Category Archives: Writing

Aug21

The Ill-planned Grand Tour: Part 2

Posted on 21 August 2015 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

In 1988 when I flew to London with some of my classmates from Anderson University, the song that was stuck in my head was Kate Bush’s “Oh England My Lionheart” which had the most gorgeous, historical and literary lyrics and the refrain, “Oh! England, my lionheart/I don’t want to go.” As we boarded our plane for home, at least half of us were mentally humming this song. We weren’t ready to say goodbye to this city that existed for us previously only on the pages of the books we were studying.

As Z and I walk along the Thames, by Parliament, up Whitehall past the statue of Charles I staring forever towards the place where he lost his head, through the tombs in Westminster Abbey where Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I are stretched out side by side despite a lifetime of distrust, imprisonment, and conflicting religious ideologies, what song is in my head? Why, Fergie’s “London Bridge” with lyrics that I won’t repeat here because my mother-in-law reads this blog. It will NOT leave my head. I walk around looking at sights that quicken my heart while mentally, there’s Fergie, getting her groove on: All my girls get down on the floor/back to back drop it down real low.

This difference pretty much epitomizes the alterations that twenty years can make on a place. I’m not sure if those differences I see are primarily in my head or if they are in the city itself. Certainly, London has changed. I need only look at the skyline across the Thames to South London to see the difference. Skyscrapers, the London Eye (a massive Ferris wheel built to celebrate the Millennium that wrecks that old world feel I loved so long ago, though demonstrates what a modern tourist destination London is), and the general hubbub makes the south side of the river suddenly seem like the place to be instead of the stuffy historical sites on the north side. (We stay on the north side.) Also, though one of my previous trips was during the tourist-laden summer, London feels positively stuffed to the gills with people. There is no room for us on the tours, on the sidewalk, in the Tube. I can’t decide if this is my age, the fact that now that I live in a city I’m no longer as enamored with them as I used to be, I’ve become a claustrophobe in middle age or because the EU and globalization have turned the city into the world’s oyster. Also, a new development since 1992: at least ¾ of the people we pass have their faces buried in their smart phones with no awareness that the throngs are having to dodge their zombie-esque lumber down the middle of the sidewalk.

At one point, I actually think but don’t say, “London may be due another plague to thin this herd.”

Lest it seem like I haven’t enjoyed myself and don’t love this city, fear not. Z and I have had a great time. It’s hard to see a red double-decker bus, a red phone box (a few less since last time I was here), or the iconic red mailboxes without catching a little London fever. Samuel Johnson said that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, and I’m inclined to agree. I will never be “over” London, though I do wonder if Dr. Johnson was ever tired IN London as we have been, and if he didn’t ever long for a little respite in the Lake District. Certainly, at the end of our days, we’re happy to stumble into our hotel room.

Our hotel, The Regency, in South Kensington, is delightful. Its location just a few blocks from the Tube is why we picked it, but when we walked up to it we knew we’d be in good hands. Queen’s Gate Avenue is a wide, flower-lined street with Georgian homes that lead into the Queen’s Gate in Kensington Gardens. Though the room is small and the water pressure is non-existent, the quirkiest thing about it is the high tech light system that the hotel staff is very proud of. If you get up in the night, the lights sense your movement and pop on. This would be handy if you were in a room by yourself, but with two people, it’s unsettling to have the lights flash suddenly because your spouse needed to make a late-night trip to the loo. The hotel is quiet and they accommodated my ice addiction by bringing me a bucket of ice every night. (Though on the last night, I only got a glass of ice, much to Z’s delight. He couldn’t quit laughing at my disappointed face.)

In Seattle, the city parks planners have recently started a “parks to pavement” movement, the result of which means on our block of First Hill we’ve lost about six parking spaces that have been painted aqua. They chained some jaunty folding chairs to sign posts and we’re meant to think it’s a park (and it’s worth noting, it’s five feet from a non parking lot park). But you only need to be in London about five minutes before you see proper parks, both big and small before you realize that Americans often don’t really do parks right at all. The ones in London are under huge canopies of trees and there is everywhere evidence of landscape design. Aside from the big parks, there are also little “squares” in the midst of Georgian row houses that are private for the residents around the block. It’s a bit disconcerting to be on the outside of the locked gate looking in, but it must be such a delight to live across the street from one and know that you have access and can find therein a park that is less likely to have litter strewn about, needles cast aside, and a safe haven from the stress of the city. There should be more of these everywhere and not just in wealthy neighborhoods. It seems like it would foster a sense of community more than our little patch of aqua pavement. If we went to a park every day of our stay here, I’d ask to go to two.

On our first jet-lagged afternoon, Z and I head off to Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens (the two parks bleed into each other and even my pop-up map is vague about where one ends and the other begins, but combined they are larger than the whole of Monaco!). Henry VIII created Hyde Park for hunting, and London is all the better for it. Marble Arch in Hyde Park was my very first tourist stop in 1988, so I’m always happy to return there, even in a gentle rain. Z and I stop for photo ops at the Albert Memorial, created by Queen Victoria to pay tribute to her beloved husband, and I remember in college how silly she seemed to have gone into a mourning that lasted the rest of her life though her husband died when she was 42 and she would live to be nearly 100. Standing there with Z, it makes much more sense to me now that a woman who ruled half the geographic world would feel she’d lost her own when her husband died. Is it possible that I’m more romantically inclined in middle age than I was as a twenty year old?

While in the park, we walk along the serpentine–a swan-laden lake that twists and turns—and we visit Peter Pan, pass the Italianate garden that looks like it belongs in another country. It’s a peaceful re-introduction to London.

The next morning, we manage to get ourselves to what was previously my favorite place in London: The Tower. It’s a fortress comprised of multiple buildings that span centuries in architecture and that was the backdrop for some of England’s more grisly history, including the place where wives lost their heads simply because Henry VIII had in mind to wed another and where people whose faiths differed from the monarch’s were put to death for heresy. When I was 21, this place sizzled for me. I walked along the parapet where Elizabeth I walked when she was being held prisoner by her sister and felt alive, like I was somehow touching the past. I watched the ravens hopping freely across the green and recited to myself the myth that if the ravens leave, the Tower will fall. (They haven’t left because their wings are clipped, and now, sadly, they are in cages.) I traced Jayne Grey’s name, carved in the wall by her husband before the pair of them were beheaded at the end of Jayne’s 9 day reign as queen and got choked up. I stared at the Crown Jewels and imagined which crown I’d get to wear when Prince Edward finally saw sense and married me. Full disclosure, I also stared at Henry VIII’s codpiece and wondered if I could get Edward to don similar armor periodically to keep things spicy.

On this August day, the Tower is crawling with tourists. Since last I was here, they’ve built a souped up tourist center and started charging a lot more, including a “voluntary donation” that is in the price posted! There are lines for the Crown Jewels that snake around the White Tower and leave Z and I shaking our heads: I’ve seen them before and he isn’t that interested, so we move on. They’ve refurbished apartments above Traitor’s Gate that belonged to Edward I, which are fascinating in their medieval-ness. In other places, I feel disappointed that “improvements” have been made to entertain children—unnecessary sound effects that make it impossible for me to do my own imagining, a lot of hands-on feeling of feather ticks and metal soldiers’ helmets, and an array of animal sounds from the menagerie that used to live there. I understand the inclination to make history come alive so young people will be interested, but what I notice is most of them could care less about the history and simply want to move from experience to experience. I feel sad for them that they live in an age when grown-ups feel they must entertain children instead of helping them develop imaginations that can fill in blanks, but mostly I’m sadder for myself and Z. There is no time or space now for reflection about politics, faith, war and affairs of the heart without hearing “tigers” growling and the clang of swords from a mock joust. Even Tower Green, which used to have a sort of tacky chopping block to illustrate where heads were lost now has a beautiful monument made of glass and stone with a lovely poem etched into it and a sculpture of a pillow.

I’m still unsure how I feel about this. The poem is nice and offers a sort of benediction for those who have become cartoon characters in the history books of our minds, but it’s a little too pretty. For me that chopping block was jarring reminder in such a beautiful setting that the Tower wasn’t all banquets and Tudor-era tennis.

But still, why am I complaining about any of it? For an American whose history barely goes back 200 years, it’s amazing to stand in a structure that has existed since William the Conqueror in the 11^th Century. I get chills standing in the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula knowing that two of Henry VIII’s wives lie beneath the floor, heads no longer intact, and can’t be having much of a peaceful rest with all the tourists that trek through on a daily basis.

Because I’ve always wanted to walk along the Thames—mistaking it, I suppose, for the Seine—Z and I leave the Tower and walk towards Parliament on the Thames River Walk. It is a longer distance than our pop-out map indicates, and more to the point, London is a boom town with a lot development happening along the river, so we walk twenty feet and then have to circle around construction; walk another twenty feet, circle around. It’s hot. We are tired. Honestly, I prefer the Thames in my mind. As we walk away from Tower Bridge, towards London Bridge, Fergie cranks up in my head, and I sigh. I think I’m missing 1988 London. Possibly, I’m missing 1588 London.

I’m Fergie Ferg. Me love you long time.

Aug19

The Ill-planned Grand Tour: Part I

Posted on 19 August 2015 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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My first trip to London was in 1988 with a small group of my fellow liberal arts majors and my beloved mentor, Gibb. I’d just read 84 Charing Cross Road, I was 3/4 of the way done with a lit degree that focused heavily on British Lit, I was studying British history as an elective, and I had an unhealthy attachment to the Royal Family. (Specifically, I was sure I was meant to be one of them and was holding out hope for Edward.) It was my first trip abroad and as soon as I discovered that the ability to read a train schedule, a guidebook, and a metro map opened up a person’s world exponentially, I was hooked. And so a love affair that began in books was finally consummated.

Four years later, a family friend agreed to act as tour guide for Mom and me, and we spent two glorious weeks living in a house owned by Stephanie, an Austrian octogenarian who was friends with the doctor who delivered Prince Charles and knew from first hand experience that Winston Churchill’s wife’s Siamese cats had ugly dispositions. Her three-story brick house was on Muswell Hill and on the first day there we looked out the back windows to discover not just rose-covered walls but also a community bowling green where men dressed in whites looked like something straight out of a Merchant Ivory film. In America at the time, we were obsessed with all things British, all things Victorian and Edwardian. It wasn’t just Mom and me; entire stores were dedicated to bringing a little 19^th Century British class to our ranch houses and condos. Though the city was modern, it was as if the plane that carried us across the Atlantic had also been a time machine. Because of the lady of the house’s age and social class and the length she had owned her beautifully appointed home, we could, at the very least, pretend we were in pre-Blitz London. At night, I’d eat biscuits and work on a needlepoint project I’d purchased at Liberty while Stephanie and I would watch TV. In my twisted memory, instead of viewing episodes of East Enders though we were listening to the wireless and hearing news about impending troubles in Europe. We were delighted one day when Stephanie was in a tizzy because she couldn’t find her hat for Royal Ascot, and the next day, we were lucky enough to see the entire Royal Family leave Windsor Castle for the big race. They were waving and all be-hatted, while we stood along the road, cheering and clapping and taking blurry photographs. (Sadly, Edward did not notice me, and one of us noticed how miserable poor Diana looked despite the fact we were all about to be surprised by her tell-all biography and impending separation.)

Because Barb, our tour-guide friend, had traveled extensively, I studied her actions carefully. She carried a small backpack so she was always ready with a rain coat, London A to Z, and space to shove bread and cheese from Sainsbury’s for lunch on a train to Dover. She understood the Tube and planned well a day’s itinerary so no time was wasted. I could do this, I thought, unadventurous as I was. I was in my early twenties and determined not to spend the rest of my life in Richmond, Indiana, waiting on the Barb’s of this world to take me to the places I wanted to see.

When Mom and I left, we had an extra suitcase full of all the bits of England we’d purchased in gift shops in an attempt to take the experience home with us. In our carry-on luggage alone, we had three teapots. All these years laters, it remains one of the Big Moments on the timeline of our respective lives.

Seven years later, I fell in love with Ireland and never once looked back across the Irish Sea to England’s green and pleasant land. I became obsessed with Irish literature and Irish history, and the best I can do to explain this is to compare it to the difference between a first love and a soul mate. There would always be a tiny corner of my heart that belonged to England, but I was in love with Ireland body and soul, and because England had been, over 700 years, badly behaved towards Ireland, it was like realizing that first love of yours was actually a bully who’d been taking your (eventual) soulmate out into the school parking lot and beating him senseless while you were eating a cheese sandwich in the cafeteria. In 1998, I started seeing Ireland exclusively and I never regretted my decision. The landscape, the literature, the people—it all felt like mine. The first week I was there, it occurred to me that I’d spent my twenties looking for the right man when really what I should have been doing was looking for the right place in the world. Ireland was that place. If I could have easily moved there, I would have. Because I couldn’t, after every return back to America, I’d start planning my next trip, enlisting other people to go with me, traveling solo if the situation dictated it.

So now Z and I are spending a month traveling through England, Wales, and Ireland, while he does research and I write and stare at views and buildings that quicken the heart. It is the most ill-conceived, ill-prepared for trip ever because we’ve had to postpone it twice and didn’t know until two weeks ago that it was even going to happen because of visa issues. (If you have a US passport, might I recommend you take it out of its hidey-hole and kiss and bless it for the ease of travel it provides–not all passports are created equal). Also, the day I decided to extend my trip to Indiana by a week, we got the news that this trip was a go. I don’t regret being home to visit Mom and her ailing back and to help my stepfather celebrate his 70th birthday, but what this means is I was back in Seattle for just two and a half days before we had to be on our Heathrow-bound flight. And finally, in the eleventh hour, I thought I was coming down with shingles again, which would have thrown a further kink into all of our plans. While in my suitcase there are the clothes and equipment for every conceivable weather condition and natural disaster, the rest of the trip has only the vaguest of outlines. Barb nor my Girl Scout leader would be proud with my planning and preparedness levels at this moment. Case in point, we seem to be in London on the brink of both a train and Tube strike, which could make things interesting.

But even with delays and missed connections and the realization there’s no way to do “it all” in just a few weeks, I’m looking forward to reconciling my past love with my current one and sharing both (plus Wales!) with Z, who is better than any Windsor prince, any day, any time.

Stay tuned.

Jul8

Post-Apocalyptic Lifestyles of the Timid and Bookish

Posted on 8 July 2015 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Columbia River

There’s been a heat wave burning through the Pacific Northwest, so naturally my pale Irish American thoughts have turned to the dystopian future that is probably awaiting all of us. I’ve barely left the house for five days—let’s be honest: I’ve barely had clothes on for five days—I’ve been reading the world-is-mostly-over-because-of-flu novel Station Eleven, Z and I finished binge watching The Walking Dead, and we went with Hudge to see Mad Max, a movie so aesthetically assaulting that I kept my eyes closed for the bulk of it. So it’s hard to see the weeks’ long streak of 90 degree heat as anything other than a harbinger of bad things to come.

In other words, this is my annual post about how much I hate summer.

Robert Frost may enjoy debating whether the world will end with fire or ice in his famous poem, but I have no doubt that ice will not be the method. It’s going to be one really big, hot sun and not enough fossil fuels to run the last remaining air conditioner on the planet. This might explain why I buy three bags of ice every three days from the drugstore on the corner and then crunch it obsessively all day long, much to Z’s chagrin.

Aside from the heat, one of my fears for my future post-apocalyptic lifestyle is that I was always one of the first people knocked out in elementary school when we played Dodge Ball. I wasn’t particularly quick or athletic, which was a contributing factor, but often I’d stand there making myself an easy target in order to get it over with. I hated waiting for the worst. In high school when my friends and I would play Ditch ‘em in one of the farmyards, I was always perfectly happy to get caught early and spend the rest of the game sitting on a hay bale at home base waiting for everyone else to get corralled. It was preferable to the heart-pounding rush of hiding under a pine tree and hoping no one could hear my anxiety driven loud breathing. Despite having a competitive spirit in the board game arena, I have very little in the physical world. In terms of fight or flight, I’m almost 100% flight unless someone mistreats or underappreciates Z, and then I want to cut them.

So when I watch something like The Walking Dead, I want to be Michonne, the sword-wielding badass who doesn’t need a gun to take out a herd of zombies. You never see anything akin to terror or dread on her face. She’s fueled by rage and some innate desire to survive, and she is always calm and rarely breaks a sweat. However, I know should I find myself jettisoned into a zombie-apocalypse situation– even with years of training–I almost certainly would not be Michonne or her male counterpart, Daryl the bow-hunting-survivalist-tracker of few words. Instead, I would be the sniveling character who a) must be protected b) inevitably ends up a zombie feast when the source of my protection has “gone out for supplies.”

Last week Z and I drove down to our favorite beach hideaway on the Oregon Coast. It’s a little cottage that hangs on a hill overlooking an outcropping of rocks and endless surf. We always pack our swimsuits and then discover that only small children, people in wet suits, and the mildly insane can brave the temperatures. This year the Pacific was particularly cold and I couldn’t even stand to wade for very long. While folks back in Seattle were trying to find the one restaurant in town that has air conditioning, Z and I were huddled under our beach towels trying to stay warm. We were committed to the beach experience, even if it meant sweatshirts with hoods up. I was particularly pleased with my heartiness the day I did brave the water for a quick “paddle” as Z calls it, and then he looked down and noted that my fingernails had turned blue. (I’ve never been so cold I had blue fingernails before—what an accomplishment.) We didn’t really care though. The colder it is there, the more the beach belongs to us and it’s just the escape from the city that I wanted and Z earned after his long hard slog towards his much deserved tenure.

When we first discovered this outpost back when we were dating and I was living in a cornfield, I longed for civilization and every night we’d drive into the nearest town for dinner or a trip to a big box store to buy unnecessary plastic objects so I’d feel connected to humanity. On this trip, however, I had no desire to leave our little cottage and drive somewhere with traffic lights—a sure sign I’ve been too long living in our part of downtown-adjacent and way-too-populous Seattle.

On the trip to our beach haven, we stopped in Astoria, Oregon, the place where Lewis & Clark spent the winter when they were busy “discovering” this part of the world. Now, it’s a town of almost 10,000 residents where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean. Then, it was, well, nothing but a vision for westward expansion and commerce. Their trip fascinates me for many reasons. I’m in awe that anyone would look at a wall of wilderness, harsh weather conditions and potentially dangerous situations, and think, hey, let’s see what’s out there. Lewis and Clark probably never had a Dodge Ball strategy that involved letting themselves get thwacked with a ball in the first 30 seconds so the horror would be over more quickly.

I am not a camper or an adventurer. I enjoy the trappings of civilization, even as I am critical of it and all the ways it has really messed up the world. As much as I would love not living in an urban apartment building outside of which a fellow tenant sometimes shouts about the pyramids and unfair rent increases at 2 a.m., I also can’t get excited about a back-to-nature lifestyle that doesn’t involve stacks of books and time to read them and electronic devices and places in which to plug them. I’ve heard when you are conquering new frontiers, there aren’t libraries or a lot of down time, and so other than a little travel, I should be content where I am, five blocks from one of the country’s best independent bookstores, two blocks from a modern marvel of a public library, and surrounded by Starbucks full of people reading real and virtual books. Not to mention the heavy duty extension cord that I cleverly put under our sofa so Z and I have easy access to free plus to charge our devices.

This is a war that constantly wages inside of me: this desire for tranquility, space and a view of the gorgeous sunsets like those outside my parents’ country home versus my love of culture and convenience.

Ultimately, these are my fears about a post-apocalyptic life: I don’t want to have to spend time figuring out how to stay fed and sheltered and cool when I could have my nose buried in a book or a screen showing some excellent television programming. I don’t want to have to work out “reading shifts” wherein someone keeps me safe from zombies or marauders while I read the latest Marian Keyes novel or daydream in front of a vista. It sounds like no kind of life.

Fortunately, I’m well-practiced in how to get out of a game of Dodge Ball.

Oregon Coast

Jun9

Girls Growing Up

Posted on 9 June 2015 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Dear diary.

If it weren’t a sin to make additions to the Bible, I’d probably implore the folks at Zondervan to include a verse that reads something like: Woe unto the adult woman who happens upon her junior high diaries and reads them, for she will be sorely mortified.

I found the red calico receptacle of my seventh-through-twelfth-grade thoughts on the bookshelves while I was back home in Indiana babysitting Mac the Wonder Scottie. I tucked it into my suitcase before I returned to Seattle, anxious to see what messages I had had for Future Beth. Because I had no such biblical warning and because I was a bookish girl who was overly concerned with grades and my future, I assumed that I would discover raw genius on the pages. I also suspected that early 1980s Beth had a clearer perspective on who her essential self was before she was shaped and twisted by the outside world. I settled in to read these nuggets of teen wisdom with anticipation.

Sadly, what I discovered was that aside from having truly atrocious handwriting, the only thing in my head was apparently boys. Pages and pages about my feelings for and the merits of this boy or that boy. Boys whose names no longer can bring an image to my mind. Boys I barely knew. Boys who likely didn’t know me at all. Sentence after sentence of heartfelt evaluation of the various boys in my school, in my youth group, boys I had known for all of 15 minutes when we were visiting family friends out of town. I had a vivid and completely imaginary romance with a mortician’s son from one of those trips. In one entry, I marveled that I had not gotten depressed when Mom and I went to the wedding of “S”—“S” was the son of a friend of my mothers who was about six years my senior and with whom I had never once had a single conversation. It is a mystery as to why it seemed likely his nuptials would have made me blue.

It was hard not to be retroactively disappointed in myself. Z suggested I should be kinder to the younger Beth because she was just behaving age appropriately, but it took me a good two days to get over the shock of realizing that I hadn’t been some writerly savant. I was no Anne Frank. No junior Virginia Woolf. No teenage girl Pepys. I sure wasn’t writing pages about my career dreams or my hopes (outside of boys) for the future, which disturbs me greatly because I know in 7^th and 8^th grade I was obsessed with getting a 4.0 GPA, I learned to play string bass because the orchestra had no bass player, I took piano lessons, played a flute, loved art, read, thought regularly about college, and wanted to know everything about the world and the people in it. But none of that is recorded. No one would ever know from the evidence before them in the red calico journal that I had a brain in my head or aspirations beyond convincing the boy I liked to like me back instead of hitting me on the arm so hard I’d have bruises.

(What was that about? Who was I then that I’d let a guy sock me in the arm and not flatten him. I blame his dreamy blue eyes but am thankful that after about three weeks of the daily arm slug, I determined that he “wasn’t really the guy for me.” Ya think?)

The whole time I was reading my journal, I kept texting my oldest friend, Leibovitz, to tell her what 1980something me was concerned about, what she’d been up to, who was annoying us in 7^th grade.

“You just danced with J.T!” I’d text, to which she would reply, “Oh, don’t remind me.”

Possibly, my texts were annoying. Her oldest daughter was about to graduate from high school but I was so immersed into the early 1980s–wondering if I’d be more appealing to the boy of the week if I asked for a pair of Bass Weejuns for Christmas—that I couldn’t even fathom a Little Leibovitz existed at all, let alone talk coherently about her high school graduation. It was as if the last thirty odd years never happened (and it may explain why this weekend I bought a pair of Tom Mcan tasseled mocs for $12.99 on a K-mart clearance rack even though, my mother pointed out, I made fun of her for wearing the same in 1998). I did not need a DeLorean to go back to the future; I was wedged in it.

Plus, I admit, I did not like the way Little Leibovitz had recently made me feel ancient. While I’d been home, I took her out to dinner—something I did more regularly when she and her sister were little and I was still living in Indiana. She’s beautiful and seems supremely confident in ways I could not have mustered at her age (or now). Maybe she doesn’t feel like she has the world on a string, but it seems like she does. We chatted about school and her summer and college plans. After we were finished eating, I offered to take her out for dessert or to the mall or something. She shook her head and said no thanks, and then it hit me: Little Leibovitz had been humoring me. She didn’t need me to drive her around town: she has her own car, a rich collection of friends, a busy social life. My offering of taco chips and boring old-people questions about her future plans was not the draw it might have been a decade ago.

The thought of her in a cap and gown made me feel old and I wanted to keep on feeling like I’d just seen Urban Cowboy for the first time. (One advantage to not having children of your own is that you can more easily live with the delusion that you are ageless.)

A few days after reading my journals, I started reframing what I’d read there. Yes, I did talk obsessively about boys, but on a second thought, it was not random, mindless chatter. I was analyzing and evaluating them like I was a detective or a zoologist: what were the subject’s good qualities? Bad qualities? Did those qualities mesh with mine? What was the likelihood of our future contentment? I was picky and dis-inclined to flirt. As my detecting progressed, I moved more quickly reached the “not the guy for me” evaluation and moved on. I seemed to know exactly the sort of person I wanted in my life and I was willing to wait for him. Which is a good thing since it took Z a few plane rides and three decades to arrive on the scene.

If I had the superpower of time travel, I’d put a Post-It in that diary for 12-year-old Beth to read that said something like, “Honey, calm down. It’s going to be a few years before you find the right one. Why not jot down some current events while you wait?”

I’m certain my dog-eared copy of _The Preppy Handbook_ did not allow for shoes from K-mart.

Mar27

Flashback Friday: An Omnibus

Posted on 27 March 2015 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Lighthouse, San Juan Island

[Herein are three baby posts from the first spring break I spent with Z in Seattle in 2007 right after we’d first gotten together. There are other posts from this visit that I’ll flashback to at another time.]

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Flying Alone

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

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

On the plus side: so far my flight is on time and Z is on the other end of it waiting on me. (Well, technically Z is asleep, but if he were awake, he would be waiting on me.) I must learn to embrace my co-travelers and their winkdogs.

Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle

Friday, March 16, 2007

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Island Girl

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

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

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

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

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

Feb27

Flashback Friday: Lowered Expectations

Posted on 27 February 2015 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Mac, soon to be usurped by Z.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

[I’m now wearing a whole different style of jeans with a whole host of other fashion problems, but please remember this was eight years ago and don’t judge me too harshly.]

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

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

And so I begin this blog….

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

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

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

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

As luck would have it, I’m at the Dog House for the rest of the month, babysitting, while my Scottie’s parents are off on a cruise of South America. My fantasies of putting the house to good romantic use have already been dashed. The nice thick white carpet in front of the fireplace that would be good for a picnic–or let’s be honest, making out–has been ripped up and replaced with very trendy hardwood and no area rugs. The hot tub is broken. It’s 3 degrees out, so the sweet walks on our old, friendship-only stomping ground cannot be re-dedicated to this new incarnation of us unless we bundle ourselves up like the little brother in A Christmas Story. I’m beginning to suspect the Scottie Dog is not going to approve of the two of us in a romantic relationship, and I’ve already begun envisioning all the ways he will try to break us up, kind of like Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills did to Brian Keith and their potential new step-mother in The Parent Trap. He’s a good dog, but he is an only child. [In fact, Z gave Mac a very sweet talk about how love was expansive and Z was not replacing Mac in my heart. Mac had none of it and promptly hopped in bed, wedging his way between the two of us with his back side pointed in Z’s general direction.–RGS, 2015]

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

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

But I am NOT wearing the low-rise jeans.

Feb20

Flashback Friday: Rip Van Winkle & the Gastritis Queen

Posted on 20 February 2015 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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[We return here to a recently reunited, fresh-in-love, Z & Beth. Sadly, things are not going well.]

3 January 2007

I made it to Seattle before the clock struck 12. Just barely. Z and my luggage were both waiting on me, so I felt welcomed. We took a taxi back to his flat, where he had New Year’s champagne waiting as well as those little confetti bottle poppers. By the time we got back there was precious little time to get anywhere fun for midnight, so we watched the Space Needle fireworks display on television. It’s weird to be one of the last places on the planet to experience the New Year. I kept waiting to see Dick Clark, but he’d been in bed for three hours—2007 was already old news by the time it hit the Pacific Northwest.Don’t judge me harshly, but I’m a little superstitious. It’s haphazard superstition. I’d walk under a ladder, but I don’t like a candle in my house with an unburned wick. The whole black cat thing annoys me because it smacks of feline racism. One of my superstitions is that however you spend New Year’s Day will pretty much determine the shape of your year. It’s not looking good for us. Z was still horribly jetlagged, so he slept until 6 p.m. on January 1st. [It is worth admitting here, that I went mentally ill for a few hours and convinced myself that he was pretending to be asleep because he realized he didn’t want to spend any time with me, so there was some cabinet door slamming and a pouty walk up to McDonald’s where I ate alone and wondered if I should book an early ticket back home. I hadn’t yet flown to Zimbabwe and didn’t know about jetlag of this magnitude.–RGS] Once he was up, we walked to his office so he could take care of some things before classes started and then decided to eat at our (formerly) favorite Mexican place. It was not so good as we remembered, and by 3 a.m. I was awake with “gastrointestinal distress.” By the time I woke up the next morning, I was achy and still making regular trips to the bathroom. Between my marathon bathroom visits, we lounged in bed watching Gerald Ford’s funeral. Not really the honeymoon-ette I was planning.

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

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

If you ever have to go to an emergency room, try to go to one in Seattle. I’m not a regular ER visitor, but based on my experience at my local one in August, I can see a vast difference. Here, I was treated kindly, I was given warm blankets, I was clucked at and reassured. No one made me feel as if I had no business being there. The doctor looked like someone who would turn the heads of both McDreamy and McSteamy’s. She was kind. Kind and beautiful and smart. It was like night and day when I think about the shark-tooth wearing doctor I had to see in the fall and how I felt like I was wasting everyone’s time.

Z came and entertained me, though I kept dozing off from the IV they’d given me for dehydration. The blood work indicated that it was “just” gastritis, so they gave me some drugs, some instructions, and sent me on my way. One of the drugs to stop nausea I vowed not to take: a suppository that Z and I immediately referred to as a “spy pill” like the cyanide capsules that are last resort for secret agents.

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

Feb17

Our Fake Life

Posted on 17 February 2015 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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A week ago, Z and I embarked on a road trip from hell to get to southern Oregon to celebrate the 90^th birthday party of a family friend of his. Forty-five minutes in, I had a skinned knee, we’d had to return one rental car in need of engine maintenance for another, and we’d been in a high-speed fender bender on I-5 that could have been deadly but instead was just nerve-wracking. It was pouring with rain and while a shaky Z pointed the car to downtown Tacoma so we could grab lunch and collect ourselves after the incident, we considered the possibility that we weren’t meant to make the journey. We both wanted to go home and pull a blanket over our heads and send our apologies to the Birthday Girl.

I’d been looking forward to the trip ever since we’d made plans, but after this start, I’m honestly not sure what made us climb back in the car and keep driving south other than a shared belief that you need to get back on the horse that threw you. Well, that and a desire to fulfill some fantasies.

Though I grew up content to be the only child in our little apartment, I was fascinated by larger families and some of my favorite TV viewing included families where there were more than the American Dream recommended 2.5 children: “The Brady Bunch,” “The Waltons,” and “Eight is Enough.” There was something about all that noise and hubbub and ability to disappear in a crowd of siblings that intrigued me. Because it was just Mom and me coasting our way through the 1970s, we often found ourselves staying with friends and living on the periphery of other people’s lives. While I was never disappointed to return back to our quieter, more peaceful existence, when we were staying with family friends, I loved observing what life in a larger sort of family might be like. One of the more fascinating qualities to me was that the larger the family the more able it seemed to incorporate additional honorary members. In our little apartment of two, if we had a guest, it was an Event. But we once spent an entire summer with family friends and while we were staying with them, two other people were also summer guests and seemed to barely affect the functioning of the family other than the number of chairs that had to be pulled up around the table. I consider these expeditions into a larger tribe to be a highlight of my solitary childhood.

When I married Z and moved to Seattle into another apartment of just two, I wasn’t thrilled about the loss of easy access to “my people”—my cousins, my friends, and those above-mentioned family friends. I did, however, inherit family friends of Z’s who at the time were living near Seattle. A few decades earlier, the Birthday Girl and her husband had been staying in Z’s hometown as part of a service group—think Doctors Without Borders—for retired professionals, where her husband was offering his knowledge to the local paper mill. Z was soon to leave for college in America, so when Z-ma found herself playing bridge with this American woman, she had a lot of questions for her. A friendship was forged and the Birthday Girl and her family provided Z with the sheets and towels he didn’t have room to bring in his suitcase. Later, they hosted young Z on his first trip to the Pacific Northwest, where he met the family. It seemed fortuitous a few years ago that Z got a job in Seattle that put him in close proximity to these family friends.

My first Thanksgiving away from Indiana—when I was weepy because I missed home but insisted it was only because I couldn’t find the box-mix of gingerbread I’d been eating since I had teeth—was spent with the Birthday Girl and part of her family. I was happy to feel connected to someone out here. We all sat around a huge round table with a large Lazy Susan in the middle of it, spinning helpings of food around to each other. I looked at the members present and imagined the life they’d had together and apart in this other hunk of the country, and because I was on the outside looking in, all I could envision was something akin to a more contemporary Norman Rockwell.

When we would visit the Birthday Girl, I’d ask her about her life as a young woman, a young mother, a grandmother. I was itching to hear her stories about going to work at Oak Ridge when the US government was piecing together the atomic bomb, how they’d lived in Mexico for a time, how she, who had done a lot of volunteer work for Planned Parenthood, had ended up with an astounding number of grandchildren and great grandchildren. I’d study the artist’s renderings of the various houses the family had lived in that hung along her stairwell and look fondly at the wedding photos of all her children that hung above the piano. I loved her house and the way I felt cared for there while looking out at Puget Sound. I even loved the spread of magazines on her coffee table: National Geographic, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian that made me feel better informed just by being near them.

A few years later after her husband had died, she relocated to Oregon to be nearer her daughter. Z and I felt a little bereft. It’s not that we saw her daily or weekly, it’s not that we talked to her with any regularity, but knowing that she was nearby made us feel connected to something beyond our small city life. Not long after she left we found ourselves driving near her house and it was almost more than we could bear to know she wasn’t inside, having a cocktail and reading those magazines.

I-5 South thru Oregon

So, despite the accident, we headed south and both of us had some mini-version of PTSD wherein we felt certain that every car and big rig was about to careen into our lane and sideswipe us. The traffic was slow. The rain never let up. Fog set in, and though we should have been at our destination before the sun went down, the trip took two hours longer than it should have, so I was steering the dented car up and down mountains in the dark. It wasn’t “unsafe” in that the traffic by then had thinned out, but it was unnerving because the wipers were sub par and the unfamiliar road with twists and turns offered no view into the distance so we could anticipate where the road was taking us.

Eventually, we reached the Birthday Girl and her family, where we were greeted as if we were part of the clan instead of interlopers. We caught up with various family members, watched its newest members tumble around on the floor, talked to the most recent crop of young adults about their plans for the future. It was chaotic and loud and fun. We stole a couple of hours with the Birthday Girl herself and were happy to see her looking healthy and willing to talk about the books she’s reading and her bridge games and specific memories we asked about. It might not be our family, but it felt like a real gift to be included in this one’s big milestone celebration. Our only regret was that Z-ma wasn’t able to be with us so the pair of them could see each other again.

TouVelle House, Jacksonville, OR

We were the only residents our first night in the TouVelle House B&B, a gorgeous Arts & Crafts mansion decorated with period furniture and trimmings. Normally, wherever I stay, I feel like my room is “mine” and the only time I’m in a lobby or shared living space is when I check in or check out or, if in Ireland, someone is feeding me a big Irish breakfast. But this place was too beautiful to go scurrying up the steps to our suite. Z and I came in from the rain, shook off our raincoats in the huge entry hall, made hot drinks for ourselves in the darkly paneled dining room, and then settled down on the Stickley-esque furniture next to the fire in the expansive living room. I’ve always admired Arts & Crafts houses but felt it would be too difficult to live a modern life in one while making it look the way it was meant to. But this night was our chance to try it on for size. The fire crackled while we talked about politics and world events and the annoyance of the drive down. Neither of us were making a mad dash upstairs to our screens… in fact, it was as if we were living in a pre-screen era. We refilled our mugs and talked some more. In the flickering light, it was easy enough to pretend it was our house and this was any ordinary Friday night for our more sophisticated alter egos.

The next morning, we shuffled downstairs to the gourmet breakfast and chatted with the owner, who looked entirely too young to own a house so grand. I peppered her with questions so I could better understand what a day in the life of an innkeeper is like, and because I’m always curious about how people ended up where they are. She was friendly and we felt well cared for as she made suggestions for the day’s activities and offered to make us a to-go breakfast for the next morning since we hoped to be headed home before the regular breakfast would be served.

TouVelle House, Jacksonville, OR

Other than the potential nightmare at the beginning of the trip, the weekend was a dream. A sort of fantasy. Because the TouVelle House was not ours, I didn’t have to think about how the property taxes would get paid or how much it cost to heat such a big space or whether any of the beautiful artwork might “accidentally” end up in a guest’s suitcase. (There was a clock there I really wanted to bring home!) I only had to sit by the fire and slide into the 400 count sheets and pretend it was mine. I could pretend the owner was our friend who was feeding us not because we paid her but because she wanted us well-fed and happy. I could pretend that big, unwieldy family a few blocks away was my own without having to jockey for time to myself or ferry someone to a doctor’s appointment or look at the breadth and depth of the family history and wonder what my place in it was. I could just let it all wash over me and for a minute try on a different sort of life.

When we come back to Seattle, I’m always a little indifferent. If I’m with Z, then that is home, but there are other places that call to me and so I don’t often walk into the door of our little apartment with the same exhalation of relief that I do when I return to my folks’ place in Indiana, for example. Even though the drive back was kinder than the trip down to Oregon, when we crested the hill on I-5 and saw Seattle splayed out before us, I felt a little flutter beneath my ribs.

The spell was broken, but I didn’t mind.

TouVelle House, Jacksonville, OR

Nov21

On Surprises, Big and Small

Posted on 21 November 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Z is a master of surprise. He’s thoughtful and listens when I say off the cuff that I like something, and then at Christmas or a birthday, voila! He’s like one of those 1930s movie heartthrobs who is always at the ready to light your cigarette (even though you don’t smoke) because he anticipates other people’s desires. It’s like his super power.

While I wouldn’t classify it as a super power, one of the things I delight in is getting the “right” gift for someone, and I really like to find things a person doesn’t even know he or she needs until I offer it up, tied with a bow. Z is very problematic for me in this regard. He’s one of two people I know most well in the world, yet every year for his birthday or Christmas I find myself wandering around stores trying to find a gift that I think he might like or need and it’s as if I don’t know the man at all. Like maybe he’s a new co-worker instead of my husband. Last year for his birthday I made the completely arbitrary and now embarrassing decision to buy him a honey dripper because, well… I don’t even know why. He looked at it and said, “What is it?” and now it lives in the back of a drawer and occasionally we’ll joke about it. It’s not like we’ve got pots of honey sitting around that require a dripper. We pretty much squirt the honey right out of the plastic bear bottle and cut out the need for any utensil at all, so I’m not sure what I was thinking.

So this year, I’ve been trying to stealthily compile a list of non-embarrassing presents I could get him, and the only thing I lighted on a few weeks ago was his very own bottle of Aveda Blue Oil so he doesn’t have to rifle through my purse every time he has a sinus headache. We’re both plagued with sinus issues in Seattle because of the frequently and rapidly changing pressure systems here, and though we have a whole list of treatments we use ranging from pills to hot compresses, Aveda Blue Oil is a favorite.

Oh, I was pleased with myself for thinking this up. The very next day after I had this idea, he said, “I wouldn’t mind having my own bottle of Blue Oil.” So much for the surprise.

Fortunately, Z is sometimes forgetful after he says he wants something and it’s been a good three weeks, so it didn’t dissuade me from getting the concoction for him yesterday when I stopped at the Aveda store to replace the bottle of hair gel I accidentally flushed down the toilet a few weeks ago. The clerk asked if I’d like a complimentary neck massage while I was there, so by the time I met up with Z at Barnes & Noble, my hair was pinned back and I was smelling all peppermint-y and I was sure I’d given myself away. I told him about getting the hair gel and the complimentary massage, and he acted none the wiser about his future present. Mission accomplished! Oh, I was pleased with myself.

Z and I have a glut of celebrations in the fall. First, there is his birthday, then there is the anniversary of “our love” when we first became a real couple and not just movie-watching, food-eating buddies—which this year I re-discovered in an old journal coincides exactly with the anniversary of my First Deception for Love.

And then there is today, which is the sixth anniversary of our engagement. Aside from deciding to confess his love two years before, “engaging” me was perhaps his best ever surprise. Later today, I will be forcing Z to look at photos and listen to our engagement song and admire my engagement ring and re-live the day, moment by moment: his surprise present of a trip to Las Vegas, a private-non-public-y proposal, phone calls to friends and family, walking outside into all the blindingly tacky electric hope that is Las Vegas, feeling weirdly insulated in a love bubble and thus not bothered or thrown into a feminist rage at the the dudes handing out flyers for mostly naked female escorts, going to Tiffany to look at rings and realizing that I am not a diamond girl, standing in front of the Bellagio fountain and listening to Andrea Bocelli and Sara Brightman sing “Time to Say Goodbye” (“Con te partirò”), and realizing for the first time ever that it is a love song and not the world’s loveliest sad song, and how it and Z and our new engagement made me feel completely full up with love, not just for Z but for the whole world, tawdry as so much of it was, displaying itself there beside us in rhinestones and neon.

Today, we walked to the Corner Café, and on the way, Z told me how nice my hair looked, and I told him it was because I’d finally replaced my Aveda hair product, and then he said—just like a detective—“Aha! You got that neck massage yesterday because you bought my Blue Oil for Christmas! I tried to convince him that I’d completely forgotten he wanted Blue Oil and that the massage had nothing to do with a Blue Oil purchase, but I am the world’s worst liar. Like really, criminally bad at it. Oh, I was annoyed. Surprise presents for Z: zero (again).

We eat at the Corner Café so much now that the servers there don’t even ask for our orders. We show up, and our drinks magically appear on the table. Minutes later, our meals appear. We’re predictable, some would say boring. Today while we ate, we laughed and whooped because of Z guessing his present and because we discovered that for my entire adult life I’ve thought “milieu” meant “expertise” and I stubbornly refused to believe Z’s definition until I’d Googled it. (And then I spent the next five minutes saying “milieu” over and over again, dragging the last syllable out like a French-speaking cat, and making us laugh some more.) We aren’t what you’d call high-context humorists.

After lunch, we went to the drugstore to pick up some odds and ends. We had to have some photos made, so I left him to it while I did the rest of the shopping and then met him back at the cash register. The clerk briefly held up one of the photos—one that appeared to be of the two of us—and told us that while he didn’t usually look at guest photos, that one caught his eye because it was so sweet. (Aside: we know his statement isn’t altogether true, because he once gushed excessively about how handsome Rick’s father was when we had a family photo enlarged. It made us a little uncomfortable.) I didn’t think anything about it other than Z must have made some photos of us to send to Z-ma. Then, as the cashier handed us our bags, he said something that sounded vaguely like “Congratulations on your years together.” Weird, I thought.

We slogged out of the shop into a downpour, me trailing behind Z like a baby duck trying to keep up with its mother, haranguing him all the way: What did that guy say? And finally Z growled back at me, That silly man! It was supposed to be a surprise. He’s ruined it!

When we got home, Z presented me with a photo that Mom took of Z and me this fall, looking out over Lake Washington and holding hands. He’d printed a happy engagement message above it, as a sort of sweet, personalized card to commemorate the day. It’s sitting next to the bulldogs-at-the-movie anniversary card I got him, which was also not really a surprise because I had to dig it out of my underwear drawer and sign it in the bedroom like an after thought because I forgot to get it ready yesterday while he was out of the house. I briefly considered giving him the Blue Oil as an engagement anniversary present, but then I thought, December 25^th is a ways off—there’s still a chance he’ll forget what’s coming to him.

There’s also a good chance that after we run down the litany of engagement memories we’ll end up watching West Wing on Netflix tonight and eating the remains of a decapitated Gingerbread Man, which isn’t quite as glamorous or exciting as life this time six years ago, but I don’t think I’d get in my time machine for do-overs if you paid me. I like our little rut. Our (non)surprises. Us.

Nov5

Reading Between the Lines

Posted on 5 November 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Today, my only job in the whole world is to make edits to an essay I wrote on Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” so I can resubmit it to a nice editor at a new journal on the study of creative nonfiction.

My. Only. Job.

I do not have to do dishes. Laundry can wait. I have no tiny noses or bottoms to wipe, and Z will not be expecting a four-course meal when he gets home from work (mainly because he knows I can’t cook). My editing projects are either done or not ready to be started.

No one is expecting me to finish a TPS report at the office. There is no office.

More specifically, this job is not even a complete overhaul of an essay. The editor said after the first five pages that my essay “roars.” I don’t exactly know what that means except “to roar” sounds like the opposite of “to suck” so apparently most of the essay is on the right track, which means 13 pages of it are okay. Maybe even good. But those first five pages? Meh. I’m not bitter about this criticism. I’m a big fan of revision. But I’m clueless as to how to fix these pages, never mind on any given day I write five page emails to Jane before my eyes are fully open. (Tuesday two weeks ago was extra easy because we had a lot to say about Reneé Zellweger’s surprising new face).

Also, I’m sitting in the café at the Elliott Bay Book Co., a place I normally delight in. Everywhere I look there is someone on a laptop that looks like mine, though with cool ironic stickers that I’m too chicken to put on my own MacBook, and none of these people appear to be blocked. In fact, right this minute, I’m just paranoid enough to believe that every one of them to a person is also writing about Joan Didion and doing it far better than I ever could.

I’m realizing now that writing in a bookstore is not good for my psyche. I can see all those books on the shelves, with all their perfectly published words, taunting me. What’s your problem? they seem to be saying. Just get it done.

But I can see this writing day for what it is: over. Instead, I’ll tell you about other words on a page that came somewhat easier and had recent fruition.

Back when I was just giving up on my quest to earn all the Girl Scout badges ever, I started reading teen magazines. My favorite was ‘Teen, which had very informative columns that offered advice on love and friendship and sex. I also read Seventeen, though I found its fashion advice dubious because it was too avant-garde for Richmond, Indiana. (Sweatshirts paired with skirts weren’t happening yet, and I could never believe that red and pink should be worn together—colors should be complements and shouldn’t be reminiscent of Valentine’s Day.) In one of these magazines, you could send in your name and address and be paired up with a pen pal.

It wouldn’t be my first pen pal. Mom had carefully arranged for me to have a Swedish one because she had had a Swedish pen pal when she was my age and she felt they were superior (and there was a lovely array of Swedish candies and doo-dads that got sent my way on the holidays from Cecelia—so, good choice there Mom)! Through a Trixie Belden fan club, I’d acquired a fun-loving girl from Colorado whose dachshund Barney I was jealous of (I lived in a “no pets” apartment with a “no pets but fish” mother). Through school, I acquired a West Indian, and two Canadians, one of whom seemed to delight in copying out sexy passages from trashy novels I wasn’t yet cleared to read and another who sent me a photo of herself with a goat. The most exotic was Glenda from Zambia, who came via the TV show, Big Blue Marble. I loved getting her thin, light blue airmail envelopes and reading about a world so different from mine that it could hardly be imagined. With Glenda, I was concerned that she was in danger of being murdered by Idi Amin because I didn’t fully understand the vastness of Africa (or even that Africa wasn’t a single country). After a few months or a few years, all of these pen pals and I developed differing interests and the letters got fewer and further between until they disappeared completely. I tried reconnecting with Cecilia a decade ago and managed to find her, but she admitted her English was not what it used to be and since I had not learned Swedish, there was nowhere to go with the old friendship except fond memories of her colorfully decorated envelopes and the Carl Larson inspired life I had imagined her living.

But my teen magazine pen pal, C., from a province in Canada that was roughly above my head (how I thought about geography in 1980, sadly no joke), was something different. We were a good pairing: both introverted, goodish girls, book-inclined, and studious. We wrote each other dutifully about the classes we were taking, the books we’d read, the music we were listening to, and for some reason a tradition that has stuck ‘lo these many decades, a list of Christmas presents received. Our letters might have become less frequent as we got older, but we both made an effort to write at least at Christmas to check-in. In retrospect, I think it was my first experience with what would later become a weird sort of computer-age norm: talking to a total stranger about your life and developing this odd sense of knowing them even though you’d never really met them.

Five years ago when Z and I were compiling our wedding guest list, I have no idea what made me ballsy enough to send an invitation to someone I’d never actually met. Who does that? But it seemed weird not to send C. an invitation when technically, she’d been my (pen) friend longer than any of my real life friends who would be there. I never imagined that she and her husband would brave the winter roads to come to our December wedding, but they did. I’d like to say that as soon as we saw each other it was like we were reunited long-lost friends, but the truth is, there were a lot of people at the wedding, my tiara was cutting off my circulation, and I’d had too much to drink to be a proper good hostess. I did, however, feel honored that they’d come, and because I am the sort of person who is often in awe of other people, during a few of my more “aware” wedding moments, I was envious of her sophisticated dress and the ease with which she and her husband glided around the ballroom. (Z and I had exactly one dance move that we put on repeat for the duration of our first dance.)

Last week, C. and her husband incorporated a visit with us into their travel plans to the Pacific Northwest. She texted me updates as they—more adventurous than we have ever been—hiked Mt. Rainier and through the Olympic National Park and ate meals that my bland, 4-year-old-inspired palate would not even consider. We met them for dinner in Belltown on the first night, and I admit while I was excited at the prospect of actually getting to spend time with the real person, I was also wishing there were some sort of pill I could take that would give me an evening’s worth of extroversion and gregariousness. C. and I are clever introverted women, however, who married men with communication skills, so they got things rolling for us, and soon it did not feel at all like strangers meeting for dinner. This night turned into two more meals together during their time in Seattle and some good conversation.

The thing that most struck me after we’d said goodbye on the last day of their visit was that I was saying goodbye not to a new acquaintance but to an old friend. C. was exactly how I’d imagined her for all these years, not because I’m wickedly intuitive but because she’d represented herself so well in the letters she’d written over three and a half decades. I knew what she looked like from photos and our brief interactions during our wedding weekend, but I wasn’t at all surprised by those things you shouldn’t be able to tell about someone you’ve only ever corresponded with: how she carried herself, how she spoke, her quiet but quick wit, the way she and her husband interacted. I felt what can only be described as deep affection for the pair of them–these “strangers”–as they walked down our steep hill towards the lightrail that would carry them to the airport and then back home to Canada.

If you ask me, telling yourself true is the best writing any of us can do.