The good, the bad, the electrical

I had some vague idea that this summer would be relaxing, that I could leisurely undertake some modest home improvements, that I could spend a couple hours each day working on a creative writing project, that I could imagine my courses for the fall as I planted hostas and watched my jalapeños grow. I thought that just maybe J and I would drink cocktails on the patio in the evening, marveling at our good fortune and savoring the fresh summer dinner that I’d just whipped up with delights from the farmer’s market. I’d even open the dreaded dissertation manuscript and start the revisions. Oh, and we’d surely travel to Michigan and then out East, for a meandering road trip in our new car.

All of this seemed possible as I packed my bags in Philadelphia. After all, the blogs I read each day make it seem so easy, so beautiful, so perfectly uncomplicated. So unreal. How did I forget that home improvement doesn’t actually happen in the space of a blog post? How did I forget that my relationship to writing is so vexed that I’d rather make the bed, mow the lawn, and pick up dog shit than sit down and put pen to paper? Why didn’t I remember that having a puppy is like losing an arm and having to work one handed, the other one constantly throwing the ball, removing the bottle cap (or the rock, the sock, the sleeping pill bottle (!), the drano bottle (!!), the shoe, the sandal, the rug) from that damned puppy jaw? And wait, what about this whole marriage thing? Why didn’t occur to me that it would actually take time and energy, patience and fortitude to negotiate all of this with another?

And so now, as we scramble to get out of town for one last breath of coastal air before the grind begins, I feel frantic, made ever more so by the first major house problem. A little bubble on the kitchen ceiling, one that I diagnosed even before I’d mounted the step stool turned into this:



Well, actually, this is the brand new fix. I was too horrified by the problem, I guess, to get a good picture of the old lead pipe (yes, it was actually lead) that was so contorted that it had practically split in two and was spilling toilet “water” into the ceiling. I’m trying to forget the fact that we had just had this ceiling redone a few weeks before. I’m also trying to forget the fact that this drama was playing out on top of our refrigerator. Gross.

The plumber was here all day yesterday, dashing out every hour or so because he was missing yet another part or tool to fix this decided singular set-up. He spent most of the time sawing cast iron and lead pipes, spewing metal filament all over the kitchen. In the fruit bowl, on every plate, glass, and mug. He draped the kitchen in a black snow. And so I spent last night drinking a stiff gin and tonic and mopping up the mess. This all would have been well and good had I not insisted on standing on the counter to wipe the top edge of the window trim. It was then that I noticed that all of his banging had actually dislodged a new light fixture above the sink. I was annoyed and wanted to see if I could sort of jimmy it back into place. I grabbed the metal bar and zap, I felt the shock shimmer up my arm. The light went out and I thought, huh, that was sort of weird, but I didn’t register the problem. So I turned off the switch and grabbed it again. Another zap and then another. I thought maybe I was losing my mind and so I made – forced, really – J to try it also. And of course, electricity knows no favorites and he got zapped also.

This struck me as truly bizarre. How could a fixture be zapping us if the circuit was turned off at the wall? I still don’t know. But a quick google search suggested that we were liable to burn our whole house down. And faced with an unlabeled breaker box (now on “the list”), we decided to be safe and flipped the entire house breaker. Good thing it’s summer and we found the flashlights beforehand. I took down the fixture today, resigned myself to calling an electrician, and I’m forcing myself to just walk away from it for the moment. Argh.



But wait, wasn’t this post going to be about everything evening out? About finding balance in the midst of struggle? Wasn’t I planning to linger on the good, the beautiful, the moment of grace that washed all of this away? Well, I was. Really, I was. But come to think of it, this moment has no beauty and has no grace. It’s just a hot day in Kentucky with a hole in our kitchen and a few singed hairs on our arms.

That last bit, well, that’s just a bit of narrative exaggeration for rhetorical effect. Arm hair remains healthy and growing.

outtakes from a fortnight away

After six weeks of moving, painting, hauling, and settling, I was ready to hop in the car and head north. I came for these sunsets over the bay. Each night I’d sit outside, usually with Homer biting my ears, and try to impress the reds and blues in my mind, storing them for the waterless year ahead in Kentucky. It was hot, though, even in Michigan, and Homer took to wading in until his undercarriage was submerged.



I arrived with great ambition. I was going to get started on a conference paper and write my fall syllabi. Instead, I read a mediocre novel and a couple good memoirs, and I delighted in seeing my family. I drank with my Aunt and hosted a visit from close pals. But mostly, I just slowed down, lay on the hot sand, and tried to quiet my mind before the frantic push of the new school year begins.

marital edibles

It’s funny how marriage makes you eat differently. What’s suffices as a perfectly adequate meal for one tends to flop as a dinner for two. J’s standard issue pile of beans and canned chicken -- yes, I said CANNED CHICKEN! -- doesn’t go over well with me. And my overcooked scrambled eggs on a soulless corn tortilla from a bag hardly passes the muster with him. But we both end up stretching here and there. He’ll eat the whole wheat blueberry waffles when I make them (even if we have no maple syrup), but he’d rather just grab a fistful of almonds and get to work. I’ll try yet another stir-fry, usually persuaded after a bite or two. We haven’t quite found a rhythm though. It’s unclear who is going to cook what and when and how. And all the while, we have a real dining room mocking us. It’s this dedicated space calling out to us, to eat, to put our work away, to throw Homer out the door, to break bread -- err, kale -- together.

And small town Kentucky certainly prompts one to cook. There’s a semi decent Indian place about ten miles up the road, but you can only eat Indian so many days a week. Instead, we troll the farmer’s markets and pick through the “World Foods” aisle at Meijers. I’ve been working my way through Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Everyday. This is the first cookbook that just absolutely works with my ideas of good, simple food. A couple days ago, faced with the slimmest of slim pickings in the fridge, I flipped through its pages looking for lunch. The micro greens that I haphazardly “planted” (i.e. I tossed seeds on the ground) a couple weeks ago were going crazy in the soil, but I needed a vehicle for them. Swanson answered my call with an open-faced egg salad sandwich that uses plain yogurt instead of mayonnaise. I picked some thyme and threw it all on German whole grain bread. The next day, with even slimmer pickings, I tried her chickpea salad recipe, added a couple slices of local tomatoes, and J and I both swooned. Now if I could only find black mustard seeds and rye flour in the land of Hamburger Helper and Mountain Dew.

pinnacle

When you get a puppy from the roadside, you can’t be sure what you’re going to find. Homer is delightful in so many ways: he’s peppy and happy, free of solemn brooding of Arlo. But he has several idiosyncrasies that prove rather challenging. He loves, and I mean really, really loves, to bite our ankles with his jagged puppy teeth. Sometimes he gets a running start and just barrels into our calves at a full sprint. We both look like we’ve been sleeping on a barbed wire bed.



He’s also terrified of the leash. As soon as we clip it to him, he nosedives into the nearest brush and plays dead. Utterly unwilling to move, he gets his entire little mass onto the ground so that we have no choice but to surrender, unclip him and proceed with the walk. And then there’s the issue of his walks. In some strange twist of marital encouragement, Homer will only agree to walks if both of us are with him. Otherwise, faced with just one of us, he flops on the ground and simply refuses to move.



I suspect that we’ve quickly become hopeless slaves to his whims. But this hasn’t been all bad. We’re working on the biting and we’ve found ourselves walking together each evening. Last night we headed to the nearby Pinnacles for an evening, July 1st hike. I think we both like the fact that Homer has brought us together for these romps. We coo over him and look like absolute saps, delighting over his log hops and trail navigation.



But what do you expect, we’re a childless couple with a new puppy and it’s summer.

slowly

There are still stacks of boxes (lots of them) and unpainted trim upstairs and old ceiling tile that needs replacing. The walls -- newly coated -- are bare. I haven’t hung a thing, save for a single painting by my Aunt Mimi. Rugs are a distant hope. As are curtains. Reupholstering the couches is on the list, but it keeps falling below the more urgent need of the day, like fixing the hissing toilet or replacing the lousy shower head or making a vodka run to the next county over. My painter, the one whom I hired just to paint the ceilings but who has now become a third member of the family, can only work in the afternoons because he is -- and I’m not joking -- a bounty hunter the rest of the time. He’s not working today because he’s on a hunt with his pepper gun in some strip mines in Eastern Kentucky. He’s twice offered me a job, once to be his partner, “50/50 all the way!” and once to photograph children riding his miniature donkeys -- still not joking -- at county fairs. Extraordinary.

Before

But this isn’t about my painter turned bounty hunter turned breeder of donkeys. It’s about the slow changes happening around here. When we moved in, the living room was a creamy beige and all of the walls were shot through with old nails and anchors and holes. I spent the first week here filling and then sanding all of those holes. Hundreds of them. My mom came down -- bless her -- and we painted the next week, in the 95 degree heat. Though she and J had some initial misgivings about the color -- it’s “moonshine” by Benjamin Moore (I ask: how can you not paint your walls moonshine if you live in Kentucky?) -- everyone fell into a kind of dreamy rapture once it dried. It’s downright gray on the paint chip, but it’s blue on the walls. We were all so smitten by it that we went ahead and gave the dining room and kitchen the same treatment.

After

The couches are old and I’ve loved them since I was a child. They spent their first years in a mid-century house in Midland, Michigan with my grandparents on my Dad’s side. They’re Danish, teak and wicker on the sides. They even fold down into little beds. I’m not sure, but I think they’re from the late 60s. After awhile, they traveled north and resided in my hometown. Eventually, they ended up with my Aunt Barbara, who moved into my grandparents’ house at some point in the early 90s. Or was it the late 80s? I don’t remember. After that, they ended up in the East Village with my cousin Margaret and her boyfriend, in a fourth floor walk-up with narrow halls and steep stairs. As soon as we bought this house, I knew that I needed them. So I begged my Aunt -- who kindly obliged, even if she was mystified by my ardor -- and J and I went and fetched them in a rented zipcar before I left Philadelphia. They’re perfect for this space, even if they desperately need to be recovered and are virtually begging for some funky pillows.


After again.

The space is certainly inchoate, but it’s coming. Slowly. For now, I like to fall onto a couch, catch up on my stack of unread New Yorkers, and pretend that I’m thinking about my syllabi for the fall. Homer sleeps on my chest and J fusses in the kitchen. It’s happening. We’re settling.

Homer!

Meet Homer. The Homebot. Nugget. Sir Puppo II. He showed up right after I did. We were out for drinks with friends when one of them mentioned the puppy who was living on her porch. She had found him a couple weeks earlier lying in the middle of a country road in Jackson County. He was all alone, a few weeks old, nearly bald with mange, and eager to hop in the car with them. I'm not sure I would have been so generous with my backseat. When I first met him, he looked a little like an old and wrinkly man. I should post a photo, but I wouldn't want to embarrass him. At first I volunteered just to take him to the vet and pay for the medicine that he needed to combat the mange. And I really did maintain some kind of healthy distance from him for a few days,or at least until I fell hopelessly in love with his high pitch yawns and his baby suckling noises.

We wanted an old-timey, straightforward name for a pup with such modest beginnings. But J wasn't having any of my suggestions. Then I remembered a friend's doggie nephew, another Homer, and we decided that it was okay to plagiarize a dog's name from Connecticut. We tell ourselves that they were channeling the poet; we're channeling the country. Neither, let's hope, were going for the Simpson.

going analog

Three years ago, J and I were at a wedding in Florida. It was June and hot and I insisted on floating in the bath water of the Atlantic until just before the ceremony, my hair a salty tangle as I slipped on my azure silk dress. The minister, a middle-aged-pleated-pant-wearing-kind-of-guy, took his place at the arbor and clutched his e-Reader to his chest. He greeted us all extemporaneously and then dove into his electronic bible. All was well and good until it froze, in the middle of a psalm. He cleared his throat, paused, looked up sheepishly, and confided that he’d need to “reboot his bible.” If there’s ever an analog-only event, I thought, it’s gotta be a wedding.

But, it seems, there are other analog-only events:
moving to kentucky
buying a house
finding a puppy
buying a car
settling into real married life with someone you hardly remember

For the last six weeks or so, I’ve kept the computer off. I mean really off. Sure, I check email three times a week on my phone, but I’ve had little desire to record this crazy transition here. I haven’t even been reading other blogs nor have I written a word. I’m not sure I can explain my desire to turn it all off. I suspect it has something to do with leaving a job in which I sat in front of my laptop in a cubicle for nine hours a day. Now I spend nine hours a day unpacking, painting, shopping for new toilets, sanding kitchen cabinets, and trying to teach little Homer to stop -- just stop for god’s sake -- biting my toes.

And then there’s the matter of what this space will become, now that 550 square feet have multiplied into 2000 and my quiet life of one has become the negotiated life of two. I find myself looking for the familiarity of my studio in Philadelphia as I hang artifacts of that life in Kentucky. There are traces, of course, but so many unrecognizable differences. Perhaps that’s what this will become: a record of difference, of change, of the new.

compression

For most of my life, I’ve looked young for my age. I don’t hear that so much anymore, but that may just be because I married a man who looks a decade younger than his peers. When I was very small – and much of my childhood was spent that way – I sensed a kind of eerie dissonance between my form and my interior, between the way I looked to others and the way I felt myself. This wasn’t a kind of teenage angsty discontent, but rather a simmering sense that it did me no good. I got carded at an R-rated movie when I was 25. I had to sit out from the roller coaster rides on a youth group theme park trip when I was 10 because I wasn’t the requisite 45” (which, to be honest, wasn’t all that disappointing). When I was 19, I had a fake i.d. that claimed I was 26, and it still shocks me that it actually kept me in beers and bars throughout college.

People always said that I’d be thankful one day. That seemed like a shitty consolation, perhaps because I knew, even then, that it wouldn’t pay off. It couldn’t.

After work yesterday, I redeemed a lovely spa gift certificate to get a massage. I warned the guy that my back was, as always, a mess. Bad backs seem to be a genetic gift that I share with my dad and sister and aunt. They extend through the branches of our family tree like that sinewy wild grape vine that withers a perfectly healthy oak. The masseuse tried to untangle the mess of my shoulders, the Gordian knots in my neck, stretching and pulling my muscles back into place. Once I emerged from the foggy warmth of the session, he said, “Man, you got a really intense back.” He might as well have said, “Little sister, that back of yours, it might look like 29 and a half, but it feels like 60.”

In other words, the dissonance, instead of gradually harmonizing, seems to be getting louder. Now my body has surpassed my age and I still have yet to glean the wonders of being mistaken for 33 instead of 35, for buying a gin and tonic without flashing my gummy grim.

Maybe I should drink more gin and tonics and my back would feel better. But would that take away my crow’s feet?

belatedly

I’ve been thinking a lot about knitting lately, trying to figure out what it would mean to create meaty prose about purling and dragging yarn over and over and over again. My sister-in-law Lisa has escorted me to the yarn harlot and knitting daily, and as much as I appreciate the former, the writing on neither really piques my interest.

And then there’s those blog readers -- those modest few -- who tell me that they skip my posts whenever I write about knitting.

In any case, I realized this morning, on a bumpy train to work (only 10 days left!), that the reason I’m interested in writing about knitting is because -- and perhaps for me alone -- it’s the stuff of muscle memory. Or rather, it’s somehow and quite literally often the fabric of my emotional landscape.

Like yesterday. On a perfectly balmy mother’s day afternoon, I meditatively continued on with a teal summer cardigan in Philadelphia’s under-appreciated Fitler Square. This sweater features the kind of lace knitting that I actually have to pay attention to or I’m apt to misinterpret a knit-two-together as a slip-slip knit. Yesterday, though, my mind was drifting off and I could -- for the first time in more than twenty five years -- recall my very first piece of knitting: a mustard yellow acrylic patch, one of those misshapen numbers that my mom told me was most definitely a doll’s blanket. Too bad I didn’t like dolls.

I recall neither the yarn passing through my fingers nor what became of this scrap, but I do remember showing it to my mom and sheepishly pointing out the mistakes. And this is where it gets at something I want to remember. My words are missing, but in some resonant way I recall blaming that acrylic for the skipped stitches, the little holes that surely meant a doll’s toes would catch cold. What I remember even more clearly was my mom telling me that it wasn’t the yarn that had erred. It was me.

I’m convinced that I remember this moment amidst all of the other fogginess of my life because of it was such an anomaly, a moment in which my mom actually called bullshit on my bullshit. I like this moment, then, because it’s one rare bit of critique amidst an otherwise hazy morass of adulation and encouragement. I want to believe that this moment made me a more careful knitter, that it implanted some shed of self-reflection, and for it I’m thankful.