Confessional Highway

With My Dad

2009-06-25T21:47:00.000-07:00

When I see the news blurb that Hugh Hefner is selling one of his mansions, I feel a rush of panic. I’m not concerned about the health of Playboy, an empire about which I have mixed feelings. My concern is personal. As an LA native, through the years I’ve seen my past erased, sometimes slowly, sometimes with the abruptness of thievery in the night. And now I fear that the Playboy mansion, the majestic estate in Holmby Hills, is up for sale.

In third grade I was extremely popular with the boys, presumably due to my tomboy demeanor, how I slid into the boys’ games at recess like I was one of them nearly indistinguishable with my short haircut and athletic skill. With this strong schoolyard bond, it was natural that afternoon play moved to my home.

I don’t remember when I came up with the idea of sharing the Playboy magazines in my parents’ bedroom with my friends, magazines not hidden in covert places but out there in the open filling the antique wood magazine rack at the foot of the bed. No shame there. My dad worked for the company.

Determined to use my dad’s job to my advantage and elevate my cool friend status, one day I nudged a male friend towards the stash, and from that moment on my carefree afternoons turned into a time-lapse movie sequence where boy after boy came to my home and disappeared into the magazines, ogling one playmate after the next as I sat bored on the end of my parents’ bed aware that my plan for securing friends had been misguided.

When my parents separated, the Playboy Mansion became a regular destination for my Saturdays with Dad. As a producer for Playboy Productions, a film division responsible for Roman Polanski’s acclaimed Macbeth as well as the unfortunate hiccup, The Naked Ape, starring the darling child from The Rifleman, Johnny Crawford, as a grown up, my father had become good buddies with Hef and had open access to his home, as did a lengthy list of Hollywood celebrities and sports stars.

“We can play at Hef’s,” my dad said, referring to a game of tennis. I’d first walked onto a court five years earlier at age seven, a court in our own backyard. Sports were a strong bond between me and my dad, for we were the two athletes in the family. But since my parents’ marriage ended and the house was sold, our tennis matches needed a new home.

So off we went, snaking through Holmby Hills in my dad’s convertible Caddy, a boat of a car, so very 1970s. At the guard gate, my dad turned his head to the small speaker box, announced his name, and I watched the wrought iron gates part to allow our entry. Keys to the kingdom, indeed.

We parked the car in the well-photographed circular drive in front of the English Tudor mansion, and crossed a vast lawn towards the secluded tennis court. After a couple hours, Dad and I transitioned to lunch, magically ordered from any phone on the property to a phantom kitchen without a menu. Ask for whatever you wanted, give your coordinates, and club sandwiches would arrive within a half hour.

Dessert was the game room. Wall to wall pinball machines encircled a pool table. Dad and I stood side by side at our favorite machines, desperate to beat our best scores, throwing our weight into our flipper action, twisting the ball release plunger to get the right spin. My dad taught me that, though I don’t know if the technique was scientifically sound. Winning free games sounds meaningless in a no-coins-required world, but it wasn’t meaningless to us. It was the measure of our skill, our determination, our progress. Next we’d move to the pool table. Dad had turned me into a bit of a shark for my age, a skill that stayed with me through college and was useful in the dating world to stand out as a little surprising. When Dad and I needed fuel, we’d reach into the bowls of M&M’s – both peanut and plain – behind us on low-lying tables. A never empty refrigerator offered up soft drinks. People think of the Playboy Mansion as Disneyland for grown ups, but I tell you it was Disneyland for a 12-year-old as well.

Aside from the ubiquitous display of Playboy Magazines on the indoor surfaces, I seldom encountered the adult side of the Mansion. There was the time I tripped into the circular space off the game room with the sponge-like, seductively cushy floor. I figured out its purpose, and knew I wouldn’t be playing in there. Then there was the hot afternoon when a post-tennis swim was in order. The Mansion stocked bathing suits for guests in all sizes organized into little cubbies along a tall cabana wall. I don’t know if it was the strangeness of borrowing a suit or not wanting to figure out how my 12-year-old body would look on display amongst the grown women, but I decided to skip the bikini and swim in my red-trimmed, white tennis dress.

Oh the beauty of the pool. A ring of water arching around a grotto over whose entrance cascaded a waterfall. A lovely stone deck dotted with lush lounge chairs.

I eased into the water, ruffled panties and all, as was the tennis fashion of the era. Breaststroking toward the grotto, I dove beneath the waterfall, resurfacing inside the darkened cave, its perimeter adorned with padded couches. The grotto was empty, but within seconds a man walked in from the cabana entrance, walked in tall and naked. I caught a glance – my first full frontal of the grown up variety – dove shyly back underwater, and swam out.

Strangest of all, I told my dad, as if I needed to confess interrupting a private moment. In response he said something like, “I’m sure it was fine with him” or “I’m sure he didn’t mind,” words that carried a slightly lascivious hint that made me realize that men sort of like being caught on display.

While the Mansion’s public image is of bathing beauties and constant nudity, that just wasn’t the Mansion I saw, no bunnies sporting ears and puffy tails, no wild orgies on the lawn, no sexual innuendo in every conversation. I had that one brief nudity encounter, but generally people dressed as they would around any swimming pool, fully covered in bathing suits. On occasion, a top may come off for some sunning, but it was tasteful, less overt than those who strut on the French Riviera.

In the daylight at the Mansion, you could see families with toddlers, parents joyfully showing their child the amazing collection of birds housed in the enormous aviary beneath the trees. And on 4th of July there was always a huge kid-friendly buffet. Only once did I stay at the Mansion past dark in order to see a screening of a film, and we left as the credits rolled, for I think my dad understood that the tone of things shifted as the sun went down.

All this was the window dressing on the Mansion, images I strongly remember. But what I remember more was that it was at the Playboy Mansion when I first beat my dad at tennis. It had been coming. Our games were getting closer and closer. My dad played tennis every weekend with his friends. I had recently entered the world of junior tournament tennis. When I hit the perfect drop shot and my dad couldn’t race forward fast enough to catch the ball before it fell, game and set went to me, 6-4. I felt the sting of pride and fear at the same time. A child beating a father. A daughter beating a father. But before I could digest my emotions, my dad’s face broke into a large grin. For the next hour, anyone who wandered over to the court heard my father boast that I had just beat him. He was more proud of my achievement than he could ever be disappointed by his loss.

And there was the time when I took on Jim Brown, the famous footballer with the speedy legs. (Try getting a drop shot past him.) And all the times I was the only female in a game of doubles. I was a real competitor amongst the men, and that made me think about identity and womanhood and achievement. The bunnies were appreciated for their beauty. I was appreciated for my skill, and I saw the difference. I felt the respect.

I also met my first porn star courtside, and had a hard time looking him in the eye years later after having seen his famous film at a retro on-campus screening during my freshman year in college. He and I ended up in a conversation about the first amendment and several lawsuits he was involved in, and that, too, taught me something: Don’t diminish people based on assumptions. And yes, Hef does always walk around in silk pajamas.

Some dads teach their kids to fly fish. Some sit down and deliver lectures packed with words of wisdom. Mine took me to fantasyland where I could think about my place as a woman and my goals and dreams. And have fun, simple fun, even if the setting wasn’t so pure.

I search the Internet to see if another piece of my childhood will be boarded up and dismantled, and I learn that it is Hef’s neighboring property that’s on the market. While I haven’t visited the Mansion since my late teens, I am relieved that it will remain. Many people – my mom included – questioned my dad’s judgment in taking a young girl there, but I can tell you, the time I spent at the Playboy Mansion built memories. Good memories. Indelible memories. Memories with my dad.

Puff

2009-05-29T09:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve never been a smoker, but I’ve never been a vicious anti-smoker either. Well, except for that time my mom lit up in a doctor’s office waiting room when I was a precocious child. Despite my requests, she wouldn’t put the thing out, not even when I feigned a coughing fit. I asked the receptionist for a piece of paper, pencil, and tape, and made my own ‘No Smoking’ sign that I posted on the wall. That sufficiently embarrassed my mom into snubbing out her cigarette.

That moment aside, I’ve always been laissez faire about smoking. I’ve traveled Europe and sat in smoke-filled cafes and bars. I lingered in the Los Angeles clubs of the 80s where only through the hazy filter of polluted air could you see the performers on stage. The smoke never bothered me, and I seldom gave it any thought.

Until lately.

Since my brother – a smoker since his early teens – died of lung cancer last month, I just can’t look at smokers the same way. I can’t just shrug and not care. I can’t.

We all have habits, some easy to discard, some that clutch to our sleeves desperate for survival. Not everything in my day amounts to healthy living. Not even close (okay, close, but still.) But smoking, that now has moved into its own category.

My brother was diagnosed around the New Year, and my parents instantly rallied for him to quit smoking, but his attention wasn’t focused in that direction. He was about to start chemo and radiation, and the thing is, I got why he was still smoking. He was about to face the most stressful and challenging time in his life, not exactly a setting best suited to kick the habit. Besides, his problem was so much larger than a few more months of continued smoking. If he made it through treatment, then he could face the reality of quitting.

He didn’t make it through.

When we emptied his apartment, we found a few cartons of unopened cigarettes. My mom wanted to destroy them. My brother’s friend said he could see if they could be returned to the store. My mom didn’t like the idea of someone someday smoking these cigarettes, but the conversation veered off to another corner of the room, to the stacks of clothes and papers and other remnants of a life snubbed out suddenly.

I don’t know what happened to the cigarettes. I don’t need to ask.

Now when I drive through LA traffic, my eyes hang on the smokers. I examine their profile, the way they move fingers to mouth, and the quality of their exhales. I drift into their heads looking for what their thoughts might be, could be, how they can puff away with the knowledge of the potential harm.

I study these inconsequential moments of these smokers’ day and think of my brother, of our last email exchange on his birthday – his voice too weakened to speak – when I playfully suggested that he’d be healthy and running marathons and doing yoga on his next birthday, this to the brother who never engaged in any form of exercise. He responded that all he wanted was for his next birthday to be cancer free.

He died later that night, alone, in the secluded hours of night, his eyes turned towards the TV.

When smokers shrug off their habit as just another habit, as an enjoyable slice of their day, I just don’t get it, because really, it is not so simple, not so innocent.

Black Thumb

2009-05-23T11:11:00.000-07:00

I don’t know how it happened, but walking towards my bedroom door, I tip my head to the right, and there it is, my plant in bloom. For many, this is an annual occurrence, the resurgence of blossoms that definitively demonstrate life’s cycles.

The typical cycle in our household begins when I impulsively and optimistically buy a cute little plant, usually something on display at Trader Joe’s, imagining it the center of attention on the island between the kitchen and living room, or perhaps on my nightstand greeting me as I start my day. During the next phase, I kill said plant either with neglect or ineptitude. After watering it for a few extra weeks just to be sure that the brittle brown leaves don’t really signify death but rather a state of – let’s say – disinterest, I finally give up and give in. The burial is an unceremonious dumping in the garbage can.

I could turn the failed dream into mulch in our communal front yard and let it participate in the parallel life cycle story, cinematically valid but a little depressing. The fact that I don’t just shows how black my thumb is. In fact, I think my thumb can now be labeled a serial killer, so many have died under its care.

To see fresh blossoms on a plant I nearly killed two weeks ago while trying to extract all the spindly brown stems weaving through the cheerfully green show-offs, only to discover how truly entwined they all were (sorry, healthy stems that I ripped from life and a hopeful future), is truly amazing. Really. This is the first plant I’ve kept alive through one whole cycle.

There was one plant I had in college, that leafy green variety bred specifically for college students because it cannot be killed. Drownings in beer, lit cigarettes scorching its soil when used as an impromptu ashtray, a complete absence of light – the plant barely flinches. Sophomore year I went home for winter break, a full four weeks, and had no one to care for my plant, so I left it on our back porch and promptly forgot about its existence. Six months later, when packing up for summer, I found the plant on its side having fallen off the porch and living in a tangle of dirt and leaves. And you know what? It looked great. Better than if I’d actually tried to care for it.

My mom tried to give me an orchid on Mothers’ Day. I just couldn’t accept it. I have killed so many orchids that I’m sure I’m on that plant’s most wanted list. I can imagine them all lined up at the post office, waiting to send goodies to loved ones and glaring at the photo of my innocently smiling face – though in their eyes, maniacally so – amongst the other FBI’s most wanted felons. It’s that bad.

While Spring arrived for others weeks ago, I mark today as my official first day, commemorated by little purple flowers. At the same time, I must say an apology to all the plant siblings that didn’t make it. I did my best.

There is a reason I have only one child. I know my limits. Most of the time.

Venice, CA... my hood

2009-05-04T10:01:00.001-07:00

:: taken too soon ::

2009-04-21T15:22:00.000-07:00

It’s the image that always comes to me when I think of my relationship with my brother, the royal blue and white striped peashooter he gave me for my fourth birthday. It must have been his idea at age eleven. I don’t think my parents would have suggested arming a four-year-old.

He may not have thought it through, the fact that once armed I would request ammunition – unpopped popcorn kernels – and permission to follow him outside with his gang of friends. They’d shoot slyly at the moving cars that passed our house, raising peashooters to mouth at just the right moment, puff out their cheeks with requisite air, and blow, jettisoning a small morsel at their target, and then quickly hide their weapons by their sides. I’d stand focused on the parked car in front of me, roll a popcorn kernel around on my tongue to gather the right amount of spit to afford perfect trajectory – my brother must have taught me that – and then fire away awaiting the satisfying sound of the ping, of kernel hitting metal.

It’s the only gift I remember receiving before age nine when a snazzy three-speed Schwinn bike arrived, that’s how important that peashooter was to me, probably because it came from my older brother, the one I mimicked and followed around, stealing his T-shirts and any other clothing items of his I could wrap around me.

Through the years we grew apart, our relationship more courteous than connected, but lately things had shifted. We were on the mend, so it seemed. In his illness, challenged to speak, we resorted to emails, emails that bounced back and forth like live dialogue, emails that revealed our history, our one-time bond, our status as siblings. In his words he was warm and encouraging, inserted happy face emoticons and LOLs.

He spoke of his gratitude for his friends and family, what the caring of others in this time was teaching him. He spoke honestly about his mistakes and how he wanted to shift, of changes he wanted to make. “I have found that once I let others into my life things get easier all the way around,” he said. And I thanked him, told him he was gifting me with his openness, and that he was teaching me about learning to accept help.

I’m sorry he and I didn’t have more time to explore this renewed connection. I’m sorry he didn’t have more time to explore what he had discovered. Mostly I’m sorry for his young children because I know what their dad wanted more than anything was to have more time with them. If their mom doesn’t mind, maybe I’ll get them each a peashooter for their next birthday, and together we can fire off a popcorn kernel or two and try to make a ping and think of their dad.

In/Out

2009-04-14T09:29:00.000-07:00

You come because you fear missing. The moment, the announcement, the invite, the laugh. The need to be in, be a part, belong. Like willingly slipping into handcuffs, you log on, log in, but with the sound of the bird caw you raise you eyes to the window, see the crow dodge and swerve, rattle in the palm fronds.

And then you know.

Time to go outside.

Outside, without devices.
Outside, untethered.
Outside, to catch the missing.

Like the accidental brush with a stranger, the person who passed that spot that one time, who dropped a card you would have retrieved and returned, who would have thanked you with a lingering look in your eye that moved past courtesy. You missed the cloud that blocked the sun just so to create colors and swirls like watercolors meeting in a rinsing bath. You missed sounds uniting in cacophony, unchoreographed bikers and skaters in dance, dots of sand skimming the beach in the wind.

But you never know, for no record remains, no evidence taunts you. And the indoor habit, mighty, forceful, demanding, unwilling to lose, mocks when you stay away, when you return, with etched proof of what was.

Balance. In/out.

There are the online connections, the people who enter your life through serendipity. There is the info, the images, the stories, the words, more and more and more until you drown in what you cannot absorb.

Whenever I leave, leave and fill the void with in real life, I find the me that goes missing in the information age. I find the me of greater confidence, who compares less, who competes less, whose breath grows deeper, whose legs grow sturdier. I find that which I do not know I look for.

Balance. In/out.

Home and Away

2009-04-13T14:37:00.000-07:00

It could be the jetlag, the confusing sleep pattern that allows me to drift off at a reasonable 10:30 p.m. only to awaken four hours later prepared to start a day that still sleeps. Or it could be the disorientation of returning to a life that demands planning beyond which sights I will see before noon, before the descent onto a nice lunch spot. The loss of life-in-the-moment slaps me hard as thoughts return to paychecks and tuition checks and career milestones and how to track down the undelivered post that was squeezed out of my mailbox during my two weeks away, the two weeks that my neighbor forgot to bring in my mail.

I am not born to travel. I am born to not be stationary, to live outside a predictable existence, to be part of a community that changes with the turnover of hotel rooms. In a life outside expectations of consistency I do better, where it is the circumstances that prevent relationships from growing too deep as opposed to life where the relationships do not grow because the connection is just not there.

Happy.

That is what this awareness offers. When I stay off the internet, when I do not read of all that I cannot change – despite the proclamations that change resides in each one of our hands – I find peace. Selfish peace – or not – but peace nonetheless. When I walk instead of drive, when I read fictional tales rather than watch fictional tales. In these moments I connect with a quality that surpasses these simple actions.

The trip was to jumpstart the creative flow, to remind me of life outside the one offered in my day to day, to bond with a teen who may soon refuse to travel with me. Once I learned not to starve him in an effort to keep costs low (“What, fries and chocolate do not a lunch make?”), we found our rhythm. I hand over the guidebook and say, “Here, you plan Amsterdam,” and he does, and he leads and he chooses and his directionally-challenged brain learns to read a map.

We return home with shared sadness to a world awash in English, to signs we read effortlessly as opposed to the signs we proudly deciphered in the foreign lands, the ease diminishing the achievement we savored each day as we traveled.

We launder our limited two-week wardrobe of two pairs of pants each and a few shirts, and quickly re-adorn the same clothes, neglecting the closet full of options. Simple, I think. Fewer choices, more simplicity. I want to toss the clutter, remove the stacks of magazine back issues I will never read, create clear countertops and paperless drawers. I want less and less, yet do not know how to get to less.

But I will. I must. I must get to less. This is where my sanity resides. Spare. Sparse. Less.

And remembering. Remembering what brings out the best of each day, and recreating it here no matter the challenge, no matter the struggle.

Looking for Love

2009-03-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

It’s not your fault.

I say the words as I stroke his back, nuzzle his muzzle, watch him fall asleep curled into my lap as if he has found home.

Tears trail my words and gather in my eyes. Tears unseen and quickly blinked away in the chaos of dogs running, barking, leaping, of people looking and deciding and considering.

It’s not your fault.

It has felt like my fault. Simple words spoken to the mixed-breed never offered a home, to the ten pounds of love in my lap. Simple words to take away the blame.

From him.

From me.

It’s not your fault.

I lean my face into his, and thank him for healing me.

Underwater

2009-03-04T09:47:00.000-08:00

True to self. I struggle to find me in a sea of others, others who gather like a school of fish, swimming in unison, following the leader, accepting the hand off to swim in the front, but always going together. I drift on the edge like a piece of floating sea junk bobbing up and down.

Pulled into the updraft, I slide into the stream. But the school takes a sharp left and I go straight, fast and furious as if my steering is set on ahead, cruise control, no means of adjustment.

They don’t see me leave, don’t care, don’t notice. Except for one, out of the corner of her right eye. A pulse of kindness, yet she stays with the pack.

My eyes follow the ocean floor, notice the sway of seaweed, the loner fish dipping in and out of rock dens. I let the current carry me forward, trusting the glide, trusting the ride.

The colors reside in the palette of cool with occasional punctuation marks of red and orange. My arms extend wide and I am an airplane underwater, dipping and soaring, dipping and soaring.

Ahead the sea grows murky, cloudy, destination obscured. I disappear into the haze hoping to emerge into clear when the sea rests, when the waves stop, when the sun shines down from above.

Patience, I tell myself. Patience. And I close my eyes.

4 a.m.

2009-03-02T11:42:00.000-08:00

The sound of the quiet wakes me. My ears strain to absorb the white noise of life sleeping, the molecules of sound that lay like a blanket over four a.m. I picture soft-spoken particles colliding in air like flitting dots of dust that dance in sideways angles of light beams. Despite their tiny size, their lives are full.

With these awakenings now a regular occurrence, I wonder what predawn wants to tell me. I roll from side to back, back to side, in search of comfortable. I name the hour peaceful, for that is how I feel, except when I imagine four p.m. and the sleepiness that will descend in protest to my early waking.

To remain with eyes and ears open or to negotiate a return to sleep? I want to treat the waking as a mandate and follow the natural flow of my rhythm. And sometimes I do. Sometimes I reach to the nightstand for the laptop and start my day in the silent darkness. And sometimes I reach for the stories of my dreams that slip back into silence when I open my eyes. And sometimes I squeak out a couple more hours of sleep.

But mostly I wonder what the predawn is trying to tell me because I believe a secret waits to be discovered at 4 a.m.

Life vs. the Living

2008-11-28T07:53:00.000-08:00

I can’t write myself out of unhappiness. Trust me, I’ve tried, for I’ve believed happiness lies at the end of a sentence. So on the days that I didn’t write, couldn’t write, I berated myself for creating my gloom, believing that transformation – my transformation – lay in my words and my diligence and my follow through.

What I haven’t wanted to admit is that my happiness lies outside the words, or in parallel to them. My happiness lies in the living.

In the past few years as I’ve turned inward, away from external work and into the stories of my mind, the opinions in my heart, the look and feel of a sentence, my joy has walked away. Now I sit in tune with struggle and out of tune with pleasure, out of tune with the fun of life.

I need to turn it around.

I don’t fault the writing but the way in which I’ve lived the writing life, cloistered in my bedroom, laptop poised, determination scrawled on my face. But in this process, I’ve omitted the necessary step of being in life, of being outside that room. Others can’t see this. They see me on the go, in the world, living. But I can tell you I haven’t been, not in the true sense of participation.

I’ve put enormous weight on writing, how accomplishment in that area would give me the life I want, the one I need, a sense of purpose and belonging. But under all that weight falls the reality of life delayed, the proclamation that only when I get there, (there, of course, being a completely unattainable destination for it moves faster than you can chase it) will my life begin.

Life begins now. Declaration. Proclamation.

So I am accepting a job, a teeny tiny job of a week or so, a chance to be outside myself and in a project that has nothing to do with me except in the way I translate its goals. And I’m excited because it takes me out of the center, gives each day a destination beyond my choosing. I am racing towards what so very recently I ran from.

Curious how life works, eh?

And I’m hoping this dip into life will remind me how to be in the world, how to give to it and take from it. I’m hoping it will fill me with fuel to nourish my depleted projects, the ones running – no, slogging – on empty. I’m hoping I will have conversations with people I’ve yet to meet because the conversations with self and Chihuahua are circling back on themselves leading to the title of Boring.

But most of all, I’m hoping for hope, the commodity that when missing makes every day a challenge.

Calling Inspector Clouseau

2008-11-20T14:22:00.000-08:00

My son lost his breakfast somewhere between the kitchen and the car this morning. We both assumed that as he piled up all the necessary belongings that accompany him to school, that the breakfast simply got left behind, neglected on the kitchen table. I pictured my dog salivating, wondering how he could leap three times his height to gain access to the luscious smelling toasted manchego upon everything bagel.

Imagine my surprise when I returned home hours later and saw no sign of my son’s breakfast. No abandoned bagel, no abandoned bagel plate, no signs of anything. My Chihuahua didn’t look guilty, so I know he didn’t pull off a Houdini stunt.

I march through the three rooms of our small home certain that teenaged brain syndrome transported breakfast to the most unlikely of locations like upon the toilet tank or adjacent to his toothbrush. But no. Nothing.

Mystery.

I’ve seen the times when straight out of a stop at Starbucks, motorists place freshly purchased brew atop car and speed away allowing coffee cup the most elegant of journeys through air only to land sad and forgotten upon oil-stained pavement. This could be us, I think. But when I returned to our garage, there was no breakfast strew upon the cement.

My only fear is finding the food weeks from now, when the stench provides the missing clue to the treasure hunt.

Promises

2008-11-17T17:50:00.000-08:00

Today the wind blows wickedly as if to challenge my request for colder weather, and I think of the carrot danglers, those who make promises they don’t keep. The proclamations can be tiny, almost insignificant, like, “I’ll call you right back,” times when I smile broadly, make a note on the calendar, wait by the phone. And when follow-through doesn’t come, my trust wilts. After each disappointment I believe less and less in what people say.

“It’s about them, not you,” others tell me, and I say, “That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if their intentions are real and pure. It makes me not believe their words and as a result I push these people away bit by bit.”

The cycle makes me feel ‘word literal,’ but I don’t know how else to process language. I don’t know how to live if words don’t have the meaning I’ve been taught they do.

Everyone these days is so overwhelmed, I hear, that promises now equal stated desires, intentions. Not following through is as much a disappointment to the promiser as the promised. But I don’t see it because, the thing is, I’m able to distinguish between “I’ll try” and “I will.” When I’m stretched, I know it.

The wind whistles down my chimney, joins me in my living room, moves the palm fronds. It creates a musical backdrop to my thoughts, offers an available deterrent to slipping into running shoes and taking a step outside.

I promised myself I would run first thing in the morning, and the clock already reads 11 a.m. with my running shoes still by the door. I promised myself I’d return to the shaky pages of my novel and push past doubt, but the novel file remains unopened.

So I do break promises, only they are promises I make to myself. And that’s terrible, tragic, because these are the promises I can control.

As I step away from judgment, I discover my greatest disappointment lies within, that I am no better than those who don’t honor words spoken to me. Through the years I’ve wallowed in pain by blaming those who haven’t come through, but the truth is that if I honored my pledges to self, I would care less about the broken promises of others. They would fall to the back of the line of things I’m waiting for.

As I walk towards my running shoes, I think of enduring the wind-whipping run, the action that tries to knock me over and push me back, the goal that challenges my resolve. This will become my touchstone, the way I will keep promises to myself.

Dollars and Sense

2008-11-12T12:48:00.000-08:00

Because I’m superstitious, I tip better than custom dictates. I factor in how long I occupied the booth at my favorite diner and tack on a bonus for keeping others from sitting in my spot even if there was no one waiting. If the bill is particularly small, my baseline 20% has been known to bump up to 50%.

I come at this from all the woo woo proclamations of abundance, thinking if I give a little extra maybe I’m upping my chances for good karma. Yes, I know that’s contrary to the concept of giving without expecting return. Yes, I know. But still. It’s like all those people who attach disclaimers to the chain letters they forward. They know it’s wrong but they keep doing it. At least those who wait on me in restaurants benefit from my neurosis.

And then there's my guilt of not needing to stand in a breadline, which prompts further generosity. While I currently wear the label of ‘Increasingly Downwardly Mobile,’ I still have it better than most. I have options, the freedom to chase dreams, the knowledge that when push comes to shove, I can plunk down a credit card and deal with it later. Luckily, at this point, later is usually just when the credit card bill arrives. I really don’t live beyond my means.

But all the muttering of financial fear is chipping away at my notion of security. It helps when I think of friends living with enormous debt and rationalize that if they can stay afloat so can I. But that’s insensitive and naïve of me. We can all sink together. But to get philosophical, if everyone sinks, is it still sinking? How about, ‘Sinking is the new normal’?

Trying to live freelance in a panicked economy is comical. Can I really go forward and promote a new photography business designed to supplement my pittance of earnings as a writer? I don’t even believe my sales pitches of why it is critical that I take your holiday card photo. (Holiday cards…yeah, right. Have you seen the price of postage and ink and paper and pens??)

But I also must discuss those whining about the economy who have such an abundance of cash and resources that the only way their daily lives are being affected by this downturn is in their conversations and the fluctuation of their heart rate when they open their investment statements. They can still afford every dream they’ve ever had. They have not even come close to being knocked down to normal, but many of them are the ones complaining the loudest. Am I really to believe that those with millions in the bank can’t afford Christmas this year? I’m no economist (obviously) but I simply want to holler at those crying poor who are anything but.

It is the charities that these often generous folks give to that I pity. They’re the real losers as philanthropists see their resources shrink and thus must pull back on giving. And of course I think of the trickle down effect, of the employees of struggling corporations, those facing all the layoffs.

But if you’re one of the ones with excess money in the bank (my definition of ‘excess,’ not yours; my blog, my rules) go out and do some spending. Help that small business or even that large one with a long list of employees. Fuel this ailing economy. Consider it your call to duty.

And if you need some photos…

‘Nough said.

In the Quiet

2008-11-07T15:53:00.000-08:00

The quiet. I am thinking of the quiet, of the writing in the writing, the wondering when I’ll find my way back to the writing, the wordplay I enjoy, the thoughts expressed, the desire to communicate.

I am thinking of the quiet that has taken my voice, the quiet that has become me as I’ve ceased to want to speak, the voice that has left, gone on the road like a young runaway boy of a storybook era, clothing bundled up and tied at the end of a stick, held high above a shoulder.

The voice craves liberty from obligation, but if I let the voice leave, watch it walk down a dirt path, say, “I understand. All has not gone as we thought,” what am I left with?

I’m left with a pile of debris, the words swirling around in my computer, attached to files, residing in documents. Words that want to leap and flee, to find new options of expression. I want to let them go because I don’t want to hold them hostage in my virtual computer world. The words deserve escape.

Each day I wonder if I’ll want to speak again, and each day slides into the next and the next and the next.

And I want to believe this is a glitch in my system, the barrier I must push through to prove my worthiness.

My worthiness. I’m always aiming to prove my worthiness, for somehow, somewhere deep inside, I don’t feel worthy. And no matter how I phrase the question, I don’t receive the answer as to why. I don’t know from where crept in undeserving, but now it is my roommate, the companion that follows me, through my life, through my day, whispering in my ear, taunting. It accuses me of grandiosity when I strive to make change and chase a dream. It tells me I’m not special enough or have not paid off an unknown debt.

I’ll pay. I swear I will. Tell me when and how, and I’ll cross off that burden to allow me to reach the heights I crave, to become the someone that I know is huddled inside of me eager to see light and life.

Those who snarl at doubt and push through, how do they do it? How? My youthful confidence has stepped aside to make room for doubt born of experience, the experience that has humbled me, made me shier, more timid, more unbelieving.

This is not the me of my birth, the one who eagerly reinvented the wheel if it didn’t turn the way I wanted.

A glitch, I say. Just a glitch, a temporary station to allow me the vision to see how others struggle and overcome because, really, truthfully, I was spared struggle in earlier days. I grew confident and certain. Cocky even. Yes, cocky.

Cocky enough to dismiss a secure path to vault into the unknown. Cocky enough to believe that perseverance would reward.

And maybe it still will. Maybe I’m closer to the beginning of the journey than I know, even though I feel so far in. Maybe I haven’t hit the real heart of struggle.

You see, I don’t do well with patience. I want it yesterday. I want the guarantee, the promise. The hard work doesn’t scare me, but the mystery does, the ‘maybe it will never happen.’

Someone asked me if I wanted to go back, back to the past of safety. And even the question robbed me of my breath, the thought of living the life that felt so very wrong. No, I can’t go there. But can I really be here? Can I?

Can I not?

I will give it today. And tomorrow. Okay, another week. Or a month. Till the end of the year. Okay, a bit longer. Yes, a bit longer. I got here for a reason. I just must trust enough to stay.

Clarity

2008-11-05T16:12:00.000-08:00

I suspected it, but I couldn’t have known for sure, not until the veil lifted, not until the deed was done, not until the declaration of President-elect was announced.

I’d felt this election was holding me hostage, sucking up all my energy and setting my imagination to inert, but only upon waking the day after can I confirm my suspicions.

For the first time in months my mind slipped into creative meditation leaving the gnawing realities to wait patiently for my more wakened state. I saw images of fairy tale walks, heard characters telling me their stories revealing where I must take them and why. I stopped despairing over all that hasn’t been working and set a plan for the next step forward, how one foot in front of the other can be enough.

The part of my brain conditioned to worry is still frightened, untrusting, uncertain. It doesn’t believe that I’ll hold this energized view for longer than it takes to type this sentence. It has a bit of experience with how these moods can come and go.

But I’m tired of how I’ve been living, how I’ve not been living but simply staying alive. And I figure if Obama can rise up to become president, I can manage to type a few words upon the page each day, can line up a photo job here and there, can plan a dinner party to gather friends who will want to insist that the traffic to cross town is too heavy, that there’s work to be done or sleep to be had.

But I will insist.

If nothing else, hosting a small election party reminded me of the power of shared experience, how we can all get by in singularity, but that the quality of certain moments can be so very heightened when in the company of others.

Of course the right others, not just any others.

By the way, I’m looking to line up a few more right others.

I’m done with shallow breaths, wanting once again to fill my lungs to their fullest. And I want others to do the same, because there’s been too much aching occupying our days, too much focus on what we can’t control over what we can, too much hopelessness. I’ve been the guiltiest of all. I know it. But it’s time to embrace the new chapter. Please come along.

Optimism

2008-11-04T11:40:00.000-08:00

Today I woke with optimism, optimism that has been missing for so long, optimism that had vanished like a friend who goes on a roadtrip promising to call upon return only return never happens and instead silence and alone becomes your companion.

And waiting. There’s all that waiting.

I’ve been waiting for optimism because it’s been so lonely without it.

Without optimism my days have felt long and tedious and repetitive.

Without optimism I haven’t felt like seeking companionship because my words were too quiet and thin, uninspiring, on the brink of bitter at all times.
Without optimism I couldn’t imagine a future any different from today, and with today reeking of dissatisfaction that just wasn’t a place I wanted to consider.
Without optimism I lost faith in myself, in my ability to change and progress, to become, to inhabit, to embody any feeling beside disinterest.

So of course I feel joyous upon optimism’s return, because with it comes the sensation of a grand shift, of a day packed with full thoughts, richer thoughts, of possibility.

As I stood in line to vote, in the first line I’ve ever encountered at my polling place, I joined the conversation around me. I met neighbors I’ve never seen, people who live within a block of my front door. And I looked to the lunch tables at my side and wished I’d anticipated this moment, had brought cookies and pastries and treats for a post-vote slice of community. And I said, “We should have a block party,” and I meant it.

And maybe we will, and maybe I’ll be the organizer, my first act of optimism after voting.

A Dog’s Life

2008-10-26T15:45:00.000-07:00

The vegan man, the ‘Meat is Murder’ guy on the boardwalk, scoffed when I let my dog pee on a lamppost. Under his breath he mumbled, “People used to be able to sit there.” And I wanted to ask, “Really? When? When did dogs not pee in Venice?” At the same time, I understood. I now look at all patches of grass as suspect, not as a place to roll around and allow the blades to tickle the undersides of your legs like I did as a child in blissful naiveté.

But what am I to do? Our condo association recently requested that residents not let their dogs pee in the front yard. As a dog owner I acknowledged that I couldn’t vote fairly on the matter. I like the convenience of strolling out the front door, dog off leash, and allowing him to use the front yard as his own. Yes, I come with baggie in hand and clean up, but I also understand that this doesn’t leave the grounds sanitary enough to allow for a barefoot journey over the small patch of grass.

In compliance with the new mandate of my neighbors, I now escort Speck down to the boardwalk for more than the midday walk. This pleases my neighbor, Mike, who assumed those of us who used the front yard were just lazy. I like Mike, so I concede to ‘occasionally lazy,’ but won’t wear the lazy hat for when I return home after 11:00 p.m. and don’t feel up for a walk in the less than tame parts of my neighborhood. And then there’s the early morning, before-school rush that falls on my son’s shoulders. Maybe a little lazy, but mostly just overextended.

But now the Meat is Murder guy, who puts up animal torture posters that force me to look away, gives me the evil eye, and I want to declare my vegetarian status, but I also want to say something about my questioning of how much he loves the animals. It’s kind of like anti-abortionists who drop the ball once the kid is born. You can’t have it both ways.

At the same time, he does force me to think. I wonder where we should allow our dogs to go, those of us who don’t have private yards to defile. In typical suburban neighborhoods you have that no man’s land patch of grass between sidewalk and curb, a stretch that could easily be renamed ‘public dog toilet.’ But my slice of Venice doesn’t have that. We have cement walkstreets where the dogs mark every wall announcing their daily walk to their peers, leaving little patchy stains on gates and entryways. I try to deter my dog from this practice and move him towards the generic lamppost, but it gets hard. I want him to be able to communicate with his friends.

But I also want to be a good neighbor and responsible pet owner, and I’m left not knowing how. When I lived in London for a spell for an editing job, I frequented Holland Park. There, amidst the loveliness of peacocks and sculptured landscapes, the city offered a patch of dirt officially labeled “Dog Toilet.” Taken by this act of civility, I snapped several photos to share with friends back home, and I would have had I not been mugged weeks before the end of the job resulting in the loss of not only my camera but a healthy chunk of change. So much for civility.

Perhaps I should have boldly asked Meat is Murder what I should do. I suspect he may have an opinion or two.

Above the Earth

2008-10-24T10:52:00.000-07:00

The jagged edges of a scene, those who can leave and those trapped inside. You escape on horseback, and enter the desert, but looking back you see the others trapped, the perimeter of town like torn paper, jagged and irregular. The inhabitants gather at the edge, their eyes fixed on you far away. The proportions are unreal, you large and grown into giant status, the town shrunken like a playset upon a table.

And that becomes the perspective, the playset life, the stepping out of a scene undesirable.

You always run. The first hint of trouble, you run. You wonder if you should have run earlier, thinking of the times you didn’t escape soon enough, of the times when you were warned but didn’t pay attention. You shoulder it all beneath the weight of blame, believing you should have known. You see the root of ‘should’ in shoulder and wonder why you never saw that before, how the difference in sound masked this reality.

You can’t help thinking of how early influences are poisoning your life, and when you hear the words, “Maybe you should complain more,” you consider what that would be like. But you say nothing, only that you don’t like to complain. You remember your sister’s words about how there was no one to hear your complaints and you wonder if complaining has been bred out of you.

Your friend tells you you appear too strong, and you realize you’ve lost your voice of connection, how you can no longer speak of your reality, and how you’re drifting further and further away, that solitude has become the only place that feels familiar.

You tell no one.

You change your bed linens to pure white and start living in the world of no color. This is the land where your dreams are born, but you can’t be certain because none are remembered. You don’t know how to answer the question of how you spent your day because saying you floated above it would scare the questioner.

But you are floating because you can’t anchor in the world of hatred, in the world of divisions and rush rush rush. You float above because your perspective doesn’t allow you to be within, and you wonder when this shift happened, when you began to live above the earth, when parties and dinners and common interactions started to feel so foreign.

You remember once living with someone, only you don’t. It appears in your memory like a book you once read but that didn’t touch you deeply. All of life feels unfamiliar and that’s why you grow quiet because you know no ears could understand these words. You know you can’t explain what it means to be an alien in your native land.

Others smile, see your state as a phase, but you know it’s bigger than that. You know your idealism has been massacred by the news that seeps under your front door, through the little crack that allows outside in, the place where you forgot to lay down protection. You want to say that no matter what happens a week from Tuesday you will no longer be who you once were because you’ve been saddened beyond a place of redemption, that you’ve seen ugly where you never knew ugly existed in a way you never allowed to be imagined, in a form so disheartening that even if your candidate wins you know that you can never feel as you once did.

You want these ten days to pass because you hope that you’ll be able to breathe again with a gap in the airwaves, when news anchors and campaign leaders crawl home in exhaustion wondering how they weathered it all.

But then there’s the other half of you, the half that believes this will never be over because some story will linger. A dispute or thievery or something odd and unimaginable. The noise in your head has grown so loud that you no longer believe it can go away. You no longer can imagine calm and silence and a collective sigh of relief because, you see, you already fear the infighting.

You have been poisoned and you wonder what kind of purging can clean the soul. You wish a wave of burning sage could smudge your psyche, your heart, and reset both on the dial of idealism, of optimism, of hope.

Your trust in decency and good has been shattered and only a time machine can take you back to you.

The getting away. That is the consistent fantasy. A quiet life on a quiet island where no news matters, where society can only progress in teeny tiny increments, where slow is really slow. No alarm clock, no schedule, no questioning of why. Simple.

You’ve lost simple and only this fantasy gives you its glimpse.

Your life has been on the run ever since you had the ability to power your own two-wheeler. You hear tales of your early independence and you suspect all you were doing was trying to get away, trying to put a wall between you and the house you were born into. You seek to create family with friends so that you can learn what for others was a given, but with all the motion of life, without bloodlines it doesn’t work.

You go back to your room of white sheets and tan walls and wonder what color would do to the experience. You wonder if it could reintroduce feeling into your life, trump numb, and make you step outside for sunsets once again.

You start with a captured image and the link to a printer. And one by one you place two-dimensional replications of a moment in time on your walls, arranged and organized beside one another until you have a jigsaw puzzle of mismatched pieces. You see that red and blue are the dominant colors of your images and you wonder how that happened, how the colors of an election could become the colors of your memories. You select the image of the lemon to add yellow to the scene, but once on the wall you realize the background is a deep hue of red.

Finally you laugh. Finally.

Last year you bought a bracelet that said LAUGH as a mandate and to be a reminder to ride on your wrist, only it hasn’t worked, and now you want to trade it for another word, a word you could possibly access for real because wearing the bracelet and not laughing mocks your efforts. You want to feel successful.

Yes, that’s what it’s all about – wanting to feel successful in every version of what that word can mean. Successful in joy, in love, in honoring self and truth and dedication and feeling. And that’s what drifted away on the raft out to sea, bobbing over waves. Success. The ability to feel in your life rather than floating above it. It drifted away when you weren’t paying attention, and now you don’t know how to get it back, how to find satisfied and content in a world gone crazy, in a world gone ugly. Except when you’re on that island and the water taps the shore leaving little arches of wetness. That’s where you feel calm. That’s where all the madness falls away. That’s where you find quiet. Only you don’t know where the island is. You don’t know how to get there. You don’t know.

‡ ‡ ‡ ‡ ‡

Earlier today a friend told me to write about how this election is making me insane, how I’ve shut down, grown unable to speak. I said I didn’t want to go there, that all the rants have been written, that the smartest minds with the loudest voices are being ignored. I said I just want it all to be over. What I didn’t say is that I don’t know if it will get better.

And as I write this it sounds as if I don’t believe things can ever be good again, but what I mean to say is that even if things do get good, a part of me may remain sad. A part of me will never get over what it’s seen.

Existential crisis

2008-10-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

[From a folder of pieces started and abandoned. I bring them forth now.]

My son climbed into my car yesterday, a look of sadness on his face. He said nothing was wrong, but I prodded him, clear that something was on his mind.

And he starts describing how he sees his life, how he doesn’t dislike school – he has no complaints against it – but he doesn’t exactly like it either. He just sees the days passing by, the time barely noticed. He says he doesn’t know why he’s learning what he’s learning.

I offer words about the complexity of the unforeseeable value in it all, but that isn’t the problem for him. He gets that.

“Let’s say I use what I learn in school, that I become a successful cartoonist, get married, have kids, everything. What’s the point?”

At thirteen, his existential crisis is a bit ahead of schedule.

I explain to my son that I struggle with how childhood is structured as a training ground for adulthood, that childhood should be enjoyed and appreciated as a unique and equally valuable phase of life, but that at the same time, we do need to learn and prepare for the future, that it comes down to balance. And he says that he understands and has been thinking about all that, but he then returns to his view of life overall, the existential crisis part.

I tell him that I completely understand his feelings, that I share them and even as an adult still think about all the things he has expressed. I explain that some people are wired to examine life in this way while others just march on with little thought to it all.

He and I fall into the first category.

And I can’t exactly answer his questions about the meaning of life since I have the same ones, but I tell him our discussion alone is important, that simply sharing the examination matters.

But it also pains me that he doesn’t just feel joy.

He asks if life is about being as happy as you can or about what you do. He believes in helping others, and sounds as if he feels guilty about seeking happiness. I answer by saying pursuing a happy life is an excellent goal, especially if you help others in the process.

I realize how much his questions are the ones I ask myself and wonder if that reveals how much alike we are or whether it reveals how much I’ve influenced him. And I wonder if he’s come to this place as a normal act of questioning or whether his life needs a shift, whether he would connect with more happiness at a less conventional school.

And I look to myself to see if I can inject more joy into our days, if I can focus less on where we’re headed, how we will get there, and what the impact of today will be on tomorrow. I think of ways to look for more frivolous fun. I don’t want to teach my son to be irresponsible, but I do want to allow him more laughter. And if I look for it for him, I suspect that along the way I’ll find it for myself.

It’s as if my son’s thoughts and questions have poked me in the ribs, stirred up the pot within, and forced me to reexamine my methods. It’s as if he is my wakeup call, and now I must aim to parent in a more joyous way. I must trust that I have already sufficiently grounded him and now it’s time to teach him to soar. It’s time to teach myself. My accomplishments will mean little if I can’t look upon them with a celebratory heart.

Be mindful of the future, but don’t live for it. Don’t count on your expectations and hopes coming true. Be open to the serendipity and the detours. Trust.

In Empty Spaces

2008-10-22T13:55:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure who I am right now, whether words will return to me, whether I’ll find the desire to speak. So I dig down to what I’ve known before, the capturing, the offering of service, the one foot in front of the other.

This takes me to the dogs, the ones abandoned and homeless, the ones with large eyes of hope. I see myself in those eyes. I relate to the feelings of lost.

Or I project. Whatever it is doesn’t matter. I show up.

I take their photos trying to make them look as desirable as possible, to capture their essence in a tiny frame. I think of online dating and see the overlap from dog needing a home to person needing love. Neither wants to look desperate. Neither wants to seem needy. Both want to appear as an offering.

The dogs quickly grow tired of my prodding to look this way, to move left, to move right, to respond, to bend their faces into a smile. They realize I am not there to take them home. Their attention drifts off, their disinterest unmistakable.

I process and edit the photos, send them off, and eagerly await their posting online. My imagination decides a simple, happy photo will earn these dogs a home. Of course I know better. Of course I know how complicated it is.

Like online dating. Appearance counts for a moment, but then the other conditions fall into play. Size. Temperament. Style. Behavior. Plays well with others.

I have more in common with these dogs than I care to admit. I, too, feign initial enthusiasm only to quickly let my attention drift. I, too, give up hope when the wrong words are directed my way. I, too, wonder when I will find home.

For the dogs, I maintain hope.

For myself, I put one foot in front of the other. I wait to see if words will return to remind me why I’m here. I prod myself forward and think about home.

to find a pet, visit petfinder.com. these dogs currently reside with Bill Foundation.

Filed in: pet adoption

Modern Convenience

2008-10-02T13:55:00.001-07:00

I find it extremely ironic that the only page that won't load on my iPod Touch via the NY Times app is the technology page.

Silence

2008-10-01T10:46:00.000-07:00

The teen years and silence. So much is said about how our children retreat, pull inward, keep thoughts to self.

That is yet to be my reality, but silence has descended upon the scene. Silence. My silence.

When my son shares with me the gritty details of teen living, of feelings, friends’ behavior, risks and calamities avoided, I grow more silent. I let him speak and don’t leap in with my words. I wait for the pause in the conversation, read his eyes, see if he wants me to comment. I tread carefully knowing that an unwelcome response can shut the door on future disclosures. And I often misstep, speak against a friend he just railed on only to see him do an about-face and defend the same person. It’s like chiming in to criticize someone’s boyfriend only to see loyalty and love rear up and come charging back at you. It all requires a light touch.

But there’s another silence that enters the teen years: my (un)willingness to share specifics here upon the page of the discussions I have with my son. The cute quotes get tucked away. The overwhelming concerns hide in my conscience. His pain, it all gets more private. Because there really is something unique about this phase, and number one for me is respecting my child. Number one is keeping him coming back to me for as long as he’s willing.

Trust. It is so tender at this age, so easily damaged, such a precious commodity.

“We are a village,” other parents say as they beg to exchange details of our children’s teen behavior, details of what our children are doing when out of sight.

I have some knowledge that I don’t share, a fine line to walk, for this knowledge comes to me from my son, and my primarily responsibility is to keep that line of communication open and flowing. If I witness something first hand, I have every right to report – and I will if a child is at risk – but if the information comes to me via my teen, I must respect his disclosure.

Is this easy? Absolutely not. Were I to hear of escalated dangerous behavior from my son, would I go to the child’s parents? This is the struggle, for I may help one family and never hear another word from my son. I could lose contact with all future disclosures, disclosures that could prove more critical, disclosures of my son’s own behavior that I must be there to hear.

Were my son to share something that required immediate intervention, I would assert the need to share this information. My son and I have talked about this, but it’s dicey. It would be a negotiation, but I would hope to prevail in stressing the need to speak up, in receiving my child’s blessing to help a friend.

Other parents may scream in hearing my reticence to break my son’s trust, but may I ask, “Would you risk shutting down your child’s voice in order to call another parent to report pot smoking?”

But then I ask myself, “What if the drug use is more serious, what do we do? What if I hear about risky sex or other disquieting behavior?”

This is an ongoing conversation, a conversation with self that takes place in my head, in a room of silence. Meanwhile my son’s voice returns home everyday at 3:00.

Away

2008-09-18T13:55:00.000-07:00

The road that took me away brought me back. Forget jet lag. There’s road jag, the brain trailing behind the speeding vehicle, reaching out to catch the bumper and be pulled along, to climb inside, to relax as a backseat passenger. But even then, the mind – maybe the soul – lingers behind, not able to keep up with the speed.

I’m back and suddenly not sure I left. From tall trees to countless waterfalls, the sights pile upon each other until no longer noteworthy, like when you visit too many cathedrals or museums in Europe, when the impressive ceases to impress, when you hit a default setting of enough and crawl back to that which is familiar.

You think you wanted to get away until you no longer remain in away. Nothing welcomes like your own bed and your dog’s greeting. The memory of away fades so quickly that you want to carve a city sign, etch the word Away capitalized, and name the town. You look at the sign when you need to be there, when you want to be taken again, when familiarity drowns you, and to Away is all you want.

In Away you need so little. Food. Water. Sleep. A shower. You may crave a bath, but you settle for a shower. In Away you have no ambition and you picture yourself holding that job behind the counter, both hotel clerk and cashier for the convenient in-house grocery. True one stop shopping.

You picture the friends you’d make and the conversations you’d have. And while in Away, it all seems like enough, no phones to ring, no newspapers to read, no deadlines. Money only flows out in Away. That’s how it is. You don’t bother thinking of earning, for as a guest in Away it’s not an option. To live in Away, the clerk job would be sufficient because you’d stop thinking of Europe and buying anything more than a new pair of hiking boots.

You’re skinnier in Away because it’s not L.A. You care about so much less in Away, and you wonder how to capture that feeling and bring it home with you, better than any souvenir, better than anything that can be bought.

But the feeling was bought, bought with gas money and hotel fees. The feeling of Away is not free. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Away comes at a price. Namely, you must leave, for if you stay, it is no longer Away. It is Here. Here and Away are not the same place. One who moves discovers this quickly.

But the feeling. To capture the feeling.

You take photos hoping to remember, even the non-artsy one of the parking lot featuring trash bins and your car with the bug-plastered windshield. You snap to aid memory because no one remembers what we think we’ll remember. No, something else is always remembered. Not the beautifully received gift, but the small, tiny slight. Not the most glorious vista, but the kind words of the clerk who drew the makeshift map, the one who will remain for six months at that job before hitting the road for another, and another after that, and again and again.

You want to ask him about a life lived in six month increments. It sounds fantastical, sounds timeless. How can one age when moving at that pace? He will never wake up old, or so it seems in that one conversation. That’s the thing about Away, you ask more questions of strangers. It never feels like prying but rather what is expected and appropriate.

How can you not ask the cave guide how long he’s had his job and how he got it? How can you not ask about the network that lives within the national park walls? The cave guide tells you he will leave when the season ends. He punctuates the thought with the words “Peace Corps,” and you remember when you thought Peace Corps more than twenty years ago but never went, though those two friends did – the couple. And instead of keeping journals, they pledged to write detailed letters to each other daily, having been placed in different countries, to bridge the distance between them. At the end of two years, they would exchange the letters and have them as journals. You remember this detailed plan for their time apart but you have no idea of what their names were and you can’t picture their faces either. All you have held onto is their story, and until the cave guide mentioned Peace Corps you didn’t even know you had that.

That’s how it happens, the triggers, the sparks. And now you can’t stop thinking of that couple, of wondering how the two years went, where they are, who they are, did it work, did they work?

The couples who work.

You want to line them up in a row and fire questions at them, to ask how, when, and why. You see it like a stage play. They stand in the illumination of bright lights and you fire questions from the darkened audience, kind of like A Chorus Line without the music or dance. Just the inquisition.

Weddings can do that. Make you think about couples, about the matching up, the chance of it all, the amazement of believing in the life commitment. When I left home for the wedding, I thought I was just heading off to attend an event, a family gathering, a time of celebration. But hitting the road is always more, is always an opening to something unexpected, to free-flowing thoughts and discovery. Like finding Away, and how it hit me this time as opposed to last time, how it’s getting harder to come home because I don’t know what this life is right now, not with all the changes and transitions and the absence of anchors and definition, without precise direction other than “Wake up and do it again.”

It. Discovering it. Defining it. Finding the label I can attach to my life and mean it. I try not to glorify Away, for that is naïve. But some days that is all I have, my longing for Away.

I've Been Spotted Elsewhere

2008-08-31T18:26:00.001-07:00

Please come say hi, but don't blow my cover.

Tattoo Highway - issue 17
(500 word fiction contest)

(and if you need more info to locate me, please send me an email.)

Images Before Words

2008-06-18T15:20:00.000-07:00

I spent the weekend in memory. Memory, as if it were a place. A passerby, had there been one, pausing long enough to peek into my bedroom would have seen me deep in a task. Surrounded by trays of slides, a scanner propped before me, laptop tethered, I loaded and scanned, loaded and scanned. The buzz of equipment musically augmented the scene. I was in the room and so very far away at the same time.

I am coming up on twenty years or twenty years are coming up on me. You pick. This mark of time prompted action, forced me to tick a chore off a list. Rent scanner. Scan slides. One weekend. Seven hours of immobility. Images and memories and colors and emotion.

1988. The Soviet Union. 500 participants. Multiple nationalities walking under the banner of Soviet-American Peace Walk. Odessa to Kiev with three capping days in Moscow. Tents and sleeping bags and bureaucracy and new friendships. Frustration and final tears. So much, so very much.

I pore through the images. The stories return. The need to capture knocking at my mind. This is just a beginning, a nod to maybe. How much will I present? How much will I revisit? I can’t say. I won’t say. I will show. Image by image. A start. A nudge. A beginning. We shall see…

Spots

2008-05-09T09:06:00.000-07:00

“You grew up here. You played tennis.” She says it both as a statement and a question.

The new dermatologist looks over my body like a surveyor. From mid thigh to ankle the spots loom. Upper chest. Arms. The rest is pristine having lived beneath clothes sheltered from the skin-damaging sun. We didn’t know. We thought tans looked healthy. We liked how we looked when we edged to darker shades. We still do.

But now. Thirty years later. The glow is remembered in sunspots. In damage. Call them freckles, call them aging, they are the map to where we lived, to how we lived. The other skin, the skin rarely on display, is smooth and beautiful. It hints to me of what could have been. I look at my stomach to feel young. Evenly hued, soft. No blemishes, no scarring. It invites touch. It’s ready for its close up. The legs look battered, warriors of service. Speckled white, speckled brown, the dueling effects of five to eight hours a day under Southern California sun.

“I can recognize all of you. Your skin all looks this way,” the dermatologist says.

I’m part of a group, a class. The label makes me sound like a survivor. We pursued our sport for fun, for camaraderie, for achievement and ambition. We thought to the future but were also very in the moment, refining our motions and our focus and our competitiveness. We took breaks on the hottest of days and stripped off our shoes to dip our feet in the pool, the glaring tan lines revealing our dedication. When I dressed for nice occasions out with the family and slipped into sandals, I looked a joke, as if I were still wearing socks. A trip to the drugstore to acquire rub-on color turned my feet a more acceptable shade of orange-tinted tan. It was the best available.

I am mostly one color now excluding the spots of history. Though they tell where I’ve been I do wish I could erase them. I don’t like how they reveal the decay of my skin. I don’t like how they make me feel older than my spirit. I don’t like that I notice them or that I care about them because they link me to vanity I seldom feel.

I look to my son’s fresh skin and I remind him of sunscreen, telling him he doesn’t want to end up looking like I do. And sometimes he listens and sometimes he doesn’t. And I am reminded of all the warnings I ignored and all the ones I still do. I think ahead to when I will think back, to when I will wish I would have taken better care of my body. But we live as we live, and we can’t always aim to prevent, for the burden would be heavy with caution. Joy would succumb to weight. The years on the tennis court gave me much – identity, structure, perseverance, dreams. If only they hadn’t given me spots.

A Little Friendliness

2008-05-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

Strange things are happening in my home. Very strange things. Three days ago I parked in front of the desktop computer, the one I’ve largely handed over to teenaged son. But I had to do some scanning, and this was the place to do it.

I’m a Mac enthusiastic, have been since 1985 when that cute little original Macintosh 512k (with no hard drive, thank you) was handed to me by a friend moving overseas. He’d be set up with a new computer when landing in Tokyo, and I was part of a 501c3 that had a mega grant proposal to write and was very much in need of a computer. All was good.

Major flash-forward. I sit before the sleek aluminum Intel iMac sorting through forms and such when I glance up and see an odd name displayed in my Leopard finder window under Shared. It starts with “mac” and then disintegrates into a series of numbers and letters that looks like a Mac traveling undercover.

“Sharing?!” I gasped. I imagine an uninvited hacker picking files off my desktop. I reach for the phone and call Apple Care, and successfully stump tech rep number one. He hands me off to product specialist, and we spend a lovely and lengthy time together. We succeed in banishing the unwelcome mystery computer after a series of comic mishaps that had me hopping between two laptops and the desktop to see which could successfully communicate with my suddenly nonfunctioning Airport Express. Bravo, the older and semi-retired iBook G4 running Tiger came to the rescue proving that newer isn’t always better.

With a more potent password protecting my wireless connection, I retire to my private space downstairs and disappear into laptop land. For a little intriguing sidebar information, my desktop had its airport card turned off and is hardwired to the internet. Does the fact that resetting the wireless device banished the mystery machine truly make sense then? Of course not, but can’t dispute successful results. And no, the phantom computer did not show up on my laptop on the same network. It’s a mystery appropriate for Ellery Queen if he weren’t a fictional character living in pre-computer times.

Yesterday. More scanning called for. I head upstairs. Phantom computer has returned, but I don’t have it in me to chat up tech support. “Tomorrow,” I think. “Tomorrow.”

Tomorrow is today. I head upstairs to retrieve papers from my file cabinet, and when I glance at desktop, the phantom computer taunts me. It struts across my desktop, and I reach for the phone.

An hour of friendly discourse with product specialist number two. We run some fascinating tests that I email to him which allows him to conclude that I have a good son.

“You call tell that from gathering info off my system?” I ask.

“Yeah, he doesn’t use any illegal downloading programs.”

I sit up straighter in case product specialist can see my posture via that freaky device, and smile proudly at how I’m raising my teen. But my exhausted scowl returns when product specialist number two reveals that nothing in the data explains the mystery computer. I only need hear the words ‘archive and install’ once over the phone line to tremble with fear. Setting up this computer and installing all my programs and updates took about two days. I am so not reinstalling my operating system and doing that again. Product specialist places me on hold to confer with other tech gurus. I’m proud that I’m stumping the best of the best.

“Well, everyone hear agrees that your computer is just searching for other computers on the network.”

“You mean I just have a really friendly computer?” He laughs. “Hadn’t thought of it that way,” he says. I clarify that there shouldn’t actually be anyone else accessible on my closed network, and he clarifies that no one is actually gaining access to my computer. We hang up after a few more laughs but not before my new tech friend sends me a picture of a cat, “just to check that your internet is working fine.” I haven’t received this much affection from a man in a long time.

Returned to the silence of me and my desktop, I think of its personality, how sitting alone in a loft for countless hours each day and night has appeared to leave it lonely. By means none of us completely understand, it’s reaching out to find other computers. And it’s succeeding. On a closed network. In fact during the final minutes of my phone call with product specialist number two, desktop found another potential friend. I now see two mystery names under Shared, one portrayed by an ancient box-type monitor icon and the other a proud, sleek iMac variety. My computer is nondiscriminating.

If our pets can start looking like us and us like them, can the same thing happen with our technology? Isolation and reaching out…I’ll leave it to your imagination. Mine’s already going wild.

Why?

2008-04-17T11:50:00.001-07:00

(click on photo for clarity of question...)

Whims of Desire

2008-03-07T10:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday my son and I got lost in Los Angeles traffic. Not really lost, but delayed. Confined. Streets immobilized by what I later learned was a landslide that closed a major thoroughfare and had that trickledown effect of gridlocking a city already hovering beneath the strain of too many cars.

We aborted our plan, said ‘another time’ to karate, and turned the car towards home. As they say, “a blessing in disguise.” An afternoon ahead of us with unplanned extra time together, homework free, a chance to just be.

“Can we go to Europe again this summer?” my son blurts out out of nowhere.

“No, I don't think so,” I respond practically. “Why?”

“Well, it was fun when we went.”

That was three summers ago. Three weeks of travel with an eleven-year-old who felt homesick rather quickly, missing our dog, missing his bed. He opted for hours in a hotel room with Harry Potter over wandering the cities with me. I wondered if in some ways I'd brought him too soon, a trip wasted, before he could fully appreciate what was around him.

But here he is, longing for a return trip, wanting to go with me, asking with hopeful eyes.

“I wish we could go,” I say, his having activated the longing in me. “If we could, where would you want to?”

I’m playing with the fantasy as much for him as for me. For a while now, I’ve sidelined my travel bug. In abandoning a career with real paychecks to chase a dream of writer, I don’t know when the next paycheck will arrive. I don’t know when these free wandering trips will again be an option. I’m dipping into stockpiled resources on a regular basis these days. How long can that continue? Which impulses can I listen to?

“I’d like to see Scandinavia,” he says. “Sweden. Oh, and the Netherlands.”

Most of my travel has centered around what I might call the passionate countries: Italy, France, Greece. I speak Italian and French, though that may be a generous description of my current language skills, and I’ve always gravitated to places where I can slide into the native language and not arrive as the stereotypical, American tourist approaching everyone and simply speaking English.

I think of my son’s desires, his instincts to hit these northern countries, and I imagine my experiences expanding with his lead. I imagine us with backpacks hopping on and off of trains as I did for months post-college more than twenty years ago. I imagine our being able to share this experience before he decides being with his mom isn’t really that much fun, a time I thought had already arrived before he launched this conversation.

“I wish I was studying a real foreign language at school,” he continues. “Latin doesn’t count. You can’t really speak it.”

I’m treasuring this moment, the fourteen-year-old before me wanting to speak a foreign tongue, wanting to leave the comfort of the known, and venture out.

Since that conversation, I can’t get the image out of my head of our traveling together, even though the last time was challenging. I check my accumulated frequent flier miles that I zapped down to zero last year, and see if they’ve built up enough to squeeze out two tickets to Europe if I could miraculously find any open flights during the peak travel season. Miles away from what I need, I turn to the internet to search for cheap fares to anywhere over there, to find just a place to land and begin. I start thinking of how I could possibly support this trip, if some magazine somewhere might want to hear of the tales of a single mom and a single son wandering cities and countrysides, discovering the land and each other.

And I decide to put that out there, to create the intent and the possibility, for when will I even again be presented with this opportunity with my son? How can I let it pass due to life’s practical decisions? Is it worth stretching, and borrowing from here to pay for there, all with the promise of an irreplaceable experience?

Most of me screams, “Yes! Don’t let this go!” Another part of me says, “It’s irresponsible.” I want to put both voices in a ring and let them duke it out. You know who I want to win.

I know I haven’t heard the end of this. Not from my son, but from myself.

I Saw Magic

2008-03-02T09:50:00.000-08:00

You won’t believe me, but don’t file this under fiction.

Morning. Long awake. The enjoyment of a novel completed and set down, logged into my list of books read and books awaiting. A few more long minutes of rolling over onto my side to enjoy eyes closed and the quiet of Sunday morning, surprising quiet in my densely populated neighborhood of apartments atop apartments beside apartments.

I feel the pull to climb from bed. To start. To stand. Towards the bathroom I walk. Eyes to the bathtub. Turn the tap and close the drain. A brush of teeth as the tub fills. An unwrapping of a fresh toothbrush after I realize it’s already the second day of the month and my hygienist recommends fresh bristles on the flip of the calendar.

Task complete. I climb into the tub. A soak anticipated. A slow entry into the day. I see the large jar of sea salts sitting before me. I usually turn away, not a huge fan, not from a place of displeasure but from never having fully felt the tingle. Today I say, Yes, I will soak with you. I add a generous supply to the water below the tap, close the lid, and replace the jar. I lay back and relax.

My mind dances. It always does. Leaps from thought to idea and back again. Heads west and circles left. Constant motion. Constant exploration. I reach for bath gel, spill a little into my palm, and lather up. Rinse. No repeat. Moments pass. Mind still moving. And then I see it. I train my focus, for it can’t be real, can’t really be there, but it is.

Floating five feet above me to the right is the tiniest of soap bubbles, at most a quarter inch in diameter. How it got there, I can’t imagine. My eyes lock on, follow its descent, waiting to see where it will land. It magically avoids the shower curtain and darts towards the green-tiled wall. I await the collision, but no, the bubble changes direction, zooms towards free air and leaps skyward. A collision with the ceiling, I think. But no, the bubble reins itself in. Stops short. Chooses a new course.

This goes on for five minutes. I barely breathe. I refuse to move. I don’t want to create air currents to affect movement. I invite the bubble to land on me. It hovers above. I think of Glenda the Good Witch and her descent to earth. I watch and watch and move my mind away from impatience, away from wanting to know how it will end. I just keep watching.

The bubble circles the entire area above the bath. It never heads towards the more open area of the room. It travels perilously close to the walls, but always dodges away at the final moment. I think, No one will believe this.

The bubble comes dangerously close to my face, so close that my eyes can’t focus. I fear I will lose its story in my failing vision. I fear I won’t see its last moments. But then it moves away. I follow its path. It circles me twice again, and then moves across my body. Diagonally. Slowly. It dips. It dips more. And it lands. Of all the places, it lands upon me. An inch from where left arm meets body. It doesn’t break. The bubble bonds with my skin and sits there in its perfect form. I wait. I wonder. And then it’s gone. It didn’t really pop. It just ceased to be.

I sit up, release the drain, and reach for a towel. I climb from the bath, enter my bedroom, and head to the keyboard.

Zero Tolerance

2008-02-27T12:41:00.000-08:00

There have been a lot of noteworthy shakeups lately at private schools in my city of Los Angeles. Expulsions for drugs. Expulsions for cheating. Many of the decisions to expel fall under the ‘zero tolerance’ clause accompanying life these days.

I roll zero tolerance around in my head and think, “Oh, how easy to educate our children when they’re behaving and following our rules, and oh, how quickly we discard them when they get out of line.”

I know the infractions of these assorted children are serious. I know the actions deserve consequences. But expulsion? Is that the best way to handle these matters? Shouldn’t school remain a key ingredient in realigning the child gone astray? And what kind of lesson is taught with a simple discarding of the misbehaving child?

I am not an educator, nor am I a psychologist, but I am a parent, and I believe there are lessons to be learned from being caught using drugs and cheating, lessons that go beyond, “Well, you blew it and you’re out of here.” Whatever happened to the punishment that fits the crime? There are lots of possibilities: extra schoolwork, real community service (as opposed to a lot of cushy experiences children select), maybe visiting juvenile programs for those who fell victim to bad circumstances and bad choices. Come on, administrators. Get creative. Isn’t that part of the job, educating the whole child and not just the part that always toes the line? And yes, of course, get the parents involved.

Expulsion is purely punitive. Naturally, there are times when it comes down to this, but the practice of zero tolerance is a dreadful lesson to impart of our youth, especially if we want them to learn about their actions and see how they can right a wrong. And is zero tolerance a phrase we really want circulating in society these days? I’m not for coddling – quite the opposite – but I think simply relocating a child to a new school places little burden on the child and teaches little responsibility. What it mostly does is remove the original school from the burden of dealing with the child and offers a public display that says, “We’re serious about this problem.” That may benefit the school, but it hardly benefits the child.

Philosophizing

2008-01-29T09:26:00.001-08:00

What if there is no right answer? Does that translate to mean there is no wrong answer?

Acts of Love

2008-01-24T14:17:00.000-08:00

In an act of love, I ironed a shirt for my son. I despise ironing. When purchasing clothing, the item must pass two tests: Can it forego ironing and can it go into the washing machine? Hand wash? I don’t think so. Dry cleaning? Paying for the item over and over every time you wear it? No, thanks.

My son is old enough to learn to iron his own clothes, but we don’t own an ironing board. Initiating him into this undesirable practice while requiring him to navigate our awkwardly shaped and unwelcoming flat surfaces is cruel, kind of like forcing him to learn to drive on a stick shift, which by the way is only about a year away. Good luck, dear son. Just pretend you walked into a time machine and you have no choice, which of course you don’t since I’m not heading off to buy an automatic.

On the other hand, putting my son behind the wheel of a five speed with the worst blind spots of any car I’ve ever driven is foolish. A friend recently told me that the period of driving under a learner’s permit is mostly to get the parents used to the idea of the child driving. He said his son is already quite skilled behind the wheel, but he and his wife need the time to digest their son’s progression to adulthood. I don’t doubt it. When I look at my son and imagine his navigating a large moving vehicle through our traffic-crazed city I pretend it will never happen.

To fend off the inevitable, I come up with a set of preliminary tasks.

“You must first learn to iron. If you can’t drive an iron, you can’t drive a car.” Or cooking. “If you can’t find your way around a stationary stove, I’m certainly not setting you loose on the open highway.” Laundry will follow close behind, or maybe take the lead since it is the safest and easiest of the three.

Ironing, cooking, laundry. Maybe this has nothing to do with priming my son to drive. Maybe I just want to lighten the load around the house.

My ex-husband was raised in a foreign rural village where his sisters taught him self-reliance. When we moved in together, he knew his way around the kitchen better than I did. Not only could he mend clothes but he could also create them from scratch. Mother of necessity, they say.

For the few years that my son saw his parents living together, he didn’t witness stereotypical gender roles. There wasn’t a go-to parent for certain tasks. House duties were spread around. But there is something in me that has ratcheted up the nurturing since the end of the marriage. I feel my son has taken on added responsibility in his role of ‘man of the house’, and I want him to still have a childhood, to feel cared for and not be rushed into adulthood. I don’t want him to feel that he never had a chance to just play and be. But I also don’t want him to sit back and wait to be catered to.

Sometimes after spending times at friends’ houses, he returns home and when I ask him to vacuum his room he replies, “Kids aren’t supposed to do that.” And I challenge him on the notion, ask him if he really believes that the mountain of cleaning duties should all fall to me. Faced with the accusation and shame I throw at him, he reaches for the vacuum or the scrub brush and gets to work on his room and bathroom. Part of me is really proud and part of me dreads his inner thoughts of how his friends have it easier, how he might shift to a moment of, “If only.”

I know that when he heads out on his own, he’ll inwardly thank me for his knowing his way around home maintenance, that he won’t feel robbed of a childhood but that he’ll feel a bit grateful that his apartment won’t make the first girl he brings home grimace. And I imagine that girl thinking that my son is something special beyond all the obvious traits and assets he puts forth, that she’s finally met a guy who can keep his own place clean.

And then I wake from my delicious fantasy and iron my son’s next shirt and try to figure out in which car he’ll learn to drive. Luckily I have a year to solve that problem.

It's Who You Know

2008-01-21T10:45:00.000-08:00

I’m supposed to not worry that my son’s new school may not be teaching him anything. “Connections,” my friend says. “He’s making connections.” I’ve neglected to tell my son that middle school is about networking, that the power play of private school is setting up your future via who you know. Funny, I’d had other thoughts about middle school, but I’m naïve in that way. My friend makes her comment with humor, trying to ease my concern that I must solve this problem.

My son left a rigorous, academic middle school program to join a private school in September that equally favors the arts with the academics. At least that was the pitch. At least that’s what we hoped. As a dedicated artist, he was feeling underserved at the public school, hemmed in creatively. Each day felt repetitive and lacking in imagination. He grumbled constantly.

At his new school, his arts are thriving. But when your teen repeatedly comes home from eighth grade asking for his academics to be more challenging, you pay attention. After all, this is the phase where he’s supposed to be all about play and distraction.

So this past week I’ve felt anger boiling in me that I face this school dilemma again. I long for the era of no choice, when you shoved your kid in the neighborhood public school and met up with him again at graduation pleased he’d done enough to get into a good college. At least that’s how my parents did it. I don’t think they knew what I was up to for an entire decade.

Recently I heard a lecture on Ted.com by psychologist Barry Schwartz about the fact that we strive for choice because we think it improves happiness but in fact the opposite is true. Too much choice creates dissatisfaction. And as I heard the words, I felt my head nodding. There is comfort in making the best of what you have over analyzing if you should go for another option all together.

But I can’t unring the bell of school choice at this point. I know it’s out there. My son knows it’s out there. I can tell him to make the best of where he is, to point out that opportunity exists if you seek it. And trust me, we’ve had this conversation in exhaustive detail, but choice denied does not erase its existence. The question of whether he is in the right place will whine in the back of our minds.

I think back to my practical friend, the one who recommends the art of teenage networking. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I have to look at this humorously. Maybe my academic artist son will do just fine in the long run of life if he cozies up to future art buyers and the well-connected. After all, it certainly can’t hurt.

Public Service Announcement

2008-01-15T12:43:00.000-08:00

Did you know that when your dishwasher is on, it is not full of water, that it is not exactly a washing machine for your dishes? I mean, it washes them, but it’s not an enormous tank of water filled from bottom to top.

You may have known this. You may not have overlooked the dishwasher’s design of a pull-down front door that certainly would have been a precarious way to hold water.

And if you knew this and your dishwasher started making a loud and suspicious sound upon hitting ‘start’ only to later leak water from the lower right corner, you may have done something different from thinking, “Ugh, the leak has returned,” and then call the dishwasher repair company that replaced a hose four months earlier.

No, you might have hit ‘cancel’ and opened the door to see if just maybe you hadn’t closed it sufficiently the first time around, because, you see, your dishwasher is not like your front-loading washing machine, the one that won’t even indicate power if the door is not fully closed. Had you known that only about an inch or two of water sits in the bottom of the dishwasher, you wouldn’t have envisioned a flood pouring across your kitchen floor and eventually seeping into your downstairs neighbor’s home.

My repairman, who arrived only to discover that my dishwasher was working perfectly, taught me all this. He told me that it’s safe to open your dishwasher during any phase of the cycle because the machine shuts off and drains within two minutes, and even if it isn’t drained, the water is so low that it can’t leave the dishwasher. We discussed barbeque forks that may just interfere with the dishwasher achieving a tight seal as they press their length against the door. I appreciated his desire to offer up this visual as an illustration to his lesson.

And unlike me, writing a $60 dollar check to the repairman who has just said, “Sorry, I have to charge you,” you wouldn’t be tempted to say, “Really? You do? That full amount?” given he was in your home for a maximum of ten minutes and the last time he’d come out you paid him $187 to pull out the machine and replace a drainage hose. You wouldn’t have thought any of that because you wouldn’t have called him in the first place.

Of course his time is worth something. And what it’s worth, I realize, goes beyond his fixing skills. I didn’t pay him to repair my dishwasher, but I did just pay him $60 to educate me about my dishwasher and to rewire the inner workings of my imagination, the same imagination that previously created images of dishes taking a soaking bath within my dishwasher rather than sitting and enjoying a spraying shower.

“Now I know,” I say to the repairman as he hands me my receipt. “Now I know.”

The Tree

2008-01-04T12:03:00.000-08:00

She places the tree outside to experience weather, but the tree has never experienced weather so it does know how to process the move. Instead of seeing an opportunity, the tree feels cast outside in punishment, cold and scared, and slips into reliving its behavior to try to understand how by sitting in a window sill, quietly without bothering anyone, only asking for water on the occasional day and then only doing so by appearing parched and dry, did it deserve a trip to the porch, a third story balcony for precision, where the view is beautiful but the temperature cold.

The tree doesn’t know that its guardian thought it would enjoy the natural fall of rain that brings with it whatever nature intends. Well, that plus city pollutants riding along as stowaways.

The guardian, awaiting the promised rain, glimpses over her shoulder to spy on the potted tree and feels a small pang, knows what it’s like to be jolted into a new environment without warning, without explanation, without the proper tools for survival. But then the guardian remembers. Tools rise up from within, make the possessor stronger and better prepared for the unexpected future.

She glances to the tree again, and thinks, “I know it’s a bit cold, but when the rain comes, you will enjoy it.” At least she hopes so.

List of Lists – or – Emptying My Head

2007-12-18T13:32:00.000-08:00

Card list
Shopping list
To Do list
To Be list
To See list
To Know list
To Taste list
To Feel list
To Dream list
To Mourn list
To Appreciate list
To Scream Of list
To Thank list
To Let Go Of list
To Embrace list
To Find list
To Release list
To Purge list
To Avoid list
To Understand list
To Remember list

There. I feel lighter now.

Learning is Doing

2007-12-18T10:35:00.000-08:00

My mom always says to me, “I need to learn to do all the things you can on the computer.” She says it like it’s a project that lays ahead, one that must be committed to and planned for. But today, as I looked at how I manipulate my machine to make cards and gifts, to edit movies and create DVDs, I realize that learning is doing. I never set out to know these things. I didn’t one day say, “I must figure out how to make a photo book.” I just did it. Trial and error. Navigating through screens and tools, mistakes and successes. Had someone taught me how to get the results I wanted, I wouldn’t have gotten the results I wanted because I didn’t know what I wanted until I saw it and built it and lived it.

Maybe I need to remember this when I grow frustrated with the progress – or apparent lack thereof – in my life. I always come back to fighting the process and longing for the results. I do live by doing, but the doing can feel slow and tedious. The doing can hit serious ditches in the road that fling me from the seat I ride in, toss me in the air with no way to navigate. I flap my wings, but I’m no bird, so I hit the ground hard. I stay prone and cry a little, secretly, into covers pulled up to my eyes so no one sees and no one knows. After all, I have my pride.

Pride. My other demon. Pride and Success laugh at me because they know I hold them in such high esteem. They know that as long as they are my goal, they will dine without me. They know to get to sit at the table with them I must take a circuitous route. A smarter tack would be for me to turn my back on those beasts who taunt me so.

So I called up Process and asked if we could have coffee. Process smiled knowingly into her end of the phone line. She’d been waiting for my invitation. She doesn’t know how hard it is for me to be her friend, to even want to be her friend. She doesn’t know that even when I want to appreciate her, others plant fear in my mind. They tell me that I may go broke. They tell me with their eyes that I am being foolish, that I am a sweet dreamer. Those looks activate my inbred fear, give life to what rests buried within, bring to the surface what I must struggle to shove down again.

Over our steaming brew I ask Process how to better embrace her. I ask her where to find Trust, a necessary companion for the journey. Process tells me that she can’t tell me, that the answer lies within her and is only accessible to me through our friendship.

For a moment I feel cheated, deprived of instant answers and the comfort of knowing. I tell Process that everyday I try to believe in myself. I try to quiet the dissenting voices of Security and Instant Gratification. I try to not need.

But I do need. And needing is hard. We live in this vast community of fractured ties. We come together in times of real trouble, but I don’t know how much we’re there for each other when only simple questions arise, questions that may seem personal and specific. We don’t slow the way the support demands. We talk about this and we know this, but we don’t know how to climb off the treadmill. We have become addicted to our habits. We don’t know how to break loose.

Except when we do, when we pause and say, “I can do this differently.” Those are the glorious days. Those are the nights that we go to bed not exhausted but exhilarated. Those are the times we most dream of. This is when we find our true selves.

My true self needs to work hard on my relationship with Process. A casual coffee is not enough. It needs to not let you scare me with your words of concern, with your “How will you earn money now?”

“I don’t know,” I whisper gently into the wind, hoping my words will float to the land where what I say and do matters, where the images in my mind have meaning and value, where I can be me and live and flourish and appreciate Process. If I see it, perhaps it can be.

x & y

2007-12-11T09:31:00.000-08:00

By definition it was inevitable that she and her son would end up in different generational classifications, but it didn’t mean she had to like it. So when she sat him down to discuss the gap between them, she had all her points carefully inked and bulleted on a lined index card for clarity.

“We need to talk,” she started, sounding more like a woman about to end a relationship than one trying to speak to her own offspring.

“Um,” he responded in perfect teen pitch that signaled obligation rather than interest.

But before she could continue, she flashed on her childhood of wonder, the time of bb guns and endless bike rides, of games of ditch in hotel corridors and shoplifting at the local five and dime. Hers was the more disobedient generation, the one operating outside parental observation.

‘Be home before dark’ was the extent of adult guidance. That and ‘The Golden Rule.’

What if she could shift right now in this precise moment and offer her son those few words? She could tear up her list and allow him the freedom to encounter error and hurt, to walk his own path and learn his own way. She could give him that gift, if only she could do so and still breathe.

The Water's Edge

2007-12-10T12:54:00.000-08:00

I’ve been away. Mostly inside myself. Today I venture back to the water’s edge, dip my toe in, see how it feels. I don’t exactly know what took me away but it was potent and strong, like a demon who shows up in your dreams without revealing origin or motive.

Hidden in the folds was crisis of confidence, now replaced with glimmer of belief and a willingness to see what unfolds. New documents opened, stories combined, word counts and page clicks. Walks down avoided paths, a loosening of the tongue, a maybe.

Being Good

2007-09-13T14:03:00.000-07:00

Are you being a good person if you’re trying to be a good person? Does it count if you’re conscious of the fact, if you’re measuring your own progress, which then by definition contains some self-congratulations? Doesn’t that negate the goodness or at least diminish the selflessness of it?

How about those who are just good by nature, who operate unconsciously? One could argue that since their goodness is effortless they deserve less credit. However, we tend to praise those born into goodness as if somehow, somewhere, they created their own nature.

My nature feels born of less goodness. My quibbling brain. The scowls my face births effortlessly. The judgments of my mind I strive to silence even though they exist only in thought. Does fighting what I dislike about my nature elevate my goodness rating or does my innate badness trump action? And does my interest in my rating further lower my goodness factor?

In this Catch 22, my striving for goodness casts my actions as disingenuous. When I bought a new baby gift for the neighbor below me, a neighbor I almost never see or speak to, was I just purchasing goodness points in the package of cute onesies? What did she think when I knocked on her door and handed over my purchase? “Thank you,” or “Why now?” When I left after our short visit where I got the birth story and commented on the girl’s full head of hair and inaudible cries, why did I think, “I did it,” as if it had been a challenge?

When I let a signaling driver into my lane, I do it out of courtesy, but also to show I am good. When I make a charitable contribution, more attempts at goodness, even if I genuinely support and care about the cause. Goodness is my constant barometer.

In yesterday’s state of dysfunction when my brain begged to cocoon, to not speak or interact, to say no to the phone, it still offered me all these questions. It sat me down and stuck a pen in my hand. It told me, “Go ahead. Explore.” It told me that questions can matter as much as answers. And when I ran out or words, it took me to the movies to see “In the Shadow of the Moon,” a documentary that not only took me into space but took me back to a precious childhood moment that made me swell with nostalgia and the sensation of wonder.

I walked out of the theater glad I had gone alone, glad that no one else’s experience of the film could debate my own, glad that I could just be in that moment. And all the questions of goodness fell away, for I can only be who I am, like it or not. I will not walk on the moon as I once dreamed. I will not be remembered for goodness. But those who knew me may chew on my understated perseverance. Or maybe not.

And I will still try to be good, rating be damned.

In Lieu of My Writing...

2007-08-27T13:32:00.001-07:00

...go check out my friend's new book and help send her up those bestseller lists.

(click on the photo for a link to her website...)

It Started as a Letter

2007-08-22T10:45:00.000-07:00

I worked through the first two weeks of my editing job, and now I'm on hiatus for three weeks until I dive back in till the end (supposedly three weeks.) It's bizarre to be back in the editing room realizing I have these skills that I seldom think about, realizing how disconnected I am in many ways from the work I did for years and years. And now, here I am, time off, able to write if I choose, and not so inspired in that arena. I think I'm just a wanderer and explorer in my soul, that all these other things I do are just things I do.

Things I do. The things I do. It’s odd to have this sensation of passing the time (and to encounter the ‘v’ key on my computer refusing to depress unless I assault it harshly with repeated stabs. Maybe completing my words is simply what the ‘v’ key does, not what resides in its soul.) Some people – fortunate souls, perhaps – connect with the life they lead. They wander into the day they call community. They exchange tidbits with friends about the progress and amusement of their kids’ lives. They strive to move upward in a career, in a passion, in a framework carefully crafted and nurtured.

I find them a mystery.

I live life as if I’ve been dropped here from a passing spacecraft, deposited to do a job of observation, taking notes, analyzing data, all the while wondering when my ship will return and take me back to a home I don’t remember but that somehow I believe must exist. It exists here for others, so mine must, too, but just not here.

So I pass my days doing things of sweet interest. I disappear joyously into assembling those horrendously addictive photo books one can create through iPhoto. I stare at my dog and try to crawl into his brain to imagine his experience of sunshine and a carelessly tossed towel that becomes his well-designed bed after tugs and molding. I shuttle my teen around wondering where he will be in thirty years and if any of my current thoughts will be his. I suspect not, though, because I believe he is of this earth, less peripheral than I, and he will find his way. His current angst only emerges in spurts due to a shot of hormones and too many late nights strung together. He is not waiting for his spaceship to return.

As I leap from blog to blog – most recently in the mode of drive-by, sorry – I marvel at the growing communities and the cheerleading comments. I wonder where the dissenters are, wonder if they fall into the category of the silent lurkers, or if they just don’t read there. It’s not possible for everyone who comments to have such common feelings. Have comments just become one giant cheering section? Is that the etiquette? It that what people want? Slap me, but I miss the discussion that goes beyond, “Good on you.”* (I’m sure I’ve just opened the door to scathing words in my own back yard. Let me step away to adorn armor. I’ll be right back.)

But I digress from the opening letter, from my drifting in and out of assorted identities, at wondering whether I’d rather be a storyteller or a photographer (which is really just a storyteller with pictures over words) or an on call computer tech nerd for those who respond to my help with, “How do you know all this?” or a dog rescuer or a person with just a backpack and no permanent address.

Then again, I am a parent, so I must assume some degree of concrete foundation, for my son does not desire the untethered life that I do. For him, I will remain solid and here, but I will still wonder, wonder why I don’t understand the world around me, wonder why I don’t feel so tickled by the things that others work towards, wonder why while I crave gadgets all the time in my admiration for technology I have no relationship with shopping and consumerism (that alone makes me an alien in this current societal structure.) And I will wonder when my spaceship will return.

*picked up on an overseas job amongst Aussies in Sydney many, many moons ago...

**allow me to tag that this was not crafted or thought out. (uh, did I have to tell you that?) This was my version of an online coughing up of morning thoughts and a partial explanation of my recent silence here that goes beyond, “I’m working.”

Either/Or

2007-08-07T06:40:00.000-07:00

I am not dead. I am not gone. I am earning money, and by the time I walk through the door at the end of the day I spin around looking for a horizontal surface to call home.

This will not last forever, but it will make me appear to be off on some kind of exotic vacation. And it is kind of exotic, barreling through hours and hours of Moroccan footage and filmic bits. The downside to this creative enterprise is that little remains of what I affectionately refer to as ‘my brain’ come night. Ten hours at a mystery job, two hours of accumulated commute, a weak stab at parenting…I suspect humans were not constructed for this.

I will pop around here in fits and spurts over the next couple weeks. I may even return with a tale up my sleeve.

Meanwhile, enjoy the sunshine on my behalf…and leave me pearls for sustenance...

In My Backyard

2007-07-30T09:54:00.000-07:00

I almost wish I just got rear-ended, not because I’m after insurance money or I’m trying to do away with my car, but as I drove towards home, I looked in my rear view mirror and the woman behind me was driving holding a parrot, a big white parrot that probably could almost have driven the car itself.

And they say cell phones are a distraction.

I figure collecting this story by way of a collision would have upped the dramatic value, but it was not to be. The vision of parrot in driver’s seat was enhanced by the fact that the parrot-toting driver didn’t need to be holding the bird while navigating her vehicle, for beside her sat an able-bodied passenger who could have cared for the parrot or at least driven the car. So, of course, I questioned the decision to drive while holding a bird, but I also questioned this motoring couple’s choice of driving with their top down, which not only seemed risky but also a taunting gesture to the parrot as if saying, “Feel the breeze through your feathers? See the open sky above you? Isn’t it beautiful? Sorry, you’re relegated to my captive arms. This is all just a tease.”

Maybe parrots love living in the confines of human life. Maybe a ride in the car is the equivalent of taking a dog on a walk. You see, I don’t know much about parrots, but I do know you can’t give full attention to driving while holding a bird. Think of ‘wing flap.’

I have heard that parrots live an extraordinarily long life – up to eighty years – so an owner must be prepared to will the pet to a future owner, for the bird is nearly certain to outlive the human caregiver. Now that is commitment. I’m worried about finding someone to watch my dog if I want to go out of town for the weekend. Finding a friend you can bank on outliving you who is parrot friendly and interested in a hand-me-down pet? Phew. Talk about stress.

The parrot-driver and I parted ways three blocks from my home as I watched in concern/amusement while the driver successfully achieved a one-handed right turn onto a street that dead ends into beach parking. I suspect that means that the parrot got to go for a walk, which is a nice gesture on the part of the pet owners. Hopefully they headed south on the boardwalk, for then they were likely to encounter a long time Venice regular, a guy who totes around his own parrot of the royal blue variety whenever he goes out for a bike ride (another brave undertaking). Bike rider and parrot park at a local restaurant, and then dine al fresco, the human ordering off the menu while the parrot enjoys carted-in sunflower seeds and then spews shells everywhere creating impromptu art upon the gravely boardwalk.

The fact that this image no longer registers as odd to me shows that I’ve been living in Venice a long time. We collect these kind of visuals in my neighborhood, though I wonder how much longer that will last. Venice is changing under the escalating real estate values, and I don’t imagine many new colorful creatures moving into town. These days when I discard furniture to the alley for any taker, items actually sit there for up to a day. They used to vanish with the speed of a David Copperfield trick. Ah, the good old days when a donation trip to Good Will was a waste of gasoline. Nowadays I suspect my tabletop-size tree of clustered, fake red apples that create the canopy – supposedly quite valuable in its day (and received by me with an awkward smile upon completion of a film job) – would establish a rather secure spot in my alley.

I have to wonder if the days of traveling parrots, rollerskating guitarists, and python-carrying walkers will come to a close, and crazy Venice will only live on as a memory. I hope not, for a slice of history will die when that day comes. In order to preserve the insanity I’m even willing to (cautiously) accept some parrot drivers. And I do hope that the white and blue parrot got to have an encounter. That would be a true Venice Beach moment.

(if anyone is interested in my red apple tree, email me and we can arrange a hand off before it journeys to the alley...)

An Open Letter to David Sedaris

2007-07-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

July 21, 2007

Dear David,

I’m standing at the counter at a Mexican/Cuban eatery at the Farmer’s Market in Hollywood with my son by my side. A young woman stands next to him hearing me ask what he wants, and she jumps in and says, “Aren’t you the David Sedaris kid?” He answers yes, and she says, “I saw you two years in a row.” She goes on to express sadness that you’re not coming back to appear this year, and we compete to see which of us has seen you the most years in a row. I win, which is an odd thing to boast of, but we bond over the moment and she advises my son as to what to order because she’s been through this menu a few times and can comment on the effect of the spices.

“Don’t skip the potato soft tacos,” she says. “They’re like Mexican potato knishes.” My son has no idea what that means, but he smiles and says okay. An older woman who seems to be her mother walks up to join her, and our dining advisor turns and says, “Look, it’s the David Sedaris kid. You were with me when we saw him.”

We get down to ordering and thank our consultant as we add to our meal one soft potato taco, which is called something far more elegant in the Spanish we don’t speak. Sitting down at a table, I turn to Anthony and say, “Well, David Sedaris doesn’t have kids, but he kind of has you.” We laugh, loving this little recurring appearance in the spotlight. He gets noticed every once in a while, but usually not with such gusto as this time.

I’m sad that you’re not coming back in 2008. I’ve started the rumor that you’re probably busy writing a book on your experiences in Japan. I don’t imply that you told me as much, but I can imagine you sifting through all those wonderful tales you shared during your last visit to Royce Hall. In 1986 I spent two months in Japan hiding from Hollywood and trying to recover from an extraordinarily long stint on a film job. I took six Japanese lessons in Tokyo over the course of two weeks and then decided I was good to go in rural Japan. Amusement did follow. While I’m certain the country has changed a lot since then, I related to more of your stories than you can imagine.

Just thought I’d share this tale. Sorry we won’t see you in 2008. Los Angeles will miss you.

Anthony’s mom

for the back story, go here for part one, and here for part two...

You Gotta Be Good at Something

2007-07-18T09:11:00.000-07:00

A funny thing happened on the way to this post. I became an “expert” (picture my fingers miming in the air) on internet dating. Yes, I have people ringing me up for advice that ranges from which sites to join, which includes questions about the peculiarities of each one (an acknowledgement that points to my site hopping tendencies) to how to conduct the entire process.

Once I place my friends onto the appropriate site for their personality and goals, I graduate to an actual Cyrano, which is great because I love that my writing skills aren’t going to waste. These friends audition their email responses seeking my input on tone and word choice, and allow me small tweaks to rein in over-eagerness or to up the level of enthusiasm. Balance, I say. You must maintain balance. They then seek further guidance when trying to decipher a response by way of “What does he mean by that?” I cheerfully weigh in, tossing around advice as if I actually know what I’m doing. It is fun.

But I must pose the obvious question: Why would my friends want my advice on internet dating when I am impressively single after journeying around these sites on and off for years? Yes, I’ve developed a wealth of good stories, have tucked away a healthy dose of flings, and can entertain with tales of younger (and I mean younger!) men. But would you want me helping you to find the love of your life? Doubtful. On the other hand, if you’d like guidance as to how to become a career internet dater, I’m your go-to girl.

The first thing to know is not to take it too seriously. In other words, don’t agonize about what you write on your profile, and those self-timer photos with dodgy lighting and focus are just fine. Only the truly serious run their writings past friends for feedback and enlist others to snap the stills. Jeez. That would be too much group activity for me, not to mention far too revealing. I’m fine with strangers hearing my wacked words on how I present myself, but I certainly don’t want to reveal the five things I can’t live without to my friends.

The first thing you need to know if you want to remain in the dating pool is to be sure not to be too flexible. My age range is nice and narrow – 40 to 50. At least that’s my public declaration. The reality is that I’ve dipped into the 20s for the right letter writer, but I’m certainly not going to post that option for fear of being labeled as one of those ‘cougar’ types. I’ve yet to cross the divide past 50, which I know is pretty brutal of me, but remember the goal here: Remain single!

Create a healthy list of reasons to knock people out of consideration. Wrong job. Wrong height. Wrong part of town. For the unplanned accidental meeting with a charming lad live in front of you in line at the dry cleaners you can be flexible and toss all these requirements out the window, but in internet dateland you’re hiring and it’s all about the quick romp through resume. This is what makes it so efficient. You don’t want to wade too long in the vast pool of probably nots.

If you’re a man, this process is far quicker and simpler: Don’t bother reading anything but just scroll through the photos in gallery mode. Distracting yourself with words will just get confusing and is counterintuitive to the male dating model. Remember, if you want to remain single, basing all you criteria on appearance is the perfect way to assure delightful flings with no risk of long-term connection.

Much gets debated as to how quickly to respond to emails. Too immediate and you seem desperate and without a life. Too slow and you project a lack of interest. With this I say, “It doesn’t matter.” Most email exchanges vanish after two back and forth letters, which is just enough to allow you to maintain the illusion of ‘polite.’ Usage of a nails on the chalkboard phrase, such as ‘nails on the chalkboard,’ can speed this demise along. Other common clichés that knock you out of the running are ‘I love walks on the beach at sunset,’ ‘I’m as comfortable in jeans and T-shirt as a little black dress,’ and ‘don’t be on meds.’ That last one really limits the pool in my town, for nearly everyone I know is on meds.

I warn women that guys offer up their phone number almost immediately and expect a call often before you’ve revealed your name, so you must come up with a way to identify yourself. (Funny, guys don’t care much about getting that name first.) So, while you’re dialing prepare yourself to say, “I’m the woman from the email,” and then be ready for a long pause as he runs through the lengthy list of woman he emailed his number to. The other option is to refer to yourself by your screen name, which should be the first cautionary tale in internet dating: If you can’t say the name out loud, you might want to choose a handle besides the boastful ‘GoodInBed.’

Don’t worry too much about what you will say on this preliminary phone call. Basically, it’s just the equivalent of looking at a photo. You’re sizing up each other’s voice for desirability. If you have a tendency when nervous to constrict and screech, this would be a good time to rein that in unless you actually believe that your soul mate would love that quality in you. Of course while this isn’t about finding your soul mate (remember goal: Lifetime internet dater!), even the short-termers don’t like screechers.

If you actually decide to meet, enter Starbucks – why doesn’t Starbucks just have it’s own online dating site and cut out the middleman? – and scour the room for someone who once upon a time might have looked like the photo you saw online. As mentioned, I’ve been dancing with this process on and off for years and several of the men I met still have the same photo posted from before our meeting four years ago, and even then it was hard to match photo with face. Men, you have no authority to complain about old photos of women. You can claim laziness when it comes to putting down the toilet seat, but that camera on your cell phone? It’s there for a reason.

One side note on dating the younger men: You don’t have to worry about looking too old when you show up for your date. They want old. That’s why they emailed you. You can’t fail in this arena, so relax and let the guy pay for your drink. He’ll want to, trust me, to prove that he’s old enough to have a job or that he’s good at saving his allowance.

Gosh, I could go on and on here, but I have an email in my inbox demanding my attention. If you want more of my pearls of wisdom, just drop me a note. I’m excellent at the one on one. I love my expert status.

***************

Unrelated piece of trivia:
For those locals who would like an opportunity to experience me in person, I’m reading Sunday, July 22nd at 2 p.m. on Dutton’s patio on San Vicente in Brentwood. I’m not trespassing; I was invited.

If my words and those of my fellow readers don’t lure you (some stellar folks who far outshine me in their brilliance), perhaps the offer of free wine, cheese, and home-baked goods will. Go ahead, pull yourself away from your computers and face the glare of the outdoors.

As far as you singles, you may meet someone to add to your list of, “I can’t believe I ever went out with him/her!” That alone is worth the trek.

When Asked to Write about Courage

2007-07-13T14:24:00.000-07:00

I close my eyes and look for courage, look for the incidents, look for the word. And letter by letter it comes at me through space, first the ‘C’ growing large and then shrinking to make way for the ‘O’ and then right down the line.

But no incidents come, no memories, no grand gestures of overcoming fear. And I realize that as a child I just did. My relationship with fear and banishing it with courage didn’t exist. Every act of every day was courageous. I never considered being otherwise. Either that or I have a convenient memory.

And now. Me and courage. We do well together. I take risks. I decide that if something has a hold on me I must take it on, and with that acknowledgment an act of courage leaps forward demanding attention, saying, “Remember me? Remember me?” The act wants to be recounted, wants the spotlight, wants me to tell you of the time my college roommate comes to me and says, “There’s a guy coming to our dorm to talk about skydiving. I’m gonna go listen to him. Come with me.”

I think she’s crazy, but I walk downstairs with her. We sit through a presentation of photos and description, how the training will last eight hours and then we’ll go up in a plane, line up, and one by one leap from 3000 feet. No need to pull the ripcord – we’ll be on static lines that do the work. Unless they don’t. Then you’re up.

When his words wind down, I turn to my roommate and say, “Okay. I’m in.” And she responds, “Are you crazy? No way.”

But I go, and it is a story. I’ve never faced fear like I did when I dangled my legs out that open airplane door, felt the rush of speed, and saw the tiny doll-sized life on the ground. I convince myself to jump by saying, “I don’t think this is my time to die,” and I cap it with, “I was drawn to this for a reason.” These sentiments partnered with the jump instructor’s palm on the small of my back giving me a less than gentle nudge send me through the door to hit the wind, to try to scream out 6-5-4-3-2-1 as instructed, hoping to never hit ‘1,’ for if I do it’s time to go into emergency action through a set of learned steps ending with “Pull ripcord on emergency chute.” But I never even get to ‘5.’ The speed of descent contorts my mouth to unmovable motion locking my lips apart and, I’m convinced, pressed somewhere around my ears. Stunned by my inability to vocalize, I lose count and pray that my distraction won’t render me a cartoon pancake upon the ground.

Luckily, the chute opens with a reassuring assault that sends me skyward in defiance of gravity. And then I float through the most beautiful two minutes of my life.

I come in hard on the landing, on an angle, they say, and take all the impact in my left ankle. I can barely stand to celebrate my act, the pain great, but I don’t care. This was all a gift.

But I must say that that was an easy act of courage, and I almost didn’t speak of it when considering the topic. Doing is not my nemesis. I can do. But there is a foe, the kind of courage I can speak of if I dare, and that is the courage to step forward and be willing to be seen beyond the casing of my being. What demands my courage is the willingness to strip off the façade and let you know the weakness that lurks within. The power does well for itself, but the weakness has never had a turn on stage, and letting it out would be an act of courage far beyond leaping from an airplane.

On Editing

2007-07-11T18:06:00.000-07:00

Bill stood and opened the lid to the toilet, unscrewed the top off the bottle of red nail polish, and poured the flamboyant color into the water. When he flushed, it swirled around like spin art and disappeared down the drain. He threw the empty bottle into the trash and covered it with used tissues like a murderer hiding his weapon.

“I don’t think nail polish would behave like that,” my editor says. “I don’t think it would spin and go down the drain.”

I deflate, bonded to the image my brain had concocted. Could she be right? Am I prepared to offer up my own toilet bowl as a guinea pig?

I sit on her note for a long time, but finally my curiosity speaks and demands resolution. I open my bathroom medicine chest and locate the two bottles of nail polish I own. I opt for the tiny container of light blue thinking that if something goes wrong, the color is more subtle. I unscrew the top and tip it sideways to peer inside. The contents are all dried out. Useless. I reach for the other bottle. Blood red like in my story. I give it a good unifying shake. Plenty of liquid within.

I close the sink drain and fill the basin with a couple inches of water considering it a more manageable locale to navigate than the toilet bowl. Slowly I pour in a few drops of polish. More dramatic than spin art, the color scurries across the surface separating into odd flat creatures that get me thinking of amoeba. Some race to the edges and cling to the porcelain. I stare for a moment and then release the drain. The water descends leaving behind all the red – filmy and flat – to decorate my sink.

Shit.

I quickly reach for nail polish remover, splash it onto tissue, and rub away. Some comes off easily. Some hangs onto the basin. With a little elbow grease, my sink returns to its original white.

Time for a rewrite.

Bill stood and opened the lid to the toilet, unscrewed the top off the bottle of red nail polish, and poured the flamboyant color into the bowl. The color dispersed quickly dancing on the surface of the water, splitting into odd-shaped particles that resembled amoeba. He flushed. The color clung to the porcelain walls as if mocking his desire to banish it. Bill sighed and vowed to deal with it later. He threw the empty bottle into the trash and covered it with used tissues like a murderer hiding his weapon.

I thank my editor for catching my creative gaffe. I’m still learning about the writing world, about what literary editors offer and how they work. Through the many years of my career as a film editor, I encountered the question, “So you get to decide what to take out of a movie?” and I’ve had to explain that film editing isn’t really the act of ‘taking out.’ That comes in at a point, but film editing is the act of putting a film together, that every time the image on the screen changes, an editor made a cut. As editors, we sit with miles of film (now in digital format) broken down by scene. We have assorted angles to work with from wide shot to two shot to close ups, over the shoulders and inserts of objects. We pour through it all selecting performances and figuring out where to be during each moment of a scene. Do we want to watch the speaker speak or the listener listen? Where does the heart of the moment reside? At what point do we go in tight for emphasis? When do we pull back for air?

To me editing is the act of creating visual music. What motivates a cut is often the editor’s sense of rhythm. We work with the director to incorporate his/her notes and desires, and then are sent off to “do what you do.” And what we do includes little tweaks of frames here and frames there, mere fractions of seconds that if left untouched make an editor squirm.

I have been away from editing for nearly two years. It’s trying to lure me back due to less than stellar progress in the writing arena and a bank account that’s crying, “Foul.” My heart wishes it could keep thinking of spin art nail polish and dancing amoeba blobs. I’d love to know that this blind walk down an unmarked path will get me through the woods, but the reality is that right now I know nothing. And going on when we know nothing is the real art of life. Saying ‘no’ to a paying job because I must get Amber and Cassidy, my newest born characters, through their lives is a leap of faith, and these days I’m finding it easier to help them find their way than to find my own.

Drive By

2007-07-09T16:00:00.000-07:00

As I stroll down the street with my strutting Chihuahua, I detect a voice to my left. A wisp of a voice. I turn and see a black SUV pulled alongside a parked car. Window down. Male inside. His face turned my way, lips moving, a hint of sound floating through the rolled down passenger-side window.

“Excuse me?” I ask.

More near-silent lip movement.

“Sorry?” I say formatted as a question.

“Do you live here?” he says, finally in an audible tone.

“Yes,” I reply imagining he’s about to ask for directions.

“Do you want to get coffee some time?” he asks.

Okay, is this really how it’s done? Drive by pick up? Perhaps I should be flattered, but the lack of precision to the event leaves me less than.

“Uh, that’s kind of random,” I say, not certain how else to respond to a stranger, motor running, tossing out an invite from ten feet away based on, uh, how I walk my dog.

It’s been a dry spell. Very dry. Drought dry. But no, sir, I can’t leap to for a drive by. I can’t believe you are very discerning. I can’t accept an invite that way. I can’t. I’m sorry. Maybe if you had parked, walked down the sidewalk and appeared to have happened upon me, struck up conversation. Maybe if you’d at least given me something to go on besides, “He drives a black SUV and speaks the same language as I.”

The driver pulls away, and I continue towards the park with Speck who always gets a lot of action in the sniffin’ meet ‘n greet scene. Despite his diminutive size, he’s very bold in his encounters. I’m the one who grows cautious when the bigger beasts come bounding up imagining my precious one carted away in the jaws of a stranger.

But it wasn’t caution that kept me from exchanging numbers with Mr. SUV. It just felt off. LA has a reputation for being a tough place to meet new people. We move through space in our encapsulated vehicles, our portable homes, my trunk stuffed with every need a whim could desire. That is, except for one. The chance encounter. I love them. Crave them. Smile over them. Some people prefer the fix up, a history laid out in advance, a guarantee of civility assured by a mutual friend, but not I. I like mystery and happenstance.

But again, the drive by factor. Looking back, I’d now like to question this guy on his method. I’d like to sit him down like an investigative reporter removing my personal role in the story and ask, “What prompted you? Is this your normal m.o.? Has it worked before?” I’d like to know if he headed out with the cruising in mind or if he’d leapt forth on a whim. I mean, when I said how random it was, he didn’t come back with a witty reply. He didn’t work to lure me in.

Being the initiator is tough, and in response to Mr. SUV’s gesture I have decided to put myself in the driver’s seat by pledging to reach out and launch my next encounter. The one thing is, I plan to get out of the car.

Reach Out and Touch Someone

2007-07-02T11:11:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about prisons and the absence of touch. The two go hand in hand, don’t they? Can’t an absence of touch land someone in prison, and can’t prison bring others to an absence of touch?

And then there is the prison that is the absence of touch, the prison that moves with you wherever you go. We don’t talk about that one, but we should. A lot of people live in that prison and something really should be done about it.

Not to defend the wrongdoers, but if we lock someone away for a crime committed, we must choose between a desire for punishment and a desire to return a healthy being to the world at the end of incarceration. If you have ever lived in the absence of touch, if you have ever lived in pockets of aloneness that turned to pockets of loneliness, you know that that is not the way to become whole. Maybe for short periods of time where there are lessons to be learned, but prolonged, that absence of touch is a killer mightier than any sword, deadlier than any weapon of mass destruction. It may not kill your body, but it kills your spirit.

I think of what gets prisoners to prison in the first place, what turned the innocent child into the not so innocent, what birthed the cruel and the heartless, the one to be feared and hated. If we want a healed society, we all must care. We must reconcile the religious view of good vs. evil and the belief in the Devil embodied with earthly context and opportunity and injustice and inequity. We must remember what hurt and sadness and isolation breed.

My stepfather was a doctor who believed in the healing power of hugs. He mandated a hug a day for everyone, prescribed it like medicine. And you could see the instant effect from resistance to acceptance to easing into the moment.

And no, I have no idea how to apply this to prisons and prisoners. I have to idea how to connect the unconnected in the world, the criminals and upstanding citizens alike, the ones who go days and weeks and years without the simple touch of affection, the ones who never get to spill the words choking the base of their throats, who want to bond with another, who want to find a way to liberate what is buried within, who want feedback and guidance and consolation and comfort, who want to offer the same in exchange. I have no idea.

I think of the traveling prison of isolation and what that does to our society. Despite the connection that technology offers, that solution is feeble compared to the power of touch to heal all that wounds. But maybe if we put our heads together, if those who live enfolded share their success, the rest can find a way to join in. Maybe if we reexamine the goal of incarceration, if we intervene sooner and better, maybe we can cut the number of victims. And maybe, just maybe, if we start talking about all this we can move forward towards a whole lot of healing.

By Coming Here

2007-06-26T17:44:00.000-07:00

I have realized that my imagination is more important than my opinion, that I can persevere even when I don’t want to, that how things begin is seldom how they end. I have discovered that there is more anger and pain in the world than imaginable, that we have forgotten much about joy, but that many discoveries are just a moment away. I have witnessed the universal longing for connection and the various ways that individuals seek to reach out, that it is often easier to reach forward to the distant stranger than to reach across the room to someone who shares your life.

Daily we move furiously past the familiar faces we don't slow to meet because we think what we want is further down the road, and we tell ourselves that we must race to get there or else. Or else. Or else we will be here with what we don’t quite want. Wanting what we have is a lost art because we believe the commercials of endless promises laced with temptation. Or endless temptation laced with promises.

We are more confused than we admit.

But somehow at some point in some day something sneaks in. A sunset glowing red and orange. A small child waddling with chubby little legs in a soggy and sagging bathing suit. A glimpse of dolphins leaping through the air. These small things invite us back, remind us of what to celebrate. A taste against our tongue. A stranger holding the door. A task accomplished. And if we go to sleep with these small things in our mind, we stand a chance. We wake up with a smile and savor more of the next day because we’ve digested a clue.

And we cling to this sensation of nourishing fullness that fills our chest, to this encounter with happy. We think that if we could bottle and sell it, we would be rich because everyone wants this same feeling. But despite our promises to self, despite our desire, the fullness vanishes, drifts away into the air. We just can’t hold on.

The feeling roams looking for a home in need, and when you’re lucky it descends upon you.

Care to Lend a Hand?

2007-06-13T11:45:00.000-07:00

In a few weeks I will participate in LA Bloggers Live by getting onstage and reading my words.

The big question: what to read?

I’ve been bouncing around, revisiting some of my older posts, the ones many of you may never have read because they showed up before we became acquainted. Some of these are early posts, and thus may seem loose and flabby before my tightening exercises worked some magic, but still...

Some possibilities…

Synchronicity
(the time my dog and computer broke on the same day)

Inside the Animal Kingdom
(some key things I’ve learned from my dog)

Safe Deposit Box Buddy
(my attempt at becoming a grownup...minus the political tag, which feels dated)

Car Talk
(insight on how we Angelenos use our horns and might better communicate)

Balance
(how moms get out of whack and how I tried to climb back)

I promise this isn't just a way to avoid writing and send you back to old posts (though wouldn't that be clever). I need your help and beloved guidance. If you were to see me march forward and use my voice, what would you like to hear? (and rumor has it that the reading may live as a recording archived online at some point.)

And if you’ve read something else that stuck in your brain that you want to suggest, please do. Really. Please do. And then there's the option of requesting a new post, but that simply can't be guaranteed.

Finally, if you are a local, come out and join the fun…

And thank you in advance to all who offer up advice.

Last Kiss

2007-06-09T08:15:00.000-07:00

If I had known it was to be my last kiss for a year I would have paid greater attention. I would have made it linger or been more inventive. I might have drawn my partner in closer or kept my eyes open to seek a hint of what he was thinking. I might have done a lot of things, but I wouldn’t have pulled away so casually as if the next kiss were waiting for me the next day from the next partner, the one I imagined really wanting me and I really wanting in return, the one with whom I would share a kiss unlike the kiss with the one filling in during a gap where we each found ourselves far from love.

I wonder if during my last kiss, my kissing partner thought of his future girlfriend as his lips touched mine or if he could bury himself in our moment. Had I known I would go kissless for a year, I might have asked that question as we pulled apart, for his answer could have made the kiss significant beyond its lastness, transformed it to a wondrous incident to add to the pages of my life, one to be underlined in pink highlighter, the time I learned what a man was thinking.

But I didn’t ask because I didn’t know. I didn’t know how kissless I would become. And now, a year later, I wonder where all my unused kisses have gone. Are they annoyed and hanging at a bus stop hoping to find someone else to carry them on to an adventure, or are they enjoying a little time for self in the shallow end of a pretty pool with palm trees overhead and waitresses with cocktail trays circling in colorful sarongs and bikini tops? Maybe they’ve enjoyed the time away, a sparing from all the kissing that wasn’t quite right. Or maybe my unused kisses are right here inside me lying dormant waiting to spring forth like a budding virus.

Some days I tell myself that I am the discerning restaurant patron who waits patiently to encounter a tasty dish, that my patience improves my palate by not deadening it with wrong encounters. Those are the strong days, the days I don't ask questions, but just go about my business until the next kiss appears.

Faith

2007-06-01T09:37:00.000-07:00

How do you have faith?

If you turn to religion, how do you justify the suffering? If your answer is a bigger picture, I want to discuss the pain of the detail in the bottom right corner. If your answer is closed eyes, how do you quiet the observations of the dreaming mind? If your answer is one foot in front of the other, how do you do that? Really. How do you? How is the motion sufficient? How do you feel that you’re doing enough?

I know I should walk out my door and pursue my life, but confusion blocks my way. I know that I should trust that all works out, but I don’t know how, for even if it works out for me I ache over wounded children and generations haunted by war. I know I should have faith, but after driving into so many brick walls that my front bumper now sits exhausted in the back seat, I fear I do not see properly.

Existential crisis and I are one. We wake and make coffee together. He takes cream. I drink it black. We both use wooden stirrers even though mine is just for the calming effect the soothing motion offers, the same way I look at a conductor’s baton and find it more satisfying than the music.

Some say suffering is inevitable and I shouldn’t feel sad about how the world motors on. But I do. I can’t accept inevitable. I must believe that it can be better, profoundly better. I fear we have been lulled into acceptance, into shrugging our shoulders and saying, “Human nature.” If human nature is so cruel, how tragic. And if not, we should stage a worldwide rally to claim our true nature. We should stand up and say, “Not one more day of violence. Not one more day of hostility.” We should stop marching towards commercial gain and throw a picnic where we mobilize for the beautiful world we dare imagine, for if we don’t, soon our imaginations will be consumed by ghastly images that massacre optimism.

Or maybe that’s just me. There are wonderful people who reach out to cure the harm and don't get discouraged. But isn’t the mopping up exhausting? Can’t we launch a global campaign of preventative medicine of good? If it sounds like whining, is it whining? Or is it just appropriate introspection to seek to evolve the species?

Self-Reliance

2007-05-22T20:03:00.000-07:00

You start off smart, gathering tools and planning. You’ve waited long enough, ignoring the annoyance of the never-properly-installed under-cabinet Lazy Susan that has shifted so that it rests too far to the right thus preventing the right-angle shaped cabinet door from closing. But today you are ready. You want a remedy.

You remove all pantry items from the top shelf of Lazy Susan (you drop the article because today it has a personality and is just ‘Lazy Susan’) claiming “I’ll put everything back in a more organized fashion so that I will actually know what keen food options lurk behind closed doors instead of saying to my son, ‘We have no food in the house. Eat something from the freezer or make yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.’” You reach for the Phillip’s head screwdriver and for a minute wonder who Phillip was, or is it Phillips? You loosen the screw and slide Lazy Susan’s upper shelf to the left so that its right angle lines up with the cupboard’s opening right angle. You spin it a few times because you know it has a tendency to migrate to the right.

It stays in place.

You rearrange all food items so that rice offerings – “I really bought two kinds of jasmine rice?” – and boxed Italian sauces – “If its ‘best by’ date was six months ago can I count that as a recommendation rather than a health warning?” – and all those canned things like water chestnuts and canned coconut milk that sounded good at the time but are unlikely to ever get eaten are grouped with their peers. After clearing the counter and nearly applauding the beauty you’ve created in your organization, you give Lazy Susan a spin.

It lines up exactly where it did before the process started, preventing cabinet door closure.

Hell if you’re going to remove everything again. You’ll just sit on the floor and wedge your left hand and arm under the shelf to support it while you loosen the screw with your right hand just a bit to reposition the shelf once again to the left. You face inward so that you can’t see the idiot light flashing behind your back screaming, “Bad idea!” You turn the screw one turn, and whoa, the shelf heavy as can be – you think? – slides down and crushes your left hand and arm. You try to pull it out, but you’re wedged in. You try to lift the shelf saying, “Think like a mother with her child stuck under a car!” only you can’t muster the same rescuing power for yourself as you could for your kid. Your heart starts to race and you realize you’re pinned and your hand is really starting to hurt and the pressure across your forearm is moving towards numbness and you can’t reach the phone and no one would come if you cried out because there is no one.

You close your eyes close to panic. You let out a groan and a yelp for dramatic effect. You pull again. Nothing. Panic builds. You look to your front door as if a fireman is bounding up the building’s stairs to save you, but all is quiet. You breathe fast and then go for a deliberate inhale. You tug hard and fast and glare at the shelf with all the anger and hatred you can access, and your arm comes free. You place it in your lap and see the deep line that adorns the top of the hand. You breathe relief. You’ve set yourself free, but with the freedom of your limb comes the freedom of your tears. You realize how bad it could have been, trapped with no one coming, circulation cut off. You cry with the pain, but mostly with the embarrassment of your actions and the knowledge that there was no one to rescue you from your own stupidity.

You banish the budding tears and wipe away those that escaped onto your face. You stand and yank all items off the Lazy Susan, cursing your inept and uncaring contractor. You adjust the shelf one more time compensating a little extra to the left. You don’t put any food away, thinking, “Now would be a good time to come up with an innovative menu to use all this.”

But you can’t. Not quite yet. So you leave it all strewn about the kitchen as if you’ve just done a major shopping trip to replenish the earthquake kit. You head to the bedroom where you lie down next to your Chihuahua who as much as he would have liked could not have been your Lassie.

And you wonder if you do it all yourself because you were born in the 60s and taught to be self-reliant or if it’s just your personality. You wonder why the thought of calling out for help was as painful as the compressing shelf on your arm. And you think about how there are now courses to teach women to learn to receive, to ask for assistance, to be less self-sufficient because apparently we’ve tipped the scale so far in one direction following the promise of an equal society that we didn’t know we’d passed middle and are doing too much on our own.

So here we are trying to learn how not to prove that we can do it all by ourselves. We struggle with accepting the idea that needing someone is okay because we’ve thought we should want rather than need, that our independence was seductive, that we are our own best helper. And maybe we are, but my self-reliance has turned me into an island. Sitting on the floor, trapped, I both needed and wanted.

addendum: Upon relating tale to teen son, he interrupts and asks, “So you just started taking things off the shelf to liberate yourself?” I paused. You see, when in the midst of panic, you really can get stupid.

How Did We Get Here?

2007-05-15T10:40:00.001-07:00

Like Dorothy singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ we imagine a better place because there has to be, because this can’t be it. To solve the dilemma of not here, not now, you think to convene a town hall meeting, but you don’t want to invite all to attend because you know there’s poison out there and you always recognize it too late, once it already circulates through your blood. You cut your finger to bleed yourself, and you think of leeches doing a job of good over harm. They’re black and ugly and you prefer the poison to their cure. How many times you’ve preferred the poison.

You don’t believe this is life intended. More like a rollercoaster that’s jumped its tracks and flies out of control still diving and twisting and turning out of habit, not because its wheels are held to do so. Everyone’s going crazy. Smiles drug induced because we’ve forgotten the art of conversation. We race past those with little voices not slowing to hear as we build walls of protection to keep out what we most need. Our filters are clogged and we no longer can distinguish the good from the bad. We run when we should walk and sit when we should dance. We’ve lost the ability to navigate, so we cruise like automatons unable to feel breezes and sunrays. Our skin burns, and we don’t know. Our lips grow cracked and dry, and only after the fact do we apply balm, a mere band-aid to the dysfunctional life society breeds when progress takes us backwards.

Dreams offer visions of marshmallow clouds but awakeness burns our retina. “Glaring pain,” you said, or was it I? Did I speak of the pain the last time we lunched or did I offer encouragement and platitudes. “It will all be fine.” But is that true with no one at the helm? Can we just trust the drive without a driver?

The only thing that keeps me going beside the dictatorial rant of the ticking clock are the images of fantasy. The small lives of microscopic proportions. The couch talking to the pillow. It’s the maybe’s and the could be's that I love. They ignore the clock for it doesn’t speak to them. They reside outside in a world they’ve conjured from knowledge through resistance. “We need not follow,” they say. “Your rules aren’t ours.” And I want to echo their words. “Your rules. Your rules.” No one cares about my rules. My rules unsanctioned sit on the steps of the pool tapping toes against water wanting to play. The fight in me diminishes and I think of running, but sprinters don’t carry suitcases and I have a dog. Once you’re in you can’t easily get out. That’s the fine print on the back of the birth certificate. No one flips the document until it’s too late.

Not too late. What would not too late look like? More no’s, perhaps. Shoulder shrugs. Why explain especially to ears that don’t listen? Cashing in and cashing out. Remembering sudden death that suddenly makes the money look sufficient. Yes, plenty to live until tomorrow. But you plan beyond tomorrow and then walk around in concrete shoes, box-like and ugly. “Who designed this fashion?” you ask, but passersby whiz in their dainty collection. They don’t feel your weight, but they also can close their eyes to slaughtered animals and eat meat, to bloodied children and wave the flag. Your eyes don’t close as easily so the pain sneaks in via your pupils. Too late you shut your eyes. Too late because the images are within and no matter how tight you squeeze your eyelids, you can’t stop seeing.

When you put color upon the walls you blot out the images, lulled into rhythm by the up down up down of the saturated bristles hued in the color du jour. When all the walls are covered, you panic because how now will you escape? You skittle through your house looking for scuffmarks on baseboards saying, “Hold on. I’ll fix you,” but you know the baseboards are fine and you’re fixing yourself. They know it, too, but don’t mind a sprucing up layer of white. “Spring time,” they say.

But then the baseboards are clean and all that’s left is to wash the brushes. Paint mixes with water and goes downstream trailing color like a road map. “Follow me,” it says, and you do until your feet are muddy and your legs are tired. You sit on the banks of the jungle river and sigh, “How did I get here?” And then a chorus echoes from behind thick vines singing, “How did I get here? How did I get here?” A musical erupts around you and you’re on stage with a smiling audience filling the theatre. The crowd sways involuntarily caught up in the music and you invite all to sing along, and soon an entire auditorium is singing, “How did I get here?”

The music ends and you take a bow. The orchestra packs up instruments as the audience exits through doors at the back, left, and right. Streams of people forget about the chant and forget about the questioning and get back on freeways to drive the speed of the car ahead of them. We once listened to radio but now we mostly talk on cell phones, which apparently is much better than actually driving over and seeing the person whose voice comes through our earpiece. If we’re with them we can’t do anything else, and in the religion of multitasking that would be a sin.

“Sinner!” they scream as they stone me, for I held a dinner party with no purpose of moving forwards. I refused to denounce my crime during sentencing, so the judge was harsh. “You’re sentenced to forever,” he said, which I found vague. “Forever what?” I tried to ask, but my lawyer shoved an elbow into my side, which made me buckle and lose my wind.

In my cell I reflect on my choices and wonder if I’d really earned punishment or if I’d just landed in a parallel reality when I finally got to slow down. “Maybe I need to be more specific in stating my wishes,” I think, but it hardly matters now for it’s too late to undo the confusion.

I reach for a piece of black coal upon the stone floor, rub it between thumb and index finger. I then turn to the blank slate of the prison walls and start to write myself out of my reality one coal mark at a time.

All I Want for Christmas is an Industrial-Strength Paper Shredder

2007-05-08T11:35:00.000-07:00

I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. The fear of God has been bred into me. My mail stacks up and my file cabinets are overflowing. I’m afraid to throw away even junk mail without shredding it first. Never in my early childhood dreams could I have imagined that my simple name and address would be of value, and not because I’m a celebrity and people are interested in coming to gawk, but because someone could want to become me, at least in the steal-my-identity financial sense.

I haven’t actually tracked how name and address results in five credit cards and a car lease, but I’ve heard the horror stories. Why I end up responsible baffles me. My friend could easily prove she wasn’t the woman receiving unemployment checks issued to her social security number in someone else’s name at a different address. Did that get her off the hook? No. Or the MasterCard account opened in her name by someone who wasn’t her, a suspected inside job at the issuing company. A lawyer simply told her that her best option to clear up her – uh, someone else’s – debt linked to her identity was to declare bankruptcy. She did and left the country. (For other truly romantic reasons, but still.)

So now I sit over a paper-eating machine begrudgingly shredding pieces of mail that should be of no interest to anyone. I waste time and energy – both mine and that of the electric kind – and at the end of it all, all I’ve succeeded in doing is theoretically protecting myself from some unknown thief. I willingly put locks on my door, but this other kind of protection I don’t understand. The territory I must guard is so vast and so invisible that I can’t imagine successfully defending it, at least not on my own.

I suspect someone else should be in charge of this.

Perhaps if the crime were more vigorously investigated and prosecuted the benefit of it would vanish. Perhaps if regular folks like me had a shred of protection from this practice we wouldn’t all have to buy shredders. If someone steals my car and crashes into a street-load of pedestrians, I’m not carted off to jail. If someone steals my identity and goes and buys that car, too bad. The debt is mine. Logic, please?

We now are offered identity theft insurance. Why should we pay for crimes perpetrated in our name but without our knowledge?

Recently a friend of mine was talking about cleaning out her files. With the average shredder disposing of six sheets at a time, she figured she could spend the next year shredding for protection. Her husband offered to burn the papers in their barbeque. I suggested the fireplace despite the fact that spring has arrived. Then we discussed whether she wouldn’t be adding to pollution from this mass burning. Endless shredding versus air pollution versus potential identity theft. Can we get an intervention here?

Some believe the shredding of junk mail is an exercise in over-caution, yet another friend of mine insists that is how her identity was snatched, which led her down the path of clearing her good name for months. When this happens one can only guess the origin of the thievery, so now we examine all our identifying documents and ask, “Could it be you? Could you betray me?”

Others say that they refuse to live in fear, and I was one of you until last year. I tossed my mail into the trash figuring the likelihood of a dumpster diver barreling to the bottom of a twelve-unit condo building’s garbage heap and poking around through rotting food and dirty disposable diapers was unlikely. But then I discovered that we could put mixed paper into our recycling bins, and being the God fearing environmentalist that I am (exaggeration noted), I started depositing papers and cereal boxes inside a tidy bin that smelled just fine. Suddenly I saw my papers as actually inviting theft, as if I’d placed them in an ornate and calligraphy-addressed envelope and sent them out to Mr. & Mrs. Identity Thief.

I bought a shredder.

It was fun for about twelve minutes. Commercial shredders fill up fast and require constant bag replacement. A financial statement ready for disposal requires two to three passes to reduce it to the six-sheet maximum. Sometimes I get cocky and feed in a few extra pages. When it shreds to a halt, I get to learn how to use the ‘Reverse’ setting, pulling my half-shredded identity from its clutches as if rescuing a treasured body part from the teeth of a shark. (Less blood, of course.)

I’ve made it through my recent mail, but my file cabinets are due for a purging. I honestly can’t face the task. One acquaintance suggested watching TV as I shred claiming it could be relaxing. At that moment I decided he wasn’t very bright. “Ah, the serenade of the shredder burying the dialogue of ‘Without a Trace.’” (Guilty pleasure revealed.)

Please, oh Federal Government, come up with a system to protect your citizens. Free us from endless shredding and endless guarding of who we are and where we live and where we bank and how we paid for last summer’s vacation. Let me run free through the wind, hair flowing behind me, carefree and spewing my personal data for all to hear. Let me shift my worries to something that betters the world, or better yet, you can go ahead and wipe out world problems while you’re at it. (A girl can dream.)

In lieu of the above, please deliver an industrial-strength shredder to our multi-car communal garage and set it conveniently to dump into the recycling bin. If it weren’t springtime, I’d ask Santa.

Possibilities

2007-05-07T21:06:00.000-07:00

I want to talk about the cows, but not just about the cows, but about how they reached out to save me, the cows that need saving, the cows that live impossibly crammed in pastures of dirt off Hwy 5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco awaiting their slaughter.

Every time I drive past the cows that live so innocently, grazing, walking around amongst one another, it breaks my heart. They have no idea. One time I’m driving past, and a bunch of fresh young calves have joined the herd. As I look at them I think ‘pack’ instead of ‘herd’ because to me somehow ‘pack’ implies choice, an intentional coming together. I’m funny that way.

So the young calves have joined, and they’re romping around, running on super skinny legs, buoyant and playful. And they make me laugh out loud. I stop to go near them, stop in a place I never stop, and I walk towards the fence that imprisons them, look around, wonder how to liberate them. I glance down to my left and see a large stone that would require both my hands to lift it. And I do. I pick it up and start pounding the wooden stake of the fence trying to hammer it into the ground. I imagine that if I keep hitting it over and over it will vanish into the earth and the cows can run free and escape their death. But I’m not making any progress with the post. It doesn’t give at all, and the cows see my trying and we speak with our eyes. “I want to save you,” I convey, but they tell me to save myself. They tell me to take the rock and move on.

And I do because I sense the cows know something. I cradle the stone in my two hands and it becomes my heart, and I walk holding my heart out in front of me like it’s an offering. I’m not really surprised when I meet the cowboy even though I don’t really like cowboys. We face each other, and suddenly my heart/rock becomes a balloon filled with helium and it soars into the clouds.

So there I am left to decide, do I follow my heart or stay with the cowboy? In an ideal world my heart would lead me to the cowboy or to a cowboy or to someone as available as the cowboy. With my balloon heart soaring towards the clouds I can’t be certain where it is headed and where it will take me if I follow. Will it continue to climb high or will it veer off to the left, take a sudden dive and land me in a quiet field of wildflowers? It could happen just like how the innocent, penned cows told me to save myself. It’s all in the listening and the looking, the messages and signs around us daily, the ones we miss because we rush past in a predetermined hurry to stay on a schedule that we create not imagining the wise cows and soaring hearts.

While the cowboy is cute and standing before me, I opt to follow my heart, for flying without wings is an experience not to be missed. I will myself high and extend my arm to catch the teeny string tail of the heart balloon. With two hands I cling to the string and look down at my dangling feet remembering those years on the monkey bars with too-weak arms, where kicking of legs propelled me across the overhead railroad track of hot grey metal coated with the grimy sweat of elementary school primates. I kick my legs to direct the balloon as I kicked my young legs to move me forward towards my playground destination.

The cowboy grows tiny on the ground beneath my swaying legs, and I lift my head. Before me I see forever, knowing it’s forever even though I’ve never seen forever before and couldn’t have previously described what forever looks like. But here it is: forever is limitless hope. It contains every color and every dream, every motel and every rest stop. It offers the previously seen and the yet to be imagined. It’s both bumpy and flat at the same time and yet is not contradictory. Forever is like the universe with no foreseeable end. Forever promises things it can’t prove. Forever demands faith. Forever appears like a board game of fresh rules, a descent into a land once unknown but when you finally enter makes all the sense in the world.

Gliding beneath the balloon heart I get lost in sensation as cool wind slaps my bare legs and swirls my hair into a beehive. I want to offer the view to the cows, for they live too close to the ground. “They deserve this,” I think, “because they thought to save me first.” I wish them free once again, not wanting to soar at their expense.

Now that I am out of his sight the cowboy vanishes, for he was never truly real but merely a roadside mirage. Thankfully I didn’t stay to hold his hand. As a city girl, I made the right choice. The heart balloon twirls riding the air currents like a surfer on a wave. Finally we touch down in a vast field of dry California weeds. After the brief life in the sky, solid ground feels foreign and unsteady. I shake out my legs and work through a quick jig to find balance. Tall grass tickles my legs, the kind of grass the cows like to eat. I wonder if I can fall in love while the cows stay penned. It seems unfair, even if it’s what they wanted for me.

The Weight of Words

2007-05-05T22:37:00.000-07:00

Sipping a cup of coffee, you consider what people do and where people go and what phrases appear in the descriptions of these life events, and you remember the time you witnessed a child’s caution and you concluded, “He didn’t want to get in trouble.”

In trouble. What a phrase.

In trouble, as if it’s a dish cooking on the stove. A pot of trouble. Stovetop trouble bubbles furiously like tomato soup being cooked over too high a flame. But it’s trouble, so it’s not that it’s angry. Bubbling is just one of trouble’s characteristics, for trouble is never completely stagnant. Trouble tends to rumble like a hungry stomach wanting attention.

In trouble, as if it were a place like a small town. Kind of rural with a tiny main drag, a Western town, or maybe more desert-like. Not much water around trouble. The sign on the edge of town says ‘TROUBLE, elevation 11 ft., pop. 57.’ You cross the border the sign marks and you’re in Trouble. You spend some time there, meet the locals, and drink at the saloon because you’ve always wanted to pass through swinging doors with ‘Saloon’ stenciled overhead. You shop at the ‘Five & Dime’ because you haven’t been to one in a long while and it sparks a fond childhood memory. The woman at the cash register ringing you up invites you home for supper because in Trouble strangers don’t remain strangers for long.

Around the table, the food is fine and the family is simple with a working wife, two children, and the kind of husband who would find himself in this small town, a man who used to roam the highways shaking it up and lifting his fist until he found himself in Trouble. You finish your meal and play Parchisi in the living room and you thank your hosts as you leave through the front door.

After a couple days – or is it hours? – you leave Trouble just as you arrived: casually, without much thought.

When people ask where you’ve been and you answer, “In Trouble,” they scrunch up their faces with concern. ‘In trouble’ is the kind of answer kids and criminals give, and you’re neither. In the 1950s a pregnant unmarried woman might use the phrase, or at least the gossiping neighbors would. “She got herself in trouble.”

Being in trouble speaks of going against the rules and getting caught. Being in trouble links with punishment. But after your detour to the small town, those two words will forever sound sly when they crop up in conversation like they’re winking with a bigger story to tell.

A Year Later

2007-04-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

We often encounter markers of time’s passage. Birthdays, anniversaries, New Years. For me it’s the annual trek to see David Sedaris at UCLA’s Royce Hall. Wednesday night was year seven for me, if memory serves. Assorted friends often recount the time they were my guest, sitting beside me, laughing till their stomachs hurt, grabbing at key phrases and tales to stash away for future recall, to facilitate a laugh on demand. Each year around the beginning of April, my phone rings with a caller inquiring, “Who are you taking to David Sedaris this year?” It’s a subtle way of asking for an invite to secure one of the most sought after tickets in town.

Last year my son was my date, the night David Sedaris asked my then twelve-year-old to introduce him on stage, a simple request that lead to a memorable evening. Following that night, I wrote a piece about the adventure and then boldly mailed it off to David along with a thank you and a photo I’d snapped of him with my son. Not long after, I received a warm and witty reply full of details of his recent vacation with his boyfriend that included an anecdote about a midget bouncer at a bar. In order to respect the privacy of personal correspondence, I’ll leave it at that. Beside, you may read about it someday in The New Yorker.

When April rolled around this year, I found myself starting to dream about David Sedaris, odd dreams of nervousness as if I might forget to attend his reading. The morning of the event I worried that I would leave the tickets tucked in my living room drawer or would somehow lose them on the way to UCLA. Weird anxiety, I confess.

My son was to be my date again. We arrived at UCLA early with the plan of seeing if my son could say hi to David. And I really mean, ‘my son.’ I’ve more than let go of the idea of a budding friendship with the admired writer. That rapport belongs to David and my teen with me as a mere observational bystander.

We entered Royce’s lobby and looked for the woman who had taken us backstage last year. No walkie-talkie wielding employees to be seen, I considered approaching the box office and asking for assistance. A table sat in the lobby selling books, so we first wandered over to catch a glimpse of the offerings. My anxiety must have blinded me to the long line snaking from the table, but finally after observing all the books for sale and noting that I owned all except those by an author David was promoting, I glanced left. There sat David signing books. Pre-show. Calm as can be.

“He’s right there,” I said to my son. “Let’s get in line to say hi.”

We waited patiently, the only patrons not holding a book for signing. The line moved slowly, David taking the time to talk with each fan, sharing a personal moment with an anecdote attached. Finally we reached the front of the line. I pushed my son ahead of me and took a step back.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Anthony. I don’t know if you remember me, but I introduced you last year.”

“Anthony, hi. I was thinking about you,” replied David. “You wanna do it again?”

“Sure,” said my son, and David reached for his wallet, pulled out a twenty, “Your stage fee,” he said, and handed it to my son. “Could you sign it?” my son asked, and he did. Anthony had doubled his earning potential in one year, but it hardly mattered. The ten was neatly tucked in his bedroom drawer and the twenty would take a place beside it.

David told us to meet him back at the table in twenty-five minutes. This year he’d be signing books right up until show time. As we stepped away, my son said, “‘Stage fee.’ See, I told you that’s what he said. Not ‘stage pay.’” I wondered if my son was requesting an edit of last year’s piece.

A UCLA Live employee offered us to wait in the green room and eat David’s food. “He never eats it,” she said, but this year we decided to just linger in the lobby. When time came for Anthony to go backstage with David, I didn’t follow. In the passage of a year, I’d seen that this was my son’s moment, that he deserved a private interaction with David to find the words he would say on stage, that I didn’t need to hover and interfere. David had been kind when I’d said hello, but just like last year, I felt his discomfort in small talk with me. And I was fine with that. Really. We are strangers who pass each other once a year, usually with me in the audience and David on stage. That is the natural order of things, at least for now.

As my son disappeared through the lobby by David’s side, I entered the auditorium. Despite the ban on photos, I’d been given permission to snap away while my son was on stage, so I pressed against a pillar up front to the right and waited. I peered into the wings, and finally I saw David and my son arrive deep in conversation. David saw me standing within view and pointed me out to my son who waved and looked really happy and relaxed. I appeared oddly conspicuous standing with my tiny digital camera in hand. In this age of fear, I wondered if anyone found my behavior suspicious, and I launched into a fantasy of my being jumped as the lights came down and I snuck forward camera ready to capture a precious moment. I’d lift the camera and threaten with a flash of light, be tackled by a well-meaning patron or usher, get removed from the theater, and miss my son’s moment.

Of course, none of that happened. The lights went down, my son emerged, I snuck forward and snapped largely worthless photos with my pocket camera’s weak flash just as my son said, “No photos, videos, or recordings.” Like last year but with the modification of a few words and a deeper voice, he told everyone to turn off “cell phones and pagers and anything annoying.” He added his praise of David as a writer who’d told him a funny story about kidney stones backstage.

And then he was done and replaced by David on stage.

I took my seat climbing over fans who seemed annoyed, but when Anthony took his seat beside me, my status was instantly elevated as if those around us were thinking, “Ah, she must be his mom.”

After David read his first piece, he paused, and like last year, thanked my son for his courage to come on stage with little warning in front of a room of nearly two thousand people. He then went on to say something like if he had a kid, he’d want him to grow up to be like Anthony, that anyone would want their kid to grow up to be like Anthony.

I couldn’t agree more. And I thank David Sedaris again for a wonderful evening and memory.

A Semblance

2007-04-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

She sat down at the table and tapped the seat beside her. “Sit down, denial,” she said. “We need to talk.” She proceeded to praise denial, the often maligned guest in the room, for following a week of achievement and well being, she realized what she had done best was to dance with denial, denial in the form of the unspoken self-critique, denial in the form of the over-obsessing worry sidelined, denial in the form of pure celebration of what is.

In waltzing with denial, she glided through life with ease, found new energy to greet life, spent time doing rather than imagining.

With denial’s urging, she gave her life a makeover. When the new furniture arrived unexpectedly in boxes with the declaration “Some assembly required,” she chuckled rather than groaned. “Just like life,” she said. “Assembly required.” So as she placed part A next to part B and joined them with screw C, she saw her life coming together. And when she stripped the paint off the layered and tattered closet doors getting down to the core in order to start fresh and build back up, she again saw her life paralleling the journey. The old layers of trash and garbage stripped away for new color to emerge. And with all the work done and pictures newly hung and the bed freshly made, she sat herself down and leaned against supportive pillows. She looked at the masterpiece she’d created and understood the newness before her. Some assembly required indeed.

(to see a before shot...go here)

Bowing to the King

2007-04-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

When you place a beating heart upon a throne and adorn it with a crown, like any other ruler it gets mighty full of itself and starts bossing around others. The body parts gather to listen, for the heart’s been away for a while and like any admired traveler that returns from a lengthy journey, its subjects wanted to hear a good story.

I’d expected a place of exalted honor for delivering heart back to its home, but I was quickly pushed to the back of the crowd, my view obscured by arms and livers, a gallbladder or two, and even an overgrown ear. Heart stood high and claimed knowledge the other body parts were too ignorant to know. I didn’t like heart’s pompous tone, so I pushed out of the crowd and decided to wander along the highway that bisected the vast nothingness of undeveloped terrain.

Fields spread wide on both sides of the road, and I wondered why heart had asked to return home rather than enjoy wildflowers and discarded aluminum cans. One could learn a lot about travelers by studying the trash they threw from their windows. I could never do that, brazenly toss my garbage from a car, not since those anti-littering ads starring the crying Indian in full headdress. Years later when attending a university that once had an Indian as a mascot, I learned of the sacrilege of dressing an actor in Native American religious wear to cheer on a football team or for use in advertising campaigns. I think that may have been one of the key things I learned in college.

The two-lane highway was void of all cars, a simple dotted line dividing it into its two parts. I stayed to the right and walked mimicking the invisible flow of traffic, but I longed for a car for company, for life on a highway without cars was lonely and unexciting.

Restless with my walk and curious about how heart was getting on, I turned around. I heard the echo of heart passionately spewing from the throne, thinking it rules the body, getting all bossy and dogmatic about the importance of its role including mandates that it must not be neglected. Meanwhile, brain sits on the sidelines shaking its head – its head? itself? – anyway, shaking in amusement over heart’s overblown self-importance. On the other hand, brain relates to feeling all knowing in its role. It, too, has wanted undying admiration.

When the gathering of body parts ended and heart had said its piece about love and passion and paying attention to when it beats hardest, the crowd dispersed and brain saw its opening. It walked over to heart and asked to talk, defying the protocol of requesting a formal audience. Heart was initially suspicious remembering the last time the two of them had gotten into it over what heart called a failed romance and brain called an act of stupidity. The chill and silence between them had lasted for weeks until they were forced into an encounter at a whole body symposium. In each other’s presence they’d both finally conceded the value of the other and had agreed to a truce, though with notably less enthusiasm than was required to peacefully coexist.

But since brain was approaching nicely this time and heart was feeling generous in light of a warm welcome home, well, heart warmly embraced brain.

They stood in silence before each other for a moment. Finally heart opened the door. “You wanted to speak to me.”

“Yes,” said brain, but brain was uncertain how to begin.

“Well?” prodded heart.

“Well, I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for challenging you all these years, for trying to diminish your importance.” Brain paused.

Heart waited.

And then brain started to weep, a role usually played by heart. Heart softened, stunned by this shift in brain. Heart had wanted this for brain for so long, a letting down of its guard, a willingness to melt. In another era, heart might have been smug, but not today. And in an embrace, heart and brain finally realized they were on the same side.

Margaritas and Sushi

2007-04-15T08:43:00.000-07:00

Last night I sat beside two men at a sushi bar, the ones who struck up conversation by asking how a margarita, which I was drinking, goes with sushi as opposed to the traditional sake or beer, and to whom I responded, “Well, I guess I’m always a bit of a rebel, but besides, it’s only vegetarian sushi, a veggie roll, so it’s kind of like having a margarita with a salad.”

These men next tried to draw me in with, “So, what do you think of Hillary for president?” And I told them that I refuse to talk about the presidential election at this point, that I’d rather these elected officials go do the current job they’ve been granted, that I could gather far more information about them by watching them perform as senators and civic leaders than by hearing them on the campaign trail. And besides, whoever has my attention at this point is completely irrelevant because eight months from now they could be long gone following a presidential race implosion.

So they got me to talk a little bit about the campaign, but my heart and head weren’t feeling political. I’d come for food and drink and the noise of the room.

The men started maligning assorted public figures as I sipped my margarita and dipped my not-tightly-enough-rolled sushi into soy sauce and wasabi, watching the rice and shredded carrots leak from the middle to create a textured landscape in my dish. I lightly continued my sideline participation in the conversation and eventually tossed out with a smile that I was certainly more liberal than they were, at which point they grabbed onto ‘liberal’ and told me what I believed, how I wanted to take their hard-fought-for money and hand it out to bums and partiers.

Despite the words, their tone was not aggressive and I took no personal offense, for from my perch on the counter-high stool I was relaxed listening to how others think. We were in communal drinks and sushi mode and I had no need to be right or understood. I uttered a few phrases that contained words like “not everyone starts on equal footing,” but I never let the softness leave my face for these men had come to their opinions long ago, as had I. I did say that if my neighbor is living better, I live better, that giving more isn’t a taking from me but a bettering of community. But I said little else. I didn’t discuss how far reaching ‘liberal’ goes for me because they set it in the corner with money and I didn’t uproot it to bring it to the table with justice.

Near the end of the trialogue when they suggested switching the conversation from politics to religion, which brought a huge smile to my face and the comment, “I don’t think we want to go to religion,” the man closest to me leaned back and spoke to the woman on my other side. She dismissed his question, “Are you a liberal?” with, “I’m a capitalist!” and they giggled together – really giggled – and I offered to switch seats since they seemed much better suited to each other as opposed to gentle dissenting me who was sliding into mentioning those who work very hard but may not be blessed with a mind best suited for navigating society’s complexities. I pointed out that I don’t take credit for the way my brain makes things easy for me, that I only take a little credit for what I do with that brain, but even then… I trailed off.

I didn’t go into my philosophy that I’m not certain I can take any credit for hard work because my brain is what pushes me to do what I do, and I was born with the brain I was born with. I did say, though, to the man who was certain that I wanted to take his money and give it to lazy partiers, that he may have a head for business while I know someone who works very hard but who has a head for art and music. When given a task he digs in, but forced to find his own way in a world of commerce he becomes a little immobilized, not from lack of desire but from being blessed with a different skill set. The sake drinker paused at that one. I saw a glimpse of new thought cross his face. His head even nodded a bit, though perhaps involuntarily.

I paid my bill, said good-bye to my accidental dinner companions, and walked out into the cool night air with a huge smile on my face. “I’ve grown,” I thought. “I didn’t need to strut my stuff or get stern and argumentative. I could simply allow that we would never see the world the same way.” I walked with a fresh understanding of how hard it is to get those with differing views to have the same conversation. I realized that maybe it’s okay to not even try to discuss the details, not when we’re all sitting firmly in our chair of belief. I didn’t make friends while dining, but I didn’t make enemies either. I wasn’t angry at their assertions about me, or their stances that I didn’t share. In talking to them, I simply saw ‘different’ sitting beside me. I understood that they feel they’ve earned what they have, and those who haven’t achieved as much don’t want it with the same will and determination. I don’t agree, but now I at least know what conversation lurks below the surface, and a night out gathering information and experience is always a blessing.

Gravity Killed Kurt Vonnegut

2007-04-12T09:20:00.000-07:00

Gravity killed Kurt Vonnegut.
At least that’s how I heard it
as I drove in my car.
Complications from a fall, they said.
From a fall.
Not illness.
Not old age.
His own body hitting earth
did him in.

Despite plane crashes
and slips from rocky cliffs
I’d never thought
of gravity as a murderer.
What grounds me can kill me.
When I next lose my footing
I will think of Kurt Vonnegut
and the simplicity of his farewell.

The Life of a Sound

2007-04-09T14:26:00.000-07:00

Until I got quiet and listened in a way I never do, I didn’t know of all the sounds, the voluminous sounds that when allowed to be heard jockey for attention like schoolchildren in a room with arms reaching towards the sky waving to say, ‘Pick me! Pick me!’

The sounds want to be heard, hateful of their dismissal as white noise.
Imagine how they see us, the inhabitants they dodge or bounce off of as they move to gather in a wondrous corner of a busy street to share their tales of adventure.

Sometimes they want to go unheard, for sounds have private moments, too. They can feel sad and small, seek to take up less space and go unnoticed. The life of a sound is seldom considered, but when I listened with clean ears, I understood, and I no longer complain about the noise.

The Highway Confessional

2007-04-05T09:26:00.001-07:00

I hit the road, well, really the air, and landed on rich red clay that spent all week trying to henna my feet. When it came time for me to head home, the clay tried to come with me not knowing how good it had it where it was. But aren’t we all that way, unable to appreciate the beauty that greets us daily, the beauty we grow accustomed to?

On the road I tasted a life rich with quiet. The phone never rang, no messages to check, no email to answer, no news to read. I unplugged by choice, and once breathing this air, I said, “I can’t go back, at least not to what I’d become.” Over there, I remembered the me I once was: adaptable, flexible, curious, in movement, in conversation, gasping in laughter, pushing myself right up against the edge of tears in experiences richly felt.

But I had to come home. My life is here. However life and I had a little chat, and we’ve both agreed to change. I promised to walk forward more and detour less, for while detours are delicious, they can evolve to distraction, a reason not to cross a much-desired finish line. I have some finishing to do. In exchange, life offered to lend a hand, to keep me mindful of the present and not allow me to obsess about the unknowable future. Life offered me delusion, for only in delusion can I walk the path I have chosen. Life also offered to prod me to action, which has thrust paint swatches onto my bedroom walls and paint stripper onto my bedroom doors. These days, everyone gets a makeover.

And then there’s the other confusion. Here. As in here. Today is the one-year mark of this site, and we’re having some relationship issues. Here has become a detour rather than a forward march. In the clarity of away, in the over there, I couldn’t deny it. I couldn’t ignore all the hours I leap around the internet visiting other voices while the finish line waits with hands on its hips, looking at its watch, wondering what’s taking me so long. I have things calling, and I’m not sure how to reconcile my confusion.

So if I seem distant and unavailable, recognize the behavior as my dance with processing. How can I stay and not have an affair with distraction? How can I leave and turn my back on those I’ve met and what I’ve learned?

Heart and Fear*

2007-04-03T11:20:00.000-07:00

Fear entered my heart, sat down on the sofa and put its legs up on the coffee table. “Long time no see,” fear said. Heart looked on suspiciously. “Well that’s not entirely true,” fear continued, “is it?”

Heart didn’t want to answer, not particularly happy to see this uninvited houseguest. Heart had been cleaning – dusting, actually – and whistling in a nice pitch that reflected calm and contentment. Fear sensed this and swooped in before things got out of hand.

Recently, having seen itself in a new light, heart had undergone a transformation. “I’ve kind of got it together,” it told its friends the other night over drinks at the local watering hole. Its friends had nodded and smiled. They’d seen the shift but had waited for heart to bring it up on its own. Heart continued, “I remember fun and relaxation and feeling good about myself. I don’t want to lose this.”

So when fear showed up, heart froze and grew stiff. “So you’re done with me, eh?” asked fear.

Heart smiled, “Oh, do you think I’ll ever be done with you?”

“Still…” fear slid in.

“Still,” repeated heart.

“I can see you don’t want me around anymore,” fear said.

“Well…” said heart.

“Go ahead, say it,” jumped in fear. “Say I don’t serve you anymore. It happens to me all the time. You’re not the first.” A tear leaked from fear’s left eye. Heart started to soften and thought to invite fear to stay.

“You’re very good,” said heart wising up quickly, nearly duped by fear’s ploy. Fear’s tear retreated back into its eye socket. Humiliated and angry, fear stood abruptly.

Watching fear leave through the door, heart felt warmly nostalgic. They’d been together a long time, and it wasn’t like heart to turn its back on a friend. But heart had to be honest and admit that fear had been no friend. Loyal, yes, but fear had clipped heart’s wings, and heart, wanting to fly, knew this relationship must end.

“Good-bye, fear,” heart whispered for no one to hear, and went back to cleaning and whistling a sweet tune.

*an accidental homage

Gone Fishing...

2007-03-24T04:56:00.000-07:00

...minus the fishing part. (though writing is a lot like fishing. you throw out a line and see what bites.)

Be back in a week or so with a bit of a tan and a bounce in my step. Cheers...

On Pause: Where the Physical and the Mental Sip Tea

2007-03-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

I’m on pause, that place of immobility where even attempts at action result in pause, such as repeatedly hitting the play button on the DVD remote that offers no result unless you count ‘staying as is’ as a result, the unacknowledged and much maligned result that if properly examined is as much of a result as any.

Got that? Reach for tea. Sip. Continue.

I battle pause due to my overdeveloped relationship with forward. Forward is my buddy. We toast often, glancing back over our shoulders at where we’ve been. In our religion, we pray to next. ‘As is’ is tough for pause skeptics. Believers try to tell us of its value, and we smirk saying, “I don’t want to simply live like a dog and accept,” even though of course we would. We just don’t know how.

I think of treadmills. Inconsequentially. The moving and unmovingness of those wannabe sidewalks make me smile and that is a tiny departure from pause, kind of like one frame forward on the DVD. Undetectable progress, perhaps, but progress nonetheless.

Smiling is good. Smiling beats its opponent.

The paddy wagon knocks at my door, but I say I’m busy learning about pause, so I can’t come to the door right now. Have you ever seen a paddy wagon? They move in a staccato kind of way as if they haven’t caught on to 24fps. Those of you in video world should insert 30fps thinking, but I’m old school and I think in film. We are a dying breed, I am warned, as if I didn’t know that, as if I thought forever lived in my DNA. Well, maybe it does. In my DNA. But in this case that indicates that my DNA isn’t really me because while my DNA can live forever, I cannot. I am a dying breed. Just ask anyone who still develops film. And if you find that kind of logic circular, I invite you to join me on the treadmill where circularity is welcome and appreciated.

Pause is interesting, I say to Forward as my tea reaches a comfortable temperature. Forward replies that pause looks a lot like insanity.

Bah humbug, I retort because no one likes a killjoy.

The tenor of this discussion indicates a need for vacation, a change of scenery, which some would interpret as challenging pause to a duel. While I’m not a fighter, ‘duel’ has an appealing romantic quality to it, so I nod, and say, “Yes, yes. That is what must be done.” Pause, I take you on.

In other words, I’m going on vacation. Sort of. A writing vacation in the company of others who wield pens. Far, far away where palm trees sway and I will learn the hula. If you think all of this has been crazy, picture me doing the hula. If that image doesn’t scare you, you’re not properly informed.

Fringe People

2007-03-16T10:32:00.000-07:00

You know fringe people. We glide amongst you down city streets. We drink coffee nearby as you pour through notes and scratch out reminders preparing for your next engagement. You laugh joyously with a friend as she details last night’s misadventure, and we watch. We see the sad child-eyes when a parent gets too angry. The dog running off-leash, he is in our visual care.

Some seek the comfort of being enfolded while fringe people need to reside in the outer position, a place that allows the freedom to flee at the first hint of danger. You invite us to join, and we accept, yet even when there we observe.

We play with our duality, the ability to participate and watch at the same time. Inside and outside simultaneously, we try to explain. You smile and nod but aren’t certain you understand. And we know this.

When others say they struggle to be alone with themselves it is our turn with confusion, for intimacy with our thoughts is what we know as home. Sometimes we feel guilt for our place on the fringe, as if we’re defying the biological imperative to bond. And then we ease into our thoughts and recognize our hard wiring as our imperative. With an inhale and an exhale we accept.

The Wild West

2007-03-13T11:28:00.000-07:00

New street-side accoutrements are popping up in my adjoining neighborhoods, and I’m certain I’m witnessing the birth of a cultural revolution. I’ll call it ‘Governance by Guilt.’ Children raised in certain households will recognize the method.

Our cars are outfitted with accurate, visibly placed speedometers, yet on my daily commute I now am greeted by large monitors that display the speed of approaching cars on a screen directly below the speed limit. Most of us knowingly speed, so confronting us with our transgression is hardly illuminating. On the other hand, the public shaming aspect of this tactic is highly effective. I can’t help myself. As I see the device looming in the distance, I slow down, an involuntary reaction to ward off criticism.

Those monitoring our streets are onto something. We will start driving slower, at least when facing these signs. We may not actually ever drop so low as to hit the speed limit, but each one of us will determine our own acceptable level of disobedience and tack that number onto the legal maximum. After all, this is already fairly common psychology amongst freeway drivers. Take a poll. Most believe that driving 5 mph over the speed limit on freeways isn’t even speeding. “You can’t get a ticket for that,” these drivers will say. I dare not counter, “Of course you can,” because that is not a welcome response. Furthermore, no one ever goes just 5 mph over the speed limit anymore. That’s so 1970s.

In Los Angeles, we’ve basically adopted the attitude that you can drive as fast as traffic will allow because it is such a rarity to see a clear street that when we do we feel as if we’ve landed on open course day at the race track and just let it rip. (Please note, around schools such behavior is frowned upon even by the most diehard of traffic whiners.)

What I find most disconcerting about this trend is that drivers will actually begin to drive more slowly and then traffic will back up even worse in LA. We just don’t need that. Road rage will peak, and we will be in the news for all kinds of bizarre incidents.

What I’d really like to know is why the 30 mph limit is so widespread. Have you ever tried driving 30 mph? It feels like you aren’t moving. The close second is 35 mph, which I just consider a typo. 40 is more like it, but when we encounter 45 mph, we begin to see the word ‘reasonable’ instead of numbers. Unless of course, it’s on a freeway ramp, in which case we tell ourselves, “I can easily take that turn at 60.”

Despite my discomfort with these devices, the most laudatory aspect is that they’re solar powered. It’s amazing how a city can innovate when motivated. In the spirit of forward thinking, I think my city should mandate solar powered contraptions everywhere. Hanging off buildings, powering streetlights, running the gas pumps at gas stations. Wouldn’t that be a nudge to the energy industry?

In the meantime, I’m off to reset our alarm clocks. Due to the trickledown effect, if I’m going to start driving the speed limit, it’s going to require my leaving home earlier in the morning. It was one thing to begin daylight savings sooner this year, but forcing me to drive slowly and wake up even earlier? I just don’t know how much change a person can take.

Relativity: the Exhale

2007-03-12T10:53:00.001-07:00

[a tidbit on the heels of Relativity, which is required reading for this to mean a thing...]

After she disappeared through the door, he reached for the paper napkin that she’d delicately placed against her lips, and drew it to his nose to see if any scent of her remained. All he smelled was aroma-of-brown-napkin, the distinct scent that indicated a bypassing of the crucial bleaching phase towards purity.

“Or impurity,” his mind interjected. “Bleach is hardly pure.”

He shook his head to shut up his dissenting thoughts, and reached into his coat pocket for a pen. And upon the napkin that had touched his lover’s lips, he started making a list of the pros and cons of their relationship.

She, on the other hand, required no list for guidance. As she exited the coffee house, their life together receded into the background as her eyes focused on the path ahead. Without hesitation she moved forward through determined pedestrians as if part of a virtual reality game, leaning left, leaning right in order not to collide with the fast walkers. Each time she succeeded with minimal sideways momentum, she gave herself a point. By the time she reached the end of the block, she’d scored eleven to the pedestrians’ three.

“Not bad,” she thought. But when she saw the empty bench before her, she crumbled onto it. She thought of starting over and how people turned to newspaper want ads, to page after page of desires and needs. She moaned. She wasn’t organized enough to condense her wishes into a single concise ad.

My Concern is Your Concern

2007-03-09T17:05:00.001-08:00

Dear Sitemeter,

I am worried about you, which is kind of a way of saying I’m worried about myself. And no, not all of my relationships are thus structured, but I think you can handle my honesty because we have never pretended that ours is a two-way relationship.

You have refused to share stats with me for three days. I tried emailing your master to determine if you were ill, but I received no response. Either your master is off at a prolonged happy hour, you are truly ailing and master is thus preoccupied, or as a non-paying customer I am of little concern. I don’t know which of these possibilities I would most embrace.

The truth is that with you out of commission my stalking behavior is hampered. I can no longer discover which kind souls are sending me readers, and therefore I cannot hop back to them and say ‘thank you.’ I like to be gracious, so you see you are harming my reputation by making me seem ungrateful.

I don’t know how long I can let you malinger. At what point do I end our relationship and find a new stalking partner? Have you ever done this to others? I hope you will reply and let me know how to proceed.

Thank you.
Your loyal blog writer who is slowly going mad

UPDATE: the impersonal response snatched off sitemeter's blog...

s25 - Update
We are aware of delays and lag on s25 and are doing are [sic] best to resolve it. In this case we had a particular site that has been running a promotion, nearly quadrupling their traffic. We’re working on relocation [sic] this site to another server. We expect to see the lag dissipate over the weekend.

Thanks,
The Sitemeter Team

Yes, I am part of s25. I can assure you that I am not the site behind the snafu. Quadrupling my traffic would register less than a passing 18 wheeler on the Richter scale (we Californians do care about that Richter scale.)

But really, running a promotion to increase traffic? Interesting. I could use a little more lovin'. Now, what can I offer??? [thinking cap put on and plugged in...]

In the meantime, I've have taken your suggestions and am stepping out on sitemeter. Statcounter, are you ready to dance?

Going to the Well: the First Good-bye

2007-03-08T16:10:00.001-08:00

[continued from Going to the Well: The Beginning]

Remembering Our First Farewell – September 1988 – Moscow Airport

The first time I said good-bye to Yuri, it felt final. I blurted out proclamations of reunion, but deep down didn’t believe a word leaving my mouth. In 1988, the barriers between our countries – the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. – remained strong and required many negotiations with bureaucrats to circumvent them.

The Moscow airport was bustling as the 270 American peace walkers searched out Soviet counterparts, our companions of thirty days, to say good-bye. Together we’d navigated propaganda, language barriers, constantly changing schedules. Conspiracy theories had circulated of the Soviet organizers intentionally upsetting our orientation to keep the politics subdued. We’d debated and discussed it all.

But at the boarding gate on our final day, none of that mattered. We’d formed strong bonds that seemed to mock the proclamations of the Cold War. The finality of the hugs hurt deeply, and months later when studying a photo of Yuri and me saying good-bye, I couldn’t deny our pain filling the frame.

The Americans put off boarding as long as we could.

After the final hug, swallowing the suppressed tears, I climb onto the plane and stumble towards my seat as the nearly three hundred American peace walkers around me move towards theirs. When the plane takes off, I am in silence, squeezed into my seat, the air oppressive with the sadness of hundreds of good-byes.

Once aloft, the restrictions of the seats too formal, we throw our bodies onto the bulkhead floor to huddle in small circles, ignored by Soviet stewardesses who simply don’t care.

We play oneupsmanship with the stories of our good-byes, detailing how we rid ourselves of our worthless Rubles by stuffing them into the pockets of our grateful Soviet friends, the ones we were leaving behind a barrier open only to departing foreigners with proper passports. Many of us discover we’d showered the same group of Russians with our money, leaving them like strippers with bills tucked into g-strings.

Our sadness turns to laughter. I’d given all my money to Yuri and he’d looked shamed to accept it. But it truly was just paper to me, Americans unable to convert Rubles back to dollars, and Rubles of no value outside the borders of the Soviet Union.

As I recalled those final moments with Yuri, our frantic words of meeting again, of his band coming to the U.S. on a cultural exchange tour, our voices gaining speed in the excitement of the dream, I had to wonder. Two countries filled with such hatred for each other, could they ever be bothered to sanction such a fantasy?

So two years later, as I stood before Yuri’s family in his tiny Siberian village amidst the hugs and squeals, Yuri exploding with laughter, it just couldn’t have been more surreal.

Within days I came down with a stomach bug, and as I tried to rush to the outhouse in the middle of the night, I threw up all over his mother’s vegetable garden. This after my first night when I’d nearly suffocated due to some inexplicable allergic reaction. As I felt my lungs filling with fluid, my wheezing growing louder, Yuri broke out a pane of the window to allow some untainted air into the room. But it didn’t help, and I moved onto the front porch in the cold night trying to breathe wondering how I was going to survive.

For the next two weeks, I slept in an unheated outer room with a sweatshirt over my face, the seemingly fragile American girl undoubtedly a mystery to this rural Siberian family.

Ever since that night on the porch, I’ve had an inexplicable image of dying in a fire, the time unclear, possibly a century earlier in that village. Perhaps before I’d continued with my relationship with Yuri, I should have read that as a sign.

…more of Siberia and beyond to come…

Relativity

2007-03-04T07:25:00.000-08:00

“It’s not working,” he said. “The way you’re living life is not working.” He’d sat her down gently, intending to break the news over an hour’s worth of coffee, but once faced with the task he leapt in unable to contain himself.

She glanced up from her steaming brew knowing he needed no prompting to continue.

“You see, I’ve been watching you, and your ‘trying’ is misguided and quite pathetic. You’d be better off sweeping all day.” He hadn’t meant to sound so harsh but her unwillingness to launch a defense before his brutality started fueled his ire. He used to know a fighter in her, but that person was gone. Before him sat a passive being of small attempts. He wanted his old lover back.

She reached for one of those petite plastic thimbles of milk, pulled off the foil top, and added it to her coffee. She had given up the substance years earlier, but now faced with an attack, she decided to distract herself. Reaching for the wooden swizzle stick, she created beautiful swirls that reminded her of images she saw on Nova.

“You have so much,” he offered. “Not everyone is offered such a repertoire upon landing on the planet.” She nodded involuntarily. He no longer was playing fair, tugging at her subconscious. But it hardly mattered. This conversation had no end, so there could be no winner.

She glanced up from her art and met his eyes. “What would you prefer me to do?” she asked. “Apparently the tenor of my existence is an annoyance to you.”

“I’m not here to prompt drama,” he retorted.

“Of course you are,” she said more calmly than intended.

“You see, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about. You won’t fight for yourself any more.”

“No, I won’t,” she replied. She reached for her coffee cup and took a sip. The milk congealed on her tongue due to an unpleasant chemical reaction with her highly acidic saliva. At least that’s what she told herself. She wasn’t much interested in the realities of science for they didn’t contain the romance she needed to thrive. She reached for his cup of black coffee and took a sip to cleanse her palate, and then reset the cup in front of him. “Thank you,” she said. “I needed that.”

He assumed she meant the coffee. He didn’t know that his words had sparked her memory of romance. She stood from the table, and reached for her satchel. “I suspect that I’m done here,” she said, and left unceremoniously through the door.

No Warranty Required

2007-02-28T12:36:00.000-08:00

“At my age I don’t need a warranty.” That’s what the man said standing beside me at the counter as he ordered his new eyeglasses, rejecting the offer to protect his lenses. He punctuated the sentiment with a chuckle that made us all smile.

I studied him. Trifocals. A slow gait as he walked to pick out new frames. Every statement ending with a poke of humor.

The technician asked him if he read a lot, to which the man answered, “Yes.”

“The lenses aren’t positioned right for reading. They’re too low.”

“I just tip my head back,” the man said and demonstrated with a gentle movement of lifting his chin. So easy in his dialogue, not a single complaint crossing his lips. He never said, “My old glasses weren’t right? You mean, I could have read more easily?” He simply said, “I just tip my head back.”

He was there alone, this man, the epitome of peace and acceptance. He selected new frames in thirty seconds. No meandering. No time wasted obsessing. He didn’t ply the employee with questions. Just a simple, “These are light,” as he cradled his new frames in his palm.

I wanted to know this man, wanted to ask him how he’d found calm, how he learned to casually toss around his mortality. His energy was infectious. I wanted to be him.

We never had that conversation. I never got his name. He vanished in the brief moment that I looked away.

Being Someone Else

2007-02-26T10:10:00.000-08:00

The black canvas bag sat pressed against the walkstreet wall, top open and displaying its contents to the sky as if waiting for someone. I walk up cautiously, look around, expect an owner to be hovering near by. But I am alone. I hesitate to touch the bag. What if someone appears and thinks I am a thief rummaging for booty?

The street remains silent and the bag calls, so I bend down and tentatively push around the visible contents looking for a wallet or some identification. A walkie-talkie lays inside with a strip of orange tape sporting ‘Glam’ penned in black Sharpie. I pick it up, push a few buttons, but total silence. I imagine the bag having been grabbed off a messenger’s bike, rifled through, and left for dead.

I figure there is little I can do, so I stand and continue towards my home thinking, ‘Someone else will take care of this.’ But then I think, ‘Someone else? Aren’t I someone else?’

I run inside my home, grab my dog awaiting his walk, and head back out. Facing the bag once again, I further study its contents. Hair tape, sewing kit, boxes of safety pins, fabric pouches. I think, ‘Make up and hair person.’

I step away from the bag and move towards the Venice beachside boardwalk, my eyes scanning for evidence of a film crew. A few blocks north, production trucks stand gathered in a parking lot. I go into a slow jog dragging my dog with me.

“Hey,” I say, arriving next to a location trailer. “Did anyone here lose a black bag, probably hair and make up, with a walkie-talkie inside? One that said ‘Glam’ on it?”

“Let me ask,” the crewmember says, and disappears into the trailer. A second later he yells across me to a woman on my left. Suddenly she’s at my elbow.

“Yeah, the bag’s ours,” she says.

“Well, it’s down on my walkstreet if it’s still there. I’ll show you.”

She grabs a bike to get there in a hurry, and I start running beside her, rushing my Chihuahua who’d really like to stop for a pee. I point out my street, and she races off.

When I arrive on my block, she’s huddled over the bag. “Well, the cellphone’s gone, but it seems like everything else is here.” She thanks me enormously, scratches her name and number onto a piece of paper in case I discover the cellphone, throws the bag over her shoulder, and hops back on her bike and pedals away.

It was so simple.

When immediate danger calls, conscience and instinct kick in and we race into burning buildings, call 911, gather around an injured stranger. But when confronted by an inconvenient, non-emergency – the abandoned possession, the driver stuck by the side of the road – we call up the imagined ‘someone else.’ It’s easy not to stop and slow our pace of life.

But this time I did stop and was rewarded with satisfaction for reaching into a stranger’s life and lending a hand. I breathe in being someone else, and in the future will listen very differently if my mind tells me, ‘Someone else will take care of it.’

Reflective Appreciation

2007-02-22T19:38:00.000-08:00

If you come here often, you may know that I seldom participate in comments on my own blog. When I set out on this enterprise ten months ago, I was attached to an archaic idea of how I should approach my writing. This was my personal op-ed page, and who on the op-ed pages comes back to post-comment on what they wrote the first time around?

Well, nowadays, the writer’s response is common practice at papers like the NY Times, yet I have still largely refrained despite this green light from above.

My silence in my comments is not a lack of appreciation for all of you who do comment. Quite the opposite. I’ve been allowing that to be your arena to talk about me, uh, in front of my face. I didn’t want to interfere and trample the conversation, which is ironic because I love visiting blogs where the writer participates in these exchanges. With that in mind, I may have to reconsider my self-imposed policies.

But on to you. I want to clearly state how much I appreciate your coming here to read my words and how much your feedback means to me – including when you disagree with what I’ve written, for your thoughts encourage me to examine my words and opinion and to consider whether I have presented my views as intended. I also want to thank those of you who have helped promote my site via your site. Meeting new readers is why I’m here, and I couldn’t do that on my own.

When I launched this site, I intended to work on cultivating my voice. I envisioned crafting articles that I could eventually place elsewhere. I never planned on digressing into personal pieces that would clearly live only here, but as it goes, writing begets whatever the hell it wants. As a result, you’ve had glimpses of me I never knew I would write or post.

My one year blog anniversary will arrive in early April. At that time, I will see where I am with the blog. Sometimes this site prompts me to write and sometimes it takes me away from long-term objectives that deserve more focus. For now, I’ll take the wait and see approach. I hope you’ll keep coming back and sharing your thoughts with me and others.

With deep appreciation…

On Addiction

2007-02-21T10:07:00.000-08:00

Like the last two participants in musical chairs circling the final remaining seat, my son and I hover over my laptop. Yesterday our 20” desktop iMac put itself to sleep – actually, knocked itself out completely by shutting down – and when my son approached to do his homework, it refused to wake up. I tried to come to the rescue, but none of my tricks worked. I suspect exhaustion and a condition of under-appreciation (the computer, I speak of.)

The power supply on this machine went out once before and needed to be replaced, so I figure we are going down that road again. Only this time there is no old backup computer waiting to be called into action. That one died an overdue death months ago leaving behind its unsheathed hard drive on my desk like a tombstone.

With the iMac off in repair land, the sole remaining computer in the house is my laptop, which I guard like it’s my third child after teenaged son and undersized dog. I share my son and pet more easily than I share my laptop, for it is my personal zone, the guardian of my two-dimensional life. A virus here would knock me out more than one in my own body.

But homework really did call, so I relinquish my machine to my son and then go into full-blown withdrawal. While I’m not on my computer all the time, knowing it’s out of reach makes me start to salivate just like when you declare a lover off limits and (s)he suddenly becomes more appealing. You may not call this person for weeks, but just add the mandate that ‘You can’t!’ and the jonesing begins.

I tell myself, “This is good. I can’t go strolling endlessly on the internet. I’ll pick up one of the many novels piled on my nightstand. I’ll file papers. I’ll redesign my bedroom. I’ll do sit ups – yes, sit ups – and stretch my hamstrings,” because in an act of positive thinking I’ve been visualizing my hamstrings loosening and allowing my hand to wrap comfortably around the bottom of my foot as my forehead rests relaxed upon my knee. Yes, with less time on the computer, I could achieve that.

The other half of my brain rejects the vision of loose hamstrings, instead having a vision of laptops, more laptops, endless laptops, saying, “This house cannot exist on one computer. Buy your son a laptop!” Apparently my alter ego is a consumer.

After hearing of this fantasy, my son has the good sense to suggest that a second laptop is a mighty pricey backup for the desktop computer, but then I mention the words “built-in iSight camera” and the consumer side of my brain has an instant ally.

“We are spoiled,” I tell my son. “We are whining about sharing a computer.” Actually, I’m whining. He just grabs the laptop and runs. I can call him back, but then I’ll have a brooding teen to add to the drama, so I let him go. The computer is his lifeline to his friends and without this connection he could literally go into shock. I have books and pen and paper and really shouldn’t be suffering such severe withdrawal.

But that’s the funny thing about addiction. It doesn’t listen to logic. And now with all the gadgets in our lives, we have so many more things to be addicted to and so many more things that can break to test our resilience. Cellphones that go silent, cars that won’t run, elevators that sit still, DVRs that reject our programming. Simple life can barely be remembered.

I feel the absence when my luxuries abandon me. But when I abandon them, when I travel to distant lands where these tools are better replaced with a Swiss army knife and a map, a comfortable pair of shoes and a well-designed backpack, I feel liberated. I just don’t know how to locate that feeling in the fast-moving world I inhabit daily.

Word finally arrived that our iMac will be on vacation for another “three to five days,” a casually tossed off declaration from the technician surrounded by more computers than he can dream of. In the span of my life, that’s not much time. In the span of my teen’s, an eternity. And while I could challenge his addiction and deny him access to my laptop, instead I will challenge my own.

Beyond the Double Zero

2007-02-18T19:57:00.001-08:00

A lot of ire was expressed when the ‘double zero’ size was released. Here was the evidence that women were getting smaller and smaller, striving to attain unreasonable sizes and weights.

But I am a double zero and would like to come to its defense. Sort of.

When I was in high school in the 70s, I wore a size 6, and I weighed about two pounds less than I do now. Slowly, I diminished to a size 4 without shedding an ounce. Five years ago when I was five pounds less than what I weigh now, I wore a size 2.

Recently I went shopping for a new pair of jeans due to the disintegration of my old favorites. I tried on assorted styles in different stores. Finally I found a pair I liked. The size two hung on me. The size zero fit fine, but I didn’t like the overly distressed color of that specific pair. There were no other size zeros in that style, so I grabbed a double zero on a whim. I pulled them on with no trouble, but they felt a little snug, and I wanted a pair to lounge in. I stuck with the zeros despite the color I didn’t love. I figured they might grow on me.

And grow they did. After twenty minutes on my body, I could slip off the zeros without unbuttoning them. They sagged and bagged everywhere. Jeans stretch, but this was extreme. I wish I’d left the store with the double zeros.

The problem is not the double zero. The problem is size inflation, a marketing trick to make women feel better about our bodies when shopping. I am no giant, but I am no wisp of a woman either. At 5’ 2”, my weight usually fluctuates between 105 and 110, appropriate for my height. And I remain in the same clothing size through it all.

The frighteningly thin super models do set an unrealistic standard, and if you’re five foot ten and wear the same size as someone five foot two that is the problem to be discussed. But as long as size inflation continues, please don’t deny me my double zeros.

The bigger concern is the continuing message that a women’s worth is in her appearance. Virtually every woman’s magazine focuses on beauty – even when the motto is ‘accept yourself as you are.’ As ‘yourself’ you can still look pretty, and the magazine points out how, supported by countless ads to back it up. Some magazines reject this emphasis with more of a focus on politics or feminism, but if you stroll past a newsstand, the overwhelming message from the covers of women’s magazines is appearance, appearance, appearance.

Where are the magazine covers celebrating aid workers or women with small businesses, innovative teachers or dedicated community leaders? When will we routinely see covers adorned by women representing the breadth of female contributions, those that reside outside beauty and celebrity? And when will the press stop reporting what a woman of power wears to a meeting?

Quite simply, when will we modify the message of what it means to be appealing as a woman?

I find it impossible to be immune to these societal pressures. As much as I strive for achievement in my chosen field and seek to contribute to society, the message that comes through the loudest is that my primary goal should be to work on my appearance. And this is why size inflation works in selling clothes. We will accept even blatant manipulation to feel better about how we’re measuring up.

If women were routinely and widely celebrated for reasons outside our physical appeal, the size of models would matter less. The size of clothing would matter less. If female role models from every arena of life graced the covers of magazines, women and young girls would receive the message that we have more to offer than a perfect body and a nice wardrobe.

From a Lump of Clay

2007-02-15T19:05:00.000-08:00

When I lived a life of wide-open space, I spent hours in a potter’s studio hunched over a spinning wheel, legs in a ‘v’ to accommodate the machine before me. Arms tensed, hands gripping the moving blob of moist earth, I pushed and positioned trying to convince the clay to give over its will to me and become the shape I desired. I endured many frustrating battles before I learned to move with the clay rather than against it.

The chilly, concrete-floored studio became a relaxing and peaceful place to escape into during my long stretches of unreserved time between freelance jobs. I developed a specific wardrobe for this room – clay-encrusted, turquoise blue high tops and faded cutoffs. I had discovered it was easier to wash clay off of skin than out of fabric, and the assorted splatters on the high tops became a journal of the various colored clays with which I’d experimented.

I haven’t been back to the studio since my son was born thirteen years ago. Those wide-open spaces of time don’t exist in the same way. When emptiness sits before me, I feel the pressure to fill it with useful and productive over pleasure, but when I pull out my ceramic creations of the past, I feel longing. And last night when I served my son dinner in one of the bowls that usually lives high up in a cupboard more as a memory than as a daily life participant, he said, “Nice bowl,” in the offhand way a teen pays a compliment, and I thought of the studio again.

Pottery was good for me. The studio offered a built-in community of artisans and explorers. We’d share tips and marvel at the results of glazing experiments. At the wheel we’d sit in silence and watch our clay spin round and round. While the professional potters greeted a fresh chunk with a specific result in mind often requiring the use of a ruler to create a matched set, I went off in spontaneity, saying, “Bowl,” unconcerned as to what precisely would emerge.

A lot of (un)fortunate friends received my pottery as gifts, and eventually I'd created too much to store in my home. But I couldn’t halt the output because going to the studio was the only time in my life that was about process over results. The doing really was more enjoyable than the outcome. I was not in the studio to create cups, pitchers, bowls, and plates, but to experience the meditative pleasure of getting lost in spinning clay, to see a creation grow before me, to laugh at the miscalculations while also marveling at the unexpected.

As much as I tell myself to experience life as process, that doesn’t come easily to me. I always return to my goal-oriented perspective, certain I’ve spent enough time in process and now deserve to luxuriate in splendid results. But in remembering how joyous I felt in the potter’s studio, I seek to implant that vision in my mind to make it readily available upon request. Whenever I start to feel impatient awaiting results, I will picture myself at that potter’s wheel content and mesmerized. No matter what activity I am engaged in, I will strive to overlay the image of the potter's studio and chant the mantra, “Process, baby. Process.”

Two Halves Making a Hole

2007-02-12T19:22:00.000-08:00

Mary is a different person when her husband is around. Not bad. Different. She’s not unique in this shifting of identify. You know because you’ve met her. Over lunch when her husband is off at work, she spouts opinions and speaks with animation. She makes snide jokes. She has an edge that sparkles like a piece of broken glass.

In the company of couples with her husband by her side, Mary becomes a wife. Caring, nurturing, a little quieter in speech. Not bad. Different. And she knows it, though she doesn’t speak of this transformation because Mary doesn’t want to sound like she’s complaining by admitting that a part of her vanishes when she touches shoulders with her spouse, even when the touch comforts, even when it confirms her partnership.

For two halves to become a whole, Mary thinks part of her must sit on the sidelines. She has never told her husband because she doesn’t know how to respond to the imagined arrival of his crooked eyebrow of confusion. Instead she maintains her private side like a secret garden watered by daydreams.

Mary feels happy knowing she has a good life and a loving marriage. She tells herself that the part of her that questions is leftover from an earlier time. What she doesn’t know is that her husband has the same conversation with himself. He loves Mary, yet wonders who he’d be on his own and has fantasies of grander adventure and bigger risks.

Mary’s husband also transforms in the company of couples. He leaves crude jokes outside on the curb even though everyone would likely laugh. Instead of navigating into appropriate conversation, he finds his focus drifting away as if the room has less of a hold on him. Fortunately, his body remains behind to smile and insert well-timed questions, but his spark is weak. He is not complete.

The other halves of Mary and her husband await their turn. They hope that someday they, too, can join the party. But if two halves make a whole, what do two wholes make?

Miraculously, Mary and her husband share that thought on the same day. They shuffle to the breakfast table. Both reach for the pitcher of orange juice at the exact moment. Their hands touch. They don’t pull away. And they stare at each other and wonder what it means to be a fraction of a larger part.

Dreamscape

2007-02-08T17:14:00.000-08:00

“[Of course we make jokes about marriage because] the enormity of being responsible for another person’s life [devastates us.] ”

The lead-in was vague, drifting away. Maybe less important, maybe swept up in ethereal dream movement unwilling to wait for me to focus. The tag equally so. But the middle part, ‘the enormity of being responsible for another person’s life’ might as well have been tattooed on my forearm, those words refusing to be forgotten.

I woke up in heart-thumping panic because an actor on stage had spoken this phrase in my dream, and it was as if it had to be remembered. Two of us exiting the play commented on the line because it spoke to us so deeply.

I have no idea why.

Sunrise hours away, I insist on writing down the words telling myself, “Do this now. Do not go back to sleep first.” I am certain I am plagiarizing, remembering something rather than mining my own thoughts, because when have I ever used the phrase ‘the enormity of’? Sitting in the dark, I actually think, “Do I use the word ‘enormity’?”

But I want to listen to my dreams and my passionate response because when dreams wake you up, they want your attention. Yet I don’t know about his phrase. Where does it come from? What does it say?

The dreamscape is a faux European land of concrete and trains and underground passages. Lots of underground passages. Hued by overhead greenish lights and ticket takers in tollbooth cubicles. I miss a train, get on the next, and then travel too far. I’m not alone. Some mystery friend is by my side.

‘the enormity of being responsible for another person’s life’

I am responsible for my son, but he does not live in this dream. The mystery companion? An appendage whose resonance fades upon waking.

My husband and I lived our marriage as two very independent people. Too independent. Safely detached. We found in each other exactly what we needed: another who let us be free. Too free. We weren’t trapped in each other. We were barely tethered. Too free.

I’ve wondered if marriage and I will have a reunion. For the me who is now, it would have to be different. I’d infuse the vows with some dependence, with the freedom to need the other, to trust such needing wasn’t needy, to proclaim a responsibility for each other’s life. An enormous declaration. In a good way. For it would be by choice. The enormity of being responsible for another person’s life: a commitment to love that deeply.

Unless my dream returns to comment, I can only pretend this to be the message. Or, I can choose it to be.

Don't Be Scared, It's Just My Brain

2007-02-06T19:13:00.001-08:00

I have wanderlust. Don’t know why and can’t say for how long. That’s the amazing thing about following your moods – they don’t offer advance warning of their shifts. There’s no ‘I’m gonna feel really up and perky in an hour and fifteen minutes, but right now, kind of mopey, ya know?’ We don’t so much follow our moods as get dragged with them wherever they go like an unrelenting tour guide who really isn’t interested in what we want to see.

Mood sits beside me in my passenger seat, looking out the window like a dog who loves a car ride. I drive until Mood tells me to pull over. And then I brake and breathe deliberately. Sun hits me through the windshield, and I put down the window to release the stifling stagnation of the greenhouse effect.

Sounds differ depending upon where you park. In LA you seldom escape the Doppler effect of a passing car or a helicopter overhead. Motors create our white noise, and if the atmosphere grows still we imagine ourselves inside a Twilight Zone episode. I pity the next generation where the Twilight Zone will cease to be a reference point. That shorthand phrase unifies my generation with concise clarity.

I consider my scenery. To see a driver in LA without a cellphone pressed to his head or a Bluetooth device encircling his ear draws my attention. The absence of an electronic distraction makes the driver look unoccupied. To confirm this, I look left and see two drivers pass not speaking on cellphones. They look occupied in thought, so I immediately peg myself a liar.

As the drivers pull away, I notice my dashboard covered in white, hairy dust that insists on reappearing within six hours of carwashing. Studying the furry coating, I picture the inside of my lungs. I’m certain they never breathe air without texture. Another driver passes by not speaking on a phone, and I realize that today’s experience differs from my LA driver generalization because I’m not moving at rush hour but am parked on a residential block off a main drag during an unexceptional hour of the day. No one passing is hurried. If they were, they’d avoid this street with a stop sign every one hundred yards, a measure I arrive at after going to my brain archives and recalling two years of fall and winter Saturdays spent on football field sidelines with a long-lensed camera pressed to my eye striving to capture football moments that when frozen in still frames mimic ballet. The side benefit of my job was that the length of the field became etched into my mind as a handy measuring tool. Unfortunately, saying ‘the length of a football field’ to my foreign-born husband didn’t work, which added to our communication challenges, but I never blamed the divorce on that.

At this point I don’t blame the divorce on anything but bad judgment and misplaced idealism. Our system mandates marriage licenses, yet doesn’t insist on any test other than one of our blood, as if suggesting that driving a car is more difficult than driving a relationship. A few pre-marriage questions would serve us, I figure, and the test could simply be Pass/Fail with the opportunity to retake as many times as necessary until the participants pass or recognize they shouldn't be together. For ease of creation, questions from The Newlywed Game could serve as a launching point with creative modifications offered up by unemployed writers or marriage counselors. I would apply for that job.

Pulling away from the curb, I ask my mood which way to go, but get no response. I am on my own, required to be my own motivator and support system. I picture living in cavepeople times when questions of career were occupied by ‘You hunt, I’ll cook.’ I like the idea of stirring food over open fires, sharing stories about animal behavior and elusive berries. Fantasy is a drug like any other, only free and legal.

I consider what life would look like if we were handed a map upon birth with directions and designated destination. Detours would be permitted if you promise to return to the redlined highway within a reasonable amount of time, for the blue lines are known to vanish suddenly and lead the unsuspecting over a cliff. Some would say that that removes choice, but let me ask, do you really believe we have free will? How can we know since we can only make each choice once and will never know if we were capable or choosing otherwise?

Bittersweet

2007-02-02T10:35:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I received an email filled with good news. A former colleague of mine who’s been waiting desperately for a lung transplant was on his way to the hospital, new lungs en route as well. He’d been on the transplant list for more than a year and was seriously deteriorating, his lungs damaged from radiation treatments for cancer years before when he was a teen.

Seeing that he was finally going to get his lungs, I felt cautious optimism, relief, hope, anticipation – a smorgasbord of emotions. I repeatedly refreshed the page of updates on his family’s website eager for the latest news. The reports were good – the lungs arrived and were in good condition, he was in surgery, it was going well, etc. Finally he was in recovery, the surgery a success. He would sleep for a day or two, his family explained. The post ended with the tag, “Donor was 22 year old male who was six feet tall. Lungs fit perfectly.” My heart sank. I had been rejoicing for my friend’s successful journey through surgery, and suddenly I was mourning an unknown twenty-two-year-old. I pictured his family in sadness, wondered how the young man had died, imagined facing the decision to donate his organs.

I saw the cycle of life, the hard choices, the loss next to the gains, and from that moment on, struggled with the comments of joy celebrating my friend’s good fortune. Before the donor was mentioned, I could see the organs as a generic pair of lungs. Suddenly they became someone’s lungs. Thoughtfully, one well-wisher mentioned expressing gratitude to the donor’s family when the time was right, while another voiced sadness for the loss of the young man. My soul felt heavy.

Today I remain on my friend’s family’s website monitoring his recovery from surgery, hoping it goes smoothly, eager to see photos of him awake and smiling and breathing on his own. At the same time, a part of me hurts. I think of the other family gathered in mourning.

Last year I went to the Donate Life website to register as a donor while thinking of my friend with so much to offer, so young at twenty-nine. At 6’9” most donated lungs weren’t suitable for him and went to someone below him on the list, someone in less urgent need.

We’d worked together on a film about the war in Iraq. He fed me new facts and new clips daily. He helped me navigate the complexity of the story, thorough in his accuracy and consistently thoughtful regarding subtleties. He helped calm my frustration with the mounting footage and my distress over the stories we couldn’t fit into the piece. His focus and integrity inspired me daily.

When I first heard of his failing lungs, I lost my breath. “Not Jim,” I thought, as if somehow his life counted more than another’s. I wrote to him instantly expressing my shock and saying I hoped he would get the transplant soon. I visited his website frequently over the following months, but his posts focused on the extensive creative and political work he was doing and rarely mentioned his deteriorating health. A simple link sent readers to his family’s website detailing the transplant process. Knowing Jim, that didn’t surprise me.

For the past year, I’ve read about his struggles with insurance and hospitals, his family’s optimism and their disappointments. Over time he was forced to work from home, his mobility more and more restricted by the deterioration of his lungs. Standing in the shower eventually became almost impossible. Every update on his family’s website made me sigh, and I kept thinking, “Not Jim.”

Now Jim has his lungs. He has recovery ahead of him, but the caution attached to my optimism is receding. I picture him continuing his life and his work, and I feel relief. Our world is better with him in it. At the same time, I think of the unknown twenty-two-year-old whose family cries today.

UPDATE: Jim is breathing on his own, which raises the sweet quotient in the 'bittersweet.'

Seeing Ghosts

2007-01-30T12:58:00.001-08:00

Packing up to leave a coffee house on my circuit, I decide to purchase a delicacy before departure when I glance right and see my old boyfriend sitting at the counter. He’s not supposed to be here – he lives nowhere near this locale – and I’m not supposed to care because we broke up five years ago. Only seeing him casually sitting there is like seeing a ghost sunbathing. You can’t help but be startled.

We met over hot beverages. Accidentally. A crowded coffee house with too few tables. I pulled an empty chair into no man’s land trying to balance my drink with my reading material, no surface for support. A guy with bleached-out hair and the coolest fountain pen offers to share his table. I say thank you and slide over. He’s scribbling in a spiral notepad and I’m lusting over his pen.

“Cool pen,” I say with all the suave in the room. I flash my drugstore variety Sheaffer at him and say, “I love fountain pens.”

“Me, too,” he replies, and he starts sharing the history of his pen while demonstrating the way it moves across the page and pointing out the fine crafting of its nib.

Five months later he vanishes without warning, without a word, and takes my heart with him.

The in between part from pens and coffee to disappearance are messy and involve shared living quarters (mine), loaned money (mine), and the destruction of trust (also mine.) He resurfaced two years after his departure to apologize and repay his debt. By then I was accustomed to living without a heart, so after the initial jolt of hearing his voice, talking to him had little effect on my pulse.

But seeing him today oddly did.

I alter my direction and exit the coffee house via the side door leaving the thought of food inside. And now, with an empty stomach, I’m digesting. That man sitting with his coffee was the first person to sit me down and tell me that I must write. As he said the words handing me back my pages of a meandering novel/memoir-type concoction, I smiled and shyly shrugged off his praise. And then he upped his level of seriousness to stern and said, “I mean it. You Must Write.”

Without offering me a roadmap, he insisted on my taking the journey. His adamance got my attention and along with my own desire pushed me to abandon the working life I’d been living. Over time I concluded that this was the purpose of his entering my life, for after the blow of his disappearance that left me paralyzed for months, I needed to find positive meaning. I’d been certain that he was my reward for the hard work of healing after a troubled marriage, but then he was gone.

Seeing the ghost reminds me of the good he brought out in me, how I was lighter and funnier, risky and playful. I was kind to myself then, more tolerant, more accepting. To lose that when he left stung, but I finally believe that he had no intent of hurting me, that his abrupt departure was simply a dramatic display of his own problems.

And suddenly I feel forgiving. I consider other hurts of my life and I recognize how I could have minimized the pain, how I could have stood up for myself better. Receiving hurt in silence is wrong. If we’re not willing to stand up for our needs and wants, how can we expect others to honor them?

So, seeing the ghost has pushed me through forgiveness and made me stand up straighter. My rescuing days are over unless it involves my child, my dog, or strangers who fall onto subway tracks (hey, I, too, can aspire to greatness.) I feel a smile that can’t be squelched. And I can’t wait to see who shows up next, spooky or fleshlike.

Sisyphus Has Nothing On Me

2007-01-28T19:37:00.000-08:00

There’s something that’s coming between me and my sanity and it’s called my much neglected mail, the mail that stacks up because I’ve paid the immediate bills but before me sits that semi-necessary stuff that really should be sorted into my overstuffed file cabinets because there are rumors floating around that someday I just might need it, like in case of an audit or a purchase malfunction or if I ever find myself with a shortage of reading material (impossible!) or I just don’t know why.

Going through the stacks semi-weekly, I manage to toss about half of what was left over from the previous week because the offer expired or the event has passed or the election is over and I never did read those recommendations because the ones I found online were much easier to access because they didn’t involve climbing the mail Mt. Everest.

When I purchased a shredder, I envisioned my path to clean-counter heaven. There’s nothing like a new toy to enlist participation in a dreaded chore. The whizzing, the whirling – I saw junk mail disappear before my eyes, but I faced the daily arrival of the postman and like Sisyphus could never get over the hump.

I hear the tips roaring in. Tackle your mail the minute you walk through your door! File immediately! Nothing gets to remain on your desk/table top!

Brilliant advice, but my file cabinets are exploding. Each time I must file something new I don’t want to wade through all the old to figure out what can go. That’s double duty. I got it into the file cabinet once. Can’t it just reside there forever?

It could if I owned a million file cabinets and lived in a palace.

I could go paperless and get all my bills and statements via email, but I don’t trust that yet, which is a shame because my computer is a beauty to behold – organized and neat – with all its endless folders. If I forget where I filed something, I can just do an easy search, and there it is dancing before me saying, “Here I am. Here I am.” Furthermore, if longevity is what I’m after, I’m certainly more likely to rescue an external hard drive in the event of a fire than fifty file cabinets (okay, two, but once they’re beyond the size of a shoe box, numbers don’t mean much.) We’re talking fire and running and grabbing animals and photos and children. Old credit card statements? I don’t think so. So maybe I must rethink my skepticism here.

The biggest obstacle between me and relief is the tax audit. I’m convinced that as soon as I toss my old financial records, the Tax Man will knock at my door and wag his finger at me as if he’s been lurking in my alley peering through binoculars into my window to detect the perfect moment to strike. Ironically, I don’t even know if the papers I save would prove anything on my behalf. I have a creative way of tracking my expenses that has little to do with receipts. Still, I have faith in my system, mostly because it’s mine.

In an effort to force my hand, I placed all my unfiled mail upon my bed with the mandate, “No sleep until this is dealt with.” Unfortunately, my mind has a mind of its own, and with one grand gesture it found a spot in the corner of my room screaming for company. That corner is no longer lonely.

My file cabinets still overflow, my shredder is silent, and the Tax Man must lurk a bit longer. If there’s ever a fire in my home there will be no shortage of fuel, and I’m convinced my obituary will read, “Death by mail.” When people ask, “Given the opportunity, what one luxury would you offer yourself?” I answer, “Forget the daily massage. Forget the gourmet restaurants. Give me a secretary.”

Finding My Home

2007-01-25T11:55:00.000-08:00

I’ve gone offline and started submitting more pieces to print media. Romping through newsstands looking for a fit is enough to bring a female essayist to tears. I have little to say about make up and diets. Actually, I have a lot to say about make up and diets, but what I have to say would get me banned from women’s magazines. Besides, content aside, I can’t stand the stench left on my hands from touching those perfumed pages. Do these magazines really speak to my species?

I have much to say about the journey of the parent, but so far I’ve noticed that in-print documentation of the experience appears to end before the kid’s age hits double digits. My tales of encountering puberty don’t fit next to toilet training. Parents of teens don’t read magazines geared at parents anyway. We’re so ecstatic to have more freedom that we mostly just drop our kids at the movies and go read a novel or hang out with friends. If we’re feeling especially entitled, we may sneak in a massage. We return to pick up the kids and ask them if they smoked while we were gone. We then practice reading body language. I must find a publication interested in this phase of the parenting journey, the stories that reflect as much about our learning as that of our offspring.

Despite previous attempts, I’ve been discouraged by those in the know from further submitting to the NY Times op-ed page – the paper I read – because supposedly I need a bit more fame in my corner to get printed there, even if it’s fame only in the eyes of the NY Times. Instead, I’ve been nudged to the LA Times, which I no longer read. I will look there again.

I can’t deny my grandiosity. I’ve submitted to publications I’m too shy to confess to here despite my blog title. If they take me, I’ll shout it from the moon so you’ll certainly know.

I’ve been told not to look for a fit for my writing, but to find a place I could imagine writing for. This frustrates me. I’ve spent all this time looking for my voice, and now I’m supposed to tell it to shut up and be someone else. “These magazines have a format,” my ears hear. “Don’t try to get them to bend for you.”

“Why not?” I want to scream. “Isn’t that the point of creativity and originality? If we all speak the same cloned voice, why not just program my computer to write?”

Wait, could I do that? Go spend a week on a tropical island and have my computer write for me?

“But of course not,” you say.

“I know,” I reply, while fantasizing ever so briefly and imagining turning the idea into a tidy short story.

I will keep writing. I will be mindful of publications and what they print. I will send stacks of essays appropriately modified to places that may wish I’d never been born. I will poke and prod and pray and hope. And I will offer a finder’s fee to anyone who points me to a publication I haven’t considered that ends up taking me. Ready, set, go.

Beyond Memory

2007-01-22T11:37:00.000-08:00

To ease our access to history my mother pulled our home movies from the closet and transferred them to disk. As I pop DVDs into my player, images of my mother in her youth move before me – parading coyly before the camera, in a cowgirl costume dancing with friends, posing with her brother – and I sit transfixed meeting a person I’ve never known.

And the journey continues from my parents as teens freshly in love before the promises of forever to my sister’s arrival. She appears serious and observational, the dramatic demonstration of the personality she still inhabits. My brother comes next, altering the family balance and casting the players into new roles. Finally I appear causing yet another shift.

I watch myself as a baby and a toddler living a life of which I have no memory. “But that’s me,” I think to myself. It’s so foreign, so inaccessible. It might as well be someone else’s life. And I can’t help but wonder how to calculate the value of what I can’t remember.

Seeing my family before my existence, in motion, offers a kind of understanding that anecdotes, still photos, and description will never provide. The way my mother walked as a teen. How my grandfather always mugged and performed for the camera using whatever props were at hand – a garden hose, a diving board, another person. His spirit of play greets me in a way that I never experienced in the flesh. Unknown faces appear representing an unknown story. It’s a tease. I want to dig deeper, to sit my mother down and ask questions.

I continue watching and come to a gap in the history. Life between my third and eighth year doesn’t exist. “Mom, there’s nothing of all the roadtrips we took when I was four.” I say. “Sun Valley. Crater Lake. Nothing.” And her simple response of, “Really?” rather than, “You’re kidding? We were shooting movies all the time,” leads me to imagine that the films aren’t missing from the neatly labeled and organized box of 16 and 8mm treasures.

If the cameras stopped rolling, what altered my parents’ need to preserve our adventures and milestones on film? Had they recognized they would not go forward as a family? Had the unraveling begun? Or was it just the syndrome of an aging family where the tireless documenting slows down?

1969 and 1970 present two offerings: my sister’s high school graduation and a random day as I played with my two dogs. Then all the recorded moving history ends, as did our family unit.

I think of the closet of home videos of my son. Will he recognize the day his parents split up by the sudden absence of his father in the videos? Will the visual shift speak poignantly or appear as a simple marker in our family’s history?

And I see that I owe my son the preservation of his father in this time, that since the camera lives in my hands, I should film his dad whenever he appears, whenever they are together, or in the least, hand over the camera to them to capture their own moments. My son will want to remember.

My mom asked me to edit the films she gave me, to compile them in a neat and tidy way, to remove the boring and the blurry, but I can’t get myself to do it. Out of focus or repetitive, lingering or chaotic, all are precious moments, and I don’t want to lose any of them. Adults often say to children, “I was once a kid, too, you know.” The viewable proof is breathtaking.

Tagged: I’m It

2007-01-17T13:37:00.001-08:00

I only did this for Cover because I love her writing and sort of considered it an invitation. But, I won’t be tagging anyone to follow because it feels like supporting the draft, which I oppose. (Either that or I lack blogger spirit.) However, if you want to be tagged by me, consider it done. I won’t deny it. Even under oath.

Five Things:

1. I seem to always get my car washed two days before it rains. Two days. After waiting months to do the deed. So if you live in Los Angeles and want to make plans that are weather dependent, monitor my car washing. I think I’m more reliable than the nightly news.

2. My thirty-year-old boyfriend took me to my senior prom. Beforehand, he bought strawberry daiquiris in a posh restaurant that my friends and I shared. Nearly thirty years later, I’m still attracted to thirty-year-olds. Either I live in a time warp, my soul has a permanent age of thirty, or there was something very magical in those daiquiris.

3. The only regret I have in life was trying to put on overalls in a small bathroom at age eight. A piece of advice: never attempt this by bending rapidly at the waist as you reach behind to fling the strap over your shoulder. I collided with the sink and spent the next ten years in a dentist’s chair as a lab rat before the days of perfected bonding. Better advice: don’t wear overalls unless you’re a farmer.

4. I speak four languages, one quite well (English.) My ability in the other three (Russian, Italian, French) is deteriorating at an alarming rate. Luckily, I came up with a handy solution: blending. When I put together what I remember of the three, it comes out as a delicious Esperanto-imitation, yet more flavorful and with a far more sordid history. I give lessons upon request, though don’t expect to get much use of it in the real world. You will, however, have the opportunity to see the look on the ticket seller’s face at Gallerie dell'Accademia when you ask to purchase one adult and three children’s tickets in ‘Italian,’ prompting her to respond, “What language do you speak??!”

5. My right shoulder barely functions, supposedly due to overuse at a young age. I question the simplistic diagnosis, suspecting instead a war wound from a past life (hence part of my resistance to the draft.) I think a spear was involved. Don't worry, I've learned to compensate nicely with weird body contortions.

And despite all that I’ve shared here I am profoundly private, except in the company of alluring strangers and alcohol. You’re been warned. Onward.

Watching the Detective

2007-01-12T11:06:00.001-08:00

I suspect I wasn’t born a detective. I suspect my occupation was cultivated in my youth. However, as with many of life’s mysteries, I’ll never know, will I?

As I went about my young life climbing and playing, racing the neighborhood, shooting unpopped popcorn through a peashooter at parked cars, things were happening around me. Things no one was talking about. Things I was blind and deaf to. I embodied innocence in a not so innocent world.

In my third grade year, the bomb exploded in my upper middle class home. Climbing from the rubble, I watched as my parents came and went in shifts. I learned about hospitals of the physical and psychological kind. I learned that asking questions might not get you answers, especially if you have no way of knowing which questions to ask.

So much was going on in my world that I didn’t even know how much I didn’t know, but eventually my subconscious caught on and planted the seed that if you want to know anything, you better pay attention. There are signs, my subconscious warned. Only the savvy and the attentive will know.

The Detective was born.

I imagine what I’m not hearing and what isn’t being said. I look over my shoulder, search for clues and signs and indications and hints. I take notes. Friends come to me, my skill at detection well known, and ask, “What do you think it means?” My powers of observation and analysis are well respected. I offer answers. I serve the people.

And I’m tired.

I’m tired of not trusting in what I don’t hear. I’m tired of imagining what is being said between the lines. I’m tired of waiting for the next bomb to drop, in believing that if I’m more vigilant in my detection I can get out of the wake of the explosion before I end up in the rubble again.

I used to see my story as one of survival, of making the best out of the bad, of using adversity to hone independence and create a pocket of powers. And all of that is true, but more is true as well.

Children should not be protected from all that is bad. Absence of information and explanation creates a lack of trust, for once the curtain is pulled aside and the protected learns the truth, he doesn’t know what to believe in the future.

If you want to protect your children from a lifetime of healing, let them heal in pieces from the beginning. Share pain in small doses. Share truth in age appropriate terms. This does not mean bleeding all over the child. A child can choose to drown saving a parent. Throw your child a life preserver first. But do not protect with lies. Do not mask reality with well-rehearsed smiles and fairy tales.

Unless you want to raise a detective. A suspicious, somewhat-paranoid detective. A detective who will blame himself for his lack of belonging and trust. A detective who will always be searching, for there is undoubtedly something to be found. There certainly was in this detective’s childhood, and while one can’t blame the budding detective for not unearthing clues at such a young age, the detective may always believe that the clues were sitting waiting to be discovered. He may not believe it in his head, but he may somewhere deep in his soul.

But take heart. It’s not so serious. The Detective has fun. The Detective figures out movies before the rest of the audience. The Detective seldom says, I never saw that coming.

The Detective even has enough savvy to eventually figure out what’s been nagging him for years. The Detective can turn his detective powers on himself. It’s the beauty of living. Everything moves and changes. The absolutes are the beginning, not the end.

Dance Partners

2007-01-09T15:35:00.000-08:00

Forgiveness and I are not close. I’ve never really understood the terms of the friendship, so I haven’t reached out and invited Forgiveness into my life in any grand way.

While Forgiveness has made short visits such as after a minor misunderstanding or slight – the kind that mends easily with an “I’m sorry” – for big injuries of the recurring kind I have mostly shunned Forgiveness by saying, “I need to know how and why.” And so far, Forgiveness has mostly defaulted to clichés, such as ‘to forgive is divine’ or ‘it’s for your own good.’

Of course, I know Forgiveness is good for me. In theory. But sometimes I feel that Forgiveness wants me to assume the entire burden of the friendship. In becoming buddies with Forgiveness without first having tea with Understanding, mustn’t I simply swallow Hurt?

When the way through pain is visible, it is easy to dance with Forgiveness. But when pain is disorienting with no clear path to release and Forgiveness casually calls, how can I act all cool and jaunty and step onto the dance floor? To link hands and prance feels so disingenuous.

I know a friendship with Forgiveness can liberate me. I know it’s like saying, “[Whoever] didn’t mean it.” But what if [whoever] did mean it? Or what if [whoever] doesn’t care about repeated insults? Must I then simply try to have a threesome with [whoever] and Forgiveness? Isn’t it kind of slutty if you’re not really into it?

I have a long way to go in developing a healthy relationship with Forgiveness, but I’ve decided to at least try a few dates. Maybe with some time spent together, we can learn the fox trot.

Take a Walk with Me

2007-01-08T13:00:00.000-08:00

Despite my inviting faux-down comforter and several soft pillows, if I toss down the TV remote onto my bed, my dog scurries over, circles, and plops right onto the device. It’s hard plastic. With protruding buttons. It can’t be comfortable.

Most say that men have a more passionate relationship with remote controls than women do, and since I have a male dog, I attribute his behavior to his gender. But honestly, I think it’s damn weird.

Speck has strong affection for my cell phone as well. If I’m lounging on my bed with my cell lying beside me, Speck sneaks over, glances about surreptitiously, drops down, and situates his head right upon the phone. He concludes by wrapping himself in the headset cord as if he’s trying to floss his whole body.

I’m not one to deny my housemates their pleasures, but I’m a bit uncomfortable with my dog’s infatuation with technology. Maybe I’m just bothered by the fact that I can’t ask him about it and get any kind of reliable response.

I want to get down to business, to write interesting and insightful things, yet all I can do is look out the window and notice how the sunlight is hitting the palm fronds. I sway with the gentle movement of the leaves in the breeze, the afterbirth of the tremendous wind that was here a few days ago. I tell my mind, “Focus. Vacation is over,” as if I were ever really on vacation. My son was on a vacation and I jumped aboard as if I’d been invited, neglecting the necessity of having to have something to vacation from. In my inventive way of thinking, I decided that as long as my son was sleeping late in the morning, so could I. If my son was staying up late doing frivolous things, I could turn to him as my role model. It was party season, and I wasn’t about to be left out.

But today school is back in session, and my body knew without any formal ceremony. I awoke on schedule before six a.m. to darkness and quiet. For a brief moment, I mourned the end of permission to do nothing. I reached for my laptop on the nightstand, booted up, and raced through my morning reading of key New York Times articles with one eye on the clock. As if programmed by the military, I knew when it was time to pull myself from bed, stumble towards the bathroom for the morning ritual, and then move to the kitchen to feed the offspring.

After depositing my son at school, I went to one of my favorite coffee shops to write, but just as I was settling in, the speakers filled the room with Shirley Temple singing “On the Good Ship Lollypop.” I know they were going for unexpectedly hip, but I found the attempt unsuccessful. I dove into my laptop bag for my headphones only to discover they weren’t there. I was hostage to the young lass’ voice.

Turning to my laptop, I tried to imagine anything other than a four-year-old tap dancing, but Shirley wouldn’t be ignored. My coffee was growing cold with neglect, my ears were screaming for a song of this era, my fingers wanted permission to meander, and the tauntingly delicious pastries in the case were mocking my healthy resolve.

Like a refugee seeking a new country, I quickly packed my belongings, and ran for the door. “There’s a better world out there,” I told myself. “Go find it.”

Only guilt jumped in and reminded me that today I am to be focused in a way that will forward my goal of something. That’s the problem, the goal has grown murky. The goal of career success is being replaced by – catch your breath – the goal of romance success.

“You’re not allowed to talk about that now,” my inner critic interjects. “I’ve warned you about this.” And Inner Critic has, only finally, I may stop listening.

I have been singing false independence for far too long, the I-don’t-need-a-relationship mantra to keep me firmly planted on my own two feet because I hate the word ‘need.’ Only, my feet aren’t the problem. My heart is.

Last night, an old flame rang me up. We always settle into nice conversation, and suddenly I am reminded of how nice an easy connection is, how with someone by your side, all the other life goals have a chance of cozying up to perspective. After such a lengthy period of singledom – so long that if I revealed the duration you might panic on my behalf and organize a search party for my next mate – I have begun to question my ability to find romance again.

So once again, I am faced with the question of balance. I have been convinced that establishing a new career will calm my inner longing, but now I wonder. If that were to be secured, would I then just look for the next missing ingredient? How do we find contentment?

Love.

I blush just typing the word. I want to be anonymous in confessing the longing, but if Speck can unashamedly profess what he loves, maybe I can take yet another hint from him and come clean with my desires.

And maybe I can even invite them in.

Complicated Relationships

2007-01-05T10:00:00.000-08:00

Writing and I are arguing a bit right now. Some days I'm in love and other days I want to break up. Today I'd rather spend time with coffee and have an illicit affair with someone else's novel.

I know every relationship goes through troubled times so I’m determined to stay patient. After all, it is the new year, and though many leap forward with rash decisions disguised as ‘resolutions’ I know better. I know that while I’m happiest with guarantees and promised futures, that the creative life seldom offers such comforts.

My relationship with Writing is, however, straining my relationship with Bank Account. Bank Account was spoiled for many years, indulged with weekly deposits of escalating amounts. Such attention made Bank Account feel loved and nurtured. Now it wants to know why I care for someone else more.

It’s hard to convince Bank Account not to take it personally, that I wish things could have remained how they were.

“Peoples’ needs change,” I told Bank Account the other morning. “While I loved our healthy run, my dedication to you was interfering with my relationship with Inner Peace.”

Bank Account doesn’t understand for it sees my monthly stress while paying bills. It thinks Inner Peace has me duped, that I’ve fallen under the spell of the guru chant of ‘Find your true path.’ I try to convince Bank Account that this bumpy patch in our relationship is temporary, but Bank Account interrupts me and asks, “Are you trying to convince me or convince yourself?”

I never knew Bank Account was so savvy. Clearly while I’ve been off pursuing some new avenues, Bank Account has been reading, which brings me back to where I started. Writing and I are fighting today. I’m going to go read. If I call it ‘research’, maybe Bank Account will cut me some slack.

Chipped Away

2007-01-02T16:40:00.000-08:00

experiences come at us like a sculptor’s tool
injury, hurt
the unexpected collision,
a troubling encounter.

as pieces
of our form fall away
we imagine
we are losing who we are.

but maybe
those who enter our lives,
who take a small swing,
are indeed the sculptors

the ones who seek to get to the heart
like Michelangelo
chipping away at the unnecessary
to find the essence within.

Yesterday I closed my eyes and saw myself as a piece of marble with chips flying off of me. As I examined the experiences of life, suddenly the hurt hurt less, and the dismantling felt more like a gift than any kind of loss. I thought of Michelangelo and the slaves.

Visualizing particles falling through the air like confetti, I felt enormous appreciation for all that I’ve been through.

I welcome the new year and the opportunities it will bring.

Going to the Well: The Beginning

2006-12-29T13:30:00.000-08:00

The holidays bring up feelings of nostalgia, memory, the past. The experiences we didn’t know we’d ever think about again, the ones we thought had served their purpose, that were merely a piece of the puzzle adding to the picture of the present.

I find myself looking backwards, thinking of the first time I traveled to a tiny village in Siberia called Kolybelka, the car bouncing down the bumpy, unpaved road. We pass a string of ducklings trailing their mother, pass houses of green and blue – not shades but the conventional Crayola crayon colors, primary and strong – odd housing colors for American-trained eyes. The dirt road, wooden fences, horse drawn carts, the sense of quiet and calm – it is as if I’ve driven into the 1800s, and when my boyfriend bursts into a huge smile and says, “This is my village,” I laugh thinking he is joking.

While our lives were different – him a Soviet citizen, me American; him a resident of Moscow, me a Venice Beach dweller – until that moment, I don’t think I appreciated how different different was. I’d made room for our language barrier by devoting hours to study and conversations mediated by a Russian/English dictionary. I’d imagined what it must be like to live behind borders that didn’t let you leave. I’d understood the difference between abundance and not enough. But I hadn’t imagined this.

We round the corner and slow. Faces peer from a window of the house on the right. We’d ridden a train from Moscow for two and half days and then climbed into a car for a three and a half hour drive courtesy of my boyfriend’s brother-in-law who met us at the train station in Novosibirsk before the sun came up. At sunrise, we stopped in the middle of a cornfield, stood behind the open trunk, and toasted with a shot of Vodka. Thinking of the imprecision of our travel, I look towards the house and wonder how long the eyes in the window have been awaiting our arrival.

As I climb from the car, the rural quiet is interrupted with squeals of joy as my boyfriend bounces from one set of arms to the next, the urban university student returning to the nest. The eyes shift to me, the first American – and possibly foreigner, according to the local paper – to set foot in this village. Through the introductions, I repeatedly say, “Privyet!” in my expanding Russian. I opt for the familiar ‘hi’ over the more formal “Zdrastvutye” because I know that my tongue might get twisted on the polite greeting.

I am the first girl my boyfriend has ever brought to his village since leaving eight years earlier for his army service in East Germany, which was followed by his move to university in Moscow. At twenty-six, his family worries that he’s not yet married. At twenty-nine, my culture still allows my singleness but is definitely curious about my pursuit of a long distance relationship born two years earlier on a Soviet-American Peace Walk, a venture that created a traveling city of 500 Soviets and Americans that camped from Odessa to Kiev for one month, culminating with a celebration in Moscow. My boyfriend was the first person to approach me on the tarmac at 3:00 a.m. when we touched down in Odessa after 30 hours of travel, a trip expanded by lengthy flight delays endured by a circus of travelers that included a rollerskater who refused to remove his skates even as we traversed from one flight to the next across the polished floors of the Moscow airport.

When my to-be boyfriend approached bleary-eyed me, he offered a flower or a flag – the memory escapes me – and said, “Unfortunately, I don’t speak English,” and when I replied, “Your English is very good,” he repeated, “Unfortunately, I don’t speak English,” the one complete sentence he had learned. We took our language inventory, and despite the combined total of six, we didn’t have one in common.

But over the next thirty days our romance developed as we struggled through broken attempts at conversation and shared flowing exchanges via interpreters. When the time came for us to say good-bye – a good-bye that felt more final than any other I’ve experienced in my life – I could only pretend to believe we would ever see each other again.

…to be continued…

Resolute

2006-12-26T21:30:00.000-08:00

My dog operates like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, stashing his meds under his tongue and then depositing them elsewhere later. Half-tablets of Glucosamine Chondroitin show up in assorted locales – under the dining table, camouflaged by a multicolor area rug in the living room, discarded near the foot of my bed. One time, not to be bothered with movement, my dog simply removed the supplement from his food bowl and dropped it alongside the dish in an overt display of defiance, as if saying, “Don’t let this contaminate the good stuff.”

It’s hard to explain to Speck that the medicine is for his own good, that his joints will thank him later, that due to his trick knees if he doesn’t chew and swallow, he may end up with arthritis. Of course, if I could explain it to him, he may request to see the research proving the effectiveness of the medication. He may pull up studies with contrary conclusions in order to challenge the benefit of ingesting a tablet whose taste he clearly finds disgusting, for this dog rejects nothing outside this medication. My dog eats dirt, for God’s sake, revealing that he does not have the most discriminating palate.

On the days that he can’t be bribed to take his medicine willingly, I pry Speck’s mouth open to shove the tablet inside, and I think of my father who always says he doesn’t have time to attend to his failing knees, who claims that work calls and there are countless demands on his time. I say that none of those things will matter if he’s unable to walk, that suddenly he will see that he has all the time he needs to attend to his health. I point out how much more he could do if he could walk more easily, how life would be richer.

I don’t say that it’s not fair to ask others to fetch things for him off the dining room table as he sits perched in the easy chair in the living room because he has a hard time standing up. I don’t point out that when he decides he doesn’t have time for physical therapy, he’s assuming we’ll have time to come to his rescue when the option for therapy has passed. I do say that if the roles were reversed and I were neglecting my health he’d be outraged and lecture me that nothing takes precedence over care for our own bodies, how if I argued he would call me stubborn and sigh with frustration. And in response he nods.

When a month goes by and he still hasn’t returned to physical therapy, I give up and let my thoughts drift to what kind of older person I will be. It’s hard to watch our parents age, to see their limitations grow, to see ourselves next in line. As if offering a warning, my body showed me the effects of neglect the other day. After some weeks off from an already scaled down exercise regime, too busy and too distracted to be bothered, I felt the neglect undeniably piling up. I called to my son, “Let’s do the stairs today.” He agreed. We donned our exercise clothes and hopped in the car.

Falling in line behind the other climbers, up, up, up we go. It starts easy and quickly gets difficult. Just steps from the top, my lungs are trying to leave my chest as if convinced they could get more air on the outside. I’m startled by how quickly I have declined, that even as a former competitive athlete I don’t have much in the bank. We complete our routine – up and down a few times – legs trembling before sweat can even appear. Despite the difficulty I feel proud that I am back on track.

The next morning I wake up and can barely stand from bed. I’ve done the stairs before, so I feel completely betrayed by my body’s reaction. By sheer coincidence, the elevator in our building is out – we live on the third floor – and we face the long Christmas weekend with no chance of repair for days.

Trying to walk down the stairs to my car, I feel a hundred and two years old, pain surging through every muscle I never knew I had, and suddenly I want to call every old person I’ve ever mocked and apologize. I swear that as soon as I recover, I’m back to a routine that includes the stairs regularly. Suddenly it’s simply about being able to function, about picturing myself traveling the world and facing Machu Picchu or some other equally demanding physical challenge. I’m unwilling to be the one who waits at the bottom for the others.

Days have passed and I’m still hobbling, the elevator is still broken, and Speck is still spitting out his medicine. Soon it will be the New Year. While part of me wonders if I will ever achieve prime form again, ‘Do stairs’ will be high on my list of resolutions. ‘Find flavored Glucosamine’ will be close behind. As far as prodding my father back to therapy, well, maybe I'll try to replace that goal with acceptance because some mountains are too high to climb.

Tis The Season

2006-12-21T15:13:00.000-08:00

I never knew shopping at Borders during the holidays could be the new thrillseeking experience. Pulling into the parking lot, I see cars attempting to exit backed up deep into the underground structure, the occasional driver creeping over the center divide to face oncoming traffic, trying to peer ahead to figure out what is causing the departure holdup.

I am the face these daring drivers encounter under the ‘oncoming’ label, requiring me to demonstrate precise driving skills in order to avoid a holiday season, head-on collision. While a quick calculation informs me that such an accident would raise the interest in the ‘Guess what happened to us this year?’ greeting card enclosure (if I actually did one), I decide to opt for safety over drama. I move slowly and cautiously and snag a primo parking space thanks to my remarkable parking karma that materializes spots just like the onscreen movie-parking phenomenon.

Entering Borders, I can’t help but notice the lengthy line awaiting checkout. Holiday shopping in full swing. And I’m actually glad to be a part, having left my bah humbug home with my dog who has buried himself beneath covers seeking shelter from the recent chill that has arrived beachside, the kind of chill that will never make national news because no one much cares about the impact of fifty degree weather on thin-skinned Southern Californians.

I wander the store wrapped in wool coat and scarf fulfilling my consumer duty of impulse purchases from the bargain table. What thirteen-year-old boy doesn’t need to learn to juggle? Or a hardbound, black spiral notebook of staff paper for the budding composer? But of course. Ooh, I spy a book for mom, and the year’s running out so best pick up a new wall calendar. I arrived as chauffeur to a son in need of wheels and will leave as a sherpa.

But oddly, I am enjoying myself. I feel as if I’ve joined the club of revelers and celebrants. My cynicism is off hiding as I stand inoculated against its snarkiness by commercially packaged holiday cheer. In order to not be late for a dinner reservation, my eyes dart from the check out line to my watch. I’m cutting it close, so I slip behind the other eager purchasers in line. From where I stand, I can barely see the cash registers, but my anxiety over the time is quickly refocused because Borders is not run by fools. All along the check out line are tables of additional potential impulse purchases. Held hostage and in shopping glee, I pick up a book on how to combine Hanukkah and Christmas celebrations as if my family isn’t lifetime masters of the practice.

“We could get this for Grandma,” I say to my son. The book shows menorahs of candy cane candles and displays matzoh balls as snowmen. It’s kitschy enough to nearly mandate a purchase. But as I consider adding this book to my pile, the line picks up and starts moving. I toss the book back on the table, saved from a purchase I would definitely regret. A Christmas miracle…or is that Hanukkah?

And then I see the offering of all things optimistic, the perfect smile producer. Five feet ahead, a neat little sign affixed to a pole reads, ‘Average waiting time from this spot five minutes.’

“Look, just like Disneyland,” I say to my son, but it is the woman in front of me who laughs.

Borders smartly plays us again. The sign works, for I instantly stop worrying about the length of the line. My body posture relaxes. I no longer feel rushed. ‘We’ll make dinner,’ I tell myself, believing the sign. Borders has sold me trust and optimism.

But I must question, did anyone really clock the wait time from that spot? Imagine a Borders’ employee, stopwatch in hand, calculating the exact place in line where five minutes would occur. How likely is that? But it doesn’t matter. I am so touched that Borders wants to calm us – and prevent bitching and moaning, not to mention a shoppers’ riot in its store – with this magical little sign, that I can’t stop smiling.

When the line speeds ahead, I celebrate Borders’ accuracy. It was definitely less than five minutes. In front of the cashier, I feel as if I’ve fully crossed over into holiday spirit. It may not be as exciting as climbing into a car for Space Mountain, but it’s not a bad place to be.