Author Archives: The Reluctant Girl Scout

About The Reluctant Girl Scout

Let's be honest: I haven't been a Girl Scout since the Reagan Administration. What I really am is a writer, a teacher, and a muser, who goes places (reluctantly) and loves them a lot (once I get back home).

Dec12

A Sort of Fairy Tale

Posted on 12 December 2013 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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December 12, 2009

Today is our fourth anniversary, and as you may have heard, Z and I are in different time zones and on different continents. I fully expected to be in a full-tilt fit of melancholia with a side order of pout as soon as the clock struck December 12^th, but it turns out, it’s not happening.

Here’s the thing: we shouldn’t be together. At all. If I wrote a book about my life (Oh, wait! I am!) and you were introduced to a character called, say, “The Reluctant Girl Scout”, and a character called “Z”, you would say to yourself, Who is this writer kidding? This would never happen. It’s just not believable!

It isn’t believable. It’s a fairy tale. Highly improbable.

1) There is the improbability of geography. How many Zimbabweans did I meet before Z? Zero. People in Richmond, Indiana, do not meet people from Zimbabwe as a matter of course. Often people in Richmond, Indiana, aren’t even sure where Zimbabwe is or that it is a country. (There is a water slide at Holiday World in Southern Indiana called “Zoombabwe” and that’s about as close as we get.) Statistically, since Z came to college in America and stayed through two graduate degrees, there was a high probability that he might end up married to an American. But me? I haven’t crunched the numbers because I’m not that strong a mathematician, but I think the chances that I– a person who had mostly lived in Richmond and traveled primarily to Ireland and Indianapolis–would marry a Zimbabwean are about .00000000001%.

2) There is the improbability of time. What are the odds that a visiting professor position in Z’s discipline would open up at the teeny university where I had just been hired full-time six months before? (Sub improbability: what are the odds that at this university, his discipline, which is often considered a social science, would be housed instead with the humanities, where I was, so we could sit next to each other at faculty meetings for the next two years, bonding via the series of disgusted looks we would flash at each other whenever our senior most colleague started clipping his nails in the midst of budget debates?) You’ll have to do the calculations on that one yourself, but I’m telling you, the odds are not high.

3) There is the improbability of Z finding a cyber café with electricity (there are a lot of Zesa cuts in Zimbabwe) and then finding the ad for the position at my teeny university (not to mention the improbability that he would be hired via a phone interview alone).

4) There is the improbability of me, an introvert, going to the beginning-of-the- year faculty party where I would have my first conversation with him and make the improbable proclamation to a friend that I was going to marry him. (I didn’t even believe in marriage at this point in my life. I thought marriage is where love went to die.)

5) There is the probability of Z’s policies working against us. Z did not believe in dating co-workers (he says), so we were never going to happen. I did not know this, nor did I know that when Z has a policy, he sticks with it. (The only policy I’ve ever known him to break was his “I do not go to Starbuck’s” policy, which is hard to do in Seattle. He let this policy lapse in 2009 when he was out with Z-ma and she needed the loo.) The whole time we worked together, we never dated. Instead we had “outings”. The closest we ever got physically was when our heads bumped up against each others one night when I was helping him put together his new Kathy Ireland stationary bicycle.

6) Z just wasn’t into me. We were friends. I was delusional. The end.

7) I am not a tenacious person. If I have a goal and am met with opposition, I often just change my goal instead of fighting to meet it. Yet when Z left town for Zimbabwe after his job ended, instead of rationally assuming I would never see him again, I became uncharacteristically cunning. I suggested he store his belongings in my attic, thus ensuring at least one more meeting.

8) The final, most outstanding improbability is that after five years of pining for a man who was only ever going to be my friend I was ready to admit defeat …just as he had an epiphany of his own.

So yes, we aren’t together today. Instead, we are in our respective countries looking at photos on our respective computers of our American-Zimbabwean wedding with the zebra cake topper and the fire in the fire place and the Christmas trees and the kissing ball and the hula hoops and the Scottie dog and my blue suede shoes and his rented tux that was so big it required safety pins and made him look like William Howard Taft.

We could be sad, but in the face of such dire statistics, wouldn’t that just be greedy?

Dec8

Blue(ish) Christmas

Posted on 8 December 2013 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Z just called from the airport, ready to board his flight for the other side of the planet. As soon as we hung up, I burst into tears. I hate these Dark Side of the Moon hours, when we can’t communicate because one of us is in transit. Astronauts’ spouses have my sympathy, especially those wives and husbands of astronauts who did boldly go before it was possible to tweet from space.

No matter how many times I check Flight Aware and know he’s on that plane watching some Owen Wilson movie, it is not the same as getting an email from him or hearing his voice.

Prepare for some whining in the next twenty-three days. I apologize in advance, but because Z-ma has been suffering with vertigo, Z and I decided that though we were loathe to spend the holidays apart—not just Christmas, mind you, but our fourth anniversary as well—we’d feel better if he headed to Zimbabwe to help her out while he’s on break from classes. Because I have an allergic reaction to the thought of being in Seattle without him, I boarded the next available flight to Indiana two days ago, and here I will remain until New Year’s Eve. If Providence, weather patterns, and flight times agree with us, Z and I will be reunited just in time to see 2014 in together.

This is the time of year when I am torn between being delighted to be in Seattle, gearing up for the Christmas traditions of the city—the Christmas ships, the tree on top of the Space Needle, the tree lighting and carousel at Westlake Center, the scheduled “snowfall” at Pacific Place Center, the illuminated fruit atop Pike Market—and feeling a little bit envious (and maybe a little angry?) at the people who live in our city amongst family and life-long friends. Of course I don’t actually know any of these people—these native Seattle-ites with a rich web of their own tribe—but when I go past certain houses in neighborhoods with driveways and where wreaths are on the doors, I imagine entire multi-generational scenarios for them that would probably even make the Waltons envious. Or nauseous.

So, though I will be missing Z, I will not have to be hating on complete strangers in Washington just because their imagined holiday lives are more glorious than my own. Instead, I can partially live the dream in my beloved Midwest, where I have already been greeted with snow. No one here will think less of me if I wear a holiday-themed sweatshirt or my Santa troll earrings, which is an added bonus.

Because I’m not in Zimbabwe to see that it isn’t true, I can even imagine Skampy (and possibly a zebra or two) wearing a Santa hat at a jaunty angle to usher in the season.

But still, I promise you, there occasionally will be whining, gnashing of teeth, renting of cloth. I am heartily sorry.

Nov22

Flashback Friday: Planning Ahead, Missing Out

Posted on 22 November 2013 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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[This is a blog entry from the Girl Scout vault from early 2006. In case it seems I have an inconstant heart where Z is concerned, he was home in Zimbabwe, not being my boyfriend.]

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 administration 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 road kill, I want my students to flounder for a few weeks in memory of me.

I’m not a bad teacher–in fact, I think and annual reviews argue that I’m actually 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 so I wouldn’t get bored. 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, [that for our purposes I will now refer to as Belle, as in “the belle of Worcester, Mass” 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 Belle 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 it’s 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 longing for Ireland. Aching. Why would I NOT go to Ireland with Belle 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. 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.

Nov16

Hair Stylist Monogamy and Other Simple Truths

Posted on 16 November 2013 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Sunset from my folks’ backyard.

This is how monogamous I am: I’ve had the same hair stylist since my first year out of college. When I met her, she was at the hippest salon in my little town, and whenever I was in there talking to her as the music thrummed and hair clippings fell on a groovy wooden floor that had been artfully painted, I felt like I was some place more exciting than my hometown. Friends would insist I should try “X” at some other salon because he or she was “the best”, but I’ve never really understood that mindset . . . that “new” is better or that having the most up-to-the-minute hairstyle mattered more than a connection I felt with the person behind the clippers. A few years later, my stylist left town for a while, so I had my chance to branch out and see what I’d been supposedly missing. I now think of that as the Dark Ages. There were a host of people who were hard for me to talk to (my introverted problem, not theirs) and who seemed not to understand that I am basically a person who will forget to brush her hair on most days and therefore should not have a complicated or fussy hairdo. One guy decided what I really needed was bangs, never mind I have only fourteen strands of hair that grow in that magical bang place, and it didn’t really matter to him that when I left the salon I kind of looked as if I was four and had cut my own bangs because he didn’t know me from Adam.

One day after what felt like five years of her absence but what was probably closer to two, the “it” stylist of town (who randomly decided I needed to have hair like Sherry Stringfield’s on ER, mainly because there was an article about her in the People magazine he was reading right before my appointment), leaned over my shoulder and sang into my ear, “Guess who’s coming back to towwwwwwwwwwn!”

Oh, happy, happy day!

While I have embraced my new life in Seattle on several levels, there are other areas where I have not. I’ve been dragging my feet on finding a new dentist, I save chiropractor visits for trips to Indiana no matter how bad my back gets, I prefer using that Greek cobbler at home instead of finding a new one here, and since no one in Seattle really knows me (or notices if my roots are showing) I feel compelled to save hair cuts and coloring for when I’m back in Indiana. Fortunately, my trips are often enough that this usually works out. A couple of times when there have been long stretches between visits to the Midwest, I’ve gone to the Aveda school up the street to have some student practice his or her arts on my hair. The place fascinates me because it reminds me of Hogwarts, what with some students mixing potions and others doing intricate experiments on dummy heads. Plus, they are all whipping around in black and my imagination can easily turn black sweaters and tight pants into those excellent swooshy robes seen regularly on Harry, Hermione, and Ron. The Aveda school appeals to me because I never have the same stylist twice since there is constantly a new crop of students, and this makes me feel like I’m not cheating on my One True Stylist back in Richmond. I shall have no stylist before her.

One of the things that fascinates me about my relationship with her is that despite the fact we don’t interact with each other outside of the salon (give or take the odd text about Game of Thrones), we’ve watched each other’s lives unfold with joy and concern as warranted. I’ve seen her kids grow up via the latest snapshot stuck to her mirror and the stories she tells about them, we’ve had long conversations about marriage, pets, family gatherings, vacations, death and grief, our hometown, and various seasons of life. I called her the day after Z proposed because I knew it would please her. Yet, if we run into each other outside of the salon, it is a little awkward. I feel like I’m intruding on her private life. We share a few pleasantries and then exit each other’s company as quickly as we can. I don’t know how you classify that kind of relationship. Some people might say we aren’t really even friends and this is just a business arrangement, but it isn’t. The length of our acquaintance and the intensity of our talks puts her somewhere in the same orbit of some of my college friends, though I see her with more regularity.

The thought of finding a new stylist in Seattle makes me twitchy because I know I won’t find another one of her. You can’t duplicate people. Plus, I’m too old. People move around too much in this city. It takes a lot of energy to get to know new people and I’m more tired now than I was when I was 22—how much genuine enthusiasm could I muster for a stranger’s engagement or first house or pregnancy? So I don’t look for her replacement. If I can’t make it back to Indiana to get my hair cut, I’ll probably just keep trying my luck at Hogwarts and hope that the stylist of the day isn’t from Slytherin.

That photo at the top may be confusing you at this point since it has very little to do with hair or hair care products. That’s because when I got started on this post, I meant for it to be about the superiority of the Midwestern sunset. My brain cells sometimes connect things like a Wild Mouse at an amusement park: just when I think the track is taking me one direction, there is a sharp turn and a drop.

In my earlier life, I noticed maybe ten sunsets. I wasn’t a total philistine—I’d see the sky oranging up in the west and I might think how lovely, but I wasn’t moved. The sun going down just meant it was about time for the evening line-up of sit-coms to start. And also, when you are young and from the middle bits of the country and you’ve never been too far afield, you’re basically required by law to assume that life somewhere near water or near a big city is inherently better than wherever your hick life is being lived. You don’t even question this—it’s like it’s an inherent truth and doesn’t need empirical evidence.

Whether it was during her lengthy disappearance when I was forced into life with bangs or some other, shorter visit, my hair dresser underwent a life change when she went to Key West. I remember her telling me about it—how she’d realized how unimportant flashy clothes and jewelry were once she’d been in Key West because every night going to watch the sunset seemed like the most meaningful thing a person could do all day. It was an event. The simplicity of it astounded her, and because it had meant so much to her, I began to realize how little attention I paid to the beauty of the natural world. And then, because I was twentysomething, my next immediate thought was not that I should enjoy that evening’s sunset but instead that I must move to a place where the sunsets are superior. I’d been living with my mother and step-father in a house in the country that is perfectly positioned between fields so I didn’t even have to leave my room to see a perfect sunrise or sunset, yet I was certain that ours were inferior simply because they were in Indiana.

What can I say? I was young. I had no idea.

When I moved to Seattle, my assumption was that the sunsets out here would be just the sort like those my hairdresser had told me about in Florida that changed her life. Give or take the Olympic Peninsula, we’re basically hanging out here on the coast and we’ve got Puget Sound for reflection purposes, so they were bound to be glorious, right? For months, whenever Z & I had a car or had made our way down the hill to Elliott Bay, we’d try to time it for the sunset, and we were regularly disappointed. Occasionally, it would be lovely, but the more frequent options were either a) gray so thick that there wasn’t much sunset action at all or b) a clear sky that meant it was literally just a round sphere that suddenly dipped below the horizon. Still miraculous, I guess, but it didn’t change our lives. We’d look at each other, shrug, and go get a milkshake.

It turns out all that dust and dirt kicked up by tractors and smog belched out by factories make the Indiana sunsets some kind of wonderful. It’s like a different movie is being projected onto a screen outside your house every night and tickets are 100% free. No two shows are the same and pretty much all of them are worth watching. The one pictured above was an Oscar contender.

While I have little doubt that at some point I would have discovered the joy of this phenomena without aid of my stylist, I love that often when I see a particularly gorgeous sunset I think of her, think of her assertion that these are the things that should matter most to us because they’re more impressive than a new car, leather boots, or even an awesome hairstyle (bangs optional).

Nov15

Flashback Friday: The Wisdom of Petula Clark

Posted on 15 November 2013 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Downtown Richmond, Indiana.

Before I was married, I had a blog that about three people who knew me read. I didn’t have a plan for it but only knew there were stories I wanted to record so I jotted them down. This was before I married Z, before I moved to the Pacific Northwest, and before I took a hiatus from teaching.

I’m of the school of thought that says if a blog post gets uploaded in the forest and no one is around to read it, it might be pointless. So I’ve decided to take inspiration from pop radio stations across the country and start Flashback Friday and post one of those older, mostly unread posts until I’ve exhausted my supply.

Because I was an English teacher for almost two decades, I firmly believe few pieces of writing don’t require revision, so I’ve added and deleted a few things here for timeliness and clarity’s sake. Anything in [brackets] is Current Beth narrating for you.

I give you the first installment in Flashback Friday: a little ditty about my hometown’s downtown. (Or uptown, depending on your perspective.)

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The Wisdom of Petula Clark

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 and my mother, aunt, and cousins nearly were as well, were it not for a serendipitous grilled cheese.) 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, economy, 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 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 toy store instead of the ones from Toys ‘R Us because I love the store and think my selections at Veach’s are going to promote better brain development. I love standing on the old star bricks that supported my childhood in what is now Olde Richmond and knowing that decades of people who predated me had walked upon them. They’re so much more lovely than concrete, even if a tree root does occasionally upend one and cause passersby to trip a little.

Star Bricks, downtown Richmond, Indiana

[I also love how that unlike the strip malls that have spread like a plague across the U.S. during the course of my lifetime, if you look UP in Richmond’s downtown, you are greeted with architectural uniqueness and surprising elements of beauty, like the upper level of this storefront directly across from that favorite toy store of mine.]

Storefront. Downtown Richmond, Indiana

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. [Also, unlike in Zimbabwe, Mr. Marinakes would never disappear with your shoes for weeks on end!]

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. You’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 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. [Now that we aren’t co-workers and collegiality is no longer necessary, I want to say something even more aggressive, but this is a Quaker town, so I will refrain.] Some 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 [former] 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 nostalgic. 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.

[And now, it goes without saying, I will never not miss both its vibrant past and its current incarnation. When I drive through other abandoned downtowns in the Midwest, I’m grateful for whatever hope or vision it is that the people here have that has kept this downtown alive. It may be a shadow of its former self, but it isn’t a ghost town. This post by Richmond’s own Local Lady encapsulates many of the feelings I have about the place: http://local-lady.blogspot.com/2013/09/richmond-indiana-roots-and-new-growth.html plus it features a groovy postcard of Richmond in its heyday].

Nov13

The Photo In Question

Posted on 13 November 2013 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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: St. Andrew’s Steeple, Richmond, Indiana

St. Andrew’s Catholic Church, Richmond, Indiana

There are a lot of beautiful churches in Richmond, but this is the one that stood guard over my childhood. I could see the clock face from my bedroom window once the trees had lost their leaves. Some nights it looked like the moon. It stands a block away from where I went to elementary school, and I have vivid memories of watching the nuns in their habits walking on the church grounds while I was at recess on the swings. I’d say a prayer to God not to give me The Call because I was pretty sure I would not enjoy life as a nun even though I didn’t really know what it would entail other than lack of clothing options. Though this wasn’t my father’s family’s home parish (the Irish Americans went to St. Mary’s a few blocks away), we did sometimes attend mass here and I loved the neo Gothic architecture, the Stations of the Cross that kept my eye entertained while mass was in progress, the way it felt like all prayers whisked right up into heaven like smoke up a chimney. It’s still one of my favorite sites in my hometown (particularly now that I’m no longer worried about being called to convent life). This is the photo I was taking when the man in the last post offered me the fan he’d just acquired.

Nov13

Back Home Again in Indiana

Posted on 13 November 2013 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Indiana has been clinging to a few leaves just for me, and when I wake up my first morning back home, I’m grateful for its effort. Every one in Puget Sound has been exclaiming about how beautiful the foliage is this year, and it is, but it is more muted oranges and russets interrupted by evergreens. In my part of Indiana, where the hills roll a little and there is almost as much woodland as there is farm land, the colors pop and sizzle. I’m convinced the only place where the fall leaf display might be better is New England, and I’m not even sure about that. That could just be something the Vermont Tourism Board sells us.

In the first few days I am home my eye is so happy to be looking at a big sky and a horizon instead of layers and layers of office buildings and apartment complexes. Mom complains about how much worse the traffic has gotten since the ethanol plant opened up, and I do notice the loads and loads of grain being carted up the road in long-haul trucks, but compared to siren-infested and traffic congested First Hill, I could be on a deserted island, it is so quiet.

Don’t even get me started on the sunsets or the constellations I can see in the crisp November sky. In Seattle, we’re lucky to see the moon because of the ambient light and the cloud cover.

This isn’t a home-is-better-than-Seattle post, in case it seems like it is. I’m not unhappy in Seattle, and like most good Hoosiers, I spent a fair share of my youth imagining an escape, dreaming of pulling what my friend Buns calls “a geographic”: moving across country with the misguided belief that a place other than home is infinitely better just by nature of not being the tired town where you grew up, only to discover when you arrive in the new place that all of your problems and quirks and failings have followed you. So no. I have to let Washington be what it is and I have to let Indiana be what it is and quiet the ranking system that self-starts in my brain whenever I’m in a new place even if at some genetic level I feel like home is “better.”

But there is an ease of being that takes place in your native geography that is astounding. It’s as if I’ve spent the last few months with non-native speakers of English and have had to navigate the quirks of language to get my point across, and suddenly I wake up and find myself in the company of my paisanos, where a gesture is understood without explanation. In this honeymoon phase of my visit, I’m so glad to be in the land of the un-ironic seed cap and people in Carhart jackets for reasons that have nothing to do with fashion.

My first day home I go downtown to look for something new and fun to wear to the wedding I’ve come home for. In the store, it seems easier to tell clerks that I don’t need help. I’m not navigating around hurried shoppers screaming into cell phones. (In fact, there are so few shoppers in the store I wonder how it stays in business.) When I leave, I stand on the sidewalk to take a photo of the church steeple that was backdrop to my childhood and I don’t have to worry about being in anyone’s way. While I peer out of our little apartment windows in Seattle, the world feels crowded and too full and I want to beg people to quit reproducing because there are too many of us and I am an introvert. But when I am home, there is a surplus of space. In Richmond, if you wanted to walk down Main Street with your arms stretched out beside you, you wouldn’t bump into anyone. At no time while I’m home, will my hips and shoulders be uncomfortably close to the hips and shoulders of total strangers. In Seattle, I’m amazed that we don’t all have communicable diseases because we’re always accidentally touching people we don’t know and pretending we aren’t, staring straight ahead, busying ourselves with our smart phones and creating invisible cocoons around ourselves.

The city is a petri dish.

While I’m snapping shots of the steeple, I hear an older man say, “Excuse me, young lady.” It doesn’t immediately dawn on me that I am no longer young and because I’ve been in the city for so long, I assume I’m in his way and he wants me to move, never mind the perimeter around me that is empty. I apologize without looking at him and step back so there is more room on the sidewalk. What I’ve become used to in Seattle is ignoring people. It goes against my nature to selectively NOT hear someone talking to me, yet it feels necessary if you have any hope of getting to the drugstore without having to hand out all your dollar bills to the people asking for them on the street corner.

I look at him and he’s a bit scruffy. He has on a puffy, jean jacket and there is a box fan tucked under his arm, which is a little weird for a crisp day like this. He stops in front of me and takes a deep breath, tells me his friend, who is a landlord, just had tenants leave this brand new fan in a vacated apartment. In Seattle, there’s a chance that I’d just not hear him and walk away. But I’m home and it never occurs to me that he could be a threat or even a huckster. I’m not even in a hurry to dismiss him. “That’s lucky,” I say. Then he says, “The thing is, I’m tired of carrying it. You want it?”

I can hardly contain my smile at this unexpected turn of events. I assure him that I have no need for a fan but thank him for his offer. He sighs and says, “Well, I guess I’ll just keep carrying it then.”

Later, when I’m driving home, what strikes me is how easy the exchange was. I didn’t ratchet myself up to DEFCON 1 assuming the worst about him and his intentions. He didn’t hold it against me that I wasn’t interested in taking the fan off his hands.

It is good to be home for a couple of weeks, even if I’m missing Z in the process.

Nov3

A Visit from Chickpea

Posted on 3 November 2013 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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The thing about living on the edge of the country, far away from your people, is that when a friend comes to visit, it’s an event of note. In my case, when Chickpea phoned to say she had arrived and was out front, I ran out of the apartment, left our door standing wide open, opened the building’s door and raced down the steps to greet her. It wasn’t until the front door of the building slammed shut that I realized I’d left my keys inside. Welcome to Seattle, Chickpea. Can I interest you in drive around town in your rental car until Z gets home from work?

Fortunately, the new maintenance guy broke his code and let us in when he saw us scratching at the glass, looking pitiful there surrounded by her luggage. He was gruff though. “I’m not supposed to do this.”

Chickpea and I met five years ago in the very first workshop of my MFA program. Because I’d read her workshop submission before meeting her—an essay on her tendency towards loudness—I was pretty sure I was going to loathe her. Excess sound annoys me. I have no idea why, when we can put people on space stations and every third person on a flight has on noise-cancelling headphones, we have yet to develop a silent leaf blower, for instance. I don’t need monkish silence, but I like quiet, and based on her essay, Chickpea and I were not going to be pals for auditory reasons alone.

I don’t know if any of you have recently re-lived junior high, but as a newbie in an MFA program, you’d be surprised how quickly you are transported back to the social anxiety and neuroses you thought you’d overcome when you were 13. For the first two days, I’d walk along the grounds on breaks, talking to Z, who was in Zimbabwe, so he could remind me of all the reasons the program was a good idea and all the reasons I should not bail prematurely. Fortunately, I’d packed multiple phone cards for this very purpose, though I knew how ridiculous it was that a grown woman would pace on the edge of Casco Bay, making repeated extremely long-distance calls to Africa for reassurance. In retrospect, I’m glad for his gentle prodding for a variety of reasons including a lot more knowledge, a degree, and the opportunity to work with some great writers. But aside from that, I’m grateful not to have missed out on the unlikely friendships that developed there.

On the first day of my first workshop, I was anxious to see what Chickpea would look like. I had imagined her big and swaggery, entering a room with a shout and maybe banging a stick against a cowbell, so it was a bit of surprise that she looked normal and didn’t fill the room with extraneous noise. In fact, I can’t remember a single sentence that passed between us those first two days, but if someone in the workshop said something that smacked of the pretentious or that was too precious, she would look at me and make a face. Maybe just an eyebrow raised a millimeter. Before long, I was doing the same to her. Was it rude? Probably, though I had this sense that only we could see the faces we were making because they were so subtle. Was it juvenile? Oh, definitely, but it felt so good to suddenly not be alone in this literary endeavor. In those shared expressions I somehow felt I’d met a paisono, and this made me less inclined to bolt from the program. Within a few days, I was spending time with her and with her group of friends, with whom I felt similarly and strangely connected, despite the fact that they were over a decade younger than I was, and they were way more raucous. It’s not that I’m incapable of making friends, but as an introvert and as a person who has always felt that old friends were just naturally superior friends, it was surprising how quickly these people mattered to me. The following year when I attended their senior readings and graduation, I openly wept. It was bewildering to me that people I had spent so little time with could matter to me so much.

When people visit us, I always mean to be an excellent tour guide. Seattle has a lot to offer, even when the sun isn’t out, but Chickpea and I were so busy talking about writing and relationships and things we hate and dogs we love, that the city seemed secondary. Sure, we went to the Market and to the Olympic Sculpture Garden, but we could have spent all that time in a booth at Denny’s if you want to know the truth. At least I could have. Sometimes out here I get a little lonesome for friends. Or rather, I don’t notice that I’m lonesome for friends until they are here and then I want to drink them up in huge gulps.

Summer before last, Z and I were away from the city for awhile, and when we got back, a giant Ferris wheel had been built on the edge of Elliott Bay. We didn’t know we’d been missing a Ferris wheel on our landscape, but then there it was, lit up like a blue and green Christmas tree when the Seahawks play a home game, and now it’s hard to remember what it was like before The Great Wheel was there. It makes the waterfront look a little less utilitarian and a lot more fun. Chickpea and I went up for our three spins around. Like all good Seattle tour guides, I spent much of the ride telling her all the things she couldn’t see because of the hazy sky: no Mt. Rainier, no Olympic range. Later, we would learn a pod of Orcas had been in the bay, so we could have been looking for those and enjoying what was in front of us instead of focusing on what wasn’t.

Chickpea lives on the east coast, so when I go home to Indiana, it’s not like she’s on the list of friends I’ll get to see. When we say goodbye at the airport, it’s not like there is any schedule for when next we’ll be together, talking about the merits of Scottie dogs or why we loathe Joyce Maynard. Instead, we just have to be glad for the time we had together, make a plan for an exchange of our writing, and hope that not too much time will pass before we see each other again. Goodbye, Chickpea.

And then, a half hour later, the cell phone rings. Chickpea has missed her flight and if Z and I are inclined to fetch her, we get a few more bonus hours with her. We point our rental car in her direction and accelerate.

Oct29

Happy Birthday(s) to Z

Posted on 29 October 2013 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Z’s birthday at a random hotel with bad art a few years ago.

Z’s birthdays always start off with the ceremonial presentation of gifts while he is still in bed, with only the top of his head peeping out from beneath the quilt, and this Friday was no different. I’m not sure how this tradition got started, particularly since I was always a save-the-presents-until-the-end-of-the-day-so-there-is-something-to-look-forward-to kind of girl, but Z loves his birthday and likes to start it off right. Because I was born early in the new year, my birthday has always signified the end of the holiday celebration, and so those last few hours of gift joy were to be savored. Z’s birthday is on the other, better end of the holidays, so maybe this is why we have such different “birthday styles.” Though we do both seem to be in agreement that we should stretch out the celebrating for multiple days. We’re extravagant like that.

This year there were very few surprises because he’d given me a list of things he wanted and I wasn’t feeling very creative. The bulk of his gifts were treats from Zimbabwe that he wanted, as well as a request for a duplicate silicon spoon for the kitchen because—full disclosure—I don’t always do dishes immediately and he’d like to have a spare so it’s ready for the next day’s meal preparation in case last night’s is still dirty. (Z is an excellent cook and I am not, nor am I an enthusiastic dish washer.) Honestly, the biggest surprise I could muster this year was one of those Slushee cups like I had when I was a kid—you know, you freeze the inner part and then later pour a soda or Kool-Aid into, scrape the sides a few times, and voila!, instant frozen beverage. That’s right. Z and I may be middle aged, but we act like eight year olds. A Slushee cup is a good present. (I really am pleased with myself for thinking of it.) Had he not forbidden me to show you examples of his annual birthday gift bed, I’d post one here. We always do a before photo, when the presents are still nicely wrapped, and then five minutes later, I take an after photo and it looks like a windstorm blew through.

Twelve years ago, I met Z at a beginning of semester party at the nameless Indiana university where he’d just been hired as a visiting professor and where I was a lecturer. It sounds dramatic, but the minute I saw him leaning against a post, sipping a beer, and talking about fishing on the Zambezi with his brother and getting chased by hippos, I said to myself—and then drove immediately to the house of my oldest friend so I could have proof that I’d said it aloud on September 15 , 2001—I’ve met the man I’m going to marry.

Who I forgot to tell was Z. In fact, a month later when his birthday rolled around, he still thought we were just colleagues who shared pleasantries at faculty meetings. His birthday that year fell on a faculty meeting day and he arrived with donuts in hand to celebrate. As luck (and a little pre-planning on my part) would have it, we sat next to each other at that meeting. During a lull, I asked what he was doing for his birthday. I’d never been so bold as to ask a man out, but I couldn’t stand the thought of my future husband sitting on a lawn chair in his apartment in lonely splendor on his birthday, so I decided that I’d see if he’d like some company. Before I could ask, though, he said he was flying to Minnesota to visit friends. Immediately, I imagined some horrible girlfriend there that I’d have to do battle with, but instead of walking away in defeat, I got crafty.

I’m a terrible, terrible liar, and that, more than morality, is the main reason I do so very little of it. I’m not even good at faking enthusiasm for things I don’t like. But I had to think fast, so I asked how he was getting back from the airport when he returned. He said he was taking a cab, and I said—seriously, my only successful lie ever—“As luck would have it, I’m visiting my step-mother who lives right by the airport on Sunday. I could pick you up if you like.” This was not a lie technically in that I do have a step-mother and she did live by the airport and I could visit her, but none of that had been planned. He didn’t immediately accept and I thought perhaps he’d seen through my ruse, but Z is a thrifty guy, and so after the initial pause, he agreed.

Joy!

I spent the next three days while he was in Minnesota painting my nails and plucking my eyebrows and trying to pick out an outfit that didn’t look like I thought I was on a date but that was still alluring. (Very difficult to accomplish.) On the forty minute drive to the airport—and no, I never did make it to my step- mother’s—I constructed a list of conversation generators, and I showed up fifteen minutes early, pacing in the arrivals hall, wondering who this Beth was who was suddenly so convicted of what needed to belong to her. And there he came through the arrivals gate looking slightly hung over.

I don’t remember much of the drive back home, only that it was as impossible to figure out if he had a girlfriend in Minnesota as it was to figure out if he had any interest in me. We talked easily though I found it difficult to focus on the content of what he said because his accent was so intoxicating. I’d ask a question and realize ¾ of the way through his response that I had no idea what the answer was that he’d been giving me. (He would say I am still this way, and it has nothing to do with his accent and more to do with my under-developed listening skills.) The forty minutes flew by. Towards the end of it, I suggested an outing for the following weekend, and he agreed.

Much to my chagrin, it wasn’t a date. Nor would the next five years worth of activities and birthday celebrations. He remained completely oblivious to the fact that we were meant to be together, and even seemed to skip over the part where, after two years, I suggested to him that maybe it was worth considering. I spend a lot of time talking about how awesome Z is in this blog because he IS awesome. He was completely worth the wait. But I have to say, in the years between 2001 and 2006, I was the awesome one. If they gave one out, I’d have earned the Congressional Medal of Unrequited Love during this period. I was a trooper, though at the time, I think most people and one shrink thought I was either deranged or pathetic because I couldn’t let go of that idea I had of the two of us as a couple.

In 2006, Z had just moved to Seattle from Zimbabwe. He had been offered two jobs and because I was starting to suspect that possibly everyone else was right and nothing would ever change between us, I suggested he take the Seattle job instead of the Pittsburgh offer only because I’d never been to Seattle and it sounded like a good place to visit. For his birthday, I flew out to see him and met this city for the first time. While nothing changed ON his birthday, everything changed during the week of my visit. Z had had an epiphany of sorts and wondered if I was still free or willing to consider possibilities between us.

Was I free or willing? Ha. Like I was going to suddenly, after this long wait, start railing against destiny? I don’t think so.

So now, on the occasion of Z’s birthday, I feel extra happy. Not just because I’m glad he got born or because we get excited about things like Slushee cups and Chia pets that other people our age are probably too busy and mature to care about, but because it’s also like the birthday of us, twice over.

Though in retrospect, I’m thinking maybe I should start demanding presents on his birthday too.

Oct24

Remembrance of Things Bulldozed

Posted on 24 October 2013 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Every time I go home to Richmond, there’s a certain sadness that comes from seeing how much things have changed. I don’t stay away long, but even so, when I come back, yet another formerly gorgeous Victorian mansion has been demolished leaving in its place a grassy lot with worn stone steps that go nowhere. Restaurants I grew up loving have gone out of business. The hospital, parts of which were beautiful and where some of my first memories of the town are stored, has been abandoned and looks both haunted and haunting, standing there empty with its eyes poked out and its structure ravaged. (A brief aside: those first memories I speak of were not my birth, but because my mother worked there. Before I knew that things I wanted had to be paid for, Toddler Me tried to make off with a toy toaster from the hospital gift shop.)

If you don’t look in the right places where things are still lovely, it’s a heart breaker.

I was raised to appreciate the town’s history and my heritage. How Quakers (and ones I was related to, which gave me a sense of unearned pride) from North Carolina had made the trip northwest, in part, because they disagreed with the institution of slavery. I knew which parts of town had been settled first, how the gorgeous, crenellated courthouse had a hanging balcony even though no one had ever been hung there, and what businesses had been on what corners at a time that pre-dated me. I grew up in the oldest part of town before it had been revitalized, and I knew that the streets used to have names instead of numbers and on certain buildings you could still see the street markers embedded in the brick. Market and Marion was my favorite intersection, a block from my elementary school. There was something about these hints at how the place used to be that made me wallow in melancholy and long for a past that I was sure was better (and more aesthetically pleasing) than my 1970s reality.

In addition to the town’s history, I’d also been schooled on family history as it unfolded in this town. I knew which Catholic church the Irish people went to and which one the Germans went to, where my maternal grandfather’s car lot had been, how my other grandfather worked at the old post office, now the site of the Indiana Football Hall of Fame, where my parents met, how my great aunt worked at the Hoosier Store , where the furniture store had stood before it caught fire in the 1968 explosion that killed a great uncle. I could locate the place where the interurban used to run, connecting Dayton to Indianapolis. I wondered at a postal system that had two deliveries a day and what it must have been like to live at a time when a horse and wagon brought milk (and ice!) directly to your house. I knew the location where the “girlie” shows used to be that an otherwise God-fearing great-great grandfather was reported to have visited with some regularity.

Somehow I knew it was important to remember and acknowledge this past, despite the fact that people in towns all over America had similar memories and histories. But I liked wallowing in the notion that somehow “my people” had been living life more lovely than I was, and so often I would spend as much time thinking about how it all “used to be” for them than I did noticing the present I was actually inhabiting.

One day before I got married I was driving across the new bridge, hollering to myself about how ugly and modern it was compared to the old bridge. Suddenly, I was struck by the notion of how much simpler my life would be if I weren’t always reflecting on a past that wasn’t even mine. I imagined it would be the most astounding kind of liberation, not to have to feel your blood pressure go up when a favorite building was demolished or when another big box store usurped the heart of downtown. What would it be like to just live my life and not drive past the Leland Hotel without having bricks and mortar trigger a spiral of thoughts including the hotel’s former grandeur, how before it was a building, it was the site of a casket factory where my great grandfather worked at the end of the 19^th century, and from there have my imagination take over with constructed memories about how hard it must have been for him to leave his parents in West Virginia, and how hard it must have been for them to leave Ireland and back and back and back . On a drive from one side of my small town to the other, I could have been crushed by the weight of other people’s histories.

And then I moved to Seattle. I missed home regularly, but after a few months I was struck by how light I felt in a city where I had no emotional attachment to anything. It’s as if the Rockies and the Cascade Mountains were holding back all the history of home that had made me broody my whole life. It was a strange sensation to listen to the news and realize I didn’t particularly care if the heavily trafficked but sort of hideous viaduct downtown was demolished. If I saw a wrecking ball, I didn’t assume it was destroying something historically important. Instead, I’d cross my fingers that a grocery closer to our apartment was going in. Because Seattle is younger than my hometown and none of “my” people had settled it, I’ve been detached as it moves and shifts around me.

But lately…I find I’m suddenly aware of the changes that happen in my vicinity, and I don’t always like them. Two years ago the grocery down the street that was perfect if you had a late night baking or cooking need went out of business, and I’m still bitter about that loss, but it was more an issue of being inconvenienced than feeling like the fabric of society was ripping. And of course I was upset when two bookstores I regularly visited went out of business, but that’s how I feel about all independent bookstores everywhere that can’t compete with that other colossal “local” bookstore (that begins with an A).

No, what I’m noticing now are much stronger negative reactions to changes like the disappearance of an entire swathe of diverse buildings in Capitol Hill—the gritty sort where you can imagine what Seattle was like before the rest of the world discovered it and started fancying it up—which have been replaced by layers and layers of living space that looks identical to the apartment tower next to it and behind it. In the seven years that Z has lived here, Broadway has become more upscale strip mall and less quirky neighborhood haven for artists and social outcasts.

I still can’t even talk about the heartache of the neighborhood Greek diner going out of business and being replaced by something Asian.

Other, smaller changes have begun to bother me: a re-configured turn lane to accommodate the streetcar that will soon be in place (a good thing, really, but still, it rankles); a dirty-looking hookah bar, parking lot, and drive-thru coffee hut bulldozed in one fell swoop for yet another apartment tower in an area that doesn’t really affect my normal line of sight, but I find the shadows from the taller building off-putting; the removal of an authentic Mexican restaurant so a Mexican food chain could go in its place.

Last week I was mentally growling at a crane and pile of rubble two blocks from our house and realized that I had finally gone round the bend. I was lamenting the absence of what had only ever been a façade for the whole of our Seattle experience. Someone knocked down a building, left the front of it standing, propped up with two-by-fours, and the debris left behind was inhabited only by some street-smart raccoons. What exactly was it that bothered me about that particular eyesore being replaced with the promise of something more substantial (and less raccoon-y)?

The best I can figure is that what I’m railing against is having the backdrop of our history here changed. When Rick first came to Seattle and I started visiting, we were focused forward: our newly discovered love, a new city to explore, a new phase of life. Our history was miniscule—there was nothing to pin to the corkboard in our minds of “how it used to be.” It was a good time; everything was in the present tense. We may never have gone into the Lusty Lady, a downtown hot pink peep show venue that had been hawking its wares with some hilarious and pun-filled signs for 27 years, but it was part of the landscape of our new life together, and all that mystery and hope. There’s still plenty of both of those ingredients, but some chapters have been written now. When we walk by what remains of the big pink marquis and see “Space for Rent” in place of “We Take Off More than Boeing” it feels a little as if “Early Beth and Z” is being slowly erased.

Fortunately, new memories are being constructed here daily.