“Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
I posted this quote on a discussion board for my seniors during our first official week of remote learning. They'd read most of Roy's novel before the school closure, and suddenly her words took on new meaning. So we started there. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted.
Little events: Trips to the grocery store.
Ordinary things: A walk through a neighborhood. A package of toilet paper.
Smashed and reconstituted: Prom. Graduation. English class on a Monday.
The bleached bones of a story. Our stories. All of them. These small bones, and the way we pay attention to them now.
***
Almost exactly ten years ago, we were in Montana for my grandmother's eightieth birthday. Isaac was just four months old, and I was still on maternity leave. April was strange that year, too. I remember: snow on the mountain passes and staying the night in Helena when the roads became too treacherous. Eating at a diner, too late, but cozy anyway. A vanilla latte before we hit the road. I read Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire when I wasn't driving. We drove into Gildford after lunch in a brisk wind in time to celebrate with my grandmother at the little general store: someone had baked her an Elvis cake. My daughter, only three at the time, remembers the blue frosting. We stayed overnight at the hotel in Havre I still I love, even though the tiny pool is cloudy with too much chlorine.
Even with an infant and a not-quite-four-year-old, I remember sleeping so peacefully.
I remember my aunt Liana taking family pictures; we were all so rarely together. I remember one day in Bozeman, and a quick visit with Julia, my oldest childhood friend, when we stopped in Great Falls on our way down to my parents' house. We had a date night for the first time since Isaac was born.
I miss my family.
I miss my grandmother.
I miss crisp hotel sheets and lattes on the road, the highway through the mountains and across the prairie. (I miss road trips.)
I miss date nights. Restaurants. I miss the wood booths at the Elliott Bay Brewery. I miss the Seattle skyline when we drive over the West Seattle bridge at sunset. (Now that the bridge is closed for safety, I will miss it for a long time.)
I miss hugging the people I love. (I love the people I live with and I am grateful for their hugs every day. But I love a lot of people.)
I miss my old friend Julia.
I miss the landscapes of my childhood.
I miss writing alone in coffee shops, and drinking wine in cafes.
I miss hugging my toddler nephew, I miss my parents, I miss my friends.
It is not lost on me how lucky I am to live in a life that brings me joy exactly where I am, even now. But sometimes the missing is a deep ache, all the same.
***
How quickly we adapt and change.
On a Monday morning in early March, I pulled up to the espresso stand I drove through every day on my way to school. (Drove. Past tense, for now.) My favorite barista had seen me in line and made my drink already, so she handed my Americano through the window without my asking.
“Isn’t everything so crazy?” she said. Her words sent me spinning back to the first month of my teaching career, when I’d driven through on my lunch break. September eleventh. I’d ordered a mocha that day, my standard back then. She’d said the same words.
That day, though, she said, “I guess I don’t understand all the hysteria. Why can’t we just live normally and be smart about it and let it pass?”
The previous Friday, one of my coworkers asked about social distancing at our upcoming student-led conferences, an event that brought hundreds of parents and family members pouring through our cafeteria and commons area, where we had tables set up in close proximity. Our principal replied, “It’s way too late to reschedule or change the format. Families already have the schedule and the expectation. We’ll proceed as normal, but we can talk about your questions and concerns at next week’s staff meeting.”
But on Monday morning, we received an e-mail: the district had decided to hold conferences remotely instead. Students would sign up for a time slot with their advisory teacher, and we would make phone calls. We were still expected to hold the same hours, our principal said, to accommodate our families. The building would be open, and we could call from our classrooms. We would discuss the details further at the staff meeting on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, instead of discussing the logistics of remote conferences, we watched Governor Inslee declare that schools would be closed for six weeks, effective no later than Tuesday, March 17. We limped along until Friday afternoon, when we were all hustled out of the building. I walked to the parking lot in a daze, watching thin flakes of snow drift from the gray skies.
***
“Staff, you have five minutes remaining. Five minutes remaining before you need to exit the building.”
The office manager’s voice echoed over the intercom. I stood behind my desk, my arms around my desktop monitor. I set it down and yanked the cords for my docking station out of the outlet. Sweat trickled down my back. I wondered how I would carry this out to my car with the three overflowing bags at my feet. Could I sprint to the parking lot with the books, the binder filled with senior IB material, the chocolate and snacks I’d stashed in the back of my file cabinet (I didn’t want them to go stale or attract ants) and make it back for the monitor, all in five minutes? Could I just cram the docking station into one of the bags?
I could not.
“Three minutes. Staff in the building, you have three minutes remaining. Please gather the last of your things and exit your classrooms.”
“Fuck it,” I muttered. “I don’t really need another screen.” My laptop would have to do.
I slipped my mask back onto my face and took one last, long look around my room. It looked like the end of summer, only cleaner. The student desks had all been scrubbed and stacked in the back of the room. My desk was completely clean. I thought the carpets had been shampooed, and the harsh scent of disinfectant lingered in the air. Everything was wrong. When my room looked like this, it was time to set it up, arrange the desks, touch up the paint on the walls. Now I didn’t know when I’d be back.
“Bye, D-7,” I whispered. I grabbed my bags before my tears could dampen my mask, and I flipped off the lights.
“I’m out. I’m done,” I called to my assistant principal who sat with her laptop in the breezeway between buildings, noting our times in and out. We’d been given twenty-four hours to sign up for a time slot and twenty minutes to gather what we needed. It wasn’t enough.
My coworker (or, more accurately, my work wife) and I stood in the parking lot, separated by two spaces. We hadn’t seen each other in exactly one month.
“Coffee?” I asked. She nodded. We drove up the street to that drive-thru espresso stand I’ve loved for my entire adult life, ever since I discovered their black-and-white mochas the weekend before my first day of teaching. She parked in the back of the strip mall parking lot, skipping the coffee. I pulled through the stand and ordered an iced chai latte. I didn’t know the afternoon barista. She was nice, though. She took my card and wiped it with Clorox before handing it back to me.
“Stay safe,” she said.
I parked two spots away from my friend in the nearly-empty lot. She rolled down her window.
“I have camp chairs in the back,” I said. “No one’s touched them in a month. Want one?”
She hesitated. “Okay,” she said.
I hauled it out of the car, slid it from its canvas cover, and set it up next to her car. When I’d retreated to my own space, she opened her door. We slid on sunglasses in the afternoon sunshine.
“Do you think we’ll even be back in September?” she asked.
“I cannot think that way right now,” I said. “I cannot.” My heart began to thump with anxiety and my stomach churned. I sipped my chai and remembered my friend Jessica's words from a few weeks ago: When Sean was dying of brain cancer, we had to find a way to live in ever increasingly horrible new normals. We learned to keep going by living in the present and finding good moments. This means trying not to think about what your day would have been like in the circumstances of a few months ago or what your day might be like a few months from now. It means trying to find good moments in today.
I try to remember this every day -- not as a trite admonition about positive thinking, but as the only way I can live, to breathe in and out and try to put forth some good in this world anyway. If I start worrying about a situation I can't control three, four, or five months from now, I am no good for anyone.
We chatted for awhile. When we stood to head back home, she gave the chair a shove so we didn’t have to get any closer than eight feet apart. All the same, it mattered -- that brief human contact, face-to-face.
***
I think about the things that bring me joy, like my early-morning walks. I've watched the spring unfold and bloom in a way I never have. Every day, I walk through the streets of my neighborhood and beyond, exploring new routes, new views of Puget Sound. How have I lived here for so long without realizing what shimmering expanse of water can be seen from a street so near my own? I've met other folks on a similar schedule: the older gentleman who walks with a cane at the same time every day. Last week he raised his hand in greeting and said, "Hello, Dear," and it filled my heart. Hello, Dear. When would I have the chance to encounter him in another, ordinary life? Or there's the jogger who sprints up the hills I walk every day, and sometimes we cross paths in the middle--maintaining a respectful distance on the other side of the street. A month ago we nodded greetings; now he shouts a cheerful "Hey!"
My son and I play games in the middle of the day, after he finishes his math and reading. I unearthed a board game all about U.S. geography; I have no idea where we got it, or when, and Isaac showed zero interest in it, proclaiming that it was "so boring." But! I bribed him one afternoon, because obviously I parent (and teach) through bribery and emotional manipulation, and now he begs to play every single day. I guess it isn't so boring after all.
The kids and I get outside every day. Unless it's pouring, this is non-negotiable for me. My son hops on his bike and I walk and we head to the school, where he zooms around the playground and I walk or jog on the track. Fresh air and sweat. Every single day.
My children are experts at trolling each other, but we have settled into a rhythm now, and there is something sweet about looking up from my laptop and watching my daughter at hers while she works on her math or typing. I watch my son curled up on the recliner in the living room, reading. They are old enough to read what their teachers send and "do school" without too much guidance from me; I think I merely set the tone for our classroom. It's possibly the sweetest time to be quarantined with children. They're old enough to manage themselves (and ask their teachers questions, instead of me) and young enough to follow my basic expectations of routine. We work in the morning and head outside in the afternoon, at at lunchtime we watch the Cincinnati Zoo "Home Safari" which features a different animal each day. Fiona the hippo is still my favorite. And I know I'm going to remember these moments sweetly someday.
I have learned a very certain thing about myself: I am not meant to be an online teacher. I need to be in the room with my kids. But I can't be in the room with my kids now, and I am grateful for the technology that allows me the next best thing, which is to see their faces in a Zoom classroom meeting. Truly, it is one of the highlights of my week. I miss them so much.
This isn't forever, and I know this. But I can't think about teaching this way long-term. Not now. It's already hard enough to know that the last glimpse of my senior class will be when we line the streets for them as they pick up their caps and gowns for a graduation that won't happen -- at least not as we envision it. I will be there in whatever capacity I can. On the street, with a sign, anything I can do. But it isn't the same.
I suppose the fact that this hurts so much shows how deeply privileged I am. To love someone so much, to miss my work so much. Please never believe this fact is lost on me. It isn't.
***
Things fill me with anxiety and rage, too.
Armed (and white) protestors screaming at our healthcare workers are not "very good people." Friends of friends in my homestate who tell the whole internet that no one will force them to wear a mask or get a vaccine because they're not sheeple, thank you very much are also revolting (and to be fair, I probably have friends who say the same thing, but apparently they're doing a good job of filtering me out of those particular posts). So are the conspiracy theorists and the "Do Your Own Research" people who think watching a YouTube video or reading an article in a publication that requires you to pay for your submission counts as research. The flippancy -- if I'm not sick, why shouldn't I do whatever I want? If you're immunocompromised, you stay home! I think about the relative who e-mailed me over a decade ago with concerns about Obama's death panels. He'd euthanize all our grandmothers as soon as they turned seventy. That aged well, didn't it? I have no idea what that person thinks these days, because after I told them I didn't think I was their target audience, I never received another e-mail.
It's too easy for me to spiral into anger, rage, and anxiety, so I'm trying to put down my phone during the day, read balanced sources I trust, and avoid scrolling through social media. It really does help.
I actually think it's important to stay angry. And awake. But I can't drop anchor at anger.
So instead I'm trying to focus on gratitude, and, yes, joy. It doesn't negate the anger or the anxiety, but it means I can slow down and take notice of the world I want to preserve. The friendships that last through physical distancing and the hope that I can hug my people again. The kindness of neighbors and the kindness of strangers. The way the spring comes again, every year, whether we notice it or not, and the unexpected privilege of witnessing it each day. And maybe I can send a little of the fierce hope and love I have into this broken, beautiful world, and maybe it will land on the people I love and miss every single day. I don't know how else to live.
Showing posts with label stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stories. Show all posts
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Thursday, February 28, 2019
On Turning 40
I understand why people hate February, deep into the slog of winter. I especially understand the weariness my friends and family in Montana and across the Midwest are feeling after so many (So. Many.) snow days. Admittedly, we were going a little crazy after five, plus a few late starts and early releases. I had to remind myself more than once that this wasn't a thing happening to my precious little self.
Anyway, I don't happen to hate February. First of all, it's my birthday month, and my birthday is at the end of February so I have all month to look forward to it -- and I was lucky enough to be born into a family who has always made me feel loved and celebrated on my birthday. And because I live in the Pacific Northwest, February is the month where spring starts to break through the surface of the mud. I'm also one of those people who enjoys Valentine's Day for purely silly reasons. I like chocolate. I love being a mom of children on Valentine's Day. I love buying cheap, fun Valentine's Day socks. I do not see it as a day for romance or expectation, necessarily, and neither Matt nor I spend much time worrying about what to give each other. Usually we pick up chocolate and share, and I think Matt has brought me flowers every year of our marriage. We exchange cards. Our first year of marriage, we went out to dinner -- along with every other couple declaring their public love for each other, which meant we waited way too long for a table at a mediocre restaurant. The following year, we stayed home and I wore fuzzy gray sweats and we cooked some pasta thing together in the kitchen of our still newish house, and it was so much better. Since then, I've never wanted anything else.
It doesn't hurt that our first Valentine's Day together was spectacular in its own way, though. Matt and I were a long-distance couple that first year; I was a senior in college and he was living in the Twin Cities, working in downtown Minneapolis. The band tour that year took us to places like Nashville and Memphis but we also played a concert in a suburb north of the Cities, and Matt drove an hour to meet the bus that night. He was waiting in front of the school (a high school, maybe? Or was it a church? I don't remember) when the bus pulled up, and our tour manager grudgingly let me vault off the bus and into his arms, and with everyone watching he handed me my Valentine's Day gift: a little bag full of things he knew I liked. A nice pen. A half-pound of good coffee beans. Bubble bath. A book of poetry. Writing all of that out, I would marry that man all over again in a heartbeat -- that and his pecan pie at Thanksgiving. (I also remember our friend Katie, who was his friend first, calling over my shoulder, "Wow. I used to get drunk with that dork.") (Also, Matt just now yelled at me, "You can't use that quote on your blog! My parents read your blog!" Sorry, honey. I love you. It's too cute and it still makes me smile.)
That was eighteen years ago.
I'm still happy to stay home and cook and curl up in sweats with him. And he still knows the little things I love.
I turned forty this week, and last night, curled up with my husband, I said, "I've officially known you for half my life." From now on, every year we're together I'll be able to say, "I've known you for longer than I haven't." And that is one of the great blessings of this life I was lucky enough to land in.
I turned forty this week, and I am nothing but grateful. Growing older, as I posted on Facebook this week, is privilege not all of us get. And I don't feel old, because what does that even mean? I feel like me, which is to say, to echo Madeleine L'Engle, that I am every age I have ever been. I remember reading this when I was fourteen, late at night in my bedroom long after the rest of my house was asleep -- from The Crosswicks Journals, I think? I did a quick Google search:
*
Last weekend I went out to celebrate with Jessica; of all the friends with whom I still keep in touch, I've probably known her the longest. (I still remember the time someone threw up on the back of her dress at our church Christmas program. I'm pretty sure her parents took her home to change and she was back for cookies afterwards.) We've known each other since we were seven. My family moved from Great Falls to Bozeman when I was in the eighth grade, but we still attended each other's confirmations. We went to the same college, had separate friend groups there, but went on the same trip to Europe. We roomed together for the entire month as we traveled through Ireland, England, Wales and France, and she was the one to witness my falling for a boy on that trip, the same one I married a couple of years later. She read at my wedding. I stood on the side of a mountain in Glacier National Park for hers. I had the tremendous privilege of holding her newborn son in the middle of the night while she napped. She had the fucking awful luck of being on the surviving end of "till death do us part" when her husband died of brain cancer last spring.
Let none of us complain about growing older.
She was determined to celebrate. Last week she reminded her friends of the importance of celebrating birthdays, "not with more fanfare, but just with more emphasis, more care. We each have one day a year to celebrate our existence." And it reminded me of the time I said to Matt, years ago, that maybe he should throw me a big party. For my thirtieth. Or my thirty-fifth. Or something.
"Do you...actually want that?" he asked.
He knew I didn't. Instead, five years ago, I started taking my birthday off without apology. I gave myself the gift of a day to do exactly what I would ever do with the gift of a day, an afternoon, free of obligation or responsibility. I took myself out for a really good birthday latte. I sat at a wide wooden table in a coffee shop and wrote. I read a book, and not one I was teaching or going to teach. I took myself out for lunch, where I read some more and sipped a glass of wine. I walked around the streets of a neighborhood I love with a gorgeous view of Puget Sound. I went for a run in the almost-spring air. I soaked in a bubble bath before picking up my kids and heading to Seattle to meet Matt, who entertained them while I shopped for new books, and then we all went to dinner together. It was my perfect day. It still is.
In warmer years, I might see the first buds of cherry blossoms as early as February 26th. Not this year. That's okay. They'll be bursting into bloom soon enough.
*
I was raised to celebrate birthdays. It wasn't that we always needed huge parties, but attention was paid. I remember birthday parties at my grandmother's house -- coffee and cookies for her, or her friends, and probably cake. It's where I learned to sneak sips of watery black coffee. For the first fifteen years of my life I shared a birthday with my great-grandmother. I remember her 100th birthday at her church, shared with my 15th. It's the last picture of us together.
I remember waking up on my 10th birthday to find a pink clock and a note from my mother -- she had received it as a birthday gift when she was a girl, and she was passing it on to me. I woke up early, as I always did. My room was still dark, and everything was in the wrong place. The door was to my left. The window was on the wall opposite my bed, instead of directly above my head. I sat up and remembered that yesterday my mother helped me rearrange my bedroom, something I was allowed to do a few times a year. My room was just large enough to accommodate a few different set-ups, and simply moving my bed to a different wall made me feel like I had an entirely new room. I am orderly by nature, but the momentary disorientation always made me smile. I had chosen this.
A line of light shone beneath my door. My mother was already up, moving around in the kitchen. And then I saw it -- the clock.
I recognized it right away -- the pink plastic rectangular clock with the dancing ballerina. For years it perched atop the headboard in my mother’s old bedroom at the farm, the room I slept in when we visited my grandmother. My parents slept in the bed, and I slept in my Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bag on the floor along the wall. Sometimes I took the clock down and wound it, fascinated by the delicate sound of the wheels inside, the mechanisms turning. When I released the little key, the ballerina turned to the sound of “Oh, what a beautiful morning.” The clock was decades old, but it kept perfect time.
And on the morning of my tenth birthday, I found it on my nightstand. My mother left a note: Dear Shari, this clock was given to me by my grandmother on my eighth birthday, and now I am giving it to you. Happy Birthday to my beautiful girl.
My mother would have turned eight in 1960. Even at ten I possessed an uncanny memory for dates and a deep yearning to know my family’s stories. I remembered that my great-grandfather died the day after my mother’s eighth birthday. His wife -- her grandmother, my great-grandmother -- would have given this clock to her only the day before. I was born on my great-grandmother’s eighty-fifth birthday. She turned ninety-five on my tenth birthday, and two days later I joined her for our family birthday dinner. I’m not sure if this was the reason I felt the clock was weighted with more than my mother’s love for me, but I picked it up with nothing short of reverence.
*
I am every age I've ever been.
The following winter, I could have had a new clock radio. My church youth group was selling meat and cheese trays that year—maybe mixed nuts, too. Christmas-themed snacks. And I was tempted, because my best friend had a clock radio that played top-40 songs when it went off in the mornings. What I really wanted from that fundraiser, though, was the phone—it was just a simple white plastic touch-tone, but it would go in my bedroom. I wouldn’t get my own line—ever, my parents emphasized—but if I sold enough beef sticks and cheese balls, I would be allowed to keep it in my room. There would be limits, but I would be allowed to call Julia and speak in relative privacy, rather than in the middle of the kitchen. And anyway, I loved my little pink ballerina clock. It only played one song, but I loved the physical motion of winding it each day, loved the sound of those intricate little gears and the way I could set the time so the ballerina would begin to dance each morning. I loved the click, the momentary grinding before the plinking music began.
When my grandmother moved into the nursing home a year later, we still slept at the farm and my parents still slept in my mother’s old bedroom. I was the one who slept in my grandmother’s bed, alone on the main floor. I packed the little pink clock into my suitcase each time we visited.
My grandmother died -- too young -- from Scleroderma on a Tuesday morning in November. My mother was younger than I am now. My parents needed to make arrangements so I spent the night at Julia’s house, unrolling my sleeping bag against the wall of her basement bedroom. We went to school together the next morning as if everything was normal, and then my dad drove my brother and me north to the farm where we would stay for the rest of the week.
My friend’s bedroom was almost as familiar as my own, but that night I was as disoriented as I was when I rearranged my own furniture. None of it was my own choosing. She set the alarm on her clock radio a little early so we both had time to shower before school, but before I went to sleep I pulled out the pink ballerina clock and wound that, too.
I am every age I've ever been.
Let none of us complain about growing older.
*
I turned forty this week. My parents flew in for just a few hours, trying to return to their snowy home after a few days in Phoenix. Suzannah had a band concert, and my mother had a gift for me -- a mug I gave her when I was Suzannah's age, when she turned forty. Twenty-seven years ago. 40 is not the end of the world! But you can see it from there.
I laughed hard, and after sipping my morning coffee from that mug all week, I realize I love it at least as much as I love that pink ballerina clock. This is what it means to celebrate a birthday with care. This is a gift my mother gave me, and it transcends any thing on this earth.
I turned forty this week. I woke up in a life I love. I am lucky to love so many people.
It was a perfect day. I sipped coffee from my new twenty-seven-year-old mug. I jogged around my neighborhood in the bitingly cold and beautiful sunshine, the snow barely melted, Puget Sound a brilliant blue just down the hill from my house. I walked down to the edge of the water to catch my breath. I stood in a hot shower. I took myself to lunch. I read a book I'm loving, ate something that made me feel amazing, sipped a cold glass of white wine at noon. I lingered over a latte at a coffee shop I don't get to often. I came home and curled up on the couch for a nap, the sun streaming through the glass doors in the dining room. In the early evening, we all went to the Elliott Bay Book Company, and I picked up just a few things I may have missed at Powell's, and we went out for a cozy dinner. It is everything I could have wanted from this day, from any day. To feel the sun on my skin, to taste good coffee, to hug my children, to curl up in bed with the one who's known me, really known me, for my entire adult life.
I found this in a journal I kept a decade ago, from an entry I wrote late in February. It seems fitting to rediscover now:
Anyway, I don't happen to hate February. First of all, it's my birthday month, and my birthday is at the end of February so I have all month to look forward to it -- and I was lucky enough to be born into a family who has always made me feel loved and celebrated on my birthday. And because I live in the Pacific Northwest, February is the month where spring starts to break through the surface of the mud. I'm also one of those people who enjoys Valentine's Day for purely silly reasons. I like chocolate. I love being a mom of children on Valentine's Day. I love buying cheap, fun Valentine's Day socks. I do not see it as a day for romance or expectation, necessarily, and neither Matt nor I spend much time worrying about what to give each other. Usually we pick up chocolate and share, and I think Matt has brought me flowers every year of our marriage. We exchange cards. Our first year of marriage, we went out to dinner -- along with every other couple declaring their public love for each other, which meant we waited way too long for a table at a mediocre restaurant. The following year, we stayed home and I wore fuzzy gray sweats and we cooked some pasta thing together in the kitchen of our still newish house, and it was so much better. Since then, I've never wanted anything else.
It doesn't hurt that our first Valentine's Day together was spectacular in its own way, though. Matt and I were a long-distance couple that first year; I was a senior in college and he was living in the Twin Cities, working in downtown Minneapolis. The band tour that year took us to places like Nashville and Memphis but we also played a concert in a suburb north of the Cities, and Matt drove an hour to meet the bus that night. He was waiting in front of the school (a high school, maybe? Or was it a church? I don't remember) when the bus pulled up, and our tour manager grudgingly let me vault off the bus and into his arms, and with everyone watching he handed me my Valentine's Day gift: a little bag full of things he knew I liked. A nice pen. A half-pound of good coffee beans. Bubble bath. A book of poetry. Writing all of that out, I would marry that man all over again in a heartbeat -- that and his pecan pie at Thanksgiving. (I also remember our friend Katie, who was his friend first, calling over my shoulder, "Wow. I used to get drunk with that dork.") (Also, Matt just now yelled at me, "You can't use that quote on your blog! My parents read your blog!" Sorry, honey. I love you. It's too cute and it still makes me smile.)
That was eighteen years ago.
I'm still happy to stay home and cook and curl up in sweats with him. And he still knows the little things I love.
I turned forty this week, and last night, curled up with my husband, I said, "I've officially known you for half my life." From now on, every year we're together I'll be able to say, "I've known you for longer than I haven't." And that is one of the great blessings of this life I was lucky enough to land in.
I turned forty this week, and I am nothing but grateful. Growing older, as I posted on Facebook this week, is privilege not all of us get. And I don't feel old, because what does that even mean? I feel like me, which is to say, to echo Madeleine L'Engle, that I am every age I have ever been. I remember reading this when I was fourteen, late at night in my bedroom long after the rest of my house was asleep -- from The Crosswicks Journals, I think? I did a quick Google search:
“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.”I don't mourn the passing of my childhood, or my twenties, or my thirties. I've learned a lot -- who I am and what I want. And I woke up on my birthday in the very life I realized I'd always wanted for myself. I have so much more work to do, so much more, and there are still things I want. Deeply. There are things I want that I won't ever have, and that's okay; part of the blessing of living forty years is the realization that we won't ever have everything we want, and that it is possible, still, to be happy. Part of the blessing of living forty years is that the pursuit of individual happiness isn't, perhaps, even the point. I am working towards the things I still want, but I'm not sure that my individual happiness is the point there, either. This is the work of a human life.
*
Last weekend I went out to celebrate with Jessica; of all the friends with whom I still keep in touch, I've probably known her the longest. (I still remember the time someone threw up on the back of her dress at our church Christmas program. I'm pretty sure her parents took her home to change and she was back for cookies afterwards.) We've known each other since we were seven. My family moved from Great Falls to Bozeman when I was in the eighth grade, but we still attended each other's confirmations. We went to the same college, had separate friend groups there, but went on the same trip to Europe. We roomed together for the entire month as we traveled through Ireland, England, Wales and France, and she was the one to witness my falling for a boy on that trip, the same one I married a couple of years later. She read at my wedding. I stood on the side of a mountain in Glacier National Park for hers. I had the tremendous privilege of holding her newborn son in the middle of the night while she napped. She had the fucking awful luck of being on the surviving end of "till death do us part" when her husband died of brain cancer last spring.
Let none of us complain about growing older.
She was determined to celebrate. Last week she reminded her friends of the importance of celebrating birthdays, "not with more fanfare, but just with more emphasis, more care. We each have one day a year to celebrate our existence." And it reminded me of the time I said to Matt, years ago, that maybe he should throw me a big party. For my thirtieth. Or my thirty-fifth. Or something.
"Do you...actually want that?" he asked.
He knew I didn't. Instead, five years ago, I started taking my birthday off without apology. I gave myself the gift of a day to do exactly what I would ever do with the gift of a day, an afternoon, free of obligation or responsibility. I took myself out for a really good birthday latte. I sat at a wide wooden table in a coffee shop and wrote. I read a book, and not one I was teaching or going to teach. I took myself out for lunch, where I read some more and sipped a glass of wine. I walked around the streets of a neighborhood I love with a gorgeous view of Puget Sound. I went for a run in the almost-spring air. I soaked in a bubble bath before picking up my kids and heading to Seattle to meet Matt, who entertained them while I shopped for new books, and then we all went to dinner together. It was my perfect day. It still is.
In warmer years, I might see the first buds of cherry blossoms as early as February 26th. Not this year. That's okay. They'll be bursting into bloom soon enough.
*
I was raised to celebrate birthdays. It wasn't that we always needed huge parties, but attention was paid. I remember birthday parties at my grandmother's house -- coffee and cookies for her, or her friends, and probably cake. It's where I learned to sneak sips of watery black coffee. For the first fifteen years of my life I shared a birthday with my great-grandmother. I remember her 100th birthday at her church, shared with my 15th. It's the last picture of us together.
I remember waking up on my 10th birthday to find a pink clock and a note from my mother -- she had received it as a birthday gift when she was a girl, and she was passing it on to me. I woke up early, as I always did. My room was still dark, and everything was in the wrong place. The door was to my left. The window was on the wall opposite my bed, instead of directly above my head. I sat up and remembered that yesterday my mother helped me rearrange my bedroom, something I was allowed to do a few times a year. My room was just large enough to accommodate a few different set-ups, and simply moving my bed to a different wall made me feel like I had an entirely new room. I am orderly by nature, but the momentary disorientation always made me smile. I had chosen this.
A line of light shone beneath my door. My mother was already up, moving around in the kitchen. And then I saw it -- the clock.
I recognized it right away -- the pink plastic rectangular clock with the dancing ballerina. For years it perched atop the headboard in my mother’s old bedroom at the farm, the room I slept in when we visited my grandmother. My parents slept in the bed, and I slept in my Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bag on the floor along the wall. Sometimes I took the clock down and wound it, fascinated by the delicate sound of the wheels inside, the mechanisms turning. When I released the little key, the ballerina turned to the sound of “Oh, what a beautiful morning.” The clock was decades old, but it kept perfect time.
And on the morning of my tenth birthday, I found it on my nightstand. My mother left a note: Dear Shari, this clock was given to me by my grandmother on my eighth birthday, and now I am giving it to you. Happy Birthday to my beautiful girl.
My mother would have turned eight in 1960. Even at ten I possessed an uncanny memory for dates and a deep yearning to know my family’s stories. I remembered that my great-grandfather died the day after my mother’s eighth birthday. His wife -- her grandmother, my great-grandmother -- would have given this clock to her only the day before. I was born on my great-grandmother’s eighty-fifth birthday. She turned ninety-five on my tenth birthday, and two days later I joined her for our family birthday dinner. I’m not sure if this was the reason I felt the clock was weighted with more than my mother’s love for me, but I picked it up with nothing short of reverence.
*
I am every age I've ever been.
The following winter, I could have had a new clock radio. My church youth group was selling meat and cheese trays that year—maybe mixed nuts, too. Christmas-themed snacks. And I was tempted, because my best friend had a clock radio that played top-40 songs when it went off in the mornings. What I really wanted from that fundraiser, though, was the phone—it was just a simple white plastic touch-tone, but it would go in my bedroom. I wouldn’t get my own line—ever, my parents emphasized—but if I sold enough beef sticks and cheese balls, I would be allowed to keep it in my room. There would be limits, but I would be allowed to call Julia and speak in relative privacy, rather than in the middle of the kitchen. And anyway, I loved my little pink ballerina clock. It only played one song, but I loved the physical motion of winding it each day, loved the sound of those intricate little gears and the way I could set the time so the ballerina would begin to dance each morning. I loved the click, the momentary grinding before the plinking music began.
When my grandmother moved into the nursing home a year later, we still slept at the farm and my parents still slept in my mother’s old bedroom. I was the one who slept in my grandmother’s bed, alone on the main floor. I packed the little pink clock into my suitcase each time we visited.
My grandmother died -- too young -- from Scleroderma on a Tuesday morning in November. My mother was younger than I am now. My parents needed to make arrangements so I spent the night at Julia’s house, unrolling my sleeping bag against the wall of her basement bedroom. We went to school together the next morning as if everything was normal, and then my dad drove my brother and me north to the farm where we would stay for the rest of the week.
My friend’s bedroom was almost as familiar as my own, but that night I was as disoriented as I was when I rearranged my own furniture. None of it was my own choosing. She set the alarm on her clock radio a little early so we both had time to shower before school, but before I went to sleep I pulled out the pink ballerina clock and wound that, too.
I am every age I've ever been.
Let none of us complain about growing older.
*
I turned forty this week. My parents flew in for just a few hours, trying to return to their snowy home after a few days in Phoenix. Suzannah had a band concert, and my mother had a gift for me -- a mug I gave her when I was Suzannah's age, when she turned forty. Twenty-seven years ago. 40 is not the end of the world! But you can see it from there.
I laughed hard, and after sipping my morning coffee from that mug all week, I realize I love it at least as much as I love that pink ballerina clock. This is what it means to celebrate a birthday with care. This is a gift my mother gave me, and it transcends any thing on this earth.
I turned forty this week. I woke up in a life I love. I am lucky to love so many people.
It was a perfect day. I sipped coffee from my new twenty-seven-year-old mug. I jogged around my neighborhood in the bitingly cold and beautiful sunshine, the snow barely melted, Puget Sound a brilliant blue just down the hill from my house. I walked down to the edge of the water to catch my breath. I stood in a hot shower. I took myself to lunch. I read a book I'm loving, ate something that made me feel amazing, sipped a cold glass of white wine at noon. I lingered over a latte at a coffee shop I don't get to often. I came home and curled up on the couch for a nap, the sun streaming through the glass doors in the dining room. In the early evening, we all went to the Elliott Bay Book Company, and I picked up just a few things I may have missed at Powell's, and we went out for a cozy dinner. It is everything I could have wanted from this day, from any day. To feel the sun on my skin, to taste good coffee, to hug my children, to curl up in bed with the one who's known me, really known me, for my entire adult life.
I found this in a journal I kept a decade ago, from an entry I wrote late in February. It seems fitting to rediscover now:
The air is sweet with the first breath of spring. I never feel the need to crawl up, crawl out from winter's quiet depths until I smell it, that singing fresh scent under the mud, under the earth and the grass. It's almost painful, that first gasp of sharp sweet air, like a birth, like a death.
We find ourselves so fumblingly human together. My head meets your shoulder, your hand finds mine. We seek out that touch, your lips against my hair, my breath against your neck, my hip bumping yours, our hands across a table, our knees underneath. And all of these accidental collisions of skin, proof of life, proof that we are still alive, proof that we still are breathing and moving. My sigh against your chest, my tear against your hand, my hope against your life. Our eyes meet. We are not meant to go it alone.
We drove to Discovery Park this afternoon. We left it in late October, our feet treading upon the sweet damp mulch of fallen leaves. All that sweet rot. We returned today in the sunshine, cool air knifing my lungs. Wake up. I know this scent. It is buried deeper in the landscapes of my youth, under snowfall and dirt, deep, dark in the earth. It emerges earlier here, washing down the streets in the rain, rising to the surface of the earth in the sunlight, in the breeze.
We hiked to the bluffs overlooking Puget Sound. You are the rock against my wave; we are the rocks against each other's waves; we are the waves together, crashing against grief, against joy, the terrible swelling, the ebb and flow, the rise, the breaking.
I thought about grief, about joy, about all the ways we find and lose each other on ordinary days, on the breath of the first day of spring. About how it comes from the same place, about how the source of joy can be so dark and deep, how grief can be surprisingly light.
Thursday, February 21, 2019
Give Me Everything
“Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
I don't really understand people who don't read books, or who don't, at all times, have a reading list -- fluid, ever-growing, ever-changing. I'm so excited about my list for 2019 that I'm writing about part of it before I read everything on it, and about ten months before my end-of-the-year book review. And it's not just the books on my personal reading list; I have the extreme privilege to teach literature in an IB school. About every seven years, each subject area goes through curriculum review and program changes, and the changes coming for literature starting next year are pretty exciting to me.
What I'm telling you is that my work wife and I armed ourselves with with index cards, stickers, and markers (all in different colors) and met at Starbucks on our day off to start working on our vision board. I have never made a real vision board in my life, but I am joyfully and unironically making one now. We are that excited. Today I skipped around my classroom singing softly about changing the world through literature. I don't think my students noticed anything out of the ordinary.
*
Last weekend I made my annual/semi-annual pilgrimage to Powell's Books in Portland. We plan a family trip there every winter, because I like to have something to look forward to in the slog of January and February. We work in activities for everyone, it's not just books -- folks want to eat and things, I guess. So we do that too. But this trip, I explained to my students this week, is really a spiritual experience for me. I work in at least two visits to The Bookstore in a 24-hour period (but I've been known to squeeze in more).
The first time, I take my list. We drive down sometime during the afternoon, check into our hotel, and head downtown. I have an agenda for that visit. At some point, Matt and the kids will wander across the street to put in our name for dinner at Deschutes Public House; the wait on a Saturday night is always long, so I can linger at the bookstore for anywhere from forty minutes to an hour.
(I should point out how absolutely wonderful it is to have children who a.) love to read and b.) are old enough for me to deposit in the enormous Children's/Young Adult section and leave them while I browse. These trips were more challenging when they required direct supervision, or carrying, and I will forever love my husband for taking on a great deal of this responsibility when they were little.)
On the second day, we do a Family Activity (OMSI, the zoo, etc.), followed by lunch at Laughing Planet, and then we return to the bookstore, and this is when I allow myself to wander through the stacks and let the books call to me. I don't know how else to describe it. Sometimes I discover books I didn't know I needed. Or I find a beautiful signed hardcover first edition of a book I've wanted for a long time at an absurdly cheap price. Often my family grows restless, so Matt takes them to a nearby park. He takes them to another brewery he wants to try, and the kids eat pretzels and drink root beer while he orders a beer sampler. They collect me in the late afternoon before we eat an early dinner and begin the drive home.
*
During our Portland trip three years ago, I learned that my very favorite writer, Pat Conroy, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I wrote about it here, even:
I wish I would have. I had things to write about in the journal I always carry with me.
*
I bought eight books last weekend. At least one of them I won't read right away. I am slowly collecting every single book Brian Doyle wrote; he is my second favorite author, after Pat Conroy, and he died of brain cancer a little over a year after Conroy died and almost exactly a year before my oldest friend's husband died of brain cancer, and seriously, just fuck all of that cancer. I will ultimately read all of Brian Doyle's work, but I can't bear to read it too quickly.
I don't buy an obscene amount of books, ever. And I don't have books piled in corners all over my house. I do own a lot of books, and I think I reread books more than most folks, and sometimes even when I don't reread an entire book there are books I need to keep because sometimes I need to reach for them and swim in their sentences. I need to immerse myself in the "texture and cadence of the language" (as I tell my students). But I don't hang on to books I don't love or won't return to. I have a lot of credit built up at Pegasus Book Exchange in West Seattle. I've also worn the same pair of shoes for the past, like, hundred years, because I don't care about shoes. (And if I don't need to own a book but still want to read it, I use libraries. I almost always have something on hold there.) That's my answer to the "How do you keep up with/how do you afford" folks. I buy books and I read them because it matters to me, a lot. It's what I do.
Anyway, whatever, I bought eight.
I absolutely knew I wanted these:
An Orchestra of Minorities, by Chigozie Obioma: I read Obioma's first novel The Fishermen a few years ago and it was absolutely stunning, and the reviews for his new novel suggest that this one absolutely measures up to that expectation.
Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli: After I read Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, an essay structured around the forty questions asked of migrant children facing deportation, I'd follow Luiselli anywhere.
All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cancer and Cooking, by Karen Babine: Fun fact -- I graduated from Concordia with the author, which has nothing to do with anything except that I was lucky enough to attend a college that fostered and produced (produces) some great writing and an enduring love and appreciation for stories and language. Anyway. The only reason I didn't read this book in a single night is because I picked it up at nine o'clock on a school night, after my children were in bed, and I finished it the next day. It's SO good. It's a book that will resonate deeply with anyone who has a strong sense of place, of family, for anyone who understands how both food and language have the power to heal and connect us. It's beautiful. This is a book that will likely be categorized in the health/wellness/illness section of the bookstores, depending on which bookstore you're in, but that's a mistake. It should be front and center with any other memoir, because what she writes about is human experience and human love. And she does it in absolutely gorgeous sentences. I couldn't put it down.
Shameless: A Sexual Reformation, by Nadia Bolz-Weber: I'll read every book she publishes, because I love her, but I am all about dismantling conservative Christians' toxic obsession with sex and sexuality. (And I hope everyone who mailed her their purity rings has experienced some sort of healing.)
Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James: I'm admittedly not a devoted reader of fantasy, but I am a devoted reader of Marlon James, and I am so here for this book, described as a sort of "African Game of Thrones." (I am 100% willing to bet it's better.) I still think it's tragically unfair that Marlon James was in Portland when I was in Seattle and Seattle when I was in Portland.
The next day, after much wandering, after much carrying books around the store to see how they felt after an hour, after much deliberation, I settled on these:
Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry: This made the longlist for the Man Booker Prize in 2017 (a year which yielded a really spectacular list in general, in my opinion), and it also comes highly recommended by some folks whose literary opinions I deeply respect. I found a beautiful used hardcover in impeccable condition, so it felt like a sign.
Parkland: Birth of a Movement, by Dave Cullen: I read Cullen's book on Columbine several years ago, and it was truly excellent. I absolutely trust him with this subject matter. If he'd chosen to write about Sandy Hook, I might have given it a pass -- I still can't read a complete account of that day, however condensed, without a stab of panic and grief threatening to choke me. Sandy Hook destroyed me in ways I still can't write about, because I identify too much with the mothers. Parkland destroys me in a different way, but as a high school teacher, and as a passionate advocate for AT THE VERY FUCKING LEAST sensible gun legislation, and as a person deeply privileged to work with passionate teenagers, I think this is one I need to read immediately.
The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Brian Doyle: Because this is the last of Brian Doyle's novels published before his death in 2017. Because every sentence he writes is magic. Because. I won't read this one right away. I have collections of his essays, prose poems, and stories that I also dip into here and there, slowly. I can't bear the thought of reading the last of his words, knowing there will never be any more. It's also hard to come to terms with the knowledge that at some point, I will have bought them all. So I collect them slowly. Powell's is a good place for this; he was an Oregon writer, and they loved him well.
*
I carried some books that ultimately went back on the shelves, as I always do. But I need to save something for my birthday next week. All I ever want for my birthday is this: a day to write and drink coffee by myself in the morning, to take myself to lunch and read and sip a glass of wine on a weekday at noon, to take a walk through a certain neighborhood with the trees I know are about to burst with spring cherry blossoms, to look out across Puget Sound, and to go book-shopping and out to dinner with my family at night. It's my perfect day, always, and it's more than enough.
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
I don't really understand people who don't read books, or who don't, at all times, have a reading list -- fluid, ever-growing, ever-changing. I'm so excited about my list for 2019 that I'm writing about part of it before I read everything on it, and about ten months before my end-of-the-year book review. And it's not just the books on my personal reading list; I have the extreme privilege to teach literature in an IB school. About every seven years, each subject area goes through curriculum review and program changes, and the changes coming for literature starting next year are pretty exciting to me.
What I'm telling you is that my work wife and I armed ourselves with with index cards, stickers, and markers (all in different colors) and met at Starbucks on our day off to start working on our vision board. I have never made a real vision board in my life, but I am joyfully and unironically making one now. We are that excited. Today I skipped around my classroom singing softly about changing the world through literature. I don't think my students noticed anything out of the ordinary.
*
Last weekend I made my annual/semi-annual pilgrimage to Powell's Books in Portland. We plan a family trip there every winter, because I like to have something to look forward to in the slog of January and February. We work in activities for everyone, it's not just books -- folks want to eat and things, I guess. So we do that too. But this trip, I explained to my students this week, is really a spiritual experience for me. I work in at least two visits to The Bookstore in a 24-hour period (but I've been known to squeeze in more).
The first time, I take my list. We drive down sometime during the afternoon, check into our hotel, and head downtown. I have an agenda for that visit. At some point, Matt and the kids will wander across the street to put in our name for dinner at Deschutes Public House; the wait on a Saturday night is always long, so I can linger at the bookstore for anywhere from forty minutes to an hour.
(I should point out how absolutely wonderful it is to have children who a.) love to read and b.) are old enough for me to deposit in the enormous Children's/Young Adult section and leave them while I browse. These trips were more challenging when they required direct supervision, or carrying, and I will forever love my husband for taking on a great deal of this responsibility when they were little.)
On the second day, we do a Family Activity (OMSI, the zoo, etc.), followed by lunch at Laughing Planet, and then we return to the bookstore, and this is when I allow myself to wander through the stacks and let the books call to me. I don't know how else to describe it. Sometimes I discover books I didn't know I needed. Or I find a beautiful signed hardcover first edition of a book I've wanted for a long time at an absurdly cheap price. Often my family grows restless, so Matt takes them to a nearby park. He takes them to another brewery he wants to try, and the kids eat pretzels and drink root beer while he orders a beer sampler. They collect me in the late afternoon before we eat an early dinner and begin the drive home.
*
During our Portland trip three years ago, I learned that my very favorite writer, Pat Conroy, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I wrote about it here, even:
Dear Internet: I do not know how to express my actual, real-life devastation. Pat Conroy changed my life. I never met him, but I fully intended to. I thought I would fly to Minneapolis if I had to the next time he went on tour (his tour for The Death of Santini didn't bring him to Seattle but it did take him to St. Paul) and I would tell him this. And then I would have him sign a book to one of my truest and dearest friends, a coach, because Pat Conroy made the word Coach so beautiful to me...I thought of her last weekend. I walked by that coffee shop, even, but I didn't take the time to stop.
...but that day I handled the news by hunkering down in a coffee shop and writing him a letter while Matt took the kids to the park. I'm thirty-seven years old, yes, and I am writing a love letter to a man I will likely never meet. I sat in a coffee shop and wrote and wrote and wrote, sipping my little almond milk latte. I didn't pause until a young woman sitting near me said, "Excuse me, but do you mind if I ask what you've been writing?" And that little exchange launched an entire conversation about literature and death and philosophy. It turns out this woman was a former IB student from Quebec who is currently studying in Ontario. We talked about writers and exchanged book lists. She left a note in my journal.
I wish I would have. I had things to write about in the journal I always carry with me.
*
I bought eight books last weekend. At least one of them I won't read right away. I am slowly collecting every single book Brian Doyle wrote; he is my second favorite author, after Pat Conroy, and he died of brain cancer a little over a year after Conroy died and almost exactly a year before my oldest friend's husband died of brain cancer, and seriously, just fuck all of that cancer. I will ultimately read all of Brian Doyle's work, but I can't bear to read it too quickly.
I don't buy an obscene amount of books, ever. And I don't have books piled in corners all over my house. I do own a lot of books, and I think I reread books more than most folks, and sometimes even when I don't reread an entire book there are books I need to keep because sometimes I need to reach for them and swim in their sentences. I need to immerse myself in the "texture and cadence of the language" (as I tell my students). But I don't hang on to books I don't love or won't return to. I have a lot of credit built up at Pegasus Book Exchange in West Seattle. I've also worn the same pair of shoes for the past, like, hundred years, because I don't care about shoes. (And if I don't need to own a book but still want to read it, I use libraries. I almost always have something on hold there.) That's my answer to the "How do you keep up with/how do you afford" folks. I buy books and I read them because it matters to me, a lot. It's what I do.
Anyway, whatever, I bought eight.
I absolutely knew I wanted these:
An Orchestra of Minorities, by Chigozie Obioma: I read Obioma's first novel The Fishermen a few years ago and it was absolutely stunning, and the reviews for his new novel suggest that this one absolutely measures up to that expectation.
Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli: After I read Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, an essay structured around the forty questions asked of migrant children facing deportation, I'd follow Luiselli anywhere.
All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cancer and Cooking, by Karen Babine: Fun fact -- I graduated from Concordia with the author, which has nothing to do with anything except that I was lucky enough to attend a college that fostered and produced (produces) some great writing and an enduring love and appreciation for stories and language. Anyway. The only reason I didn't read this book in a single night is because I picked it up at nine o'clock on a school night, after my children were in bed, and I finished it the next day. It's SO good. It's a book that will resonate deeply with anyone who has a strong sense of place, of family, for anyone who understands how both food and language have the power to heal and connect us. It's beautiful. This is a book that will likely be categorized in the health/wellness/illness section of the bookstores, depending on which bookstore you're in, but that's a mistake. It should be front and center with any other memoir, because what she writes about is human experience and human love. And she does it in absolutely gorgeous sentences. I couldn't put it down.
Shameless: A Sexual Reformation, by Nadia Bolz-Weber: I'll read every book she publishes, because I love her, but I am all about dismantling conservative Christians' toxic obsession with sex and sexuality. (And I hope everyone who mailed her their purity rings has experienced some sort of healing.)
Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James: I'm admittedly not a devoted reader of fantasy, but I am a devoted reader of Marlon James, and I am so here for this book, described as a sort of "African Game of Thrones." (I am 100% willing to bet it's better.) I still think it's tragically unfair that Marlon James was in Portland when I was in Seattle and Seattle when I was in Portland.
The next day, after much wandering, after much carrying books around the store to see how they felt after an hour, after much deliberation, I settled on these:
Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry: This made the longlist for the Man Booker Prize in 2017 (a year which yielded a really spectacular list in general, in my opinion), and it also comes highly recommended by some folks whose literary opinions I deeply respect. I found a beautiful used hardcover in impeccable condition, so it felt like a sign.
Parkland: Birth of a Movement, by Dave Cullen: I read Cullen's book on Columbine several years ago, and it was truly excellent. I absolutely trust him with this subject matter. If he'd chosen to write about Sandy Hook, I might have given it a pass -- I still can't read a complete account of that day, however condensed, without a stab of panic and grief threatening to choke me. Sandy Hook destroyed me in ways I still can't write about, because I identify too much with the mothers. Parkland destroys me in a different way, but as a high school teacher, and as a passionate advocate for AT THE VERY FUCKING LEAST sensible gun legislation, and as a person deeply privileged to work with passionate teenagers, I think this is one I need to read immediately.
The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Brian Doyle: Because this is the last of Brian Doyle's novels published before his death in 2017. Because every sentence he writes is magic. Because. I won't read this one right away. I have collections of his essays, prose poems, and stories that I also dip into here and there, slowly. I can't bear the thought of reading the last of his words, knowing there will never be any more. It's also hard to come to terms with the knowledge that at some point, I will have bought them all. So I collect them slowly. Powell's is a good place for this; he was an Oregon writer, and they loved him well.
*
I carried some books that ultimately went back on the shelves, as I always do. But I need to save something for my birthday next week. All I ever want for my birthday is this: a day to write and drink coffee by myself in the morning, to take myself to lunch and read and sip a glass of wine on a weekday at noon, to take a walk through a certain neighborhood with the trees I know are about to burst with spring cherry blossoms, to look out across Puget Sound, and to go book-shopping and out to dinner with my family at night. It's my perfect day, always, and it's more than enough.
Monday, February 11, 2019
The world happens to all of us
The sound of rain on snow.
It's not a sound I grew up with. That's what I hear tonight when I slide open the glass doors that open on to our back patio.
This is what happens after a snow event in the Pacific Northwest, though. There is no gradual melt, no tapering off for weeks or months. The temperature drops, the snow falls. And then it warms, and the snow slides from the bent branches, cascades on to the sidewalks. Trees shake free of their burdens. It's an eerie mess for awhile, and a noisy one: trickling, gushing, dripping. Tires spin through slush in the streets, and then everything is just wet. I know what's coming.
But it's been beautiful, if unmooring.
Tomorrow will be our fourth snow day, officially. I've only taught one full day so far this month. Last week we had two snow days, followed by a late start and an early release in the same day. Thursday was normal, but only as normal as a day following a semester break and two snow days and a day of twenty-three minute classes can be. On Thursday night, we received word that Friday would be an early release so we could get home ahead of the snow that was scheduled to fall. I thought it was overkill, at first; I have so much to get through in my classes, and the snow days set me back quite a bit. But by the time I pulled out of the parking lot and headed across town to collect my own children, the snow had started to fall again. At home I curled up on the couch with a book and my children crowded in next to me, their faces looking towards the sky. I couldn't help myself: I snapped a picture, trying to capture their pure wonder.
The snow fell all throughout the afternoon. My husband peeled potatoes and went out for a run in the snow. I put a chicken in the oven to roast. He'd gone out the night before for a few odds and ends -- hot cocoa, toothpaste, popcorn. We'd stocked up on groceries earlier in the week, picking up milk and bread and the chicken for Friday night's dinner. Plenty of chocolate and wine and coffee and whatever else looked good at Trader Joe's. The macaroni and cheese the kids like. Staples like coconut milk and chickpeas. More potatoes. This proved to be a good idea, because the shelves were nearly empty. We laughed a bit -- how long did folks think they'd be stranded? But then, we used to be self-righteous and vaguely smug assholes in our twenties who laughed at Seattleites in the snow, too. And then we understood what it means to drive in snow and ice here. We stopped laughing.
Last week, I had a moment where I clutched my head and grew a little weepy: getting my students through their IB assessments this semester requires a tightly planned schedule, and I am a planner, and the snow threw a wrench in all of that. (As of this writing, the wrench is still there. My inbox is filled with students' panic.) But then I was reminded that the world happens to all of us, and possibly this is one of those infuriating situations in which I can practice the patience I find myself so desperately praying for.
(I need to stop praying for patience, I guess. I get it; I won't be sent a gift-wrapped box. I'll be gifted with opportunities to practice. Blah blah blah.)
On Friday night, late, sort of, maybe just past ten, I opened the front door to watch the snow. It fell in soft, fat flakes. The driveway was covered, even though Matt went out to shovel before dinner. He only went out to shovel so he could pile the snow in a huge mound, a head start on a snow cave he and the kids finished in the morning.
I stood in the doorway and watched the flakes fall for awhile. And then I stepped outside, in my sweatshirt and slippers. It felt so soft -- so soft it was hardly even cold. My neighborhood is so quiet. I walked across the driveway, my slippers sinking into the snow. I walked into the street. And I stood there, in that unblemished snow where no cars had driven all evening, and I just stretched out my arms and breathed and smiled because it was so, so lovely, the sky soft and bright and silent. And then the door opened, and there was my daughter, framed in the light from the living room.
"Mom? What are you doing?"
And then suddenly she was bounding across the lawn with her impossibly long legs, and the two of us were running back and forth in the street, giggling. We ran around the corner to the cul-de-sac and stood in the glow of a street lamp, gazing up to watch the snowflakes falling brightly above our heads, so slowly they seemed suspended in the air. The sky was full of snow, and so were my slippers, and the bottoms of my pajama pants were wet. I didn't care.
It's not a sound I grew up with. That's what I hear tonight when I slide open the glass doors that open on to our back patio.
This is what happens after a snow event in the Pacific Northwest, though. There is no gradual melt, no tapering off for weeks or months. The temperature drops, the snow falls. And then it warms, and the snow slides from the bent branches, cascades on to the sidewalks. Trees shake free of their burdens. It's an eerie mess for awhile, and a noisy one: trickling, gushing, dripping. Tires spin through slush in the streets, and then everything is just wet. I know what's coming.
But it's been beautiful, if unmooring.
Tomorrow will be our fourth snow day, officially. I've only taught one full day so far this month. Last week we had two snow days, followed by a late start and an early release in the same day. Thursday was normal, but only as normal as a day following a semester break and two snow days and a day of twenty-three minute classes can be. On Thursday night, we received word that Friday would be an early release so we could get home ahead of the snow that was scheduled to fall. I thought it was overkill, at first; I have so much to get through in my classes, and the snow days set me back quite a bit. But by the time I pulled out of the parking lot and headed across town to collect my own children, the snow had started to fall again. At home I curled up on the couch with a book and my children crowded in next to me, their faces looking towards the sky. I couldn't help myself: I snapped a picture, trying to capture their pure wonder.
The snow fell all throughout the afternoon. My husband peeled potatoes and went out for a run in the snow. I put a chicken in the oven to roast. He'd gone out the night before for a few odds and ends -- hot cocoa, toothpaste, popcorn. We'd stocked up on groceries earlier in the week, picking up milk and bread and the chicken for Friday night's dinner. Plenty of chocolate and wine and coffee and whatever else looked good at Trader Joe's. The macaroni and cheese the kids like. Staples like coconut milk and chickpeas. More potatoes. This proved to be a good idea, because the shelves were nearly empty. We laughed a bit -- how long did folks think they'd be stranded? But then, we used to be self-righteous and vaguely smug assholes in our twenties who laughed at Seattleites in the snow, too. And then we understood what it means to drive in snow and ice here. We stopped laughing.
Last week, I had a moment where I clutched my head and grew a little weepy: getting my students through their IB assessments this semester requires a tightly planned schedule, and I am a planner, and the snow threw a wrench in all of that. (As of this writing, the wrench is still there. My inbox is filled with students' panic.) But then I was reminded that the world happens to all of us, and possibly this is one of those infuriating situations in which I can practice the patience I find myself so desperately praying for.
(I need to stop praying for patience, I guess. I get it; I won't be sent a gift-wrapped box. I'll be gifted with opportunities to practice. Blah blah blah.)
On Friday night, late, sort of, maybe just past ten, I opened the front door to watch the snow. It fell in soft, fat flakes. The driveway was covered, even though Matt went out to shovel before dinner. He only went out to shovel so he could pile the snow in a huge mound, a head start on a snow cave he and the kids finished in the morning.
I stood in the doorway and watched the flakes fall for awhile. And then I stepped outside, in my sweatshirt and slippers. It felt so soft -- so soft it was hardly even cold. My neighborhood is so quiet. I walked across the driveway, my slippers sinking into the snow. I walked into the street. And I stood there, in that unblemished snow where no cars had driven all evening, and I just stretched out my arms and breathed and smiled because it was so, so lovely, the sky soft and bright and silent. And then the door opened, and there was my daughter, framed in the light from the living room.
"Mom? What are you doing?"
And then suddenly she was bounding across the lawn with her impossibly long legs, and the two of us were running back and forth in the street, giggling. We ran around the corner to the cul-de-sac and stood in the glow of a street lamp, gazing up to watch the snowflakes falling brightly above our heads, so slowly they seemed suspended in the air. The sky was full of snow, and so were my slippers, and the bottoms of my pajama pants were wet. I didn't care.
Sunday, February 3, 2019
Snow Days
I smell snow in the air.
My husband is out for a late afternoon run as it grows dark. My children are watching the Super Bowl. We don't follow football at all, but my daughter became a fan when the Seahawks won five years ago and she actually enjoys (and understands) it, so every year now, regardless of who's playing, we humor them and buy fun snacks and enjoy the day in our own very low-key way. I'm about to make a big pot of sausage, sweet potato, and kale soup for dinner, because soup sounds good on a night that smells like snow and because my son loves it and asks for seconds. My son has become someone who eats absolutely everything I cook, and yes, we've made and heard all the jokes about how expensive it's going to be to feed this boy as a teenager, but I don't care. I love feeding him. I love watching him eat something that isn't plain pasta or a chicken tender, I love the moment when he announces he likes it, and I love serving up a bowl of seconds.
It isn't snowing yet.
We didn't have snow days growing up in Montana. I remember missing school for a day in elementary school, maybe third or fourth grade, but it wasn't for snow, it was for windchill, much like the Midwest has experienced this month. We lost power, and it was too cold to play outside. We built a fire in the basement fireplace, and I remember, vaguely, feeling excited about that more than actually missing school.
It's not like that where I live now. If snow is in the forecast, I look out the window and up at the sky for hours, mentally planning how I'll adjust my calendar if we have a snow day. Most of my teacher friends hope for a two-hour late start rather than an entire cancelled day, because they don't want to lose our built-in snow day. If we don't lose a day, we get an extra four-day weekend; usually that's Memorial Weekend, but this year our make-up day is next Friday. I figure, either I get a four-day weekend now (we had Friday off to grade between semesters) or I get the four-day weekend for President's Day. I tend not to get too angsty about a day here or a day there. We all have 180 days somewhere.
But I will never not love the romance of a snow day.
During my third year of teaching, Matt and I drove our little Honda Civic all the way from Seattle to Minneapolis -- with stops in Bozeman both directions -- for Christmas. Driving in the winter had never bothered me; I'm a Montana girl who went to college in Minnesota, and if the roads were open, I drove on them. But that trip, a year after we were married, was exhausting. We drove from Washington to Montana, where we stayed for two nights. We drove from Bozeman to Fargo, where we stayed at a cheap hotel next to a bar. Our pug had gotten carsick and vomited in her crate. We tried to clean it with cold paper towels at a rest stop, but I still smelled it all night long. After a short night on an uncomfortable mattress, we pushed on to the Twin Cities. Matt and I both had terrible colds, and we filled up a plastic grocery sack with used tissues as we drove across three states. The drive home was worse. We left Minneapolis at six o'clock in the morning, intending to make it all the way to Bozeman. It's a long drive on a summer day, but we battled blizzards and black ice for over twenty hours and nearly a thousand miles, stopping only for gas and hamburgers with creamy tomato soup at the 4B's in Miles City, Montana. We rested for a day in Bozeman before heading home. Driving through the mountains in whiteout conditions was worse than black ice across North Dakota; we slowed to a crawl over Lookout Pass, our wipers ineffective against the spray of snow from the semi-trucks that barreled past. We thought it would be smooth sailing after Spokane -- at least the interstate was relatively flat after that -- but we gave up at Moses Lake, checking into a motel that would take our dog before slumping into a booth at Denny's. We barely made it out of the parking lot the next morning, but driving was manageable in the daylight. I told Matt I never wanted to make that drive in the winter again, and we haven't.
We turned onto the street to our house shortly before lunchtime, one day after we expected to make it home. Our lawn -- for the very first time since we'd lived in our house -- was coated with a layer of snow. Not quite enough to completely hide the spikes of grass poking through, but enough to make me squeal out loud and turn to my husband and say, "Look!" Snow had become beautiful again.
We had a two-hour late start that first Monday back. It started to snow again that afternoon, and before the end of the school day, the district decided to close for the next day. My very first snow day. I still rose at five o'clock to turn on the television, to see the name of my school district scrolling across the bottom of the screen. That, I think, is a thing we've lost: the excitement of turning on the news in the dark to watch those scrolling names. Now we get texts, e-mail alerts, automatic callouts. It's much more efficient, of course, but romance and efficiency don't mix.
I put on a movie and cleaned our house, even though we hadn't lived in it for two weeks. I dusted, vacuumed, scrubbed the bathrooms. Later that afternoon I went to the Starbucks up the street to grade the junior IB Literature projects I'd neglected in Minnesota. And before dinner, the news announced that schools would be closed again. Two snow days in a row! Magic! I wrote in my journal the next day: All the branches on the bush outside our bedroom window are encased in ice. Each and every spindly little one. When I took Blondie outside the only sounds were the cracking of ice, and snow and slush falling from the heavy tree-tops, bent over and unaccustomed to the extra weight, as loud as rain.
Ten year ago we had three days off leading into winter break. My coworkers complained about making up the extra days. I was miscarrying a baby at nine weeks, bleeding and crying and pretending I was fine as I responded to e-mails from my students who were wondering how to submit the assignments that were due that week. I curled into a blanket, grateful for the respite. I didn't have to pretend to be okay.
There are flurries in the sky. Flakes fall and then it stops for awhile. But I know the smell of snow.
In January of my daughter's kindergarten year, we lost an entire week -- Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and that night they called off school for the following day. It wasn't even snowing yet, not really, but the roads were icy, and while my friends in Montana and Minnesota scoffed at my school district I will say that I would far rather drive in heavy snow in either of those places than in just a little bit of snow or ice on our hills. Snow fell that night and continued for a couple of days before turning to freezing rain. It covered the snow in an icy sheen and bent the trees. The streets glistened under the heavy gray sky.
Anyway, I shouldn't say we lost those days. They had the potential to be sort of terrible, because everyone had colds, and then Isaac's turned into an ear infection and mine turned into a sinus infection. But the forced relaxation was so good for us. It had been one of my most difficult semesters of teaching with two of my most difficult classes -- classes that had me wondering if I'd come to the end of my effectiveness as a teacher. Four days of breathing space gave me the reset I needed. I wore sweats, drank a lot of coffee, read a few books, and watched all five seasons of Friday Night Lights (a Christmas gift from my husband). The kids built a snowman outside and blanket forts inside. I am a person who likes to be able to say, I have done this and this and this; I am a checker of boxes. But it was so good to put it all down for a few days.
I've been writing this for hours now. I keep wandering away to do other things -- to make the soup, to read another chapter in my book. The football game is over and the internet tells me it was a boring one. Snow is falling again now, and the tips of the lawn are white. The district has called a two-hour late start. But it's supposed to snow all night, and I think tomorrow will be a snow day. Matt thinks that because we already know we have a delay, we won't have to worry about waiting for a phone call at five o'clock in the morning, but teachers don't sleep well with the maybe of a snow day. I know I'll wake during the night just to peer out the window, to see if flakes are still falling in the glow of the neighbor's backyard porch light.
Two years ago, in early February, we had two snow days in a row. The first day I read almost all of Swing Time by Zadie Smith while the kids played. On the second day I was restless enough to empty out every kitchen drawer and cabinet and wipe them down while the kids watched Groundhog Day. It was tremendously satisfying.
Snow days are inconvenient. They mean a lot of scrambling to adjust my teaching, and if we have more than one, the days are tacked on in June. But I don't care. These unexpected gifts of time to just be with my family have become a tapestry of memories over the years, and when I think of the blanket forts, the hot chocolate, books read and movies watched, when I think of our kids piling on our bed at six o'clock in the morning begging to go outside, when I see them charge across the unblemished yard in the first gray light of morning, I think, what's an extra day in June?
My husband is out for a late afternoon run as it grows dark. My children are watching the Super Bowl. We don't follow football at all, but my daughter became a fan when the Seahawks won five years ago and she actually enjoys (and understands) it, so every year now, regardless of who's playing, we humor them and buy fun snacks and enjoy the day in our own very low-key way. I'm about to make a big pot of sausage, sweet potato, and kale soup for dinner, because soup sounds good on a night that smells like snow and because my son loves it and asks for seconds. My son has become someone who eats absolutely everything I cook, and yes, we've made and heard all the jokes about how expensive it's going to be to feed this boy as a teenager, but I don't care. I love feeding him. I love watching him eat something that isn't plain pasta or a chicken tender, I love the moment when he announces he likes it, and I love serving up a bowl of seconds.
It isn't snowing yet.
We didn't have snow days growing up in Montana. I remember missing school for a day in elementary school, maybe third or fourth grade, but it wasn't for snow, it was for windchill, much like the Midwest has experienced this month. We lost power, and it was too cold to play outside. We built a fire in the basement fireplace, and I remember, vaguely, feeling excited about that more than actually missing school.
It's not like that where I live now. If snow is in the forecast, I look out the window and up at the sky for hours, mentally planning how I'll adjust my calendar if we have a snow day. Most of my teacher friends hope for a two-hour late start rather than an entire cancelled day, because they don't want to lose our built-in snow day. If we don't lose a day, we get an extra four-day weekend; usually that's Memorial Weekend, but this year our make-up day is next Friday. I figure, either I get a four-day weekend now (we had Friday off to grade between semesters) or I get the four-day weekend for President's Day. I tend not to get too angsty about a day here or a day there. We all have 180 days somewhere.
But I will never not love the romance of a snow day.
During my third year of teaching, Matt and I drove our little Honda Civic all the way from Seattle to Minneapolis -- with stops in Bozeman both directions -- for Christmas. Driving in the winter had never bothered me; I'm a Montana girl who went to college in Minnesota, and if the roads were open, I drove on them. But that trip, a year after we were married, was exhausting. We drove from Washington to Montana, where we stayed for two nights. We drove from Bozeman to Fargo, where we stayed at a cheap hotel next to a bar. Our pug had gotten carsick and vomited in her crate. We tried to clean it with cold paper towels at a rest stop, but I still smelled it all night long. After a short night on an uncomfortable mattress, we pushed on to the Twin Cities. Matt and I both had terrible colds, and we filled up a plastic grocery sack with used tissues as we drove across three states. The drive home was worse. We left Minneapolis at six o'clock in the morning, intending to make it all the way to Bozeman. It's a long drive on a summer day, but we battled blizzards and black ice for over twenty hours and nearly a thousand miles, stopping only for gas and hamburgers with creamy tomato soup at the 4B's in Miles City, Montana. We rested for a day in Bozeman before heading home. Driving through the mountains in whiteout conditions was worse than black ice across North Dakota; we slowed to a crawl over Lookout Pass, our wipers ineffective against the spray of snow from the semi-trucks that barreled past. We thought it would be smooth sailing after Spokane -- at least the interstate was relatively flat after that -- but we gave up at Moses Lake, checking into a motel that would take our dog before slumping into a booth at Denny's. We barely made it out of the parking lot the next morning, but driving was manageable in the daylight. I told Matt I never wanted to make that drive in the winter again, and we haven't.
We turned onto the street to our house shortly before lunchtime, one day after we expected to make it home. Our lawn -- for the very first time since we'd lived in our house -- was coated with a layer of snow. Not quite enough to completely hide the spikes of grass poking through, but enough to make me squeal out loud and turn to my husband and say, "Look!" Snow had become beautiful again.
We had a two-hour late start that first Monday back. It started to snow again that afternoon, and before the end of the school day, the district decided to close for the next day. My very first snow day. I still rose at five o'clock to turn on the television, to see the name of my school district scrolling across the bottom of the screen. That, I think, is a thing we've lost: the excitement of turning on the news in the dark to watch those scrolling names. Now we get texts, e-mail alerts, automatic callouts. It's much more efficient, of course, but romance and efficiency don't mix.
I put on a movie and cleaned our house, even though we hadn't lived in it for two weeks. I dusted, vacuumed, scrubbed the bathrooms. Later that afternoon I went to the Starbucks up the street to grade the junior IB Literature projects I'd neglected in Minnesota. And before dinner, the news announced that schools would be closed again. Two snow days in a row! Magic! I wrote in my journal the next day: All the branches on the bush outside our bedroom window are encased in ice. Each and every spindly little one. When I took Blondie outside the only sounds were the cracking of ice, and snow and slush falling from the heavy tree-tops, bent over and unaccustomed to the extra weight, as loud as rain.
Ten year ago we had three days off leading into winter break. My coworkers complained about making up the extra days. I was miscarrying a baby at nine weeks, bleeding and crying and pretending I was fine as I responded to e-mails from my students who were wondering how to submit the assignments that were due that week. I curled into a blanket, grateful for the respite. I didn't have to pretend to be okay.
There are flurries in the sky. Flakes fall and then it stops for awhile. But I know the smell of snow.
In January of my daughter's kindergarten year, we lost an entire week -- Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and that night they called off school for the following day. It wasn't even snowing yet, not really, but the roads were icy, and while my friends in Montana and Minnesota scoffed at my school district I will say that I would far rather drive in heavy snow in either of those places than in just a little bit of snow or ice on our hills. Snow fell that night and continued for a couple of days before turning to freezing rain. It covered the snow in an icy sheen and bent the trees. The streets glistened under the heavy gray sky.
Anyway, I shouldn't say we lost those days. They had the potential to be sort of terrible, because everyone had colds, and then Isaac's turned into an ear infection and mine turned into a sinus infection. But the forced relaxation was so good for us. It had been one of my most difficult semesters of teaching with two of my most difficult classes -- classes that had me wondering if I'd come to the end of my effectiveness as a teacher. Four days of breathing space gave me the reset I needed. I wore sweats, drank a lot of coffee, read a few books, and watched all five seasons of Friday Night Lights (a Christmas gift from my husband). The kids built a snowman outside and blanket forts inside. I am a person who likes to be able to say, I have done this and this and this; I am a checker of boxes. But it was so good to put it all down for a few days.
I've been writing this for hours now. I keep wandering away to do other things -- to make the soup, to read another chapter in my book. The football game is over and the internet tells me it was a boring one. Snow is falling again now, and the tips of the lawn are white. The district has called a two-hour late start. But it's supposed to snow all night, and I think tomorrow will be a snow day. Matt thinks that because we already know we have a delay, we won't have to worry about waiting for a phone call at five o'clock in the morning, but teachers don't sleep well with the maybe of a snow day. I know I'll wake during the night just to peer out the window, to see if flakes are still falling in the glow of the neighbor's backyard porch light.
Two years ago, in early February, we had two snow days in a row. The first day I read almost all of Swing Time by Zadie Smith while the kids played. On the second day I was restless enough to empty out every kitchen drawer and cabinet and wipe them down while the kids watched Groundhog Day. It was tremendously satisfying.
Snow days are inconvenient. They mean a lot of scrambling to adjust my teaching, and if we have more than one, the days are tacked on in June. But I don't care. These unexpected gifts of time to just be with my family have become a tapestry of memories over the years, and when I think of the blanket forts, the hot chocolate, books read and movies watched, when I think of our kids piling on our bed at six o'clock in the morning begging to go outside, when I see them charge across the unblemished yard in the first gray light of morning, I think, what's an extra day in June?
Saturday, October 15, 2016
At least I don't have hantavirus (probably)
Hi, everyone. I had a spectacularly terrible week, kind of, and I cried a lot and felt really angry and I don't really want to write about that here at the moment, so I'm going to write about some other things instead because it still feels like a good night to write something.
We are supposed to be in the midst of a spectacular wind storm here in the Pacific Northwest. To be fair, lots of areas are; we just left West Seattle, where we ventured this afternoon to do a little kite-flying on Alki Beach (Matt and Isaac) and cozy beverage-sipping and reading (Mom and Suzannah). By the time we'd had dinner, wandered around inside Easy Street Records, and had dessert, we ducked through some pretty impressive sideways rain on the way to our car. But our neighborhood is relatively quiet, if wet.
I'm mostly grateful, because every time we have a terrific storm I'm a little afraid that the enormous tree in our front yard will topple over and crush our house. Matt reminds me that our tree has been firmly rooted in our yard for decades longer than we've walked the planet and it has survived a storm or two. Also, during the truly spectacular wind storm of 2006, we lost power for several days. We had a baby and a freezer full of breast milk. The baby fared much better than the milk, which I had to pour down the drain. I cried bitter tears, and when I revisit that moment, I'm still not okay. (In 2010 we lost power for about an hour during a snow storm. I had another freezer full of milk for Isaac by then, and I distinctly remember telling Matt that either we make sure to get that liquid gold on ice or someone would damn well have to start drinking it.)
I do love a good storm, though. Two years ago Matt and I had a beautiful overnight at the ocean on our anniversary, and a December storm at the coast is a fabulous thing to witness when one can duck inside a cozy little cabin with a book and a good drink and company that loves the same thing. I don't think we're going to witness anything like that tonight. However, we did get to see the weather turn from eerily still to impressively gusty in a couple of hours, and tonight our kids are in jammies early and watching a movie, and I'm sipping wine and writing this and enjoying the fact that I made sure every last bit of laundry was done in case we do lose power for days, which looks unlikely at the moment.
I did have Matt stop and buy ice on the way home, though, just in case. And we may or may not have exchanged words on how "necessary" that might have been, and I may or may not have said fine, let's not even worry, and I hope the power does go out and we have to throw away all our food, so there, and then because I am a totally rational person I said that if the power does NOT go out and he says something smug about that then I might just throw away all our food anyway SO THERE. (There's a reason I have a pair of socks with the words "Dealing with me must be fun" on them.)
Speaking of Matt, two weeks ago this happened: he pulled me into the hallway and said in a low voice, "I have something to tell you. I've been putting it off, because I didn't want you to freak out."
During the time it took him to finish speaking those two sentences, I was absolutely certain he was going to tell me that he was leaving me, that he had lost his job, that he had cancer, that I had cancer, that all of our parents were dying, that somehow all of our money was gone, that he had discovered some very expensive structural issue with our house that would require us to tear it down, and/or that we had to move.
What he said was, "I'm not totally sure but I think I saw a mouse run into the laundry room this morning."
I wanted to laugh, because after all of those other things that blazed through my obviously unhealthy brain in two seconds, it was a huge relief. The relief was short-lived, though, once I realized that we actually would have to tear down our house. I am not exactly afraid of mice, but I also don't think I am emotionally capable of handling a mouse infestation at this particular moment in time.
I said as much. I think Matt made some sort of attempt to soothe me. I started googling (which is always, always a terrible idea) and determined that our house was obviously full of mice, and they'd found a hole in the dryer vent and it was just all over. I announced that they can fit through a hole the size of a pencil eraser and so there was just no way we could even fight it.
My dad, who had a workshop in Seattle and was staying with us for the weekend, said, "Oh, for Pete's sake. Have you seen any droppings? You don't have a mouse infestation."
(I was already flinging cereal boxes out of the cupboards and Cloroxing my cabinets, which were devoid of mouse droppings, but that was beside the point.)
Now, my parents come from farming folks, and they know how to deal with a mouse without getting all hysterical about it. My dad remained maddeningly calm while he said, "Here's what you do. You buy this particular kind of trap. They sell it at WalMart; we'll pick up a couple on our way home from dinner. You'll set two, with a bit of peanut butter. And if there is even a mouse in your laundry room, this will get him by tomorrow morning."
Matt listened to my dad and bought the traps.
I sent hysterical texts all over the place.
To Becca, I wrote "MATT IS PRETTY SURE HE SAW A FUCKING MOUSE RUN INTO OUR LAUNDRY ROOM. We can't find it. Probably we have to move."
To Kyanne: "I THINK THERE IS A MOUSE IN OUR LAUNDRY ROOM. My dad is being calm. I said to we had to tear down and rebuild, and that's 'silly.' I randomly bleached some cupboards."
She wondered why I thought there was a mouse. I replied, "Because Matt is pretty sure he saw it. Like the actual mouse. Pretty compelling." Later that night we all went to the Old Spaghetti Factory after Suzannah's soccer game, and since the wait was forty-five minutes Matt took the kids for a walk and my dad and I sat in the bar. My text to Kyanne: "Fyi I am drinking my first gin and tonic in six weeks in front of my dad because MOUSE."
It gets better, of course, because the lingering cough I thought was merely the remnant of my cold led me to google hantavirus, which then led to googling "Mortality rates of hantavirus," which led to me texting my mother with the unfortunate news that what I thought was a cold was in fact something far more sinister, and her response led me to believe that she was not taking me seriously. Figuring I had about a 50/50 chance and nobody even cared, I stormed off to bed, where of course I did not sleep. Early the next morning I crept out of bed and went to check the traps. The one we'd set next to the kitchen garbage can was empty. The one in the laundry room was not.
I ran back to Suzannah's room; she was already awake and reading in her room (of course).
"Suzannah!" I cried. "The mousetrap worked!"
"Yes," she said. "I already know that." She didn't even look up from her book.
My dad was up as well. "I saw it," he said, "but I didn't throw it out because I wanted to make sure you saw it. If I'd told you the trap had worked but you didn't actually see the mouse yourself, you'd accuse me of making it up just to stop you from freaking out." Turns out my dad knows me pretty well.
After examining the mouse a bit more closely, I decided it was too fat to be just a regular mouse and was, in fact, a mouse full of babies, which led to more googling, which led to me loudly announcing that mice can get pregnant every single month and they mature in a few weeks, and that had better be the only mouse, but I was going to make sure. So Matt moved everything out of the laundry room (Everything! And he had to move the washer and dryer out from the wall so I could really get back there, too) so I could inspect and scrub every corner. I feel like I keep a pretty clean house, but that laundry room hasn't been so thoroughly scoured in years.
No one else seemed flustered. My dad said he thought it probably just darted in the back door when it was left open for too long, and that I probably didn't have to worry about hordes of mice filling our laundry room via the dryer vent. He recommended leaving the two traps set for a couple of days, and if nothing showed up, I could relax.
We haven't seen any mice since then, and I haven't found any droppings. But this morning my son pulled out his art supplies, sat at the dining room table, drew and colored a picture of a mouse (really a pretty good one), cut it out, and poked it through the bathroom door when I was in there this morning.
"Hey," I said (because for crying out loud, I haven't been to the bathroom by myself in a decade). I heard his gleeful little chuckle as he ran away, calling, "Daddy! I know how to scare Mommy!"
We are supposed to be in the midst of a spectacular wind storm here in the Pacific Northwest. To be fair, lots of areas are; we just left West Seattle, where we ventured this afternoon to do a little kite-flying on Alki Beach (Matt and Isaac) and cozy beverage-sipping and reading (Mom and Suzannah). By the time we'd had dinner, wandered around inside Easy Street Records, and had dessert, we ducked through some pretty impressive sideways rain on the way to our car. But our neighborhood is relatively quiet, if wet.
I'm mostly grateful, because every time we have a terrific storm I'm a little afraid that the enormous tree in our front yard will topple over and crush our house. Matt reminds me that our tree has been firmly rooted in our yard for decades longer than we've walked the planet and it has survived a storm or two. Also, during the truly spectacular wind storm of 2006, we lost power for several days. We had a baby and a freezer full of breast milk. The baby fared much better than the milk, which I had to pour down the drain. I cried bitter tears, and when I revisit that moment, I'm still not okay. (In 2010 we lost power for about an hour during a snow storm. I had another freezer full of milk for Isaac by then, and I distinctly remember telling Matt that either we make sure to get that liquid gold on ice or someone would damn well have to start drinking it.)
I do love a good storm, though. Two years ago Matt and I had a beautiful overnight at the ocean on our anniversary, and a December storm at the coast is a fabulous thing to witness when one can duck inside a cozy little cabin with a book and a good drink and company that loves the same thing. I don't think we're going to witness anything like that tonight. However, we did get to see the weather turn from eerily still to impressively gusty in a couple of hours, and tonight our kids are in jammies early and watching a movie, and I'm sipping wine and writing this and enjoying the fact that I made sure every last bit of laundry was done in case we do lose power for days, which looks unlikely at the moment.
I did have Matt stop and buy ice on the way home, though, just in case. And we may or may not have exchanged words on how "necessary" that might have been, and I may or may not have said fine, let's not even worry, and I hope the power does go out and we have to throw away all our food, so there, and then because I am a totally rational person I said that if the power does NOT go out and he says something smug about that then I might just throw away all our food anyway SO THERE. (There's a reason I have a pair of socks with the words "Dealing with me must be fun" on them.)
Speaking of Matt, two weeks ago this happened: he pulled me into the hallway and said in a low voice, "I have something to tell you. I've been putting it off, because I didn't want you to freak out."
During the time it took him to finish speaking those two sentences, I was absolutely certain he was going to tell me that he was leaving me, that he had lost his job, that he had cancer, that I had cancer, that all of our parents were dying, that somehow all of our money was gone, that he had discovered some very expensive structural issue with our house that would require us to tear it down, and/or that we had to move.
What he said was, "I'm not totally sure but I think I saw a mouse run into the laundry room this morning."
I wanted to laugh, because after all of those other things that blazed through my obviously unhealthy brain in two seconds, it was a huge relief. The relief was short-lived, though, once I realized that we actually would have to tear down our house. I am not exactly afraid of mice, but I also don't think I am emotionally capable of handling a mouse infestation at this particular moment in time.
I said as much. I think Matt made some sort of attempt to soothe me. I started googling (which is always, always a terrible idea) and determined that our house was obviously full of mice, and they'd found a hole in the dryer vent and it was just all over. I announced that they can fit through a hole the size of a pencil eraser and so there was just no way we could even fight it.
My dad, who had a workshop in Seattle and was staying with us for the weekend, said, "Oh, for Pete's sake. Have you seen any droppings? You don't have a mouse infestation."
(I was already flinging cereal boxes out of the cupboards and Cloroxing my cabinets, which were devoid of mouse droppings, but that was beside the point.)
Now, my parents come from farming folks, and they know how to deal with a mouse without getting all hysterical about it. My dad remained maddeningly calm while he said, "Here's what you do. You buy this particular kind of trap. They sell it at WalMart; we'll pick up a couple on our way home from dinner. You'll set two, with a bit of peanut butter. And if there is even a mouse in your laundry room, this will get him by tomorrow morning."
Matt listened to my dad and bought the traps.
I sent hysterical texts all over the place.
To Becca, I wrote "MATT IS PRETTY SURE HE SAW A FUCKING MOUSE RUN INTO OUR LAUNDRY ROOM. We can't find it. Probably we have to move."
To Kyanne: "I THINK THERE IS A MOUSE IN OUR LAUNDRY ROOM. My dad is being calm. I said to we had to tear down and rebuild, and that's 'silly.' I randomly bleached some cupboards."
She wondered why I thought there was a mouse. I replied, "Because Matt is pretty sure he saw it. Like the actual mouse. Pretty compelling." Later that night we all went to the Old Spaghetti Factory after Suzannah's soccer game, and since the wait was forty-five minutes Matt took the kids for a walk and my dad and I sat in the bar. My text to Kyanne: "Fyi I am drinking my first gin and tonic in six weeks in front of my dad because MOUSE."
It gets better, of course, because the lingering cough I thought was merely the remnant of my cold led me to google hantavirus, which then led to googling "Mortality rates of hantavirus," which led to me texting my mother with the unfortunate news that what I thought was a cold was in fact something far more sinister, and her response led me to believe that she was not taking me seriously. Figuring I had about a 50/50 chance and nobody even cared, I stormed off to bed, where of course I did not sleep. Early the next morning I crept out of bed and went to check the traps. The one we'd set next to the kitchen garbage can was empty. The one in the laundry room was not.
I ran back to Suzannah's room; she was already awake and reading in her room (of course).
"Suzannah!" I cried. "The mousetrap worked!"
"Yes," she said. "I already know that." She didn't even look up from her book.
My dad was up as well. "I saw it," he said, "but I didn't throw it out because I wanted to make sure you saw it. If I'd told you the trap had worked but you didn't actually see the mouse yourself, you'd accuse me of making it up just to stop you from freaking out." Turns out my dad knows me pretty well.
After examining the mouse a bit more closely, I decided it was too fat to be just a regular mouse and was, in fact, a mouse full of babies, which led to more googling, which led to me loudly announcing that mice can get pregnant every single month and they mature in a few weeks, and that had better be the only mouse, but I was going to make sure. So Matt moved everything out of the laundry room (Everything! And he had to move the washer and dryer out from the wall so I could really get back there, too) so I could inspect and scrub every corner. I feel like I keep a pretty clean house, but that laundry room hasn't been so thoroughly scoured in years.
No one else seemed flustered. My dad said he thought it probably just darted in the back door when it was left open for too long, and that I probably didn't have to worry about hordes of mice filling our laundry room via the dryer vent. He recommended leaving the two traps set for a couple of days, and if nothing showed up, I could relax.
We haven't seen any mice since then, and I haven't found any droppings. But this morning my son pulled out his art supplies, sat at the dining room table, drew and colored a picture of a mouse (really a pretty good one), cut it out, and poked it through the bathroom door when I was in there this morning.
"Hey," I said (because for crying out loud, I haven't been to the bathroom by myself in a decade). I heard his gleeful little chuckle as he ran away, calling, "Daddy! I know how to scare Mommy!"
Saturday, April 16, 2016
Quiet within the chaos
It was a beautiful Saturday. The air smelled like pure heaven this morning, crisp and cool and sweet. I parked the car, walked to the middle of my driveway, and just looked up at the sky, breathing. Breathing. The neighborhood was quiet, except for the birds; they were already greeting the dawn in ecstatic song.
I made it, I thought. I'm here. I'm home. This moment is mine.
I let myself into the house, kicked off my shoes, dropped my purse to the floor, draped my hoodie over my desk chair, and walked into the kitchen to warm up a couple of my special breakfast egg "muffins" -- paleo and whole30 approved, and yes, isn't that so precious. But they're delicious, and I hadn't eaten anything but a handful of cheese puffs and a Cherry Coke since last night's 11:30 "dinner." My son padded into the kitchen.
"Hello, Mommy," he said. He turned around to trot back to his room -- or to ours, to wake up his daddy.
"Come here, Bud," I said. He returned to my hug, kissed me sweetly on the cheek.
I finished my breakfast quickly; I only wanted to quiet my hunger with something that felt truly nutritious and then fall into bed. Matt was still there. I crawled in next to him, slid my cold hands against his back.
"This bed is the most wonderful place in the world," I said. "I've been thinking about this moment for hours and hours. Forever."
We talked sleepily for a few minutes. He was just waking up; I was about to give in to the deepest slumber. We reminisced about last year's lock-in, about how I'd come home for a nap around two in the morning because I had to to take Suzannah to a track meet shortly after seven. About how I'd been irritated by the messy kitchen and thought I should just stay up and watch Friends and clean it. These are the kind of ridiculous fights we have.
"I left the kitchen in pretty good shape this time," Matt said. Indeed he did. I arrived home to clean, wiped counters, although I was so tired I wouldn't have cared if it had been otherwise. We laughed for a few minutes, snuggled sleepily, and then he got up to make breakfast for the kids and I pulled the covers around myself, took a moment to appreciate the sheer physical comfort of our bed, and lost consciousness.
I choose to spin this as a cozy moment because it is one. Even though I looked at the clock shortly past one this morning and thought, "Hm. When Isaac was born, my water broke around one in the morning, I think. He was born just after five. We took him home a couple hours after that. So basically I just have to get through all of childbirth and then I can go home to bed." Those were my thoughts halfway through this year's leadership lock-in; I'd downed a latte at six and a Starbucks Doubleshot out of a can around, I don't know, midnight? But I was struggling. I hit my second wind a little later, only to find myself desperately struggling to stay awake at four o'clock in the morning. My friend and fellow chaperone managed to curl up on the concrete floor of the commons area and nap, but I knew that would be futile, so I didn't even try.
Free time--the hours between three and six o'clock in the morning--are hardest. Kids either find little corners to curl up and nap or they spend those hours being hyper and insufferable. Some of the kids with energy to burn played in the gym; the ones near me watched videos on their phones and screamed with laughter. I resisted the urge to punch them in the throat, only because I am thirty-seven and not seventeen, not because they were doing anything wrong. Teenagers at a lock-in are supposed to be silly and ridiculous.
I didn't nap. I alternated between wandering around like a zombie and trying to read (I'd brought a book that is entertaining enough to hold my attention in the middle of the night). Shortly past four, one of the Leadership kids came over with a camera, politely inquired as to whether I was "busy" (no, Sweetie; I'm slumped against a wall), and interviewed me for the lock-in video. (To my pleasant surprise, when they played it at breakfast a couple of hours later, I sounded much more coherent than I felt at the time.) At five, I thought, "I wonder if Becca is up yet. It's eight o'clock in New York." But it was Saturday morning, so I resisted the urge to call her and demand that she talk to me to keep me awake. Shortly before six, kids started to set up tables for breakfast and I thought, I made it. Also, everything my fellow chaperones said for the next half-hour was hilarious. Or maybe they weren't funny, I don't even know. But I laughed a lot.
And it was worth it. This is my third lock-in, and I always think, okay, I've done this, I can check it off, someone else can do it now. But I keep going back, because there is something really beautiful about sharing this experience with other teachers who are also willing to step out of their comfort zones, and with kids who create these safe spaces for each other in which to be vulnerable, reflective, silly, trusting, accepting. I watched two girls who couldn't stand each other during first semester curl up together on a couch and giggle. I saw kids I know have trouble fitting in find a space in which they felt included, and I pray that carries over into the rest of their high school experience. Something about this thing, this event -- it embodies everything I love about teaching, about teenagers, about human potential, really. It's all about kids who are trying to figure out who they are and who they want to be. I listened to freshmen talk about their goals for the rest of their high school years and I listened to seniors talk about what's mattered to them. It was beautiful. I love it. I love it.
And it was a good way to end my week, even though, truth be told, I was dreading it. April has been frenetic. I began the month flying to Minneapolis for IB training over spring break, which was wonderful but not altogether relaxing; I could tell the story about how Matt and the kids drove me all the way to the airport but my suitcase was left behind, for instance. But it all worked out, especially because on that very stressful day of flying my little brother, a pilot, just happened to be at the airport that morning and was waiting on the other side of a hellish security line with a latte in hand, and the next day my family joined me, and Matt stayed with me in my cozy room at the Hilton while his parents lavished attention on our kids, and then we all spent the rest of the week just enjoying our time together.
But it was busy. And by the time all the Winslows had landed safely back in Washington, seventy-five percent of us had colds. I slept in the study for a couple of nights because I didn't want to keep my better half awake with my coughing and, frankly, he wasn't doing so hot himself. And grades were due. And we had conferences, which meant I had to stay at school until eight o'clock for a couple of nights. And because my physical defenses were lowered my emotional ones were as well, so when I encountered a spectacular instance of adult mean girl behavior, I didn't weather it very well; I sent my children over to the neighbor's house and cried for an hour, exactly like a girl who has nowhere to sit in the middle school cafeteria, and I e-mailed Becca, who happened to be online at that very moment and e-mailed me back right away. And that made everything okay, because she gave me the perspective I needed in that exhausted, foggy-headed moment.
Yesterday morning the kids and I had a day off, so I decided to get my hair cut; I didn't really need one, but nothing makes me feel better than a fresh hair cut. I decided that this will be the weekend I deep-clean my oven with baking soda and vinegar. I decided that the kids and I were going to go out and have a cozy lunch together, and then we came home and I let them watch Full House (Suzannah loves it so much!) while I napped on the living room couch. I decided that yesterday, just for a day, I would try my very best to forget about everything but what was right in front of me. These little moments: the way my freshly shampooed hair feels swinging around my shoulders, the way my kids hold my hands when we walk across a busy parking lot, the way the afternoon settles cozily around me when I pull a quilt around my shoulders for a nap, knowing my kids are hunkered down in front of a movie in the next room. Everything else fades away.
This morning, I napped for a couple of hours and then rose to brush my daughter's hair into a ponytail before gymnastics. I collapsed back into bed and slept again. I got up before my family came home, stood under a hot shower, was drying my hair when I heard them return. I told Matt that I wanted to go out for dinner, because if we didn't, I'd just spend the rest of my waking hours slumped on the couch. We headed out in the afternoon sunshine; he dropped me off at Starbucks to write while he took the kids to the park. We ate at our favorite place. We treated the kids to ice cream for dessert. These moments are all so ordinary, like so many we have had before, and yet they are the ones I crave, the ones I think are the foundation of our collective memories. The way I curl up on the couch with a particular quilt, one my aunt made for my college graduation. The way we head out for gymnastics every Saturday. The afternoons in which we play in the sunshine, and wind up at one of our favorite restaurants, and decide where to go for dessert. It could be any weekend, really, but these are the moments are the hard kernels of memory I want to hold in my hand. They become tangible, and for that very reason, I want to make sure I really feel them, their weight and texture, before I tuck my children into bed each night before they wake again, another day older.
I'm very tired, and in one sense I've almost lost half my weekend; I slept through half of our Saturday, and I've felt a little loopy even as I've joined my family in the land of the living. On the other hand, I haven't lost anything. Time churns, it passes so quickly -- I'm grateful for anything that makes me want to hold each moment up to the morning light, to say, I'm here, to breathe, to be thankful for it all.
I made it, I thought. I'm here. I'm home. This moment is mine.
I let myself into the house, kicked off my shoes, dropped my purse to the floor, draped my hoodie over my desk chair, and walked into the kitchen to warm up a couple of my special breakfast egg "muffins" -- paleo and whole30 approved, and yes, isn't that so precious. But they're delicious, and I hadn't eaten anything but a handful of cheese puffs and a Cherry Coke since last night's 11:30 "dinner." My son padded into the kitchen.
"Hello, Mommy," he said. He turned around to trot back to his room -- or to ours, to wake up his daddy.
"Come here, Bud," I said. He returned to my hug, kissed me sweetly on the cheek.
I finished my breakfast quickly; I only wanted to quiet my hunger with something that felt truly nutritious and then fall into bed. Matt was still there. I crawled in next to him, slid my cold hands against his back.
"This bed is the most wonderful place in the world," I said. "I've been thinking about this moment for hours and hours. Forever."
We talked sleepily for a few minutes. He was just waking up; I was about to give in to the deepest slumber. We reminisced about last year's lock-in, about how I'd come home for a nap around two in the morning because I had to to take Suzannah to a track meet shortly after seven. About how I'd been irritated by the messy kitchen and thought I should just stay up and watch Friends and clean it. These are the kind of ridiculous fights we have.
"I left the kitchen in pretty good shape this time," Matt said. Indeed he did. I arrived home to clean, wiped counters, although I was so tired I wouldn't have cared if it had been otherwise. We laughed for a few minutes, snuggled sleepily, and then he got up to make breakfast for the kids and I pulled the covers around myself, took a moment to appreciate the sheer physical comfort of our bed, and lost consciousness.
I choose to spin this as a cozy moment because it is one. Even though I looked at the clock shortly past one this morning and thought, "Hm. When Isaac was born, my water broke around one in the morning, I think. He was born just after five. We took him home a couple hours after that. So basically I just have to get through all of childbirth and then I can go home to bed." Those were my thoughts halfway through this year's leadership lock-in; I'd downed a latte at six and a Starbucks Doubleshot out of a can around, I don't know, midnight? But I was struggling. I hit my second wind a little later, only to find myself desperately struggling to stay awake at four o'clock in the morning. My friend and fellow chaperone managed to curl up on the concrete floor of the commons area and nap, but I knew that would be futile, so I didn't even try.
Free time--the hours between three and six o'clock in the morning--are hardest. Kids either find little corners to curl up and nap or they spend those hours being hyper and insufferable. Some of the kids with energy to burn played in the gym; the ones near me watched videos on their phones and screamed with laughter. I resisted the urge to punch them in the throat, only because I am thirty-seven and not seventeen, not because they were doing anything wrong. Teenagers at a lock-in are supposed to be silly and ridiculous.
I didn't nap. I alternated between wandering around like a zombie and trying to read (I'd brought a book that is entertaining enough to hold my attention in the middle of the night). Shortly past four, one of the Leadership kids came over with a camera, politely inquired as to whether I was "busy" (no, Sweetie; I'm slumped against a wall), and interviewed me for the lock-in video. (To my pleasant surprise, when they played it at breakfast a couple of hours later, I sounded much more coherent than I felt at the time.) At five, I thought, "I wonder if Becca is up yet. It's eight o'clock in New York." But it was Saturday morning, so I resisted the urge to call her and demand that she talk to me to keep me awake. Shortly before six, kids started to set up tables for breakfast and I thought, I made it. Also, everything my fellow chaperones said for the next half-hour was hilarious. Or maybe they weren't funny, I don't even know. But I laughed a lot.
And it was worth it. This is my third lock-in, and I always think, okay, I've done this, I can check it off, someone else can do it now. But I keep going back, because there is something really beautiful about sharing this experience with other teachers who are also willing to step out of their comfort zones, and with kids who create these safe spaces for each other in which to be vulnerable, reflective, silly, trusting, accepting. I watched two girls who couldn't stand each other during first semester curl up together on a couch and giggle. I saw kids I know have trouble fitting in find a space in which they felt included, and I pray that carries over into the rest of their high school experience. Something about this thing, this event -- it embodies everything I love about teaching, about teenagers, about human potential, really. It's all about kids who are trying to figure out who they are and who they want to be. I listened to freshmen talk about their goals for the rest of their high school years and I listened to seniors talk about what's mattered to them. It was beautiful. I love it. I love it.
And it was a good way to end my week, even though, truth be told, I was dreading it. April has been frenetic. I began the month flying to Minneapolis for IB training over spring break, which was wonderful but not altogether relaxing; I could tell the story about how Matt and the kids drove me all the way to the airport but my suitcase was left behind, for instance. But it all worked out, especially because on that very stressful day of flying my little brother, a pilot, just happened to be at the airport that morning and was waiting on the other side of a hellish security line with a latte in hand, and the next day my family joined me, and Matt stayed with me in my cozy room at the Hilton while his parents lavished attention on our kids, and then we all spent the rest of the week just enjoying our time together.
But it was busy. And by the time all the Winslows had landed safely back in Washington, seventy-five percent of us had colds. I slept in the study for a couple of nights because I didn't want to keep my better half awake with my coughing and, frankly, he wasn't doing so hot himself. And grades were due. And we had conferences, which meant I had to stay at school until eight o'clock for a couple of nights. And because my physical defenses were lowered my emotional ones were as well, so when I encountered a spectacular instance of adult mean girl behavior, I didn't weather it very well; I sent my children over to the neighbor's house and cried for an hour, exactly like a girl who has nowhere to sit in the middle school cafeteria, and I e-mailed Becca, who happened to be online at that very moment and e-mailed me back right away. And that made everything okay, because she gave me the perspective I needed in that exhausted, foggy-headed moment.
Yesterday morning the kids and I had a day off, so I decided to get my hair cut; I didn't really need one, but nothing makes me feel better than a fresh hair cut. I decided that this will be the weekend I deep-clean my oven with baking soda and vinegar. I decided that the kids and I were going to go out and have a cozy lunch together, and then we came home and I let them watch Full House (Suzannah loves it so much!) while I napped on the living room couch. I decided that yesterday, just for a day, I would try my very best to forget about everything but what was right in front of me. These little moments: the way my freshly shampooed hair feels swinging around my shoulders, the way my kids hold my hands when we walk across a busy parking lot, the way the afternoon settles cozily around me when I pull a quilt around my shoulders for a nap, knowing my kids are hunkered down in front of a movie in the next room. Everything else fades away.
This morning, I napped for a couple of hours and then rose to brush my daughter's hair into a ponytail before gymnastics. I collapsed back into bed and slept again. I got up before my family came home, stood under a hot shower, was drying my hair when I heard them return. I told Matt that I wanted to go out for dinner, because if we didn't, I'd just spend the rest of my waking hours slumped on the couch. We headed out in the afternoon sunshine; he dropped me off at Starbucks to write while he took the kids to the park. We ate at our favorite place. We treated the kids to ice cream for dessert. These moments are all so ordinary, like so many we have had before, and yet they are the ones I crave, the ones I think are the foundation of our collective memories. The way I curl up on the couch with a particular quilt, one my aunt made for my college graduation. The way we head out for gymnastics every Saturday. The afternoons in which we play in the sunshine, and wind up at one of our favorite restaurants, and decide where to go for dessert. It could be any weekend, really, but these are the moments are the hard kernels of memory I want to hold in my hand. They become tangible, and for that very reason, I want to make sure I really feel them, their weight and texture, before I tuck my children into bed each night before they wake again, another day older.
I'm very tired, and in one sense I've almost lost half my weekend; I slept through half of our Saturday, and I've felt a little loopy even as I've joined my family in the land of the living. On the other hand, I haven't lost anything. Time churns, it passes so quickly -- I'm grateful for anything that makes me want to hold each moment up to the morning light, to say, I'm here, to breathe, to be thankful for it all.
Sunday, March 13, 2016
"The water is wide and he has now passed over..."
We took a quick, spontaneous overnight trip to Portland last month. The kids and I had a couple of days off for midwinter break, and we found a cheap hotel, and we Winslows are always up for little weekend getaways. We could easily spend a week in Portland (apologies to those of you who live there who we didn't connect with; it truly was so last-minute!), what with the books and the beer and all the other awesomeness--food, outdoors, OMSI, whatever. The trip was mostly perfect: we spent hours at Powell's, we ate wonderful food, Matt sampled good beer, we played in the hotel pool. It does not take a lot to make us happy to just hang out together.
In the morning, I woke up and casually checked my phone. It wasn't my week to abstain from Facebook, so I checked that, too. And that's when I read Pat Conroy's announcement:
...but that day I handled the news by hunkering down in a coffee shop and writing him a letter while Matt took the kids to the park. I'm thirty-seven years old, yes, and I am writing a love letter to a man I will likely never meet. I sat in a coffee shop and wrote and wrote and wrote, sipping my little almond milk latte. I didn't pause until a young woman sitting near me said, "Excuse me, but do you mind if I ask what you've been writing?" And that little exchange launched an entire conversation about literature and death and philosophy. It turns out this woman was a former IB student from Quebec who is currently studying in Ontario. We talked about writers and exchanged book lists. She left a note in my journal.
Pat Conroy died three weeks later. I thought I'd have time to mail him my letter, as silly as that might sound. I even wrote it in my planner, for God's sake--to remind myself to do it. But last Friday night, on March 4, he died. And I grieve his loss.
During the summer of 1994 I was fifteen years old, staying with my grandparents in Gildford, Montana for a few days. One stifling afternoon, we drove to Havre, the strange little town in which I was born—it’s about 30 miles east of Gildford, and my grandparents did all their grocery shopping and errands there. Somehow, my grandmother and I wound up at a used bookstore downtown. I'd never known it was there; I didn't think Havre had any bookstores. As a matter of fact, the only bookstores within a hundred miles were B. Dalton and Waldenbooks in the Holiday Village mall in Great Falls. I can still smell both of those bookstores; they were all I knew for years and years. But somehow, we found this little bookstore, and my grandma asked if I'd like to stop. She knew I would; she still likes to tell the story about how once, when I was a little girl and she came in to say bedtime prayers with me, she asked if there was anything in particular I'd like to thank God for. According to her, I just gazed at the bookshelf in my room and said reverently, "My books.”
I've never been back to that bookstore. Sometimes I question whether or not it really existed at all; I wonder if we wandered through some mysterious door that no one else could see, like Narnia through the wardrobe, and we wouldn't be able to find it again if we tried.
We went inside. The bookstore was cramped and musty, thick with the smell of old books. There was no particular organization that I could follow, but my grandmother is unfailingly patient, so we just wandered slowly through the crowded stacks. Both of us discovered plenty of treasures that afternoon. My grandmother ended up buying a sackful of old books simply because she thought the covers were elegant and "someone might like to have them someday," and I ended up with two ratty old paperbacks that took root in my heart that summer.
The first one was Ordinary People by Judith Guest. I wouldn't see the film starring Donald Sutherland for another fourteen years, and I'd never heard of the book, but something about it grabbed me. I read most of it on the way to a family reunion in Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan -- a little oasis of trees and a lake in the middle of the prairie, a place my relatives still gather every few years. I still remember specific passages from that book, and it's still tucked in the closet of my bedroom at my parents' house.
The other one was The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy.
That book started a sacred commotion in my heart that changed the way I read, the way I looked at the world. I count that day as one of the most significant of my life. While I have been a voracious reader since I held the barest awareness of language, that was the day I began to understand the power of discovering and choosing books on my own, books that led me away from those chosen by my teachers or selected under my mother's eye at B. Dalton. I picked up The Prince of Tides and flipped through the pages. It was a tattered, mass market copy--the one with Barbara Streisand and Nick Nolte on the cover. It would require a few glue jobs in order to keep it attached to the binding.
I landed on the part of the story where Lila Wingo has given birth to her yet another stillborn child, and she calls her children in, one by one, to tell them that they alone are the only ally she has. She is utterly broken, and in her brokenness, she still manages to manipulate and confuse her children, perpetuating that grand Wingo tradition of telling lies and keeping secrets. Standing in that quiet, still bookshop, surrounded by thousands of dusty pages, I realized the power of perfectly crafted sentences. It is no exaggeration to say that falling in love with Conroy's has been one of the most important driving forces of my life.
I read it a month or so later. I started it in the backseat of a mini-van, on a roadtrip with my mom and two family friends—a friend of my mother's and her daughter, who was one of my best friends. We drove from Montana to Minnesota and spent a week there, and while I remember so many things about that trip, right down to my badly-permed bangs and green plaid Union Bay shorts that haunt me from the pictures my mother took, I can't think about it without remembering what it was like to look up from my book and see the fields of sunflowers in North Dakota or the bridge between Mandan and Bismarck. I finished the book shortly after we returned to the northern Montana hi-line, deep in August harvest. When I read the ending of the book even now, Tom Wingo's journey over the bridge above the Charleston harbor, his whispered "Lowenstein, Lowenstein," is superimposed over the way the fields look at dusk, the blinking lights of town two miles south of the farm, the heavy sweet smell of freshly-cut grain on the air, and the sound of the freight trains that pass through up to thirty times a day. There is nothing, really, that should connect these images, but there they are, no matter how many times I read the book. (I usually don't read it straight through; it's one of those books I turn to when I need a quiet moment, or an inspiration, or comfort. I used to carry it around in my backpack at school sometimes, and I'd pull it out and read random passages if I had a moment during Algebra class.)
My parents traveled to South Carolina a few years ago, and my father managed to get me an autographed hardcover copy of The Prince of Tides. It was one of the best Christmas gifts I've ever received, and that's the one on my shelf now, but my ratty old copy still resides in my old closet in Bozeman. Almost every time I'm home, I find myself pulling it out and flipping through it. Sometimes I need it for the beauty, sometimes for the catharsis that comes with raw pain, sometimes for the humor. The scene with the Wingo kids and their grandmother Tolitha? At the funeral home, when she insists on trying out the caskets because she's sure her death is imminent? One of the funniest passages in any book I've ever read. Other parts I read through pain, through anger and loneliness. That book cleanses me every time I read it, and never have I known a book as intimately as I know that one.
I devoured Beach Music in my dorm room at Concordia a few years later. I read The Water is Wide the next year as I began my teaching program. Ron, my fabulous mentor from my first year of teaching, has said more than once that it should be required reading for any first-year teacher.
I read South of Broad during the last days of my pregnancy with my second child. I read My Losing Season halfway through my pregnancy with my daughter, my firstborn. If The Prince of Tides serves as a foundation for everything I believe about literature, about why we write, why we read, and the power of language to connect us, then My Losing Season serves as the foundation for one of the most important friendships of my life. My father read it first (side note: I have always though my father looks like Pat Conroy) and passed it along to me. By then I was a few years into my career as an English teacher, and one of my favorite colleagues also happened to be a basketball coach. I thought he might like it as well, and I wasn't wrong. The following Christmas, I gave him The Prince of Tides, and when we returned to school in January he simply said, "Winslow, Winslow, Winslow," echoing Tom Wingo at the end of the novel--that gorgeously heartbreaking "Lowenstein, Lowenstein." Sometimes I think ours is an unlikely friendship. He's a coach, and now an assistant principal and athletic director. I'm the mother of two young children, and I like basketball because it's a big deal in small town Montana, but I mostly don't follow or understand sports. But Coach and I taught English together for awhile, and we share a love of sentences. He still texts me when he reads something that stirs him. We've shared other others--John Updike, Richard Ford, Frank Deford, Brian Doyle--but I really believe Pat Conroy is at the core of our friendship, which has become one of the best and most important of my life.
The day after Pat Conroy died, Coach sent me a long text message. He'd been at the high school basketball championships with some coaching friends, and one of them is a writer who has connections to Conroy as well. He forwarded that friend's text about Conroy's passing, and ended with this: "And Winslow, it puts you, by association, connected to our coaching fraternity." I love that so much.
And then Ron and I wrote back and forth a bit. Ron said, "Oddly...it feels good to know that this day sucks for someone OTHER than me."
(I believe it is no coincidence that the universe sent me a mentor who also loves Pat Conroy. Or that two of the best, most important men who've shaped my life read Pat Conroy.)
Sometimes Conroy's sentences are so perfect they almost hurt to read. His gift is using language to carry the reader through the entire spectrum of human emotion. I’ve never read one of his books without laughing hard, and not one has ever failed to move me to tears. I knew somehow, even at fifteen, that I was reading perfect sentences, that I would learn something about the art and necessity of storytelling and the sheer power of language, both to hurt and to heal—even if I couldn't articulate that at the time. That's what Conroy has always been about for me.
In the morning, I woke up and casually checked my phone. It wasn't my week to abstain from Facebook, so I checked that, too. And that's when I read Pat Conroy's announcement:
Hey out there,Dear Internet: I do not know how to express my actual, real-life devastation. Pat Conroy changed my life. I never met him, but I fully intended to. I thought I would fly to Minneapolis if I had to the next time he went on tour (his tour for The Death of Santini didn't bring him to Seattle but it did take him to St. Paul) and I would tell him this. And then I would have him sign a book to one of my truest and dearest friends, a coach, because Pat Conroy made the word Coach so beautiful to me...
I celebrated my 70th birthday in October and realized that I’ve spent my whole writing life trying to find out who I am and I don’t believe I’ve even come close. It was in Beaufort in sight of a river’s sinuous turn, and the movements of its dolphin-proud tides that I began to discover myself and where my life began at fifteen.
I have recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. With the help of the wonderful people at M.D. Anderson I intend to fight it hard. I am grateful to all my beloved readers, my friends and my family for their prayers. I owe you a novel and I intend to deliver it.
Much love,
Pat Conroy
...but that day I handled the news by hunkering down in a coffee shop and writing him a letter while Matt took the kids to the park. I'm thirty-seven years old, yes, and I am writing a love letter to a man I will likely never meet. I sat in a coffee shop and wrote and wrote and wrote, sipping my little almond milk latte. I didn't pause until a young woman sitting near me said, "Excuse me, but do you mind if I ask what you've been writing?" And that little exchange launched an entire conversation about literature and death and philosophy. It turns out this woman was a former IB student from Quebec who is currently studying in Ontario. We talked about writers and exchanged book lists. She left a note in my journal.
Pat Conroy died three weeks later. I thought I'd have time to mail him my letter, as silly as that might sound. I even wrote it in my planner, for God's sake--to remind myself to do it. But last Friday night, on March 4, he died. And I grieve his loss.
During the summer of 1994 I was fifteen years old, staying with my grandparents in Gildford, Montana for a few days. One stifling afternoon, we drove to Havre, the strange little town in which I was born—it’s about 30 miles east of Gildford, and my grandparents did all their grocery shopping and errands there. Somehow, my grandmother and I wound up at a used bookstore downtown. I'd never known it was there; I didn't think Havre had any bookstores. As a matter of fact, the only bookstores within a hundred miles were B. Dalton and Waldenbooks in the Holiday Village mall in Great Falls. I can still smell both of those bookstores; they were all I knew for years and years. But somehow, we found this little bookstore, and my grandma asked if I'd like to stop. She knew I would; she still likes to tell the story about how once, when I was a little girl and she came in to say bedtime prayers with me, she asked if there was anything in particular I'd like to thank God for. According to her, I just gazed at the bookshelf in my room and said reverently, "My books.”
I've never been back to that bookstore. Sometimes I question whether or not it really existed at all; I wonder if we wandered through some mysterious door that no one else could see, like Narnia through the wardrobe, and we wouldn't be able to find it again if we tried.
We went inside. The bookstore was cramped and musty, thick with the smell of old books. There was no particular organization that I could follow, but my grandmother is unfailingly patient, so we just wandered slowly through the crowded stacks. Both of us discovered plenty of treasures that afternoon. My grandmother ended up buying a sackful of old books simply because she thought the covers were elegant and "someone might like to have them someday," and I ended up with two ratty old paperbacks that took root in my heart that summer.
The first one was Ordinary People by Judith Guest. I wouldn't see the film starring Donald Sutherland for another fourteen years, and I'd never heard of the book, but something about it grabbed me. I read most of it on the way to a family reunion in Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan -- a little oasis of trees and a lake in the middle of the prairie, a place my relatives still gather every few years. I still remember specific passages from that book, and it's still tucked in the closet of my bedroom at my parents' house.
The other one was The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy.
That book started a sacred commotion in my heart that changed the way I read, the way I looked at the world. I count that day as one of the most significant of my life. While I have been a voracious reader since I held the barest awareness of language, that was the day I began to understand the power of discovering and choosing books on my own, books that led me away from those chosen by my teachers or selected under my mother's eye at B. Dalton. I picked up The Prince of Tides and flipped through the pages. It was a tattered, mass market copy--the one with Barbara Streisand and Nick Nolte on the cover. It would require a few glue jobs in order to keep it attached to the binding.
I landed on the part of the story where Lila Wingo has given birth to her yet another stillborn child, and she calls her children in, one by one, to tell them that they alone are the only ally she has. She is utterly broken, and in her brokenness, she still manages to manipulate and confuse her children, perpetuating that grand Wingo tradition of telling lies and keeping secrets. Standing in that quiet, still bookshop, surrounded by thousands of dusty pages, I realized the power of perfectly crafted sentences. It is no exaggeration to say that falling in love with Conroy's has been one of the most important driving forces of my life.
I read it a month or so later. I started it in the backseat of a mini-van, on a roadtrip with my mom and two family friends—a friend of my mother's and her daughter, who was one of my best friends. We drove from Montana to Minnesota and spent a week there, and while I remember so many things about that trip, right down to my badly-permed bangs and green plaid Union Bay shorts that haunt me from the pictures my mother took, I can't think about it without remembering what it was like to look up from my book and see the fields of sunflowers in North Dakota or the bridge between Mandan and Bismarck. I finished the book shortly after we returned to the northern Montana hi-line, deep in August harvest. When I read the ending of the book even now, Tom Wingo's journey over the bridge above the Charleston harbor, his whispered "Lowenstein, Lowenstein," is superimposed over the way the fields look at dusk, the blinking lights of town two miles south of the farm, the heavy sweet smell of freshly-cut grain on the air, and the sound of the freight trains that pass through up to thirty times a day. There is nothing, really, that should connect these images, but there they are, no matter how many times I read the book. (I usually don't read it straight through; it's one of those books I turn to when I need a quiet moment, or an inspiration, or comfort. I used to carry it around in my backpack at school sometimes, and I'd pull it out and read random passages if I had a moment during Algebra class.)
My parents traveled to South Carolina a few years ago, and my father managed to get me an autographed hardcover copy of The Prince of Tides. It was one of the best Christmas gifts I've ever received, and that's the one on my shelf now, but my ratty old copy still resides in my old closet in Bozeman. Almost every time I'm home, I find myself pulling it out and flipping through it. Sometimes I need it for the beauty, sometimes for the catharsis that comes with raw pain, sometimes for the humor. The scene with the Wingo kids and their grandmother Tolitha? At the funeral home, when she insists on trying out the caskets because she's sure her death is imminent? One of the funniest passages in any book I've ever read. Other parts I read through pain, through anger and loneliness. That book cleanses me every time I read it, and never have I known a book as intimately as I know that one.
I devoured Beach Music in my dorm room at Concordia a few years later. I read The Water is Wide the next year as I began my teaching program. Ron, my fabulous mentor from my first year of teaching, has said more than once that it should be required reading for any first-year teacher.
I read South of Broad during the last days of my pregnancy with my second child. I read My Losing Season halfway through my pregnancy with my daughter, my firstborn. If The Prince of Tides serves as a foundation for everything I believe about literature, about why we write, why we read, and the power of language to connect us, then My Losing Season serves as the foundation for one of the most important friendships of my life. My father read it first (side note: I have always though my father looks like Pat Conroy) and passed it along to me. By then I was a few years into my career as an English teacher, and one of my favorite colleagues also happened to be a basketball coach. I thought he might like it as well, and I wasn't wrong. The following Christmas, I gave him The Prince of Tides, and when we returned to school in January he simply said, "Winslow, Winslow, Winslow," echoing Tom Wingo at the end of the novel--that gorgeously heartbreaking "Lowenstein, Lowenstein." Sometimes I think ours is an unlikely friendship. He's a coach, and now an assistant principal and athletic director. I'm the mother of two young children, and I like basketball because it's a big deal in small town Montana, but I mostly don't follow or understand sports. But Coach and I taught English together for awhile, and we share a love of sentences. He still texts me when he reads something that stirs him. We've shared other others--John Updike, Richard Ford, Frank Deford, Brian Doyle--but I really believe Pat Conroy is at the core of our friendship, which has become one of the best and most important of my life.
The day after Pat Conroy died, Coach sent me a long text message. He'd been at the high school basketball championships with some coaching friends, and one of them is a writer who has connections to Conroy as well. He forwarded that friend's text about Conroy's passing, and ended with this: "And Winslow, it puts you, by association, connected to our coaching fraternity." I love that so much.
And then Ron and I wrote back and forth a bit. Ron said, "Oddly...it feels good to know that this day sucks for someone OTHER than me."
(I believe it is no coincidence that the universe sent me a mentor who also loves Pat Conroy. Or that two of the best, most important men who've shaped my life read Pat Conroy.)
Sometimes Conroy's sentences are so perfect they almost hurt to read. His gift is using language to carry the reader through the entire spectrum of human emotion. I’ve never read one of his books without laughing hard, and not one has ever failed to move me to tears. I knew somehow, even at fifteen, that I was reading perfect sentences, that I would learn something about the art and necessity of storytelling and the sheer power of language, both to hurt and to heal—even if I couldn't articulate that at the time. That's what Conroy has always been about for me.
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Dignity/Adulthood/Whatever
We’re home again and I am, as they say, a hot mess.
On Friday afternoon my mom took the kids to the splash park, Matt went for a run on a trail he found in Bozeman, and I took my journal and my book to the Leaf and Bean. The day was hot, and it felt so lovely to duck into the coffee shop for awhile and sit at my favorite little table in the corner by the window. After awhile the sky burst open in a sunshower, and I watched the water steaming in the streets. By the time I left, they were dry again. I headed towards my car, looking forward to going home to change for our night out alone. And I tripped. Spectacularly. Over nothing. I twisted my left ankle and landed mostly on my right knee and my hands. My hands were only a little scraped, but I didn’t need to look down to know that my right leg was a mess.
And I didn’t look down--I didn’t look anywhere but straight ahead as I limped towards my car. Thankfully, I’d at least turned off Main Street by this time, so there’s the slight chance that no one actually witnessed my undignified fall; I hope not, anyway, because no one asked if I was all right, and I’d rather think it was because no one was actually there than because my hometown is full of jerks. Anyway, I tossed my stuff in the front seat and sat there for a moment, trying to relax enough to drive myself home and dabbing ineffectually at my bloodied knee with a scrap of tissue. (I have to admit that my main concern was how ridiculous my bandaged knee would look with the cute little dress I was planning to wear. And it was pretty ridiculous, but there was no way I was not wearing that dress. I bought it two years ago just to wear out on fun summer date nights, and I never wear it any other time.)
“Oh, Baby,” Matt said when he saw it. “Wow. See, this is why I worry when we go hiking.”
“I DIDN’T FALL YESTERDAY.”
“Yeah, but...I’m just saying.”
He has a fair point. Matt and I hiked up to Heather Lake on Thursday, which is something like 10 or 11 miles round-trip. (More for Matt, though. After we’d been hiking for about ten minutes he hustled back to the car at the trailhead to grab a rain jacket “just in case” -- we’d be gone several hours, and the forecast tentatively predicted thunderstorms. We ended up not needing it. He also turned back to search for my sunglasses, which I realized went missing from my head somewhere between Emerald Lake and Heather Lake. He didn’t find them during the 15 minutes he was looking, but I discovered them next to a rock on the way down. They must have slipped off my head while I sat down to adjust my boots.) Apparently, I’m klutzier than I would like to admit. (I would, however, like to take this moment to tell you all that my new hiking boots plus my new stupidly expensive inserts plus the way the guy at REI showed me how to tie my laces kept me from having blisters, which is a first. I HIKED FOR FIVE AND A HALF HOURS AND I DID NOT GET BLISTERS, except for one tiny one that barely even hurt so it doesn’t count. This has happened exactly zero times; I figured blisters were just something I would have to deal with if I wanted to hike with the big kids.)
When my dad saw my banged-up knee, he seemed confused.
“So wait, what did you trip on?”
“Nothing.”
“You just...fell down? Over nothing?”
“YES.”
“Did you black out first or something?” he asked, genuinely concerned.
“This is just what Shari does,” Matt offered helpfully.
Fast forward to Sunday night. We’d arrived home by early evening, in plenty of time for dinner, but since we’d been gone for ten days there wasn’t much in the fridge. Matt picked up some milk and a few other essentials to tide us over until our veggie box arrived on Tuesday. I didn’t have much of an appetite after sitting in the car for most of the hot afternoon (temperatures were well into the 90’s by the time we left Spokane around lunchtime), and the only thing I really wanted to eat was pho, so while Matt set about making macaroni and cheese for the kids I went to get some. I was back home with it in twenty minutes. And I’m not sure whether I was just tired and careless or whether the container was unusually full, but when I went to dump the noodles and tofu into the steaming broth, it slopped right over the side and all over my fingers.
I don’t think I’ve ever been truly, painfully scalded before. I was standing right next to the sink and thrust my hand under the faucet within seconds, so it could have been much worse -- but when I pulled my hand out of the water, thinking all I’d need to do was run some cool water over it for a few moments, I nearly screamed. I’ve never felt anything like it. It didn’t stop burning.
Matt filled the sink with cold water and I kept my left hand submerged while clumsily fiddling with chopsticks with my right hand. The phone rang as I slurped my pho at the kitchen counter. It was my parents, calling to make sure we’d made it home, and I had to admit that I was standing there with my burned hand in the sink while I ate dinner. I assured them it was fine, though; when it was actually in the water it felt mostly perfectly okay. They told me to be careful, and we hung up.
I pulled my hand out of the water, planning to dry it off and help Matt put the kids to bed. I made it halfway across the kitchen and turned right back to the sink. It hurt so badly I couldn’t keep from yelping. This confused me, since on the surface it didn’t look all that bad. A little pink, maybe, but certainly not alarming. I gritted my teeth and sprinted into the study to retrieve my phone. Back at the sink I spent fifteen minutes googling terrible things that can happen to seemingly innocuous burns when left untreated. The internet basically told me that I should head to the ER or I might as well go ahead and bid farewell to my hand. Burns to the hand can be “quite serious” and are not to be messed with.
Once again, I lifted it experimentally out of the sink. I didn’t see flames on the surface of my skin, of course, but it certainly felt like they were there. I told Matt I was planning to just cut the damn thing off. He sighed and said that was a terrible idea, but I didn’t really feel like I had his full attention. (The children did. Settling two children into their regular old beds after ten days of camping and driving and grandparents and fourteen deserts every day is a little nuts.)
“The problem is that I’m holding it together too well,” I said to him. “I’m just too calm. If I allowed my voice to betray the amount of pain I am in, you would all be terrified and rush me to the hospital.”
“Well, do you think we need to go in?” Matt asked reasonably.
“No,” I muttered. “But I’m going to have to sleep with my hand in a bowl of cold water all night long. At the table.”
“Sorry, Baby,” Matt said, as he chased our daughter down the hallway with the dental floss.
I sat there feeling sorry for myself for awhile. I tried to appreciate the fact that Matt had taken over everything since I’d rendered myself completely useless. I told myself that my hand looked more or less fine, so if I could just get through the first few seconds of burning when I pulled away from the cold water I’d be fine.
But every time I tried to keep my hand out of the water, I wanted to scream. The internet told me that this sensation should last only five to ten minutes. Maybe twenty or thirty. After an hour, the hand would surely be lost. In the meantime, I could try painkillers. I sprinted into the bathroom and held my hand underneath the cold water tap while I awkwardly tapped a few tablets out of the bottle of ibuprofen.
“Did you take ibuprofen?” Matt called out the next time he heard me yelp.
“Yeah, but that’s not enough,” I said. “I need a gin and tonic. Possibly two. The only way I am going to be able to get any sleep tonight is to be a tiny bit tipsy.”
He seemed unconvinced, but he was distracted and I am bossy, so he made me a nice strong one. I alternated between sipping that and trying to read a few pages of The Cuckoo’s Calling. Matt eventually went to bed, and I sat there with my burning hand and my scabbed leg and felt absolutely pitiful. Shortly before midnight, I wrapped my hand in a cold dishtowel I’d thrown in the freezer and managed to fall asleep, no doubt in part because of the gin.
Thankfully, my hand felt much better in the morning. Still tender -- the thought of putting it in warm water to shower made me cringe, so I put that off for the better part of a day -- but much better. As in, I felt there was the slightest chance I would pull through, and possibly be able to pick up the dog from the vet and make the kids' lunch.
So I survived all that only to lock myself out of the house yesterday, for the second time this summer. I am just not feeling like a very competent human being these days.
The first time it happened back in June, the kids and I were on our way to the splash park and it was fairly late in the day. We could have just played in the backyard and waited for Matt to come home; we could have even walked to Starbucks for a treat, since I’d managed to grab my wallet along with our towels and sunscreen. Yesterday, though, I was supposed to pick up my friend Becca and take her to the airport to catch her flight back to China. Also, it was barely noon. Waiting for Matt was not an option.
Thankfully, my brother lives only ten minutes away, has a key to my house, and happens to fly airplanes at night so is generally home during the day when I am prone to fits of stupidity like this. I was worried that I’d wake him up, but I didn’t see any other good options.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?” (Oh, good. He sounded awake.)
“HI. UM, WHAT ARE YOU DOING RIGHT NOW? ARE YOU HOME? BECAUSE I LOCKED MYSELF OUT OF THE HOUSE AGAIN AND I HAVE TO GET BECCA TO THE AIRPORT BECAUSE SHE IS FLYING BACK TO CHINA AND IF YOU COME OVER RIGHT NOW I WILL BUY YOU ALL THE THINGS.”
He laughed, like he was totally used to me sounding so unhinged, and drove cheerfully into our yard a few minutes later. I hugged him (he was covered with sawdust or something from some mysterious project he’d been working on, but I did not care), told him he was my favorite person in the whole world, and took off. I managed to retrieve Becca and take her to the airport without incident, so there’s that.
Someday, I might manage to behave like a real adult, but my scabs are going to have to heal first.
On Friday afternoon my mom took the kids to the splash park, Matt went for a run on a trail he found in Bozeman, and I took my journal and my book to the Leaf and Bean. The day was hot, and it felt so lovely to duck into the coffee shop for awhile and sit at my favorite little table in the corner by the window. After awhile the sky burst open in a sunshower, and I watched the water steaming in the streets. By the time I left, they were dry again. I headed towards my car, looking forward to going home to change for our night out alone. And I tripped. Spectacularly. Over nothing. I twisted my left ankle and landed mostly on my right knee and my hands. My hands were only a little scraped, but I didn’t need to look down to know that my right leg was a mess.
And I didn’t look down--I didn’t look anywhere but straight ahead as I limped towards my car. Thankfully, I’d at least turned off Main Street by this time, so there’s the slight chance that no one actually witnessed my undignified fall; I hope not, anyway, because no one asked if I was all right, and I’d rather think it was because no one was actually there than because my hometown is full of jerks. Anyway, I tossed my stuff in the front seat and sat there for a moment, trying to relax enough to drive myself home and dabbing ineffectually at my bloodied knee with a scrap of tissue. (I have to admit that my main concern was how ridiculous my bandaged knee would look with the cute little dress I was planning to wear. And it was pretty ridiculous, but there was no way I was not wearing that dress. I bought it two years ago just to wear out on fun summer date nights, and I never wear it any other time.)
“Oh, Baby,” Matt said when he saw it. “Wow. See, this is why I worry when we go hiking.”
“I DIDN’T FALL YESTERDAY.”
“Yeah, but...I’m just saying.”
He has a fair point. Matt and I hiked up to Heather Lake on Thursday, which is something like 10 or 11 miles round-trip. (More for Matt, though. After we’d been hiking for about ten minutes he hustled back to the car at the trailhead to grab a rain jacket “just in case” -- we’d be gone several hours, and the forecast tentatively predicted thunderstorms. We ended up not needing it. He also turned back to search for my sunglasses, which I realized went missing from my head somewhere between Emerald Lake and Heather Lake. He didn’t find them during the 15 minutes he was looking, but I discovered them next to a rock on the way down. They must have slipped off my head while I sat down to adjust my boots.) Apparently, I’m klutzier than I would like to admit. (I would, however, like to take this moment to tell you all that my new hiking boots plus my new stupidly expensive inserts plus the way the guy at REI showed me how to tie my laces kept me from having blisters, which is a first. I HIKED FOR FIVE AND A HALF HOURS AND I DID NOT GET BLISTERS, except for one tiny one that barely even hurt so it doesn’t count. This has happened exactly zero times; I figured blisters were just something I would have to deal with if I wanted to hike with the big kids.)
When my dad saw my banged-up knee, he seemed confused.
“So wait, what did you trip on?”
“Nothing.”
“You just...fell down? Over nothing?”
“YES.”
“Did you black out first or something?” he asked, genuinely concerned.
“This is just what Shari does,” Matt offered helpfully.
Fast forward to Sunday night. We’d arrived home by early evening, in plenty of time for dinner, but since we’d been gone for ten days there wasn’t much in the fridge. Matt picked up some milk and a few other essentials to tide us over until our veggie box arrived on Tuesday. I didn’t have much of an appetite after sitting in the car for most of the hot afternoon (temperatures were well into the 90’s by the time we left Spokane around lunchtime), and the only thing I really wanted to eat was pho, so while Matt set about making macaroni and cheese for the kids I went to get some. I was back home with it in twenty minutes. And I’m not sure whether I was just tired and careless or whether the container was unusually full, but when I went to dump the noodles and tofu into the steaming broth, it slopped right over the side and all over my fingers.
I don’t think I’ve ever been truly, painfully scalded before. I was standing right next to the sink and thrust my hand under the faucet within seconds, so it could have been much worse -- but when I pulled my hand out of the water, thinking all I’d need to do was run some cool water over it for a few moments, I nearly screamed. I’ve never felt anything like it. It didn’t stop burning.
Matt filled the sink with cold water and I kept my left hand submerged while clumsily fiddling with chopsticks with my right hand. The phone rang as I slurped my pho at the kitchen counter. It was my parents, calling to make sure we’d made it home, and I had to admit that I was standing there with my burned hand in the sink while I ate dinner. I assured them it was fine, though; when it was actually in the water it felt mostly perfectly okay. They told me to be careful, and we hung up.
I pulled my hand out of the water, planning to dry it off and help Matt put the kids to bed. I made it halfway across the kitchen and turned right back to the sink. It hurt so badly I couldn’t keep from yelping. This confused me, since on the surface it didn’t look all that bad. A little pink, maybe, but certainly not alarming. I gritted my teeth and sprinted into the study to retrieve my phone. Back at the sink I spent fifteen minutes googling terrible things that can happen to seemingly innocuous burns when left untreated. The internet basically told me that I should head to the ER or I might as well go ahead and bid farewell to my hand. Burns to the hand can be “quite serious” and are not to be messed with.
Once again, I lifted it experimentally out of the sink. I didn’t see flames on the surface of my skin, of course, but it certainly felt like they were there. I told Matt I was planning to just cut the damn thing off. He sighed and said that was a terrible idea, but I didn’t really feel like I had his full attention. (The children did. Settling two children into their regular old beds after ten days of camping and driving and grandparents and fourteen deserts every day is a little nuts.)
“The problem is that I’m holding it together too well,” I said to him. “I’m just too calm. If I allowed my voice to betray the amount of pain I am in, you would all be terrified and rush me to the hospital.”
“Well, do you think we need to go in?” Matt asked reasonably.
“No,” I muttered. “But I’m going to have to sleep with my hand in a bowl of cold water all night long. At the table.”
“Sorry, Baby,” Matt said, as he chased our daughter down the hallway with the dental floss.
I sat there feeling sorry for myself for awhile. I tried to appreciate the fact that Matt had taken over everything since I’d rendered myself completely useless. I told myself that my hand looked more or less fine, so if I could just get through the first few seconds of burning when I pulled away from the cold water I’d be fine.
But every time I tried to keep my hand out of the water, I wanted to scream. The internet told me that this sensation should last only five to ten minutes. Maybe twenty or thirty. After an hour, the hand would surely be lost. In the meantime, I could try painkillers. I sprinted into the bathroom and held my hand underneath the cold water tap while I awkwardly tapped a few tablets out of the bottle of ibuprofen.
“Did you take ibuprofen?” Matt called out the next time he heard me yelp.
“Yeah, but that’s not enough,” I said. “I need a gin and tonic. Possibly two. The only way I am going to be able to get any sleep tonight is to be a tiny bit tipsy.”
He seemed unconvinced, but he was distracted and I am bossy, so he made me a nice strong one. I alternated between sipping that and trying to read a few pages of The Cuckoo’s Calling. Matt eventually went to bed, and I sat there with my burning hand and my scabbed leg and felt absolutely pitiful. Shortly before midnight, I wrapped my hand in a cold dishtowel I’d thrown in the freezer and managed to fall asleep, no doubt in part because of the gin.
Thankfully, my hand felt much better in the morning. Still tender -- the thought of putting it in warm water to shower made me cringe, so I put that off for the better part of a day -- but much better. As in, I felt there was the slightest chance I would pull through, and possibly be able to pick up the dog from the vet and make the kids' lunch.
So I survived all that only to lock myself out of the house yesterday, for the second time this summer. I am just not feeling like a very competent human being these days.
The first time it happened back in June, the kids and I were on our way to the splash park and it was fairly late in the day. We could have just played in the backyard and waited for Matt to come home; we could have even walked to Starbucks for a treat, since I’d managed to grab my wallet along with our towels and sunscreen. Yesterday, though, I was supposed to pick up my friend Becca and take her to the airport to catch her flight back to China. Also, it was barely noon. Waiting for Matt was not an option.
Thankfully, my brother lives only ten minutes away, has a key to my house, and happens to fly airplanes at night so is generally home during the day when I am prone to fits of stupidity like this. I was worried that I’d wake him up, but I didn’t see any other good options.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?” (Oh, good. He sounded awake.)
“HI. UM, WHAT ARE YOU DOING RIGHT NOW? ARE YOU HOME? BECAUSE I LOCKED MYSELF OUT OF THE HOUSE AGAIN AND I HAVE TO GET BECCA TO THE AIRPORT BECAUSE SHE IS FLYING BACK TO CHINA AND IF YOU COME OVER RIGHT NOW I WILL BUY YOU ALL THE THINGS.”
He laughed, like he was totally used to me sounding so unhinged, and drove cheerfully into our yard a few minutes later. I hugged him (he was covered with sawdust or something from some mysterious project he’d been working on, but I did not care), told him he was my favorite person in the whole world, and took off. I managed to retrieve Becca and take her to the airport without incident, so there’s that.
Someday, I might manage to behave like a real adult, but my scabs are going to have to heal first.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)