In the remaining fifteen minutes before classes start for Fall, I've been trying to clean up my "home office" (a Tom Seely Shaker farm table covered in paper, Post-Its, and small plastic gods, goddesses, and a Zimbabwean bottle cap basket), and in so doing, I have re-discovered some salvage from my library days.

For three depressing years after college when I was pretty sure my life was over, I worked in a public library. It wasn't a bad job in that it was clean and there was electricity and there was very little chance I'd be trapped in a cave-in or develop Black Lung from my work there, but it was soul deadening in a way most book lovers can't imagine. Anyone who reads always says, "Oh, you worked in a library! How wonderful." If by wonderful they meant how wonderful for a sugar addict to work in a candy factory where she is not allowed to sample the wares, then yes, I guess it was wonderful. Mostly, my time was spent trying to soothe patrons who were sure they had been overcharged fifteen cents on their fines, keep the odd pervert from masturbating in the 600s, and trying to fly beneath the radar of a mentally ill boss.

One of my few joys, aside from ordering fiction and quittin' time on Friday, was cleaning out the lost and found. Frequently, there were items in there I wouldn't have touched if I'd had on a haz-mat suit, but other times, there would be Aignier change purses (now used for toll money) or interesting bookmarks or photos of strangers. Twice, there were Cross pens, one pink one with PJB etched on the barrell and another, more distinguished navy blue one with "Jeff Aluotto" engraved on it.

When I worked at the library, Al Gore hadn't yet invented the internet, and there was no "Aluotto" listed in our databases nor in the phone book. PJB was similarlily elusive, so I became the proud owner of two slightly used Cross pens.

Fast forward 16 years. I still have both pens, though I rarely use either. I am a pen whore, and there are too many pens in my possession for any of them to get used more than a few times a year. So in my cleaning frenzy and my desire to "simplify" as the magazines all tell me I must do if I wish to find inner peace, I re-discovered Jeff Aluotto's pen and decided to see if I could find him. After 20 seconds of googling, I located a likely candidate, living about an hour and a half from my own fair city. He seems to be doing well for himself and in all likelihood, he has many other Cross pens in his possession, but I've been enjoying the idea of reuniting him with this pen. He appears to be roughly my age, and I'm speculating that his pen was a graduation present. Possibly from an auntie of whom he was fond.

So I decided to send it to him semi-anonymously. I shoved it into a padded envelope with a note wrapped around the barrell that said, "Did you lose this sixteen years ago?" And then, because my professional interest in "story" got the best of me, I signed the note with my email address, hoping that he would write me back to say either, "Thank you so much. My auntie died shortly after she gave me this pen" or, possibly, "Who the hell are you and why did you send me a pen with my name on it? Are you trying to sell me something?"

I had a brief fantasy in which he writes me back and we strike up a conversation and discover we both had a great love of Ireland and jig punk and the novels of Thomas Hardy and Nick Hornby and Italian food and voila, we decide to meet and fall in love and Plan B pays big bucks to make the movie of our romance since the James Frey thing isn't working out so well for poor Jen's production company.

But then I did an additional search and discovered a woman, roughly my age, living in the same house with my fantasy man, so now I've begun worrying that perhaps the arrival of this pen will break up his happy marriage. For instance, I suspect perhaps they were high school sweethearts and she gave him the pen and is now going to ask him uncomfortable questions about who I am and why he was with me sixteen years ago. And the fighting will escalate and then they will divorce and their three beautiful children (who may or may not exist) will be statistically damanged by being raised in a broken home. And it will be all my fault for reuninting a man with his pen.

The most likely scenario, I realize, is that the man I selected as the most likely candidate isn't the original owner of the pen. But it really is the least fun of the possibilities.

Little Brownstone on the Prairie

2006-07-15T12:02:00.000-05:00

Last night I was feeling "troubled" about my silly life as I went to sleep, which is a fairly frequent occurrence. Usually the troubledness has to do with my age, my living situation, my marriage/partner/dating and motherhood status. Other things get factored in based on the latest magazine article I've read or Dateline exclusive I've watched. Last night, after messing with a picture shelf my mother and I were hanging above my desk and trying to figure out which of my 20 works of art I was going to hang on the little hunk of wall that is left in my room, I was feeling particularly freaky. I have friends who are bitter because their houses aren't brand new and don't have granite countertops or swimming pools or room for a home office, but all of them have managed to get more than four walls to hang things on. This isn't about some people being luckier or having more than me. I know if I wanted to make it a priority I could maybe get myself eight walls, so I'm not talking about jealousy here. If I wanted to give up the frequent flying and the handmade furniture and the Sundance catalog jewelry, I could buy a little house and hopefully have enough money left over to pay a boy (preferably a shirtless one) to come and do things for me like hang picture shelves. I could.

Anyhow, I woke up this morning, looked at all my stuffed-full bookshelves and realized, I'm living in a brownstone circa 1945. I always imagined living a writer's life in a big city where I couldn't afford anything but a bedsit so all of my worldly possessions would be in the one room, and for reasons that are unclear, I always imagined doing this in the post war era. And now I realize that's what I've got. Only without the city, without radiators (thank you, Jesus), without loud neighbors, and without a book contract. I AM Helene Hanff. I am whatever the bookish sister's name was in My Sister Eileen. I just can't go walk my dog in Central Park (partly because I don't have my own dog), and I still have not developed a taste for coffee and cigarettes, both of which figure prominently into my 1945 brownstone fantasy.

Also, in this fantasy, I have a throaty laugh and I know how to dance.

I really am amazed by people who figure out how to settle into a place. At almost 40, I'm still trying on locations for size. For instance, I now know I do not want to live in Aspen, even if I do become a billionaire. In fact, you can scratch 'anywhere in Colorado' and 'the Rockies' right off the list of possibilities. It's gorgeous there. The quality of life is good. I understand the fervor of John Denver's Rocky Mountain High, but it is not my place in this world. There is too much sun and too many people happy to be outdoors, risking their lives on guardrail-less roads, in treacherous rapids, and while battling wildfires.

While I was at Aspen Summer Words, my friend H. drove me up Independence Pass so I could see the Continental Divide. On the way up I told her how beautiful the landscape was and she said, "I know. When I see these mountains my heart just opens right up." My heart wasn't opening--not for those mountains--but I liked the emotion with which she spoke. It's how I feel about the West of Ireland, Chicago, East Tennessee, London. There are places you belong and places you don't belong and I live in fear that I'll accidentally end up in a place where I don't belong, where my heart not only won't open up but instead will seize because of the ugliness or inhospitably of the people or landscape. For instance, the two hours I was waiting for my return flight from Phoenix, I kept thinking, "This is a dead place. People aren't supposed to live here." Yet people do. And some people love it. My grandparents loved it. But they sure didn't pass those genes down to me. (Nor the genes that would make camping seem like a good idea, for that matter. Nor the ones that would make me good with money or able to cook.)

When I figure out how to get myself to 1940s Manhattan, I'll let you know.

Ellie Mae Clampett Goes to Aspen

2006-06-26T23:45:00.000-05:00

Blogging is a type of writing, right? I don’t need to feel guilty about sitting in an Aspen Starbucks blogging instead of working on a novel or studying craft, right?

It’s beautiful here. The house is remarkable. But I’m left with this sense that I’ve just packed up the truck and moved to Bever-leeee.

The trip here was only mildly eventful. At the Phoenix airport, while waiting on my (late) connecting flight I looked down at a young woman who was reading a manuscript and realized it was mine. I introduced myself and thought we’d have a chatty moment or two about our hopes for the week. She said, “Oh.” Not “Hey, I liked your story” or “Funny line on page three” or even “What do you think Ron Carlson will be like as workshop leader?” I asked who she was and was not surprised to learn she was the author of the only story in the whole pile that I hated—writing that gives the impression of depth but wherein there is no there there.

The flight was delayed, the plane was tiny, and when I got on I stepped on a pair of abandoned sunglasses and broke them. I though, shamefully, “I’m so glad those were someone else’s sunglasses and not my own.” Then last night when I unpacked my own sunglasses were broken in two. I’m not sure what the message there was from the universe: be more remorseful when you break people’s things? Always keep your sunglasses in a hard shell protective case? What?

Unfriendly Writer Woman ended up being my seat mate. I tried again to engage her by commenting on her rapid-fire line editing, but she just smiled that smile that is not really a smile but more of a ‘Beware of Dog’ sign. So I turned on my iPod. Later, when the plane hit the most horrendous single-moment of turbulence I’ve ever experienced—we’re talking “Tower of Terror” style drop—my glass of water went flying and then water all over the ceiling that rained down on her for the rest of the trip, I felt like, well, maybe there is something to the whole karma deal. (But I still don’t think my sunglasses should have broken.)

D & L, my hosts, were not at the airport to greet me. The American West delay threatened to make them late to the YoYo Ma concert. A woman gave me a note from L with directions to the house and a suggestion to take a cab.

The house is indescribable, though of course I will try. Where I’m from, when people are “having a house built” what it means is that a new house is being built in a former forest or cornfield and it looks, basically, like the other houses near it. This is a house. With an architect and a lot of square footage and a view.

The entrance to the house is a curving gravel lane flanked by pines, Aspens, and wildflowers (L is a landscape architect). From the outside you can tell that it’s going to be something special inside, but it doesn’t call a lot of attention to itself—no big Tammy Wynnette-esque pillars out front. (Dark wood, lots of glass, maybe Neo Prairie style if such a thing exists??) D has a little office building in the front garden, all glass. Lots of sculpture, flowers, stepping stones, and a formidable entrance.

Hannah the Golden Retriever greeted me as soon as I opened the door. She immediately tried to crawl up onto me and started whining with joy that someone was giving her some attention.

The entry hall was so breathtaking that I had a hard time moving further into the house. Gorgeous hardwood, four giant medieval-looking figures, twice my height lined the corridor, a big vase of fresh flowers, artwork. I can’t even begin to think of how to do it justice.

I told Hannah that I needed to find my room (L had left directions to the room and instructions for how to avoid altitude sickness—drink lots of water and lie down flat for a half an hour as soon as you arrive). Hannah very regally walked me to my room and stood at the door like a bellhop, awaiting her tip.

My room is huge—cathedral ceiling with a ladder that goes up to a loft, an entire wall of windows overlooking the Rockies, a door out on to the back patio, beautiful, unique antique furnishings, literary readings placed out on the desk for my perusal, a bar of lemon verbena soap awaiting me in the shower, fluffy duvet, what must be 6,000 thread count sheets, not to mention the fluffy robe, towels, and flip flops. Also, in the closet—a hanging metal skeleton!

A river rushes down the incline off the patio. I went out to hear it and locked myself out of my room, so had to traipse through the yard (more wildflowers! More view!) back to the front door, where Hannah greeted me again and insisted I look at the living room and kitchen. Wow. One huge room, huge cathedral-sized windows, lots of exposed wood, big firepace, books, artwork. Every where there are little wooden artists dummies, sitting in windows, hanging on picture frames, doing acrobatics across a bulkhead.

Hannah insisted I play tug of war with her, which I’m used to with my Scottie, though it turns out Golden Retrievers can do a LOT more tugging. I finally had to cry uncle.

After my altitude treatment, I decided I’d walk to The Gant where Summer Words is being held this year. D had told me it was a 15 minute walk. Sure. For someone who is fit, athletic, and used to this altitude. Forty minutes later I lumbered into the reception area, just in time to meet Ron Carlson, get my name tag, say hello to the Countess who was on the Ireland trip with me in November. Then I found my friend H who was looking for me, so we went off to have dinner, talk about writing, and catch up. She very graciously drove me back to The House and went off to set up her camper. (People who can do grown-up things like set up campers amaze me.)

I sat on the patio watching the sun set behind the Rockies and waited for my hosts to return. When they did, we talked a little and then I tumbled in my Princess and the Pea bed. I can’t believe I had doubts that this house would be less exciting than the Hotel Jerome.

Fruitless Sneaks

2006-06-15T13:43:00.000-05:00

I hate snakes. Call it irrational, girly, predictable, whatever you want, but I seriously think all snake should die. I don't feel this way about spiders or mice--in fact, I regularly spring the traps set at the Dog House because it seems like bad, bad karma to eighty-six something so cute who is just out there trying to make a living like the rest of us. But snakes are a different story & I'm not even from a part of the world where they are poisonous.

Today, I let the dog out and two seconds later heard this awful caterwauling on the kitchen deck. I looked out in time to see a giant snake coiled up and ready to lunge at my sweet Scottie, who has a ferocious bark that should have scared the snake off. I called the dog in but the snake then glared at us, still coiled, through the window. He opened his mouth, wide, to show us what he was made of (though possibly he was just yawning and completely bored by us). The Scottie whimpered, desperate to give the snake what for. I poked at the glass and made noises meant to scare it off, but the snake just stared at me, sitting on its snake-haunches, ready to attack. He didn't leave until we walked away from the window and let him "win." I haven't let the dog out since.

There are a lot of fantastical things in the Bible--people turning to pillars of salt, burning bushes, walking on water--but I've never had a problem with believing any of it. Today, though, I'm thinking the whole Garden of Eden story is a real crock. What self-respecting woman would talk to a snake? I just don't think it would happen. They are all side-windy and slithery and awful.

At school, I regularly have female students--usually those with tattoos of pentagrams who smell of patchouli--who insist that snakes are wonderful, loving pets, but I never believe them. I think its for affect. I'm sorry--you can't curl up with a snake and watch old "Frasier" reruns, like the Scottie Dog and I did last night. What you can do with a pet snake is take it out of its aquarium in an attempt to make guests uncomfortable. That's about it. I've always thought how awful it was that cats were regularly murdered in medieval times (and beyond) because they were associated with witchcraft. How ignorant and heartless, I'd think. But snakes? It just seems like the truth--they are evil and must die.

Several years ago I had a student who was not a native speaker of English who wrote a paper in which she talked frequently about "sneaks." At the time, I pictured people who were out to get her, sneaking around her neighborhood, maybe painting racial epithets on her garage door or rifling through her garbage. After the third read-thru, it dawned on me that "sneaks" were really SNAKES. The paper was about how much she hated sneaks. Here, here.

Summer of a Dormouse

2006-06-03T15:55:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, my BABY half-brother graduated from high school. Technically, I’m old enough to be his mother (my father and step-mother didn’t adopt him until I was 21), but normally, I feel like I’m just a few years older than he is, possibly because I never learned to be a grown-up. I can still remember the joy I had when I was in graduate school and listening to little five year old him espouse the joys of “Beavis and Butthead” not because he “got” it but because he wanted to emulate anything his cool older brother did. All three of us were the same age in that moment, liking something irreverent and silly, no matter how inappropriate the show was for a five year old. Or a ten year old, for that matter. Or somebody working on her master’s degree. I was raised as an only child and was basically adult when both boys were born, so these moments of sibling camaraderie are few and far between.

But then on a milestone like graduation, I’m forced to admit how old I am and reflect on his childhood and how quickly it went and how mostly I didn’t witness it because we lived in two different cities and I was busy. It seems like two years ago that I met him for the first time, played with his chubby toes, and looked into his little almond old man eyes and felt a sorry for him, that he’d just been hanging out in a Korean orphanage, minding his own baby business when he was plucked from his crib, flown around the world and deposited into the loving arms of a family that is not bad, but at the very best, is pathologically dysfunctional.

And now he is a grown-up, who doesn’t have to have the time for me if he doesn’t want to. How quickly the tables do shift.

I rode the 40 minutes to the graduation with my step-mother and her new husband, Not My Dad. I never miss Dad so much as I do when I am around NMD, and he is telling his silly jokes, spouting off his rigid religious views, or implying that my whole family is screwed up because we’re introverts and not extroverts like his family. He’s not a bad man, makes the step-mother happy, and seems to care about my brothers. But when he speaks, what I want to hear is my dad’s voice, having a discussion, cracking off some line & then laughing. What a good laugh my dad had. Also, Dad would never have told a joke about knowing my step-mother ‘biblically’ and expected laughs for it. His wit was cleverer and slightly more tasteful in mixed company. (Also, Dad would have been aware of the frightening images he was scarring the listener with!) But, there you go. Not only do you not get to pick your family (biological or adoptive), but you also don’t get to pick your second round step-families. So you laugh when it is expected and you are appreciative when NMD buys you a sundae at Friendly’s.

In other news, I have sent off five chapters to Aspen to be considered by fellow workshoppers and two agents I’m paying $35 a pop to “consult” with. The manuscript was due—in Aspen—on Wednesday, to be considered for the agent lottery, so of course I was still writing it all on Tuesday and mailing it out for $36 via Fed Ex at 4:30 in the afternoon. One day I hope to discover why my writing is better when I put myself into fit of terror and self-loathing at the eleventh hour. I don’t know that the chapters are “good” but certainly they are better than the swill I’d written a few weeks earlier when I wasn’t under the gun. I think in the perfect world (for me), I would have an agent/editor/publisher who would, at least once a week, call and say, “Look. Your stuff is due tomorrow or your career is over and, what’s more, we’re going to take out commercial time on major networks to tell the world what a horrible, lazy person you are if you don’t meet this deadline.” Then I’d write. I’d write regularly and well.

Bridget Jones Has a Baby

2006-05-29T00:11:00.000-05:00

It's Memorial Day and I'm tired of thinking about the war dead, the high cost of crappy plastic cemetery flowers, and why it is everyone else I know has cookouts but I mostly have bowls of Fruit Loops.

So let's talk about babies. It seems timely. The media can finally quit telling us that Baby Jolie-Pitt is about to be born, has been born, has been given the name of a Golden Retriever, has been made an honorary Namibian princess, etc. (The downside, of course, is that we'll be back on Britney-watch.)

Also, in other celebrity baby news, it seems Helen Fielding, the author of _Bridget Jones's Diary_, has just had her second child at 48. I like this story because it gives me almost a decade to still keep motherhood on the table. I keep a list of "older" mothers just in case--at some later date--I need a role model.

That said, today I visited a friend who recently had her first baby, and I'm not sure what compels rational people to procreate. A little over a year ago the two of us got together for the ballet and dinner, where she confessed that she was thinking of having a baby but she really wasn't sure she wanted to, had never wanted kids, had never seen herself as a mother, etc. (I encouraged her, for the record. It seems like a thing you are supposed to do if you can.) Then about three weeks later she wrote that she was pregnant and so she guessed the decision had been made. Before Baby, we met in bars and talked about men and what we wanted to do with our lives. Today we met at Bob Evans. On the surface, she looked as fresh and well-organized as she always has, but something was off. She seemed scattered and a little unsure of herself. She kept apologizing. She confessed that she knows nothing about babies and so still has no idea if he is exceptional or below average in what he does, though what he does mostly is chew things and smile. She said that while she used to think about climbing the corporate ladder, she now suddenly wants a job where she can work less than 40 hours a week and wear comfortable shoes. I felt both sorry for her and a little envious. There's this cocoon around a mother and a new baby that third parties just can't quite penetrate.

She's younger than I am and I (being so very old and so very jaded) have lived through several of these get-togethers in the first six months of Baby's life and it is wrist-slittingly tedious while the two of you try to re-navigate your friendship since you are no longer in the same boat...or floating on the same body of water. I'm sympathetic to how hard this transition must be for the parents. In fact, on a couple of occasions with close friends, I've enjoyed watching the transformation and hearing about the feeding schedule and quality of diaper contents and the features on the Bebecar Stroller (which costs more than my first vehicle) and how really, you just can't be a GOOD parent without a Diaper Genie. I take mental notes so I can have rational discussions about things I know nothing about with whomever has the NEXT baby. And maybe I take notes in case my ovaries are as hearty as Helen Fielding's. Maybe.

I've always wanted to be one of those cool single people who "understands" the trials and tribulations of marriage and a childless one who totally "gets" what it is to be a mother, so admitting any of this is like blowing my own cover, but here it is: when friends have babies it totally sucks. At least it does in the early days because suddenly the glow of the spotlight shining on the baby is just wide enough to shine a bit on you and expose something you've never known before about your own life, which is this: it is silly and insignificant. I want to be clear: this has nothing to do with the mothers' attitude. For instance, my friend today generously praised my writing and asked several about my life, but then when I went to tell her, the baby would coo or shake his stuffed cow and we would BOTH stop mid-sentence and grin at him like a couple of idiots. She asked what I'd been up to, and nothing I've been up to seemed noteworthy--eating Fruit Loops on Memorial Day hardly qualifies as news. I've been to Ireland. I've taught some classes. I've flirted with some men. But how can we discuss that when she so recently brought new life into the world and here it is sitting before us, filling its diaper?

We gave up after awhile. We made faces and weird sounds at the baby and assured each other regularly that he really is the most beautiful, smartest, and most cheerful baby ever (as all babies are). When I pulled away, he was screaming at the top of his lungs, his mother looked pained at the thought of the hour long drive she had in front of her, and I cranked up the Pearl Jam in my own car where there were no little eardrums to worry about, which is another kind of satisfying.

Bad Book; Good Dog

2006-05-25T00:11:00.000-05:00

I’ve been reading the same book since mid-March and when I reached page 612 today I realized the book sucks. For two months I’ve been berating myself for not reading more, for letting the internet, the TV, student papers, etc., pull me away from reading, and then today I discover it wasn’t really my fault. It was the book’s. True, I could have put the book down at anytime—I’m not one of those people who has to finish what she starts (which explains a closet full of craft projects beginning with 1970s plastercraft and ending with a sweater I’ve been knitting since 1999—but let’s not blame the victim). I was so convinced by this book’s cover, by jacket blurbs, by it’s sticker declaring it one of Richard and Judy’s choices (I assume this is the UK version of an Oprah pick—I bought the book in Ireland), and the subject matter that I just kept plugging through eight centuries of religious persecution and grail mythology to come to the conclusion—with only twenty pages to go—that this was not a good book. Perhaps it was historically accurate, but the writing and presentation was. Not. Good.

This always causes some anxiety—the bad books that get published. I could do this. I could do better than this. How does K.M. get her crap book about the Crusades published when mine just sits there, ignored by agents and editors alike? Well, here’s how: my book is invisible. It exists only in my mind and therefore is difficult to market. You can’t get bitter about someone getting all the publishing laurels when you have been busying yourself with postcard writing and season finale watching.

What I’ve been writing instead of chapters for the writing festival I’m going to in Aspen at the end of June: a journal for the Wonder Dog. I’m cracking myself up with it, putting words in his mouth, seeing things from his point of view, writing diligently every day. In yesterday’s entry he wrote about going to an Amish greenhouse where he was in awe of a horse. I’m thinking he might start a blog of his own. With my luck, he’ll get a book deal and I never will. His work ethic is stronger than mine. That’s all.

The Cheerleader and the Brain

2006-05-21T22:28:00.000-05:00

Today I was walking the Wonder Dog and listening to my iPod. It was a perfect, beautiful day after about eight days of rain. So glad was I to be at one with nature that I took the time to smell the peonies. I took three deep sniffs, mindful of not inhaling the ants, stood up, caught my earphones on the blossom, unsnagged them with a jerk, and catapulted about fifteen ants right onto my head and down my blouse.

Once a month when the bill is due, I go to the gym. I can’t say it does much for muscle tone or weight loss, but I am dedicated even though I don’t see results. Once a month. Like clock work. I go to the gym at 10:00. This is the perfect time to go because the only people who are there are usually older people who have either had strokes and are rehabilitating or older people who are healthy and trying to ward off the strokes. Nobody is there who looks like they’ll be on the next series of Real World in other words. The older people don’t really work the machines right. They do things in a lopsided fashion. I say this not to make fun of them but to point out that for me to feel good about the hour I sometimes spend in a gym requires me to be surrounded by people bent over with osteoporosis and propping themselves up with canes. I am not what you would call a natural.

When I was in high school, I was one of those girls who always had her nose stuck in a book and who was always the last one in from the mile run around the track in gym class. Because there were no books involved with gym, I considered it a waste of my time. I didn’t particularly like my body (though I would certainly like to have access to that version of myself again) and so tended towards maximum coverage in oversized Amy Grant sweatshirts and army jackets. Gay men loved me. Boys who read The Lord of the Rings found me a worthy enough companion.

On the other end of the mind/body spectrum was a girl, let’s call her Trixie, who wore her parachute pants so tight that little was left to the imagination. She was spoiled and cute. She had a horrible reputation as being both a bitch and a whore, though I knew her as neither. She was just someone in general math and English classes whose wardrobe and body were enviable, who had gone out with a lot of different guys, and who had a contagious laugh. Also, she was a cheerleader.

Yesterday when I got the gym, there on the steppy-uppy machine I haven’t the stamina to use, was not one of the geriatric regulars, but Trixie, chewing gum, reading a celebrity gossip magazine, and talking to a trainers. She saw me and greeted me warmly, as she always does though we were never friends, and we talked about school and old acquaintances and life. She was sheepish because the last time I saw her was at a restaurant where her eleven-year-old son announced across the aisle separating us that she’d been married and divorced twice and that he and his brother had different fathers. This announcement caused her to clam up and me to eat the rest of my deep friend dinner in uncomfortable silence.

At the gym, we were able to laugh this off. Obviously, this is her domain. She effortlessly talked to me as she climbed an invisible K-2 while I huffed and puffed on the 0% incline of the treadmill. She told me how good her boys are—how they are so much better than she is. She said she wished I had a kid that would spill MY secrets to her, and it struck me how sad it is that we humans go through our lives worrying about what other people think of us. Trixie thinks I sit in judgment on her because she’s been married twice, didn’t go to college, and knew how to have a good time. Meanwhile, I think Trixie is judging the size of my treadmilling ass, judging me for my no mate, no children, and lack of fashionable workout clothes.

Why do we torture ourselves this way? I allowed myself about 120 seconds of the masochism and then forced myself to focus on her and what she is: a thing of beauty. Not just because she is firm or tan or has long blond hair, but because she still cracks her gum and giggles and tells you she likes your shoes instead of mentioning how you look fatter or older or more single than you did in 1985.

As we were getting ready to leave, the trainer she had been talking to earlier was rubbing a kink out of her back. In six years of semi-irregular gym attendance, no trainer has bothered to smile at me let alone rub a kink out of any of my muscles, but here was Trixie, getting a post-workout backrub and telling the trainer that she thought perhaps she was so tense because she hadn’t had sex for so long. Gum crack. Gigggle. Maybe its something I should try to incorporate into my life.

Future's So Bright

2006-05-14T00:01:00.000-05:00

The university’s graduation ceremonies were this weekend. My first as faculty because I usually skip town the minute grades are in. I don’t like ceremony and I loathe long speeches full of empty slogans and clunky metaphors. Also, normally because I teach lower level classes more frequently than upper, by the time “my” students have graduated they’ve forgotten both my name and how to document properly. So those are my reasons. My excuses. This year though it was made clear that faculty participation in graduation is mandatory. For two days I stewed. My rebelliousness turned me into an instant four year old (“You are NOT the boss of me”) but my need for approval sent me running for a last minute gown and appropriate cap and hood.

Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the hood color for humanities is white and with my alma mater colors of red and white, I was not nearly so colorful as my peacock-y colleagues. In fact, I looked like a nun. Also, I felt inferior in my non-velvet trim un-PhD robe. Until, that is, I discovered that my special master’s sleeves had secret pockets for lip gloss, Kleenex, and mints.

There is always a little too much optimism at graduations. When I graduated from high school, someone had cut out Old English letters that spelled out our class motto: The Future Is Ours: Therefore, the Best is Yet to Come. Though I was no good at math, this equation didn’t add up for me. Why would the future be better simply because it was ours? Who were we? After the masking tape letters started to unstick, the art teacher saw it and thought it was an apathetic motto for an apathetic generation. The “b” had fallen and she thought it read: The future is ours; therefore the REST is yet to come.

This is a better motto, in my opinion. The pressure is off. There will be no let down when the best doesn’t happen because it’s really just the rest. Blessed are those who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.

Back to this more recent graduation. The speeches were long and the metaphors were clunky. But I liked the medieval-ness. The tradition. Seeing the biggest class my division has ever graduated marching through the tunnel of us. Who knew that would be such a good feeling? So, yeah, I’ll go next year. I won’t feel the need to rebel. But I’m hoping to use those sleeves to smuggle in some Oreos and maybe my iPod.

White City

2006-04-29T06:15:00.000-05:00

It's 6 a.m. and I am in my 26th floor room staring out across Lake Michigan, up Lake Shore Drive, and into the apartments of the rich and possibly famous who live across from Doubletree Suites. If Oprah still kept her guests at the Drake, I'd probably be staring into their rooms too.

Chicago really is my kind of town. It has water. It has great architecture. It has green space designed by Frederick Law Olmstead (see Park, Central). It has Pearl and Papersource--two excellent art stores. It has the 'L.' It has great food, great entertainment, and this big city Midwestern sensibility that agrees with me more than New York or L.A. or any of the other cities we are meant to think are 'best.' (I've always been partial to second best.) I like a town where you can dress up if you want to or commit to a life in sweatpants.

My mother and I came up to see the wife and children of Gerry, my second cousin once removed, from County Galway. (Did you catch that?) His Mary was here visiting her family, so she and Catherine, 13, and Brendan, 12, and her brother and his wife met us at the Museum of Science and Industry yesterday. I've seen them more in the last six months than I've seen most of my first cousins who live five miles from me. They're lovely people and I fell a little in love with Mary's brother Michael. But don't be alarmed--there are very few Irishmen I don't fall in love with. He was shaped the way I like a man to be shaped--kind of roundy, but not fat, kind of baldy, but not bald, but most importantly, hilarious. And also, I love the way Irish men interact with children--I've seen all the movies and read all the books where the men of Ireland are abusive, alcoholic assholes, but so far, I have not met one. And the visible pleasure he expressed when I gave him a spare "Hillary in '08" button with which to torture his Republican wife was priceless.

Before they arrived, Mom and I decided that we'd rather be outside than inside the museum with the teeming throngs of children hellbent to be the first to traipse through a facsimile of a coal mine. I like this museum a lot, but not because of the Apollo lunar capsule, submarine, perpetually hatching chicks, or walk-thru human heart. It's not even Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle/dollhouse. No, I like it because it is the only remaining building from Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition, the World's Fair to end all World's Fairs, when an entire white city was built in order to convince the rest of the world that Chicago had more going for it than hogs. It was the only construction built to last--the rest of the buildings just had to hold it together for the year-long run of the fair. It was an exciting time in human history and a turning point for Chicago.

So, Mom and I walked around the perimeter of the building, through the grouds which were also designed by Olmstead (and to whom Chicago owes a great debt for his understanding of the importance of and preservation of the lakefront) and I tried to imagine what it was like more than a century ago: the other gleaming buildings, the canals, like a Neoclassical Venice, the people, the excitement about a future as bright as the city itself.

Well, it's all an awful lot to take in. And that's not even mentioning flashes I had of America's first serial killer who used the Exposition as a sort of dolphin-safe tuna net to gather victims, which was written about in the National Book Award finalist _Devil in the White City_. My copy has gone missing and I'm tempted to buy another. It's that good.

Of course this isn't the only dark side of Chicago. Last night at Borders I was loaded down with a stack of books I wanted to thumb through, and when I went to sit down on one of the couches--the only available one--the handsome guy in the chair next to it who looked to be reading something terribly important, gave a wry smile and shook me off. Initially, I was ticked--clearly he was saving it for some attractive, cosmopolitain friend of his.

Then I took a whiff.

Someone had taken a dump on one of the cushions. I'm still trying to imagine the scenario in which that seemed more convenient than taking the escalator down two flights to the basement toilet. If I were a better person, I'd be filled with compassion for whoever was physically or mentally ill enough that they couldn't prevent such a thing. But instead, I was just annoyed that a perfectly good seat had been wrecked, and basically, for me, wrecked for all time. I'll never be able to sit on that couch or possibly any other without wondering if it recently has been disinfected and anti-bacterialized. Another thing I'm pondering is why the handsome guy was just sitting there, next to the stench of it. Seats are at a premium in Borders on a Friday night, but even loaded down with books on Joseph Cornell and What Not to Wear, I couldn't have made that choice. Part of me admires him for being so engrossed in his book that he could sit there concentrating on it. Part of me wonders if he wasn't the offending party.

The day is yawning and stretching in front of me. Maybe I should get dressed.

New Ways to Be Judgmental

2006-04-20T21:28:00.000-05:00

Today I was an interviewer for the mock interviews that are held in the Education Department. I'm not sure why I do this every semester but I suspect it has something to do with the director of the program being the mother of children I babysat for for my first babysitting job. Though we're colleagues now, she'll always be the grown-up and despite six years of therapy, I will always be the child who wants to please grown-ups. I'll watch "Dukes of Hazzard" and "The Incredible Hulk" with your children; I'll be a mock interviewer for your students. Just give me a hoop to jump thru and the promise of a pat on the head, and I'm there.

I dropped my own Ed major after six weeks in my first Education class as an undergrad. The terminology bored me and the prof talked too slowly. I had no interest in wasting precious moments learning things I didn't care about when, instead, I could be reading Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath. I had no real vision of what a non-education English major career might be, but saying goodbye to terms like "differentiation" and "rubric" was worth every time after I announced the major change that I had to hear my father say, "What? Are you going to be a professional college student?"

I have often wondered if perhaps I wasn't a bit hasty in dropping the Ed major, but today proved that I made the right choice. A fourth of the time I had no idea what my partner-interviewer or the interviewees were talking about. Learning Mandarin would be easier. Sometimes I feel annoyed by the terms because a perfectly good word like "artifact" which _should_ conjure images of the pyramid that has just been discovered in Bosnia-Herzegovina instead means, essentially, "photos of 4th grade art projects and math worksheets."

Also, the director kept referring to items on a the question sheet that were "bolded." I hate when un-poetic words get made up. Made-up poetic words I like. Today, a student shared with me her word for the desire of girls and young women to make real their Disney fairy tale fantasies. She calls it "princessing." Now that is a good made-up word. She is now getting a divorce and is thus, one assumes, in the final throes of being de-princessed.

There are other reasons I don't like participating in the mock interviews. Like I hate fake stuff. Like I hate "rating" people. Like sometimes it is difficult for me to stay focused if I'm not interested in something. So for instance, on the comment sheet I filled out after each interview, instead of commenting on their presentations and examples, I found myself wanting to write helpful tidbits like, "Honey, you are over-plucking your eyebrows. It makes you look hard" or "Your hair is overprocessed--pick a color and stick with it." This is information that I think they need--and having just watched five back-to-back episodes of "What Not to Wear" I feel qualified to give it--but in the interest of professionalism, I restrained myself and responded instead to the next bolded question.

Possibly it is a good thing I don't have children because the other thing I realized is that I am now so old that these soon-to-be teachers seem much too young to be teaching. If I were a mother I'd have to quit my job so I could home school. On the positive side, in my home school, there would be no differentiation or rubric talk. To my credit, I would limit the princessing.

To reward myself for all of my hard interviewing work, I spent a half hour on iTunes planning the music I would download after my next pay day. While there, I discovered Celebrity Playlists and a whole new way to be judgmental. I surfed through the playlists of various celebs to see who listens to what and their comments about why X is the best song ever. My assumption, initially, was that I'd learn what music is cool in Hollywood. Instead, I lost respect for people I'd previously never had an opinion about. For instance, what would possess Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick to post together and tell us their favorite sex song. I've always thought they were a cool couple, but somehow their need to post together annoyed me. Ditto Courtney Cox and David Arquette. (Who's watching Coco while they're playing around on the internet, telling us what a good road trip song "Free Bird" is?) I had high hopes for Bill Mahr but he disappointed me. What's worse, the people I admired who had playlists I would make myself? Well, suddenly they seemed less cool. Shouldn't they like things beyond the scope of what I (a mere mortal) have access to? To misquote Groucho Marx, I don't want to be a memeber of a club that will let me play my own music.

I liked Nicole Kidman's. I can't say why exactly. It might just be a need to support her in these dark days following the birth of her children's half-sibling/alien, but I appreciated that she had some Lenny Kravitz on her list and wasn't pretending he never existed for her. I also liked that Elvis Costello had himself on his own list. Because you know all the musicians were wanting to do that. They were DYING to do it. But it takes a guy in horn-rimmed glasses to pull it off with any kind of panache.

Perhaps in the next six years my shrink and I can work on me becoming the kind of person who would put her music (if she made music) on her own playlist.

It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta

2006-04-16T22:36:00.000-05:00

Easter was always hard for me as a child. I'd been taught that I should be pleased about the news of the risen Christ, but what I really cared about was the basket. Eternal salvation sounded like a good thing, but with Brach's jellybeans and Marshmallow Peeps right in front of me, it was difficult to see that the less immediate thing was the important bit. I always hoped by devouring one white chocolate cross on a yearly basis, I was participating in a sort of sweet holiday communion that would guarantee a Get Out of Hell Free card later. I never liked white chocolate but ate it out of sense of religious obligation. Just in case.

I say this in the past tense, but even though I know an angioplasty and diabetes are going to be in my future if I don't cut out the Peeps and other sugary, fat-laden goodness, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around future when the present is so delicious. I'm not a stupid person, but somehow I've never gotten how heavily buttered potatoes in front of me now are going to equal too-snug jeans and shortness of breath later. I keep thinking medical science has to have it wrong--that one day they'll realize Coke cleans out your arteries, that a thick layer of subcutaneous fat around a knee is actually _protecting_ the joint, not putting its owner on the short track to knee replacement surgery.

Last week I saw "Office Space" for the tenth time and somehow the Geto Boys song "Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta" got stuck in my head. All week. I don't like Rap, I don't like those lyrics, but if you could have heard inside my head, that's what would have been there. On campus on Wednesday as I drove past the one-day-only talking speed limit/radar detector sign and it told me I was four miles over the ridiculous 25 mph limit and said "SLOW DOWN!!" as if I were driving 75 thru a school zone, I curled my lip at the sign and thought, "Damn it feels good to be a gangsta." Of course part of my cockiness stemmed from my having just seen the campus police SUV parked at McDonald's.

Today, aside from being Easter, was my maternal grandmother's 85th birthday. There's no real story, but I thought I'd make note. She hasn't felt good for my entire life and now has trouble getting out of chairs and down steps and her redneck neighbors plague her with late night ATV rides, but hey, 85 is one better than 84, and gentically speaking, I'm happy to have had a couple of grandparents who made it to that age even if there is gout affliction and high blood pressure pills. Though I'm hoping I won't be as thrilled with "Deal or No Deal" as she is. Somehow that just seems like something that would be playing on the televisions that must line the walls of Purgatory.

While we were eating Easter/Birthday dinner, my cousin was revisiting his romantic past. It was a story about a girl who once beat him up for kissing someone else. A girl whose family was likely Midwest mafioso. Then we talked about other people we know who seem to work beneath the radar of the law, who make bank deposits like Carmella Soprano's $9,999 so it doesn't get reported, who drive big, expensive black cars, who always pay cash, and who live behind huge iron gates, but if you ask them how they make their living they'll say they're on disability or that they sell Hot Wheels on eBay. Just simple folk, trying to get buy.

I don't know why this intrigues me so much. Despite my four miles over the speed limit last week, I'm the kind of person who would admit to crime I didn't commit just because I feel guilty about stuff. The fact that I use non-rechargeable batteries or don't recycle peanut butter jars because they are too hard to wash causes me moments of self-loathing. I worry over much that when I make a judgment about someone or something, that perhaps I don't have all the data. It's the reason I don't believe in the Death Penalty--400 eye witnesses could see a man shoot a convenience store clerk point blank and I'd always wonder if maybe it wasn't the defendant's doppelganger. I feel guilty. I question. I fret. I would be a jury foreman's worst nightmare.

Which brings me to my uncle's latest wife. I don't have anything against her particularly. Her choice of dogs is small, fluffy, and therefore a bit suspect, but other than that she's just a person. But this afternoon she and my mother were talking about trouble in the Middle East. It was a non-religious conversation, but this woman said, "Well. It's all predicted in the Bible that this stuff will happen. The End is coming." And then, without missing a beat, she said, "Ohhh. Are those Clark's shoes you have on? Those are so cute."

My life would be so much easier if I didn't have to think so hard about stuff. Your reading it would be a lot easier too. No pondering the mysteries of the criminal mind, candy, religion, justice, my own psyche...just one stream of consciousness thought after another: "400 dead today in trainwreck. Cottonelle on sale at K-mart. Gee, my hair smells terrrific." It's another kind of gangster life...where you just live your own life and don't think too much about it...or anything else.

Help Desk

2006-04-12T00:37:00.000-05:00

The iMac carcass is on my bedroom floor begging to be buried or turned into an aquarium, so during the computer help segment on WMUB, the local NPR station, I emailed the experts and asked if it was possible to stuff a Mac Mini into my old purple iMac case. Only the email was funny. And they laughed, which pleased me. Though perhaps my email wasn't funny. Maybe they were laughing at me because the color of my computer matters more than Gigs or USB ports or processessing speed. One of the techs said, "Why doesn't she just buy a new iMac or Mac Mini?" and Cleve Callison, the host, said, "Well, she admits here that she is emotionally attached to her computer. And she really likes purple." They didn't have any answers for me and got distracted by "invisible desktops" but I got a certain amount of pleasure out of having made three guys laugh on the air.

Though I think the PC guy was snickering if you want to know the truth.

M and I had dinner tonight and she asked what I'd heard from 'our boy.' I had no idea who 'our boy' was at first, but she meant the visiting writer with the suckable lips. Mr. Top 25. My phantom baby's daddy. I haven't heard from him because I haven't written him since I was in Ireland. I'm trying to think of some new clever line of conversation to zip off to him. I'm just not very good at being a girl. I email him and he emails me right back, but his emails lack "hooks" and so then I go silent. I wish they would have taught useful flirting skills even middle aged women could use back when I was in Home Ec or Girl Scouts. Because in all honesty, I've never had to make tea sandwiches or start a campfire. It turns out you can live a big hunk of your life without having to do either or those things. But flirting? Well, I could use those skills.

So far I have: "Hi! How are you?!" but beyond that, zip.

Today, a student asked me what anal beads were. It was an innocent question, though I'm unsure why anything with that adjective in front of it would seem like something within a writing instructor's field of expertise. Of twelve students, three are writing about sex and one is writing about comic books (which is sort of the same thing). Maybe the 'laid back & open' tenet of my teaching philosophy needs to be revisited if they are going to mistake me for Susie Bright.

Beyond that, today I have been obsessed with my own feet. It was warm enough to wear sandals. (Teva flip flops--a little piece of $17 heaven.) But the thing is, my feet didn't look like mine. All day I'd look down and feel like I'd checked my feet in for a pair of bowling shoes and then, somehow, when I went to get my feet back they had been swapped for someone else's less attractive, more worn feet. Forget the iMac. How do you rectify THAT?

Narcissus

2006-04-09T21:59:00.000-05:00

Today, a bird (I don't know kinds of birds--red breast, but not a robin) flung itself at its own reflection for a solid hour, so enfatuated with itself that he almost gave himself a concussion. It seemed fitting that while he was going through this masochistic mating dance, some friends and I were watching _Capote_. If Narcissus had had a blog instead of a pool of water, perhaps someone could have intervened.

I am With Dog this weekend, which means we've spent a lot of time on campus having squirrel chases. Spring is amazing and everything--the flowers, the trees, the smell--but college students in love are in bloom, which is just annoying. I'm glad they're young and thrilled to be with each other, but their rolling around together on the springtime grass just makes me feel old. Really, really old. And like maybe I should have studied less when I was in college and done more campus canoodling.

Yes, I hate college students in love today. And possibly tomorrow.

Thursday I tore my office apart looking for a mug to pour my can of Coke into so I'd look more appropriate at the department meeting. I felt like a heroin addict kicking telltale needles under a sofa when the doorbell rings. An Indiana-sized woman shouldn't be slurping down 12 ounces of high fructose corn syrup and I'm self-centered enough to think my co-workers would actually notice. (Never mind one of my fellow teachers is hyperactive and drinks espresso by the gallon.) Viva la insulated mug with sippy top.

Late Friday night the friends and I were at Meijer. In my mind, I'm still 20, so this is acceptable behavior. But I ran into a couple of students--twentysomethings themselves, though one has a child and divorce papers and is in a relationship with the other one, a boy who I visited in the hospital the day he was born because his aunt was my best friend in high school--and the student shrieked across the fruit bins, "WHATAREYOUDOINGHERE?IT'SMIDNIGHT!" Which I can only assume means she thinks someone of my advanced years should be home filing her corns at such a late hour on a Saturday night. And maybe I should be because I buy stupid things at midnight. Like hot pink nail polish and coin purses with Scottie dogs on them. Two items every almost forty year old needs. And when I left? Two bobble head Justice League figurines from the bubble gum machine. There's a dollar well spent. My friends with husbands and children and mortgages? They buy more practical things like 1200 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets and patio furniture.

Add to this that I discovered I was misguided when told that DHC Deep Cleansing Oil was just olive oil, so for a month I've been 'washing' my face by rubbing Bertolli's $5.99 olive oil all over it, sure that I had beaten the system, figured out a cheap way to have the gorgeous skin of a Mediterranean goddess. Well, it isn't. A moisturizer, sure, but there is no cleansing going on. So the whole 'with age comes wisdom' thing? Not true. We aren't even guaranteed that.

Biopic

2006-04-02T09:47:00.000-05:00

Last night I watched _Walk the Line_, and it occurred to me that the main reason Johnny & June Carter Cash had time to write songs and make up prison identities and get high and divorce spouses and fall in love with each other and play to an audience is because to supplement their creative inclinations they did NOT have to grade 85 papers four times a semester. They didn't have students stopping by their offices telling them stories so sad (and unfortunately true) that they had to shut the door and have a cry once the student left. They didn't have to go to faculty meetings.

I fear I've just opened up a portal in the universe wherein my job will be sucked because it sounds as if I'm ungrateful and I don't like it. Before that happens, let me say I DO like it. I really do. I'd prefer a book on the bestseller list so successful that I could buy Neverland Ranch, but barring that, my job is the best way to supplement a creative lifestyle. Of course no one is going to make a biopic of my life. Even Joaquin and Reese are now entitled to their very own E! True Hollywood Story episodes, but the life of a writing lecturer is never going to make the big OR small screen.

When I have 3 stacks of papers to grade, it seems insurmountable. It's as if I've never graded before & I can't imagine how I'll ever get through them. I think of all the things I need to do like organize my files or weed my books or put my photos in decorative boxes. I eat food I'm not hungry for. I get bitchy and want to smack a lot of different people who probably don't deserve it.

Like for instance, people who aren't concise when they speak. People who, before they will ever give you the first line of their story so you can decide how interested you are in it, will spend five minutes trying to figure out if it (whatever 'it' is) happened on Monday or Tuesday. People who talk slow and pause between words. People who talk about their neighbors that I've never met. People who think how much head lettuce costs at Kroger is a valid topic of conversation. None of these things is worthy of my wrath, but when I have stacks of papers to grade and minimal time to spend on my own thoughts, I don't want the air crowded up with stuff that doesn't matter. Just--please in the name of all that is holy--cut to the chase. You missed class because your tire went flat? Tell me that. One sentence. Thank you for sharing--now please step away from my office door. In the time it takes me to listen to the average why-my-paper-is-late excuse, I could have written a companion piece to "Burning Ring of Fire."

Other reasons I'm crabby today: my dearly beloved purple iMac died. I haven't had a technician look at it to perform last rites, but I know a death rattle when I hear it. This one, for instance, sounds like the fan purring but the hard drive not engaging. And no magical Mac chime to let me know all is well in the universe. I use it only for email and playing snood while listening on the phone to people who commit one of the conversational sins in the above paragraph, but I love it. It's so grapey. So roundy. Has been there with me thru both good and bad times.

I'm trying not to think about all the files that are on it that aren't backed up that I have likely lost. This is no one's fault but my own and it disappoints me that when I learned this lesson seven years ago it didn't stick.

When computer dies, it's like a place got sucked up into heaven that you can no longer visit. My mother has my old Mac Performa--it is, essentially, the one I bought in grad school in 1994 with a few minor modifications. Sometimes I turn it on and have memories wash over me of life from that time. Papers written. Emails shared with the two people I knew who actually HAD email. Wallpapers that decorated my life. Strange men talked to before a lot of women had clawed their way online which made me a hotter commodity than I have ever been at any other time in my life. It's like revisiting a playground from a school you used to attend. Not that I have first hand experience with this--the playground of my youth is now a parking lot. Sigh. No movies are going to be made about this kind of loss either.

Everybody Else is Doing It So Why Don't We?

2006-04-01T23:50:00.000-05:00

I'm a Hoosier. A lot of us don't really understand complex theories like fractal geometry and Daylight Savings. With the exception of a dark year in the '70s, we've avoided participating in DST, but then Election 2004 happened and somehow we ended up with a governor who decided the most pressing issue for Indiana was to get us aligned with 47 of the 50 states. One argument he used was that Indiana looked 'backwards' not to be on DST when most of the country & a lot of the world does it. Never mind most of us learned from our mothers that just because "everybody" was doing things like jumping off bridges it didn't mean we should too. But by all means. If Rhode Island is using DST, then sign us up, otherwise we might not get to sit at the popular kids' table tomorrow in the cafeteria.

There are people who think it is a great idea, mainly because we live on the Ohio border and so for once in our lives, we won't have to do math just to watch television or make a flight. But then there are people like me who just can't see the sense of upsetting the internal clocks of humans, livestock and microwave ovens so the governor can work in an extra game of golf.

When I was a kid, my dad and his wife lived across the state line in the land of DST. Because he had me every other weekend, I was at their house when the ritual of pushing the clock hands forward on a Saturday night took place. Because they lived in a city instead of a town, a house instead of an apartment, and were Catholic instead of Protestant, I tended to see DST as yet another difference between us. At the time I somehow thought they were more progressive than we were, pushing that little wrought iron clock hand forward once a year. Maybe the governor is a child of divorce too. Maybe he was just trying to prove something to a Buckeye father. Who knows.

Tonight while re-setting my clocks, I was talking on the phone to my cousin G. She also lives in Indiana and so changed her clocks with me, while we groused about how dumb we think it is and how we can't believe next year DST will start even earlier at the President's direction (why not just set the clocks ahead an hour and leave 'em that way permanently with no switch back? If 8 months of DST is a good idea, why not go for 12!). Anyhow, five minutes after we got all of our clocks reset, G. says in a shocked voice, "My God! We've been talking for almost 2 hours!" She'd already completely forgotten she'd lost an hour. So obviously it really isn't that big of a deal. What IS a big deal is this: i cannot figure out how to spend my extra hour of daylight tomorrow. I'm considering lawn tennis.

The Sea is Wide & I Cannot Swim Over

2006-03-27T06:16:00.000-05:00

There's something about leaving Ireland that makes it imperative that you listen to all of your favorite Van Morrison songs immediately. Lucky for me, I had several on my iPod and so could begin the lament on the long train journey from Waterford to Limerick before I ever got on the plane. I started with 'Carrickfergus' where the line about Kilkenny had new meaning to me, and ended with "Won't You Stay."

The last day in Ireland was a drizzly one, so it took awhile to get moving. I have about a sixty minute tolerance for museums of any sort, so even though I'd been warned to have three hours for the Waterford Treasures museum, I had to walk around the town centre, poking my head into stores, getting dew kissed from the drizzle, and generally feeling a part of life there before trekking to the museum. The Irish coat I bought when I was there in November must make me look more like a native, because again I was asked for directions. This time, sadly, I had no answers.

The museum is nicely done and has a remarkable amount of interactive "treasures" as well as the more traditional kind. The first thing I did was go into a little theatre where a modern version of a Viking ship made up the seating area. I was the only person in there and almost got hysterical when the movie started and the ship started rocking back and forth. The movie itself was silly--about a bunch of Vikings making the journey from York back to Waterford, calling out to a horned old disembodied head who must have been Odin. But the creaking of the aluminum bleacher-seat ship was worth 12 minutes of movie boredom. I was only sorry that I was alone on it and so my laughter must have seemed a bit deranged.

Probably the most impressive piece in the whole museum is the city charter, which is, essentially, a bunch of documents about mayors and city ordinances written and illustrated on vellum and then sewn together into one big historical quilt. I liked seeing man's history presented in such a girly fashion. Which brings me to my main beef with museums and history in general. I can rarely find myself there. Sure, there might be some bowls women served food in, a beaded necklace of some ancient peoples, but mostly what you see are the stories of men. Likely, they affected the women in fringe ways, but I would prefer learning about their lives & that forgotten history. What shaped domestic life instead of how a political action shaped a nation's history, or, to borrow words from the Feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, I am most interested in how the political shaped the personal. While I don't care which king presented the Mayor of Waterford with the Cap of Maintenance (which, by the way, looks over much like the Hogwart's Sorting Hat), I am curious about the woman who helped piece it together or the Lady Mayor who had a laugh with her husband after the presentation about how stupid he looked in it.{"Ohhhh. Don't you look divine in your cap o' maintenance, Darling.") But those aren't the stories we get in museums or history books because they aren't considered important. They aren't national or global. They aren't worthy of being recorded. In museums, it seems, the female story is predominately relegated to who wore what and which of our dishes were used to feed the men who were fighting the wars and signing the charters. This is an old, unoriginal argument I'm presenting, and it is changing in terms of recorded _modern_ history, but it does impact my level of interest in dusty relics that I pay 7 euro to see.

I cruised through the rest of the museum, paying homage to anything that seemed homage worthy, but generally reassuring myself that I am not a bad person or a bad student of life if I don't love museums, where life and stories are kept in airtight cases.

Back at the Artist's house that evening, he showed me his artwork from the period right after his wife had died. These were all chalk pastels with mythological figures and death symbols throughout. He explained each one, which I appreciated, because it helped me understand his thought process. Talking about these pieces must have been exhausting for him, both because physically it is hard for him to get breath behind his words and also because of the subject matter. I was overwhelmed by the pain that was in them & found myself having to turn away periodically. After he had shown them to me, I asked about the sketches he did while his wife was dying and he nodded toward the cabinet where they are kept and said that his children can't even look at them because they are too painful. At that point, the phone rang--two of his friends were taking M. & I out for a drink--and I felt relieved to have the spell broken and to have been spared witnessing that pain. Even so, as M. and I were driven away while he stood at the door, holding onto his wheeled-walker, waving goodbye to us, I wanted very much to hop out of the car and insist we spend the evening at home with him instead of drinking with his friends. I wanted to soften the sadness of what I'd just seen. Of course he has lived with these paintings and his grief for several years, so it is likely that I was the only one who needed the softening.

The man who picked us up was the Artist's neighbor, a retired banker who now travels and studies languages. He drove us to the house of the other man, a sort of care-taker for a Big House that was formerly owned by the Waterford Crystal people. Gates had to be opened before we could drive in. We had drinks there and then later at a 17th century pub which sits under an ancient-looking "flyover" (overpass). We talked about politics (Irish, U.S., African, E.U.) and drank, then went back for tea before heading back to our unpacked suitcases. When we got back, the Artist was already in bed, so M. and I stayed up until 1:30 talking about life, even though we knew we had to get up at 4:30 the next morning to catch the cab that would take us to our train. Though we've worked together in one form another for over ten years, we didn't know all the bits of each other's lives.

Morning came early, but we made our connections and had only an hour to kill at Shannon. There were a few U.S. service men (I'm not being sexist, I saw no women) walking around in their desert cammies. I felt self-conscious about my black shamrock, anti-U.S.-troops-at-Shannon-Airport button and was glad it was out of view. As much as I don't believe in this war and don't believe we should be involving Ireland in our nation-building, I feel none of those things about the soldiers themselves. They are my neighbors, my students, my cousins, and, if I'd been more productive on prom night, they could be my sons.

As we were in the departure hall, we could see a large line of soldiers on the other side of the glass just arriving from their trans-Atlantic flight, ready to be shipped to Iraq. As they walked by us, a few waved tentatively through the glass, and M. and I and some others felt compelled to wave back. My God did they look young. I know this is what people always say about soldiers, but seriously, these boys looked about 14. And maybe I was reading in, but they looked a little scared too. More people waved. A few clapped. I got teary, thinking of the hardwork they were about to undertake. How some of them wouldn't be coming home as they left. How some of them wouldn't be coming home at all. I had to turn away, as I had the night before looking at the Artist's study of grief, because the idea of it all was overwhelming. But then the cheers and chants of "U.S.A." started and the spell was broken. Suddenly it became not a poignant, human moment, but a sporting event. Our team is best. Our team will win. Our team will trounce your team. Gooooooo team. No doubt there is need to build the gladiators up before they go into the arena, but it rang false.

My thoughts turned to a local business owner whose marine son recently walked through that same arrivals hall on his way to be a tank gunner. She said this is what he wanted to do with his life, that this is his destiny. She told me the story of how he and a woman he'd met online tried to connect at Shannon so they could meet face-to-face before he went to Iraq. She talked about how upset the woman was when they missed each other, how touched she was that someone cared so much for her son that she would drive all the way from Dublin, just for a glimpse of him. She explained how she sent an angel statue to the woman as thanks. So anyhow, I ignored the cheers and false bravado and thought instead of these two women and this young soldier, and how though I haven't met him, I hope he comes back in one piece, because this personal story is the one I care about. Not the oil. Not the WMDs. Not even how political boundaries are drawn or how the history books later present the events.

Maybe its juvenile of me to have this attitude, but I don't think so. Several years ago a friend told me that he believed poetry would save the world. I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the concept at the time, though appreciated the validation he gave to my chosen line of work. Now, I think I understand better. It's the little moments of personal pain or joy that are recorded into the story, the song lyric, the dance, that will do the work all of our peace talks and war making cannot. It is art that will breathe life into dusty relics in those air tight museum cases, even if it is by way of an aluminum Viking ship and bad video. It is Van Morrison telling us how he longs for the ability to swim or fly or pay a boatman to carry him back to his own ones across a wide sea.

Ghost Ship

2006-03-23T18:02:00.000-05:00

Crystal is expensive & its absence of color bothers me, but when you are at the Waterford Crystal Factory and you've watched the film about how it is the MOST perfect crystal in the world--how, in fact, imperfection is not tolerated--suddenly it seems like you need to own a piece and like maybe your cousin who is getting married next month needs a piece. And maybe your mother. Maybe an aunt. Maybe a neighbor. If you find yourself in this situation here is my advice to you: don't do the euros-to-dollars conversion in your head. Pretend that the sticker which says '85' means eighty-five dollars and be done with it. Later, when your Visa bill comes, you can worry about the math and bad exchange rates. At which point, the prisms dancing around your living room and your cousin's note of thanks about how her marriage would not have been so happy without your gift will soften the blow.

It really is just the most awful kind of extravagance there at the Waterford Crystal Visitors' Center. For instance, I mailed ten postcards by dropping them into a giant crystal mailbox.

When you walk in, you are at the highest level of the show room, looking down on the chandeliers. This level has replicas of the various trophies that have been created (one in the shape of a football, most in the shapes of loving cups), place settings of goblets and doo-dads that Queen Elizabeth (or Oprah) couldn't afford. It's gorgeous, but excessive.

The next level down is where the goods are sold. I walked around this area for an hour, trying to do the math that would make it possible for me to spend money in a cost-effective way, get a wedding present, a shower present, some other small gifts, and spend the 200 euros needed so I could ship everything home for free. (For the record, other people are going in with me on the wedding gift. I'm not THAT extravagant. I do just teach at a small Midwestern university.)

I couldn't decide, so I went to the next level down where the Wedgewood is sold. I'm not buying English china in Ireland. I'm not. So I scooched on into the room where other bits and bobs were sold. The space started feeling a lot less posh and a lot more like a basement. I was more comfortable. Here was the tourist tat that is sold everywhere in Ireland, of which I own too much because in those last minutes before a plane boards, suddenly it seems imperative that I have a Claddaugh apron or sixteen bumper stickers that say 'Pogue ma 'Thoin' and key chains and coasters with my family's supposed crest on it. (You know, my family who had to leave the auld sod in the 19th century because they were starving or at least terribly uncomfortable. Sure they had a crest. Sure they did.) It disturbed me that Waterford Crystal, an entity that couldn't be more Irish, has the same class stratifcation that the Titanic (another Irish creation) did. So there I was in the basement in my scuffed up clogs with my hair in a ponytail and my black 'just say no to troops in Shannon airport' Shamrock button, KNOWING that I belong--and always will--in steerage. But for the sake of my cousin and her fancy wedding, I clawed my way out of the ship's hold before I was tempted to buy her a shamrock covered teapot with 'Eire' written above a facsimile of Brian Boru's harp.

I made my choices, did the euro-only calculations, and then at the last minute asked the woman how long the free shipping would take on these items. Six weeks, she says. The wedding is in three weeks. Guess what's going to be in my carry-on, wedged under the seat in my own little hunk of American Airline's version of 3rd class travel?

An interlude: yesterday in Kilkenny, I saw a pub with a blue sign that said, 'The Mouse Bar.'It made me laugh and imagine tiny rodents sidling up to the counter, asking for a pint, so I took a picture. This evening I mentioned it to M. and Himself and showed them the picture. Isn't this funny, I said. The artist looked at me like I'd lost my mind. 'It's the HOUSE bar,' he said. 'Not the MOUSE bar. I told you about it before you left, said it would be a good place to eat.' M. got so tickled she couldn't quit laughing. Her face was red and Himself said, 'Get control of yourself, woman.' For the rest of the night, all either of us would have to do was softly mention 'mouse bar' and the other would start cackling.

Back to our regular scheduled programming:

This afternoon, M. decided that I should see the famine ship in Dunbrody. She'd tried to see it last Spring and it was in dry dock, and then later in the year she'd made the trip and found it worthwhile. She'd even checked the web last week to make sure it would be open this time of year. It is a replica of one of the ships that brought over emmigrants who were trying to leave an inhospitable Ireland in the mid 19th century. The night before she'd pointed me to a few sights to find information on a great-great grandfather no one in my father's family knows anything about, and she said that at the ship I could search manifests to see who traveled from where and when. Though I'm not big on re-enactments of such things (can we really know how horrible the insides of those coffin ships were in 1847?)the genealogical aspect seemed excellent, so today we drove the 20 minutes or so down the road to New Ross, and as we were crossing the bridge, she said, 'I don't see the boat.' It was misty out and I figured she'd just forgotten where it was. The closer we got to the dock, the more sure it seemed that it wasn't there.

The visitos' center, however, was opened. People were there having sandwiches in the little shop and the ladies running it were dusting off the souvenir erasers and sterling silver celtic crosses in hopes of making a sale. It was as if they were unaware that the boat wasn't there. As if, perhaps, it were a ghost ship that only they could see. There were two computers there and I momentarily got my hopes up that I could do my search anyhow, but then quickly saw the 'out of order' signs hanging on both. M. asked about the ship. It's in dry dock again for some big sailing thing later in the Spring. M. pointed out that she'd just checked the website. The lady said, 'But it only went into dry dock last week!' M. said that yes, perhaps that was the case, but last week was when she checked the website to see if it was worth making the trip (FROM AMERICA) and the woman said, 'But it will only be in dry dock for a week!'as if that explained it away. She then offered to show us a ten minute video about the boat we wouldn't be able to see. I said, 'No. I've gone off it,' and we left. And then we laughed most of the way back to Waterford. It was annoying, but I can't really be too annoyed in Ireland about anything. Everything just seems sort of funny. Going to the wrong church. Having a pint at a mouse bar. Visiting a ghost ship.

To save the day, M. then drove me to East Dumore, a resort town that Maeve Binchy writes about and where movies of her books are filmed. Lots of cottages with English thatch. It was a windy, misty, cold day, and the sea was crashing against the rocks and roaring. We saw a monument to the sea-dead from the area that one of the Artist's co-workers designed, and drove around the high road looking at the view. It was breathtaking, and there, without benefit of ten minute films or faux famine ship passengers, I could think about what that voyage must have been like, how desperate a person would have to be to leave family and home to brave a sea that could be so violent. How optimistic. And while I'm not ego-centric enough to think they imagined their future generations drinking Coca Cola out of crystal goblets, I wonder if maybe they weren't wanting something a little more close to perfect than what they'd been born into.

Isn't that why we're always scratching and whinging and charging things on our credit cards? Don't we have some idea that things could be better if only we...?

The Moose at the Gate Should Have Told You

2006-03-22T19:00:00.000-05:00

This morning I woke to the sound of M. scratching at my door, singing 'Morning Has Broken' and saying that the musical wake up call is just another of the services offered here. I had a train to catch for my solo adventure to Kilkenny and she'd been given orders from the Artist to leave forty minutes early 'just in case.' She rolled her eyes at his caution, but it was harmless. Both of us were secretly pleased to have someone clucking after us, I suspect.

My reasons for wanting to go were three-fold: 1) my need to go places alone periodically so I feel adventurous 2) Rick Steves's (my former travel god) recommendation that it is the most beautiful inland medieval city in Ireland 3) a song of the same name that I love to torture myself with.

In terms of adventure, I'm more like a toddler who is just learning to walk, being shunted across a narrow living room between parents. I like the independence of mini-solo travel when I know at the end of the day someone is going to be waiting on me and will know if I've been hit on the head with a piece of Connemara marble and left for dead in a bog. (And yes, I AM mixing metaphors.) To my credit, I know non-single people who can't go an hour without dialing up their beloved even if they are both in the same city with plans for dinner at 6:30, so I'm not that bad off. No. I KNOW adventurous people. I am not one. But this affords me the illusion.

My mother thinks I have amazing traveling acumen because I can navigate the Dayton International Airport without studying signs overlong. She finds this ability akin to a sixth sense or messages from the Holy Spirit, but the reality is that everything I know about getting from one place to another I learned at amusement parks. I think parents who don't take their children to Disney World or Six Flags or even Kennywood should be brought up on child-endangerment charges. When I go somewhere new, the first thing I do is look for the 'park' map, find the key things I want to do and make a plan of attack (to avoid lines, excess walking, or midday sun), and then search for a landmark by which I can navigate. 'Tram' service of some sort is operational most places. 'Concession stands' (most here selling pub grub instead of corn dogs, admittedly) are every two feet, where you can also find restroom facilities. Souvenirs can be purchased anywhere, though balloon animals in this location tend to make you look a bit touched in the head.

So this morning when I got off the train in Kilkenny (population 10,000), I immediately searched for castle turrets and got my bearings. Irish Frontierland. It was about a ten minute walk and on the way a car pulled up beside me and asked how to get to the castle. I said, 'Straight ahead and turn left. You can't miss it.' I didn't KNOW this for a fact (I'd left the guidebook back in Waterford, even) but the truth is these are basically always the directions you get in Ireland anyhow, so why not give them like a native? Sure enough several minutes later, I was standing behind the folks I'd given directions to, waiting to get my ticket for the Kilkenny Castle tour. They thanked me; I smiled, secretly pleased with my own navigational brilliance.

Kilkenny Castle is nice. I'm not a fan of Irish castles because I always think of oppression and audacity instead of the romance and adventure. In England, it is easier to buy into the whole chivalry thing without worrying too much about serfs and thralls. Maybe a beheaded wife will intrude on your Arthurian fantasies. Here, you can smell it for what it was--imperialism with a helping of genocide. Rich people (living richly) on the backs of the poor. But I digress. The castle is lovely. It's 800 years old, has beautiful grounds, and has been refurbished impeccably in Victorian decor, the last era it was used before falling into ruin. The town was beautiful too. Bustling. Narrow, cobbled streets. Brightly colored store fronts. Just what you expect to find.

I ate lunch at the Irish equivalent of Subway, and when I was finished asked for directions to the cathedral. Which cathedral, the sandwich guy wanted to know. I don't know--the cathedral you're supposed to see when you are here, I said. He chewed his lip, consulted with the sandwich girl, and they decided it must be St. Mary's I was after. I asked how I got there and they said in unison, Straight up the street, turn left, you can't miss it.

I walked to the cathedral, humming 'Kilkenny.' It's a song that you listen to when you feel you need to cry but can't quite get yourself over the hump. Three lines from it and you'll be wiping your nose on your sleeve. After the first round of the chorus, you'll be belting out great hiccuping sobs. It's like an old-timey Irish version of 'Cats in the Cradle.' So I sang it, walked to the cathedral, peered in the door and felt generally unmoved. I like Catholic churches when they aren't in session. I like the smell of incense, the candles flickering, the sounds of the kneelers creaking under the weight of the devout. But this church didn't feel like the one I was supposed to see. I shrugged and headed back toward the train station. On the walk I started thinking that 'Kilkenny' didn't sound right either. It didn't sound right at all. I hum-sang a few more bars and realized it WASN'T 'Kilkenny.' It was KILKELLY. 'Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 60, my dear and loving son John/Your good friend the schoolmaster Pat McNamara's so good as to write these words down.'

Sniff. Wipe.

So, while I had managed to get myself and a family of four I'd never met to the castle, I had basically gone to the wrong town in the first place and while in the wrong town I had hummed and fantasized about a song that was, apparently, inappropriate, seen a church that was not recommended by Rick Steves, Esq. Still, it was a good day. I'd seen some things, I had people waiting on me when I got home, and in my fake-out amusement park world, no humans in giant furry animal suits tried to hug me as I departed the magic kingdom of Kilkenny.

Secrets of the Other Sex

2006-03-21T18:51:00.000-05:00

Last year, M and her man thought for about two days that I would be a good thing for his son, who is younger than me and an untamed creature of sorts. I suspected after two descriptions of him that we would not be a Love Connection on account of he was living in New York City where surely all the girls are thin, young, and lovely, and also on account of his documented hyperactivity, which was evidenced on his webpage and the number of extra curricular activities he was involved in. We never met, he fell in love with some Southern Belle, and is now back in Ireland. The end.

Except now I find myself in the peculiar position of sleeping in his bed. His room is still his, though he's lived in the U.S. (and now Dublin) for quite awhile. I've never met him, so it's an interesting study.

When I was younger, men seemed like the ultimate mystery to me, like if you could crack open one of their heads like a melon, all the secrets of the universe would spill out. I've snooped through the drawers and bookshelves of men I love hoping to uncover the thing that would help me understand them, to no avail, and then after several years of married friends telling me that as far as men go, there is no there 'there,' I gave up wondering what secrets lurked therein.

So now I'm in the room of this guy I never met, and I'm reminded of how mysterious men used to seem. Of how I'd stand outside the boys' dorm in college and wonder what went on in there, listening to their music choices and suspecting the choices were superior to mine, realizing their lives functioned fine without me (or other women for that matter, about 40% of the men at my college ended up being gay or Celibates for Jesus). What I'm finding, instead, is that there is a hell of a lot of little boy in a man. True, this is this guy's childhood bedroom, but he's got literary classics in Irish, English, Swedish, and German on his bookshelves. He's no slouch. But there, in the midst of John Gardener and Joseph Heller will be sandwiched a Mad Magazine. Family photos dot the room, along with posters in languages I don't speak. And then, inexplicably, a stuffed animal. I'm beginning to embrace this nearly middle-aged thing, where I feel wiser and know things I didn't used to know. Where I have no need to snoop or speculate.

Maybe I'm kidding myself. Likely, if I'd met this person and were having a relationship with him and if he'd been unusually silent at dinner tonight, I would have had the room torn apart in five minutes flat, trying to understand him, wondering if I could find evidence of his love or his deception...going back to my old way of thinking, that a man I want inherently knows something about life that I don't. Yet, as I've mentioned before, I like to think I'm smarter now. Older. Wiser. More sure that what I know is enough and the rest I can just google up and find answers for my ownself.

Today was a windy, grey day in Waterford. M and I took a walking tour of the old part of the city, Ireland's oldest, a Viking city. One thing that interested me was the big archaelogical find they uncovered when getting ready to build a shopping center. It was a huge thing--Viking settlement, bodies, wood houses, the whole deal, buried in the bog. There's a little bit of it on display in the shopping center that was built on top of the find after the better bits were excavated and carted off to a museum. Initially, I was annoyed that they hadn't turned it into a Viking National Park or something, until the guide pointed out that once most of it would hit the air it would turn to dust in just a matter of hours. Oxygen, it turns out, isn't good for everything. Some secrets--like those in the hearts of men--need to remain under cover, under floors, under parking garages, under lock and key.

The Bus Eireann Shuffle

2006-03-20T17:23:00.000-05:00

I spent the better part of the day on a variety of busses,and have finally landed here in Waterford with M and her man, the Artist. The house is a good sort, full of books and his art and his dead Swedish wife's Swedish things. In fact, the house feels more Swedish than Irish for reasons I'm unsure of except a few of the rooms are bright blue and yellow. You can tell life was lived well here for their family before she died several years ago and before the Artist himself got sick with MSA, which has left him weak and with muscles that do not always cooperate as he'd like for them too.

Waterford I'm unsure of. At the moment, it looks a bit too much like Cork City for my liking, but I saw very little of it this evening. M picked me up and we went to pick up her man at the osteopath, who is about to turn 40 and to celebrate is going to Malaysia. This seems a bit like celebrating a major event with an eyelid-ectomy to me, but I am not _that_ adventurous. Steven the Osteopath, however, looks like a man who does yoga in his sleep and who will return from Malaysia fully relaxed and epiphinized. After that we went to Tesco to do some grocery shopping (brown bread, Kerry Gold butter, Dubliner Cheese, and Guinness for me, slightly more healthy things for M and Himself.) And now here. Tomorrow is an unknown. If it is sunny, a walking tour of Waterford. If it is raining, I have no idea.

Saturday and Sunday with the O'Mahony and Mohan cousins was good. Saturday night we watched Ireland beat England in rugby and win the Triple Crown. (I know nothing about rugby but was told anytime the Irish beat the English at anything it is cause for jubilation.) John and his young son were both so into the match that they were dancing around the TV, screaming at it, and a few times when it got too unnerving, John had to go into the other room to talk to Ginger the Cat in order to calm himself down!

Sunday I got to visit with the other cousins who live at the Homeplace. They have a cozy farmhouse, and the kids entertained me. I left full of tea and Guinness and good stories. One thing I learned that I did not know is that there are World Plowing Championships. Did you know this? Gerry the Cousin goes to them. He says they'd be no use to Americans who can plow however they like because our hot sun will burn off the green bits, but it in Ireland if you don't turn a row correctly the vegetation will grow and then no more row.

His wife and two oldest children are going to be in Chicago in April. It would be fun to see them on American soil, so I hope to make the trip up there. His wife is convinced that I must come back in September to go to the matchmaking festival in Lisdoonvarna, though the other set of cousins warned me off of it later.

On the bus today leaving Galway, I listened to the Saw Doctors sing about the West of Ireland and realized once again, that it is my favorite part of this country. As the bus moved out of County Galway and into County Clare and then further in toward Tipperary, the stone fences and rocky landscape became less and less frequent. It's all gorgeous, but there is something in Connemara's harsh landscape that speaks home to me in ways the rest of the country don't.

Also, I felt a bit hypocritical that I was enjoying watching the lambs frolic and just twelve hours before had been enjoying a lamb dinner. It's not right. I won't ever eat lamb at home, but when I'm here and it is served up, I don't feel like I should refuse. And sadly, it is delicious.

So the six hours on the bus was not so bad. I listened to my iPod shuffle thru various Irish songs and watched the movie of Ireland's landscape unfold to the soundtrack of my own making. (I'm beginning to 'get' the iPod business.)

That's what I know today.

Magically Delicious

2006-03-18T09:06:00.000-05:00

Ireland is still here. Sometimes when I leave, I wonder if it disappears in a mist. An Irish Brigadoon. Since I was here in November, not much has changed except the flipflops are in the stores even though it's only 8 degrees celsius out.

Uneventful flight. Uneventful departure from M, as she headed off to Waterford. Uneventful bus ride to Galway alone. I got here at 10:30, dumped my suitcase at the train station, and decided to pack as much into the day as I could before my cousin Mary and her husband collected me at 3:00. At home, I could spend a Saturday doing my nails and looking at the window. That's it. The day just disappears. It is nice to know that if I really want to, I can move quickly and get a lot done. Like this blog, for instance, which will end in approximately five minutes so I'll have time to go to Charlie Byrnes, buy a postcard & a couple of books, and trot over to station to pick up my suitcase and catch my ride.

So, I got here, I looked at the eyesore which is still an Eyre Square under construction, with fewer trees, but otherwise looking like it did before the city planners spent their millions refurbishing it. Saturdays in Galway are market day--a sort of farmers' market with cheese and veg and handwoven bracelets from Guatamala (Genuine Irish). While there I found the baby shirt I had wanted for my U2-lovin' boss last fall when she had her baby. It says "U2: Rattle and Mum". Then I turned a corner and saw what looked like the poet Michael Gorman, who taught a summer course I was in four and half years ago at NUI Galway. He walked like him and wore a hat like him, so I yelled, "Mickey???" He snapped around, looked a bit frazzled, like perhaps he had enjoyed St. Patrick's Day too much last night, and stared at me blankly. I didn't expect him to remember me though I had a summer crush on him that was almost painful. So I re-introduced myself, shook his hand, he said, 'Ah, yes!' but I'm not convinced he remembered. He said he was in a hurry to get teh shopping done and something about a football match or something, but he wrote his number in my journal ("A Moleskine, I see!") and told me to call him tomorrow for coffee. I won't BE here for coffee and am sure he forgot as soon as he hurried off to fondle carrots, but boy if it didn't make me feel good to bump into someone I knew here. Particularly him, still looking befuddled and artistic and cute.

In order to celebrate, I went to my favorite sweater shop and bought a new cardigan. The woman who owns it was back. In November, she had been out with a broken knee cap and her very charming son managed to sell my friend Isabella and me about 400 euros worth of woolens. So I asked after her knee, asked after her son, and then talked to her friend who now lives in Canada but is moving back. It was a perfect morning--making me feel, as I almost always do here, that I am HOME.

After I was warmed up by my sweater, I sat by the Corrib and watched it race by, before going to Fat Freddie's for my favorite pizza. And then the Ninja Shopping commenced. Less bought than looked at, but two books, a notebook, some inkpens I like, and a birthday card for a kid's birthday in June.

So, all in all, a very fine day indeed. Now I'm off to buy a few books and meet up with the O'Mahony family to find out how the rugby match went yesterday. I think I need a hot whiskey!

Bon Voyage to Me

2006-03-16T02:05:00.000-05:00

My cousin saw photos of the pieces I have in the art show, found out I was leaving for Ireland in two days, and said, "It must be so satisfying to be you!!!"

It's so odd to see your life from someone else's perspective. In my mind's eye, people look at me like I'm mildly mentally handicapped. I imagine they expect little out of me because they don't think I'm capable of much. This isn't the truth. I know this isn't the truth. Yet it's what I think sometimes. So when I heard her assessment of my life, I laughed out loud.

I've been talking to an old friend I lost contact with for awhile. He reminded me that ten or so years ago I sent him a tape of some sort and wanted to know if I remembered. I didn't. The tape isn't currently in his possession, though he's getting it back, and for some reason, I'm disturbed by this. Whatever bad music choices I made when I was 27 are hurtling back towards Canada, and thus, inadvertently, me. Possibly, I fear being judged. I did, afterall, own a John Secada CD at one point. And I totally got sucked into the Evanesence thing before I knew they were going to be on the radio every fifteen minutes three years ago and that my students would, inexplicably, write papers about them. I'm easily persuaded to listen to schlock if the commercial for it is catchy enough.

My best guess is that the tapes contain one of three things. My number one guess is that it is Nanci Griffith's _Flyer_. I'd just discovered her in grad school. If its _Flyer_, I'm not embarrassed. Guess Number Two is that it is the Irish-American punk band, Black 47, also discovered around the same time. This seems like a long shot, though I do remember going through a month-long period of trying to convince other people that they were fabulous. The final, and most disturbing possibility, is that it is not music at all but an audio tape of Marianne Willimson talking about the Course in Miracles. We'll see.

In an attempt to figure out what I was listening to in 1994, I dug out an old journal from that time. It was painful to read. I'm considering installing self-destruct mechanisms in all future journals, so six months after I've finished them they disintegrate like those "Mission: Impossible" tapes. I've never understood how people destroy their own journals because it's an archive, but now I get it. You turn almost 40 and you realize what hooey you believed when you were younger. You also realize that no matter how many times a day you wish you could go back to your twenties, you don't really mean it. The twenties were awful. Nothing on your body was sagging yet, but your brain is riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing. I don't know if it's satisfying to be me, but it is much more satisfying to be me now than it was then.

So I leave for Ireland in the morning. My cousin Mary has said it's supposed to snow on Saturday when I get there. I fly into Shannon, part from my traveling companion-co-worker for a couple days as I go to Galway, in the West. Land of my forebears and sheep-shaped rocks and rock-shaped sheep. On Monday I'll take a six hour bus trip South to Waterford where I'll spend the rest of the week, skulking, drinking Guinness, and chatting up Irish men.

Our Bold Lies, Our Selves

2006-03-13T00:31:00.000-05:00

It's March. It's hot. I hate summer and today has been a painful reminder that we're heading straight for the inferno. Kamikaze flies are buzzing around my lamp because I opened a non-screened window in hopes of catching a breeze. I'm thirsty and feel like I should sleep in mosquito netting tonight and go on safari.

A while ago I had a thing for an African guy I know. A friend. In my deluded, lovestruck state, I actually thought for the right man (and he seemed like the right man) I would be impervious to heat, to bugs, to dictators, to poverty, to eating crocodile. This is why women haven't ruled the world for a few millenia: if a man is involved we believe the most ridiculous crap, and most of it is our own fabrication. This guy wasn't hinting I should come home with him where we could make a home at the foot of the Ngong Hills with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. Mostly, he wanted someone to go to movies with, someone to play miniature golf with, someone to drive him to the airport for his 20 hour flight home twice a year. I'm the one who filled in all the blanks.

No. It wasn't any sweet nothings he whispered to me that made me imagine this Daktari-style future. It was all me. And yeah, I wanted him (he smelled good, he was funny, and I loved the way he said 'banana'), but it is _possible_ that I also wanted to believe I am the kind of person who doesn't require airconditioning and porcelain. A person who could say at cocktail parties, "Oh, yes. That's when I lived in Zimbabwe." But I'm not. I'm me. I need several months of cold weather to get me through July and August. I need a suitcase with wheels. I don't really want to drink out of a _canteen_.

So I kind of know who I am, but what I wonder is this: who ARE those people we imagine ourselves capable of being? What's the line between having a goal/overcoming personal obstacles and just completely deluding yourself? I've never really wanted to be a self-deluder, yet the evidence indicates that perhaps that's exactly what I am. Perhaps that is the only way we are able to live with ourselves. I could admit--at nearly 40--that I'm never going to join the Peace Corp, yet I like the idea that I might. I might quit my job and join the Peace Corp. I might become a foreign correspondent. Maybe one of those people who cashes it all in and lives on a sailboat.

This is how fairy tales (and heat) addle our brains.

I Bet You Think This Blog is About You. Don't You? Don't You?

2006-03-08T00:50:00.000-05:00

I'm scared of my iPod.

Right now its lying in bed beside me, curled up in its little complimentary leatherette case. I imagine it is hoping I'll take it out for a spin, but instead, I've been online, ordering a lime green iSkin for it and an adaptor so I can charge it when I'm in Ireland. (Did I tell you I'm going to Ireland? I'm going to Ireland.) See, I KNOW how to order things online. I KNOW how to dress something up. I even KNOW how to plug things in. But I'm not all together sure how to use the thing yet. Last night I couldn't figure out how to turn it off. I have no idea what the 'hold' button is for, but get the impression that it is important. Today's concern is that I don't know how to organize the music the IT guy at school downloaded (uploaded?) for me. I'm afraid I'll do it wrong. I'm afraid some really cool guy--probably a 17 year old in a letter jacket--will see my iPod and sneer because I have Sinead Lohan's music under "Sinead Lohan" instead of under "Irish Pop" or "Road Trip" or whatever other playlist would be appropriate. (Never mind that he'd already be sneering because I have a Sinead of any sort in there.)

There are two critics who live in my brain: one is a 40something writer--Gore Vidal in younger days, perhaps, John Iriving in his wrestling duds--and the other is the abovementioned 17 year old boy. The boy's name is something like "Kip" or "Chet" and he makes fun of me for a variety of reasons including my inability to realize that I'm a square, my ineptness on the stairmaster at the gym I visit once a month when I'm not too tired, the way I shush him and his buddies when they talk during a lecture, the width of my ass, and so on. Gore Vidal/John Updike has a much narrower genre of items he can sneer at, but for Kip, it's all fair game.

I hate Kip.

Aside from my iPod ineptness, I'm a little uptight about three "assembalges" (read: junk in a black shadow box) I entered in the women's art show where I teach. I like them. They please me. Yet I don't so much like that other people are looking at them (or not looking at them). A co-worker friend reported that another co-worker I don't know very well is concerned about me because there are babies in all three of the pieces. She's afraid my being of a certain age and childless is a problem for me. She wonders why I don't invest in some invitro and have a baby on my own because everybody knows babies don't need daddies. The childless Mary Cassatt spends her entire artistic career painting children she doesn't have and is considered genius (for a woman), but I throw some 99 cent plastic babies in a Martha Stewart party favor tin and I need either psychoanalysis or a turkey baster. See, that kind of thing makes me feel a little too vulnerable. It's just a matter of time before Kip walks through the hall and jostles one of the boxes off the wall with his big football player shoulder...a matter of time before Gore Vidal/John Iriving saunters through and says dismissively, "Crafty."

I hate Gore/John too while we're at it.

So anyhow, I'm thinking that once I master the fine art of iPod-ing that I'll compile a playlist of songs for my inner critics. For Kip, possibly the soundtrack to "Everybody's All American" with movie stills of a bloated Dennis Quaid at his 20 year reunion flashing on my little video screen. For Gore/John, a host of feminist rants starting with "You're So Vain" and ending with something dismissive and Shirley Manson inspired.

Tonight, I will let the iPod sleep in bed with me. All the manuals say not to do this, that the iPod will cease to recognize me as master if I let it think it is on the same level as me. But I plan to run an iPod-centered household and don't want it to grow up with a complex, thinking it is subordinate to me.

Princess of Prosperity

2006-03-01T00:46:00.000-05:00

I'm in the market for an iPod. I'm a sucker for whatever Apple wants to sell me, particularly if I can get a fruity-flavored skin to keep it in. Whether or not I'll be able to figure it out is anybody's guess, but I see this as the fork in the middle of my late 30something road. If I don't go forth and embrace iPod, I will become instantly old...one of those people who refuses to use the LCD display on the digital camera in lieu of the eentsy viewfinder or who doesn't trust electronic paycheck deposits. I'm not ready to become that person, so this weekend I'm going to take the plunge. Or at least dip my big toe into iPod waters.

But I'm approaching it the way my mother would, which is a cause for some alarm. I scour the descriptions on the Apple website, trying to figure out how they are trying to "trick" me into an inferior model or into buying add-ons I don't need. I sent an iPod savvy friend approximately 23 emails today, in essence, begging him to make the choice for me between the teensy hip Nano and the more powerful (and impressive) regular iPod.He graciously responded in Yoda-like phrases though ultimately refused to make the choice for me. (No chance of blaming him later if the iPod seems too cumbersome compared to the Nano.) Now I must decide do I want 30 gig or 60? Black or white? My name engraved on the back by what I assume is a licensed Apple engraver? Decisions, decisions.

Today when I wasn't obsessing about my choices, I listened to Louise Hay's CD on creating prosperity in your life. When I'm not in a cynical mood, her mind-over-matter belief system seems not completely unsound. We are, probably, what we think, and so better not to think that other people have everything and you have nothing. She has this soothing, wise, voice, so I had no reason not to buy into what she was selling me this morning.

Louise may be on to something. When I got to work, there were exam copies of textbooks I didn't order. I had my annual review and was recommended for highest merit (which, if approved, will result in a slightly larger (small) annual raise). Back in my office, the textbook buy-back guy who usually shows up once a year, stopped by on a whim to see if I had anything to sell him--and remarkably, I did: the three new books, one of which I had rejected simply because of the word "roadmap" in the title. Nothing like being $21 richer for doing absolutely no work. Tonight, the guy whose novel I'm editing called to talk about the work I've done. He likes the feedback I've given him and asked me to edit another manuscript. Also, he and his wife have invited me to stay with them in Aspen when I go this summer for a writing workshop, which will save me about $1,000 in hotel bills.

Tomorrow I'm going to listen to Louise Hay's tape on "Breaking Down Barriers to Get What You Want." By the end of the day I should have a marriage proposal, a Capricon fetus in my womb, a winning Powerball ticket, and a three-book deal with Penguin.

If I win the lottery, I'll buy you a copy of this CD so you can win too. At which point we'll buy tiaras and eat caviar on my private island off the southwestern coast of Ireland. (Possibly instead of caviar, I'll go for the brown bread and Kerry Gold Butter with a Guinness chaser.) We'll talk, have a good time, and when we get sick of each other, we'll listen to our iPods. We'll have different models for every day of the week. Because, seriously, isn't the whole point of prosperity having the means to buy an excessive amount of stupid things (in fruity flavors)?

In the Absence of Dog

2006-02-19T11:54:00.000-05:00

The weekend has been one of no visitors or houseguests (I entertain a lot when I am In House) and so I've had time to miss the Scottie Dog. There is more room in the bed, I haven't had to open the door 200 times an hour to let him out and the cold air in, and I've had to endure none of his sad, disappointed Princess Diana looks, an artform he has perfected which results in extra treats and walks and generally anything he wants. Yet, I miss him. I imagine him in Florida with his parents, strutting down Main Street of Disney World with mouse ears bobbing as he growls at the folks in the Chip-n-Dale costumes and begs to eat in the Lady and the Tramp café. To the best of my knowledge, non-service dogs are not allowed in the Magic Kingdom and he is really in a condo on the beach chasing waves and seagulls, yet this is how I imagine him. If any dog could convince Disney security that he should be allowed access to the premises, S.D. is the man.

If he were here, what I'd be doing instead of grading three stacks of papers, is playing "Bone." This is his favorite game and I don't understand the rules. He carries this giant bone in his mouth, expects me to chase him, and then hides under the baby grand piano so I can't get him. Game over. He's in control of the game, yet he always seems depressed when it's over.

S.D, turned me into a dog person. Before him, I was just a person who would occasionally smile at a puppy. Then his parents brought him home from the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, asked if I would watch him for six weeks while they were in Italy, in North Carolina, in Montana, and that was it. He was mine. They think he is theirs: S.D. and I know the truth. And you know who this has given me sympathy for? Those women who go a little crazy and steal other women's babies. I get it. I really do. I woudln't DO it, but I understand. Sure, I could get my own dog, but he is the chosen one. And the fact that he isn't with me but is in Florida? Today, it makes me want to crawl under the piano and sigh.

The Wisdom of Petula Clark

2006-02-18T22:05:00.000-05:00

Like a lot of small American cities, it's pretty easy to avoid downtown here. The major thoroughfares were constructed to circumvent it. Judging from photos, the place was hoppin' from the late 1800s thru the mid 20th Century. In the late '60s it blew up. (No, really. It did. People died. My great-uncle--now a saint--was one of 41 casualties.) In the '70s it fell victim to bad urban planning and it was turned into a pedestrian mall. People quit going to the shops for whatever reason--inability to park close, creepyness of the giant Alice-in-Wonderland style toadstool umbrellas, number of vagrants who enjoyed the fountains and ergonomic benches--and so a lot of the shops closed. New shops sprang up, but many of them had the smell of death on them before they even completed their first week of business. Wal-mart arrived and even more local businesses closed. In the late '90s, the pedestrian mall was ripped up, the signs were changed from "downtown" to "uptown" in a moment of marketing optimism, and and a few coffee shops opened. Other than the part where it exploded, my hometown's downtown isn't unlike a lot of others across the U.S. that are dead or on life support.

I like to think this one isn't terminal, so I go through rituals the equivalent of lighting candles and saying prayers to the patron saints of economic prosperity and good parking spaces. I find reasons to do business downtown. I buy watch batteries at the local jeweler though it would be easier to get them at Meijer. I buy "unique" (read: "expensive") toys for my friends' kids at the local toystore instead of the ones they probably really want from Toys 'R Us. And, as often as I can find reason to, I take my shoes to "the shoe repair guy." This is my favorite. It's very old world in there, started at a time when people needed to repair their shoes because they had one or two pairs that had to last...a time when people had "a craft" like cutting new insoles instead of just selling you a pair of Dr. Scholl's one-size-fits-most pre-formed air cushions. It's a long, narrow space, with shelves on both sides that are stacked with shoes and boots and jars of solvents and cans of polish. There are family photos on the walls, and I always feel like life is probably lived better in there than it is in most places. I don't know why I believe this exactly, but I do.

Yesterday, I took three things into "the shoe guy": a pair of Haflinger slippers that have developed a case of leprosy, one purple Dansko clog (don't ask), and a leather field bag I bought when I got my first post-college job in 1989. I'm thrilled to have three things to bring in, though once I've plopped them on the counter I want to kick myself for not spacing out the joy. Why not sprinkle out the shoe/bag repair over a series of weeks? The part I love most, aside from being in this space, is when Mr. Marinakes himself looks the items over. He's thoughtful. Is the shoe worth saving? What can he do to fix the problem? While he examines the damage, his assistant talks to me about the weather. Mr. Marinakes turns the slippers over, tugs on the insole that looks moth eaten, and shakes his head. The slippers are good, he says, but the insoles are shot. He can make me new ones out of leather, but it will be pricey. How pricey, I ask. Six dollars, he says. I'd pay twenty just for an excuse to come in. And I really do love the slippers. He asks when I want them and I say I'm in no hurry. It's Friday. I'll have them at the first of the week, he says with what may be pride.

I leave feeling kind of happy and I wonder if maybe Petula Clark wasn't on to something when she sang "Downtown." No doubt she was talking about a more _vibrant_ city (one where you could listen to the rhythm of the gentle bossanova while looking at neon lights), but, to quote another bossy musician, this is MY hometown. And somedays, just seeing remnants of what it used to be (with the occasional horn honk) is enough for me.

I have a non-poet co-worker who writes a lot about this place, but she is a transplant from the East, and so when I read about the poverty she sees here or the grammatical idiosyncrasies of the residents or the lack of culture, I sometimes want to challenge her to a smackdown. Most of what she says is true, but how dare she judge MY hometown. It's probably like family. You can say shitty things about your own siblings, parents, cousins, but if someone else does--even a friend--something goes icy in your gut. Where my non-poet co-worker sees decline, depression, dereliction, I see a history. I see the corner where my maternal grandfather had a car lot, the post office where my paternal grandfather worked, the dimestore where my grandmothers shopped, the bank where my parents met, the movie theatre, the bakery, the furniture store, the old (better) library. It's sentimental. It's nostalgiac. But there's still life here. I'm not as optimistic as the "uptown" city planners about the prospects here, but I kind of love it and want the best for it.

Planning Ahead

2006-02-17T01:05:00.000-05:00

On any given day my lesson plans look something like this:

Discuss "Shrek" & intertextuality. Do that bird exercise. Have them write about that one article.

Right there, in a nut shell, is why I decided higher education was the place for me. If I taught in a high school, the adminstration would expect detailed, week-at-a-glance type lesson plans that spelled out exactly what I planned to do as well as the objective of the exercise. They want these, one assumes, so if you get hit by a garbage truck on the way to school, your class can continue without interruption.

I've never really wanted to be thought of as "easily replaceable," so my lesson plans tend to be more along the lines of Post-It Notes stuck to the back of a recycled "Hello Kitty" folder. If I'm roadkill, I want my students to flounder for a few weeks in memory of me.

I'm not a bad teacher--in fact, I think I'm a good teacher. I know what I'm going to do. I know what the objective of the lesson is. But if I had to write it out, weeks in advance, it would no longer seem interesting or viable to me, so I'd have to think up a whole new set of things to do. It's more efficient in the long-run to do Post-It Note planning on the drive to work.

Which brings me to my current dilemma.

Last week, a co-worker, poet, and friend, asked if I wanted to go with her to Ireland for Spring Break. She's going to see her boyfriend. It's a love story with a thirty year interruption that I am particularly fond of, and Ireland has been a sort of surrogate boyfriend of mine over the last several years. In fact, the relationship is currently monogamous. Since I was just there in November for a week's writing workshop with Hugo Hamilton, going again seems a bit extravagant. Also, I'm not sure if the c-wpf really invited me or if I whined so much about going that she felt compelled to agree that I could tag along. Also, I'm not sure its ever a good idea to spend that much time with someone you are fond of but don't know ALL that well. Also, I was raised with my mother's axiom of "fish and company smell after three days." So I've been torn. Mostly, I've been leaning towards doing the right thing--saving for a house I'll never buy--and skipping the trip.

But then today another co-worker who just went to Dublin brought me a copy of Hugo Hamilton's new memoir, which won't be available in the U.S. until September, and I read the first two pages and I started aching for Ireland. Longing. Why would I NOT go to Ireland with the c-wpf when I'll have free lodging, will get to explore the southern bits of the country, a place I haven't yet been. I rushed back to my office and checked Cheaptickets.com for the fare she'd mentioned to me, only it wasn't there. It had gone up $130 which pretty much pushed it out the range of do-able.

What a non-planning dumbass I am.

She stopped by and we talked about the trip I wouldn't be taking. The things I could have done. (It turns out there's more to do in Waterford than just the crystal factory tour.) We stretched ourselves over my Irish road map and speculated about places I could have seen.

She distracted me from my One True Love though by asking what the deal was Friday with the visiting writer, my two-day crush.

What deal?

He was flirting with you, she said.

He was? I knew I was flirting with _him_, but he was flirting with me?

Seemed like it to me, she said. He was mostly talking to you all night. He kept saying that thing about having you come down and taking you up in the chopper. I think he was flirting.

Here was me thinking my co-workers were embarrassed for me last week, flirting so pathetically with the famous writer, the author of one of the best 25 books of 2005. Here was me not knowing he was maybe flirting back. Oh, how I wished I'd have shaved my legs. Maybe I would have been bolder. Maybe, at the very least, I would have gone to Comfort Inn and pelted his windows with tiny chunks of Hoosier limestone.

There really is not any Hoosier limestone here. I said that to be poetic. I apologize.

It's hard to live your life with no foresight. It gives you the opportunity to be spontaneous (there's no plan to stick to), but without a plan sometimes you forget what your goals are. Fares go up, you miss a trip. Legs aren't shaved, you miss, well, out.

Darwin and the Book of Love

2006-02-15T21:07:00.000-05:00

There's this guy I should like. He's funny, smart, polite; he'd announce himself as a feminist; he's not un-cute; a co-worker friend praises him for his worshipfulness of me. (I've never been worshipped.) I'm 39. I wouldn't mind another relationship. I wouldn't mind a baby. He could provide these things as well as quiet evenings reading and not talking about NASCAR or deer hunting. People would see us and think we were compatible. A fit.

But here's the thing: he just doesn't do it for me. I haven't been able to pinpoint why. He looks a bit like my cousin Randy, which is a drawback but not a deal breaker. He's not an alpha male, but I've always been partial to betas. He's not particularly ambitious, but then I'm not either. So I've been trying to figure out what the problem is, and yesterday it came to me: he has weird earlobes. They are giant. Too thick. Too wide. Too jutty-outty. You haven't seen earlobes like this before.

My cousin's wife once told me--in front of him--that I was single because I was too picky. The implication seemed to be that she hadn't been and had reaped the rewards. (I tend to think it was my cousin who wasn't picky enough.) For the record, I don't believe I am too picky. I do think if you are talking about something like a relationship that might end only when death doth part you, you should be choosy. Careful. Selective.

Which brings me to Darwin. Am I too picky? Recent evidence points to it. Or does something happen on a subconscious level--a molecular level--where we are able to recognize what would be a bad concoction of DNA? Perhaps a person with giant earlobes and a person with an abnormally large Irish American head shouldn't do anything that could potentially result in a big-headed kid with earlobes so massive you could figure your taxes on them. Seriously. This would be a child who couldn't get into a Toyota Prius.

It's not a theory based in scientific reason, but I like to think I'm not _that_ picky, not doing anything a bunch of turtles and blue footed boobies in the Galapagos wouldn't do.

Real Estate

2006-02-12T23:49:00.000-05:00

It's Sunday. Some people go to church. Others settle in for an entire day of televised sports. I look at the real estate listings in the paper. I'm not what you would call 'in the market.' I could be. Probably I should be. You see, I am a Gen X loser who--oh, this hurts to admit to total strangers--LIVES AT HOME. Yes, I know. Pa-Thetic. I don't really know how it happened or why it is I lack that gene that makes most normal people run screaming from the idea of living with parental units. It helps that my living space is bigger than most New York City lofts. It helps that 1/3 of my year I am In House with the Scottie Dog, that I travel a lot, and that the majority of my life is lived in my head where a 3BR/2BA and attached garage is unnecessary.

So anyhow, I browse the real estate section, imagine a future in a dozen different bungalows, do the math and think about how, yeah, I could swing it. My friends would encourage this move, particularly the ones with miserable marriages who might need to sleep in the spare room. Some days I go to open houses and mentally arrange furniture and look at paint chips. But then I get sleepy and postpone such decisions until later.

Who else is in the market for real estate? A couple of Canadian geese who are paddling around the pond at the House. This doesn't look like a roadside stop, either. The male stands up tall, looks around menacingly, as if he is already establishing the borders of his property. Meanwhile, the female pecks at grass on the bank, testing bedding for the nursery. If I have my facts straight, these are mate-for-life birds, but let's be honest, when you are dressed exactly like everyone else in your neighborhood, how do you measure something like monogamy?

I wonder if I should run them off before they get settled in. I can imagine the turf wars when the Scottie Dog returns. It will end one of two ways: S.D. pecked within an inch of his life or Gosling Snack Crackers. Neither seem ideal, but frankly, I have no idea how you get rid of a couple of geese. Do you shake a stick at them? Throw rocks? Type up an eviction notice and have it notarized? No idea. As I write this, the geese are looking at carpet samples, making long-term plans.

Spinster Housesitter

2006-02-11T23:13:00.000-05:00

I got this compulsion to start a blog tonight while I was at an Irish Dance performance in my small Hoosier town. The tickets were given to me by the owners of the house where I sometimes watch their Scottie Dog and where I sometimes--like now, when he is on vacation on the Gulf Coast with them--just watch the house, redecorate it in my head, and basically think of it as my own. Anyhow, the performance was no "Riverdance." When the dancers came out something seemed not quite right. For one, they looked like a high school drill team. For two, they didn't have what you might think of as professional dancers' bodies. They were nice bodies that I personally wouldn't mind trading up for, but they lacked that elk or swan look. After their first dance, one of the musicians introduced the troupe and explained that all the dancers were not so much from Ireland but from the Midwest. That explained it. They were _cornfed_. Healthy. Thick. Their curls were not natural, created by parents who love Guinness, but were synthetic. For the fourth dance, they came out, inexplicably, in too-short kilts and did what could only be called an Irish step-dance strip-tease. The lead dancer had on a belly shirt and her navel glittered when the spotlight hit the rhinestone that was nestled therein. She flipped her hair and taunted the audience with a pre-baby Britney Spears "I'm Not That Innocent" come-hither look. She and the other dancers rolled their hips and slapped their own asses. At intermission, I had to go.

The Owners have a new light in the bedroom that changes color according to the temperature and pulses when there is a chance of precipitation. It's blue right now, bordering on purple. It's pulsing. I think that means sled-riding tomorrow. At first I hated it. It kept me up at night, but I've grown to appreciate it. In the absence of dog, it has made a pseudo companion. Maybe I should get an ant farm and bring it with me when I am In House.

For the last two days we had a visiting writer at the college where I teach. He was my age. Dead middle of life. Totally suckable lips. He flew away this morning. And so I had a two-day crush. I find I like the two-day crushes. When I was younger, there was time for longer crushes that might develop into something if the planets were aligned correctly. But this speed crush, well, it works out nicely. You don't have to rearrange your calendar, figure out schedules so you can skulk around places the object of your affection might be, or fantasize about him taking you to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. He's here; he's gone. For 36 hours or so you giggle a lot and flip your hair if you are having a good hair day. (I was.) I recommend it.

This is what you need to know about me: I'm single; I'm 39; I'm putting Japanese olive oil on my face once a day because I got sucked into DHC's marketing and free catalog samples, and also because I want to look better when I turn 40 than I did at 35. It could happen. Cher was strutting around that battleship in pantyhouse and a leather jacket when she was 40 and she looked damn good. I don't have goals so lofty. I just don't want a creased 40 year old forehead next year. A cornfed faux Irish dancer's body would be an added bonus, but I'm trying not to hope for too much. If it happens, I'll buy a kilt. I'll even post a photo.