Our too-many-dollars-a-month Oh La La apartment has a lovely view and nice big windows with plenty of light, but what it doesn’t have is screens.
Other people who are not on the tasting menu of Mosquito Café can probably live without screens here, but I am both starter and main course on their menu, which means last year we used the AC a lot when we didn’t really need to. This year, however, we had a plan: Velcro tape and mosquito netting!
Is it attractive and befitting Oh La La’s standards? Absolutely not. Is it effective? Based on the number of mosquitos stuck to it on the outside, absolutely. Do I feel guilty about the deaths of the mosquitos who can’t always figure out how to get out from between the window and the net? No, I do not. They’ve had a campaign to either kill me or at least make my life miserable for years now. In the words of Samuel L. Jackson’s character in A Time to Kill, “Yes I think [they] deserve to die and I hope [they] burn in hell.”
Also, as a non-scientist, I spend a weird amount of time thinking about the purpose of different creatures in the Circle of Life, and I’ve made as much peace as I can with things that creep me out like snakes and other reptiles, but is there ANY purpose to a mosquito besides spreading ill-will and disease?
The “screen” that I installed just this morning next to my desk makes me feel cut off from my neighbors across the street. The view is not as clear, which they might think is a boon, but what it means for me is less watching cats stretch in windowsills or seeing the pre-schooler on the eighth floor who moved in with his family recently. He peers out the window and I have imagined having a friendly wave that develops into one of those feel-good videos you see on social media of the kindly older neighbor who makes life more fun for the youngster by putting on puppet shows from afar.
Before the mosquito net went up, one evening I saw his parents chasing him and his little sibling around like a little family locomotive on a circular track to nowhere. It was a moment I wish I could film and then send them—those non-occasions you forget to record—but even if I could, all arrows would point to me being a creepy threat to their privacy.
Now, with the mosquito netting up, we’ll never make a connection. He is a tiny ghost and to him I probably look like a bear writing its memoirs.
Things rarely look the way I imagine they will anyhow, so why would this be different?
Over Memorial Day weekend, I convinced Z that we should make our first trip to Elliot Bay Books now that he is boosted and I’m Evusheld-ed. Because it was the holiday weekend, I imagined everyone out hiking in the mountains or off at a cookout or picnic, Z and I having the bookstore to ourselves, so comfortable with the lack of people that we even would dare to take off our masks.
Hardy har har.
Everyone in Seattle was in the store. Every. Single. One. And they were all exactly where I wanted to be. It was an entire store of Freebreathing Readers. It’s the most people I’ve been around in a long, long time and while I wasn’t actively hating them at mosquito levels, I really did wish they’d leave. Especially the ones glued to their phones who weren’t even browsing. At one point I was upstairs near the bargain tables and believed there was no oxygen getting through the tight weave of my N95, so I considered tossing the books in my arms and racing outside to pull the mask from my face. (My second thought was, how am I ever going to fly again so long as we’re all poison to each other?) It just wasn’t what I’d been picturing for us on our first outing into the world.
Here. Let me re-direct myself to the brighter side.
Was out in public for first time in months and months and months!
Was in a BOOK STORE that is one of my all-time favorites!
Was able to touch books I have only read about in the New York Times!
Had over a $100 worth of gift cards from 2019!
Had a full punch card which meant $20 off my spending!
Found three books and a magazine I wanted!
Did not die of a near panic attack—Lexapro must be working!
Did not spend all of my gift cards on the 3 books and one magazine and so can go back to buy more at a hopefully less busy time!
That’s better.
The books are just staring at me, calling to me even, but I’ve been busy reading other things and have had to put them on pause. Don’t they look inviting though?
I loved the poetic sentences and thoughts in Melissa Febos’s Abandon Me, and so can’t wait to read these two books of hers. The Tracy Chevalier was the only book of hers on the shelf and I fell in love with the cover even though I’d gone there to get one of her other titles. I find her usual mix of history, imagination, and feminism to be exactly what suits me when I’m looking for a story to lose myself in.
Z went in with less gift-card-buying power than I had and, as usual, left with more books because he’s a thrifty shopper and I usually get suckered in by the new releases or, at least, new in paperback. He’s a much faster reader too, so it probably comes out in the wash.
Here, he would probably like for me to tell you that he is only allowed one IKEA 12×12 square in our bookcase system for his books, which sounds grossly unfair on its face given the sheer number of 12×12 squares we have for “my” books. (May it please the court, if his books are good ones that he passes on to me because he thinks I’ll like them, they make their way into the General Collection and the number of books on Zimbabwe and novels and memoirs by African writers in general have pride of pace on the top center shelf right at eye level. Also, though I abhor stereotypes about only children because I’ve found them not to be particularly accurate, it’s worth noting he knew what he was getting when he married me.)
I want to live in this cover.
Speaking of Z, he also would like for you to know that in my last post I made it sound as if he were the dog gatekeeper in this marriage—putting an electric fence between me and the canine object of my desire. That is not true. The deal I made with myself was that I wouldn’t let myself get a dog until I finished the memoir. It’s easier to make it seem someone else is keeping me from the things I want instead of my own brand of slow-writing and semi-regular procrastination. Do not blame Z! He is blameless!
The only pet I’m entitled to currently is a rock.
Last week Leibovitz and I talked on the phone while she waited to hear if Baby Leibovitz–with a recently minted college diploma—had landed in Australia for an internship. It seems like only a few months ago she was toddling around the Leibovitz house dragging her pink blanket with her, making everyone laugh, which was her special baby medicine to make everyone around her feel better/happier than they already were.
I understand now—all these years later—why so many older people had opinions about what I should be doing with my life when I graduated. They cared about me, yes, but also, there is something about a young person going out into the world on an adventure you wouldn’t have tried yourself at 22 that makes you want to live vicariously through them, waste none of the time you did, make none of the mistakes, miss none of the opportunities. You kind of want do-overs and the only way to have them is vicariously, and thus the over-investing in someone else’s life choices.
Baby L’s Graduation/Bon Voyage card.
And now I realize linking the stories about Gauze Boy and Baby Leibovitz and my fascination with them and the lives they are leading makes me sound like I’m about to build a Gingerbread House and lure them in for a snack. Maybe forget everything I just said about both of them. And please believe me when I say I have no cages here and am not firing up any ovens to bake a Youth Pie.
You know I don’t like to use the kitchen.
What I have been fantasizing about lately instead of anti-aging pastries is traveling. I’ve always been the absolute happiest in life when my next trip was already an idea in my head, even if it was a weekend away at a cottage somewhere. I liked thinking about what I’d pack, which books I’d take, and I’d toy with the idea of taking no electronics and then laugh at myself because, of course I’d be taking my laptop, iPad, and phone, as well as my headphones, and booklight. It’s like meditation to me. Watching packing videos on YouTube lulls me into one of the best sleeps.
And that’s not even planning what I’d do when I got there, even though usually what I do is berate myself for not reading or writing or painting more. Or going out and pretending to be an extrovert and chatting to the locals. (Why enjoy yourself when there’s an opportunity for self-flagellation away from home.)
Anyhow, none of that is happening because everyone in America is vacationing this summer and so hotels and house rentals are either not available or a bajillion dollars here in Puget Sound. Car rentals are hard to find and, again, when you do, instead of our preferred $14.99 a day at Enterprise, they’re more like $200 a day. And you all know what gas is like right now. This is one of the few times I’ve actually been glad that we’ve lived the last 12 years Carless in Seattle and aren’t having shock at the gas pump like everyone else. But it is currently limiting our options.
So I’ve been trying to figure out ways that we can make a staycation seem exciting even though we’ve been staycationing since March of 2020. I was considering hanging mirrors to reflect light in a different way or putting on a different bedspread or rearranging the furniture so we feel like we’re somewhere else.
Enter World Traveler Hudge, who has offered us an opportunity to stay on her houseboat for a bit when she’s out of town doing research. It’s two-miles away and I can see part of the water her houseboat is on from my window here at Oh La La (one that is NOT covered in netting), but it will be a whole different world. Hopefully next time I report to you, I’ll have stories of waterfowl and boat traffic and walking through a neighborhood that isn’t “downtown adjacent.” I’m already looking forward to a time in the future when I can say, “When we lived on the houseboat” without lying, even though what we’re really doing is staying on a floating home.
A view from Casa de Hudge
That said, I have some potential bug-bite concerns and am already mentally packing mosquito nets. Once when we were staying on a houseboat on Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, Z and our family and I were sitting on the upper deck as the sun set, listening to waves lap against the boat. And then suddenly, as if an alarm had gone off, a cauldron of bats flew into the sky. My sister-in-law let a cheer and said, “Get ‘em, guys” and the bats feasted on any mosquitos who might have been thinking of snacking on us.
There were so many things on that trip that amazed me and that stick with me, but that one—the discovery that a creature I’d associated only with haunted houses and vampires could be so helpful—is one of my fondest memories.
You know, I’ve made no deals with Z or the universe about finishing any writing projects before getting a pet bat. Maybe if we had a small, cute one, I could forego mosquito nets henceforth, open up the views, cast aside the insect repellent, and various fairy tale concoctions–lavender, vitamin B, white clothing, Avon’s Skin So Soft–that I put my trust in to make me less delicious. We’ll see.
Wherever you are, I hope you are well, bite-free, and traveling with a full tank and unobstructed views.
Neighbors from the Seattle University art department.
Recently, I started my Writing for Procrastinator’s class at Hugo House—a favorite of mine to teach—and I’m finding myself in the unfortunate position of not having taken my own advice for the last three months. I’ve written at least five partial blog posts, but then I make the mistake of reading the news and my mind gets funky. Like a lot of us, I sit and stew in the news’s aftermath and wonder what the point of any of it is. And then I distract myself with writing, or reading, or watching the hummingbirds that come to our window daily like well-dressed drones, peering into our windows.
Me telling you about my new glorious votive candle seems trite in the face of war, disease, pestilence, etc. Who cares if I’ve discovered the perfect chocolate bar and pen when we’re all clearly in a hand basket headed straight for hell.
But also, who wants to read—let alone write—more words about how rotten the world is at the moment? Maybe it’s the muchness of information that exists in all of our lives now, but at the moment, it feels like there are enough people writing about the horrors out there, enough people reminding us that we shouldn’t be enjoying X because the Ukrainians can’t or because people suffering Long Covid can’t remember that a chickadee is their favorite bird or whatever. There were enough people weighing in on the Oscar slap heard ‘round the world that I really, REALLY don’t need to add my two cents.
Oh, how that skyline has changed just since I’ve been here.
Also, I’m reading Coll Thrush’s 2007 Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (highly recommended for anyone who lives or knows Seattle, and for anyone interested in blasting away the myth that the indigenous people of what would become the United States disappeared and weren’t a part of the shaping of urban centers). With practically every page I turn I’m reminded that what we’ve been living through the last few years is just life. I’m only halfway through the book, but it’s all pretty relatable: the virus in question is small pox, the clashes are between cultures, yes, but also different ways that “the Bostons” (aka settlers) envisioned the future of Seattle, etc. There really is nothing new under the sun, something it would do me good to remember when I close my eyes and ignore the news.
Let’s call the above five paragraphs what they are: me finding fault with the things that occupy my mind so you will be less inclined to find fault with me and how I’m writing about the frivolous instead of the important.
The Big News on the Beth-n-Z frontier is that I won the lottery and get to have the Evusheld shot next week that will bring my wonky immune system up to something more akin to “normal” and thus—with precautions—I can maybe see a friend or two, maybe visit my beloved Elliott Bay Books for more books by local authors or on local history. Also, there is a breeder of the rare and delightful Glen of Imaal Terriers in town and she has invited me over to meet her first litter of puppies to see if they can woo me away from my Scottie love. By now, I suspect the puppies are all spoken for and Z is not in a pet-ownership mood yet, but it’s coming people. It’s coming. I’m tired of looking at people around the city with their cute dogs and badly behaved dogs and bedraggled dogs and well-dressed dogs, and wondering when I’m going to be adult enough to say, this…this is what I want in my life. Once I have this magical shot, visiting a stranger who lives on Queen Anne to see some puppies can actually happen and though nothing will come of it, it’s a step closer to me stamping my foot and pointing out the faulty logic my mother (in the 1970s) and Z (in the 20nows) have both presented me with re: the impracticality of having a dog in an apartment.
In case you are unfamiliar with the breed, here is one of the wee beasties—Jill–that I follow on Instagram. In at least half the posts she has a stick twice her size jammed in her mouth, and it astounds me that someone else’s dog—and a dog that lives on the other side of the world at that—delights me so much.
Last month, Chickpea sent me a package that was the fabulous surprise of not only the perfect Scottie dog pen but also a Saint Stevie Nicks votive candle, and I see that as a positive sign about better days ahead. Or at least the days right in front of me that I—right this minute—can enjoy as they present themselves.
Stevie is now living in the “Lady Magic” corner of my desk where I keep my inspirational baubles and reminders that though I was raised in a patriarchal religion it’s okay if I have touchstones with the Eternal Feminine. You’ve been introduced to some of the relics there and others might be new to you. At the moment, those items include: three different containers full of my favorite pens and paint brushes; a photo of Bailey, the first Scottie dog I truly loved; another of me, aged four, typing away on my mother’s Olympia typewriter despite having only a few spell-able words in my brain and no idea what a narrative arc was; a third photo of my parents in 1966 when I was still baking and they were young, happy, and looked exactly like younger versions of themselves; a prayer card of Joan of Arc, believing in her visions and ready for battle; at least one set of prayer beads draped over a shrine I’ve made to Our Lady of Perpetual Help; a wooden file box with index cards in it for places to send my work and notes about what is circulating and what has been rejected.
The pen isn’t working for me, but that ink. My.
I also recently added Crow Oracle cards (designed by Seattle artist MJ Cullinane) that I use to start writing sessions by selecting a card and seeing if it gives me a new way to look at my work. Today’s card: Anomaly—a depiction of a white crow—sits on my computer so I’ll see it throughout the day and ponder the notion of differences, of what is “normal” and what stands uniquely alone.
Stevie will be at home here. All that is missing is Blue Pearl incense, which I can’t burn because of Oh La La’s policies against open flames and because Z and I have lungs that do not appreciate incense of any variety. Even so, I took a chance and briefly lit the Stevie votive in the bathroom with the fan on because I had a great grandmother who believed that unlit candle wicks were bad luck, and I’ve adopted it as my own superstition. It was lit just long enough to blacken the wick and not long enough for the smoke detector or Deputy Z to notice and report me to the management.
It’s good to have things to rebel against when you light a candle—oh so briefly—to a rock goddess.
“She is like a cat in the dark and then she is the darkness.”
Look at her. Nobody can wear a hooded cape or red lipstick like Stevie. And I’d like my 13-year-old self—who was always on the lookout for backward masking and Satanic symbolism on my LPs in the early ‘80s—to take note that that pentagram on her chest is not upside down and therefore not shaped like a goat’s head and therefore nothing to be concerned about re: Satanism. Stevie has been many things but the reason she scores a place in the creativity corner is because she has such confidence in her lyrics’ right to exist. And nobody dare question her fashion choices.
You need someone like her in your corner when you are a woman of a certain age who has erred on the side of caution re: expressing yourself. Stevie has never erred on the side of caution. She has written the tortured love songs (which, I posit, no one truly understands—least of all Lindsay Buckingham) and they have been hits.
There’s another new development in Lady Magic Corner: a bottle of Waterman Encre Bleu Sérénité ink.
As a messy person, I’ve never taken to fountain pens in the past. The ink always ended up all over my hands and seemed too fussy when a person can just use a ball point or felt tip pen. Also, their tendency to scratch was a problem for me and sometimes they seemed too show-offy. If I don’t have on a top hat and spats when I go to an (imaginary) board meeting in a room paneled in solid walnut, then I have no right to such a fancy writing implement.
That single semester I was an art major in college was marred by a first assignment that involved three of my least favorite things: outdoors, a blistering sun, and a scratchy drawing utensil. As a class, we had to go to a farm and draw something there that inspired us in pen and ink. The only thing that inspired me was the promise of the end of the two hours and a trip back to campus, but I scratched out a massive scene of a rickety shed and some rusty farm implements. An aunt who would to support my art, had it framed and hung it over her sofa for years. When she died, the drawing returned to me, and even now I can’t look at it without feeling my nerves made electric and raw from the feeling of that pen on the paper.
So me having a bottle of blue ink on my desk is somewhere near anomaly, but when a friend’s artistic teenager suggested a fountain drawing pen, I bought the pen and the ink and then I fell in love. Not with the pen—though it is smooth and nicely weighted—but with this gorgeous blue ink and the glass bottle it came in.
See that bright, cobalt line on the outer edge of the bottle if it’s held up to the light? I can’t get enough of it. This particular color has been my favorite my entire life, so while it is unlikely I’ll start writing in my journal with a quill, just looking at the blue ink sloshing around inside the glass makes me feel all the feelings. It’s the exact opposite of that scratchy pen I had to use in Drawing 101 when I was 18 while I slapped at mosquitos in a hayfield. I can feel something akin to those same nerves crawling up the back of my neck, but it’s the good kind of hair-raising electricity.
None of these descriptions are saying what I mean. Let me try again. To see cobalt blue—whether it is my engagement ring when it catches the light or the ancient jar of Vicks VapoRub from a time when it was still in glass—is to leave my body and float above it, clutching my sides in ecstasy much like Snuffles from Quick Draw McGraw cartoons:
Snuffles knows what makes him happy.
Also in the color department, for my birthday in January, Z got me the Cariuma OCA sneakers that Helen Mirren has been seen in. When I put them on for a daily walk I get another little thrill. Until I saw them, I had no idea that I hoped to one day wear something that Dame Mirren has been spotted in (excluding her costumes from Excalibur in 1981), but here I am. Ecstatic about rubber-toed Kelly-green tennis shoes and shocked that droves of people aren’t stopping me on the street to find out where I got them. I know it’s a kind of fashion blasphemy, but they are prettier than Chuck Taylor’s and they plant some trees with every order.
I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille
Don’t tell Z, but now I’ve got my eye on another pair in an exquisite shade of Periwinkle. Somewhere in his future is a wife who has a different color of sneakers for every day of the week that she puts on in the morning to walk a dog.
These are silly things. Maybe signs that I’m just a consumer or my belief system is problematic. Or in finding joy in plastic Scottie pens and new shoes and the color blue I’m kind of…shallow. But when you find things that delight you when there are so many arrows, bells, and exclamation points calling your attention to the ugly, to the battlefields, islands of plastic floating in the Pacific, and the sick or dying, I like to remind myself that while these things are true, so is beauty, so is delight, so is love.
Normally, this time of year I’d have some stories to tell about Mom’s annual birthday trek to Seattle, how much I love fall, how I dragged Z to an orchard though he doesn’t understand the appeal since you can buy cider at the grocery, big plans for Z’s birthday, etc. But like last year, Mom had to give the trip a miss because of COVID threats and because her offspring (that’d be me) may or may not have immunity to the virus after receiving a second try at getting vaccinated. I’ve been nowhere except to get said vaccines and I’ve only seen Z in the flesh and everyone else via Zoom since mid-August. This was Zs second boring Pandemic Birthday, where we stayed in, watched TV, and he washed his new birthday socks. Woo hoo.
Also, I’m avoiding the news because it’s rarely good, so unless you’d like to hear me talk about Squid Game, the Great British Bake-Off, and whether Noodle the TikTok pug is having a Bones or No Bones day, what you’ll be getting this month are random thoughts and questions I’m wrestling with at the moment.
1.
Z and I have trash bags full of our freshly laundered clothes layered with lavender-scented dryer sheets because I read moths don’t like lavender. We’ve been dealing with a moth infestation for months, which wasn’t so strange at our old place with windows that didn’t close tightly and that seemed like they had been in the apartment longer than we had, maybe even since 1923 when the place was built. But it is very odd here at Oh La La because we’re basically living in a non-spherical biosphere.
We’ve made our apartment as hostile an environment for them as possible, short of installing the moth-equivalent of those non-roosting bird spikes that I hate to see on eaves around the city. Those seem so mean-spirited, but apparently if pigeons moved into our apartment, I’d be installing spikes everywhere because my compassion doesn’t extend as far as holes (or pigeon crap) in my woolen Irish acquisitions: two woolen blankets, an Aran sweater, my favorite winter coat, and a pair of forest green cashmere gloves that I bought in Waterford in 2006 and wear so rarely that they are still like new but just knowing I have a pair of cashmere gloves makes me feel like a grown-up (even if I got them on a clearance table at the history museum there). No. There I draw the line.
Trash? Moving? Moths?
2.
I’m reading Colum McCann’s novel Apeirogon wherein he tells the true but partially fictionalized story of two grieving fathers—one Israeli, one Palestinian—who are friends and working towards peace. The format he uses is with numbered cantos (sort of like this) that add up to 1,001, as in The Thousand and One Nights. Some of the sections are meaty narrative. Others are a single sentence. Some are just photos. Some are all about the main story of the two fathers and their dead daughters and their conviction that with communication and recognition of the Other as human, peace can be attained. Some cantos talk about birds or slingshots or François Mitterrand. I like miscellany and McCann’s style, so for the most part the structure works for me.
At other times I wonder if all the numbers and pauses and details don’t get in the way of the story. Also, the beauty at the heart of the story doesn’t have anything to do with McCann and so much more to do with these two men, Rami Elhanana andBassam Aramin, and the stories that conflict forced onto their families. So, I go back and forth on this issue about whether it’s a great book that everyone should read or if I’d be as moved had I read an article about the men. I have no idea where I’m going to land on this once I’ve finished the book.
A thousand-and-one numbered sections seems like a lot. Is it genius? Is it arrogance? Is it something in between?
Also, I’m beginning to question why I believe I must land on one or the other.
3.
The summer JFK Jr.’s plane went missing on a trip to Hyannis Port for his cousin Rory’s wedding, I got asthmatic bronchitis. Going upstairs to my bed was overwhelming because I had so little breath and even less energy. Once I made it up to my bedroom, I’d climb in bed for a nap and thought I wouldn’t ever go downstairs again because of how awful it was to gasp for breath trying to do something I’d been able to do just fine a few days before as if there would always be plenty of air to breathe.
I spent a lot of time thinking about these mythical creatures—the Kennedys—while I convalesced. I had learned about them as a child in the same way I learned about Snow White, Santa Claus, Abraham Lincoln, my great-great grandmother, Amelia Earhart, and Jesus. They were all equally cartoon-y and real to me and people whose stories were worth studying.
Mom had a book of photos of JFK’s life, and I would study the ones of him with his arm around his daughter, playing with his kids in the Oval Office, some fuzzy images from the Zapruder film, and that iconic photo of his toddler son saluting his casket.
It was hard to believe that that toddler was now missing at the prime of his life. Because I loved Arthurian Legends, there was part of me that had always believed JFK Jr. was the Boy Who Would Be King, never mind his main political overture had been starting a magazine about politics for people who didn’t know much (or care) about politics.
I also felt weirdly mournful for Rory too, and how her wedding day had been wrecked and how it’s not the kind of thing a bride can complain about without seeming like a selfish whiner: that one time my cousin ruined my wedding by going missing. At the time, I knew nothing about her, but with my new computer, I asked Jeeves to tell me all about her, and discovered she was the youngest of RFK’s children, a year younger than I was, and so young, in fact, that she had never met her own father because he was assassinated six months before she was born.
I didn’t believe in things like curses though the tabloids were regularly talking about the “Kennedy curse” whenever a Kennedy died in a tragic way. But when you added up all the sadness that one family had it seemed unlikely that they’d find John John’s plane parked in a hangar somewhere while he, his wife, and his sister-in-law were grabbing a lobster roll at a roadside stand on a whim.
4.
On my last outing into the world, Providence, Hudge, Z and I went to Camano Island for a picnic. We sat under tall pines, listened to Puget Sound licking the shore, annoyed occasionally by the noise of a boat or seaplane that passed, and we rejoiced that at last we could all be together, have our masks off, and share a meal. It was such a magical day that I even had a rare Scottie dog sighting when an older man walked his pup near us. A friend refers to those heady days this past summer when it felt briefly like COVID was behind us as “Hot Vax Summer.” This day had all those hallmarks: it was beautiful and so nice to be reminded of all the things I love about the Pacific Northwest and have seen so little of for the last year and a half.
5.
Is it worth noting that I am reading Apeirogon with my eyes on my iPad and listening to it on my phone simultaneously, which may be why the book works for me? McCann’s Irish accent and use of the pause makes it sound more like poetry than it might if I were only reading it on the iPad and hearing the words with my eyes. In fact, I wonder if I had the book in my hands if I’d be annoyed by the structure and the weight of so much extra.
6.
There’s a new puppy across the street who has his own little patio-kingdom to explore. When he first arrived, I thought he was a Lab. Then his hair got longer and he seemed more like a Golden Retriever. Then the fur got curlier and Z and I speculated that it was some make or model of a Doodle. Now that I can see his paws, I’m wondering if he’s going to be a Pyrenees. It feels like all of those possibilities still exist in him though—the different breeds, the different personalities. He is adorable no matter what he turns into.
Unless you are the calico cat who lives with him.
7.
We are still ordering groceries and having them delivered. Z is a good husband. He really wants to get back to QFC in person so he can squeeze mangos and check eggs for cracks before he puts them in the cart, but he wants to keep me safe until we find out what my antibody status is.
When the groceries arrive it’s always a bit like opening a grab bag to see if you “won” something good or if you got a dud item. Yesterday, the guac got replaced and we were sad, but then when he pulled it out of the bag, we discovered it had been replaced with a bigger tub of guac, which felt like a win. Other items feeling less like a win: the sale grapes ($2.99) being replaced with grapes that must be magic because they cost $9.99. Somehow, we ended up with three loaves of bread. And the mystery we can’t quite solve is why we ended up with a huge brick of cheese (HUGE) when cheese hadn’t been on the order at all. Maybe the shopper thought gobs of real cheese was a great replacement for the fake cheese I have to eat that the store rarely has, or maybe he thought since we had almost ten-dollars-worth of grapes, we needed cheese as an accompaniment.
8.
You can plan all you want, but you never really know what you are going to get in this life.
9.
I had a mild reaction to the second vaccine that left my nose dripping, my head aching, and me sleepy. One night I fell asleep listening to Colum McCann narrate Apeirogon and I dreamed I was having an intense conversation with a handsome man I was trying to woo (Z did not exist in this dream—forgive me Z) as he stocked shelves and racks at a high-end men’s store. It was the kind of store I never go into and he was the kind of small-boned man with overly gel-ed hair- that I never had interest in. In the dream I realized why. He wouldn’t quit flitting and he wouldn’t quit talking. My sense was that he was always this way, but on this occasion of me following him from display to display and trying to get a word in edgewise, he wouldn’t shut up about the tensions between Israel and Palestine. I’d try to ask a question or add my own thoughts on the matter, and he kept droning on and on as if I weren’t there.
I have never felt so unseen. I kept checking to make sure I wasn’t a ghost.
When I woke up, I realized it was just Colum McCann reading his own novel into my ear to put me to sleep, clueless that anyone was on the other side of his recording trying to have a conversation with him in her dreams. I turned off Colum and went back to a more peaceful slumber.
10.
The lifespan of a female moth is around 30 days.
11.
Because it was still technically summer when Providence, Hudge, Z and I went on the picnic, I wore sandals. I was imagining a beach with sand that we might walk on, but instead, when we headed to the water after lunch, I discovered the beach was covered in golf ball and baseball sized rocks that were nearly impossible for my shoes to manage. The three of them in their more sensible shoes moved up the wrack line, and I sat on a log and watched the waves of Puget Sound. To be “alone” in nature for a time was blissful. Spiritual even.
Though I was ecstatic inside, apparently my outsides weren’t satisfactorily expressing this, because a man who walked by with his wife jolted me out of my moment with a shout, “Smile! It’s not that bad!” I looked at him and he was so pleased with himself for having dumped a load of his brand of sunshine on my otherwise delightfully grey day.
Even though I’ve been a feminist since birth, when a stranger man—and it’s always been men because women never tell other women to smile—has commanded me thusly, I’ve felt that I was failing to present myself in a pleasing way, as if that were my job, though I am not a model nor am I in the hospitality industry. The line I hate the most is, “It can’t be that bad!” There are two reasons I hate this.
I was born with a resting melancholic face, and I always look kind of the way I imagine Jane Eyre looked when she had to leave Thornfield Hall because the man she loved and nearly married had failed to mention his current wife’s existence in his attic.
How does the speaker know the person hasn’t just had a terrible day or gotten devastating news? They never say, “Oh my goodness! You look so sad. Is there anything I can do to help? Would you like half of my Snickers?” No. They say, “Smile!” as if your face is theirs to shape to their liking.
And now, the Crone years are upon me and I long for a sword that I could brandish in the faces of the offending parties and tell them to move along and accost no frowning woman ever again or I will hunt them down and teach them what chivalry really is.
Camano Island, WA
12.
After searching our apartment thoroughly—opening drawers, flipping through our hanging clothes, carefully inspecting pillows and the underside of three wool rugs—I finally discovered that the moths had been living rent-free in the vacuum that we keep in the coat-closet-slash-“laundry room.” The very vacuum I’d just carefully run all over the rugs to suck up any moths keen to set up a homestead. Also, it turns out, after cleaning up our previous apartment last November before we turned in the keys, we brought this very vacuum to the new apartment and promptly forgot to change the sweeper bag. Or rather, I thought I changed it but did not. And then we got our loyal robovac, Angus, and kind of forgot about the old upright anyhow because we haven’t been so concerned about deep cleaning since we aren’t having guests in.
Basically, we let the moths gestate in the closet for nine months, and now we are reaping what we accidentally sowed.
13.
Given how addicted I am to the National Zoo’s current “Cheetah Cam” maybe I should ask if it’s possible to set up a Moth Cam
14.
The cat across the street periodically comes onto the patio and sniffs around, and inevitably, the puppy discovers the cat is not in the apartment and comes bounding out, searching for it, and then barks at it. The bark could be anything from a joyful attempt to get the cat to play to a territorial reminder that the patio is his. What I do know is the cat braces herself for the onslaught. She turns her back to the dog, even if it means she’s facing the brick wall, and her body—though it doesn’t move—appears to be in her best facsimile of a you-don’t-exist-to-me stance. I am mostly a dog person because I’m allergic to cats but I feel badly for her and think about how her life must have seemed ideal before the puppy arrived, took over her territory, tried to tell her how to behave. I keep hoping I’ll look out one day and they’ll be curled around each other in inter-species companionship.
A rare moment when Cat is facing Puppy
15.
The neighbors probably think I’m spying on them, but it’s really all about their animals. They could be doing naked fire dances in their living rooms, and I’d only be interested in whether or not the dog’s tail was getting too close to the flame.
16.
That’s a lie. There are new human arrivals five floors up from the puppy and the cat. It’s a woman and man who have modern but stately furnishings, like real grown-ups and not people who picked a room at IKEA and re-created it in their own apartment. I have this feeling that it is a mother and son, even though that seems so unlikely. The son could be 16 or 26 and she could be 24 or 64 from my vantage, but her hair is nearly white or platinum blond and short and she’s always buzzing around cleaning things up while he stands eating over the sink. Usually, she has a phone crooked on her shoulder. Does anybody do that anymore who is Gen X or younger? Crook a phone? Talk on a phone? It doesn’t matter, but we so rarely see people our age or older in these buildings because they all headed for the suburbs years ago.
17.
In 2005 I was at a writer’s retreat at Kinnitty Castle in Ireland, and Colum McCann led a session on the work that goes into one of his novels, where story ideas come from, the writing life. At the time, he was telling us about the research he did with the unhoused population in a major city, how he spent some nights with them under a bridge, the conversations he had.
Women were swooning as if George Clooney were suddenly in our midst.
That night he danced in the castle pub with my friend Isabella who was in her 70s at the time, and I was charmed by their flirtation, by the way he treated her with respect and as if this dance was just as important as some dance he might have had in his youth when he was hoping to score. He was enchanted by her just as so many of those in our group were enchanted with him. I loved him a little for that because I too was enchanted with Isabella. She and I spent a lot of time together at the castle, and I invited her to go to Galway with me for a couple of days at the end of our week-long workshop. At the time, I was feeling old and unwoo-able at 38, she told me—using her psychologist’s authority, her warmth as a new friend, and her New Yorker’s no nonsense—“If you lived in New York instead of Indiana, you’d just now be thinking about settling down, finding a partner, starting a family if you wanted. You’re young.” Then she proceeded to tell me about the man she’d most recently had a fling with. She’d always mourn her husband, she said, but there was a lot of marrow to be sucked from life yet for her and thus, by default, for me.
It doesn’t sound like much of a message, maybe, but I quit worrying about my age quite so much that day and when I think of the kind of older woman I want to be, Isabella is one of the people I think of.
Kinnitty Castle, Ireland
18.
I miss Isabella.
19.
Since the summer of asthmatic bronchitis and search and recovery missions, I’ve had pneumonia. I can’t really distinguish between the two conditions except to know that I hope to never get either again. Both of my grandmothers were on oxygen, one because of emphysema and the other because of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. My father and his brother died of lung cancer. I worry about lungs. My lungs. The lungs of people I love.
20.
Because my pulmonary system is related to people who have bad luck with their own, I’ve locked myself in my tower while I await the All-Clear signal from the CDC or the Fully- Vaccinated-with-Antibodies signal from my doctor.
21.
Around the time of my self-imposed quarantine, a two-person parole board in California recommended Sirhan Sirhan for parole. In a statement decrying this recommendation that was written by Rory Kennedy and five of her siblings, they address not just the loss of their father that shaped their family but the loss to America. My mother hadn’t had books about RFK’s life and assassination to fascinate me as a child, so I’d never considered how the country—the world—might have been had he lived. He inspired the daughter he never met to make documentaries about people marginalized for one reason or another. What else might he have inspired if he’d been given a chance?
What might anyone who has died unnaturally because of violence or their own or someone else’s bad choices have accomplished if only they’d been able to live their lives fully?
22.
The busy woman in the modernly furnished apartment looks like she’d make a good pie. I worry that she’s lonely. Or has an unhealthy obsession with freshly washed windows.
23.
I imagine our neighbors peering into our apartment and feeling relieved that we appear to be moving with our many bags of clothes stacked in the living room. We are not a blinds-down people and sometimes in the morning we are not a pants-wearing people either. Sometimes our coffee table has books and papers and bowls of fruit stacked on it. Sometimes there are random things slung into the arm chair so we can never sit in it. We watch a lot of TV in relaxi clothes and I imagine they don’t approve of our lifestyle.
24.
People are less interested in us than you think they are. Z says this with authority, as if it is a truth universally acknowledged. But that doesn’t explain why I care about the ages of my neighbors, why the dog barks at the cat, and why I believe that the across-the-alley neighbors put up curtains shortly after we arrived. There is disapproval and dislike in those curtains.
A judgmental neighbor perhaps.
25.
A word of advice: never ask someone who has just lost a family member to a lung ailment if that person was a smoker. The only purpose it serves is to make the speaker—almost always a nonsmoker—feel safe. At least I won’t die of a lung ailment because I’ve never smoked, they must think while the person they’ve asked is fighting the urge to growl in their general direction.
26.
What I didn’t admit and what shames me a bit is this: I smiled at the man on the beach when he commanded me to do so. Even now, I smiled.
27.
I found out Isabella died on her birthday when I went to check her page on Facebook to see what she was up to. We hadn’t had a real conversation in five years, just periodic check-ins over email, but I felt gutted and played that old, tiresome game with myself of self-blame about all the ways I take love and friendship for granted, as if it will always be there for me.
28.
In an effort to avoid any real controversy, my high school U.S. history class spent more time on Tammany Hall and the Teapot Dome Scandal than on anything that happened after the Great Depression. Thus, we avoided much of WWII, all of Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, and Watergate. So I didn’t learn anything useful about who Bobby Kennedy was or what he might have done or who killed him and why.
From my post-parole hearing “research” (thank you, Google), I learned that Sirhan’s mother believed he was traumatized in childhood by the Israeli-Arab conflict and by his brother’s death, which was caused when a military vehicle swerved to avoid gunfire, and that in 1989, the New York Times quoted Sirhan as having said his only connection to Robert Kennedy was Kennedy’s support of Israel to the physical detriment of Palestinians.
29.
Lately, when I want to ask if some recently dead-by-COVID person had gotten the vaccine, I try to fight the urge. It’s an apples and oranges comparison, but I am daily trying to remind myself to err on the side of compassion. People make bad choices. I have made plenty myself.
31.
Now, I’m slowly emptying the bags of clothes and reinstalling them in drawers that I sprayed so thoroughly with lavender oil that I coughed the rest of the day. I have no idea what moth lungs look or feel like, but if the hangers-on know what’s good for them, they’ll fly out the window or sit on the coffee table and watch Hulu with us instead of noshing on our fibers.
32.
I never know if there are real connections where I see them or if I just need to believe they exist to manage life.
33.
We were an odd band of writers at Kinnitty Castle. It wasn’t a group I should have felt comfortable with—a man who was on the Forbes 100, a Countess, various people with second homes, a woman who lived near me in the Midwest but was dismissive for reasons that had to do with either her recent MFA or the fact that she’d been born in Ireland—I knew instinctively that she was not going to warm to me.
Still, I fell in love with some of those people who were so different from me.
During one workshop (and days before Colum McCann showed up and danced with Isabella), there was a dust-up when a piece being discussed could be construed as anti-Semitic. Because I loathe discord, I can no longer remember specifically what it was or whose piece it was, but I do remember Isabella’s raised voice, the tears that welled in her eyes, as she pointed out the injustice of how the writer had characterized a Jewish character or the nonchalance with which the person had written about the Holocaust. She had lost family in the Holocaust. She herself had come to America as a refugee when she was a child. Later I would learn—because I hadn’t ever had to consider it before this because of the luck of my birth and place in history—how difficult it was to be a refugee in America. How difficult to be Jewish at a time when America hadn’t exactly put out the welcome mat for people who were attempting to escape the Nazis.
I was just an observer. It wasn’t my trauma. And yet, seeing how it affected Isabella all these years later—an ill-worded passage in someone’s novel manuscript . . . Even now, I have no words for the effect it had on me. But it made me wish I could always only see the humanity– the layers of sadness and joy and wisdom and wonder—in every person whose path I cross.
I’ve discovered that swiping through TikTok videos in the morning is the perfect way to stay cozy in bed. I give myself ten minutes and then look at the clock and a half hour or hour has passed, which is disturbing, but I keep telling myself this is just winter behavior. It is cold. The flannel sheets and Z snoozing next to me and radiating heat are too inviting for me to willingly bound out of bed the minute my eyes open.
One drawback (of the many) to beginning the day this way is the frequency with which some videos use earworms to highlight whatever antics are going on in the video. For three days now I have had a few bars of Beyonce’s “Halo” stuck in my head on a loop. It. Will. Not. Go. Away. Yesterday, I thought maybe if I listened to the entire song instead of just those bars it would finally exhaust itself but all it did was make Z start humming it too. There are worse songs, but I’d like to move on in my life now.
My recent desire to stay in bed an extra hour was exacerbated by the Big Snow we had that lasted a couple of days. We’re in much better shape than the rest of the country in this regard—now it feels like spring is afoot—but for those two days of snow, the city felt magical and Z and I were thrilled with our new perch here at Oh Là Là, looking down on snow-covered streets and not having to go out on un-shoveled sidewalks. We did venture up to the roof deck and threw a snowball and attempted a snowman with snow that would not pack, but for the most part, we just stared out the window like a couple of kids who had never seen snow before.
Z on the roof deck about to be pelted with a snowball (of sorts).
Oh, and I did a jigsaw puzzle because snow days are perfect for that and I still miss RBG.
Nobody ever looked so good in a lace collar.
INTERLUDE
During the snow days, I got unnaturally concerned with the well-being of a neighbor who lives across the street. Please note (and believe): I am not a peeping Tom. I am not hoping to see any fights, naked bodies, or assess whether my neighbors wipe their noses on their sleeves. Still, when you are living in the sky and working at a window, occasionally your gaze will fall on the neighbor who has a lovely big St. Bernard thrilled with the snow or the neighbor whose cat peers down from the 12th floor as if everything on First Hill belongs to him.
Occasionally, my eye lands on the woman whose blinds are never closed, who sleeps on the sofa with the lights on instead of under her Marimekko duvet in the bedroom. After the first quick glance months ago, I’ve wondered about her. What’s the deal with the sofa? Did she have a bad break up and can’t face her bed alone? Why the lights on at night? Is she afraid of something? Has someone threatened her?
So the other day when I did my quick morning glance before settling into work, I saw her lying on the floor, and my pulse quickened. What had happened to her? I glanced again and the position she was in was really awkward, so I worried that she’d hurt herself. Or, horrors, someone had hurt her.
I instantly started thinking of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, wheelchair bound and stuck in his apartment, passing the time by looking at his neighbors with a telephoto lens. When he sees what he believes to be a murder take place, no one will listen to him.
They were both much closer than this but not when I had my camera.
Recently, a pair of eagles have been flying over our building, so my mini-binoculars were on the desk. I have never used them to look in anyone’s apartment and when I do use them, I make over-exagerrated motions so anyone peering at me can see that I am only looking up at the sky and not trying to peer into their living spaces. It occurred to me that if this woman was compromised, I might be the only person knew it, so I allowed myself to fake look for the eagles in the sky above Lake Union and then do a slow but continuous spin in my chair and briefly train the binoculars on her apartment.
As it happens, I did not have to call 911. The body on the floor was not hers. In fact, it was not a body. In fact, it wasn’t even on the floor. It was an oversized knitted blanket stuffed into and spilling out of a basket.
I haven’t had my eyes checked for a year and a half. It might be time.
Sans keg of brandy for snow rescues.
PART THE SECOND
Because Z himself is also magical and amazing like snow in Seattle, the number of times I’ve had a crush on a “celebrity” since we got together is almost nil, but I’m finding myself disturbingly attracted to the bobble-headed @therealindiandad. Initially, I didn’t know why. I mean, his cartoon head is handsome, I guess, but other than the fox in Robin Hood I don’t make it a habit of crushing on cartoon characters. But then one day Z was bossing me up (in a very loving, comical way) and we were laughing, and I realized it’s because watching @therealindiandad joke-chastise @sheenamelwani while Z is still sleep is the next best thing to having Z awake. They remind me a lot of each other, though I’m relieved Z doesn’t have a bobble head. Z was disturbed by this news until I pointed out to him that his bobble headed doppelgänger is not the father of the woman he chides but the husband and the two of them are laughing so much and having such a good time that they feel like good company these days, particularly when so many posts are full of rage or sadness.
When I finally do shut off TikTok, drag myself out of bed, and head to the study, I’m immediately greeted with annoyance because this is the last space in our apartment at Oh Là Là that has refused to organize itself since our November move. I seem to just keep moving the same items in a circle around the room. A stack of things on the ottoman gets moved to the Napping Cloud and sits there for two weeks, and then I move the items on the bed to the floor so I can nap. Then it’s time to run Angus the robotic vacuum so I pick the stuff up off the floor and put it on the ottoman. I think the problem is I haven’t found a home for these final bits of our life: photos, art, and frames we aren’t using right now, stacks of paper I don’t know where to file, knickknacks in the windowsill, tote bags full of projects I have yet to finish, etc.
And in the center of this still messy space is The Desk: the black hole that sucks in and spews out chaos threefold.
This isn’t a new subject for me—I’ve always had trouble with organizing the place I write and teach. I could clean it up for a photo op, but no sooner is the pic posted than the mess starts building again. It’s one of the things that annoys me most about myself: not just that I can’t be neater but also that I can’t fully embrace my messy tendencies without chastising myself. And because the desk is an exact replica of the inner workings of my mind, I’m also annoyed that after all of these years I also can’t just embrace the rich alphabet soup that is my thought process and instead am convinced there must be something wrong with me.
My desk is really a 6 foot cherry dining table with one tiny drawer and a faux drawer with a keyboard ledge in it. When I ordered it two decades ago, I’d just read a book about how people with my brain type were no good with things that were put away and we just need to see everything in front of us in stacks. The book’s premise was that creative types have different brains and were fighting a losing battle in trying to make traditional 1950s-office-systems-with-filing-cabinets-and-in-and-out-trays work for them.
The theory was a good one—and remains true…if my house keys are under a piece of mail, say, the keys cease to exist for me and I start to make plans about how I’ll have to live the rest of my life without locking the door. But when I embraced this new way of organizing, I imagined myself being tidier than I actually am. I was picturing a soft focus desk with a stack of three books, a cup of tea (even though I don’t drink it that often), and an artful lamp so I could write until the sun came up. I imagined a vast expanse of empty desk, glossy wood grain encouraging me to put only beautiful words on the page.
The dream.
Alas. It never looks like that.
There is never an empty space where I could suddenly do a project or a puzzle. Instead, there are layers. If I dig down, I’m reminded that a month ago I was really interested in learning how meditation can be different for women than men, I was organizing things to put in a scrapbook, and I was planning to frame a couple of pictures. If I dig further still, I’d discover a gift card for Elliot Bay Books and a receipt for something I bought Z for Christmas. A jar of pickled onions, I think.
A few weeks ago, I was talking to the Poet Friend on the phone and told her how frustrated I was, and she—a tidy Virgo—suggested that I get an empty box, put everything on my desk in the box, dust and oil the surface of the desk, and then put back only the things I use. For two days, it was the desk I imagined it would be when I bought it. But now, I have this box of “essential things” on the floor:
And the desk is now looking like it’s former, messy self.
I’ve taken very little out of the box of essentials, so what I did was find more/different “essentials” to fill the surface. Nature and Beth abhor a vacuum.
Current essential items on desk:
glass desk lamp filled with my mother’s childhood marbles
Row of “must have near me” writing books held in place by Scottie dog book ends from Poet Friend
clock with big numbers so I always know how late I am to a Zoom appointment
laptop
Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls tin can now containing pens, scissors, letter opener from elementary Swedish penpal Cecilia, and two beaded Roses from Zimbabwe
1972 Christmas present clipboard from my maternal grandmother given to me because of my love of drawing but now used for class notes and other things I want to remember but eventually forget about and discard
On a six foot desk, this seems like a reasonable amount of items and all you really need for a desk to function, but I’m not done yet.
Other “essentials”:
An anatomically correct metal bulldog with spiked collar and butt door that raises for insertion of a tea light candle if Oh La La allowed candles and I wanted to illuminate a metal bulldog
An ashtray from a bar bearing my surname purchased on eBay 20 years ago even though I don’t smoke
a two-handled tea cup/soup bowl which I use on different days for:
my earphones
my prayer beads
clean watercolor water
a vaguely royal looking red box in which I intend to keep bits of paper with notes jotted on them of things I don’t want to forget but that currently holds only a Serenity Prayer key chain of indeterminate origin and a postcard of Wales from a boy I never met but with whom I tried to hae a romantic online relationship in 1994
a handmade Scandinavian-looking pottery gnome holding a warm pie next to a toadstool because she looks capable and happy
a shallow light blue dish with my grandfather’s rosary in it. I’ve had the beads for almost twenty years and still haven’t learned all the components of the rosary because the 50% of me that was raised Catholic never got to those lessons
a chicken timer named Erma to keep me writing
a series of gemstones the names of which I can never recall and must then dig in The Box to read the leaflet that came with them reminding me what each crystal is good for. My favorites so far: amethyst and tiger eye
a deck of Farber-Zerner tarot cards because I like the art and like to use them for a focusing practice before I write even though I don’t really know that much about tarot and don’t want my future told. (I’m in it for the metaphors.)
three books on tarot because why have one when you can have three?
my new set of prayer beads (sodalite to encourage intuition, focus, and creativity)
my old set of prayer beads (cobalt blue glass, made when I found out my father was sick, the color of which calms me)
a rock that fits perfectly in my palm that Z found for me on San Juan Island
a Bluetooth speaker
a statue of a pig with a quote from Winston Churchill about the superiority of pigs, which reminds me daily not of Churchill or of pigs, but of my college mentor, Gibb, who loved pigs, particularly his boyhood pig, Jipper, who would meet him after school when the bus dropped him off
some coasters
a tiny painting I painted last year of a young girl squeezing through the Eye of the Needle in a church ruin in Dingle
an envelope that likely contains a home colorectal screening test that I have been ignoring for a year but because I’m partly a responsible person and thus haven’t thrown it out but I keep thinking Tomorrow Beth will take care of it and do the responsible thing
a Venus of Willendorf statue
a holy card of Joan of Arc
class notes, printed readings, and dogeared pages of book passages I want to share with my students
a paisley beanbag from my childhood with a tag hand stitched on it that says “Wayne County Historical Museum Richmond, Indiana” that I like to play with while I’m lecturing and have had since I was about five
So where exactly would I put the stuff in the box (notebooks, ShellE the stuffed turtle, my hairbrush, various pics, notebooks, small clipboard, empty box of chocolates with my last name on the lid, to-do list notebook, notebook from my Swedish penpal circa 1978, an Apple box for my AirPods because Apple boxes are just too good to get rid of, a wooden file box that has half a screenplay written on notecards inside that I started with a friend twenty-five years ago and which I keep meaning to put elsewhere and use the box for some other important non-computerized filing, and a variety of pottery dogs.
I need an intervention.
My desk and mind are kind of like the Hotel California.
Lately I’ve been writing every morning with my newly discovered family of fellow INFP/J creatives and we often spend time talking about how our brains work, how differently we are wired from most of the population, and what the insides of our heads look like. We’ve talked about how when we are writing or drawing or doing some other kind of creating, we are out there just loosely tethered to earth and when Ground Control calls us back down to have a conversation about cornflakes or the funny meme they just saw, it’s really, really hard for us to make that adjustment. It’s hard to acclimatize back to earth’s atmosphere.
In my life, I’ve had what I would classify as two and a half visions. One was holy. One was comforting. And then this one from my childhood when I was staying with my grandmother that until now I’ve never been able to interpret.
It was just the two of us together on a Saturday morning, and I was lying upside down on the davenport, my head nearly touching the floor as I took in the new perspective of the acoustic tile and how the dropped ceiling into the hallway would make a stair step if her pink mobile home were upside down. (I’d been exposed to The Poseidon Adventure at a young age and was fascinated by how normal things would be transformed if flipped upside down. Please note, Gene Hackman was an early celebrity crush. A man who was convicted that he could get you to a place of greater safety—what was not to like? Even better than @therealindiandad.) As I hung upside down, Grandma was across from me in the kitchen, where she always was. I never saw the woman sit down until I was a teenager.
Then suddenly, without planning it, I was on the ceiling. I don’t know if this would be classified as an out-of-body experience or a vision, though probably most people would say it was just the fancy of a child, but I felt myself floating in this upside down landscape—the only thing keeping me earth bound was the ceiling—and my grandmother was frantically reaching up towards me, kind of hopping up and down trying to grab ahold of me, and pull me back towards earth as if I were a balloon that had escaped. It was so real. Then I came back to myself and my real grandmother was asking me which cartoon I wanted her to put on the TV because I wasn’t hovering above her after all but was lounging on the sofa expecting her to serve me by turning the channel to Scooby-Doo. We grandchildren were so spoiled.
On terra firma.
The vision was weird and for years I’ve wondered what it was, what had or hadn’t happened, and then it just sort of folded into my life like the time I was stung under the arm by a bee or the time I fell out of a tree and had the wind knocked out of me and thought I’d killed myself. It was just an event in my life: that time I was floating on the ceiling and Grandma pulled me back to earth.
But now? I think the universe was trying to give me a metaphor for how I’d spend the rest of my life, trying so hard to listen to step-by-step instructions or remember a list of five items to pick up at the grocery or to stay engaged in a conversation or stay focused on my non-creative work, but always, I find myself somewhere other than where I’m supposed to be living between my own ears. Then I come back to myself and the other person hasn’t noticed I was gone. Or, if they are Z, they have noticed and they think I’m a bad listener or lackadaisical worker or a bad bet if they want me to pick something up for them at the store. But they love me despite my human frailties.
It’s been a real boon to know 60-90 minutes a day I’m going to be getting together with these people I’ve never met in real life (and were it not for the pandemic would never have met on Zoom) and they get it. One of us will say, “Have you ever…?” and everyone else will nod in agreement and the conversation will flow. And then we write. And when the host tells us it’s been an hour, most of us are startled because we’ve been out there on our own individual tethers. But also, together.
Goodness knows what the totality of 2021 is going to hold for us. I don’t even want to guess about the future (I told you those Tarot cards are not about knowing the future), but my goal for this year is to embrace my quirks, to work around whatever ear worm has burrowed into my head, and if my neighbors appear to have been murdered, to check in on them even if I feel foolish (or criminal) afterward when I realize their knitted throws were never in any danger.
In the remaining ten months of 2021, let us all be kind to ourselves and laugh whenever we find cause.
Seattle. December 23rd, 2020. (Please note the “12” in the building lights mid photo.)
So this is Christmas. And what have you done?
What I’ve done is make the study smell like a dead sheep.
In 2003, my brother and I went to Ireland to celebrate his 21st birthday and on our last day there, I discovered a sheepskin that I really wanted to buy because it reminded me of the bed Mac, my beloved Scottish terrier friend, slept on at his parents’ house. But the thought of buying an animal pelt repulsed me even though I’d been eating meat and wearing sensible leather shoes on the trip. Still, I couldn’t quit thinking about that sheepskin and how much my own dog would like it—once I got a dog. It seemed like the logical step to the dream I’d been building for myself—a full-time teaching job, a therapist, a new car in which I could see the world (or at least the drivable bits) with a backseat in which both a dog and car seat would fit should I acquire a child and/or a dog in the process. (I wasn’t picky at that point—dog, kid, both…whatever.)
It being our last night in Galway, Steve and I “took some drink” and the amount of drink it took for me to have zero qualms about buying that sheepskin was three pints of Guinness. You’d have to ask my brother, but I have a vague memory of him shushing me at one point, so it’s possible that I was louder than I needed to be when I went to the sheepskin selling shop and bought a fine large fluffy one in case one day I acquired a fine, large dog who might want to sleep on it. I’ve taken comfort over the years when I bury my feet in that pelt that I was not 100% in my right mind when I purchased it.
Fast forward nearly two decades. It’s been living on the floor of the guest bedroom since I moved my things in with Z eleven years ago. Periodically, it would get a bit matted, and I’d fluff it up with the vacuum or rake it with my fingers until it looked respectable again. Though Mac’s mother regularly washed his because he was sometimes a dirty little dog who would get it muddy or full of burrs, I had never washed mine. But every since we moved into Oh La La, it has looked decidedly dingy. The wool was sort of matted together in places and I was thinking even a dirty dog probably wouldn’t want to curl up on it, so why would I want it on my floor.
I asked Mac’s mom how she had cleaned his, and she sent me easy directions (“put it in the washer”) and so I put it in the washer.
What came out was a mess. Despite spinning it twice, it was still sopping wet. (Sheep are really absorbent.) I put it in the dryer for 20 minutes (the super smart dryer suggested it would need to go for at least 95 minutes, so it was in no danger of shrinking) and then I hung it up. It dripped dryish for two days. Z hit it with a hair dryer. It had developed dreadlocks. There was no fluff to it at all. It reminded me a lot of my first disappointing Irish sheep sighting. I was expecting little cotton fluffs on the hillside, but instead, the flocks of sheep were spray painted so farmers would know which ones were theirs, and they inevitably had bits of grass and mud and dung stuck to their coats.
Two days ago, I bought the fleece it’s own brush and started the arduous job of brushing the wool. It was hard work and reminded me of why we don’t yet have a dog (so much work) and it reminded me of carding wool in third grade for the Bicentennial when we were all in training to be modern-day pioneers. After several minutes at my task, it also reminded me that one of the things I learned from carding wool in 3rd grade is that I am allergic to wool. My hands got itchy and red, my eyes started watering, and I wished I’d never started the project.
Also, the bathroom where I was brushing no longer smelled like lovely fruity soaps. It smelled like wet sheep. I sprayed some Opium in the air. Now it smells like a fancy wet sheep.
I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with myself this Christmas because I wasn’t home in Indiana (or in Zimbabwe with Z and his family) for the first time in my life. When it first became apparent that we’d have to stay in Seattle for the holidays, I thought of things we should do so I wouldn’t get too blue. I vacillated between doing lots of things (make cookies! get a live tree! make a paper chain for said tree! make popcorn balls! play Christmas music every night!) and doing nothing at all. Z was not on board with the latter, but I considered just hiding in the study—the one that now smells like a dead sheep—while he listened to carols and walked around with too much joy in his heart.
We had snow for 15 minutes.
In the end, we had that big move in November and we’ve spent all the days since then trying to get our living space in order. I started writing every day with a group of women from around the world on Zoom. Z and I have both been busy with work too, so there hasn’t been a lot of time to get worked up about Christmases past and where this one is or is not being spent. Instead, we sit at our computers. I race to the study every morning to see my new online writing friends in Australia and England and San Diego and Chicago and other parts of the planet, commiserate with them about being sensitive souls, and then get down to the writing. (Yesterday, one of our members took us out on her parents’ veranda so we could hear the early morning birds in Queensland.) Z writes emails and makes plans for his department. Later in the day, we have our non-work routines—our walks, our projects, our shows, and we check in with friends and family, we say prayers for those who aren’t doing well, and clap our hands when new babies are born and new puppies adopted (not us, we are still sans dog and the toddler down the hall who burns off energy by slapping our door at night as he races the hallways is as much kid as we are up for in our dotage).
Yesterday we got the news that a close family friend of Z’s had died. She was 95, behaved like she was half that age, and she and her husband were the first Americans to welcome Z to the US when he arrived from Zimbabwe to attend college. Though she and her husband had only just met his parents by happenstance when they were in his hometown, she made sure that when he arrived in Minnesota he had the sheets and towels he would need there. Later, they invited him to their home in Washington State for Christmas. Later still, when he happened to get a job in Seattle, she invited him up to spend weekends and welcomed his new girlfriend (that’s me) to Thanksgiving, and so my first introduction to Z’s family was his American family-by-proxy. We were both sad to see her go, but we also feel so lucky that Z got the job here that allowed him to have more time with her over the years, that we were able to celebrate her 90th birthday with her, and that just days before we got this news, her Christmas letter arrived in the mail and was a hoot and demonstrated her spirit and way with words.
Last week on a clear night, we rediscovered the roof deck here at Oh La La. We hadn’t been up there since the first day we toured the building. We went up as the sun was setting, and we were shocked by how far we could see. We can see both mountain ranges, we can see Lake Union and Puget Sound, we can see Smith Tower and the Field Formerly Known as Century Link where my beloved Seahawks play. We can see Z’s school and just make out the park on the edge of which Hugo House stands. The lighted TV tower on Queen Anne that is shaped like a Christmas tree stands off in the distance, and various church steeples dot the horizon. We can see the traffic lights on I-5 in the distance, and the planes that are bringing in all of the germy people who just will not stay home like they are supposed to. The apartments and condos near us have lights up, and it is fun to see which ones stand out.A tugboat pulled into Elliot Bay and a ferry pulled out. It was so beautiful. (Except for the germy travelers.)
Today I dared to listen to the most melancholy of Christmas music—some of my favorites, including “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” (Bing Crosby was from Washington and the flip side of that record when it was released was “Danny Boy”—a twofer for the pensive listener and proof enough that Bing had Irish grandparents) and “In the Bleak Midwinter”, and I thought about how I love Christmas and how it is so much like the rest of life. There are things to be truly grateful for, to be excited about, and to get weepy over. Life is hard. The world is hard.
But also, it’s impossibly glorious. And this is what I love about this season—that you can be miserable on the darkest night of the year yet celebrating because the days are going to start getting longer. That you can be enjoying your loved ones and missing your other loved ones. That you can be as thrilled with “Silver Bells” as you are songs that remind you the world isproblematic like “Happy Xmas (War is Over)”. That you can keep a dreadlocked sheepskin that fills you with revulsion because your imaginary dog enjoys sleeping on it. That you can be sick of the city and then walk out on your newly acquired roof deck and see it for all of its imperfect beauty.
There’s a car out front that has stalled and the driver keeps trying and trying to get it started but the engine won’t turn over. Or catch. Or, well, go. It’s been so long since I’ve driven a car anywhere (almost 9 months) that I can’t remember the proper terminology, but what I know for sure is that it seems like a metaphor for this blog, for the 18 previous blog attempts I’ve made since May, and, let’s be honest, for 2020 as a whole. It’s like the year didn’t get started and we just had to push it to the curb, sit, and wait for AAA.
And now it’s October and AAA has been taking its sweet time rescuing us.
Fortunately, it’s not quite rush hour yet or there would be cars behind this guy honking their horns and telling him to get stuffed, as if he intentionally chose to make them go around him. I feel like I should go down and offer to help him push his car, but he’s not wearing a mask and I’m still wearing my nightgown and UGG boots (a sexy, sexy look on the over-fifty set) even though it’s 4 p.m. So instead, I’ll do what I’ve been doing since March and just stare out the window and wait for something about this scenario to change.
It’s not a perfect metaphor, I guess, because this year has not exactly stalled. The hits just keep coming when you get right down to it. The fact that I haven’t really written since May isn’t from lack of trying. No sooner would I start a post on whatever the latest worry or “event” was, then something else would happen making what I’d written seem suddenly less timely or worthwhile. Were I quicker writer who didn’t need to let my work steep before sharing it, you might have been reading entries about what it was like to live in Seattle during the protests against police brutality and systemic racism that resulted—for a time—in the creation of the police-free CHOP Zone not all that far from our apartment. You might have read about the fires here and in Oregon and California that left the city with unhealthy air for almost two weeks while we were in the middle of a heat wave sans AC. You might have read about how the pier downtown where we have taken the most photos of the Sound over the last decade collapsed. You might have read about my stepdad’s surgery and the two weeks that followed wherein I tried not to call daily to see if he was demonstrating any COVID symptoms. You might have read about my sadness about the passing of RBG (and what the means for women and people who aren’t corporations) or a host of other people who have died since last time we met here. More recently, there’s been grief in the extended family, though I’m not yet ready to write about that, and so I guess that shouldn’t be counted in this list, other than it’s made the prospect of writing a blog post—about how disappointed I am that the Just Born candy company wont’ be making Halloween or Christmas Marshmallow Peeps because of the pandemic—seem extra trite.
Ditto the trite but bothersome news that the store we go to most often—Bartell Drugs, which is a local chain that treats its employees well, carries local products, and has been around for 130 years—has decided to sell itself to Rite Aid. The letter they sent out to their loyal customers said nothing would change, but, of course, everything will change. It might take a couple of years for it to get that unique Rite Aid smell—cheap laundry detergent, off-brand candy, and desperation—but it’s coming. As is the 21-story building that will block our view (and possibly the sound of the bells that please me daily) of the beautiful St. James Cathedral. As will the new bus route that’s going to add a lot of noisy, dirty traffic to our already noisy, dirty street.
These are mere trifles compared to the other stuff happening in the world—to people we know and don’t know—and our country and the global environment, and so what’s the point of complaining? But I don’t like change or discord and we are in a long, ugly season of both these days.
So, I was good there for a few paragraphs. It seemed like maybe the car was finally going to start and I could tootle on down the road, but here I am again, stalled. Z and Hudge are honking at me to get a move on, but I clearly need a jump. Or gas for the tank. Or a complete engine rebuild.
What I’d most like to do is to hire a chauffeur and shout “Home, James” from the backseat while I sip a Moscow Mule and wait for the car to drive over the Rockies, through the Great Plains, and over the Mississippi towards my own ones. One of my chief beefs this summer has been seeing people on social media enjoying their vacations, time with family, and mask-less interludes with friends. Some days, I’m even passive-aggressive about it and won’t like those pictures. Z and I would both like to be with our families, with each other’s families, sitting on a beach, crowded or otherwise, but we don’t think it’s smart given my wonky immune system, Mom’s compromised one, and Zimbabwe has had closed borders for quite awhile even if we were feeling brave enough to go see Zma. I realize some people think we’re being excessively cautious. Aside from not wanting to get the virus, we’re also trying to be halfway decent citizens.
If it seems like I’m patting myself on the back for our virus virtue, I’m not. This is one time I’d very much like to not follow the rules. But neither of us are made that way, so here I am, watching a car in the middle of 9th Avenue try and try to get itself started.
Another metaphor we had to work with this summer was Chicken Little worrying about the sky falling when the ceiling in our kitchen literally fell in. Neither of us were in the kitchen—and were, in fact, across the hall asleep and didn’t realize it had happened until the next day—but it was a mess. Like car jargon, I’m also bad about house construction terminology, but we could see the rough boards above and it pulled down enough plaster where the walls joined the ceiling that we got a glimpse of the wallpaper that had been up there possibly since 1923 when our building went up. Never have two people been so happy that they are renters instead of owners, I can tell you that. Our maintenance guy and an associate had it fixed, the light re-installed, and the paint on within a day, and all we had to do was clean up some forgotten chunks of rubble.
We assumed it would be a much bigger deal and there must be some dire cause—oxen living in the apartment above us having a dance party, perhaps—but our building guy shrugged and said, “It’s an old building. It happens.” Now I’m eyeing all of our ceilings with alarm, and I suddenly understand why most of the 1990s and early 2000s were spent with my mother staring at her own ceilings and making her disapproving, I-don’t-like-the-look-of-that-crackface. I always assumed it was an irrational fear of hers, but it turns out sometimes the sky does fall.
Sorry for doubting you, Mom.
If I sound depressed or cranky, I’m not. I’ve got appropriate intermittent rage and sadness mixed in with a few scoops of joy and a lot of “I’m alright.” In January I started anti-anxiety medicine in what has proven to be my second best ever piece of intuition (after knowing instantly that I would marry Z whether he agreed to it or not). When I casually mentioned to my GP that I’d been having some trouble riding crowded buses and a particularly dastardly elevator with no buttons inside (where was it going to take me? Who knew? Maybe it was one of those Willy Wonka deals that would burst through the ceiling), the doctor said clearly anxiety was having a negative effect on my life and here, try some pills. So I started them and then the pandemic struck and while I have no idea how I’d behave on a crowded bus because I no longer ride the bus, I have noticed that in the last 9 months I spend a lot of time hearing horrible news and feeling something akin to sadness or dismay, and then moving on with my day. Maybe this is how normal people have always been functioning and I didn’t realize it and took everything personally—someone else’s misfortune felt like mine, some story about something like murder hornets had me thinking, “Well, this is it then. This is how we’re all going to die.” And now it’s more like, “Huh. That’s too bad. Do we have any more M&Ms or is it time to put in another order with the grocery?”
Oh good. The car outside has gotten started and tootled off. I no longer have to berate myself for not being a more helpful citizen. Farewell, metaphor. Drive safely.
It’s a day-to-day existence, this life we’ve been living, isn’t it? Of course it always has been, but before we could distract ourselves with book sales and concert tickets and planned trips. This Covid Time is very “Here I am in this moment. Now it’s the next moment. And the next.” It feels Zen in some ways, though I wouldn’t say it’s the peaceful, easy feeling I always imagined accompanied a Zen mindset. But I am very much aware that I’m one Netflix binge and grocery order away from either an existential crisis or enlightenment. (My money is on the former.)
Some days Z and I are so busy with work and our internal thoughts that we barely have the energy to talk to each other in depth. And other days, that’s all we do. This morning, we were lying in bed, not all that interested in getting up in the grey, cold late morning, and so we talked and then found ourselves randomly singing multiple verses in not-quite-harmony of “This Old Man/Knick Knack Paddywhack”, a song I haven’t thought of since listening to the Fisher-Price record player belonging to my cousins Jimmy and Ben circa 1972. It was weirdly delightful.
Of course we’ve spent the rest of the day asking ourselves why we feel so behind with work, but I’d rather be a little harried in the afternoon than to have missed that musical moment with Z.
I thank the pandemic for those moments. For Zooming with friends and family. For really appreciating students and reading their work because it seems more important than ever that they are doing it and we are spending time together talking about the significance of their words (and truth). For all of the adorable pandemic puppies that people have been walking. For realizing how much you really like seeing the lower half of the faces of perfect strangers and how you’ll never take a casual smile with a passer-by for granted again. From my desk, I can see the top of Columbia Tower, which is the tallest building in Seattle. During the smog from the fires, I couldn’t see it. Now it’s back, and when I look at it, I take a deep breath and feel grateful for clear air and that building even though on most days I’m mentally shaking my fist at all the high-rises that block the sky.
During the worst of the smoke and when the building peeked through.
Several years ago, a counselor I was seeing told me that every morning he wakes up and knows his “next pain in the ass is already in the mail.” His point was, I think, you’re never going to achieve nirvana, Beth. There’s always going to be something on the horizon that is headache or sadness. At the time, I thought maybe he needed to see a counselor because it seemed kind of a pessimistic way to look at life. I was young(ish) then. I wanted to figure myself out so everything in my life would be perfect. But now I think I understand what he was saying. Back then, I was incapable of hearing the implied “but” that came with his statement. This sucks, but also, there are the _____________(moments of spontaneous song, the puppies, photos of a friend’s new grandchild, an extra long phone call home).
I’m trying to focus on the but alsos.
**ADDENDUM**
Last week, while I was trying to wrap-up this blog entry with my silent writing group of complete strangers that I met in a writing course I took with Lauren Sapala in August—a class I loved and a community I’m appreciating more and more each day—Z was across the hall talking on the phone with our building manager. When my writing session was over, I packed up my stuff in my basket and made the long commute across the hallway to our “real” apartment, where he told me he had both good and bad news.
The bad news? We have 30 days to get out of our twin apartments, where we’ve lived together for the last ten years (or, alternatively, where we’ve spent the first decade of our married life) because there’s some structural unsoundness. The good news involved some reimbursement for our troubles, which, at the time, didn’t strike me as being remarkable or worthwhile because I could only picture us homeless.
It seems only fair to withhold from you the story of my frustration that in the midst of this news, Z was fussing about where his slippers were and how cold his feet were because it casts him in a bad light. I was losing my mind, wanting more details, wanting him to tell me something that would calm my heart rate, and he was fussing and faffing looking for his half-dead slippers. Finally, he returned to the subject at hand. See how nice I was there, to protect him and not tell you about how it went on for what seemed like minutes and minutes and minutes?
Initially, it was really hard to imagine living anywhere else. We’ve been so happy here. Until I found it had some structural compromises, I’ve loved the crooked walls and windows that don’t quite shut, and quirky faucets. I’ve liked being in a building so old that it creaks and “talks” even if it’s meant I share washers and dryers with all the other building residents or I’ve been doing dishes by hand for the last decade, much to the chagrin of my once-attractive nails and hands. I’ve loved our weird set-up with our writing studio/guest apartment/extra-large-storage-space-across-the- hall.
It’s unconventional and meant we had a lot of guests, including me randomly inviting a writer I’d read and loved but never met to come stay with us for a few days while she was on a book tour. I’m relatively certain she wouldn’t have been inclined if we just had a spare room, but because she had autonomy, I got to meet her, have some drinks with her, and now we send each other emails and snail mail periodically because, well, I care about her now because she’s real to me. And I’ve loved wondering about the people who lived here in the 1920s when the building was new. Were they doctors or nurses at the neighboring hospitals? Flappers? Were they reading The Great Gatsby? Could any of them fathom the stock market crash? Prohibition? A second world war? That one day Seattle wouldn’t be a sleepy logging town? There’s history here, and like living in its dust and crumbled plaster.
So it was a long, sad weekend. I kept looking at everything I’d miss. We took tours at a few places, and then landed on an apartment so unlike any place I’ve ever imagined myself wanting to live that I still can’t believe we’re doing it. I’ll give you the low-down in the next post once we have the keys and have figured out how many of our worldly goods get to come with us.
Now that we know where we’re landing though—and we’ll be in the same neighborhood—I’m making lists of things I won’t miss here at our first home together: the constant diesel grit on everything from the buses that idle out front, the late-night parties that sometimes happen on the stoop by our bedroom window, the postage-stamp-sized closet, unlocking the garbage dumpster because America is so messed up we think our trash is a treasure. And admittedly, the alley is cleaner now that no one is dumpster diving, but it still feels wrong to me every time I click that lock.
These continue to be weird, weird times. I hope this finds you well, be-masked, and managing.
This mural is on a building I pass on the way to work. Usually, I’ve got a crease in my forehead as I think about the things I need to cover in class or remember someone’s essay I forgot to respond to or am obsessed with some other worry. Then I see this and it never fails to make me laugh at myself. Most of the stuff I spend my time fretting over is pretty insignificant. As am I in terms of some of the old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. As is this blog entry. It’s the end of May. I haven’t blogged in yonks. This isn’t a real blog, but I’m hoping it will keep you sated until the next real one.
I am, yes, still angry about the end of Game of Thrones. The only reason I am still carrying my direwolf totebag is because of my deep and abiding affection for House Stark generally and Arya and Jon Snow specifically.
I am, yes, worried about Kit Harington, who is reportedly not handling the end of the show very well and has checked himself into rehab. I have watched a lot of interviews with him and poured over articles hoping that my concern from afar and Rose Leslie’s love from “anear” is healing his heartache.
I am, yes, re-reading Game of Thrones in an attempt to find evidence that should George R.R. Martin ever write his own end to the series it will be different than what the showrunners just put us through. I’m highlighting and taking notes and am generally embarrassed by how much I’m geeking out over this. (Z is being very patient. Also, he’s been instructed to quit calling me Khaleesibeth.)
I am, yes, already complaining about summer. It’s been warm here with a big unrelenting sun hanging in a cloudless sky (other people are excited about this). Yesterday when I got to my class in a brand new building, the AC wasn’t working. Unlike the old building, this one has no interior windows to open because it’s climate controlled (in theory). We pushed tables and chairs out on the courtyard patio for an al fresco class experience during which we were under the SEATAC flight pattern (roar), next to a nonfunctioning but still thrumming AC unit (dull roar), and some guy in the building behind us kept leaning out the window and retching loudly (gross). Also, I kept trying to put my hair up with a pen the way writer’s do when they are dug into the work and can’t go rustle up a hairclip out of a drawer, but like many things taught in the How to Be a Girl-Writer camp that I never attended, it is a skill I have never achieved, so I’m pretty sure I just looked like one of the Weird Sisters in MacBeth, stirring a metaphorical caldron with a broomstick handle, stringy hair framing my face as I toiled, and thus lessening my credibility as I lectured on point of view in the short story.
Today I realized that I don’t know how to use our toaster. Apparently in nine years of marriage I have never done my own toasting. The blueberry waffle I was attempting to heat kept popping up, still frozen. Instead, I heated it in the microwave from which it emerged a crunchy hockey puck. Today’s menu: hockey puck, three strips of fake bacon, and one scrambled egg with a small piece of shell. Delicious.
I’ve belatedly discovered Lizzo after listening to an interview Terry Gross did with her recently, and I’ll admit that I kind of want to pick a fight with Z tonight (maybe about the toaster and subpar waffle) so I can burst into song: hair toss, check my nails… It’s not the kind of music on my regular rotation, but I keep thinking how differently my twenties would have looked if I’d had Lizzo singing a little truth to power and encouraging me to walk out the various doors of my youth that I should have walked out of more quickly. (Alas, she was only six years old when I needed her most, and now I don’t want to walk through any door if Z is on my side of it. Even if he came into this marriage with that cantankerous toaster.)
At our last class last week, a student presented me with this awesome tote because she knew about my affection for Joan Didion. (Jane said to me when I sent her a pic, “How wonderful that we live in a time when there are totes for every interest we could possibly have in the world.”) Ever since I’ve got it, I’ve been considering ways to jazz it up so it looks even more like Didion—I’m thinking sunglasses, beads, a cigarette.
I’m headed to Indiana next week because it’s been calling to me. One of my students this quarter was from Indiana and we were bonding each week over the things we miss about it, plus I scored 100% on the “Are You a Hoosier?” quiz on Facebook (no doubt generated by Russians trying to figure out how to game sugar cream pie to Putin’s advantage). I’m looking forward to it. I’m dreading being sans Z. You’ve heard this story before so I’ll spare you.
My student & I bonded over my Hoosier tumbler of choice. (It’s more about the blue than the chocolate, I swear.)
In addition to sating the urge to be in my hometown, my trip home came about when my paternal cousins, an aunt, and I decided we needed to have a genealogical get-together. I am currently ill prepared for it. When we set it up, I was imagining that I’d morph into an organized person who went with a binder of newspaper clippings, extended family trees printed off for everyone, and photos compiled in chronological order. Instead, I’m probably going with my laptop and a recently re-opened Ancestry.com account and a dream that some, better future Beth will be prepared for the next time we get together. (Future Beth astounds me with the things she can accomplish.)
When planning said genealogy weekend, I realized belatedly that for two decades we’ve had all of our reunions at the Scottie Dog house, which I no longer have access to since Mac has gone to the Happy Hunting Ground and his parents have moved to the desert. So when you picture us together— talking about Great Great Grandmother Ellen Kelly who left Ireland during the Famine and had a baby girl on the high seas whose birth is marked “Atlantic” on census records—please imagine us gathered around a queen sized bed in a Holiday Inn room instead of on the screened porch with a view of a woods and a pond.
Do moths bite? Because I have some bites that are itching and the only insects I’ve seen in the apartment are moths trying to feast on my knitwear. I think maybe moths bite.
On Easter weekend, Providence and I paid a lot of money to spend six hours at a spiritual retreat led by The Artist’s Way guru Julia Cameron, meant to get us in touch with our creativity. In the ‘90s, I was a devout follower of Cameron, and even now I teach students about the magic that happens when you write daily “morning pages” (stream of consciousness writing for 20-30 minutes a day). It was a period of my life when I felt extra creative and so I was anxious to get a tune-up with the master herself. Providence and I both pictured ourselves rotating between listening to Cameron’s wisdom and journaling for the whole day. I imagined soft lighting and cups of tea. Instead, it was a crowded hall where we had to fight for seats, and it was an introvert’s nightmare. Rather than reflection, Cameron did very little talking and instead made us do an exercise in small groups of strangers where we listened to their answers to some of her rapid-fire prompts and then wrote out tiny encouragements on ripped up bits of notebook paper. The idea was that we’d all go home with some inspiration and a sense that we had a right to create when we read what strangers had said to us, but it was hell. I did a few rounds of it with a smile plastered to my face because I was committed to getting the most out of the experience, I really was. But then it became apparent that all we were going to do all day long (other than occasionally sing choruses of songs Cameron had written) were “popcorns” with different groups of people. Providence and I were hoping it would change after lunch, but when we returned and Cameron started with, “Okay, get in a group of four people you don’t know” Providence let out an audible blasphemous expletive, which made me snort with laughter. It was, hands down, my favorite part of the day. I did not leave with any new inspiration, though I did come to the conclusion that at this age, I know my own mind and will not be cowed into activities dreamed up by an extrovert and made to feel like I’m faulty because I hate it. I’m not sure that nugget of wisdom was worth $150 and the stress of trying to find parking around Green Lake, but that was my take-away.
And yes, two of my four Cameron books have been deposited in one of the Tiny Libraries that dot the neighborhood. And yes, they were deposited with glee.
My passport expired and because the Department of State isn’t exactly efficient these days, I decided to get a new one immediately. I waited until a day when my skin looked particularly glowy and my hair had some bounce. I put on my best color, and marched to the UPS store. I felt confident that it would be a good photo, even as the camera in use kept sliding down the pole on the tri-pod. At the very least, I believed there was no way this photo could be worse than the last one—taken on a boiling hot day ten years ago at a CVS when I was angry because two weeks before my departure and after several calls the passport folk admitted the good photos I’d sent in had been damaged and I had to resubmit and rush new ones to them if I had any hope of making my residency in Dingle. That photo is a red-faced Beth who all but has a cartoon “$%&# &%@” above her head. So really, there was no way this pic was going to be worse—the temp was cool, I was coiffed and had put on make-up, and I was feeling chipper. And then the UPS guy showed me the pic and said, “Will this do?” and I realized that though this decade has been the happiest of my life, my face did not get the memo that “happiness = youthful appearance” and my brain did not get the memo that when ten years passes it shows. I could have demanded he re-take it, but it was clear to me my jowls were not his fault. So I shrugged and said, “I guess that’s what I look like,” paid my money, shoved it in an envelope, with my old angry passport, mailed it off, and marched back home. Now I wait. Fortunately, I don’t need a passport for Indiana. Yet.
There’s a new Corgi-Australian Shepherd mix puppy in the neighborhood and I keep bumping into it and forcing its mother to talk to me. I don’t think she really wants to, but now that I’ve lived here nine years I’ve decided I’ve got to be the change I wish to see in the neighborhood, and that change is people with dogs talking to me and, occasionally, letting me pet said dogs.
Every few weekends, Z and I have a little adventure by way of taking the bus or lightrail to some neighborhood we haven’t really explored. We walk around. We get a drink. We try to look like non-threatening new neighbors instead of people who don’t belong. Some days we find views. Other days we find gorgeous houses. Sometimes we find archy shrubberies or discover we aren’t that far from the lake.
Mom and I have started painting together every Monday. When I say “painting together” I mean she paints in Indiana and I paint in Seattle at roughly the same time and then we email each other our efforts and praise each other and feel good about ourselves because we’re doing something more than watching videos of baby elephants trying to sit on people’s laps. My goal is that my efforts turn out something like this—little sketches from photos I took on past travels:
Unfortunately, some of my attempts are abject failures. This was supposed to be Z. He was not impressed:
Z sent me a string of texts today in which he was hooting in person and with laughing emojis because he was watching people walking past his office and get flapped at by some nesting crows who don’t understand about college campuses and right of way. I reminded him that Jon Snow got a scar from a crow and then I quit laughing because I started feeling sorry for Kit Harington again.
And now we have arrived where we began, the outer edge of that ancient tree stump. Not a particularly significant location in history, but here we are.
3 planes taken across 3 continents in 2 days of travel
12 hours of layover in Heathrow
2 items purchased at the Cath Kidston store in Heathrow
1 camera charger left in Seattle
2 travel games left in Seattle
1 Fitbit lost
1 cold caught
3 mosquito bites received (despite excessive precautions)
This is traveling light for us. Also, those identifying stickers I carefully slapped on our luggage didn’t make it out of SEA TAC.
So, I’m in Zimbabwe in the middle of winter in the middle of the first post-Mugabe election in the middle of a study abroad program that Z is leading and this is what I’m obsessing about:
My Headspace meditation app, which has been recording my meditation streak—63 days, people! I’ve never done anything good for me for 63 consecutive days—decided to reset at Day 1 for reasons known only unto itself. Perhaps it’s some sort of Mr. Miyagi “lesson” that I shouldn’t puff myself up with pride about meditating for two months straight or acceptance or everything is change, but the end result is the same: I’m outraged. How dare they rob me of the daily satisfaction I see with the number following my meditation sessions? How dare they make me do math to figure out how many days I’ve “really” meditated instead of their fake lesser number? But most importantly, how dare they remove the impetus for me not to break the streak? Now when it’s 11:30 p.m. and I realize I haven’t yet meditated for the day, how much am I going to care? How much easier is it going to be to say, “Eh. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Doing it tomorrow” has pretty much been the modus operandi of my life, which might explain the sorry state of my kitchen floor and why I’m wearing my “big jeans” right now instead of the slightly smaller ones. The thing about tomorrow is it never comes around.
Maybe the meditation is making me more aware of the present moment though. Certainly during the two-days of travel from Seattle to Zimbabwe, I was the calmest I’ve ever been. On the trans-Atlantic flight I was only mildly frustrated with the Russian seat kickers sitting behind me and during the trans-Africa flight, I was only slightly embarrassed that three years of high school French, a year of college French, and a year of French in grad school did not prepare me to speak en français to my seatmate, a young father who, with his son, had to sit on the opposite side of the plane from his wife and daughter. He seemed good-naturedly distressed by this—as if somehow at the end of the flight she and their daughter might have disappeared—and so he kept popping up, prairie dog style, to see if she was still there, to offer a wave, and then to speak to his son reassuringly, Elle est toujours lá. Not that I would have known if that’s what he was really saying because all I could remember from my extensive French study was how to say, “The beautiful cows of Normandy.” I couldn’t even remember excusez-moi when I sat on his jacket, despite having spent my childhood watching Steve Martin in bunny ears saying just that.
Quel dommage.
After a little in-flight meditation, a lot of movie watching (I, Tonya is way better than I imagined), and about five hours of sleep, we land, collect our bags, and then leave Robert Mugabe International Airport with Z’s brother. I feel nothing but glad to be back. Normally, on the first and second day of any trip—even to places I am desperate to get back to like home (Richmond) or home (Seattle) or the home of my heart (Ireland)—I often grumble and want to cry or shout because I’m not in my own bed or eating familiar food or smelling familiar smells. I’m like a toddler that way. I blame sleep depravation, but it might just be that it takes me 48 hours to adapt to change. And yet as we leave the airport road, I feel joyous. It’s been five years since I’ve been here and it feels like five years too long.
Zimbabwe feels different. It could be my imagination or wishful thinking, but something in the air feels lighter, more hopeful than before after too many decades and too many troubles under one leader. Harare is buzzing. There are more stalls selling wares lining the streets. There is more traffic congesting the pot-hole filled roads. People seem busier and more purposeful. It’s election season, and though that brings it’s own anxiety because of past experience—fear, violence, crooked elections—this time, people seem anxious, yes, but also optimistic that Zimbabwe is on its way up.
Z and I sit in the garden of my brother-and-sister-in-law and catch up, while we re-hydrate ourselves and enjoy the feeling of not being cramped against prairie dog strangers on a flight. We scratch behind various dog ears and talk about the shortage of cash that has Zimbabweans unexpectedly on the verge of being a modern, cashless society whether they want to be or not. American dollars are the currency here, but they are in short supply. We’re warned not to flash ours. Even if you’ve got thousands of dollars in your bank account here, you’ll be lucky if you can draw out $50 when you go to the bank. And if you are lucky enough to have some dollars you are willing to spend, you’ll get preferential treatment in gas lines (there is a fuel shortage) and you’ll get a better rate when you buy things with U.S. greenbacks instead of Zim bond notes, or EcoCash (“Zimbabwe’s Mobile Money Solution”) and swipe cards, which transfer invisible funds from one bank account to another. In the days to come, we won’t have a conversation with anyone during which the cash shortage doesn’t come up. We are never the ones to bring it up because we know when we leave in a month we’ll have easy enough access to our cash. But for people living here, it is a worry.
After our visit, Z and I climb into Z-ma’s truck and point it southwest to head towards his childhood home where Z-ma awaits us. I’ve forgotten how bad the roads are, how Z has to maneuver around dongas (potholes), hoot his horn at the badly behaved drivers. I’ve forgotten the look on his face as he sees his home after he’s been away too long, and it makes me happy to see how happy he is.
The traffic has really gotten awful in five years. The familiar police roadblocks are all but gone, which has emboldened unlicensed drivers in vehicles that aren’t roadworthy. Z follows the speed limit as cars and trucks zip past us, going lightening fast. As the city flattens out and the countryside rises up—rocks and hills and grass—I note the changes that have appeared. Mr. MaPlanka’s lumberyard has been replaced by a petrol station. There are more houses that have sprung up as sort of bedroom communities to Harare. The Lion and Cheetah Park is now just the Lion Park because the cheetah died.
Z and I talk and don’t talk as we take it all in. He was here last in December, so the changes are not new to him. He says, “Well done, Babe” when I name the things we pass that I remember: the old snake park where there is a petrol station, the Somerby Caves where a dog once acted as tour guide to Rick and his family, the farm—still mostly fallow—where family friends lived and worked until they were forced off their land and into a new life in Nigeria.
Finally, I see the grain bins in the distance and know that Z-ma’s house is two turns, three rumble strips, and a honk at the gate away. Z points out the changes in his little hometown as we bounce our way to her house. The convenience store attached to the petrol station has changed its name from La Boutique to Bonjour. The car wash—a bucket and a sponge behind a fence—has been moved. There is a building site near the shops and we wonder what the finished product will be. There are big, new churches. Z laughs because a road that was being “fixed” in December is still impassable.
We’re almost there!
I’m pleased to see that Florence Nighting Girls School is still in business.
Like that, we’ve arrived. Z hoots the horn. Eunice opens the gate and greets us warmly. We drive into the yard, past the roses Z’s dad grew, past the cacti, the bonsai, the fruit trees. Skampy stands on the porch behind the gate, temporarily incarcerated until the car comes to a stop, his tail whipping around so much his whole body waggles. And there is Z-ma, walking with a cane now when she’s on uneven terrain because a mysterious dropped-neck ailment has thrown off her center of gravity. But she’s very much herself, bright eyes, big smile, warm welcome, and still walking faster than I do. It’s been too long since I’ve seen her.
There are new developments here on the Pacific Northwestern front.
Veins in my forehead.
I don’t mean like I’m angry and you can see the contours of a vein sticking out of my forehead in a telltale sign that I need to do yoga to de-stress. I mean I just looked in the mirror and thought I had a newspaper ink smudge by my hairline. Only I wasn’t reading a newspaper. Nor have I been canoodling with a chimney sweep while Z is at work.
And it’s not a good delicate blue-vein-on-a-milky-forehead Michelle Pfeiffer style circa Frankie and Johnny. No. It just looks like I need to go wash my face.
I was calm about this because another recent development is that I started meditating almost two weeks ago. I’ve been an avid Not Meditator for years. While I acknowledged that it’s likely a beneficial practice, it seemed an impossibility because focusing on my breath makes me hyperventilate, and I’ve always had an aggressive resistance to someone—anyone—telling me what to think (or not think). But a friend said the Headspace app changed her life, so I thought I’d give it a try. I can’t say it has changed my life yet, but there is something so soothing and pleasant about the speaker’s accent that I find I look forward to my “daily practice.”
Before you get wildly impressed with me, please know I’m only doing it five minutes a day and suspect ten minutes a day will be my limit because, well, it’s kind of boring. But still, me doing anything nine days in a row that I know is good for me but am only marginally interested in is quite an accomplishment.
Other developments in the PNW: I’ve become obsessed with watching packing videos on YouTube. That’s right. I willingly give up 5-to-10-minute increments of my day to watch people pack clothes into a carry-on suitcase for three-week European vacations. It is mesmerizing. I rarely learn anything new. I’ve been mastering the fine art of packing and rejecting the mantra less is more for decades now, so I don’t watch to learn anything. But, oh, is it satisfying to watch someone take a heap of clothes, fold them up, and shove them into a suitcase. I’m also curious to see what items people deem necessary for such travel. Please note, usually these suitcase packers are young women so petite that they could fit their entire wardrobe inside an empty box of saltines.
Today’s development was that I left my card in the ATM without realizing it until 20 minutes later and then nearly had a full-fledged anxiety attack at the drug store when I reached for my card and realized it was gone. Ironically, I was waiting in line to pick up my anti-anxiety meds (that I’m always anxious about not being allowed to have—it’s a snake chewing it’s own tail this anxiety thing, let me tell you). I did not want to appear twitchy in front of the pharmacist lest he alert my doctor that I shouldn’t be allowed anymore of these pills, but once they were in my hand, I hightailed it back to the bank where I was assured the card would be accessible but I had to wait a few minutes for the banker to fetch it for me.
This is a weird thing to say about a bank, but I find ours a soothing place usually. The tellers are always friendly, it feels local even though it isn’t, and they’ve always got Dum-Dums out in a bowl so you don’t even have to pretend you’ve got a kid outside waiting with your husband to score one, and no one looks at you sideways if you root around for a strawberry or ginger ale one. But for reasons inexplicable to me, the anxiety that kicked into gear at the drug store did not dissipate even though I’d been assured the card would be returned to me very soon. I got hot. My heart pounded. A lady was hollering at a teller about the bank not treating her right, ratcheting up my stress. I started to worry about bank robbers (something I haven’t actively worried about since about 1977). I worried about how I was going to get packed before my 5 a.m. flight to Indiana, if I could stand being away from Z for two weeks. (This last one I do every time I have to be away from Z, so it was not abnormal, though perhaps abnormal to be twitchy in the bank lobby as I worried about it.) So what I know now is that even with 52 total minutes of meditation under my belt, it did not soothe me.
Finally, the woman brought my card out.
She’s helped me before—mostly with laundry quarters, but once because I’d made a math error that meant my account was empty for the exact 15 minutes the bank thought it should not be and slapped me with an overdraft fee that she kindly reversed. I like her. She’s thorough and friendly and I think of her as a contemporary though she’s probably in her twenties. I felt better as soon as my card was zipped back into my wallet. I was a little uncomfortable, however, because while all I needed for her to do was use her magic banker key to open the ATM and get my card, she somehow managed to pull up my information and decided she had some products to sell me based on the numbers she saw in our accounts. If it had been another teller or banker, I might have been annoyed, but I like her, so I asked her some questions. She answered them.
Why I often feel obligated to apologize to bank staff that I am not good enough with my money to be a millionaire is beyond me, but I do. For all I know, this woman has four roommates, has her credit cards maxed out, and lives on ramen noodles. Why do I assume that someone with a bank nametag on is automatically more fiscally responsible than I am? No idea, but this is how I am. So I said something like “ha ha, I’m not so good with financial stuff.” I loathed myself for saying it. It’s the same voice I use if someone has to change my tire or unclogged my sink, “ha ha I’m such a dolt I can’t manage to master basic gettin’-through-life skills ha ha ha.”
What I loathed more was what she said to me with a very kind smile on her face. What she said was this:
“Oh, that’s okay! That’s how my parents are too!”
Her parents? HER PARENTS? She thinks I’m the same age as her parents?
I probably am the same age as her parents, but it pains me that this is the correlation she made. Instead of recognizing me as a fellow apartment dweller who must suffer the slings and arrows of the communal laundry room, she sees me as an aging parent who never got her banking crap together so she could move on up to a condo downtown with the washer and dryer right in the unit.
I’ve kind of gone off her now.
What else is new on First Hill? Our trees out front bloomed. More construction went up around us. Belle visited from Indiana and she and I had some writerly adventures, including her guest appearance in my Writing for Procrastinators class. I edited three dissertations, attended Hudge and Providence’s dissertation defense (congratulations!), picked up a new coaching client, helped Z index his book (which will be out in July—expect to hear shouts of joy from our vicinity!), and taught a session on reflective writing to some of Z’s students.
Oh yeah. And we booked airfare for a month in Zimbabwe this summer. So excited to see Z-ma , Z family, Z friends, and Skampy. And a cherry atop that triple-layer cake: we’re going to “swing by” Ireland on the way home for ten days.
Also, when I wasn’t meditating, watching packing videos, or having public anxiety incidents, I logged a lot of hours watching the Royal Wedding. A lot of hours. Before the wedding. During the wedding (which started at 2:30 a.m. out here). And after the wedding.
The thing I hate most about a Royal Wedding after you put all that time in and the happy couple drives off in their horse drawn carriage is the realization that you haven’t been invited to the reception and you aren’t getting any cake.
So, this isn’t much of a post, but I’ve got to go pack my bag, adjust my thermostat for Indiana’s humidity, and spend my last remaining hours of May with Z.
Summer is upon us, friends, and what that means is there is a 78% chance my next post will be complaining about the heat.
I’ve been taking stock of my behavior lately to see if, perhaps, I have become unbalanced. Unhinged. Unglued. Because I am incapable of determining this myself, I offer evidence of my derangedness for your consideration in the following paragraphs.
My current state of mind
Last night the bedroom was stuffy so I opted to sleep on the sofa. This morning at 7:30 (which, with our weird sleep patterns, is the equivalent of 3:30 a.m. to most of you), I heard an unfortunate soul down on the sidewalk talking loudly to himself. We’re a floor up from ground level, so I wasn’t particularly concerned but I wished he’d shut up so I could get back to sleep. I jammed my earphones deep into my ears and cranked up a British show on architecture that is so boring and soothing that it puts me to sleep. I dozed off. Then the voice sounded like it was in the room with me and there was rustling. As in it sounded like the man in question was dragging palm fronds around my living room in a re-enactment of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. I forced my eyes open, rolled over—my nightshirt riding up and exposing my backside—and there right outside my personal living room was the be-hard-hatted head of a tree trimmer.
He was not proselytizing nonsensically but instead telling his work buddy the best methods to climb a tree. (Take note: always plan your climb ahead of time. Visualize.)
I went from pleasantly asleep to embarrassed (exposed backside, remember) to frothing-at-the-mouth angry in less than 60 seconds. Surely this is an unprecedented array of emotions for so short a time?
Though Seattle—the Emerald City—is very green and tree-inclined, we do not live on a very emerald-y block. We have one, full tree outside our window that is so thick and lovely that birds sit on it regularly and sing to us. The tree offered much needed shade during the heat wave two weeks ago. With this tree, a few months a year, we have the illusion from certain angles that we live in a tree house, and in summer, if one of us forgets our robe, we can streak across the living room post-shower with little worry that the Millennials in the 14-story building across the street will see our aging, naked flesh.
Those days are over. The tree now looks like the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree only with a few leaves and zero ornaments. No self-respecting bird will ever sit on it again. I wanted to yell at the man in question, but I’m pretty sure I have no authority over the official tree trimmers of Seattle, so instead, I pulled the sheet over my head (and my backside) and I seethed for two hours until I fell back asleep (after they’d thrown the tree limbs into a very loud wood chipper and done additional trimming with a chainsaw).
Added disappointment: now that the shade of the tree is gone, our filthy windows are on display in the sunlight. (This perpetual sunlight that plagues Seattle in summer and further agitates my mood.) They haven’t been washed on the outside in the eleven years since Z moved in because no building manager has made it a priority. So basically, Z and I are now living in Ralph and Alice Kramden’s gray, depressing Honeymooners apartment in a New York City tenement.
In addition to this, I’m a little exhausted from the rollercoaster of emotions that is the current political climate in America. On the personal front, I’m delightfully happy. I’m teaching. I’m writing. I love reunifying with Z after three weeks in Indiana, and I enjoy his summer break because we have more hours of the day to hoot it up together and love each other up.
Who wouldn’t want to come home to a man like Z and this basket of treats?
But then there is the national news and the distress that it causes. One day I’m worried about immigrants being booted from the country, including my husband. The next day I’m wondering if we should do research on where the nearest nuclear fallout shelter is. The day after that I’m weeping because actual Nazis doing actual Nazi salutes are spreading their hate on American soil. (Even if we were too young to remember World War II and those Nazis, weren’t we all raised on Indiana Jones? Wasn’t the premise of those movies Nazis are bad and we must put our lives on the line to fight them? The mind boggles that this is even a thing we are discussing nationally.)
Thus, emotional whiplash sufferer.
After the attack. There used to be 50 more branches here and one of Snow White’s birds sitting there singing.
My state pride
When I was growing up, it was not out of the ordinary to hear an uncle tell a joke about someone living in Kentucky in which the Kentuckian was presented as being a bit of an idiot. For much of my childhood, I believed it to be an inherent truth that Kentuckians (other than my Uncle Clay who was born in Kentucky and wickedly clever) were not as smart as we were. One of my favorite jokes was about a Hoosier who yelled across the Ohio River to a Kentuckian who was hoping to get to the other side and offered to shine his flashlight so the Kentuckian could walk across the water on the beam of light. The Kentuckian hollered back, “I’m no fool! I know when I get half way across, you’ll turn the light off.”
So it was some shock to me as an adult to discover that Indiana is the butt of a lot of jokes. In particular and for reasons I don’t understand, Missouri apparently tells a lot of Dumb Hoosier jokes. Shows like The Middle don’t really highlight our strengths, and since we often come in on the wrong end of nationwide surveys and statistics about weight and education, not to mention backward-thinking legislation, we don’t exactly cover ourselves in glory either.
I tell you this so if you do feel it necessary to read the next paragraph and say, “Well, what do you expect? She’s from Indiana?” you should know that I’m already aware of your derision. I understand the tendency to mock.
Last month when I came home from Indiana, I had fourteen un-shucked ears of corn in my suitcase.
Go ahead. Laugh. You can’t hurt me with your ridicule and here’s why: Indiana sweet corn is hands down the best sweet corn there is out there, and my Aunt Jean’s sweet corn—freshly picked the morning of my flight in this case—is the best sweet corn in Indiana. And furthermore, if you are eating only one ear, or worse, a half an ear at a time, you are a fool. Indiana sweet corn must be eaten by the plateful. It should be your entire meal. Coat it in butter, salt it up, and worry about your pants fitting and your blood pressure spiking when corn is out of season because it will be, all too soon.
And no. Sweet corn from Washington does not “taste the same.”
The. Best. Corn. Ever.
My forgetfulness
While I was still home, Mom and I drove north to see cousins of both the Hoosier and Irish variety. The Irish ones were in country for a graduation, and they were staying in a vacation rental in Douglas, Michigan. I hadn’t seen the parents for two years and it had been more like eight since I’d seen the offspring graduate in question, so it was a delightful afternoon catching up with them. We decided to go across the water to Saugatuck for lunch, and afterward we walked around the quaint artsy town that felt a bit like Cape Cod. The cousins asked if we’d been there before and we assured them we had not. We oohed and aahed at the tree-lined streets, the quaint cottages, the shops of art and books and fudge.
It was new to us, this sweet little coastal enclave. Later, Mom and I confessed to each other that we had gotten simultaneous senses of déjà vu but we shrugged it off. It just reminds us of pictures we’ve seen from New England we decided.
The afternoon was full of stories from Ireland and a lot of truly delightful conversation that so transported me to the west of Ireland that on the drive home (fortunately on the interstate so I was inclined to stay on the correct side of the road), I briefly forgot that I was actually in America and not Ireland. I kept wondering at how green and magical everything in southern Michigan looked and expected to see stone walls and sheep.
It was very discombobulating.
Later that night when we were back in our hotel room, Mom said, “You know, I think we have been in Saugatuck. We stopped there on the way home from Grand Haven a few years ago.” She was right. Somehow neither of us had been able to piece together a coherent memory of it when we were actually there, but everything we were oohing and aahing over had already been oohed and aahed over nine years ago.
How do you forget an entire town you’ve actually been in before? How do you forget you aren’t in Ireland when you’re driving down a U.S. highway?
Inishbofin or South Central Michigan, you decide.
My choice to buy these shoes though no one forced me & I wasn’t on drugs:
My false sense of my own intelligence
When I got back from Indiana, it was Hudge’s birthday and she decided to celebrate by treating herself, our friend Providence, Z and me to an Escape Room experience down in Belltown. None of us had ever done one. Among us, we have eight graduate degrees (come spring), one of us has a PhD, one of us did some work in “intelligence,” and at least one of us was raised on Trixie Belden mysteries, so I was feeling confident that we’d escape within the designated 60 minutes before we’d be “killed” by poison gas. I considered the possibility that we might even break records. We were instructed before going into the Victorian-inspired room of a supposed explorer that we could ask questions and hints would appear on the screen that was our countdown clock.
Friends, it was not pretty. I can’t believe that they use escape rooms as a team-building exercise because it did not feel like we were building a team. It felt like we were four headless chickens. And if I were being observed specifically, I think an employer might have fired me on the spot because I was not displaying my best qualities. I felt annoyed with myself but also everyone else for not being smarter and quicker. I got stroppy with Z who kept asking the game master (who gave cryptic help at best) for clues, which for reasons I can’t explain, felt like cheating and made me cross. (It should be noted that of the four of us, Z was the only male and the only person willing to ask for help, so I’m not sure what that says about Z or the notion that men would rather die at the side of the road than ask a passerby for directions.) When we had ten minutes to go, I wanted to sit down, put my head in my arms, and just tell the game master we gave up because it was clear we were not going to “win.” It was not a gold star Girl Scout behavior moment.
Also disturbing: at one point, we had to get on our hands and knees and crawl through a low space, and I discovered that I am now of an age where crawling is uncomfortable and best avoided. Something I’ve been doing since I was a baby is now, basically, a skill that is lost to me.
Finally, once we’d been gassed and the game master came in to talk us through our foul-ups and missed hints, my competitiveness re-animated. I got obsessed with other escape rooms I could try. I downloaded a puzzle on my iPad that I believed would make me a better contender next time I find myself in a locked room, and finally, I became particularly obsessed with an escape room in Cincinnati that has my surname in the title. I wondered if I should try to gather my family members together at the holidays and we could try to escape together. (Though in retrospect, we might hate each other—or at least they might hate me—when it’s all over.)
My choice to teach a class on writing and procrastination
You know me. You know my issues with deadlines and daily writing schedules and writing productivity. I think you can see the problem with this.
My inability to stay focused
Yesterday, a mini-van drove past with something like “Graffiti Be Gone” written on the side of it, and for a full fifteen minutes after it passed me, I considered that perhaps this is a business I should get into. I’m never good at imagining practical work that offers a real world service, and in Seattle, where graffiti abounds, this would be a real growth market. I considered how I might showcase my skills, to whom I might advertise, what the logo would look like. I even imagined the money I would make from this venture: how much it would be, what I would do with it, and how there might even be write-ups about me in trade magazines. I would win the equivalent of the Pulitzer for graffiti removal.
And then I realized in the midst of my reverie that I have never excelled at any sort of physical labor and I don’t know the first thing about graffiti removal. Do you just paint over it? Scrub it really hard with OxiClean? No idea. It’s the sort of thing I’d have to phone my Virgo mother for: Mom, what do you think I should use to get the Anarchy symbol off my front door?
(FYI, she would recommend dishwashing detergent. Right now, it is her go-to cleaning supply. I can’t think of the last time she recommended anything other than Lemon Fresh Joy. Most recently, it removed a mystery stain from my sofa arm. You should try it on everything from carpet stains to whatever you just dripped down your front while eating your lunch. It’s amazing.)
Anyhow, your takeaway should be this: if you have graffiti on your premises, don’t call me because I don’t have a clue what to do about it.
I do this sort of thing all the time. Often it’s for jobs I absolutely know I DO NOT want. Jobs that require you to stand all day or be outside under the sun holding a sign in a construction zone that says “SLOW.” I’ll worry about this. How ill-equipped I am for this work as if it is actually going to be my job. I consider how badly I’d feel at the end of the day. Whether or not I’d get along with the other workers. And then there is this moment that is the equivalent of waking from a nightmare when I realize, “Oh, wait. No one is really expecting me to get a job on a construction site. It’s okay. And some of those people who are doing that work actually enjoy it and have real skill at it, so you don’t even have to feel badly for them, Beth, because they have different strengths and proclivities than you do.”
Also, I should probably point out that when I had this Graffiti Be Gone daydream, I was sitting in Starbucks with Z having a conversation about the recent ugliness in Charlottesville. That is: I was in the middle of a conversation, and mostly holding up my end of it, yet inside my brain I had started a business for which I am badly equipped. Is there a drug you can take to stop this sort of behavior? Would a fidget spinner help?
No wonder then that halfway through a good many of our conversations, I will have to stop the words coming out of my mouth and say to Z, “Huh?” because it is suddenly clear to me that not only have I not heard him fully, I don’t even know what I’m talking about.
My refusal to admit when I don’t understand something
My tech whiz brother was here for a week, and as is our custom, Z and I pepper him with questions about tech issues we don’t understand. Earlier this year when he was visiting he made our Netflix stream more efficiently by hooking up some cables (a.k.a. “magic”). On the occasion of this trip, Z decided to ask him about BitCoin, the crypto-currency that you may have recently read about because if you had invested a thousand dollars in it four years ago it would be worth something like four gazillion dollars now. I don’t understand what it is. I don’t understand where it comes from. And I’m particularly unclear on how someone—some governing body—isn’t controlling it because it is my firm belief that the world tends towards chaos and thus this is a recipe for disaster. My brother spent ages trying to explain it, reading descriptions of it to us, offering analogies from which my non-tech brain should have been able to draw comparisons. At the end of the conversation, Z had some working knowledge of it, but I was in a full-on, feet-dug-in hrrmph because clearly, it is the stupidest thing to have ever been invented if I can’t easily grasp what it is and how it works.
My confused loyalties
I’ve spent more than a few minutes worrying about what I will do if the Seahawks and the Oakland Raiders play each other this football season because while I love the Seahawks, the reason I fell in love with them was Marshawn Lynch, and now he has taken his own particular brand of briefly-retired skill and quirky humor away from us and to his hometown. A decade ago if you’d asked me where the Seahawks were from, I would have said, “I dunno. San Diego? It’s a baseball team, right?” But now, I feel like my boyfriend just announced he’s taking someone else to the Homecoming dance.
Oh, Marshawn. We hardly knew ye.
It still pains me not to see him in blue and green. Photo: Rick Scuterl/AP
My “breedism”
I love dogs and the only thing that really gets me out of the house for a walk is the promise of seeing the neighborhood dogs. Even though I know it is wrong, I need for a dog to look a certain way or it pains me. They don’t have to be purebred, but they need to not be pointy. They need to not be yappy. They need to look like they’ve got some intelligence going on behind the eyes (although I do not insist they have a working knowledge of Bitcoin). I am not particularly afraid of any dog and will hold my own with a pit bull or a German Shepherd or a Doberman so long as it isn’t frothing at the mouth to get to me. That said, I will cross the street to avoid a Chow. I don’t trust them and I don’t like their demeanor. Not only have I known ones with lightening-quick mood changes but the fact that they look like bears with blue tongues makes me uncertain that they are even canine.
An appropriately shaped Skampy of Zimbabwe
My indecisiveness
I currently have twelve books I’m reading. Twelve. And that doesn’t count the numerous titles I plan to “get back to soon” that I started and jettisoned ages ago.
My need to rank things
I have an ice-crunching addiction that is, perhaps, the hardest thing about me for Z to deal with, which is saying a lot because there’s a lot about me that could be construed as “troublesome.” His ears are sensitive but my iron-poor blood cries out for glasses and glasses of ice to crunch on a daily basis. I get as excited about a good cup of ice as I used to get excited about a hand dipped Jif-infused peanut butter milkshake. Despite this frustration of Z’s, he regularly brings me bags of ice and I am constantly rearranging which brands and purveyors of bagged ice that I prefer in Greater Seattle (Fuel Star followed closely by Ready Ice are currently at the top). I try to have conversations with him about what restaurants have the best ice and what makes good ice (not too frozen, a little air) despite the fact that I know the subject pains him because it reminds him that he will be listening to me gnaw through half a bag while we’re trying to watch Game of Thrones.
My obsessiveness
I am watching Game of Thrones from beginning to the current episodes again for approximately the fifth time. Does anyone need to see anything five times? No. But I’m obsessed with the storytelling and want to know what was said in Season 1 that is now coming to fruition. (Also, I’m thinking Arya needs to add a few more names to her hit list. Some from the show. Some from my life. That early-morning tree torturer seems like he might be a good candidate, and I’m none too happy about a fellow on Facebook who recently suggested that my mother should “Get a clue.”)
It’s on First Hill, not Westeros, but still something the Mother of Dragons might want in her home.
My inability to know when to end things
I have trouble with knowing when a visit or a phone conversation should end. I keep talking long past the point of interest by myself or the other party simply because I have no skill at dis-entangling myself. (For that matter, I once went on one date with someone with whom I saw zero future but somehow ended up in a three-and-a-half-year relationship because neither of us could figure out how to pull the plug after a year.)
This blog post is another example.
Hopefully at this juncture, you have enough evidence to determine for yourself my mental state and whether or not you’d feel comfortable sitting next to me on a cross-country bus trip.
The Reluctant Girl Scout 