There Goes the Neighborhood

Headline news in our part of First Hill is that the local Bartell Drugs at the corner of Madison and Boren is closing in a few days. Between this and our old apartment building having turned to dust, I’m feeling like a crotchety old crone, longing for yesteryear.

Last week when I was entering the Amazon Go that lives beneath Oh La La, I asked the school boy coming in behind me to wait until the gate had closed before he waved himself in with his Amazon phone code in order that his pizza and soda wouldn’t get charged to my account. I said it nicely, not like a Karen at all, but then I heard his friends laughing and saying, “Yeah, Noah. Don’t go in before the gate has closed.” I could tell from the tone and general hilarity in their voices that they were not making fun of this Noah kid but instead making fun of me.

Reader, this was like a stab to my heart. I’ve always liked seeing these Catholic school boys—young men—in their uniforms, with their short hair, politeness when in the company of adults, and look of the future on their faces. On lunch breaks and after school and after basketball practice, we see them at the local eateries, in the above-mentioned drug store, and in Amazon Go, the store that makes you feel like a shoplifter even though you aren’t because there’s no cashier and some kind of magic that alerts Jeff Bezos to what you put into your bag, charges it to your credit card, and then you walk out.

So, I could have ignored them, but instead, it was terribly important to me that I prove to them that I was cool and not a cranky witch. I turned around and said, “So do you not have to wait for the gate to close?” I asked with my eyes big, imploring them to explain the technology to me, even though my goal was not to have it explained but to make sure they knew I was not a person who despises youth.

Noah, bless him, explained very earnestly that it’s not about the gate closing, but once you hear the beep of the next person waving their phone/QR code on the scanner that you know you’re in the clear and all Red Bulls and Skittles will be charged to the next person’s account and not your own.

“Thanks for explaining that to me,” I said before making a beeline to the bakery case, beating them to the iced maple bars before they could clean them out. I’m not sure I softened relations between Gen Z and Gen X—we are, I believe, comrades after all but that’s another blog post—but I like to think at the very least the Karen scoreboard next to my name is still set on zero.

My sense of a neighborhood was created by two things: my Fisher-Price Village when I was six and Richard Scarry’s Busytown books, that featured very busy animals working hard at jobs, often in lederhosen. When I first started visiting Z in Seattle 17 years ago, I thought Seattle was where he lived, but after moving here myself and feeling less and less pull downtown unless I wanted something specific (a ferry ride, a trip to Target, the Seattle Art Museum, or a movie), we really lived on First Hill. As per those two sections of my Fisher-Price Village that unfolded and made a city block, the only things we don’t have up here are our own U.S. Post Office or a jail.

Other than the local hospitals, the great class equalizer up here has always been Bartell Drugs, which stands on the corner of Madison and Boren. You could be standing in line behind a person who had just been asking for money on the street three minutes ago and in front of members of the University Club next to Oh La La, all while nurses and doctors from the neighboring hospitals look for lunch options in the aisles.

In happier days, there was no need for plywood on the front door.

Bartell was originally a local chain that reportedly treated its employees well, offered local brands, and manage to have everything in the store that Z and I needed: our prescriptions, sure, but also toilet paper, Scotch tape, Beecher’s cheese, shower curtains, plungers, socks, bananas, necessary seasonal items, and Oberto beef jerky. Over the last 17 years, I don’t even want to guess how much money we’ve spent there when we “just run in” for one thing. If our grocery disappeared, we could get by with Bartell for awhile before needing to find a different place to buy fresh fruit and chicken breasts.

For the record, my mother has been lamenting the loss of her beloved Hook’s Drugstores—an Indiana staple—since 1985. She was inconsolable when the news came that they were closing, and I didn’t understand at the time because I’d just graduated from high school and thought national chains were always better than local ones. More stuff. Cheaper stuff. More locations. (I did not take an economics class in school and thus knew nothing about end stage capitalism or the corporate machine.) Now I understand her sadness.

Over the years, we’ve gotten to know some of the clerks and pharmacists at Bartell. By “know” them, I don’t mean we’ve had them over for drinks, or are hip to anything about their lives outside of where they work, or even, often their names. When we walked by the building, we might see “Mort” outside on his breaks, stroking his greying beard, eating a snack he’d just purchased, and listening to music on his iPod. We’d wave and say hi, and he would smile with recognition. (“Mort” was a favorite of mine because one day I was in line at the photo counter where he checked customers out sometimes when he denied Governor Inslee a plastic bag in which to put a bouquet of dripping flowers because the city’s plastic bag ban had just gone into effect. His Honor looked disappointed —despite his approval of the ban—as he stood there in his suit, daisies dripping on the floor.) Another clerk—a young guy that had “manager potential” written all over him— had a fancy sports car that he parked out back, and we’d keep track of whether he was at work or away from work on our daily walks.

We often didn’t know their names and so called them (amongst ourselves) Gravelly Voice, Round Faces (two women who appeared to be related), Beardy Guy, and The Crab. If they wore a name tag, we learned their names, but we aren’t either of us extroverted enough to ask or introduce ourselves. Some days, when I first moved here, the clerks were the only people I saw regularly other than Z. The best day was when the man checking me out noticed my last name and and said that was his partner’s last name and so we talked about lesser Irish names and Irish American-ness.

The Pandemic was not kind to our Bartell but not necessarily because of the virus. At least not directly. The family who started the stores in 1890 sold the chain to Rite-Aid in 2020. There were other mitigating factors like the protests that took place in the city after George Floyd was killed, increasing tensions between the police and the local citizenry. The police force shrank and in addition to fewer cops being available, it felt as if law enforcement desire to help out on non-violent crimes evaporated. Suddenly, in a store where we’d never once witnessed shoplifting we were now seeing people walk in with backpacks, fill their shopping lists, and walk out. We saw people come in and clear an entire shelf and walk out. And in one instance, Z saw a man get a box of Hefty trash bags off the shelf, open it, pull out one bag, throw the box in the bag, and proceed to shove whatever was within reach into it. And walk out.

It almost looks normal from this angle.

The store hasn’t been the same for awhile. It got the smell of Rite-Aid on it once it sold. The products weren’t the same. Even the labels on our prescriptions were different, with a phone number that was impossible to read when you wanted a re-fill, almost as if they hoped you wouldn’t bother them. The brands changed so there was more and more Rite-Aid generic and suddenly we were witness to more altercations between clerks and angry customer-shoplifters. Eventually a series of security guards were hired with uneven success as many were primarily interested in their phones and not the folks walking in and walking out with the stores wares. Last week, Z happened to get locked in the store when a tiny, fiery female security guard wouldn’t let the man who had ice cream shoved under his coat leave. He shouted that he needed ice cream, and the security guard shouted back, “No one needs ice cream!” He gave up on the ice cream but not before getting melted ice cream on her uniform from a pint he’d—apparently—stolen from some other place. Maybe no one needs ice cream, but he clearly had a strong desire for it.

So it’s not always pleasant at Bartell, but it’s been ours. And handy. I was over there this week three times in an attempt to get a prescription filled, and it wasn’t a huge inconvenience because it’s right across the street. It turns out “close” and “nostalgia” are the things that keep us loyal customers.

Rite-Aid filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, and we breathed a sigh of relief when we discovered our store wasn’t on the chopping block. It made sense that it would stay in business. It’s the only big chain pharmacy in our radius where we’re surrounded by hospitals. Then five days ago we found out ours was closing in a little over a week. We were dumbfounded.

Today I went over to get toilet paper and it was a chock full of people, the line at the registers snaked deep into the shampoo aisle. The toilet paper was gone, but I did manage to score two big bottles of laundry detergent, two roles of Scotch tape, and two boxes of Dots. There were other things I should have been getting, but I couldn’t think straight. I was reminded of all the afternoons I’d wander over to Bartell to buy new nail polish when I’d had to quit my teaching job in Indiana, was in a funk, and new nail polish seemed like a salve. (It wasn’t.) I was remembering how Z and I pieced together early Christmas decor with day-after sales of leftover holiday doo-dads. How I’d stood in the greeting card aisle picking out greetings and postcards for people back home that I missed in those earliest days here.

Bartell is like the EPCOT of cashiers, with all ages and races checking people out, and it has been such a good reminder of what I love about living in a big city. All of humanity working together with the common goal of giving us our goods, receiving our money and getting us out the automatic door. I was hoping “Anne” would be there so I could say goodbye. She’s one of our favorites. Some days she greets us like she knows us and others she’s all business. She strikes us as someone who we would really like to know but we’re kind of terrified to engage too much lest it be one of the days when she just wants us to pack up our purchases and leave. We’ve felt weirdly bonded to her since election night seven years ago when Z sidled up to her register with a bottle of $5 champagne.
“We’re going to toast Hillary tonight!” he said, with a smile on his face. That morning he’d asked me if he should wear “suffragette white” to celebrate the day. We had no question about on whom the confetti and balloons would be falling later that night. The world was changing for women and we both felt excited about it.
“Anne” rang up the champagne and said, “I don’t know,” and shook her head. In the moment Z assumed she was just being cautious, but by the end of the evening, we were keenly aware that we hadn’t been paying attention to the right people during the election cycle. Ever since then, we’ve looked at her with reverence. She imagined what we could not, probably because she understood things about America that I’d never had to as a citizen and Z had never wanted to as a Zimbabwean making his home here. I wish we’d tried harder to extrovert around “Anne” and find out what she was thinking about things besides the weather and how busy or quiet the store was for the day. And now it looks like we won’t even get a chance to say goodbye.

Today while I stood in line to buy my six 50% off items, an older lady walked up to me and said, “I’ve lived in Seattle all of my life. Bartell is supposed to be here.” She shook her head and looked stupefied. A guy in front of me turned around and said, “Bartell is closing?” He looked as if I’d kicked him in the gut (though I’m still trying to piece together what excuse he had made for all the empty shelves).

Some people might think this is no big deal. In fact, there is another, bigger Bartell that isn’t closing only six blocks from our house. But it is above a busy grocery, in a busy shopping complex, and it doesn’t feel like a neighborhood store. I don’t want to walk there three times in the same day. Also, how long before Rite Aid decides to pull the plug on it too?

We’ve decided we’ll go there to do some shopping, but as for our pharmaceutical needs, we’re trying a tiny, independent pharmacy four blocks away where there is a friendly staff, tables and chairs to sit in while you wait, snacks, greeting cards, and things you didn’t know you needed like tiny reading glasses that fold up on themselves and scarves with pockets on the ends. On Friday, we both went there to get vaccines. It wasn’t Bartell, but Z said it reminded him of the “chemists” in Zimbabwe, and so now I guess it’s our new local.

Maybe nobody needs a Bartell across the street, but we sure are going to miss it.

No Elderly Ladies Were Harmed in the Writing of this Post

I dreamed the other night that one of my manuscripts had been turned into a blockbuster movie, and I went to the premiere but was so late I could only get seating in the back row where the big, movable seats were malfunctioning. As soon as the opening title rolled, my chair shifted violently to the side and I couldn’t see the screen. I could only hear the movie and comments and coughs of the audience as I stared at the dark wall and ceiling, shadows from the movie flickering in the periphery.

On the plus side, it seemed to be a success based on dream-comments, and the news that Mattel was putting out dolls based on the characters (probably all versions of me). That last bit was only because Z and I recently saw Barbie, though by now it is surely a truth universally acknowledged that until there are Barbies, Funko Pop figurines, T-shirts, and Happy Meal prizes based on your characters, you haven’t really succeeded.

Pretend there are kites in the distance. They were there most of the time we were in residence.

Z and I went on a short trip to Long Beach, Washington, with Hudge. It’s the first we’ve been to the seaside since the Pandemic. We stayed in a condo right on the beach and spent our non-beach time listening to the waves, watching a family of deer who showed up daily under our balcony looking up expectantly at us like Romeo in the Capulets’ courtyard. Walking the wrack line to the south, we dodged jellyfish and piles of seaweed and some brown foam that made me wonder if mermaids had gastrointestinal disorders. And in the distance, we could see Cape Disappointment—a high cliff with a lighthouse perched atop it to alert boats that this hunk of ocean where the Columbia wends its way into the sea can be hazardous.

Hudge and I do a mean puzzle together when not taking in the view.

Isn’t that name the best? Cape Disappointment. It was given this name in 1788 by British trader and naval commander, John Meares, who was looking for the mouth of the Columbia River based on an earlier description from a Spanish explorer. He thought he’d failed when he landed on the cape and didn’t recognize the estuary. Well, I should rephrase that. He didn’t think he had failed; he assumed that the Spaniard had shared faulty information. Why blame yourself when there’s someone else at whom you can direct your frustration?

Long Beach, WA–Cape Disappointment in the distance, not disappointing.

You can kind of see from the map below how Meares might not have recognized a river when he saw it. There’s no neon sign with El Columbia está aquí pointing to it.

Usually when I’m at the beach—or on any vacation—I spend a fair amount of time berating myself for not doing it better. For not walking further or reading under an umbrella picturesquely or drawing something in my sketchbook. At whatever place we stay, I imagine missing something in the tiny little downtown and think maybe I should be poking in the shops there or eating local cuisine, but if we do venture out, it seems like a waste. Who wants to shop when you’ve “bought” a view for the weekend?

Like Prince’s mother, on a beach vacation, I’m never satisfied, though instead of blaming a Spaniard or Z, I assume the problem is with myself.

Wherefore art thou and thy apple slices, Juliet?

This trip, however, I allowed for no self-flagellating. I read a lot. (Circe by Madeline Miller—so good.) I listened to the waves and I read some more and didn’t apologize or worry that I was missing something on a walk or at the kite competition that was happening up the beach or that I wasn’t sucking the marrow from the condo we rented because I didn’t flip through the notebook of suggested activities or all the slick coffee table books about sea glass and the Washington coast. My laptop remained in its case. I posted no pictures on social media. I worried about nothing, not even when my mother reminded me that all of the poisonous water from the Fukushima reactor had been released into the Pacific. I picked up one stray Croc someone had left behind and got it out of the water’s path so no creature would choke on it, but I otherwise chose not to worry for four days about all the ways I’ve screwed the planet personally (all those bags of minute rice and plastic candy bar wrappers; all that gasoline and sucking up of groundwater). Instead, I enjoyed the food Z and Hudge cooked and didn’t once worry that I’m a failure as a woman—as a human—because I’ve no interest in the kitchen. I just was.

Reader, it was one of the most relaxing vacations I’ve had no matter how short, not because of what I did or didn’t do, but because I just got out of my own head for 86 hours. I’d like to spend the rest of the year trying this experiment in my regular life. Making decisions. Saying what I want. Doing what I want without consulting my to-do list and feeling guilty about the things I’m not doing or did do but shouldn’t have. (Tubs of Ben & Jerry’s non-dairy Phish Food, anyone?)

What brings me here today, however, is that when Hudge mentioned my blog and Z said I hadn’t posted in over a year, I was shocked. I’ve started entries and written even more in my head, and it hasn’t seemed that long to me. So here I am, cap in hand, not out of guilt but because I have. . . missed doing it.

I have been writing regularly, it just hasn’t been a blog and most of it hasn’t yet been polished for human consumption. Still teaching writing, reading other people’s writing, critiquing writing, and, when there is time left over, reading for pleasure. Also, I got a new iPhone that came with few months of Apple+ for free, so there has been some bingeing of shows like Ted Lasso, Silo, Trying, and Encounter. And for mindless viewing, we’ve been watching (re-watching in my case) lots of Grey’s Anatomy so we can see the Seattle Z moved to in 2006 vs. the Seattle that exists now. Very different skyline. Very different vibe. Mostly, we’re pleased with the Seattle shout outs and how they use familiar-looking Native American art in the hospital. The only thing TV and movies never get right is the rain. Always it’s torrential. Always it’s with lightening and thunder. It’s meteorological Shonda Drama.

Seattle skyline circa 2007–around the time when Shonda Rhimes introduced Seattle to TV viewing America.

Seattle Skyline 2023–Artist Rendering.

I have a Post-it on my computer that says “Past disappearing with smoke.” Anybody know what that was for? Pretty sure I had something to say about it, but now, I don’t know what it was. Maybe it had something to do with the Canadian fires this summer, but it might also have had something to do with my failed attempt to use sealing wax on a letter to my college roommate and it ending in a failure of flame and smoke and nearly burned up correspondence..

My two favorite stickers I’ve seen on the light poles and mailboxes of First Hill recently:

I think I prefer the Mary Oliver one. I feel this way on days when the words aren’t coming. But I’ve enjoyed reflecting on the Old and New Testament versions of the former.

Do with those nuggets of wisdom what you will.

Yesterday, Z and I were walking down Madison which has been in a constant state of various degrees of construction for the last four years as they modernize utilities and get ready for the 2024 launch of Rapid Ride bus stops here on First Hill. On any given day, we leave Oh La La and find our road blocked or a snakelike arrangement of barricades on sidewalks we were able to walk down the evening before. On this walk, we looked across the street and saw an elderly woman who’d gotten herself on the wrong side of the barricades and so was headed into the rubble of the ripped up road. Her only option was to go all the way back up the block and get on the right side of the barriers or walk into traffic.

Though I have sold myself to you as a Girl Scout, albeit a reluctant one, what I really am is an observer. I watched this lady creak along towards the rubble with some curiosity. She stopped and looked around, and my reaction was not to offer assistance but instead to stare at her, as if she were a squirrel trying to decide where to bury her nuts. What would she do when she got to the most extreme part of the torn up street? Would she turn around? Would she curse? Would she tip over?

Z, however, IS a Boy Scout. He marched right over to her, moved one of the traffic cones and ushered her from the busy street to the sidewalk and made sure she knew which way to head to get to her destination. Earlier in the summer we’d passed an older (than us) woman who looked weak and was trying to navigate the steps to her condo with a shopping bag. So Z gave her his arm and carried her bag up the steps and asked if she was okay. He’s always doing things like that and has the kind of presence that offers a certain authority: you should do what he is suggesting—take his arm, let him carry your bags, follow his lead.

Meanwhile, I’m standing on the corner with my head cocked as if I’m watching something unfold on TikTok instead of offering a helping hand. I’d berate myself, but it’s against my new policy so I’m putting it in the category of “interesting things I’ve recently discovered about myself.” If you have an accident in front of me, there’s a good chance it will take me minutes before I realize I should offer you a Band-Aid or call 911. (For the record, I am really good at intuiting when someone is lost and needs directions or offering up a Tide Stick if you stain your shirt.) But by golly, I will write about it later.

I’ve always been an observer, but it did get worse when I moved in with Z at our first apartment at The Paul Revere. Another great name, though what Paul Revere has to do with Seattle or one-bedroom rentals that were built in 1923 is anyone’s guess. It felt like it was our duty to be alert to imminent attacks by the British, but in our decade there, I didn’t have to light any lanterns or ride a horse to let neighbors know to grab their muskets.

We had a bank of windows across the front section of the building and often when I was supposed to be writing, I’d be staring down on the activity below on the street. The traffic squabbles and squealing reunions and the confused people tring to understand the complicated parking rules in front of our building, failing, and being towed were daily. It’s much harder to be an on-the-street reporter at Oh La La because we’re eight stories above the goings on.

The Paul Revere was full of quirk. A 1923 building with blooming camellias on either side of the steps that set off the “fresco” of Paul Revere on the brickwork. Inside, we had glass doorknobs and an old etched mirror, and a single teensy closet meant for clothes, linens, shoes, and anything else the modern flapper might need. It forced me to consider how much baggage modern Americans carry with them now. Because of its close proximity to the hospitals here on “Pill Hill,” I always imagined that those earliest residents were probably nurses or interns who wanted to live near work. Some from the country who must have enjoyed the excitement of an up and coming city.

It was hard to picture our lives post Paul Revere because we’d been so happy there, but the glamor Oh La La’s views and amenities made us quickly forget our first home. Or remember unkindly how much we hated doing laundry in the basement, doing dishes by hand in the teensy kitchen, and hauling garbage to a dumpster in the alley that we had to lock up as if we were depositing treasures outside. Also the exhaust from the bus that idled out front. The unhoused guy who slept in our hallway once. The person who sold drugs on the third floor and who kept the intercom right outside our bedroom window buzzing all hours of the night. The handyman who raised mice that escaped and contributed to the building’s rodent problem.

A lot can happen in a decade in a city.

The building has been empty since everyone was paid to hustle out in the middle of the Pandemic because it was structurally unsound and wouldn’t have survived the Big One —no joke. We pass it now with some nostalgia. Initially, there were lights on and it seemed work was being done to repair it. We had hopes they wouldn’t tear it down, but then it got increasingly downtrodden with a broken window here, graffiti there. Eventually the management company took down its sign as if it wanted to dissociate itself with such a squalid looking place. Squatters moved in. Over the summer, there were two fires that started there, whether intentionally or accidentally is unclear. The second fire was large, burned a hole through the roof, and we can now see that not only is the roof gone but also the back wall. There’s a security fence around it and the sidewalk is closed. It’s unlikely we’d have moved back if they’d fixed it up, but still, it’s the end of an era, or, several eras for the building itself.

We would NOT have been thrilled with a Honey Bucket right under our living room window.

The big lesson city life seems to want to teach me is that nothing is permanent. There’s no point getting attached to the way a certain building looks or the foliage of a particular tree because next week there might be a removal sign and six months after that a security fence and a bulldozer. Things change quickly. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that there was a pink elephant car wash sign over an actual car wash instead of as an artifact of yesteryear and where Oh La La sits there was a decades-old McDonald’s that might have sold those Happy Meals with my dream movie prizes inside. But they are gone and now there are other things that will seem like quintessential Seattle to whoever arrives today.

All this to say, it’s good that I had that beachside epiphany this month so I can finally make peace with our revolving door city and neighborhood. I’ve decided to make John Mellencamp’s “Your Life is Now” the theme song of the rest of the year. Let’s see where I end up. (And if I ever remember to ask the old ladies if they need help across the street or if I decide definitively that it’s my job just to observe them like a social scientist.) Tune in next time to find out.

Whose that Nibbling on My House

Our too-many-dollars-a-month Oh La La apartment has a lovely view and nice big windows with plenty of light, but what it doesn’t have is screens.

Other people who are not on the tasting menu of Mosquito Café can probably live without screens here, but I am both starter and main course on their menu, which means last year we used the AC a lot when we didn’t really need to. This year, however, we had a plan:  Velcro tape and mosquito netting!

Is it attractive and befitting Oh La La’s standards? Absolutely not. Is it effective? Based on the number of mosquitos stuck to it on the outside, absolutely. Do I feel guilty about the deaths of the mosquitos who can’t always figure out how to get out from between the window and the net? No, I do not. They’ve had a campaign to either kill me or at least make my life miserable for years now. In the words of Samuel L. Jackson’s character in A Time to Kill, “Yes I think [they] deserve to die and I hope [they] burn in hell.”

Also, as a non-scientist, I spend a weird amount of time thinking about the purpose of different creatures in the Circle of Life, and I’ve made as much peace as I can with things that creep me out like snakes and other reptiles, but is there ANY purpose to a mosquito besides spreading ill-will and disease?

The “screen” that I installed just this morning next to my desk makes me feel cut off from my neighbors across the street. The view is not as clear, which they might think is a boon, but what it means for me is less watching cats stretch in windowsills or seeing the pre-schooler on the eighth floor who moved in with his family recently. He peers out the window and I have imagined having a friendly wave that develops into one of those feel-good videos you see on social media of the kindly older neighbor who makes life more fun for the youngster by putting on puppet shows from afar.

Before the mosquito net went up, one evening I saw his parents chasing him and his little sibling around like a little family locomotive on a circular track to nowhere. It was a moment I wish I could film and then send them—those non-occasions you forget to record—but even if I could, all arrows would point to me being a creepy threat to their privacy.

Now, with the mosquito netting up, we’ll never make a connection. He is a tiny ghost and to him I probably look like a bear writing its memoirs.

Things rarely look the way I imagine they will anyhow, so why would this be different?

Over Memorial Day weekend, I convinced Z that we should make our first trip to Elliot Bay Books now that he is boosted and I’m Evusheld-ed. Because it was the holiday weekend, I imagined everyone out hiking in the mountains or off at a cookout or picnic, Z and I having the bookstore to ourselves, so comfortable with the lack of people that we even would dare to take off our masks.

Hardy har har.

Everyone in Seattle was in the store. Every. Single. One. And they were all exactly where I wanted to be. It was an entire store of Freebreathing Readers. It’s the most people I’ve been around in a long, long time and while I wasn’t actively hating them at mosquito levels, I really did wish they’d leave. Especially the ones glued to their phones who weren’t even browsing. At one point I was upstairs near the bargain tables and believed there was no oxygen getting through the tight weave of my N95, so I considered tossing the books in my arms and racing  outside to pull the mask from my face. (My second thought was, how am I ever going to fly again so long as we’re all poison to each other?) It just wasn’t what I’d been picturing for us on our first outing into the world.

Here. Let me re-direct myself to the brighter side.

• Was out in public for first time in months and months and months!
• Was in a BOOK STORE that is one of my all-time favorites!
• Was able to touch books I have only read about in the New York Times!
• Had over a $100 worth of gift cards from 2019!
• Had a full punch card which meant $20 off my spending!
• Found three books and a magazine I wanted!
• Did not die of a near panic attack—Lexapro must be working!
• Did not spend all of my gift cards on the 3 books and one magazine and so can go back to buy more at a hopefully less busy time!

That’s better.

The books are just staring at me, calling to me even, but I’ve been busy reading other things and have had to put them on pause. Don’t they look inviting though?

I loved the poetic sentences and thoughts in Melissa Febos’s Abandon Me, and so can’t wait to read these two books of hers. The Tracy Chevalier was the only book of hers on the shelf and I fell in love with the cover even though I’d gone there to get one of her other titles.  I find her usual mix of history, imagination, and feminism to be exactly what suits me when I’m looking for a story to lose myself in.

Z went in with less gift-card-buying power than I had and, as usual, left with more books because he’s a thrifty shopper and I usually get suckered in by the new releases or, at least, new in paperback. He’s a much faster reader too, so it probably comes out in the wash.

Here, he would probably like for me to tell you that he is only allowed one IKEA 12×12 square in our bookcase system for his books, which sounds grossly unfair on its face given the sheer number of 12×12 squares we have for “my” books. (May it please the court, if his books are good ones that he passes on to me because he thinks I’ll like them, they make their way into the General Collection and the number of books on Zimbabwe and novels and memoirs by African writers in general have pride of pace on the top center shelf right at eye level. Also, though I abhor stereotypes about only children because I’ve found them not to be particularly accurate, it’s worth noting he knew what he was getting when he married me.)

I want to live in this cover.

Speaking of Z, he also would like for you to know that in my last post I made it sound as if he were the dog gatekeeper in this marriage—putting an electric fence between me and the canine object of my desire. That is not true. The deal I made with myself was that I wouldn’t let myself get a dog until I finished the memoir.  It’s easier to make it seem someone else is keeping me from the things I want instead of my own brand of slow-writing and semi-regular procrastination. Do not blame Z! He is blameless!

The only pet I’m entitled to currently is a rock.

Last week Leibovitz and I talked on the phone while she waited to hear if Baby Leibovitz–with a recently minted college diploma—had landed in Australia for an internship. It seems like only a few months ago she was toddling around the Leibovitz house dragging her pink blanket with her, making everyone laugh, which was her special baby medicine to make everyone around her feel better/happier than they already were.

I understand now—all these years later—why so many older people had opinions about what I should be doing with my life when I graduated. They cared about me, yes, but also, there is something about a young person going out into the world on an adventure you wouldn’t have tried yourself at 22 that makes you want to live vicariously through them, waste none of the time you did, make none of the mistakes, miss none of the opportunities. You kind of want do-overs and the only way to have them is vicariously, and thus the over-investing in someone else’s life choices.

Baby L’s Graduation/Bon Voyage card.

And now I realize linking the stories about Gauze Boy and Baby Leibovitz and my fascination with them and the lives they are leading makes me sound like I’m about to build a Gingerbread House and lure them in for a snack. Maybe forget everything I just said about both of them. And please believe me when I say I have no cages here and am not firing up any ovens to bake a Youth Pie.

You know I don’t like to use the kitchen.

What I have been fantasizing about lately instead of anti-aging pastries is traveling. I’ve always been the absolute happiest in life when my next trip was already an idea in my head, even if it was a weekend away at a cottage somewhere.  I liked thinking about what I’d pack, which books I’d take, and I’d toy with the idea of taking no electronics and then laugh at myself because, of course I’d be taking my laptop, iPad, and phone, as well as my headphones, and booklight. It’s like meditation to me. Watching packing videos on YouTube lulls me into one of the best sleeps.

And that’s not even planning what I’d do when I got there, even though usually what I do is berate myself for not reading or writing or painting more. Or going out and pretending to be an extrovert and chatting to the locals. (Why enjoy yourself when there’s an opportunity for self-flagellation away from home.)

Anyhow, none of that is happening because everyone in America is vacationing this summer and so hotels and house rentals are either not available or a bajillion dollars here in Puget Sound. Car rentals are hard to find and, again, when you do, instead of our preferred $14.99 a day at Enterprise, they’re more like $200 a day. And you all know what gas is like right now. This is one of the few times I’ve actually been glad that we’ve lived the last 12 years Carless in Seattle and aren’t having shock at the gas pump like everyone else. But it is currently limiting our options.

So I’ve been trying to figure out ways that we can make a staycation seem exciting even though we’ve been staycationing since March of 2020. I was considering hanging mirrors to reflect light in a different way or putting on a different bedspread or rearranging the furniture so we feel like we’re somewhere else.

Enter World Traveler Hudge, who has offered us an opportunity to stay on her houseboat for a bit when she’s out of town doing research. It’s two-miles away and I can see part of the water her houseboat is on from my window here at Oh La La (one that is NOT covered in netting), but it will be a whole different world. Hopefully next time I report to you, I’ll have stories of waterfowl and boat traffic and walking through a neighborhood that isn’t “downtown adjacent.” I’m already looking forward to a time in the future when I can say, “When we lived on the houseboat” without lying, even though what we’re really doing is staying on a floating home.

A view from Casa de Hudge

That said, I have some potential bug-bite concerns and am already mentally packing mosquito nets. Once when we were staying on a houseboat on Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, Z and our family and I were sitting on the upper deck as the sun set, listening to waves lap against the boat. And then suddenly, as if an alarm had gone off, a cauldron of bats flew into the sky. My sister-in-law let a cheer and said, “Get ‘em, guys” and the bats feasted on any mosquitos who might have been thinking of snacking on us.

There were so many things on that trip that amazed me and that stick with me, but that one—the discovery that a creature I’d associated only with haunted houses and vampires could be so helpful—is one of my fondest memories.

You know, I’ve made no deals with Z or the universe about finishing any writing projects before getting a pet bat. Maybe if we had a small, cute one, I could forego mosquito nets henceforth, open up the views, cast aside the insect repellent, and various fairy tale concoctions–lavender, vitamin B, white clothing, Avon’s Skin So Soft–that I put my trust in to make me less delicious. We’ll see.

Wherever you are, I hope you are well, bite-free, and traveling with a full tank and unobstructed views.

Anomalies in Style

Neighbors from the Seattle University art department.

Recently,  I started my Writing for Procrastinator’s class at Hugo House—a favorite of mine to teach—and I’m finding myself in the unfortunate position of not having taken my own advice for the last three months. I’ve written at least five partial blog posts, but then I make the mistake of reading the news and my mind gets funky. Like a lot of us, I sit and stew in the news’s aftermath and wonder what the point of any of it is. And then I distract myself with writing, or reading,  or watching the hummingbirds that come to our window daily like well-dressed drones, peering into our windows.

Me telling you about my new glorious votive candle seems trite in the face of war, disease, pestilence, etc. Who cares if I’ve discovered the perfect chocolate bar and pen when we’re all clearly in a hand basket headed straight for hell.

But also, who wants to read—let alone write—more words about how rotten the world is at the moment? Maybe it’s the muchness of information that exists in all of our lives now, but at the moment, it feels like there are enough people writing about the horrors out there, enough people reminding us that we shouldn’t be enjoying X because the Ukrainians can’t or because people suffering Long Covid can’t remember that a chickadee is their favorite bird or whatever. There were enough people weighing in on the Oscar slap heard ‘round the world that I really, REALLY don’t need to add my two cents.

Oh, how that skyline has changed just since I’ve been here.

Also, I’m reading Coll Thrush’s 2007 Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (highly recommended for anyone who lives or knows Seattle, and for anyone interested in blasting away the myth that the indigenous people of what would become the United States disappeared and weren’t a part of the shaping of urban centers). With practically every page I turn I’m reminded that what we’ve been living through the last few years is just life. I’m only halfway through the book, but it’s all pretty relatable: the virus in question is small pox, the clashes are between cultures, yes, but also different ways that “the Bostons” (aka settlers) envisioned the future of Seattle, etc. There really is nothing new under the sun, something it would do me good to remember when I close my eyes and ignore the news.

Let’s call the above five paragraphs what they are: me finding fault with the things that occupy my mind so you will be less inclined to find fault with me and how I’m writing about the frivolous instead of the important.

The Big News on the Beth-n-Z frontier is that I won the lottery and get to have the Evusheld shot next week that will bring my wonky immune system up to something more akin to “normal” and thus—with precautions—I can maybe see a friend or two, maybe visit my beloved Elliott Bay Books for more books by local authors or on local history. Also, there is a breeder of the rare and delightful Glen of Imaal Terriers in town and she has invited me over to meet her first litter of puppies to see if they can woo me away from my Scottie love. By now, I suspect the puppies are all spoken for and Z is not in a pet-ownership mood yet, but it’s coming people. It’s coming. I’m tired of looking at people around the city with their cute dogs and badly behaved dogs and bedraggled dogs and well-dressed dogs, and wondering when I’m going to be adult enough to say, this…this is what I want in my life. Once I have this magical shot, visiting a stranger who lives on Queen Anne to see some puppies can actually happen and though nothing will come of it, it’s a step closer to me stamping my foot and pointing out the faulty logic my mother (in the 1970s) and Z (in the 20nows)  have both presented me with re: the impracticality of having a dog in an apartment.

In case you are unfamiliar with the breed, here is one of the wee beasties—Jill–that I follow on Instagram. In at least half the posts she has a stick twice her size jammed in her mouth, and it astounds me that someone else’s dog—and a dog that lives on the other side of the world at that—delights me so much.

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A post shared by JILL (@jill_the_glen)

Last month, Chickpea sent me a package that was the fabulous surprise of not only the perfect Scottie dog pen but also a Saint Stevie Nicks votive candle, and I see that as a positive sign about better days ahead. Or at least the days right in front of me that I—right this minute—can enjoy as they present themselves.

Stevie is now living in the “Lady Magic” corner of my desk where I keep my inspirational baubles and reminders that though I was raised in a patriarchal religion it’s okay if I have touchstones with the Eternal Feminine. You’ve been introduced to some of the relics there and others might be new to you. At the moment, those items include: three different containers full of my favorite pens and paint brushes; a photo of Bailey, the first Scottie dog I truly loved; another of me, aged four, typing away on my mother’s Olympia typewriter despite having only a few spell-able words in my brain and no idea what a narrative arc was; a third photo of my parents in 1966 when I was still baking and they were young, happy, and looked exactly like younger versions of themselves;  a prayer card of Joan of Arc, believing in her visions and ready for battle; at least one set of prayer beads draped over a shrine I’ve made to Our Lady of Perpetual Help; a wooden file box with index cards in it for places to send my work and notes about what is circulating and what has been rejected.

The pen isn’t working for me, but that ink. My.

I also recently added Crow Oracle cards (designed by Seattle artist MJ Cullinane) that I use to start writing sessions by selecting a card and seeing if it gives me a new way to look at my work. Today’s card: Anomaly—a depiction of a white crow—sits on my computer so I’ll see it throughout the day and ponder the notion of differences, of what is “normal” and what stands uniquely alone.

Stevie will be at home here. All that is missing is Blue Pearl incense, which I can’t burn because of Oh La La’s policies against open flames and because Z and I have lungs that do not appreciate incense of any variety. Even so, I took a chance and briefly lit the Stevie votive in the bathroom with the fan on because I had a great grandmother who believed that unlit candle wicks were bad luck, and I’ve adopted it as my own superstition. It was lit just long enough to blacken the wick and not long enough for the smoke detector or Deputy Z to notice and report me to the management.

It’s good to have things to rebel against when you light a candle—oh so briefly—to a rock goddess.

“She is like a cat in the dark and then she is the darkness.”

Look at her. Nobody can wear a hooded cape or red lipstick like Stevie. And I’d like my 13-year-old self—who was always on the lookout for backward masking and Satanic symbolism on my LPs in the early ‘80s—to take note that that pentagram on her chest is not upside down and therefore not shaped like a goat’s head and therefore nothing to be concerned about re: Satanism. Stevie has been many things but the reason she scores a place in the creativity corner is because she has such confidence in her lyrics’ right to exist. And nobody dare question her fashion choices.

You need someone like her in your corner when you are a woman of a certain age who has erred on the side of caution re: expressing yourself. Stevie has never erred on the side of caution. She has written the tortured love songs (which, I posit, no one truly understands—least of all Lindsay Buckingham) and they have been hits.

There’s another new development in Lady Magic Corner: a bottle of Waterman Encre Bleu Sérénité ink.

As a messy person, I’ve never taken to fountain pens in the past. The ink always ended up all over my hands and seemed too fussy when a person can just use a ball point or felt tip pen. Also, their tendency to scratch was a problem for me and sometimes they seemed too show-offy. If I don’t have on a top hat and spats when I go to an (imaginary) board meeting in a room paneled in solid walnut, then I have no right to such a fancy writing implement.

That single semester I was an art major in college was marred by a first assignment that involved three of my least favorite things: outdoors, a blistering sun, and a scratchy drawing utensil. As a class, we had to go to a farm and draw something there that inspired us in pen and ink. The only thing that inspired me was the promise of the end of the two hours and a trip back to campus, but I scratched out a massive scene of a rickety shed and some rusty farm implements. An aunt who would to support my art, had it framed and hung it over her sofa for years. When she died, the drawing returned to me, and even now I can’t look at it without feeling my nerves made electric and raw from the feeling of that pen on the paper.

So me having a bottle of blue ink on my desk is somewhere near anomaly, but when a friend’s artistic teenager suggested a fountain drawing pen, I bought the pen and the ink and then I fell in love. Not with the pen—though it is smooth and nicely weighted—but with this gorgeous blue ink and the glass bottle it came in.

See that bright, cobalt line on the outer edge of the bottle if it’s held up to the light? I can’t get enough of it. This particular color has been my favorite my entire life, so while it is unlikely I’ll start writing in my journal with a quill, just looking at the blue ink sloshing around inside the glass makes me feel all the feelings. It’s the exact opposite of that scratchy pen I had to use in Drawing 101 when I was 18 while I slapped at mosquitos in a hayfield. I can feel something akin to those same nerves crawling up the back of my neck, but it’s the good kind of hair-raising electricity.

None of these descriptions are saying what I mean. Let me try again. To see cobalt blue—whether it is my engagement ring when it catches the light or the ancient jar of Vicks VapoRub from a time when it was still in glass—is to leave my body and float above it, clutching my sides in ecstasy much like Snuffles from Quick Draw McGraw cartoons:

Snuffles knows what makes him happy.

Also in the color department, for my birthday in January, Z got me the Cariuma OCA sneakers that Helen Mirren has been seen in. When I put them on for a daily walk I get another little thrill. Until I saw them, I had no idea that I hoped to one day wear something that Dame Mirren has been spotted in (excluding her costumes from Excalibur in 1981), but here I am. Ecstatic about rubber-toed Kelly-green tennis shoes and shocked that droves of people aren’t stopping me on the street to find out where I got them. I know it’s a kind of fashion blasphemy, but they are prettier than Chuck Taylor’s and they plant some trees with every order.

I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille

Don’t tell Z, but now I’ve got my eye on another pair in an exquisite shade of Periwinkle. Somewhere in his future is a wife who has a different color of sneakers for every day of the week that she puts on in the morning to walk a dog.

These are silly things. Maybe signs that I’m just a consumer or my belief system is problematic. Or in finding joy in plastic Scottie pens and new shoes and the color blue I’m kind of…shallow. But when you find things that delight you when there are so many arrows, bells, and exclamation points calling your attention to the ugly, to the battlefields, islands of plastic floating in the Pacific, and the sick or dying, I like to remind myself that while these things are true, so is beauty, so is delight, so is love.

These things—the bad, the good—are not anomalies.

A Cup of Kindness

Icicles at the Stimson-Green Mansion, Seattle.

At the day’s writing session, V. greets us from 2022 and she reports to the rest of us, still stuck in 2021 for the next few hours, that so far so good on the new year. No one in Australia has broken it yet, she says. My sensitive intuitive writing friends and I laugh at the joke, and talk about our plans and non-plans for the year. We discuss the value of goals, the pressure of goals, and some of us have lists of things we hope to accomplish and others have come up with more of a mission statement to guide the days that follow midnight. All of us are grateful that we’ve had this past year together while we create something out of nothing.

Normally at the new year, I’m equal parts hopeful (that it will be a good year, that I’ll be a productive person, that the wind will remain at my back yadda yadda yadda) and nostalgic for the year that was. Not so much because any given year was so remarkable that I don’t want to let go of it, but because it is now known in its entirety, has been survived, and seems like a tamed creature whose behaviors–in retrospect–were predictable even if they weren’t. (If you’d told me last January that even after vaccines there’d be new variants of our unwanted guest, we all probably would have been in tears. Omicron? Really? Weren’t the first several iterations enough?) It’s the difference between a book you are looking forward to reading and that book finished and how it did or didn’t live up to your expectations, how it surprised you but is no longer a surprise, and you wonder how much of it you’ll remember a week from now or five years from now.

This year I’m not looking back on 2021 with any particular fondness or hatred. It’s the first year that trying to label a year as good or bad seems a ludicrous proposition. There’s value in sifting through the artifacts (and debris) of a year and assessing how you wish it had gone, what worked well, where you’d make changes if you got do-overs, but after a lifetime of believing there was something special about January 1st or my birthday or a Monday of any week–as if it held magical properties– I’m done with that.

This past year changed for me in the middle of a week in mid August when I found out the vaccine hadn’t quite worked for me, and then–after moping around for half a day and feeling suddenly very vulnerable–I finally thought, okay then, what are you going to do with yourself since you won’t be living your life outside of these walls anytime soon? And I drew up some plans for things I’d like to get done by the end of the year: eat better, exercise more, read more, write more, submit more (writing, not to Z…I’ve never been good with submitting to anyone and there was no ‘obey’ in my marriage vows, thank you), and I did almost all of the items on my list for the first time ever in my life. Normally, 364 days after I make New Year’s resolutions, they suddenly just look like wishful thinking written by someone who doesn’t understand anything about how my brain works.

There was nothing magical about the day in August. There was no ceremony to my deciding–I didn’t light a candle or burn sage (we signed a lease where open flames are forbidden). I didn’t wait for a new moon or meditate. There’s a good chance I didn’t even have a shower that day. But I came up with some goals…or maybe “guidelines” is a better word…and the next day I kept working towards those things. And the next day, and the next day, and now here we are…on the brink of 2022 and the only thing I didn’t accomplish was getting a new website up and running. (Mainly because I’m terrified and keep putting it off, so I’ll have to face my fears and get a website up by the end of March. I’m adaptable!

We had some snow this week, which was perfect for my need for winter weather. It got really cold (for Seattle) and has required hats and scarves and gloves and given me that taste of winter I need every year to feel like myself. Z and I went out on our daily walks and it felt like a real score when we saw actual icicles on the Stimson-Green mansion up the street. Icicles aren’t usual here, or at least haven’t been for the last several years. For that matter, neither are snowmen, and we were delighted yesterday to find a few of these little mini ones that would fit into a purse like a Yorkshire Terrier. We’ve also enjoyed seeing a variety of neighborhood dogs in some truly jaunty winter coats and sweaters. Yesterday there was a black Lab in what I can only describe as a fisherman’s turtle neck Aran sweater, and he looked delighted to be wearing it instead of mortified. I imagine him at his apartment this evening drinking hot toddies with his humans by a fireplace with some soft jazz playing in the background while he waits for the new year.

As for me, I will spend the remaining hours of 2021 doing a jigsaw puzzle, hanging out with Z, and filling in the first 12-weeks of my new fabulous planner that will give the impression that I’m actually organized and know exactly what I want 2022 to be. It’s going to be whatever it wants to be and none of us can change that, but I’m hoping I can keep nudging myself towards doing the things that please me and make me feel like I’m living my life instead of life just happening to me. The problem with the last two years has been how we’ve all had to come to terms with how little control we have, perhaps.

Thank you for reading my blog this year. I hope 2022 brings all of us more of the things we want, less of the things we don’t. Fingers crossed for good sense, good health, and good fortune.

See you next year!

The Benevolence of a Sock Monkey

Do you know how sometimes you find yourself in a mood, clutching your childhood sock monkey and weeping because you feel guilty about that time when you were four and her rhinestone eye fell out and you put the errant “eye” in a Kleenex for safe keeping and your mom, thinking it was just a snotty tissue, threw it out, and so then Monkey had only the empty eye socket? And then you keep crying because of the “scar” on Monkey’s arm—a tear that was stitched up with black thread, leaving a garish mark? And then you cry some more because Monkey has been there for you your entire life, a gift from your retired-nurse-babysitter and come to think of it, Monkey never felt like all of your other stuffed animals. They were your babies and required you to mother them and not show favorites (though you had favorites, oh yes you did), but Monkey in her cap and red-checked dress has always felt more like Mary Poppins in sock monkey form—an adult. Even though you recently had to ask your mother for Monkey’s pedigree and hadn’t remembered that Grandma Sowers, the unrelated retired-nurse-babysitter (who got hit by a car crossing the street when you were two, RIP), gave her to you, it makes sense that Monkey has had that role in your life of watching out for you and was the only of your original stuffed animals to make the trip across country when you moved 12 years ago. And yes, you were 42 when you made this trip and maybe you should have come with no stuffed animals but Monkey was the only member of the family you could get in your suitcase.

Anyhow, you don’t really know why you are crying on Monkey’s red checked dress. Nothing is particularly wrong and you almost never cry anymore anyhow (thanks, Lexapro), but you can’t stop yourself and don’t want to anyhow. So you cry about her scars (her less vibrant eye, a replacement your stepmother made so Monkey didn’t have to wear an eye-patch the rest of her life), how her dress is beginning to split, how you used to love the rainbow colored pom-poms on her hat and wrist, but those disappeared after a moth frenzy of some sort years ago. And then because you feel like you are not done crying, you grab at anything you can think of that will keep the tears flowing: how you miss home in Indiana, how you miss Zimbabwe and Z’s family, how you feel like you might die if you don’t get to Ireland soon. Then because the tears are starting to dry up, you move on to more global things: the people sick and dying of Covid and other terrible things, the homeless encampment down the street that you feel ill-equipped to do anything about, how you sometimes don’t hear Z’s stories because you get distracted by a bird flying past the window or some rambling thought about Medieval castle living or an imagined conversation with someone and have to say to him, “What was that?” Why don’t you listen better? And on and on and on.

You have those days, right?

When I originally wrote the above, it went on for four more paragraphs in excruciating detail…all the things I seemed to not be crying about, and then even I got sick of myself and deleted it. The tears dried up eventually that day, but I was still flummoxed about what had caused them. Monkey was there looking on while I was at my desk writing, not bothered at all by my storm in a teacup. Her smile which is three-parts love and one-part encouragement and benevolence as she watches over me, which in turn reminds me the two holy cards I keep on my desk: one of Joan of Arc (listen to your intuition and strength to your sword arm and all that) and the other of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, who is always in my line of sight when I write, perpetually helping.

One of my favorite things of the Pandemic (aside from embracing a new hairstyle reminiscent of a combo between Endora on “Bewitched” and Marge Simpson without the blue) has been the group of introverted intuitive feelers I write with daily on Zoom. We just had our one-year anniversary of meeting each other. Every day we Zoom for a couple of hours, talk for awhile about our lives, our shared personality aspects, our creative work, and then we spend an hour creating together but separately. We call ourselves the NFers because we are all introverted, intuitive, feelers. All of us write in one form or another, but we also do other things individually: craft, paint, compose and practice music, or, if we are feeling tired, one of us might choose to read.

I’m not usually a lover of group activities or even this much group chat, but there is something magical about the combination of us. I can even imagine a day when I’ll be grateful for this weird time in the world because it brought us all together virtually. I’ve grown. I’m writing more. I’m taking better care of myself. And twice now despite my inability to do most practical, sensory activities, I have channeled my maternal grandmother and fixed two lamps that quit working after they were mishandled by movers last year when we came to Oh La La. (My next project is to entirely rewire a lamp, but Z is dubious and thinks we might need an electrician to do this! Or firefighters standing by.) Change is afoot.

Also, I’ve fallen in love with all of these women. We feel our feelings and share the things we’ve been thinking about or something we just learned or a book we happened upon. We share bits of our selves and allow ourselves and each other to be the kooks we were born to be. If someone doesn’t show up, we worry a little. When we’re all in attendance, there’s an extra layer of excitement. There’s no commitment—other than time—and yet I feel fully committed to these five people I didn’t know 13 months ago. I want their projects to go well, I want their relationships to flourish, and I want them to live in contentment.

After the sock monkey induced weepies, I mentioned to this group that I’d been a bit sad, and V who has kept the Zoom candle lit for us the last 12 months—getting up before even the roosters in her part of the world—suggested that the reason for the sadness and the clogged up creativity might just be that I’d been in a holding pattern for awhile and it’s hard to work towards the next thing when you are hovering between places, between here and there. And it’s true. I’ve been waiting on some things. Some test results. An “all clear—you can visit other humans again!” message. Next year’s lease at Oh La La where rents have been hiked. Some writing that’s circulating out in the world looking for a home. And so on. Just life stuff. But still…a holding pattern.

In one form or another, all six of us are in a holding pattern for one reason or another, and when you get right down to it, everyone (who believes the Pandemic is real) is in a sort of stuck place between Before and After. No wonder people are out of sorts, behaving oddly, and generally not mentally well.

Though I’ve flown a lot, I’ve been stuck in only two holding patterns that I remember, both times circling over New York. The first was only memorable because a small plane wasn’t communicating with the tower and they had to keep the commercial flights away from it until they made contact. Later, it would have seemed scary, but because this was pre 9-11 it was just an annoyance. All I remember is that we circled around and around and the only reason I knew we were going in a circle was because I kept seeing the same school bus on the ground. In my memory now, it isn’t a small plane causing trouble with the control tower but that the school bus was some how holding up our landing.

The second holding pattern was on a flight destined for London for a layover on my first trip to Zimbabwe with Z to see his homeland. There was a blizzard that shut down Europe between our take-off from Detroit and when we got over the coast of Nova Scotia. It’s the only time I’d ever been bumped up to first class on an overseas flight. Z and I had just had a fancy meal with wine and were settled in for a pleasant flight with the big earphones instead of the crappy earbuds back in coach. We had the free internet, the real flatware, a leg rest and an ability to recline significantly, comfy blankets and, I don’t know, maybe there was caviar and slippers or a small pedigreed lap dog to keep us company (there wasn’t), but it felt like we’d won the lottery.

And then the pilot’s announcement that we weren’t actually going to our destination because Heathrow and Gatwick had both been closed and Paris wasn’t far behind. JFK had agreed to let us land there, but only after we burned off the bulk of the fuel so the landing would be safe. So we circled. For five hours. Despite our accidental luxury in first class, the flight got increasingly more uncomfortable as we circled and circled, changed altitude multiple times, and the engine slowed down and sped up.

Though I didn’t want the oceans befouled, I started thinking, “Just dump the fuel already and let us land!” I found it impossible to sleep. There was nothing we could do to arrange some other flight that would by-pass Europe and get us to Harare for Christmas while we were still in the air, but our brains wouldn’t quit spitting out possibilities of us spending the holiday trapped in an airport, eating peanuts and trying to build a sleeping fort out of our carry-on luggage. My feet puffed up. My stomach turned with each shift of the plane. Five minutes felt like an hour.

Finally we landed and, though it took an age to get re-booked on a flight that went straight to South Africa and then on to Zimbabwe on Christmas Eve, we managed it. But now we suddenly had three days to kill before our departure. For two nights, we were in an airport hotel in one of the only rooms left and for a third night, we stayed with Z’s cousin in Connecticut. One day we took the train into Manhattan and after a lifetime of wanting to see NYC at Christmas, I finally got the chance.

We met friends of Zs at Union Station, had a meal with them at a diner where I learned about an egg cream, and walked around looking at the windows at Macys and the other stores I’d only ever seen in old movies. When they took their young daughter home, Z and I continued poking around the city, seeing Rockefeller Center all lit up and skate-y, peeping into St. Patrick’s Cathedral, trying to pretend the light sweatshirts we were wearing for summer in Zimbabwe were big winter coats warding off the freezing temperatures. It was chilly, but magical.

We were still stuck in the holding pattern—between leaving home for a holiday in Zimbabwe. We weren’t anywhere we’d planned to be, we weren’t dressed for it, it wasn’t really comfortable, but still, there were moments in those three days of waiting that I wouldn’t change (including my putting bubble bath in the jacuzzi in our room and Z having to rescue me by flushing bubbles down the toilet before the entire bathroom was overrun).

That’s us on the Jumbotron in Times Square at about 11 o’clock. Z is waving!

The thing about a holding pattern is you never know when it’s going to end. That’s why they’re so tedious. You could be circling for five minutes or five hours or forever (or, you know, at least until you run out of gas).

Oh La La is right on the flight path to SEA TAC (an airport I’ve never had to circle). So when I’m writing in the office—which juts out of the building and hangs above the sidewalk nine floors below—I feel personally connected to the planes and the crows and the clouds and the distant boat traffic on Lake Union. On days when the writing isn’t going well if the planes are especially low, I check the tail fin to see if it is a commercial flight or if it is headed for the even closer Boeing Field where cargo planes land. At night with the blinds up in our teeny bedroom, I watch the late night flights arrive and wonder who is coming home and who is arriving for business and who is brave (or stupid) enough to be a tourist right now.

Though it’s been two years since I’ve been on a plane, I can imagine being in one that is passing by our building, waiting for the landing gear to drop down, checking to see if it’s raining, wishing I’d gone to the bathroom before we’d been restricted to our seats, and mentally de-planing long before wheels down. I imagine being greeted by people who love me as I get off the escalators in baggage claim, collecting my suitcase, standing in line for the taxi or Lyft that will bring me into the city. I even imagine that moment on I-5 when you crest the hill and see Seattle in the far distance, lit up and sparkling like Oz. I’m here, and yet I’m a little homesick for that sight.

It’s snowing today. It won’t stick in all likelihood because snow rarely sticks here, but it’s a happy sight on a Midwinter day. It feels like 34 out and I’m wrapped in the shawl that G knitted for me this fall. Monkey is watching me from the guest bed with her one good eye, smiling encouragement while I write, wondering when this post will land.

What am I circling around? I don’t know. A little self-compassion. A lot of compassion for everyone who is struggling because of the virus or separation or the season or because they feel stuck. Some joy because winter can be cozy: a stack of books, a cup of cocoa, a few days off from work, a little chocolate and though I didn’t arrange any this year, a dollop of maple candy that melts in your mouth and is too sweet by half—even for me—but that tastes the way magic must taste. (It comes right out of a tree! How could it not?)

And hope. Hope that all that is wrong in the world might get righted, that all that is wrong in a head or a heart might get soothed, that there will be more light than darkness, more love than hate, and some goodwill. These are the things I need to believe in to make any holding pattern tolerable. The winter solstice seems like a good time to tap into that.

My wish for you is that your solstice–however you celebrate it—is exactly what you need. Whether that is a tree blazing with lights with family gathered around it or a benevolent sock monkey from childhood helping you through the doldrums, may it bring you, and thus the world, a little bit of peace.

Thirty-three Attempts at a Book Review

Camono Island, last days of summer. 2021.

Normally, this time of year I’d have some stories to tell about Mom’s annual birthday trek to Seattle, how much I love fall, how I dragged Z to an orchard though he doesn’t understand the appeal since you can buy cider at the grocery, big plans for Z’s birthday, etc. But like last year, Mom had to give the trip a miss because of COVID threats and because her offspring (that’d be me) may or may not have immunity to the virus after receiving a second try at getting vaccinated. I’ve been nowhere except to get said vaccines and I’ve only seen Z in the flesh and everyone else via Zoom since mid-August. This was Zs second boring Pandemic Birthday, where we stayed in, watched TV, and he washed his new birthday socks. Woo hoo.

Also, I’m avoiding the news because it’s rarely good, so unless you’d like to hear me talk about Squid Game, the Great British Bake-Off, and whether Noodle the TikTok pug is having a Bones or No Bones day, what you’ll be getting this month are random thoughts and questions I’m wrestling with at the moment.

1.

Z and I have trash bags full of our freshly laundered clothes layered with lavender-scented dryer sheets because I read moths don’t like lavender.  We’ve been dealing with a moth infestation for months, which wasn’t so strange at our old place with windows that didn’t close tightly and that seemed like they had been in the apartment longer than we had, maybe even since 1923 when the place was built. But it is very odd here at Oh La La because we’re basically living in a non-spherical biosphere. 

We’ve made our apartment as hostile an environment for them as possible, short of installing the moth-equivalent of those non-roosting bird spikes that I hate to see on eaves around the city. Those seem so mean-spirited, but apparently if pigeons moved into our apartment, I’d be installing spikes everywhere because my compassion doesn’t extend as far as holes (or pigeon crap) in my woolen Irish acquisitions: two woolen blankets, an Aran sweater, my favorite winter coat, and a pair of forest green cashmere gloves that I bought in Waterford in 2006 and wear so rarely that they are still like new but just knowing I have a pair of cashmere gloves makes me feel like a grown-up (even if I got them on a clearance table at the history museum there). No. There I draw the line.

Trash? Moving? Moths?

2.

I’m reading Colum McCann’s novel Apeirogon wherein he tells the true but partially fictionalized story of two grieving fathers—one Israeli, one Palestinian—who are friends and working towards peace. The format he uses is with numbered cantos (sort of like this) that add up to 1,001, as in The Thousand and One Nights. Some of the sections are meaty narrative. Others are a single sentence. Some are just photos. Some are all about the main story of the two fathers and their dead daughters and their conviction that with communication and recognition of the Other as human, peace can be attained. Some cantos talk about birds or slingshots or François Mitterrand. I like miscellany and McCann’s style, so for the most part the structure works for me.

At other times I wonder if all the numbers and pauses and details don’t get in the way of the story. Also, the beauty at the heart of the story doesn’t have anything to do with McCann and so much more to do with these two men, Rami Elhanana andBassam Aramin, and the stories that conflict forced onto their families. So, I go back and forth on this issue about whether it’s a great book that everyone should read or if I’d be as moved had I read an article about the men. I have no idea where I’m going to land on this once I’ve finished the book.

A thousand-and-one numbered sections seems like a lot. Is it genius? Is it arrogance? Is it something in between?

Also, I’m beginning to question why I believe I must land on one or the other.

3.

The summer JFK Jr.’s plane went missing on a trip to Hyannis Port for his cousin Rory’s wedding, I got asthmatic bronchitis. Going upstairs to my bed was overwhelming because I had so little breath and even less energy.  Once I made it up to my bedroom, I’d climb in bed for a nap and thought I wouldn’t ever go downstairs again because of how awful it was to gasp for breath trying to do something I’d been able to do just fine a few days before as if there would always be plenty of air to breathe.

I spent a lot of time thinking about these mythical creatures—the Kennedys—while I convalesced. I had learned about them as a child in the same way I learned about Snow White, Santa Claus, Abraham Lincoln, my great-great grandmother, Amelia Earhart, and Jesus. They were all equally cartoon-y and real to me and people whose stories were worth studying.

Mom had a book of photos of JFK’s life, and I would study the ones of him with his arm around his daughter, playing with his kids in the Oval Office, some fuzzy images from the Zapruder film, and that iconic photo of his toddler son saluting his casket. 

It was hard to believe that that toddler was now missing at the prime of his life. Because I loved Arthurian Legends, there was part of me that had always believed JFK Jr. was the Boy Who Would Be King, never mind his main political overture had been starting a magazine about politics for people who didn’t know much (or care) about politics.  

I also felt weirdly mournful for Rory too, and how her wedding day had been wrecked and how it’s not the kind of thing a bride can complain about without seeming like a selfish whiner: that one time my cousin ruined my wedding by going missing. At the time, I knew nothing about her, but with my new computer, I asked Jeeves to tell me all about her, and discovered she was the youngest of RFK’s children, a year younger than I was, and so young, in fact, that she had never met her own father because he was assassinated six months before she was born.

I didn’t believe in things like curses though the tabloids were regularly talking about the “Kennedy curse” whenever a Kennedy died in a tragic way. But when you added up all the sadness that one family had it seemed unlikely that they’d find John John’s plane parked in a hangar somewhere while he, his wife, and his sister-in-law were grabbing a lobster roll at a roadside stand on a whim.

4.

On my last outing into the world, Providence, Hudge, Z and I went to Camano Island for a picnic. We sat under tall pines, listened to Puget Sound licking the shore, annoyed occasionally by the noise of a boat or seaplane that passed, and we rejoiced that at last we could all be together, have our masks off, and share a meal. It was such a magical day that I even had a rare Scottie dog sighting when an older man walked his pup near us. A friend refers to those heady days this past summer when it felt briefly like COVID was behind us as “Hot Vax Summer.” This day had all those hallmarks: it was beautiful and so nice to be reminded of all the things I love about the Pacific Northwest and have seen so little of for the last year and a half. 

5.

Is it worth noting that I am reading Apeirogon with my eyes on my iPad and listening to it on my phone simultaneously, which may be why the book works for me? McCann’s Irish accent and use of the pause makes it sound more like poetry than it might if I were only reading it on the iPad and hearing the words with my eyes. In fact, I wonder if I had the book in my hands if I’d be annoyed by the structure and the weight of so much extra.

6.

There’s a new puppy across the street who has his own little patio-kingdom to explore. When he first arrived, I thought he was a Lab. Then his hair got longer and he seemed more like a Golden Retriever. Then the fur got curlier and Z and I speculated that it was some make or model of a Doodle. Now that I can see his paws, I’m wondering if he’s going to be a Pyrenees. It feels like all of those possibilities still exist in him though—the different breeds, the different personalities. He is adorable no matter what he turns into.

Unless you are the calico cat who lives with him.

7.

We are still ordering groceries and having them delivered. Z is a good husband. He really wants to get back to QFC in person so he can squeeze mangos and check eggs for cracks before he puts them in the cart, but he wants to keep me safe until we find out what my antibody status is.

When the groceries arrive it’s always a bit like opening a grab bag to see if you “won” something good or if you got a dud item. Yesterday, the guac got replaced and we were sad, but then when he pulled it out of the bag, we discovered it had been replaced with a bigger tub of guac, which felt like a win. Other items feeling less like a win: the sale grapes ($2.99) being replaced with grapes that must be magic because they cost $9.99. Somehow, we ended up with three loaves of bread. And the mystery we can’t quite solve is why we ended up with a huge brick of cheese (HUGE) when cheese hadn’t been on the order at all.  Maybe the shopper thought gobs of real cheese was a great replacement for the fake cheese I have to eat that the store rarely has, or maybe he thought since we had almost ten-dollars-worth of grapes, we needed cheese as an accompaniment.

8.

You can plan all you want, but you never really know what you are going to get in this life.

9.

I had a mild reaction to the second vaccine that left my nose dripping, my head aching, and me sleepy. One night I fell asleep listening to Colum McCann narrate Apeirogon and I dreamed I was having an intense conversation with a handsome man I was trying to woo (Z did not exist in this dream—forgive me Z) as he stocked shelves and racks at a high-end men’s store. It was the kind of store I never go into and he was the kind of small-boned man with overly gel-ed hair- that I never had interest in. In the dream I realized why. He wouldn’t quit flitting and he wouldn’t quit talking. My sense was that he was always this way, but on this occasion of me following him from display to display and trying to get a word in edgewise, he wouldn’t shut up about the tensions between Israel and Palestine. I’d try to ask a question or add my own thoughts on the matter, and he kept droning on and on as if I weren’t there.

I have never felt so unseen. I kept checking to make sure I wasn’t a ghost.

When I woke up, I realized it was just Colum McCann reading his own novel into my ear to put me to sleep, clueless that anyone was on the other side of his recording trying to have a conversation with him in her dreams. I turned off Colum and went back to a more peaceful slumber.

10.

The lifespan of a female moth is around 30 days.

11.

Because it was still technically summer when Providence, Hudge, Z and I went on the picnic, I wore sandals. I was imagining a beach with sand that we might walk on, but instead, when we headed to the water after lunch, I discovered the beach was covered in golf ball and baseball sized rocks that were nearly impossible for my shoes to manage. The three of them in their more sensible shoes moved up the wrack line, and I sat on a log and watched the waves of Puget Sound. To be “alone” in nature for a time was blissful. Spiritual even.

Though I was ecstatic inside, apparently my outsides weren’t satisfactorily expressing this, because a man who walked by with his wife jolted me out of my moment with a shout, “Smile! It’s not that bad!” I looked at him and he was so pleased with himself for having dumped a load of his brand of sunshine on my otherwise delightfully grey day.

Even though I’ve been a feminist since birth, when a stranger man—and it’s always been men because women never tell other women to smile—has commanded me thusly, I’ve felt that I was failing to present myself in a pleasing way, as if that were my job, though I am not a model nor am I in the hospitality industry. The line I hate the most is, “It can’t be that bad!” There are two reasons I hate this.

1. I was born with a resting melancholic face, and I always look kind of the way I imagine Jane Eyre looked when she had to leave Thornfield Hall because the man she loved and nearly married had failed to mention his current wife’s existence in his attic.
2. How does the speaker know the person hasn’t just had a terrible day or gotten devastating news? They never say, “Oh my goodness! You look so sad. Is there anything I can do to help? Would you like half of my Snickers?” No. They say, “Smile!” as if your face is theirs to shape to their liking.

And now, the Crone years are upon me and I long for a sword that I could brandish in the faces of the offending parties and tell them to move along and accost no frowning woman ever again or I will hunt them down and teach them what chivalry really is.

Camano Island, WA

12.

After searching our apartment thoroughly—opening drawers, flipping through our hanging clothes, carefully inspecting pillows and the underside of three wool rugs—I finally discovered that the moths had been living rent-free in the vacuum that we keep in the coat-closet-slash-“laundry room.” The very vacuum I’d just carefully run all over the rugs to suck up any moths keen to set up a homestead. Also, it turns out, after cleaning up our previous apartment last November before we turned in the keys, we brought this very vacuum to the new apartment and promptly forgot to change the sweeper bag. Or rather, I thought I changed it but did not. And then we got our loyal robovac, Angus, and kind of forgot about the old upright anyhow because we haven’t been so concerned about deep cleaning since we aren’t having guests in.

Basically, we let the moths gestate in the closet for nine months, and now we are reaping what we accidentally sowed.

13.

Given how addicted I am to the National Zoo’s current “Cheetah Cam” maybe I should ask if it’s possible to set up a Moth Cam

14.

The cat across the street periodically comes onto the patio and sniffs around, and inevitably, the puppy discovers the cat is not in the apartment and comes bounding out, searching for it, and then barks at it. The bark could be anything from a joyful attempt to get the cat to play to a territorial reminder that the patio is his. What I do know is the cat braces herself for the onslaught. She turns her back to the dog, even if it means she’s facing the brick wall, and her body—though it doesn’t move—appears to be in her best facsimile of a you-don’t-exist-to-me stance. I am mostly a dog person because I’m allergic to cats but I feel badly for her and think about how her life must have seemed ideal before the puppy arrived, took over her territory, tried to tell her how to behave. I keep hoping I’ll look out one day and they’ll be curled around each other in inter-species companionship.

A rare moment when Cat is facing Puppy

15.

The neighbors probably think I’m spying on them, but it’s really all about their animals. They could be doing naked fire dances in their living rooms, and I’d only be interested in whether or not the dog’s tail was getting too close to the flame.

16.

That’s a lie. There are new human arrivals five floors up from the puppy and the cat. It’s a woman and man who have modern but stately furnishings, like real grown-ups and not people who picked a room at IKEA and re-created it in their own apartment. I have this feeling that it is a mother and son, even though that seems so unlikely. The son could be 16 or 26 and she could be 24 or 64 from my vantage, but her hair is nearly white or platinum blond and short and she’s always buzzing around cleaning things up while he stands eating over the sink. Usually, she has a phone crooked on her shoulder. Does anybody do that anymore who is Gen X or younger? Crook a phone? Talk on a phone? It doesn’t matter, but we so rarely see people our age or older in these buildings because they all headed for the suburbs years ago.

17.

In 2005 I was at a writer’s retreat at Kinnitty Castle in Ireland, and Colum McCann led a session on the work that goes into one of his novels, where story ideas come from, the writing life. At the time, he was telling us about the research he did with the unhoused population in a major city, how he spent some nights with them under a bridge, the conversations he had.

Women were swooning as if George Clooney were suddenly in our midst.

That night he danced in the castle pub with my friend Isabella who was in her 70s at the time, and I was charmed by their flirtation, by the way he treated her with respect and as if this dance was just as important as some dance he might have had in his youth when he was hoping to score. He was enchanted by her just as so many of those in our group were enchanted with him. I loved him a little for that because I too was enchanted with Isabella. She and I spent a lot of time together at the castle, and I invited her to go to Galway with me for a couple of days at the end of our week-long workshop.  At the time, I was feeling old and unwoo-able at 38, she told me—using her psychologist’s authority, her warmth as a new friend, and her New Yorker’s no nonsense—“If you lived in New York instead of Indiana, you’d just now be thinking about settling down, finding a partner, starting a family if you wanted. You’re young.” Then she proceeded to tell me about the man she’d most recently had a fling with. She’d always mourn her husband, she said, but there was a lot of marrow to be sucked from life yet for her and thus, by default, for me.

It doesn’t sound like much of a message, maybe, but I quit worrying about my age quite so much that day and when I think of the kind of older woman I want to be, Isabella is one of the people I think of.

Kinnitty Castle, Ireland

18.

I miss Isabella.

19.

Since the summer of asthmatic bronchitis and search and recovery missions, I’ve had pneumonia. I can’t really distinguish between the two conditions except to know that I hope to never get either again. Both of my grandmothers were on oxygen, one because of emphysema and the other because of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. My father and his brother died of lung cancer. I worry about lungs. My lungs. The lungs of people I love.

20.

Because my pulmonary system is related to people who have bad luck with their own, I’ve locked myself in my tower while I await the All-Clear signal from the CDC or the Fully- Vaccinated-with-Antibodies signal from my doctor.

21.

Around the time of my self-imposed quarantine, a two-person parole board in California recommended Sirhan Sirhan for parole. In a statement decrying this recommendation that was written by Rory Kennedy and five of her siblings, they address not just the loss of their father that shaped their family but the loss to America. My mother hadn’t had books about RFK’s life and assassination to fascinate me as a child, so I’d never considered how the country—the world—might have been had he lived. He inspired the daughter he never met to make documentaries about people marginalized for one reason or another. What else might he have inspired if he’d been given a chance?

What might anyone who has died unnaturally because of violence or their own or someone else’s bad choices have accomplished if only they’d been able to live their lives fully?

 22.

The busy woman in the modernly furnished apartment looks like she’d make a good pie. I worry that she’s lonely. Or has an unhealthy obsession with freshly washed windows.

23.

I imagine our neighbors peering into our apartment and feeling relieved that we appear to be moving with our many bags of clothes stacked in the living room. We are not a blinds-down people and sometimes in the morning we are not a pants-wearing people either. Sometimes our coffee table has books and papers and bowls of fruit stacked on it. Sometimes there are random things slung into the arm chair so we can never sit in it.  We watch a lot of TV in relaxi clothes and I imagine they don’t approve of our lifestyle.

24.

People are less interested in us than you think they are. Z says this with authority, as if it is a truth universally acknowledged. But that doesn’t explain why I care about the ages of my neighbors, why the dog barks at the cat, and why I believe that the across-the-alley neighbors put up curtains shortly after we arrived. There is disapproval and dislike in those curtains.

A judgmental neighbor perhaps.

25.

A word of advice: never ask someone who has just lost a family member to a lung ailment if that person was a smoker. The only purpose it serves is to make the speaker—almost always a nonsmoker—feel safe. At least I won’t die of a lung ailment because I’ve never smoked, they must think while the person they’ve asked is fighting the urge to growl in their general direction.

26.

What I didn’t admit and what shames me a bit is this: I smiled at the man on the beach when he commanded me to do so. Even now, I smiled.

27.

I found out Isabella died on her birthday when I went to check her page on Facebook to see what she was up to. We hadn’t had a real conversation in five years, just periodic check-ins over email, but I felt gutted and played that old, tiresome game with myself of self-blame about all the ways I take love and friendship for granted, as if it will always be there for me.

28.

In an effort to avoid any real controversy, my high school U.S. history class spent more time on Tammany Hall and the Teapot Dome Scandal than on anything that happened after the Great Depression. Thus, we avoided much of WWII, all of Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, and Watergate. So I didn’t learn anything useful about who Bobby Kennedy was or what he might have done or who killed him and why.

From my post-parole hearing “research” (thank you, Google), I learned that Sirhan’s mother believed he was traumatized in childhood by the Israeli-Arab conflict and by his brother’s death, which was caused when a military vehicle swerved to avoid gunfire, and that in 1989, the New York Times quoted Sirhan as having said his only connection to Robert Kennedy was Kennedy’s support of Israel to the physical detriment of Palestinians.

29.

Lately, when I want to ask if some recently dead-by-COVID person had gotten the vaccine, I try to fight the urge. It’s an apples and oranges comparison, but I am daily trying to remind myself to err on the side of compassion. People make bad choices. I have made plenty myself.

31­­­­.

Now, I’m slowly emptying the bags of clothes and reinstalling them in drawers that I sprayed so thoroughly with lavender oil that I coughed the rest of the day. I have no idea what moth lungs look or feel like, but if the hangers-on know what’s good for them, they’ll fly out the window or sit on the coffee table and watch Hulu with us instead of noshing on our fibers.

32.

I never know if there are real connections where I see them or if I just need to believe they exist to manage life.

33.

We were an odd band of writers at Kinnitty Castle. It wasn’t a group I should have felt comfortable with—a man who was on the Forbes 100, a Countess, various people with second homes, a woman who lived near me in the Midwest but was dismissive for reasons that had to do with either her recent MFA or the fact that she’d been born in Ireland—I knew instinctively that she was not going to warm to me.

Still, I fell in love with some of those people who were so different from me.

During one workshop (and days before Colum McCann showed up and danced with Isabella), there was a dust-up when a piece being discussed could be construed as anti-Semitic. Because I loathe discord, I can no longer remember specifically what it was or whose piece it was, but I do remember Isabella’s raised voice, the tears that welled in her eyes, as she pointed out the injustice of how the writer had characterized a Jewish character or the nonchalance with which the person had written about the Holocaust. She had lost family in the Holocaust. She herself had come to America as a refugee when she was a child. Later I would learn—because I hadn’t ever had to consider it before this because of the luck of my birth and place in history—how difficult it was to be a refugee in America. How difficult to be Jewish at a time when America hadn’t exactly put out the welcome mat for people who were attempting to escape the Nazis.

I was just an observer. It wasn’t my trauma. And yet, seeing how it affected Isabella all these years later—an ill-worded passage in someone’s novel manuscript . . . Even now, I have no words for the effect it had on me. But it made me wish I could always only see the humanity– the layers of sadness and joy and wisdom and wonder—in every person whose path I cross.

Amen.

Special Delivery

Lady of Shalott Considers Success Rate of Group Projects, Stays in Tower.

Clonmacnoise, County Offaly, Ireland

After the nurse calls to tell me that the vaccine four months ago didn’t take, I do yoga.

Despite having the vaccine in April, I have no Covid-19 antibodies to protect myself, had none when I thought I did and went on a cross country trip with Z to see my family, had none on our daily walks sans masks out doors in Seattle when we got back, or when we had friends over…finally, or when we had houseguests again…for the first time in our new space.  Suddenly, I feel like a lone, limping kudu on the veldt surrounded by a pride of hungry lions.

At the moment, my doctor and the fine scientists on the case are trying to figure out what’s next for people like me who have wonky immune systems. I fall into a weird category that isn’t yet covered by directives from the FDA or the CDC. Because I had the J&J vaccine, it’s not time for a booster yet. I can’t officially cross-vaccinate though that has some promise of working. I could lie to some pharmacist somewhere and try one of the other jabs, but I’m a terrible, terrible liar and don’t think I should have to in order to protect myself. But there is nothing I can do at this moment, so I pull down the blinds and tie-up my hair and chew on the side of my mouth.

For what it’s worth, I can’t really do yoga either. I am 54. I am round. I’m standing on the rubber mat I ordered seventeen months ago when the pandemic started, which I have used exactly three times since then. Twenty years ago, I took 3/4s of a yoga class in a claustrophobic studio in Richmond, and then September 11^th happened and though yoga would have probably been the right response to deal with the grief and the fear, I chose instead to sit at home, watch CNN Headline News on a loop, and stress eat. I wanted to be alone with my feelings, not stretching in a room with 20 strangers. A few years later I bought a DVD of Megan Garcia’s that taught yoga to the non-lithe, and I did it periodically on my own but only ever really excelled at Corpse pose, which was at the end of the routine when New Age music came on and you were meant to lie there, dead to the world, not thinking anything.  

But today, after the call, after I shake the dust from my purple mat, I, do the poses I memorized from the DVD all those years ago. I’m not good, but instead of critiquing myself, I think about how I’m safe in our apartment, how I can take care of my body in this way even if there’s nothing else to be done other than stay home for now. Again.

I start with sun salutations, which I do, but as I stretch upward, I think about how half of those states we drove through in July—me finally, joyously seeing the world again—were places where a lot of people don’t believe in wearing masks, barely believe in the virus, and absolutely won’t be getting the vaccine even if their names are entered in a lottery. If I’d known in June that I had no antibodies for the virus, we would have stayed in Seattle, I wouldn’t have gotten to see Mom, my family, a few friends, or the country between. Because I didn’t get sick and have no report that I made anyone else sick inadvertently, I’m glad I was ignorant. Ignorance really is bliss. It was a good month that reminded me of what normal might look like at some future time. Maybe this is what it is like for the people ignoring guidelines and arguing against mask mandates. Just press on with your regular life until you are either on a ventilator or your fabulous immune system sees you through. Maybe if I hadn’t answered the phone I could still be living like this, free-breathing and not wanting to stab people who cough on me or Z or anyone else I love.

When we got back from our trip, I was just starting to embrace the idea of the city again. The Delta Variant hadn’t yet kicked up, I thought I was fully vaccinated, and suddenly it seemed possible to walk in strange neighborhoods, to take a Lyft without worrying that I might end up on a ventilator, to hop in a car with Providence and Hudge and go to Camano Island for the day and picnic by the Sound. I was no longer envying people in suburbs with yards or in the country with acres or even people in the city with their own cars who could drive safely in their auto-bubble and feel like they are still part of the world. It was a relief to feel cautiously optimistic about rejoining society. 

But it’s a month later, Delta is everywhere, my defenses are apparently down, and I’m back on the 9^th floor peering down on First Hill as I Cat & Cow my way toward isolated health.

As a caveat, I feel like I should tattoo on my forehead, Lucky. I know how lucky I am that I don’t have to leave the house to work, that I have healthcare, that I happened to be in a study checking into the viability of the vaccine with people who have immune systems like mine which allowed me to find out that I needed to take extra precautions in the first place. I’m lucky I live in the city I do and in the country I do where vaccines are available. Twenty years ago—not long after that yoga class—I bought an air freshener for my car that said “LUCKY” in Celtic letters over a four-leaf clover. I never win the lottery, but I’ve felt lucky for a long time. I even feel lucky that I’m an introvert and so being “stuck” at home isn’t the worst punishment in the world.

Faded, but still true.

But after the phone call from the nurse, it is not until I am slumped into Child pose—legs pulled up under gut, hands stretched forward, palms and face pressed against the mat, my breath making me hotter than I already am—that I have a flash from elementary school. It’s something I haven’t thought about for decades. The lights snap off, and the usually pleasant Mrs. Murray barks, “Bury them!” and all of us know we have to make a fortress with our arms that covers our faces because she’s sickened by the sight of us.

When we are forced to bury our heads, there’s been a real transgression. It is different than the days when everyone is a little too chatty and she has us put our heads down for a few minutes so we can calm down. When we are commanded to bury our heads, it feels a lot like she hates us. Like she would be perfectly happy if we disappeared inside our own arms and were never seen again.

In 1973, I comforted myself with the knowledge that I was not the reason we were forced into this solitary confinement made of our own flesh though my natural instinct was initially to assume that it was my fault. I was not a goody-two-shoes particularly, nor was I pleased with myself that I behaved the way we were supposed to. It is in my nature to want things to be calm and easy, and the hijinks some of my classmates got up to never held much allure. If there were going to be negative consequences, why do a thing?

Let’s face it. I was kind of a boring kid. I wasn’t what you’d call dynamic or even all that energetic. I was interesting the way a turtle is interesting: you spend a lot of time waiting for it to make a move and then it pulls into itself and you forget that it’s a creature and not a stone.

A turtle trapped in a box–souvenir from my MFA in Maine.

I hated it when we had to bury our heads because it meant I couldn’t read or doodle or stare out the window at the single ancient tree that was outside the window. As it was, school bored me and to have these things that made it tolerable removed from me caused an almost physical pain. Even now, when I’m watching a show and some prisoner gets sent to solitary, I can remember my own exhalations ricocheting off the desk, finding no real space to escape in the tomb of my arms, and bouncing back onto my face convincing me that if I didn’t die of boredom I would likely suffocate. I could probably handle solitary as long as I went in with some books and a journal and a little radio. But all that nothing? Save me.

I was quiet on the outside, but oh, was I dramatic in my own head.

We had a very soft-spoken social worker who would periodically come to our class to do presentations. I was privileged enough to have lived my life without needing or knowing what a social worker was and because her appearance in our classroom was so rare and seemingly arbitrary, I couldn’t quite figure out what the point of her was. Everyone in the elementary school world had a specific purpose—librarian=books, nurse=temperature being taken, secretary=the gateway home when the temperature taken was too high, and so on. But I couldn’t figure out why Mrs. Cobine would very occasionally show up or what I was supposed to do with the information she shared since there would be no follow-up, no quiz, no adjacent reading or art project.

She had salt and pepper curls, beautiful blue eyes, and a soft voice. I recognized her as a benign, caring force in the universe, and she certainly wasn’t going to shut off the light and instruct us to disappear ourselves. But still, why had we been ushered into the library—surrounded by books I wanted to read—to have these soft conversations about feelings.

I was particularly dubious about the box she brought with her that held a dolphin puppet, a tape recorder, and some drawings to illustrate the story being told on the recording. Because she seemed so kind, I wanted to like those lessons, but they were not Scooby-Doo caliber. They were, instead, one of those activities that adults force upon you so you can learn a lesson. I didn’t blame her for these educational interludes—I could tell from the box she carted around that this was something that had been foisted onto her the same as it was being foisted onto us. I wanted what she was selling us to be true, but I was a child who doubted things.

On two of my remaining braincells, I’ve kept the song from one of these lessons. Instead of repeating in my head “inhale…exhale” as I contort myself on the yoga mat, I start to hum the song.  This one was about teamwork and involved a sort of goodwill pirate that Duso the Dolphin visited who was trying to get his ship loaded or unloaded or in dry dock or something, and the song was this:

“Come down here and help,”

said Blooper to his crew.

“You can do things in a group

you can’t do just with you!”

Back then, I remember looking at my classmates who were incapable of going a week without doing something bad that forced the whole class to sit in the dark with our heads folded into our arms on our desks. It seemed unlikely that the group of us could achieve anything together other than a decent kickball team at recess. Even as a first grader I could see that we all had our own agendas, our own weaknesses, our own proclivities that meant it was unlikely we would ever get whatever prize promised to be at the end of just “working together.” It sounded easier than it was.

Unless you are moving or throwing a pitch-in or you are Amish and there’s a barn raising on your calendar, I’ve never really believed that many hands make light work business. Many hands mostly make work subpar and everyone leaves thinking it would have been better if they’d been in charge except the person who is sleeping under a tree and hasn’t done anything at all. (He’s usually pretty happy with how things turn out, I guess, even if the result is a C-.) 

Whoever heard of a pirate called Blooper anyway?

Generation X is, perhaps, especially inclined to cynicism, and I am genetically predisposed to it. I also have these occasional Pollyanna moments. I like Fox Mulder, I want to believe,  and the two duke it out. When the pandemic first started, I was imagining us all banding together like people did during World War II for the greater good. Victory gardens and cheerful rationing and women giving up stockings for parachutes and learning how to rivet stuff.

And there for a while when the pandemic started, it seemed like everyone was making masks and banging pots and clapping for healthcare workers and being careful of each other while we waited for a vaccine, so I was hopeful. But, of course, it wasn’t everyone, it just seemed that way because I was stuck in an apartment on a liberal street in a liberal city where people value science and kind of value other people.

These signs were encouraging when this thing started.

During the yoga session, I work through other poses whose names I can now only guess at and instead of wondering if my form is even close to what it is supposed to be (it is not), I think about how this is the first time since I was diagnosed eleven years ago with that wonky immune system that I’ve genuinely felt the weight of my condition and how I am at the mercy of others.

I still hate group projects. I’ve got no faith in every one holding up their end of the deal.

Instead, I hold a Plank pose for five long breaths for the first time ever and remind myself that this will be temporary—both the pose that my arms are shaking through and this incarceration. I prefer doing yoga this way to that stuffy room in 2001. Good thing I am an introvert. Eventually, one hopes, there will be a vaccine cocktail that works or the virus will get bored and go wherever old viruses go to die, and I can come down from my tower with a better outcome than the Lady of Shalott. (I thought my youthful fascination with this Arthurian character was all about unrequited love, but I see now it was practice for 2020 and onward.)

Then finally, the long-awaited Corpse pose. I close my eyes and relax. The yoga is done. I can tick it off my list. I am in my own home, surrounded by books, paper and pens, a laptop, a view, and Z, and no one is shutting off the lights and shouting, “Bury them.”

At least not right now.

My last visit to the cafe at Elliot Bay Books in January 2020.

Return of the Hoosier: There and Back Again

Somewhere in Montana

My first camera was a hand-me-down Instamatic from my stepmother when I was 13, right before I went on a week-long trip on “God’s Nightcrawler” with my youth group. The Nightcrawler was a former school bus that had been tricked out with bunks and a few bench seats that turned into bunks and it drove all night so we could wake up in the morning having arrived at some destination: St. Augustine, Washington, D.C., Hershey, Disney World. We’d spend the year earning money to pay for our trip and then that week would rush by as we bounced from one destination to another. Because I was 13 I often didn’t pay a lot of attention to the destination (I still couldn’t tell you what Bok Tower looks like, for instance) because the journey with my friends, and, let’s be honest, the boys I was finding increasingly more interesting, was what mattered. 

I’d love to show you all the pictures I took on that first trip, but the truth is that because no one had told me that you have to stop walking and stand still to get a clear shot, most of my Disney World photos look something like this:

Blurry UMYF Heart Throb inside Blurrier Dinosaur, Disney World 1980

Fortunately, I remember those ten hours at Disney World very well and can still picture the tickets we had to use then for various rides, the rides themselves, the meals we ate, the hijinks, the attempts to arrange yourself in the line in such a way that you would “accidentally” get to ride Space Mountain with a preferred someone, and the sweat and grime we slept in that night when we tumbled into the suffocating bunks with very little fresh air to breathe. Now, it sounds like more than one of the circles of hell to be stuffed into what amounts to a tin can on wheels with minimal windows with a bunch of hormonal teenagers, but at the time, it seemed magical. It was easy to imagine that our adult lives would unfold as a series of road trips as we saw sites across America, though—we theorized (at least some of us)—that we would be doing it at some point in a car with air conditioning and someone we loved sitting next to us. The adult versions of us would stop where we wanted, eat what we wanted, and no one could tell us we couldn’t swim after dark like our neurotic youth pastor would arbitrarily declare.

I bring this up only because Z and I traveled six days from Seattle to Indiana (and another six days back again) so we could spend three weeks visiting my family in Indiana. Triple C, the white Toyota we rented and named, literally, Cross Country Camry was promptly filled with more than we needed because I seemed to think we were wagon-training it back to civilization, so insisted we take two big jugs of water, a roll of duct tape, bungee cord, some carabiners, and a First Aid kit the size of a shoe box. Even now I can’t tell you what sort of disasters I was imagining in which duct tape, a keychain-sized carabiner, Shrek Band-Aids and bag of m&ms would be the only thing standing between us and certain death, but it made me feel safer so Z found a place to shove it all in the trunk. Our stuffed turtle ShellE who goes on all of our travels perched on the dashboard and we were off.

Because I’m not a photo journalist, I have not documented in this shot the packed-full trunk, the cooler on the backseat, or the stuffed turtle on the dashboard, but trust me, they are all there.

When Z and I decided to drive from Seattle to Richmond, my time optimism allowed me to dream of many fabulous road-side stops, photo ops, and a chance to explore places we’d never been before like Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and Missoula, Montana. I reasoned that if we left early enough in the morning and got in five or six hours of driving, we’d have entire afternoons to explore Yellowstone, or see one of the various largest balls of twine. Though I have loathed people with selfie sticks at various tourist sites in the past (especially odious at the Tower of London in 2015 on the parapet above Traitor’s Gate where you could get a good view of Tower Bridge—man, I loathed the selfie-stick users bumping us out of the way to get their shot for social media), I ordered one, and packed my “real” camera too because I was imagining at least five Instagrammable photos per day. I imagined us having picnics in roadside parks and briefly considered taking our Bocce set because I imagined us needing to stretch our muscles, and in the stretching I imagined us dressed like a preppy couple in the 1960s: wicker picnic basket, gingham blouse & espadrilles for me, something linen with penny loafers for Z, and maybe an Airedale terrier joining us. In the end, I settled on two card games (Quiddler and Lost Citiesso we could relax at night in motels across America. Instead of hotels by the interstate, I imagined us at 1950s-style motels with quirky dinosaur or giant cow statues out front and delicious old-timey diners sitting right next to them. I imagined going back to the populuxe motel and writing a blog post of the day’s events and then sending postcards along the way to document our journey and to alert friends and family in Richmond that we were on the move. In at least one fantasy, I imagined us pulling an Airstream camper behind a woody station wagon. In another, we were riding some horses.

I imagined the entirety of our trip would look like different versions of the Painted Canyon in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

In the end, the trip did not look like any of these things. For one, the selfie stick was a big pain to set up. For two (and reasons that are still mysterious to us), it took two hours longer to get to each evening’s stopover. We never did leave earlier than 9 or 10 a.m. and we were on the highway and only stopped at rest stops or for food and fuel. The name brand hotels were the only ones we trusted for our overnights as the quirky antlers and patterned bedspreads of the “quaint” ones were not as inviting as I’d imagined. When we arrived at our interstate lodging, we would inevitably drag ourselves to whatever chain restaurant was walkable from the hotel, and then we’d spend the rest of the evening trying to find the hotel for our next night’s lodging. We never left enough time to play those games we brought. Being an indecisive pair, hotel searching could take the bulk of the evening as we weighed the merits of one hotel over another as if we were buying the entire franchise instead of renting a room for a single night. Then ultimately at the last minute we’d go with one that wasn’t the cheapest but was the cheapest of the mid-range prices. Ever since we stayed at the World’s Worst Motel in Plymouth, Massachusetts, with squishy carpet, dubious bedding, and the aroma of 1972, we’ve been wary of anything too cheap.

Big Sky Montana Through Windshield

And the photos I took? Not the beauties I’d planned. In fact, I set my camera on the “action” setting and took the bulk of pics out the car window. There weren’t as many “scenic view” stops as there are on the way down to Georgia or down the Oregon coast even though the scenery is there—just not places to pull over—so it was easier to click a string of pictures and hope for the best. Some are better than they should be, but most look about like the guy inside the dinosaur in that blurry Disney World pic from 1980 at the beginning of this post.

Photos aside, the drive out was delightful. Because we’d isolated ourselves so thoroughly during the pre-vaccine portion of the pandemic, it felt like a marvel to be in car without a mask driving away from First Hill, driving away from Seattle, driving away from Washington state. Mostly we talked as we drove—some conversations serious, some ridiculous, and occasionally there was companionable silence. We listened to a little music and several episodes of the Scene on Radio podcast“Seeing White” series, which I highly recommend if you are feeling too patriotic. It will rattle your sense of U.S. history in all the ways we should be rattled. We did not get tired of each other. Z has taken to calling me Green Bean Monkey or GBM for short because of a favorite green bean snapping monkey on TikTok and because he is a rascal (Z, not the OG GBM).

Every morning as we peeled out of the latest hotel parking lot, I would be struck by the “On the Road Again” earworm, and as we drove across Montana, Z got “Home on the Range” stuck in both of our heads for the two days we were in Big Sky country. Then we’d start looking for license plates to add to our list. We made it to 38 and if we hadn’t given ourselves stringent rules about collecting them only when we were in a moving car and the car with the desired plate was also moving, we would have acquired the coveted Hawaii.

Sunset by I-90, Missoula, MT

I used to be really good at planning a trip. I had things I wanted to see and I’d map out ways to see them. I’ve led multiple people around Ireland by the nose, demanding that they adore all the same things I adore, for instance. But during the pandemic while other people were losing their senses of smell, I lost my sense of travel planning. What this meant for our trip is that we did not alert friends along our route that we were coming until a day before we got to them. I chose our first stop—a hotel in Missoula, Montana, only because a friend had once purchased a shirt for me that said on it “Missoula, Montana: a Place. Sort of.” I’d like to be able to report its merits like a proper travel writer, but when we woke up the next morning instead of heading into downtown Missoula to get a sense of this college town, we looked at the misty, grey sky and the rain splattering onto our car, looked at each other and shrugged: maybe on the way back. More likely, we’ll just look photos up online.

See you some other day, Missoula.

We have friends in Billings, so our next stop was there, but what we failed to factor in was that it was Father’s Day. We went out to eat with them at a place with lots of steak, antlers, and men wearing big belt buckles. It was busy so we stood in line for almost an hour while we waited on our table, and it was our first real no-holds-barred restaurant experience. No one was masked up so we pretended they were all vaccinated along with us and thus it was just another Sunday night. We haven’t been with that many people in a public space since February 2020. It felt a little surreal, but also completely normal to be visiting with friends and their delightful, picture-drawing seven-year-old who thrilled me when I asked her what was inside her locket and she opened it and showed me two pics she’d cut up of various cast members from Harry Potter. (Oh, my heart! I was further charmed by her when I found out that on her play dates she and a friend schedule in time for reading because books are just that important to them.)

While we drove through Montana, we were intrigued by how above whatever town you are driving through you’ll see a big first initial of the town’s name carved into the mountain There’s probably a reason for it, but I chose to think of it like the water towers that dot flatter landscapes with the name of an entire town or village painted on it. And then I get amused because in Fountain City, where my high school was, for a time the water tower was spray painted so it read “Fountain City Hell Raisers.” You can’t do that with a mountain initial.

Let’s call this one Montana, but it could be western North Dakota

Z and I had been planning to spend our next evening in South Dakota near the Badlands/Deadwood/Mt. Rushmore (even though I’m not currently speaking to three of the four presidents on that particular monument and Lincoln is on thin ice himself). But we quickly discovered that basically every second person in America is traveling there this year and the hotels were outrageously overpriced. Like over $400 for a Holiday Inn. A Holiday Inn. I always loved their advertisements with the catch phrase: the best surprise is no surprise, meaning you could count on their sameness, but let me tell you, $400 was a surprise to us. So at the last minute with the advice of our friends in Billings, we decided we’d skip South Dakota and drive through North Dakota where apparently no one wanted to be because all the highway hotels were reasonably priced and thrilled to see us and there was non-existent traffic. We ended up staying in Bismarck though I can’t tell you anything about it except the Red Lobster in our Fairfield Inn & Suites parking lot was adequate.

It’s shameful how we traveled, I suppose, and would horrify people who suck the marrow out of every place they go, but we had limited days and getting home to the Midwest became increasingly important as the land flattened out.

Since our route had changed, we decided to stop by the Twin Cities and see the friends there that I inherited when I met Z who had acquired them himself during college and grad school, and then we moved through Wisconsin, and Illinois before we hit the banks of the Wabash and pointed the car towards Richmond on the eastern part of the state. We promised each other that on the drive back to Seattle we would plan ahead, have our overnights mapped out before we ever left Indiana. What’s more, we said, we’d let friends know a week in advance before we showed up in their town so they could block out an hour or two to visit instead of emailing two hours before we arrived to see if they were free for dinner.

Z and I are masters of planning to plan. It’s the follow-thru we have trouble with. So don’t be surprised to learn that when we left Indiana three weeks later we hadn’t even booked a hotel for the first night and had to pull over at a rest stop to do it. When we left Richmond, we weren’t sure yet if we’d take another crack at South Dakota, choose a more southerly route, or return the way we came. This time we were trying to dodge heat and wildfire smoke more than over-priced Holiday Inns. It drove my retired truck driver stepfather nuts that we didn’t have a route in mind when we pulled out of the driveway to head back.

A big cow in New Salem, ND

What we saw in all of those states on the way to Indiana were basically things through the windshield with the camera set on “action”—so nothing worth an article in Travel and Leisure, but even so, here are some highlights:

• The world’s biggest cow (statue)
• The world’s biggest sand crane (statue)
• The world’s biggest buffalo (statue)
• Theodore Roosevelt National Park only because I-90 goes right through it
• Road signs pointing to other national parks we hope to one day visit when they aren’t so crowded by people who have been locked up for over a year. And also when they are less likely to spontaneously combust.
• Billboards for cheese, pornography, and anti-choice legislation—not sure what those three things have in common, but there were a lot of all three of those in Wisconisn in particular.
• Scenery. A lot of gorgeous scenery of mountains, streams, cows, oil derricks, rock formations, trees, license plates of various states (39), and, alas,  deer carcasses (31). 

North Dakota started looking more familiar give or take an oil derrick or two.

What surprised me aside from my inability to plan a trip now or my crap photography skills?

• The desert in eastern Washington that we’d never seen because we basically only exist west of the Cascade Mountains. It was bleak and gorgeous on the way out but on the way back this week with the haze of the Oregon wildfire hanging in the air, it looked more like something from a Mad Max movie and I kept waiting for Charlize Theron to roll up beside us in her big rig or Tina Turner to burst into “We Don’t Need Another Hero.”
• How beautiful that little finger of Idaho is and how much I’d like to see more of the state. Everything appeared to be made by faeries and we saw not one potato crop.
• How much of Montana’s varying landscape looks exactly the way I have imagined Montana (which is to say similar to how I felt several years ago in New Mexico when I discovered the Coyote & Roadrunner cartoon landscape actually exists minus an ACME anvil or two).
• Sight of the massive grazing land in Montana. We’d see herds of cattle but there was no sense of a farm being nearby. There was very little sense of farm houses or ranches at all. It was beautiful but also not my place in the world.
• That I missed buffalo. I’m not sure how you can miss what you never saw and don’t know personally, but I felt their loss. On the return trip, I squinched my eyes whenever I saw rocks or tree stumps and pretended it was buffalo (I know, not the same thing as bison, but buffalo is a better sounding word) but even with my imagination I couldn’t picture the millions that were here before they were slaughtered with the dual purpose of making way for cattle grazing and removing a food and income source from the indigenous people in the hopes that they too would disappear. The longing for buffalo made me regret every hamburger I’ve ever eaten.
• How North Dakota looked like neither the bleak landscape of a Willa Cather novel OR the sort of tumbleweed-strewn emptiness I’d always imagined, but instead was my first taste of the Midwest I’ve missed so much. In the 18 months we kept ourselves safe in Seattle, stuffed into our glass box in the sky, I wouldn’t let myself think too much about “home” or even what I mean when I think about home. No good could come of thinking of any of those places I’ve referred to with that distinction from March of 2020 until this trip. I’d get sad. I’d start to feel trapped. I’d start devising plans to fly home in one of those old-timey scuba suits with the big copper helmet in order to stay safe/not poison anyone else. It was better just to pretend that I didn’t want to be home, or that home was on Mars (because it might as well have been), and so I didn’t go as stir crazy as so many people did during the worst of the pandemic. Somehow—possibly my new anxiety medication—made the stuckness feel acceptable. But in North Dakota I could feel a subtle shift in my body. Like something in me was unfurling. I never expected that particular state to feel like a gateway to home.

As we drove further and further east across North Dakota and then into Minnesota, I felt more and more relaxed. Like I was in a place I understood, one that spoke my native language.  The farms started to look more like the ones I’m used to, though bigger. Suddenly the rest stops had vending. (Midwesterners would revolt without it.) The names sounded more familiar.

Because of construction in downtown St. Paul, we managed to find the cheapest lodging of our journey at the St. Paul Hotel. It’s gorgeous and “Old World” and gave us a false sense of our own fanciness. The lobby alone made us feel like we were living in a different, more opulent century, but the room was well appointed too. I don’t know that Fitzgerald did anything there, but I wouldn’t be surprised—it’s not far from the house where he wrote This Side of Paradise. Because Z has many friends in the Twin Cities from his time in college, it seemed like the perfect stop for us, and then the hotel was so cheap and fabulous that we decided to stay a second day.

St. Paul Hotel: Z’s Crocs were never so out of place

The first night there, we had a friend over and ordered in barbecue from Famous Dave’s, which Z thought was local but our friend announced there’s actually one in Seattle if we ever wanted it again. Before she arrived but after the food had been delivered, Z discovered that what he thought was a microwave in the room was actually a little microwave-sized safe. Cold barbecue and fries and beans didn’t sound that appetizing, so like a good Zimbabwean wife I made a plan and got the hair dryer and spent the next ten minutes blow drying the plastic containers to keep the food warm. A couple of sides got a little melted because I was over exuberant, but on the whole, it worked and it felt decadent to be gnawing on corn on the cob in this fancy room.

After a late breakfast the next day with another friend, Z and I attempted to walk along the Mississippi and through an old neighborhood with gorgeous old houses, but it was ridiculously hot. At one point we were standing behind the Science Center where we once saw artifacts from Pompeii on display. On this trip, I felt like I was one of the unfortunate souls being swallowed alive by lava. Minnesota might be covered in snow regularly when it’s winter, but summers are brutal. I was a red-faced mess when we got back to the hotel and did not look like someone who should be staying there. I was done for the rest of the afternoon.

View of St. Paul Cathedral from our hotel

For about two minutes I felt guilty that we weren’t taking advantage of the city to visit Z’s old alma mater or visit Paisley Park and that infamous elevator, but on minute three as I looked around our fine hotel room I realized we were doing exactly what I’d been wanting to do on this trip: sit around a nice room with good AC in minimal clothing, chomping ice and reading. That night, we had another meal with our friend MacGregor at an Italian restaurant that may well have served the best spaghetti Bolognese I’ve ever had, or, at least, the strongest Long Island Iced Tea that gave me the belief that it was the best spaghetti I’d ever had.

The next morning, we packed up our items—looking more and more like the Beverly Hillbillies at each stop as our suitcases and piles of things got more and more unruly—and hit the road, driving through Wisconsin (terrible drivers, beautiful scenery) and Illinois (windmills abound).

Be still my heart.

When we crossed the state line into Indiana on I-74 is the only time I felt teary about my return.

Seriously, my heart is doing double-time.

Before long, we were crossing the Wayne County line, and soon after that the Richmond city limits, with the big castle-like courthouse looming over the Whitewater River gorge.  In no time at all, we were headed north of town hugging the banks of the Whitewater River a fork of which ran through both my maternal grandparents’ farm and the campground that my paternal grandparents stayed at every summer during my childhood, a fact which gave me a sense that everything was weirdly unified in my life even if it wasn’t.  

Wayne County Courthouse, complete with un-used hanging gallery and Cinderella-style staircase.

And then we were heading into the driveway where Mom and my stepdad were waiting for us with balloons and a sign. It was an excellent reunion. Who cares if we didn’t get to see the world’s biggest ball of string on our journey—they were really what we’d driven all those miles for.

The human greeting was even better but the pictures were worse.

In some ways, I’m glad I didn’t have to navigate the last year and a half of the pandemic wondering things like  whether I was masked up tight enough to talk to Mom and Val through a screen door in order to keep them safe, or whether we could maybe have a picnic and not contaminate each other, or whether Corona Virus takes a holiday on Christmas so we could have gotten together. There were no dilemmas for me about who I could or couldn’t see because Z and I had hard and fast rules and lived 2,321 miles from the bulk of my familial temptations and 9,822 miles from his.

On the other hand, that was a lot of months and weeks not to see the faces I love so much with no opportunity to, even through triple-paned glass. I’d like to say the reunion was worth that wait, but I’d rather not waited. Time feels way too precious to be spending as much as we have watching Netflix. But still, the reunion was sweet.

Ways the trip did not look like I envisioned? The list I had of Things to Do While Home and what I was actually able to accomplish off of it. The original list:

• Spend time with my family and friends. (Approximately 35 people at the top of my list.)
• Get my hair cut and colored for first time since December 2019
• Get shoes fixed at the shoe repair shop in Richmond, more for the joy of it than because I love the shoes.
• Get my eyes checked at my beloved eye doctor because I fear he’ll retire
• Sit on the patio with Mom and enjoy the non-citied outdoors
• Paint with Mom
• Sift through my items in the attic and figure out what it’s time to let go of (Billy Joel concert sweatshirt 1988? Jethro Tull sweatshirt 1991? A purple keyboard that no longer works? Etc.)
• Write
• Figure out a few belongings still residing in Indiana that could make the journey back to Seattle since we had a car, including:
  • Art work
  • Art projects
  • A yardstick I inherited that I like because it’s square that won’t fit into a suitcase.
  • A full-size umbrella with a map of the Tube on it that won’t fit into a suitcase.
• Visit a dog friend who is terminally ill
• Meet the dog of a former student with whom I have become obsessed on Facebook because he has the face of Walter Cronkite (that is, he looks like he knows more than you and will deliver bad news to you in somber tone if necessary)
• For reasons known only to my subconscious, I really, really wanted to visit my cousin’s donkeys and press my forehead against one of their foreheads and commune with them.

It seemed do-able to me in three weeks, but with the heat the first week was a wash because we just sat around sweating and talking and feeling so glad to be together. The second and third weeks didn’t go much better in terms of accomplishments. It seemed like we were busy all the time, and yet I can’t really account for all the hours that passed while we were there. I got the errands done, Mom and I sat on the patio most mornings, we saw ten people out of the 35 or so I’d planned to see, I had one moment where I felt a psychic connection with a rabbit I believe I convinced not to trespass into the neighbor’s garden because he prides himself in his garden and he has a gun. I got to say my farewells to Leibovitz’s ailing dog, I ran some errands. But other than that, I failed on most other tasks including introducing myself to canine Walter Cronkite.

This could have been a much more artful shot, but it was too hot to get out of my lawn chair.

One of the other un-recorded plans I had was to take a lot of photos while I was home of different views—across the cornfield, on certain roads with particular vistas, of various people I love, of rainstorms and farm animals and moonlight streaming into my old bedroom—because during those long months when I couldn’t get back to Indiana I thought often of those people and places.

Even so, those things are sharper in my mind’s eye than they would be in any photo.

ShellE on the road again.

In the Days Before Sunscreen

One of my favorite memories of childhood is when I would get to go swimming with my Great Aunt Clara in the little oval-shaped in-ground pool behind her in-laws ranch house in a respectable-but-not-rich subdivision in Richmond. Her husband’s family was from Kentucky, her father-in-law had worked in a coal mine and had lung problems because of it, and their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren were often there, eating ham and beans or fried chicken, talking about history and politics and current events, and swimming. I learned to swim in that pool, and members of this family—a family that felt like my own but wasn’t quite—stood around the water-soaked cement deck and cheered me on as I swam the length of the pool, a real rite of passage if you wanted the privilege of going into the deep end.

Aunt Clara always wore a navy one-piece suit, nose-clips, and a swim cap festooned with flowers. She liked swimming, but more often than not, you’d see her on one of the plaid floating air mattresses, dangling a hand in the water. She’d order me to push her around, into or out of the sun, and after a particularly restful float, she’d sigh and say, “I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.” Then she’d pinch the clips onto her nose and roll off the raft and into the water to cool herself.

Aunt Clara wasn’t being snobby—it wasn’t her pool—she was playing a caricature: Eva Gabor in “Green Acres” or one of the Beverly Hillbillies’ snooty neighbors. When she said it, you could imagine a cigarette in a long gold holder and a gloved hand dripping with diamond bracelets.

We’d laugh but we also knew that this was our own stroke of good fortune that we were able—just for that moment—to pretend we were the sorts of people who had their own pool. People who could walk through a sliding door into a backyard of some manse—probably surrounded by palm trees and drenched in California sun instead of maples and a cloudy Indiana sky—into their own massive pool. This borrowed pool and the kindness of others is also why I was able to learn to swim.

Usually after a day at the pool Mom and I would go back to Aunt Clara and Uncle Clay’s, where the air conditioner would be roaring. I would inevitably have a sunburn—it was in the days before we fussed with sunscreen—and she’d put my favorite striped percale sheet on her blue sofa and I would stretch out on it, the coolness of the material a balm, and I’d fall into a deep and delicious sleep. Come to think of it, it is the quality of these post-swim naps at her house that I still chase after and never quite find all these years later.

I’m not sure why I’m telling you this except I got a sunburn on the roof deck last weekend, and it’s made me think about the nature of that nap, the softness of that sheet, the coolness of the air, and that sense you really only get in childhood when some adult person has a salve or a treat that is exactly what you need.

Come warm yourselves by the fires of Oh La La!

This last weekend, Z and I finally lifted our post-vaccine-self-imposed isolation and had friends over on three different days. Our first guests at Oh La La! We headed to the 18^th floor roof deck where we scored our favorite table, spread out a table cloth, and then piled a picnic feast Z had put together onto the table. The views were stunning—sky so clear we could even see Mt. Baker in the distance—and I kept wondering how it was that this time last year we were in our 1920s apartment with the ancient, stained linoleum, peering out of windows that hadn’t been recently washed, and now suddenly we’re on top of the world. It was very much an Aunt Clara sort of day even without a pool, though we had the good taste not to ask each other, I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight? We’re still not sure how we got so lucky to be in this space, but we’re enjoying it while it’s ours. And though there are things I loved about the old apartment, we ran into our cheerful and talented former maintenance man who said he’d had a recent report of rats in the old building, so maybe it’s just as well we had to move. Before the rats arrived.

I don’t know if this is scientific or not, but I suspect you burn more easily when you are 18 stories closer to the sun. Z thinks my science is off—does anyone know? Surely the red cheeks of those K-2 and Everest hikers aren’t just because of the cold. Regardless, I might need to invest in a parasol. As it stands, I now have a leather chest and arm that I may never be able to moisturize back to middle-age.

Crane-free viewing!

A midsummer interlude of happenings:

• The crane by the lakefront that threatened to build a building that would block our view has been dismantled and the new building is low to the ground and I can still see the sailboats and float planes landing on Lake Union. All the winter worry was wasted energy.
• We’ve finally ventured into an Amazon Go and discovered the joy of shoplifting. Funds are automatically deducted from my account when we put them in our bag, so there’s no need to check out. Our record so far for a snack fix was 58 seconds in the store. Sadly, it will take much longer to work those purchased Cheetos off my hips.  
• Angus the Robovac has finally been given free rein in the apartment without my constant clucking and correcting. He’s a good boy. (I need a dog.)
• Speaking of which, there is a new baby French bulldog puppy in the building who wears a pink sweater and snorts like a pig. She’s DELIGHTFUL.
• A film crew was using the historic Stimson-Green mansion as a location a couple of weeks ago and the street was blocked off and big trailers were pulled in and there was all sorts of hubbub. I later found out that it was for season two of “Three Busy Debras” which is on Adult Swim and a former student of mine is one of the producers, so that was exciting.
• We’ve been trying to learn to communicate with our cooling system. It seems to come on at random times whether we need the cool air or not, and we may have to bring in an interpreter from the UN. But even in its most badly behaving times, I keep rejoicing with the knowledge that when it does get hot for those five days or when the forest fires in California wreck our air quality later in the summer, we’ll be able to breathe. Woo hoo.
• My TikTok addiction is still raging. Z says he never knows what’s going to come out of my mouth. The other day, I said, “This Irish witch I follow said, ….” I’m learning all sorts of things about van life, dancing, fashion for the mid-life set, Celtic witchery, Quakerism, mandala painting, body acceptance, and all the reasons I likely have ADHD.  
• Z and I are finished with classes for a while and are contemplating a road trip. I’ll keep you posted if we happen upon the World’s Biggest Ball of String.

This whole post-vaccine situation still seems foreign, doesn’t it? Suddenly people here at Oh La La are holding the door open or smiling or letting you pet their dogs. We aren’t crossing the street to avoid every human we pass on our evening walks, and even though it makes me feel like I left the apartment without my pants on, I’m walking in the evenings without a mask. What a weird time. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I think it was that one day we would wake up and the virus would be gone and there’d be bells peeling and rejoicing and ticker tape in the streets like at the end of World War II or something, but of course it won’t be that way. Of course it’s going to be slow and odd and our brains are going to have to adjust.

Or not.

Obviously, everybody’s pandemic experience has been different, based on where you live, if you know someone who was ill, if you lost someone you cared about, or if you were adjusting to life in Montecito away from Buckingham Palace. But I am curious about the choices that people will make about their lives and how they will live them going into the future. Who will decide to change nothing? Who will change their lives completely? Quit doing a job they hate? Leave particular relationships behind? Quit trying to buy happiness? Turn over some new leaf? After the last pandemic of this magnitude, we had the Roaring Twenties—women went wild, ditching their corsets and doing the Charleston, demanding the vote. Jazz took off. American literature and fashion design, interior design, and architecture—all of that changed significantly. Despite Prohibition there was an excess of drinking, an excess of everything.

There are going to be some interesting stories that people will tell about how their lives changed because of the pandemic. I look forward to hearing them, to reading them, and maybe to living my own. I can’t quite narrow down how things have changed in my own head, though I know they have. I’m writing more. I’m reading more. I’m busier during the day in a good way. I want to keep that going. But also I hope that we will all be recognizing more of those individual moments—a dip in a borrowed pool, a nap on the perfect sheet, a conversation with friends and loved ones that involves a lot of laughter—where we count ourselves rich.