Sep26

Flashback Friday: Bridget Jones in Middle Earth

Posted on 26 September 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

[I’m finding this installment from yesteryear absent a lot of details re: the hows and whys of love. Keep in mind, 2006 Beth had no idea how this story would play out and feared she’d jinx it by oversharing.]

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

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

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

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

Only, maybe not. It turns out my ridiculous, ill-advised love and devotion to a man who showed no signs of any interest beyond friendship was wearing away his resolve. It turns out I’m now in a relationship. It turns out I have everything I’ve wanted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, that’s better.

Precious.

Sep19

Flashback Friday: Secret World

Posted on 19 September 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Wednesday, October 25, 2006

[FYI, this entry covers my inaugural trip to Seattle to help my friend Z celebrate his birthday. Keep in mind, at this point, I’d resigned myself to the notion that he wasn’t interested in me as anything other than “good buddy.” I’d been in love with him for four years and the boy just would not budge.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After that, we walked up Broadway in search of food and so I could see, as Z put it, “the freak show.” It’s a street that apparently delights in the counter-culture, so in the space of a single block you can see goths, hipsters, drag queens, the heavily made-up, heavily tattooed, significantly pierced and spiked, as well as people randomly dressed like super heroes.

Sadly, the freaks were not out, either because it was too early in the evening or two middle-of-the-week. I will have to save those human oddities for another day, though clearly I’ve got my own little freakshow happening right inside my head and don’t have to walk up any hills to get a front row seat.

Sep12

Flashback Friday: The Rules of Engagement

Posted on 12 September 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Monday, October 16, 2006

[It’s worth noting that when this entry was written my life was about to change in a big, surprising Zimbabwean way in less than ten days. Tune in next Friday for more in the saga of Z and Beth’s Love: The Early Years.]

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

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

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

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

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

What annoys me even more than this, though, is when someone willingly breaks one of these rules and finds true love in spite of the rule breakage. For instance, I know a woman who loved a man who did not love her back, even though they had a steamy sex life. By all accounting with Price Waterhouse, this relationship was doomed, she was being used, he would never respect her, and thus she would never win his love, no matter what acrobatics were involved. It’s the cautionary tale every young girl hears from her mother or Sunday school teacher. Yet after a year of this FREE and FLAGRANT milk giving, the guy realized he loved her and couldn’t live without her. They are now married and have matching tattoos celebrating their love.

When you have been a rule follower your whole life, this is one of the jaggedest little pills to have to swallow: rule breakers win; rule breakers do not necessarily go straight to hell. (Though this is a young marriage, and so the verdict is still out on that one. Hell has many manifestations.)
What is the MOST annoying, however, is when someone willfully breaks the rules but presents her story of love as if she were adhering to the above. Recently, my mother befriended the wife of the first boy I loved, grades K thru 3. He was cute, smart, skilled at kickball, and was regularly awarded the title of “Good Citizen.” His wife (an excellent and good person by all accounts) tells the story of how she was not interested in dating anyone and told the friends who set her up with him that she wasn’t. She told him she wasn’t interested in him repeatedly on that first non-date, and three days later she moved in with him and they’ve been blissfully happy ever since. She followed those rules of courtly love and rejected him multiple times, but still, she went on the non-date. Still, she answered the phone after the non-date when he was calling to tell her he wanted to see her again. And when, later that same night, he drove through the country looking for her house so he could kiss her soundly and show her that there was something between them, she told him where to find her driveway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sep9

Grab the Badges and Run

Posted on 9 September 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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I didn’t enjoy much about Girl Scouts. I liked the idea of the organization, the wholesome history of it, the biography of founder Juliette Gordon Lowe, the goodness implicit with being a Girl Scout, the uniform, the abstract idea of community. But in truth, I was too independent to function happily in a group. I found the other scouts and scout leaders to be “not my kind of people,” I looked bad in that shade of green and always felt as if parts of me were going to come bursting out of the buttons. I might have still been a girl when I was in Girl Scouts, but my body was a few years ahead of itself, so I looked like someone dressing up for Halloween more than a legitimate ten year old.

I never felt legitimate.

Frankly, I hated the outdoors, which might make one question why I had chosen this extracurricular activity for myself. Let me tell you: I was a badge whore. I loved the badge guidebook. I loved ticking items off the badge to-do list and earning yet another badge for my sash. My troop leader, an odd bird with old-timey glasses (now trendy again), told us once about a girl who had earned all of the badges. My troop leader felt it was ridiculous because it didn’t really demonstrate dedication to a single particular area and she felt the time it would take to earn those badges could be better spent living a life, but I thought the notion of earning all the badges was the equivalent of becoming Miss Teen USA. I wanted them all myself even though there were ones I never could have earned because they involved sports or extended camping or being gregarious.

Even then I was desperate to be a well-rounded person, though in my mind, well-rounded meant “knowledge about X” and not “experience doing X”, a problem I’ve continued to have into adulthood.

Oh, how I coveted those green, quarter-sized badges with activities embroidered on them that symbolized some possible accomplishment. In my thirties, I found my sash and badge book and was bitter that I couldn’t keep adding to the list as an adult. (I could easily earn a photography badge now for instance—I own multiple cameras and have an Instagram account.) Just by looking at the badges I had acquired in the late 1970s, I could see that I was preparing myself for a certain kind of life that hasn’t yet panned out. For instance, I have two different cooking-type badges even though I spend every night waiting for Z to serve me my supper like I’m some sort of princess. (The one time I tried to make him pancakes, they rolled right off of our new griddle and onto the floor. He’s the cook in the house.) Despite having a sewing badge, it was my mother who always sewed the badges onto my sash. She just did it so much better than I could, and I wanted it to look good.

We would occasionally get patches for something like the Spring Fling that we were supposed to put on the back of our sashes, but I wasn’t interested in patches. Anyone could get handed one of those who spent a Saturday attending some stupid gathering of Girl Scouts. To my mind, they just took up space where earned badges should go.

Aside from the badges, I also loved the system and symbolism in scouting. I loved that there was an actual guide about how to live your life well. And I remember in detail watching a Brownie ceremony when they got twirled around and had to look into a mirror before they “flew up” to junior scouts. I hadn’t been a Brownie, and I was bitter that I was now too old for the full experience. After being a junior scout, I wanted to be a cadet and then a senior scout, but even in my deluded, badge-lust state, I knew I wouldn’t last that long. Five days at Camp Wapi Kamigi nearly killed me. Beyond my dislike of camping, though, was my dislike of socializing with strangers, and even with people who I knew marginally. I loathed it.

One of my great early joys was an overnight (with mothers), and the next morning Mom nor I could face the idea of an entire day spent putting on stupid skits or talking about ways to increase troop revenue. I feigned a stomachache as soon as we woke up, and the two of us zipped down the tree-lined canopy of the camp like bandits, giddy with our own escape. On the way home, we stopped at McDonald’s and got Egg McMuffins and a cinnamon Danish, and if you asked, I could describe, bite for delicious bite. It all tasted like freedom.

And as a side note, this is one of the things I love most about the childhood I got to have: I had a cool mother who knew who I was and what was and wasn’t important. Spending a tedious afternoon with those earnest Girl Scouts and their earnest mothers was not going to make me a better person. It was not going to build character. It was just going to make me (us) really miserable.

I wish I’d known then about personality types. About introverts and extraverts and INFPs and the Enneagram and how kids from single parent homes maybe saw things differently than “normal” kids. I wish I could have realized that this day of declared independence with Mom was the right path for me and the other days—of which there were so many more—when I tried to contort myself into a box someone else had created for me were the anomalies.

I wish I’d known it was okay to hate schilling Girl Scout cookies. That as an adult I’d make a pledge that my children (imaginary) would never sell anything for any organization until they were adults and could make decisions on their own about how they felt about capitalism. (My imaginary children are very gifted in the arts, but they do not have the skill set to understand things like political theories or when they and their band uniforms are being used to make money for larger corporations.) My face still turns red when I remember asking my paternal grandparents to buy a Girl Scout calendar from me. I knew they didn’t want one. They traveled the country in a tiny Airstream trailer that lacked excess wall space, plus even if there were calendar room, why would two retirees want to spend an entire year looking at photos of girls they were not related to doing activities that the Girl Scout they were related to hated doing? Still, I asked. I had to sell some calendars. So I asked them, as well as my maternal grandparents who I had fewer qualms about asking because I knew they would just fork over the $5 and wouldn’t expect me to really demonstrate any marketing prowess. God bless them for that.

I suspect children inherently know what is right and what isn’t right for them, but grown-ups are forever trying to get them to do the thing that is counter to their own sense of rightness: eat the vegetables, talk to certain safe strangers, play the sport, the instrument, the party piece… Some kids try to be good and acquiesce. Some stick to their stubborn guns. I always felt caught in the middle. It was constantly a war inside me, wanting to give the adults what they wanted all the while telling them I had drawn a line in the sand that I wouldn’t cross: no broccoli, no camp-outs, no making friends with a girl who was acting a fool.

I’m still not sure which side won the war. I’m note even sure if the war is over. Maybe to be human is to house these warring factions inside yourself. Or maybe that is just what it is to be Beth.

I need to look at those badges I earned and see if they add up to me. Was I true to myself and the things I was interested in in 1977 or was I grasping at straws, at badges, at showing others I was a Renaissance girl? What I’m curious about now, as I remake my life is this: do I know who I am—as well as I think I knew myself then—and can I shape this second half into what I want? Should I try harder to put that cooking badge to use and give Z a night off?

Is there a badge for this kind of mid-life inquiry? There should be.

Aug29

Happy Birthday, Baby

Posted on 29 August 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Yours truly, age one.

Last May when I was in a pet store with my half-brother and his family, my three-year-old niece Bridget and I were perusing a rack of pet-themed cards when she decided she wanted to find her daddy. I was so engrossed in the photos of pug dogs in lipstick and feather boas that I said, “Okay. He’s over by the fish” without once thinking maybe a three-year-old should have an adult escort. A few minutes later my brother came up to me and said, “Um, have you seen my daughter?” Panic. We found her a few seconds later midway to the fish with her face pressed against an aquarium full of gerbils, but I momentarily felt like the world’s worst aunt. So maybe it’s not surprising that I’ve been having such a good time in Indiana that I not only forgot to write a real post, but I also forgot that my baby, The Reluctant Girl Scout, turned one-year-old on the 18^th. She’s twelve months old and walking and talking and I totally forgot to commemorate the moment with a snapshot. Oops.

I like to think if I had an actual human child I wouldn’t be so forgetful—failing to celebrate its birthday, leaving it in its carrier on the trunk of the car as I drive off down the road towards some exciting destination—but one has to wonder.

It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been a year since the Xanax Safari to Zimbabwe inspired me to start this thing. My optimistic self thought I’d post every day and so at the end of the year I’d be sitting on a heap of posts and the whole world would be reading me; my pessimistic self thought the likelihood that I’d forget to post at all once the trip to Africa was over was high. So the reality here that I’m still writing but somewhat less frequently than I meant to is both cause for celebration and regret. Though in my defense, there are a lot of non blog-worthy days when I’m just sitting around the house wondering if there’s a better way to organize the plastic bags under the sink.

The three weeks in Indiana have been excellent. The first two weeks we were staying with my beloved Scottie Fairy God Dog, Mac, at his beautiful house while his parents were in Norway. I’ve been staying at this house with Mac and his Scottish predecessors since I was 18, which is to say, a whole lot of years. I love the house, an L-shaped ranch that is situated on the wooded property in such a way that it feels very, very private and remote even though it is in the middle of town and there’s a Famous Recipe Fried Chicken less than a quarter mile away.

When you’ve stayed in someone else’s house for such a big part of your life, it is strange how it gets woven into your fabric as if it were your own. I’m not really talking about ownership of the property or the things inside but the place itself.

It’s the perfect house for entertaining, and with Mac’s parents’ blessing, I’ve done some entertaining there. My extended family has been there enough in both sunshine and in shadow that they think of it as my house (and Mac as my dog) and periodically we have discussions about whether, should the owners ever sell, we should pool all of our money together and buy it so we’ll continue to have such a peaceful, lovely place to gather.

Over the course of a few decades, it’s remarkable how many life events have unfolded there: affairs of the heart begun and ended, friendships begun and ended, baby showers and wakes, family reunions, phone calls both joyous and devastating, holidays, a trip to the ER after a fall through a screen door in the midst of what seemed like a promising date. (Oh, fortuitous, fortuitous accident.)

Lately, whenever I stay there, I’m afraid it will be my last time. Mac is no spring chicken. His parents threaten to move west permanently. I live on the other side of the country now, so my schedule and their vacation schedule aren’t always in sync.

Mac on his evening constitutional.

When you are living your life at 18, you think it will always be exactly as it is and you rail against it. You fail to enjoy fully the bounty (of someone else’s gorgeous house, of friends and family, of little dogs and gray cats) in front of you because you yearn for your own adventures, your own houses, in places far away. And then you wake up in the middle of your life and realize that nothing is static and maybe you should appreciate that view more, rub the Scottie dog’s ears a few more times, take a picture of the crane about to lunch on a fish in the pond, be grateful for each visit with friends, each dinner with family, any chance you get to be in a place you love. The birthdays that come unbidden.

Aug21

St. Paul Snapshots

Posted on 21 August 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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St. Paul Cathedral

When I am in Seattle, the Midwest exists in my mind as a singular place where everyone has a shared sense of values, habits, conversational tics, and driving styles, and where the landscape is a sea of rolling hills and horizon dotted with cows and corn. There are specific things about Richmond, Indiana, that I miss, but often enough, what I miss is that less specific country called the Midwest.

So when Z and I visit Minnesota, where he spent the first twelve years of his American life going to college and grad school, I am often surprised by how foreign it feels to me because I am expecting it to be Indiana. Last week we flew into the Twin Cities in order to attend the wedding reception of one of Z’s college roommates, and though in the first couple of hours I was bouncing around at all the things that were magically familiar (the landscape! the manners! stores that sell plus-size underpants!), before long, I started noticing the differences. Only I couldn’t quite name them; I only knew that I was not yet fully home.

The houses there—things that appear to have been designed by students of Frank Lloyd Wright–line tree-filled boulevards on Summit Avenue and other similar routes and are different than the brick Federals and turreted Victorian and mid-century ranch houses that fill my hometown. The grocery chains are different. People seem more mannered but also a little more distant (in a polite way) than at home. A phrase like “You betcha!” takes me aback when I first hear it because I realize it isn’t just a quirk of the characters in Fargo. The accents are almost the exact opposite of the southern twang and drawn out syllables that let’s me know I’ve ventured into my particular county in East Central Indiana, where the inhabitants often have connections to Appalachia.

House on Summit Avenue

And frankly, every time I’m in the Twin Cities, I’m completely shocked to re-discover that the Mississippi River is not just a southern entity.

Another thing that surprises me is the realization that Z has rich memories from his time in St. Paul and though I’ve heard the stories multiple times and met many of the players, those memories—no matter how diligent I am in imagining them—will never be mine.

The best cure for this ailment of mine is usually to make new memories, so we got to it. We visited with old friends at favorite haunts (no trip to St. Paul is complete without breakfast at the St. Clair Broiler), walked around his old campus to see the changes there (campus bookstore moved off campus—do not approve even if it is next to Garrison Keillor’s bookstore!), drove an hour to the little town where the wedding reception was (we got lost and there was some verbal abuse directed at Siri) and enjoyed an evening of nuptial revelry before heading back to the cities.

For this trip to St. Paul, Z’s old friend McGregor hosted us at her new, adorable house, which we found much cozier than the hotel we usually Priceline when we are in the cities. She has a lush garden because she was born with “green fingers” as Z-ma calls it, and were I not mosquito averse, we would have spent more time in it. It was charming and cozy and I say this as a person who generally does not notice things like gardens because I prefer being indoors.

Path into McGregor’s Garden

We played Scrabble and chatted and some of us (ahem) were coveting her hardwood floors and woodwork. She and Z caught up on the people they have in common and again, I felt those little jealous fingers tickling me under the chin. It’s ridiculous really. I have good friends. We have had good times. But somehow, his history seems 3-D in Surround Sound and mine is more like a Viewmaster reel. He lived in an apartment once with plumbing problems so severe that one had hold an umbrella while using the toilet. I never had an apartment with quirky facilities!

Z’s former leaky apartment.

One place we visit every time we go to St. Paul is this lovely shop called Irish on Grand. If you love Ireland and miss Ireland like I do, then going to a shop like this and talking to the proprietor makes you feel almost like you are there. I don’t need any more Irish sweaters, pottery, jewelry, or other Celtic doo-dads, but I feel better just knowing if I have a sudden urge, I can get them there. When we stop in for a visit, we always buy whatever Tayto Crisps (best potato chips ever: my favorite, Smoky Bacon) they have available and then get either a book or a new CD. Once, I loved a band I’d discovered there so much that I accidentally bought the same CD on the next visit. On this trip, I opted not to buy any music just to be safe.

Irish on Grand–excellent shop for Eire-ophiles!

As luck would have it, we happened to be in time for the Minnesota Irish Fair on Harriet Island. It’s reportedly the biggest free Irish festival in the U.S., and so we boarded a shuttle marked Galway and made the short trek to the festival, which was just getting under way.

Minnesota Irish Fair 2014

We were a bit too early to see the revelry that looked bound to happen later in the weekend when Gaelic Storm and The Water Bhoys performed, but it was still a good time. I got to pet two hot-looking Irish Wolfhounds in the Celtic Canine tent. Between roasted corn and drinks, we also managed to see some Irish step-dancing, though admittedly, instead of focusing on the performances, I spent more time lamenting that the costumes had gotten so garish (sequins! neon knotwork!) and the wigs had grown more ridiculous in the decade and a half since Riverdance hit America and the Irish dancing resurgence began.

Nicki Minaj should wear this–not an adorable 10 year old celebrating her Celtic heritage.

At one point, I had to keep redirecting myself to watch the footwork instead of the wig of the dancer in front of me who had yet to perform. Despite the visual assault, the dancing was remarkable.

Irish dancer “hair”–so springy! so lifelike!

Irish dancing always chokes me up, and I don’t know why. I’ll be clapping and having a good time, and then all the sudden there is a tightness in my throat and I start sniffing so the tears won’t spill over. It must be genetic.

Minnesota Irish Fair 2014

On the last day in the Twin Cities, we sat in McGregor’s backyard amongst the flowers and vegetables watching Z go through a tub of his things that McGregor has been storing for a decade or so. She and I were keen for Z to whittle down the items he had in storage, but then when push came to shove, as he threw things away, we’d exclaim, “But you don’t want to get rid of those!” even if “those” was just a pair of old rugby socks. He just shook his head at us. As he chucked letters and menus from awards dinners into the trash, I rescued the best so he’d have a semi-accurate historical record of his past. He has two more tubs to go through on our next trip. Maybe by then, McGregor and I will be willing to let him let go of more memories.

And thus begins our summer sojourn back to the Heartland.

Paul Bunyan; Cusack style.

Aug8

Flashback Friday: Uniformity

Posted on 8 August 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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[Fear not. This is an old post. I do not have Mystery Dizziness. All I have is a pair of tired feet from a day at the 2014 Irish Fair of Minnesota. Hopefully, there will soon be a post about Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. Until then, I give you a trip down hypochondria lane.]

Saturday, August 19, 2006

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

If you can help it, avoid this.

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

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

I’m not ready to be a woman who talks about how young the doctors and cops look. I don’t want to have a prejudice against youth. And yet. And yet. I want a doctor, male or female, with understated jewelry who isn’t wearing cabana wear.

Things you should know about your ER visit:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aug6

Snapshots of a Summer

Posted on 6 August 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Alki Point, West Seattle. A beloved escape.

It’s been a summer of little rain here in Seattle. Many summers are like this and are the reason why you can’t swing a cat without hitting a fair-weather tourist between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Yesterday, we escorted another batch of much anticipated visiting cousins to Pike Market—a place we know to avoid during tourist season—and I’ve never seen it so crowded. At one point, the foot traffic was at a total standstill because there was such a bottleneck by the booth selling lavender sachets. Once people started moving again, if you dared stop to look at any of the other handmade wares, you were in danger of being trampled. We are a family of introverts, so I think all of us were thrilled when we finally pushed our way through and burst into the open. We stood in the park across from the market under the two totem poles breathing deeply and then taking tourist-style photos, because that’s what you do in Seattle on a beautiful day. (And even in the chaos of the market, my cousin did score a bag of morel mushrooms that she was clutching to her chest like Golum because she comes from a dry, mushroom-less place.)

I don’t know who is running the rest of the country because everyone seems to be here. Two weeks ago, Z and I rented a car and decided to take our favorite drive down Lake Washington Boulevard, only to discover we couldn’t because President Obama was in one of the fancy houses there on the shore of the lake, doing a little fundraising. The place was on lock down with lots of barriers and a strong police presence. Before moving to Seattle, I can’t say I ever had an opportunity to glance at the POTUS limousine, and now at least twice a year, if I stand on the right corner at the right time, I can flash a peace sign (or a thumbs up if he’s had a hard week) at the Commander in Chief.

So I spend a lot of time in summer marking off the days until the strangers who have descended here go home and the still-crowded city becomes more habitable. But then suddenly—because the cousins were arriving, because I knew I’d be going home to Indiana soon, because the temperature and the sunlight were just right—I fell completely and utterly in love with the city. It’s a fleeting love because I am a fickle woman; I know that. I care deeply for Seattle, yet it will never be my soul mate, like a Chicago or a Galway. But I’ve had a couple of perfect weeks where I’ve spent more time delighting in summer in the city than I meant to. And because you hear me whine too much about this city I have fond feelings for, I thought you deserved to see a few random delights.

A local gardener attempts to make the place more colorful.

This woman had the brightest, yellowest hair I’ve ever seen and she was working on a little corner garden near the grocery where Z and I walk a couple of times a week. When you live in a neighborhood of apartment buildings, seeing this sort of suburban domestic scene with urban flair is a joy.

Seattle First Baptist Church

This church spire in our neighborhood always makes me happy. It’s especially beautiful at night. One of the things I love about it is that it makes me feel a certain level of humility/shame because for the first two years we lived here, when we walked past it, I would sneer at it as I made assumptions about what the people inside believed. I was once terrified (and, let’s face it, oppressed, because I was a girl) in a church of this same denomination as a child. But it turns out I was the one being judgmental because this church was the first in the city to marry same-sex couples free of charge when it became legal in Washington to do so. Before that, they hung out rainbow banners about acceptance, insisting that all were welcome. Currently, they have a banner out demanding a living wage for everyone. It is a church committed to social justice, and therefore, a church that makes me feel hope. So whenever we walk past it, it’s a little poke at me to remember to remove the plank from my own eye before I go kvetching about the splinter in someone else’s.

Peace Child Statue, Seattle

This statue entitled Peace Child draped with paper cranes stands overlooking Portage Bay where it spills into Lake Union. We drive this route a lot and I’ve never seen it, but because we were on foot one day, (and I was growling about our lack of car) we caught a glimpse and stopped to see her. I love surprises like this.

University Bridge

On the same walk, Z and I had to stand and wait for the University Bridge to go up to allow a sailboat to pass through into Portage Bay. We stood on the bridge and looked out at all the activity on the water, and it was hard not to feel lucky to live in a place where bridges aren’t static and water abounds.

Deck, Eastlake Bar & Grill, East Lake Union

After our walk, we ate at Eastlake Bar & Grill, which has, arguably, one of the best outdoor decks of any place in the city. The views of Lake Union are excellent both from the deck and inside the restaurant and the food and atmosphere is good too. When G was here in June, we ended up eating here three times because, well, look at it!

Market Pig

When Z first moved here, there had been one of those competitions—like there are in a lot of cities with different animal shapes—called Pigs on Parade to kick off the centennial celebration of Pike Market. (Rachel the Pig, a big metal piggy bank sits outside of the market and is oft photographed.) So my first days in the city were punctuated with different colorful and clever pigs. (I particularly liked the chocolate one in front of the Chocolate Box.) While the cousins were here, I saw this one still hanging out on a roof near the Market and it made me feel all warm inside, remembering the early days here with Z.

Baroness, Best Neon Sign in All of Seattle

This is my favorite neon sign in all of Seattle. There are many in my second place list, but this one is on top and is up the hill from where I live so I see it regularly. It’s a little residential hotel across from a hospital. I appreciate that the hotel hasn’t felt compelled to install a more subdued, tasteful sign.

Photo 452 of the Space Needle

When friends of mine who’d been living in New York City moved back to Indiana, one of their last purchases (if I remember the story rightly) as they bugged out of the city that had just been traumatized, was a little replica of the Statue of Liberty that took up residence on the mantel of their new house in Indianapolis. I loved seeing it—that integration of their old life and their new one. A sort of symbol of the few years they’d lived in an iconic place during a (sadly) historical moment. If Z and I ever leave Seattle, I think a statue of the Space Needle—probably one constructed of Legos—will decorate our life wherever we land. Seeing it—even on days when I’m homesick—never doesn’t make me happy. Is it an overpriced tourist icon unworthy of my affection? I don’t care. I love the history and aesthetics of it, including the weird, steampunk-ish elevators that look like they belong on a completely different structure. I love this weird human drive to build a huge, elevated viewing platform (see Tower, Eiffel) to celebrate a spectacle like a World’s Fair, and I love that we live in a city that has such a place on its landscape.

For me, it isn’t about going up the Space Needle to look out, it’s about seeing it when the skyline comes into view as we drive up I-5 from the airport after a few weeks away, or when we’re taking the ferry back home or when we’re driving back into town from a trip north. There it is, looking all optimistic and otherworldly and a little…delicate, marking “X” on the map of our life.

Capitol Hill in the rain

And finally, after many weeks of sun, there was a torrential, Midwestern-style rainstorm. Z and I worked at his campus and stopped periodically to look fondly at the blurry outlines of cars and houses, and teasing ourselves with the promise of damper, less crowded days. When we trudged home past our favorite bits of the neighborhood, it didn’t occur to us to complain.

Jul17

Ah, Those Summer Nights: Flashdance Edition

Posted on 17 July 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Flashdance.

To help combat the recent heat wave, Z and I chose to stay in our shady, brick apartment building, wearing as few clothes as possible and watching the movies of our youth while eating popsicles. Like you do. The idea came about last week when we randomly started singing songs from Grease and then we discovered it was streaming on Netflix. From that, we quickly moved to the other music/dance movies that shaped our respective youths: Grease II, Footloose, Dirty Dancing, and, finally, last night, Flashdance.

All I have to do is hear those opening bars of “Grease,” and I’m transported back to a adolescent summer when I got my first issue of ‘Teen magazine and thought I’d die if I didn’t get a pair of denim Dr. Scholl’s sandals and one of those aluminum foil mats upon which a person was meant to rotisserate herself until she was deeply tan and thus desirable. I was certain that ownership of those two things would magically transform me into an adult. By the end of the summer, I had the sandals, but my mother, thankfully, could see (as could anyone else who knew me) that my pasty Irish-American skin should spend peak tanning hours under an umbrella. Re-watching the movie this past week brought back many memories, including a mental list I kept of all the sexual innuendos that I didn’t yet know the meaning of, sensed were significant, and of which I hoped to have a legitimate definition before I went to junior high. (This was before urbandictionary.com, back when if you weren’t brave enough to ask some older family member or friend, you had to wait to find out why everyone was making that “oh my goodness!” face when “Greased Lightnin’” played.) The experience of watching all four of these movies was like opening up some scrapbook I forgot I’d kept, chock full of reminders of the way life used to be and all the ways I hoped life would turn out.

It was fun to share with Z something that had been significant to both of us back in the day, living on our separate continents, when we were imagining very different futures for ourselves. (I can’t speak for Z’s, but the future I imagined involved me actually being the pastel-sweater-wearing good-girl version of Olivia Newton-John). I sometimes lament that Z and I didn’t know each other in our youth, and I admit there is part of me that wonders if we’d met when we were 10 or 16 or even 20 if I still would have thought, “That’s the one for me!” or if I would have been unable to see his utter rightness simply because he was not a John Cusack, holding a boom box over his head and wearing me down with his love.

Dirty Dancing held up as well—better, really—than Grease. There are only two cringe-worthy lines in that film: the oft-used Nobody puts Baby in a corner, and the equally bad (and even more poorly delivered), Go back to your playpen, Baby. This is, however, perhaps the first time I’ve ever wondered why the writers thought it was a good idea to name the heroine Baby in the first place. Metaphorically, it’s just too obvious to be good, and literally, it’s just too…well, seriously, do you know anybody named Baby? On all other fronts, the movie still works, and no matter how many times I watch it, damned if I don’t cry when Baby is in the gazebo with her father telling him she’s sorry she disappointed him, but he’s disappointed her too.

For marital happiness, the least said about Grease II the better.

Footloose surprised me. A million years ago when I saw it for the first time, all of my girlfriends were going nuts for Kevin Bacon and his spikey hair and skinny tie, but I was too busy obsessing about the ridiculous premise to notice how nice he looked in his Sedgefield jeans. A college campus might outlaw dancing (I went to one of those), but a whole town? And why did it seem so Southern and some of the actors went in and out of southern accents, when those were clearly the Rocky Mountains in the distance? And were they seriously expecting us to believe that Kevin Bacon’s use of quotes from the Bible was anything but self-serving? It didn’t take a theology scholar to recognize a fallacy of false equivalence. I’d been to prom; that dancing had nothing to do with worship.

On this viewing, however, even with the extreme no-dancing-no-rock-music town ordinance still in place, the setting and the people felt real and familiar. That little church there in ArkanIowalarado felt a lot like the ones I grew up in, trying to figure out who I was while it seemed plenty of people who didn’t really know me were happy to tell me who I should be. In the scenes where the fire-and-brimstone John Lithgow is preaching, you can feel the misery of a humid Sunday service, when you wish the minister would maybe get to his point more quickly so you could escape to a place with a breeze. On this viewing, Kevin Bacon’s biblical argument didn’t seem quite as weak. John Lithgow seems more sympathetic regarding his reasons for wanting to ban music and dance (and he gains big points for compassionately stopping a book burning). Also, nobody was perfect looking like they would be in a movie now. Their teeth weren’t impossibly white and impossibly straight. They spoke like real people. They looked a little uncomfortable, and not at all like a bunch of teens who would be posting photos of themselves all over the interwebs. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) It surprised me how much Footloose felt like a real portrayal of what it was like to be a teenager in the 1980s, give or take a little gymnastical dance routine in the local feed mill.

And finally, there is Flashdance.

Oh, Flashdance, you break my heart. Weren’t you once good? Didn’t you have better dialogue? Didn’t you make more sense? Weren’t you plausible?

I saw Flashdance with my high school boyfriend, his little brother, and a friend of mine. I was enraptured the 95 minutes it was on the screen and felt like I was the only person in the movie theater. Alex, the heroine, a Pittsburgh “flashdancer” with the dream of being a ballerina is no Sandy from Grease. She is 18 and supports herself welding by day and dancing by night (though she isn’t a stripper—let’s be clear about that!). She lives in a warehouse with her pitbull and she seems not to care what anyone thinks of her. She is feisty. The night she sees her older boyfriend with another woman, she doesn’t go home and eat ice cream and weep passively and sing Hopelessly Devoted to You. No. She gets on her bike, peddles to his house in a tony neighborhood, and throws a rock through his window. But the real story is that with a little prodding by an ancient European fairy godmother figure and her string-pulling older boyfriend, she screws up her courage and tries out for the Pittsburgh ballet, which is her secret dream.

Watching Flashdance then, I knew the message of the movie—to be brave and go after your dreams—was one of the truest things I’d ever seen. When it was over, I was breathless (and anxious to get home to start ripping up sweatshirts and incorporating legwarmers more fully into my wardrobe, so I too could look like Alex while I painted and wrote). I said something to the boyfriend with awe in my voice about how good the movie was, and he said, “Eh. It was okay.” His movie tastes ran more along the lines of Conan the Barbarian and Caddyshack. I felt deflated. How could he not know this was possibly one of the best movies of all time? Were his broody silences not artistically driven after all? Were we ill matched?

It was very disappointing.

Yet here I was, thirty years later, sitting with the far more compatible and fabulous Z on our sofa and feeling very briefly annoyed with him for insinuating that Flashdance wasn’t a good movie. I think of him as a more enlightened creature, and so his lack of reverence for the film kind of hurt my heart. I felt wounded that he wasn’t even giving the movie a chance.

But then I started listening to the dialogue and making a list of all the implausibilities, starting with the existence of a club where women danced–with their clothes on–for men who were clearly not patrons of the arts. And yeah, maybe an 18-year-old woman could become a welder, but would anyone have hired her in the Rust Belt when jobs were scarce? I don’t think so. And also, remind me why none of us knew in 1983 that a body double was used to do all the dancing? The only thing I was in awe of this time during the dance scenes was that the body double’s curly wig did not come flying off.

Maybe Flashdance wasn’t a good a movie after all.

More disturbing to me than the possibility that the movie was not great (nor even good) was the realization that the message of the movie—one that I believed in fervently— was mixed. It purported to be about believing in yourself and your dreams, yet two of the three people who do just that (Richie leaves his fry cook job to move to LA to be a comedian and Jeanie enters an ice skating competition) fail miserably (Richie comes back to Pittsburgh after being booed out of LA and Jeanie falls during the competition and subsequently ends up working in a real strip bar until Alex drags her out). Plus, Alex already is a dancer—trying out for the ballet isn’t that far outside of her wheelhouse. So what exactly was the message of Flashdance? Go after your dreams only if you are the protagonist? Go after your dreams if you have a rich older boyfriend who has connections? There are magical powers in a ripped up sweatshirt, which will subsequently make your ludicrous dreams attainable? By the time it was over, I hadn’t a clue.

The moral of my story? There isn’t one. I’m just glad some of those teen fantasies of mine didn’t come true, otherwise I might have missed this perfect weekend of heat wave survival with Z. If the mercury rises again, I suspect there is a John Hughes marathon in our future.

P.S. This is not Jennifer Beals

Jul11

Flashback Friday: Little Brownstone on the Prairie

Posted on 11 July 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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[Oh, the irony of this post from eight years ago, particularly when bumped against the one from earlier this week.]

15 July 2006

Last night I was feeling “troubled” about my silly life as I went to sleep, which is a fairly frequent occurrence. Usually the troubledness has to do with my age, my living situation, my marriage/partner/dating and motherhood status. Other things get factored in based on the latest magazine article I’ve read or Dateline exclusive I’ve watched. Last night, after messing with a picture shelf my mother and I were hanging above my desk and trying to figure out which of my 20 works of art I was going to hang on the little hunk of wall that is left in my room, I was feeling particularly freaky. I have friends who are bitter because their houses aren’t brand new and don’t have granite countertops or swimming pools or room for a home office, but all of them have managed to get more than four walls to hang things on.

This isn’t about some people being luckier or having more than me. I know if I wanted to make it a priority I could maybe get myself eight walls, so I’m not talking about jealousy here. If I wanted to give up the frequent flying and the handmade furniture and the Sundance catalog jewelry, I could buy a little house and hopefully have enough money left over to pay a boy (preferably a shirtless one) to come and do things for me like hang picture shelves. I could.

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

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

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

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

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