Seven

Events tend to tie themselves to me with threads made up of seasons, the feel of the air, and the angle of the sun. Sometimes all it takes is the particular way the light falls on the trees on cold mornings leading up to the solstice, with the ground heavy and wet from the dew, clouds of my breath drifting up to mix with the clouds, to put my mind and memories back on the highway leading to a parking lot in Burlington, Washington, where I waited for what was going to come next. For the next chapter in my life to begin.

Thanks to seven day weeks, it really was exactly seven years ago, another Thursday night. Another lifetime. Waiting. Wondering if she'd show up and meet me like we'd planned. Wondering what it would bring. Knowing nothing would ever be quite the same, no matter the outcome.

She did eventually show up, if two hours late. We embarked on 48 hours of pure fantasyland on Lopez Island to a soundtrack of Christmas music, fueled by wine and chai, surrounded by seagulls and sea lions, cut off from the mainland and the greater reality awaiting us there on our return by the green waters of Puget Sound, kept warm by a wood-burning stove and a flame that had to burn out sooner rather than later.

The rest of it, of course, was a disaster.

Seven years safely removed from that particular edition of the epic drama that only lesbians can bring to a breakup, happy and secure in my relationship with the woman I love, the night before the solstice still takes me back to that singular place after which there has been no turning back, as if Billy Pilgrim was right and we do exist in all moments simultaneously, forever. As if part of me will always be sitting alone in that parking lot at the end of a two thousand mile drive, bundled inside my truck against the cold, looking at the stars, watching my solitary breath fog the windows, quietly wondering, now that I have kept my part of the bargain, how the rest will unfold.

Finding the Fulcrum

Not that I really needed another reason to love LibraryThing, but the Early Reviewers bit is pretty cool--request an advance reading copy of a soon-to-be-released book, write a review, keep the book! I'm happily plowing through Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan, set in the Mississippi Delta right at the end of World War II. Well, happy to have a shiny new book with a compelling story, even if the story itself is somewhat wrenching. The overarching theme is intrenched, institutional racism, but a corollary is tracing hopes and expectations as they inevitably fail to materialize as envisioned, but instead twist and send lives spiralling in completely different directions. It's only at the very end that the sequence of events makes sense as an unbroken chain of causality, allowing us to look back and recognize the one pivotal moment on which everything else hung.

It's odd that I should remember my pivotal moment, the fulcrum of my life, with such clarity, given the combination of how innocuous it seemed at the time and my tender age. It was an evening at my dad's parents' house, summer of 1973. I was six. Maybe I remember it because it was heralded by Grandpa's front doorbell, a low, grating rumble that always made me look up in surprise because no one ever came to the front door and its treacherous, moss-slicked brick sidewalk. The kitchen door, through the screened porch at the back of the house near the end of the long gravel driveway, was the real entryway, the door anybody who knew anything knew to come through. Knocking optional. So the doorbell rumbled, and Grandma opened the door, and in walked the new band/choir director Grandpa had hired for the high school. Grandpa and Grandma had run the music program at the school (the only high school for the entire eastern half of the county) since the late '40s, and at this point Grandpa had retired from teaching and moved on to an administrative position. My mom was already a music teacher and assistant choir director there.

The rest is, well, yeah. I never asked Grandpa if he felt weird later for bringing the new guy to town. That would have been poor form. Because mom and dad split up two years later, the new guy took a job at Saint Mary's and Notre Dame, and mom followed him to South Bend, with me in tow. And that's where the rest of my life took shape. Mom was sufficiently freaked out by the teeming metropolis we now found ourselves in (coming from a tiny farm-and-oil town surrounded by the cornfields of southern Illinois, South Bend was intimidatingly large) to put me in a private school, where good teaching and a challenging curriculum gave me a leg up in the subsequent Catholic high school, which in turn opened the door to a near-full scholarship to college in Chicago, where I met the guy I ended up marrying, but who, more relevant for this discussion, also suggested an archaeology class when I was casting about for electives, which was taught by the professor I ended up taking as academic advisor, who then took me Peru, where I learned archaeological fieldwork, and who recommended both the university and supervising professor for my graduate work and gave me enough probably undeserved A grades to sufficiently boost my GPA for a graduate fellowship, which taught me a specialization and introduced me to a classmate who came to Arizona for his doctorate and took a job in Tucson that he ultimately didn't have time to fulfill, and so suggested I give it a shot since I was having no luck finding a job in the midwestern town I really wanted to live in, and the guy who was hiring here couldn't find any better candidates and took me on a single-project trial basis in 1994... and here I am.

All because a guy with a music degree walked through my Grandpa's front door in 1973. I resented it when I was younger and filled with the self-righteousness of adolescence. Now, hell, whatever. Life unfolds no matter what. It's somewhat comforting to trace it back and recognize that balancing point. What is yours?

Blah.

As I lay back in bed last night, my thoughts drifted toward the impending birthday and the nagging suspicion that I should be making some momentous leaps of consciousness or something in honor of it. How do I even take stock of where I am?

Goals achieved: couldn’t tell you. I have never been much of a goals-oriented person. Maybe it’s telling that in 30 years of playing soccer, I have never once scored a goal from the run of play (indoor doesn’t count). One of my friends compiled a list of things she intended to achieve by 35 (happy in job, own a house, have a kid, major stuff like that) and then spent her 35^th birthday utterly depressed that she hadn’t done any of it. That’s why I’ve never felt compelled to make one of those Things To Do Before I Die lists. I would either end up feeling like a failure or discover, to my horror, that I have indeed achieved all those things, and therefore am due to die immediately. Eh. I prefer the life list in my bird book, recording the things I’ve done rather than the things I have so far failed to do. My goals are more along the lines of get to work with clothes on right side out and don’t forget to pick up son from school. Well, and be a good person who treats other people well. So far so good, minus a couple of bobbles on the first one (in which I once made it to lunchtime before my friends decided to tell me my shirt was not only wrong-side out, but also backwards; ah, the hazards of dressing on a dark winter morning before coffee).

The downside to all this being content to drift downstream is sounding like a complete dullard when getting together with friends I haven’t seen for a while. Two weekends ago a college friend I see once a year asked what the most exciting thing is I’ve done in the past year. Uh. Well, shit. Same thing this morning when an old girlfriend took me out for coffee. What’s been going on in your life? Well, uh... I get up, I go to work, I pick up my kid, he does homework, we eat dinner, I work in the yard, we hang out, I go to bed, I get up... She looked at me cross-eyed and said you need some excitement in your life.

Where should that come from? I get excited about my work from time to time. This is in fact one of those times—I am working on a grand unified theory of ceramic-era arrowhead manufacture and distribution throughout Arizona based on control of raw material sources... and bingo, your eyes just started to glaze over, didn’t they? It’s potentially a career-defining project, but it sounds about as exciting as your uncle Ernie talking about his barbed wire collection. I get excited when my son asks me to go to the park with him to toss a baseball. I get excited when I find a book I’ve been wanting at Bookman’s and have enough trade credit to walk away with it. I get... well, gratified when the dog makes it outside before puking.

So the excitement in my life revolves around collections of small things and individual moments. I feel like I should be able to come up with something better, something edgy or dangerous, something more congruent with the crazy fantasy version of my life that’s always banging around in my head. But I can’t. I’m 40 and I’m still breathing. That will have to be exciting enough for now.

Fuzz

I queried my co-worker. So, out of every ten days we work, how many are accurately described by "having a hard time focusing?" She laughed. Just about all of them, I think.

Shite.

Perhaps it's the late-summer doldrums making an unsettling appearance at the end of July, now that the end of summer is getting yanked up earlier and earlier in August by the start of the school year. August 10? What the hell? Back in the day, August 10 meant we still had two or three solid weeks of vacation left. Now it means three weeks of regimentation keyed to the bell schedule before Labor Day even hits.

Or maybe it's the impending birthday, another of the milestone decade birthdays looming in a few weeks. My son turned fifteen yesterday and I'm 40 on August 18, finally officially and unavoidably smack-dab in middle age. Yesterday's shower found me reflecting on the almost 40 years and trying to identify the unassailable life lessons and wisdom I have accrued thus far. Don't try to make social commitments too far in advance was all I could come up with. Not much to crow about there.

Could be my girlfriend's daughter leaving for college in two weeks, and the sea change in our lives that departure will usher in. Maybe I'm getting a premonition of the ache that will come when my own kid takes off. Maybe I'm not sure what happens next.

Perchance I'm noticing my old dog doddering a bit more with each passing month, the canine senior moments coming more frequently, the clouds in her eyes getting thicker.

So I sit at work and stare at piles of artifacts, hoping some great truth will suddenly leap into my brain and give me something to write about. The boss hopes for a revolution every now and then. I have one brewing somewhere in all these data and maps and pictures and boxplots, but the required words balk at being dragged out of my brain and onto the page. Deadlines loom, expectations loom larger, and I wonder when I got too old to be able to knock back copious amounts of bourbon like I used to.

The House

The house is big. You get a sense of its size from the street, but can’t feel the full impact until you walk in the oversized front door and pass through a long, low-ceilinged entryway and go around a corner to where the great room in the middle suddenly soars up to a twenty foot ceiling and you realize you are standing in a single room that on its own is nearly as large as your entire house.

The house is old when I stop and think about it for a moment, although it’s not of the century-and-a-half-old vintage and Union architectural style of the upper Midwest that is usually required to make me categorize a place as an old house. It was probably built in the early 1950s, maybe the late ‘40s, in the mold of California faux-Mediterranean mansions you might see in Glendale or Bel Air, sprawling horizontally under a red tile roof with draping trees and a few interesting angles thrown in for relief, the oval pool in the back yard growing green with algae, its central fountain long dry and its water splashed only by the once-a-week hose and the pool guy who doesn’t seem to clean it as well when the old lady isn’t there to watch him.

The house is stuffy and empty, despite being crammed with furniture and fifty years’ worth of stuff, smelling of old people and their artifacts. I wonder if my house will smell like that when I’m 80, if aging offgasses some weird blend of camphor and stale air you’d never voluntarily elect when you’re young. The girlfriend goes there to water the plants a few times a week. I have only come with her twice, poking around the ancient volumes in the immense library while she fights the overgrown catclaw in the back, able to view the compiled pair of lifetimes stored in the empty house dispassionately since I never knew the old people very well, didn’t spend half my life with them in the background of my mind like she has.

Aside from major differences in building scale and style, it’s not so different from my grandma’s house back in Illinois. Houses whose size has outlasted the needs of the occupants other than as a repository of what they had to keep and what they refused to throw away, the material correlates of choices, behaviors, beliefs, lofty values and mundane requirements of daily living, the entire human experience distilled into silent rooms and musty closets and hot attics full of now-forgotten things that persist there because they were once too valuable to discard. The old woman looks at them and says this is my life. Her grown children look and mutter how the hell are we going to get rid of all this crap?

The watering done, the girlfriend sets the alarm and locks the door. We drive off to our busy, shiny new lives, leaving the house and its history to the catclaw and the dust.

American Tragedy

The McDonald's I drive past on my way to work every day has its flag at half-staff this morning in a salute to the 32 dead at Virginia Tech. 32 people gunned down by a faceless assailant. It is terrible, unthinkable that such a thing should happen, and I can't begin to imagine what it was like to be a student in one of those classrooms, or a parent unable to reach my child on his cellphone in the hours after the shootings.

The pro-gun and anti-gun people, the politicians and the preachers and the pundits all jumped up, elbowing each other out of the way to unleash the salvos of blame before the bodies have even been buried, all sides with their simple solutions shouting past each other, interested not in discourse so much as noisemaking for its own sake.

And then I think about the fact that 31 US soldiers and marines have died in Iraq in the past nine days, that over 700 Iraqi civilians and security forces have died this month, that it's such a regular, ordinary occurrence that it's been pushed well off the front page of the newspaper. What happened on Monday in Blacksburg was horrible and ripped hundreds of lives apart. I am trying to imagine taking that feeling of horror, that shock and anger and grief, and replaying it on a daily basis, trying to conceive of how a society and its individuals can find the strength to go on living another day in the face of it.

The nation collectively mourns, as we should.

But the flag is lowered and the president shows up to the memorial service only when the unpredictable, random killing happens down the road a piece from the White House. Our flags should be at half-staff every day.

Orion

So I'm not the only person who maintains some odd cross-state-of-matter relationship with Orion, even if we take different things away from our conversations in the dark. Chris Clarke, missing Zeke, resents Orion for still having Canis Major at his side. I glance up on my way back in from the recycling bin, notice he's still chasing that damn bull from horizon to horizon, and wish him better luck tonight.

Years ago, when things were more or less falling apart, the early-morning walks with the dog managed to carve out precious little tunnels in time and space where I could find stillness and solitude despite being outside in a semi-suburban neighborhood. In the late fall and winter, Tucson is pitch dark at five in the morning, quiet and mostly asleep, giving me sole claim to the streets I trundled down with the dog. No streetlights in the old neighborhood, and the porch lights were mostly shaded, creating the illusion of walking in a low-visibility bubble surrounded by blackness. It made for brilliant stargazing. Our cadence was softly measured by the clicking of the dog's nails on the asphalt and the puffs of her breath fogging in the cold air, both only occasionally drowned out by the tires and headlights of a passing car.

I walked under the constellations, pondering both a disintegrating marriage and the unanswered questions about myself that served as a solvent, and looked up at Orion caught between Taurus and Lepus and felt some solidarity with him on his futile nightly quest. Wondered what kept him from deciding the rabbit right at his feet wasn't enough, what kept him in pursuit of the handful of stars perpetually flying just beyond his grasp.

It's no more nutty, I guess, to have a group of stars as your confessor than to pray to an invisible god. At least I could see Orion, and as I never expected him to do anything about my stuff, I was never left disappointed. He was a handy sounding board in the cold and the dark. Tiny lights in the black sky impassively watching and going on their way as I hunched my shoulders and, turning the dog, trudged back towards home.

Reunion

Today marked another rare time when the wheel came 'round again. One night back in 1987 found me sitting on the floor of my dorm room, flipping through the Northwestern course catalog, trying to find an elective to fill the spring quarter schedule. Take Mark's class, said the then-boyfriend, because he's pretty cool. Sure, fine, whatever, need the credit. I don't remember what it was called, but it was the first archaeology class I had ever taken. I do remember the first day Mark walked through the classroom door with his leather jacket and sunburned face, freshly back from Peru, and that I wondered if he was the prof or just the TA.

That class led to another, and another, and eventually to me declaring anthropology as a double major. I spent two summers working on Mark's project in Peru, became friends with him and his wife, and went to grad school on his recommendation. He moved on to a west coast school and I landed here in Tucson, so we saw each other at conferences a few times over the years and then not at all when I quit attending the annual archaeology meetings.

This morning we met for coffee for the first time since '99. I guess I had always expected to see him again somewhere, but I didn't antipate that we'd be sitting in a Tucson coffeehouse with our respective houses sitting maybe five miles apart. Despite the great tendency of people and places to change dramatically when you take your eyes off of them for more than a minute, talking to him was the same as it ever was, refreshingly comfortable.

I walked back to my parking space happy. There was also the added bonus of a dinner invitation and a handful of 30,000-year-old Tibetan artifacts in my messenger bag that I get to illustrate for him (which will be attached to a decent paycheck). After a year in which old friends were lost, reconnecting with this one simply kicked ass. Maybe you can't go home again, but sometimes you're fortunate to have a little piece of home come back to you.

Google Earth Valentine

Valentine's Day. Nice enough. An e-mail from my undergrad adviser had me surfing the nostalgia wave for a while this afternoon; I got on The Google to see what he looks like these days (same face, but the short mop of brown hair is now white and threatening his waist). While I was on the topic, I figured I might as well check in on another undergrad professor (no apparent change), which then naturally led to a quick look at the surviving English teacher from high school. I couldn't quite picture the building listed as his office address at Holy Cross College, necessitating a few seconds of tapping away at Google Earth, since, hey, Holy Cross is right there by the high school, in the old neighborhood, in the town I used to call home, so a click and a drag and away we went.

Google Earth. Seriously, how can you not be thoroughly boggled at the ability to zoom in and take a bird's eye tour of your old high school campus, getting close enough to see people on the sidewalk and hurdles tipped haphazardly at the side of the track? The football field has been relocated to the west of the school now, where there used to be a small woods. The old field has been obliterated, the footprint of the ancient cinder track reduced to the ghost of an oval ring in the grass to the north of the school. The rest of the woods are still there, still separating the campus from the field where intramurals used to be played and the marching band practiced on more frigid mornings than I care to remember.

The new track, where Tom died, skirts on its west end the edge of the ridge that plunges down to the floodplain of the St. Joe river. Click and drag the image to follow the street west a quarter of a mile down that hill, at the bottom of the curve, and there's my old house, a strange car in the driveway. Click and drag again and there's Tom and Rita's old house, down the block from mine, the trees that dropped leaves I used to rake for him full and green.

I wondered if I still remembered the way I used to walk from home over to Notre Dame, not the grand front entrance route but the back way following the railroad tracks and service drives, the solitary route leading to the quiet refuge of the lakes and the Grotto. Click and drag, click and drag, flying above streets whose names I don't remember but can see in my head, picking my way now from home past the beloved campus and the now-gone soccer fields of my youth, through the four-way stop that confounded me as a novice driver, past the ice cream place and out to the mall. The landmarks of adolescence. It was quietly comforting not to get lost.

Growing Up?

I am still waiting for enlightenment, for the knowledge I sort of thought people just automatically acquired when they became grownups. I suppose I assumed wisdom would magically sprout inside my head once I attained a certain age--I was never sure exactly what age that was, but was certain it would happen, and that I would notice when it did--much like the other seemingly magical sproutings of hair and breasts and zits.

Didn't happen. Still hasn't happened. The esoteric realms I saw my parents effortlessly traverse--mortgages, income tax, car insurance--are damn near as mysterious now as they seemed when I was 13. Knowledge and understanding of these concrete, mundane areas was hard-won in my case, and I still sheepishly ask the girlfriend, "what's escrow, again?" at least a couple times a year and then promptly forget the answer.

Some things I can do. I can fix my kid's bike when the chain breaks, handle basic first aid, change out the headlights, cook. And yes, I can do my taxes on my own with only a modicum of profanity. The big stuff, though, the major thing of having my shit together enough to explain to the boy why people do what they do or give cure-all advice for his adolescent woes? The ability to channel the adult mentors and role models who advised me and eased my own path through high school? Heh. No. No, no, fuck no. Not even close.

I am older now by five years than my own mom was when I was my son's current age, if that makes sense. I look at the pictures old high school friends send of themselves with their kids and try to see the age and gravitas in their features that we must have seen in our own mothers when we skidded into their kitchens in a cloud of dust after school, hoping for cookies or a hamburger. I stand beside my son and look in the mirror and try to find my mother's steadiness behind my own eyes.

When my beloved mentor, my junior-year English teacher, died this past August, I dug my old class journals out of the closet and read them for the first time since graduation in 1985. The pages are filled with adolescent angst (school, grades, planning for college, uncertainty about a future away from home and my ability to make it in an unfamiliar world) interspersed with equally adolescent goofiness (constant ribbing about him still playing softball at his advanced age, bets offered and taken on Notre Dame football games, a cringingly drawn-out discussion on why he was taking bee pollen supplements and hadn't been to see the latest Dirty Harry movie yet). His responses were always thoughtful and direct, giving no quarter when I was being a stubborn dork, giving praise where it was warranted, and always, always filled with insightful observations designed to lead me to answer my own questions when I needed.

Naturally, I thought he was the wisest person I had ever encountered. Reading back through those entries written more than two decades ago, it is difficult not to wonder where he ever came up with the patience to wade through that stuff from maybe a dozen students a night every night of the week for thirty years. And to wonder where he came up with the wisdom and insights to write back an answer for every question or, more importantly, to point me in the direction of discerning the answers myself.

The person behind that steady hand was 39 years old at the time. The same age I am now. I don't know when his magic moment came that turned him into the adult we knew and respected (or feared). I don't know when mine is going to come.

New Year, Old Dilemma

The waning days of '06 found me stopping in Mesa to visit my grandparents. I try to avoid this for a number of small reasons that crystallize into one big Just Plain Uncomfortable scene. Guilt at not visiting them more spars with the desire to claw my way out of the double-wide for supremacy; guilt maintains just enough of an edge to keep me going back.

My granddad is pretty cool. He turns 87 in a couple of weeks but I've never really thought of him as an old guy. He's just a guy. No mental slowdowns, pretty genial, treats store clerks and counter help politely, likes to talk baseball and basketball and the stock market, likes playing pool with my son and cards with everyone. My grandmother can be very sweet. She can also be incredibly judgmental, petty, nasty, and rude regarding people who do not measure up to her standards. The disjuncture makes me nuts.

The dilemma is finding that line between accepting her as she is and refusing to accept bad behavior I sure as hell wouldn't accept in anyone else. It's a nebulous field for sure, one whose only redeeming quality is honing my ability to rationalize just about anything. Which, when I think about it too much, feels increasingly like a skill I don't want to have. Where does wisely choosing your battles morph into rolling over, where does standing on principle for a noble but unwinnable cause become futile head-banging against a brick wall?

She loves me, which maybe should be enough, but she generally refuses to acknowledge my partner. Well, I tell myself, better she should ignore the existence of my woman than to make disparaging comments about her or try to convince me I'm making bad choices. I don't particularly like forcing my son to come with me on thses visits to be bored off his ass, especially when the conversation is guaranteed to include at least one cringe-inducing reference to non-white people. Well, I tell myself, he's the only great-grandchild and they're old white people who grew up in exclusively white small towns in the midwest; they can't help it and at least they don't say that shit in public.

The line falls in there somewhere.

My dad has a natural disinclination for shades of gray. His reaction is simple--being old doesn't give you license to be rude or demanding. Behavior that's unacceptable at 30 doesn't magically become okay at 80 just because you've managed to survive that long. At some point, "But they paid off my truck loan five years ago" fails to justify staying silent in the face of racist remarks or judgmental comments.

I try to be gentle while hoping that the velvet on the hammer is thin enough that they might eventually get the idea that certain subjects are not going to elicit a positive response from me.
Part of that comes from my intense dislike of confrontation, although I like to think the greater part of it comes from the sense that staying subtle and civil affords the chance that they will eventually recognize the bits of their discourse that put me off and at least understand why, even if they'll never agree with me.

No, I am not holding my breath. Each visit brings its moments, this last one a concerned query to my son about the relative numbers of black and white students in his school (which he answered, visibly annoyed, with, "I don't know. Why does it matter?") and the observation that it's a strange arrangement, don't I think, for me, my partner, and the two kids to have had Thanksgiving dinner with the boy's dad and dad's new wife--to which I calmly replied that I don't think it's strange at all for families to have a holiday dinner together. Each of those responses immediately ended the discussion, so maybe some lights started flickering on in her head, however dimly.

At least this year they didn't repeat last year's gift of Bill O'Reilly's book for kids.

The Best Christmas

There is no single best Christmas for me, but I do have a happy amalgam of memories and moments drawn from a couple of decades, a mishmash adding up to that mythical perfect Christmas the way it used to be. My mom and I used to turn off all the lights in the living room except for the tree and snuggle up on the couch with cups of hot chocolate to sit and look at the bright colors glowing against the walls and ceiling. Sometimes it would be snowing outside and we would lean over the back of the couch to watch the flakes swirling in the streetlights.

Christmas Eve I went to midnight mass with my dad's family. Grandma and Grandpa were the choir directors at the church--Grandma's still plugging away, pounding the keys and drilling the choir to exhaustion at 88--so it was unavoidable, but I got to sit up in the choir loft and get an angel's-eye view of all the candles and pine boughs. When I was in high school I hopped in with the choir; Grandpa always let me sing with the tenors even though I was a girl. Afterwards it was straight home and straight to bed, at least until I hit college. Once I hit some magical age--20, perhaps--I was invited to stay up with the other adults after mass.

All those years I'd gone to bed at the same time as my brothers, completely unaware that the adults got to stay up and sip hot toddies by the fire for an hour or so before turning in themselves. I was flabbergasted. What a completely civilized way to end Christmas Eve and toast in an early Christmas morning! The specific toddy was the Tom & Jerry, sort of a creamy warm eggnog with lots of rum. The recipe looks repulsive, but by firelight, sitting around the tree with parents and uncles and grandparents, finally in on the generations-old secret, it's a winner.

Later on, when I was officially grown up and a parent myself, I still loved taking that last hour or so after putting the boy to bed to turn off all the lights except for the tree, snuggle up on the couch, and sit in the quiet for a while, soaking in the peace, re-living for a few moments everything that simple act brought back to me from long ago and far away.

Maybe I will recapture some of that this year, finding a way to push away the chaos (generally happy chaos, but chaos nonetheless) long enough to close my eyes, take a deep breath of pine, and see the world however briefly through brightly colored lights.

La Tourelle

Six years ago this morning I perched my backpacking stove on the tailgate and cooked up some oatmeal, brewed a pot of tea, and popped open a bottle of bourbon at the base of La Tourelle Falls in the Columbia River Gorge (link is to photos similar to the non-digital ones sitting in my album, although these are not mine; look at them; they're lovely). Spitting rain turned into snow and back again, sending wisps and mist along the spruce boughs to settle on the ferns underfoot. The falls themselves were slender and tall, cascading more than 100 feet down a sheer cliff covered with impossibly bright yellow lichens.

I have never been in a place so green. Moss covers the rocks, the bridges, hangs down in long dreadlocks from the trees. Water runs everywhere. The hollows are filled with ferns. And early on a midwinter's morning the only sounds are the water falling over stone and the half-snow bouncing off the branches. Seriously, I would have been less surprised if a hobbit or elf had shown up than I was when none did.

From La Tourelle I motored along the road to a vista point next to a stone house stuck out on a cliff over the gorge. The wind picked up and the truck rocked pretty significantly as the other side of the river got swallowed up by a full-on snow. I had the place to myself as I picked my way back down to Multnomah Falls, the showpiece of the historic river highway. This one's the second-highest falls in the contiguous states, if I recall, with two drops into pools. The CCC architecture was almost as enjoyable as the natural scenery, the graceful stone arches of the bridges being slowly reclaimed into the landscape by the ever-present moss.

I made that trip to meet up with someone who, as it turned out, was playing me like a cheap guitar. These years later I still think it was worth it just for that breakfast in the Columbia River Gorge, sipping bourbon in a beautiful place I'd never seen before, alone but warm as the snow fell and the waters rushed on.

More Maudlinalia! Where Will It End?

One of the quirks of the little town I grew up in, which I didn't realize was a quirk until I moved to the big city, was that you only needed to dial the last five digits of any local phone number for the call to go through. We only had two prefixes, 395 and 393, so it was 5- or 3- and you were off to the races. The other nifty phone function was dialing 5-0-any three digits to get the First National Bank time 'n' temperature line, although the official number was 5-0123.

I just tried it, for the first time in probably 12 years. (618)395-0123 still works, but the random last three digits thing does not. And from what I hear, you have to dial all seven numbers now locally.

Still a comfort nonetheless.

First National Bank time, 10:51. First National Bank temperature, 40.

Attack of the Winter Maudlins

I get out of the truck and shrug my jacket on, patting for my wallet before heading into the store in the thin early morning light. A man sitting in a parked truck glances at me, glances away. I consider the fact that I possibly look even less feminine this morning than usual, bundled against the sudden winter air, in my Wranglers and boots and t-shirt over a thermal undershirt, all wrapped in a canvas coat. The bra is the single concession to my gender, although it's not visible through the layers. At least my ponytail is straight this morning, the rest of my hair not overly disheveled.

Out of nowhere I wonder if my father would be disappointed, if the sight of me would make him cringe a little at the reminder of his dyke daughter, rather than spurring a little twinge of whatever that feeling is when you see your child unconsciously emulating you. Even when the child is pushing 40. Because I have seen him on mornings like this, in a jacket like this, in boots like these, watched him get out of his truck and blow into his hands and set his face against the cold like this, setting about what needed doing.

I recognize him in myself, unexpectedly, seeing without a mirror the same weight behind the eyes, the same set of the jaw, understanding with a jolt the resignation contouring his face from time to time.

That, to me, is what adulthood means. Suddenly realizing you understand the choices your parents made because you're facing the same things in your own life. Realizing, despite how insane you thought they were way back when, your parents were just people doing the best they could with what they were dealt in this world with its infinite shades of gray, so different from childhood's simple blacks and whites.

Ouch

Oh, the pain of parenthood. The Boy played in an essentially meaningless tournament this weekend, one his team entered mainly as an end-of-season exercise to stay sharp for the high school tryouts that start tonight. They cruised through the first two rounds, and then went to championship match against a team they'd dismantled 6-0 the night before. Naturally, that game went through regulation and two overtimes as a tie and came down to the dreaded Kicks From The Mark. The first four kicks put The Boy's team up 4-3. The fifth opponent scored, tying it. The fifth kicker from The Boy's team missed, meaning the remaining kicks would be sudden death. The opponent's sixth shot scored, meaning The Boy's team's sixth kicker had to score or they lost. The Boy was the sixth kicker... and the keeper saved his shot, sending The Boy to the ground in tears and The Boy's mom holding her head and thinking, oh no, what the hell do I do now?

None of the usual platitudes (if the entire team had played better it never would have come to penalties, if your fifth man had scored you would have won, it's not your fault) matter when you're the one who stepped up as your team's last hope and put the ball into the keeper's hands instead of into the back of the net.

He is 14, tall and hairy. The moments reminding me that he's still a little boy in some ways get more and more poignant the older he gets.

Sigh. Where's that magic wand or whatever it was I had years ago that could make bad things disappear in a poof of giggles?

Rain

The sprinkles that ten minutes ago set me scurrying to get the tools, sandpaper, and half-finished bookshelf stuffed back into the shed have bloomed into a steady rain. The drops and attending glorious sunset come this evening courtesy of the remnants of Hurricane Paul, currently spinning itself out over the Sea of Cortez. By the time hurricanes meander this far inland, they've lost their oomph and give us a pleasant fall shower. The cool wind and the rain take me back home, back to Chicago.

Autumn rain transforms reality. It makes things more immediate and real, stripped down to the true nature of what they are. All pretenses and hedged bets and promises or speculations of what they once were and might yet become are washed away, and the world is as itself.

Naked and wet it's hard to be pretentious.

The rain is at once isolating and liberating, cutting down the universe of possible choices. The world turns inward and all is dark and damp, the water dripping from trees and scaffolding and buildings and people in equal measure.

Places never seem so much like themselves and home never feels so much like home as on a rainy day in the fall. Summer's bright allure of cloudless skies and glinting windows and all the brightly touted distractions have been put away for another year, and the city goes about its business, and it rains. The sidewalks are puddled and the L platforms are glistening and the street sounds are muffled and the people carry on, ducking under umbrellas and newspapers, hurrying into vestibules and onto the train, and the trains still roll and the water beads on the windows like sweat and the city strides on and it rains.

The cop directing traffic and the trader with his stock exchange badge and the homeless guy in the doorway and the bicycle messenger and the advertising executive and the guy in for the day from the 'burbs all get equally wet. And the stanchions on the Adams Street bridge and the girders under the Quincy L stop and the lions at the Art Institute and the flickering bulbs on the sign for Maxwell Street Red Hots and the expired parking meters all drip at the same rate. The water creeps up the limestone of the Trib Tower and Soldier Field and the county lockup all the same, equivalent histograms of wet and November in Chicago.

Eighteen hundred miles and twelve years removed, a cool rainy day still puts me there.

The desert rain is different. It is something not to be wasted, because when it stops it might not come back for months. I wonder but that lifetime desert dwellers must find something else to cleanse their souls, some different environmental occurrence that makes them long to curl up with a good book and a cup of tea. When else do they get to eat soup, but when it rains? And do they know to take a good look then, so that they may see things as they are?

Mourning Routine

Routines, generally, do not settle well with my system. Some routines are okay, say, for example, the morning routine of lying in bed half-comatose, wondering how long I can put off getting up, slowly warming up the synapses by trying to decide what to wear today.

It's a very good thing that my work wardrobe consists entirely of shorts and t-shirts.

Eating the same thing for breakfast every morning simply will not do. Meeting the same friend for breakfast every morning, however, is a lovely routine. I had a friend like that, once, back when we were both single and life was weird but, somehow, simpler. Every morning I pulled into her driveway and pounded on her bedroom window, hoping she'd be not quite startled or sleep-addled enough to grab the .38 she kept under her pillow, hoping the dog would nose her awake so I wouldn't have to. By the time I walked around to the back door and let myself in, she'd usually be up and in her robe, yawning and asking what a girl had to do to get a cup of coffee around here.

Some mornings we had fried-scrambled eggs, as we called them, a dish not really appreciated by anyone else we socialized with, eggs cracked into the skillet and fried until the whites were almost set, then scrambled a little with the spatula before being thunderously salted and peppered and draped with cheese and served over toast with salsa. Sometimes instead of eggs I baked biscuits at home and brought them over wrapped in a towel, or sometimes she baked a coffee cake or made pancakes. Sometimes we just had ice cream sundaes in waffle bowls. And coffee, always coffee we bought when the old Coffee Etc. on Campbell put their half-pound bags on sale, eyeballing the grounds into the metal filter basket of the Krups machine she'd bought as an indulgent whim.

We carried our plates out to the back and sat in the big porch swing I'd rescued from someone's brush-n-bulky pile, watched her dog snuffle in the yard, watched the flowers sway in the breeze, talked about the next great landscaping project or camping adventure we'd undertake. Talked about how we were sure we'd be eighty someday and still be meeting for breakfast every morning, having our eggs and toast and coffee out on the back porch. Then we'd carry the dishes back inside, simultaneously shrug and say, "Time to make the donuts," and after a quick hug I'd head off to work and she'd set about getting ready to go in to her office.

We'd talk on the phone later in the afternoon or evening, just to check in and say hi. I alwyas knew, somehow, when it was her on the other end when the phone rang, even without caller ID. And we'd know we'd see each other the next morning for breakfast. Everyone should have a friend like that at some time in their lives. I had a friend like that once. I miss her more than I can convey.

Our Lady of Perpetual Adolescence

In a refreshing change, the drive to Flagstaff was much more of an ordeal than the visit itself. We actually had a very pleasant time with the folks. The trip up there, unfortunately, joins the annals of Travel Disasters on I-17. Several years ago--my first trip up there, in fact, after my dad had moved from Illinois--we were delayed for a few hours by a minivan hauling a trailer that flipped on the winding, windy stretch of road south of Black Canyon City. It's an unpopulated area of desert mountains with no frontage roads, alternate routes, or easy access to services, so when you're stuck there, you're stuck. It's why you never travel without a couple of gallons of water, even for a routine 4-hour-drive up the hill.

Friday, of course, was the start of the three-day weekend, so traffic sucked even before we got out of Tucson. We'd made it to north Phoenix when the interstate message boards flashed the warning that a crash at Sunset Point (near Black Canyon City) had closed both northbound lanes, backing traffic up over 20 miles to Anthem (godforsaken Pulte insta-city development just north of Phoenix). It was 6 pm at this point and still ungodly hot. I weighed the options for no more than a minute before deciding to divert to the west, approaching Flagstaff via Prescott and Sedona. Looking at the map, I guessed it might add an hour to the trip, but at least I'd be moving rather than sitting and roasting on the highway.

Note to self: sitting and roasting might be preferable to trying to drive through freaking Sun City at 6:30 on a Friday. Christ on a Triscuit. We crawled and sweated and finally made it to Surprise, then Wickenburg (alarmingly full of Len Munsil for Governor placards), and eventually Prescott. I have decided that when I publish an atlas, I will color-code the roads according to average speed limit. The reassuringly short linear distance from Prescott to Sedona to Flagstaff is, in reality, spanned by a road that twists up and down several mountains via no fewer than seven bezillion switchbacks.

I might have averaged 20 miles an hour. The clock marched along merrily; the odometer sullenly refused to budge. 9:30, 10:30, 11:00. The small patches of sky visible through the pine canopy were pitch black and occasionally illuminated by distant lightning; for the most part I was driving on an unfamiliar road in a very small bubble lit by my headlights in front and closing to nothing behind. Dark, twisting, dark, brake, dark, hairpin curve, dark, accelerate, dark, 20 minutes gone, 5 miles traveled, the litany starting in my head, fuckinfuckFUCKfuckwherethefuckarewe?

As it got later and traffic fell off to nothing but me, the constant curves provided enough stimulation to keep me awake and functional, but the weirdness of it all started to play with my brain. Maybe we were the wreck on I-17 after all, I thought, and now while my dad waits for us we're driving around in Purgatory for the next bit of forever before the universe decides whether to spit us up or down. Maybe we're driving on a giant cosmic treadmill. Maybe that isn't ponderosa pine and wood smoke I'm smelling, but incense. Are we dead? Have we really been driving forever? What the fuck?

Then a cop pulled me over outside Jerome for a busted license plate light. Apparently we weren't dead after all, or the dead bulb was a metaphor for minimal karmic transgressions, and we got to Flag alive, if tired, at 11:30.

It occurred to me on the (mercifully uneventful) drive home that these visits are somehow juvenilizing. I don't know if that's a real word. If it is, it encompasses me going to Dad's house and barely noticing that it's twice the size of my house and filled with real wood floors, fine tilework, matched furniture, lots of tools. This doesn't register with me much more than the blue sky does, because it's always been that way. He picks up the tab at the pool hall and at the restaurant because that's what dads do. We walk down to my uncle's house, which is even bigger than Dad's, and while I marvel at the new addition he's built, some part of my brain kicks in to tell me that this is the natural order of things.

I'm up there with my kid, but, for whatever reason, this doesn't make me feel like more of an adult. We sit obediently side-by-side at the counter while the folks serve up breakfast and ask if we'd like more eggs, we carry our plates to the sink and brush up our crumbs. Maybe it's because my partner's not there; her presence might have jolted me into some vague recognition that I'm not the same little kid on the same visit I've always made...

It isn't until I pull away from his house that I wonder why I don't feel any more grownup when I'm up there. It isn't a resentful thing; I don't feel like I'm being treated like a child. It's simply that our relative status hasn't changed that much. I have maybe 25 bucks in my pocket and not much more in the bank to last the week. He slips me money to pay for the new starter I had to put in the truck last week. I come home, buy groceries, figure out what I can cook to last a few days, what I can send with the kid for lunch. I wonder if I will ever feel like an equal to my father and his brothers, or if I will always be the overgrown kid waiting for full adulthood to somehow magically happen.

Navel-Gazing Music

I love Mogwai. Mogwai works particularly well when it's a rainy day and you're feeling introspective. Go here and click away.

This is why, still.

I'll get back to the political yowling in a day or so. For now I'm contemplating the impact one man had on hundreds of people, evidenced by the numbers who showed up at the first memorial service. A lot of people have come to this blog by way of googling his name (hi, Tish!). He was the kind of teacher they make movies about, and I'd venture that the sheer numbers of us who count ourselves lucky to have been his students make it a happy ending.