sunny with a chance of a late-day shower

We mark our age in so many ways. Our skirts get a touch longer. We drive a little slower. Maybe we swear a little less than we used to. And our age marks us in so many other ways. Our crow’s feet get a little deeper. Our glasses become a hair thicker. And in my case, well, I start checking the weather.

I used to shamelessly mock my grandfather for asking about the weather every time we spoke. I used to laugh with my friend Damon about his father’s slightly unhealthy obsession with the forecast in places where he wasn’t. All this asking after the clouds seemed hopeless—painfully—old.

But that was before. Now you might say that I’m a weather fanatic. I turn on the radio right when I wake up so that I can catch the 6:40 weather report. I sign on to weather.com when I get to the office. I’m especially partial to long-range forecasts. I like thinking 10 days out, and I like knowing that it might just rain a week from Wednesday. I might as well have a HAM radio and a doppler feed at my bedside.

I can’t say that I get it. I don’t know where it’s come from, but I find myself asking after the weather when I get an old pal on the phone: “so how’s it lookin’ in Omaha?” I might ask. As the words tumble out, I kinda giggle at myself and I kinda just want to know about the weather.

I don’t know if I’m becoming a simpleton or what. Without a “rain plan” for the wedding, I do know that I’m a bit obsessed with the chance for rain in 49686 in 22 days. I’ll be keeping an eye on my storm tracker. You should keep your fingers crossed.

vicariously

We’ve had a lot to celebrate of late. I use that pronoun very intentionally. I mean I haven’t been celebrating. I’ve been scrambling. Scrambling to move from 550 feet in apartment 2C to 550 feet in apartment 2D. Scrambling to finish my history of bryn mawr (300 pages done and another 70 to go). Scrambling to find time to sew and to read and to exercise. Scrambling to figure out what I’m going to say in one month when I stand up in front of my friends and family and tell J why I’ve chosen him. So I’ve just been hurrying.

But we, well, we have a lot to celebrate.

Like the Lakers winning it all.
Like the end of J’s semester and his summer stay in Philly.
Like the fact that J got a book contract from UNC press.
Like the fact that J got a surprise “bonus” from his college.

So you see, J has a lot to celebrate.

I couldn’t care less about the Lakers.
I didn’t have an end to the semester because I have to finish this book.
I don’t have a hope in hell of UNC ever publishing my book because they published its doppelganger in April.
My promised cost of living increase turns out to be an extra $12.32 a month.

But wait, this isn’t self-pity, though it may look a lot like it. No, this is about feeling—I mean really actually feeling—what it means to be a “we.”

I sat at the bar last night until the wee hours with my fists clenched actually cheering for Kobe.
I made room in my 550 square feet—clearing drawers and closets—for the arrival of J and I greeted him with tremendous good cheer.
I imagine his book with its sexy new title and I think, yeah, I sorta kinda helped make it happen.
That bonus of his and those $12.32 will make plane tickets next year a teeny-tiny bit better.

I think probably the best part of choosing this “we-ness” is about allowing his good fortunes to feel like my own. I feel fortunate that he’s willing to share.

much too much

When things get busy, I get forgetful. Really forgetful. Stupidly forgetful. When I was studying for my Ph.D. exams—the lowest point of my existence—I let the exams dominate my consciousness to the point at which I couldn’t keep anything else straight. I’d show up to teach the class I’d been teaching all semester an hour late.
I’d forget dentist appointments and I’d forget to return calls, for months on end. It
was ugly.

So as I walked home from the gym yesterday—all sweaty and gross because for some reason I decided it would be faster to shower at home—I fished around in my backpack for my keys. I checked every pocket. Scrounged around in bowels of the bag (where I did manage to turn up the watch I’ve been looking for since February). They weren’t there. I knew they weren’t there. I knew I’d forgotten them. The tears started welling up as I walked a little faster home. By the time I got to door, I was inconsolable and irate. Where were my damn keys? Or what about the spares? The building manager was gone and the ever-inebriated maintenance guy said it would take him an hour to come back to town and he’d charge me $50. My doorman—who in a year has never uttered more than four words to me—kept saying “oh baby, don’t worry. Don’t you worry a thing.” I probably should have been indignant that he was calling me “baby,” but really, I just sort of liked the way it sounded. J would tell you that the only reason I was upset was because I was going to have to shell out fifty bucks for being an idiot. But really I was upset about what this little episode suggested: that’s it’s all gotten to be just way too much.

There’s the wedding, sure, but the real stress right now is getting through this enormous book project for the college. It’s big, like 350 pages big. And there are a thousand things left to be done, not to mention 30 more years of content to uncover, transcribe, edit, arrange. And here’s the rub: I was supposed to be done before I left for the wedding. But as each day passes and more work rather than less appears, I have a feeling it’s not going to be done on time. The schedule was too ambitious from the start, especially as I was expected to teach a new class--and teach it well--this semester. I was also formulating an enormous conference for September and trying in the early hours to actually get out my own work. It’s just been too much, way too much.

When Stephen, the surprisingly sober maintenance guy, showed up to let me last night, I told him that in writing that check for $50, I was handing over a little piece of my soul. He wasn’t amused. After I shut the door and forced myself to breathe, I remembered in a flash: my damned spare keys are with the damned doorman. I left them there on Friday when I thought a friend was coming to town. So I just paid fifty bucks not because I locked myself out, but because I forgot to mention to the “baby”-calling doorman that my keys were in his little drawer, 3 feet away from me as I cried on the bench.

I sprinted downstairs and nearly out of breath, bellowed to the doorman, “you have my keys. My keys are in your drawer.” At that moment he looked upon me with a mixture of pity and amusement, “oh baby, you workin' too hard.”

This baby is certainly working too hard.

inhabitations

There are so many stories we tell ourselves about ourselves: we come of age; we overcome obstacles; we fall in love; we become parents; we lose parents; we struggle against odds; we triumph over disease; we come to power. We narrate and we order, we align and we reconfigure.

I’ve been thinking about the stories I tell myself about myself. As I was cleaning my closet a few weeks ago, I sifted through a box of amber pill bottles. Oh yeah, I remember that back injury, and god, do I remember those muscle relaxants. Oh right, that kidney infection and that case of pneumonia. Oh and those damnable allergies that never go away. I was wishing that twenty or thirty years ago I started saving all of those bottles. Had I done it, I’d start gluing them together into a structure, a house made of pills, a pharmaceutical autobiography. The late ‘70s could be the portico of infant illness, the ‘80s the entryway of youthful maladies, and then a bedroom for each decade thereafter. I could build a house made of amber bricks, all signifying an ailing moment, a glimpse of pathology.

The room I’ve really wanted to build lately, though, is an entire living room of the pills I’ve taken since 1994: Trazodone. Prozac. Lexapro. Wellburtrin. Celexa. Zoloft. Paxil. I could then enact a bit of performance art in said room: miming side effects at a medicinal sideshow of sorts. I’d build this room and then open it to the public. I’d let people wander through and judge me if they liked.

I’d build this room to make sense of sixteen years of little white pills. I’d build this room to make all those pills into something beautiful. Imagine the amber glow. Imagine the way it could radiate the heat.

Mostly, though, I’d build this room as a way to understand what it means to stop taking these pills. This is what I’m building now: a body not dependent, a mind not reliant, a braver self willing to go without. I’ve tried this before—though not very often—and this time feels decidedly different. Not different because I’m somehow stronger or more able, but different because I seem more willing to sit with the anxiety, to feel the panic that’s sure to come, ready to try to endure in new ways.

I wish others talked about this process. I wish there were more open houses made of amber.

Unexpected discoveries

Last weekend my mom ferried me around town. We met with the bouquet-maker; we “rehearsed” my hair-do; we got pinned at the seamstress; we took measurements at the barn; we celebrated at a perfect shower; we strategized lighting; we took commands from my sister M (who incidentally says that I need to be more “dictatorial.” Hmm.) As we drove around, I felt like I was 12, unable to drive, exhausted by demands, more taciturn than revealing. On Friday morning, we headed out, had a few moments to spare, and to my delight, found ourselves knee-deep in a tag sale. The house was full of treasures, real treasures. Unfortunately, an antiques auction house had priced everything already, so these treasures were priced as such. And so while I didn’t get this ambrotype for a mere song, I adore it nonetheless. I had to pass on five others, but I couldn’t pass on her. I love her golden jewels and her eyes are just haunting enough to make me gasp. I think she’s mid-to-late19th century, though J thinks a bit later.

My other delightful discovery was this baby. In high school, I made skirt patterns for myself by draping newspapers over my hips and penciling rough shapes as quickly as possible. I played fast and loose with seams. I didn’t worry about allowances. I figured it out as I went along. I dreamed about one day having a dress form. J has had one on his “eventual gifts for A” list since he met me. And this one, well, this one was just my size—and also full adjustable—and very sturdy. It could use a new cover, but the pinning pad below is in great shape. At 40 bucks, it was about an eighth of the price of a new one of comparable quality. It will reside temporarily in my mom’s garage, but then it will move in with me for about the next twenty or thirty years. We’re bound to be fast friends.

anniversaries

Two years ago today I held you as we said good-bye so peacefully. Two years ago today, I cried and cried and kissed your long nose. Two years ago today I left the vet’s office without you. Two years ago today everything seemed to shift. I still thought that I saw you out of the corner of my eye. I kept seeing you, in fact. I saw you and smelled you every day for weeks afterward. I didn’t want to vacuum after you were gone and I let the dust and grime accumulate for a month before I relented. I wanted your fur to linger, traces of you in the carpet. Even now I pull out a long-forgotten sweater to find your blonde bits on the sleeve. I think of each day, especially now as I get ready to make another kind of commitment. You were my first, the first someone whom I thought of each day, whom I worried about each afternoon, whom I considered every time I made a decision to be here or there, to travel or to visit a friend. We were rarely apart, you and me. Our best times, of course, were in the woods and there were thousands of them. We also had two glorious winters of cross-country skiing on that lake in Connecticut, the one you fell into in February and cut your paw so deep and so long that you painted the hillside scarlet as we lopped to the car. You sought squirrels, though in nearly twelve years, you only ever caught three and two of them were, well, infirm. But you never lost hope. I liked your determination even as it drove me mad. I liked the way that when you were young, you’d spot a fawn across a meadow and race 300 yards across it with only the vaguest of hopes. I liked that next to chasing animals, I was your favorite thing. But sometimes—and I can admit this now—I felt suffocated by your expectations. And so once you were gone, I realized how much of myself I gave you and how much of myself was now free to give to another. When I marry him next month, I’ll be thinking of you and the kind of commitment you showed me I could make. For that, I’m always thankful.

90

I went to Michigan to do more than meet Lucy, though that was certainly part of the plan. I also went as more than an excuse for some in-flight knitting. This was, in fact, the first of three planned trips to Michigan over the next eight weeks. I love Michigan in the summer and as I get older, I love to be in my hometown. It’s less vexed now than it has been in the past, though one’s ghosts seem never too far distant in one’s childhood haunts. As my mom and I were driving to the airport on Monday, we crested a small hill and I had a long view of 8th street, a charmless avenue that has changed little in the last thirty years. The storefronts, of course, change color, but they remain. Everything is short and squat, gray and beige; it’s a luckless street that traverses the town. As we drove, I felt what I feel so often in Michigan, the layers of the past all stacked atop one another and yet distinct, a palimpsest of the past.



The layers were ever more discernible at one of the events for which I came home. My grandfather turned 90. 90 years old. My family—cousins, and great aunts, friends, and parents—gathered in what felt like nothing but pleasure. Even my father, who often inclines more toward tears than laughter, couldn’t help but laugh as he toasted his father, a man who still plays tennis each week, and whose delight in living a full life seems undiminished after nearly a century. There were three things that I loved about this event:

1. For at least a decade my grandfather has talked about the “young guys” that are his tennis partners. I always—and stupidly—imagined these to be, well, young guys. So as I was chatting with a few octogenarians on Sunday about their tennis game, I asked them where I could find the “young guys.” I was eager to ask them what it was like to play with the decidedly old guys three times a week for more than twenty years. At first they looked confused, then a bit aghast, and then they just started laughing; “We’re the young guys!”

2. During my father’s toast to his father he talked about Grandpa’s working life, a subject about which I know shamefully little. One time about ten years ago I found a packet of letters from my grandparents that were written to my parents during the 1970s, at a time when they were living near Zagreb, in what was then Yugoslavia. I had remembered—at least I thought I remembered—my grandmother telling me about buying down feathers directly from the geese (this can’t be right) for her pillows in Yugoslavia. In any case, I knew that they had lived in Europe for long stretches of time during the 60s and 70s and I knew that Grandpa was an engineer for Dow Chemical, but I didn’t know much more (and who really knows what engineers do). So when my father started talking about Grandpa opening plastics plants in Europe, I just started giggling. It was like living in The Graduate for a minute. He just kept saying “plastics.” “He brought plastics to Europe.” This cracks me up. Plastics.

3. Cousins! I love, love, love my cousins. I love hanging out with them and whenever we get to see each other, I just end up wishing that I got to see them all of the time. They’re smart and interesting, incredibly funny and definitely a little crazy.



I’m hoping that we can celebrate again at 100.

greetings

As I was walking, err, losing, Lucy in the orchard. J's sister was bringing her first baby, a son, into the world. And as she labored--hard work no doubt--I sat on a plane and knit--easy work--her son a pair of bright lime booties to match his surprise sweater. I wish I could ditch out for a day and take the bus and meet the newest delivery.

Alternatively, I'll wait patiently for J to make his way up here and we can go greet our newest nephew together. Oh joy!

rewind

I know, I know. I’ve been remiss. It’s not like I’m not aware of my lapses, my delays, my tardiness. As someone who feels obligations heavily, I’m always aware of my absence from this space, my space. But I’m also always aware of returns, of homecomings, of starts and restarts.

In the spirit of a restart, I’m going to take it in reverse. And in reverse I end up at yesterday, a day in which I awoke to the sun in my eyes in the downstairs bedroom at my Mom’s house in Michigan. She has a new pup, an almost pathologically shy poodle named Lucy.

Lucy is the kind of dog who seems to understand that there are things in life that are preferable to slavish adoration of her owners, like half-heartedly chasing a ball or lazily lounging in the sun. I think it’s fair to say that Lucy has really no interest in me. Nevertheless, she and I set off for a mid-morning walk in an old, maybe abandoned, orchard. I couldn’t help musing about Arlo, the pup whom I really got to know during the year we lived with my Mom close to another orchard nearby. As I was remembering how much Arlo loved playing a little game I used to call “chase me around the tree, please,” Lucy bolted. Took off. Made haste. She was done with me. I didn’t worry. She wasn’t chasing a deer. She wasn’t chasing a car. She just decided that she’d had enough and so she left. When I got back to my mom’s, she was happily snoozing in the sun, just where I knew that she’d be. The strange thing is that I like a dog that clearly doesn’t really like me.