Big Three

It’s funny how a visit to the hospital still brings on the pregnancy déjà vu. I had a moment in the parking garage on Monday, checking to make sure I’d left enough room next to the other car to get my big belly through the door. Oops.

No big belly here. My “baby” turns three today, in fact, and I was only at the hospital for my “Hey, You’re 40!” routine mammogram. Nice to know that even though the baby factory is closed, there are still plenty of opportunities to slip on a hospital gown and get probed. Standing there at an awkward angle while the tech carefully spread out each breast on the cold surface like a homemade pie crust, it really wasn’t much different from all those ultrasounds and blood tests of yesteryear.

Except, of course, it was completely devoid of that deliciously giddy prospect of a new baby, which takes the edge off of just about any unpleasant medical procedure. Even now, walking around that hospital is like flipping through a photo album of precious memories. (Aw, there’s the waiting room where I downed that bottle of noxious orange stuff for the gestational diabetes test! And there’s the hallway where I had all those contractions while waiting to be admitted!)

Did I mention my baby girl is THREE today? Three. Older than her big brother was when she was born. I wrote about her baby days for her birthday last year, and I’m so glad I did. Reading back over it now, there are so many details I’d already almost forgotten.



Where did that baby disappear to? This past year she’s grown so beautifully into her child-self, from the full head of hair to the full-fledged love of Bill Nye the Science Guy. She speaks in complete, thoughtful sentences now, always with a pressing story to tell. She attempts jokes and responds to them with a finely honed fake laugh. She can sit next to us at Taco del Mar and chomp down a black bean burrito with no help at all. There are plenty of tears and tantrums, of course, but for the most part she is sunshine itself. Everything about her shines – her mischief, her imagination, her absolute joy in her favorite things.



I thought I would be missing babies by now. And I do, sort of. I’m always happy to see one bobbing along in his Moby wrap or flapping her arms joyously at something shiny. But at the same time, I can definitely feel my own baby window closing. In a good way. I can look at another baby without the compelling biological impulse to swoop it up and care for it. When I hold someone else’s baby, it doesn’t instantly zap me back to my own postpartum days anymore. It just feels like . . . holding a baby.

What I really miss is my babies. Or, rather, I miss the time I spent with them. I miss when it was enough to bundle them up in ducky pajamas and just sit around listening to each other breathe. I miss heading out for long, dreamy walks with a baby snoozing contentedly in her wrap. I miss when the “firsts” were innocent and easy. Baby’s first laugh. Baby’s first ride on the playground swing.

Mostly, I think I miss that intangible bliss of the transition to parenthood itself. Yes it was one of the hardest things we’ve ever done, and I wouldn’t want to go back to the sleepless nights. But the stretch of it all . . . realizing we were capable of raising a newborn at all (and then another one!), and finding those little corners of pure happiness amid the chaos . . . I’ve never experienced anything quite like that. I used to tell people it felt like getting pushed off a cliff at the very moment you discover you’ve had wings all along.

The Christmas season is already so evocative, with its twinkling lights, carols, and whatnot; ready-made for nostalgic warm fuzzies. And each year I realize a little more just how truly amazing and special that first Christmas season was, welcoming our new baby. Our daughter. Little sister. The final member of a nuclear family which, for a long time, had been largely hypothetical.

The previous years had been a rapid current of transitions – the move to Seattle, new jobs, the new house, the marriage, the miscarriages, the birth of our first child. And now, with this final tremendous change, with the nights getting longer and our loved ones gathering to celebrate the holiday, we were finally ready to settle here for a while. Things would still keep changing constantly, of course. But at least we’d established a setting and a cast of characters. And with that, a new chapter was ready to begin.

And here we are. Three years of driving a station wagon with two car seats in the back and saying things like “Don’t ‘But Mommy’ me!” without irony. Three years of gathering them both into my lap for stories and silliness. Three years of being a team with these incredibly smart, funny, constantly evolving little people. They never cease to amaze me, and these have been some of the happiest years of my life.

Happy birthday, Little Girl.

A Very ACLU Christmas

There was a so-called “war on Christmas” long before Bill O'Reilly and friends went mainstream with it a few years ago. I should know. I worked in the ACLU’s Philadelphia office in the mid-1990’s, and it was my job to open the hate mail. Most of it arrived during the month of December in the form of Christmas cards. Nice picture of Mary and the Baby Jesus on the cover. Scrawled scathing message encouraging us to burn in hell or die painfully on the inside. Joy to the world, indeed.

It was all because of that pesky “separation of church and state” which, at least in those days, typically meant your courthouse couldn’t have a crèche on its front lawn. (Unless you went this route.) Our lawyers were much busier with other pursuits -- helping the woman who'd been evicted over her boyfriend's race or the man with Down syndrome who wasn't allowed to ride a merry-go-round at a local amusement park. Crèche-busting typically required a few phone calls in the middle of a hectic afternoon, then they’d move on. But that’s what gained us the most notoriety.

Our lawyers didn’t mind the hate mail. Some of them thrived on it, in fact. These were people who loved a good fight; being told to burn in hell just meant they were doing their job. I didn’t take it personally either. But it did make me think. I’d just be sitting there at my cluttered desk in my little hippie skirt making my little $20K a year and listening to my little mix tape, wondering what sort of Christian would think I deserved endless pain just for showing up and doing my little support staff job that day.

And what a job it was. Our office of ten people served all of Pennsylvania. There were two or three lawyers in Philly, another one in Pittsburgh. Phones rang all day long. Mail poured in. I did everything from photocopying to event planning to producing a newsletter. There were some exciting days, being in the midst of important cases and press conferences. There were downright degrading days, dealing with big egos and unkind words from our superstar freedom fighters. But there were plenty of slow, peaceful days, too.

That’s how it was right before Christmas Eve that year. My major projects were finished for the time being. No fires to put out. My mom was coming that night to take me out to dinner and give me a lift home for the holidays. I was clearing up some of the months-old clutter on my desk when I heard some bustling in the foyer area.

I saw Frank, our long-time senior citizen volunteer receptionist, sitting at his desk and speaking earnestly with a young man wrapped in a coat while two small children, a boy and a girl, squirmed in our uncomfortable waiting-room chairs. Each child was holding a gorgeous oversized mesh plastic “stocking” stuffed with toys, clearly yearning to open them but showing remarkable restraint.

Except for the children, it was a familiar scene. All sorts of folks dropped in on our office from time to time, seeking help. Frank would listen patiently to every word of their stories before he would purposefully explain, in his Jim-Ignatowski-meets-Grandpa-Simpson manner, that the ACLU does not handle such cases and refer them to an agency that did. Sometimes they’d get angry, but Frank took the verbal abuse stoically, patiently listening again before restating his position. And listening. And restating. Eventually they’d move on.

But this family was different. From what I was overhearing, this was clearly not a situation the ACLU could help with in an official capacity. But Frank didn’t give him the speech. He kept listening. He kept asking questions. The children got antsier and louder as the conversation continued. Some of us came into the waiting area and tried to keep them entertained with whatever random toys we had on our desks. Stress balls. A Marge Simpson doll. Finally, their dad gave them the go-ahead to open the stockings, and merry chaos broke out.

In the midst of all that, our Legal Director and chief crèche-buster came blustering out of his office on some unrelated matter. He asked Frank what was going on, and Frank discreetly explained. This family had nowhere to sleep tonight. They’d been staying with a friend of the dad, but they couldn’t go back there now. The friend molested the little girl. The lawyer’s tone shifted in a way I’d never heard before, from busy and important to sincere kindness and concern. He invited the young dad into his office.

Which left the babysitting to the rest of us. But no one seemed to mind. Children rarely made an appearance in our office, and they lightened the mood considerably. They pulled crayons and containers of Play Doh from their stockings, and we all got creative together. We made up games and let them run up and down the long hallway.

The meeting went on for most of an hour. Our Legal Director was on and off the phone, networking with his colleagues in social services, tracking down a place for this family to stay. Finally, he was able to line something up. We helped the children gather up their stockings, got them into their coats, and off they went into the Philadelphia winter dusk. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat as I picked the squished Play Doh bits from our waiting-room carpet. Sweet little girl. Who knew what was going to happen to her? It broke my heart just to think about it. But at least she had somewhere safe to go on Christmas Eve.

The “Very Special Christmas Episode” message here is probably pretty obvious, but it bears repeating: The ACLU may have caused the relocation of a few plaster Mary-and-Josephs that year. But an ACLU lawyer also found this real-life unfortunate family some room at the Inn. And with all due respect to Mr. Schulz, I’d like to suggest that that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Dedicated to the memories of Stefan Presser, Larry Frankel, and Frank Kent.

"What the Oh?!"

Well, here we are: the 10-year anniversary of the WTO’s ill-fated meeting. Does anyone outside of Seattle even remember or care? For that matter, do many of us in Seattle remember or care?

Well . . . yes, I expect. I mean, it was no 9/11 or 2009 Iranian election. But it’s probably the biggest thing to happen right here in our city, at least since I’ve lived here. Some of us got harassed by police or even sent to jail just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The city itself was a punch line for weeks, maybe months afterwards, and is still a one-word cautionary tale to other cities hosting controversial events: “We don’t want another Seattle.” The news media tied it up in a neat little package called “The Battle in Seattle” – that rhymes! (Incidentally, the movie of the same title does a great job retelling the story.)

I remember being very excited about the whole thing in the weeks leading up to it. Everyone knew it was coming. The local papers brought us up to speed on what the World Trade Organization even is and why people were organizing protests in the first place. On our annual Thanksgiving drive home from Oregon, we passed a bunch of Seattle-bound activist hitchhikers. One local news station was running a promo with footage of the pre-meeting protests and a goofy voiceover better suited to a dog food commercial saying “Protests! Traffic! Changes in your bus route! What the oh?!!”

I was tempted to participate in the AFL-CIO’s rally but, in the ultimate irony, I really couldn’t miss a day of work. Mr. Black wasn’t planning to participate either, but some of his fellow law students were donning gas masks and “Legal Observer” t-shirts to jump into the fray. I couldn’t help feeling like I was missing out, driving over the bridge to complacent Kirkland to work on my little magazine layouts while history was being made just a few blocks from our Capitol Hill apartment.



I kept checking the news all day, reading about the marching sea turtles and French dairy farmers handing out raw cheese samples in front of McDonalds. Somehow, the activists had actually managed to shut the WTO opening ceremonies down. A little less amazing and a lot more cynical: some protestors were smashing shop windows and looting downtown. Where was this going?

Mr. Black and I snapped on the news the minute we got home and watched the massive, unmoving crowd facing down police officers downtown. Huge white waves of pepper spray would inch the crowd only slightly backward. Another face-off. Another burst of pepper spray. And another. We watched with near-simultaneous feelings of “Power to the people!” and “Oh shit, here come the people!” Because we could see the direction the police were pushing the crowd: right up the hill, east on Pine Street. Right up the hill to our neighborhood.


Photo by Eric Draper

Surely the police would let up before they got that far, we agreed. There was a curfew in effect downtown, but not all the way up in Capitol Hill. I set off for my writing workshop in Eastlake without giving it much further thought.

Driving home just an hour or so later, I realized I’d made a big mistake. Two blocks from our building, a lone specter of a man stood right in the middle of Bellevue Street holding a rag to his nose and mouth, surrounded by a spooky haze. I inched cautiously along the road and found the next block swarming with neighbors and protestors packing the sidewalks in front of the mini-market, laundromat, and apartment buildings.

I parked the car in the little lot behind our building and impulsively hurried down the hill toward the action, ready to shake my rolling pin at somebody. Because, seriously, get the pepper spray out of my neighborhood. We live here. All at once, a misty cloud of hot peppery goodness wafted up the street and hit me in the face. Quick little sneezes came one after the other, followed by an unbearable burning in my eyes and throat. I was livid and wanted to kick the ass of whoever did it, but instead I ran watery-eyed back to our apartment. (Luckily, that news report we’d been watching earlier had told us what to do if you happen to get yourself pepper-sprayed.)

When I’d sufficiently doused my face and the noise outside died down, Mr. Black and I went up to the roof to see what was going on. The neighborhood was now eerily desolate, except for a group of police officers in full riot gear marching in ominous formation down Bellevue Street.

My suburban co-workers wanted to hear all about it the next day, especially the conspiracy-theorist guy who was always hepped up on “coffee.” We were driving to a meeting together and he talked excitedly about it all – how President Clinton was due to arrive that day and that’s why the city cracked down so hard on all the protestors last night. He enthusiastically insisted that Clinton wasn’t really staying at the Westin downtown amid all the chaos; he was probably right here in Kirkland. The words had barely left his mouth when we saw two low-flying helicopters, apparently departing from the nearby big fancy waterfront hotel. The guy nearly peed his pants with tinfoil-hat vindication.

The big boss sent me home early that night to beat the next round of neighborhood riots. Mr. Black and I sat cooped up in the apartment, uneasily watching TV, when we heard helicopters overhead. And lots of angry-crowd sounds. And more helicopters. And . . . gunfire?

The most unsettling thing was that the noise wasn’t coming from downtown or anywhere near the newly imposed “No Protest Zone.” The noise was coming from Broadway, east of our apartment and further up the hill from downtown, well outside the WTO area. Why? More helicopters. More gunfire. More shouting. Explosions. We didn’t dare go outside after my little pepper spray incident the night before, so we kept changing the channel in the hopes of finding a news report. Nothing. Hours later, we found out the gunfire and explosions were actually rubber bullets and concussion grenades fired by police in a riot whose origins are still unclear.

We never did see much about the Capitol Hill riot in the news, but there were lots of first-hand accounts from our neighbors suggesting there’d been nothing unusual going on that night until the police showed up and started sweeping the streets. Matthew Amster-Burton sums it up nicely in his essay:

A police helicopter buzzed overhead, and as we looked down the street, a line of riot cops materialized from out of the gas to look back at us. They were three deep marching up the street, flinging countless canisters and grenades at everybody nearby. A pair of armored personnel carriers pushed through, four cops hanging off each side. . .

[N]ot only was there no evidence of civilian violence, but I didn't see any protesters at all. . . . We watched out the windows as the police parked an armored vehicle on our corner and flanked it with officers. When our neighbors started to gather on the sidewalk across from them, we went back out to join in shouting for the police to leave our home. Ten minutes later, the police pushed back down the street, again beating and gassing as they went. The last battery of gas and grenades didn't end until 2:20 a.m. . .

An officer kicked a pedestrian in the groin, stabbed at him with his baton, then shot a beanbag point-blank into his chest. . . A man came out of his home to shout, "We are residents here!" He got a heavy dose of pepper spray to the eyes, courtesy of his local peace officer. A cop ordered two art students with a video camera to roll down their car window so he could talk to them, then sprayed them directly in the face.

Anyway. Things unraveled pretty rapidly in the days that followed. The WTO talks failed. The protestors and bystanders who’d been imprisoned were released. The police chief resigned and the mayor went on to lose an election. City council meetings were held, committees were formed, lawsuits were filed. But a few days after it was over, I was Christmas shopping downtown as if the whole thing had been some sort of vacation; the Disneyland version of life under occupation.

At the end of it all, I have no firm conclusions. The whole mess was just ten different flavors of bad. Egregious violations of civil rights, police officers thrown headfirst into a dangerous situation that they’d barely been prepared to handle, citizens attacked on their own streets. In a way, it strikes at the heart of what human beings are really capable of. All that ferocious insecurity and conviction. And where does it leave us? It ends with confusion and a series of anecdotes, and then it’s all but forgotten. What the oh.

Shambling After Kerouac

Jack Kerouac almost caused me to drop out of graduate school. It’s not as glamorous as it sounds. I wasn’t chasing any falling stars or yearning to follow some holy road. Not really. I just didn’t want to write a paper about the guy. And by “didn’t want to,” I mean I was seized with anxiety and self-doubt about the damn thing. (Ah, graduate school.)

I’d never read On the Road before. Somehow in my dreamy, bookwormy adolescence, I’d missed it. Maybe it’s not the sort of book a high school English teacher hands to a promising girl-geek. Flannery O’Connor, yes. Kerouac . . . better save him for those awkwardly brilliant golden boys. Somehow Kerouac and I never crossed paths in college, either, although I’d picked him up on my zeitgeist radar by then.

So, my first encounter with On the Road was in one of those early-1990’s hardcore take-a-book-you-love-and-obliterate-it classes which was the style of the time. It was a lot easier to do this with old familiar favorites like Shakespeare and Hawthorne. With a book that I’d never read before – especially this one – it was a frustrating venture.

Sure, there’s plenty of against-the-graining to be done in On the Road. But on some level I just had to say “so what”? There’s misogyny all over that book, upside down and backwards. You know what else? That book is printed on paper, too. And sold in bookstores. The misogyny just seemed so obvious, was all. Pointing it out felt redundant. Maybe if I’d kept at it I could have come up with a more interesting angle. But something else was holding me back.

Yes, I was a woman reader; a feminist reader. But somehow I couldn’t write about Kerouac without writing about myself. I knew there wasn’t a place for me in his late-1940’s world of gritty Benzedrine-and-jazz-fueled spontaneity. Heck, there wasn’t even a place for me in the 1990’s version of that world where scores of Gen-X boys wandered off to find themselves, leaving us girlfriends to heal our broken hearts and make our mix tapes. Forty years later, men still left and women still waited. And in my own way I was as screwed as Camille or Galatea or any of those On the Road gals.

“[She] would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop . . . I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

Still, I identified with the protagonist in spite of myself. Kerouac’s Sal Paradise – Kerouac himself, really – was drifting, brilliant, and stuck; trying to be a writer but coming loose at the seams; struggling to find his voice as he “shambled after” his mad and wildly inspiring friends from one road’s end to the next. Minus his actual talent, there was a lot there that reminded me of myself.

I went to graduate school straight from college because I had no idea what else I could do. It was a safe choice, prolonging studenthood for another two years while enhancing my employability. I thought it was a passionate choice, too. I loved literature. I loved being a student. This was exactly what I thought I wanted to do. But the minute I set foot on that campus, it all came crumbling down.

Everything – the classes, the people, the unfortunate architecture on SUNY-Binghamton’s campus – felt so stark and alienating. I couldn’t focus on my reading or pay attention in class, and the slightest setbacks would fill my eyes with tears. I was as strong, wise, intuitive, and spiritual then as I am now. But it was all so raw, so wild, so untested and full of self-doubt. I had no idea how to be in the world quite yet.

So what did I do? I drove. I had my parents’ old Oldsmobile sedan and I was behind its wheel at every opportunity. I’d drive three hours south to visit my parents or three hours north to visit my boyfriend, planning different routes every time to keep it interesting. I’d drive to other SUNY campuses to track down the books I needed in their libraries. I’d drive to Ithaca for cute-college-town window shopping. I’d drive nowhere in particular, through the hills and trees until it felt like I could be anywhere. Everything felt okay as long as I was in motion.

At the end of October my boyfriend set off to follow a road of his own, slacking westward toward Austin. I couldn’t quite follow him, but I couldn’t quite let him go. I wasn’t ready to embrace my new independent lifestyle, but I had no desire to abandon it, either. Months of limbo lay ahead. And driving. Lots more driving. The weather was rainier and colder, snowy at times, but that didn’t stop me. I could go for hours in my merry Oldsmobile, maps on the floor and cassette tapes all over the seat – REM, Throwing Muses, Morrissey, Lush, Jane Siberry, Concrete Blonde. Somehow I managed to pull off good grades anyway. Don’t ask me how.

And that’s pretty much the state I was in when I decided to write a paper for my “Narratives of Travel” class on On the Road. Given my current state of drifting, it seemed like a perfect fit. Unfortunately, I found myself enjoying the book way too much at face value to successfully pull off some “colonizer/colonized” reading. I’d sit down to work on it and get swept away by the wild, seamless flow of words; mired in the fantasy; outraged by the foreshadowing of 1990’s male angst bullshit depicted so unapologetically.

Still, I didn’t have an academically useful word to say about the book. The more I learned about Kerouac himself, the more I found myself genuinely liking the guy. I can’t say that I loved the book. But I loved its spirit and mythology, and at the time I wanted desperately to believe in that mythology even as the narrative itself eventually dispels it. My deadline drew nearer, the workload in my other classes increased, and I started to panic. Driving back from a weekend at my parents’ place one freezing cold afternoon, I felt my throat seize up with anxiety and a fierce impulse to drop out of school once and for all. Instead, I decided that I was simply not going to write that paper. In fact, I decided to drop the class altogether.

My only regret was that my On the Road experience was muddled in all that unpleasantness. Any enjoyment I might have found in the book was overshadowed by my gawky attempts at scholarship and a steady undercurrent of anxiety and doubt. I promised myself I’d read the book again someday, purely for entertainment this time. My old copy of On the Road is one of the few books that’s moved with me to every subsequent apartment and city with the best of intentions.

Well, here we are – seventeen years later – and I finally got around to picking it up again. The funny thing is, when I decided to blog about it I found myself just as blocked as I was back in grad school. I certainly wasn’t expecting that. What is it about this book? Maybe it just doesn’t want to be written about.

I’ll tell you one thing, though. Reading it now . . . oh, it’s incredibly sad. So sad. All that madness and frenzy; the starving; the left-behind children and women and friends; how it all goes zooming by with barely a pause. Time and again the protagonist himself gets left behind in a broken heap while his friends move wildly on. And then there’s this heartbreaking bit of insight about how children see their parents:

“I realized these were the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road.”

How did I miss this sadness the first time? Too mired in my own story, I suppose. Too wrapped up in my nascent scholarship and too eager to believe the mythology and dream of some magical “road” unfolding endless possibilities in my own life. I was more hopeful then, in spite of all the chick angst. How could I sense the weariness and regret in this book when I’d barely ventured into the world myself?

On the Road is simply a beautiful narrative and I’m glad I finally read it again. I’m also kind of glad I never tried to turn it into a paper. I mean, look at this guy. How can you academic-paper that?:

Fall

I’m with T.S. Eliot: April is the cruelest month, forcing us back out of our cocoons like that, stirring us from our cozy hibernation. But I love, love, how October gathers us up and folds us in from the cold. Spring may be all about blooming and rebirth, but there’s incredible sensuality in the autumnal withdrawing and turning inward, too, yes, absolutely there is. Fall is my time of year, and I’ll take butternut squash over a damn peach any day of the week.

For a student, fall is the real time of rebirth and renewal. Summer was your hibernation – drawing back into your nuclear family, replacing poetry classes with minimum-wage jobs, sorting out what went wrong over the past school year and how to improve it. And (unless you’re one of the fortunate ones who got to spend the summer traipsing all over Europe or something) it’s September that draws you back out into your larger world of peers, relationships, and challenges. September can be shaky, but by the time October comes around you’re just managing to get your footing in the new context – just in time for that burst of fall color and crisper, colder air, which somehow heightens the whole “You’re gonna make it after all” sentiment. I don’t know how. It just does.



It’s strange how, as a parent, I find myself living in this school-year paradigm again. Although honestly I don’t think I ever stopped. Nearly every 12-month lease in every single-girl apartment I ever had began in September, and I’d unload my books and Urban Outfitters knick knacks from their boxes with fresh optimistic resolve. As the weather got colder and darker, on some level I’d be telling myself “Okay, this is where I’m going to stay for a while,” and I’d seek small comforts as if storing them away for the winter.

In Binghamton I used to take long walks through the old part of town by myself, past all the junk shops, sometimes stopping at one of the glorious old-school diners for a grilled corn muffin and no-frills diner coffee. In Philly I’d wander from the Schuylkill to the Delaware, pausing in shops to gather Suddenly Tammy CDs or cozy sweaters before strolling home, wet yellow leaves under my feet (and ginkgo berries. Oh how I don’t miss those one little bit).



Fall can be a bit more heartbreaking in Seattle, since it heralds the next nine months of rain. But there’s a kind of beauty and optimism there, too. We seem to spend our summers anywhere but home – visiting my family on the east coast, exploring the northwest mountains or beaches, spending all day at the wading pool. Fall summons us back to the comforts of home and routine. And fall means the start of a new school year for the kids.

Up until now they’ve always attended cooperative preschool, and the transitions have been pretty much seamless. Preschool meets only a few half-days a week, one of which is my day to work in the classroom. Separation happens in small, manageable doses. You get to see your child in action among their peers (for better or for worse!), and the teachers are so incredibly generous with their time. But this year, things are a little different.

Last month I dropped The Boy off for his first day of full-day kindergarten at the big public K-8 school. I’m not sure I was completely aware of it at the time, but I was an absolute wreck those first few weeks. I couldn’t focus on anything. I could barely even eat. I don’t know what was so unnerving about it, exactly. Maybe just the feeling that Something Big Has Changed. He belongs just a little bit less to me now, and a little bit more to this imperfect world. Which is terrifying.

But I found some comfort in the faces of every other parent and child in that schoolyard every morning, because each one of them looked every bit as shell-shocked as me. Some kids clung to their parents. One mom stood outside her daughter’s classroom window until a teacher’s aide came out and asked her to leave. A girl clutched her teacher’s arm and wept steadily, while a particularly clever boy decided to just make a break for it and ran out of the school building after the final bell. And there was The Boy, taking it in and swallowing it down, trying so hard to hang in there.

“He’s doing fine,” his teacher reassured me, looking weary after her first full week with the newbies. She showed me his special chair where he knows to sit if he needs a break. She acknowledged that he gets upset sometimes. But she said he’s been so good at knowing how to calm himself down, and so good at articulating his feelings.

I like this teacher. She’s warm, smart, and positively fearless about feeding frozen mice to the class’s pet corn snake. Best of all . . . she truly doesn’t see my son as a problem. Her attitude has been so refreshingly positive and welcoming. She speaks openly with a bright and helpful tone, rather than in the hushed and worried tones of some other teachers he’s had.

And I can see The Boy responding. Not only is he making friends and learning new things at school, but he’s excited and actually proud to be a part of his class in a way I’ve never seen before. He seems to feel safe there. He seems to feel like he belongs. It’s a little sad, but a little wonderful, too, to see how positively he’s responded to a teacher who knows what the hell to do with him. What a difference a bigger pond makes.

And now it’s October. The fall color on the school playground has been positively stunning this week. The Boy used to insist on going straight home after school, but now he and his sister love to stay and play for another hour or so. Looking up at all those vibrant reds and yellows on the trees, I have the strangest sense of school-year déjà vu. This could be my old college campus; those old waves of anxiety, peace, and delight have barely changed even when I’m not the student anymore.

And as I said before, October is that time of year when the new context is just becoming joyfully familiar. I don’t want to jinx it, but I think we’re there. Oh yes, there will be challenges upon challenges ahead of us, I’m sure. But I’m also sure that we’re on a good path.

Happy fall.

Haunted

Mere minutes from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, it felt like I was the last soul left in the world as I steered my way through the gloomy country night. If the Headless Horseman happened to sidle up to my old Volvo, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised. I was already feeling haunted, though it was entirely of my own making.

I just couldn’t bring myself to admit it to my mom over the phone that afternoon – after Josh left; after we’d spent the last 18 hours gazing teen-style into each other’s eyes, telling our stories, holding each other as closely as we could – I couldn’t bring myself to say out loud that I might be falling in love (at last!) with a guy who was about to move far away (again!). Because this was getting to be embarrassing. I’d been in this situation so many times before, it was beginning to look like I was doing it on purpose.

But I wasn’t. Really. Josh was my co-worker’s roommate (well, he was crashing on my co-worker’s couch, but I didn’t know that until later), and we met at a work-related happy hour at some brew pub in trendy Manayunk. I was sitting with another co-worker and his frat brothers, one of whom was picking a fight with some dude who’d set his beer down on our table. When I slipped away from the drama to join the first co-worker at his table, I found myself sitting next to this adorable guy with glasses, a Phish hat, and a smirk to match my own. Practically upon introduction, we launched into one of those amazing conversations that makes you realize how much work most ordinary conversations usually are. It was seamless. He was witty and warm. I swear there was an actual twinkle in his eye.

He was also about five years younger than me, but I barely registered that fact. Who knows where things might have gone that night if the situation at the next table hadn’t escalated to a fist fight, getting us all kicked out of the bar. I got on my train back to Philly and hoped he’d call.

But he didn’t. I agonized over it for weeks, wondering if I should ask my co-worker to give him my number or not. Then one day at lunch, during a lull in the conversation, I suddenly found the nerve. My co-worker was so genuinely delighted to help, it warmed my heart. He was sure Josh would be happy about it. He’d talk to him. And then he mentioned that Josh was moving back in with his parents in Cincinnati at the end of the month. Was that a problem?

Maybe I should have slammed on the brakes right then, but I decided to go the carpe diem route. And it was wonderful. Every moment with that guy was pure dessert – rich, decadent restaurant dessert. We savored every minute of each other’s company. We talked and hugged so much; practically memorized each other’s faces. We spent one miserably cold October night cuddled up in my apartment – a mostly-clothed, relatively chaste encounter, but easily one of the most romantic nights of my singlehood.

It was early afternoon by the time he finally left, but I could already feel the darkness encroaching. We had one week left, and then he’d be gone for good. Incredible sadness poured in. Somehow, my mom knew to call me at that precise moment. And even though I just wasn’t able to tell her any of this, I think she got a general sense of my despair.

“Come to the pumpkin party tonight!” she urged. It was going to be so much fun! Her folk artist friend Barbara hosted a fabulous open house every Halloween featuring her fall paintings and a house full of jack o’ lanterns carved by the local high school students. I’d been hearing about it for years, but never attended one. From my lonely Center City apartment, it seemed like a world away. Which is exactly why I decided to go.

So there I was, driving down a deserted country road on a pitch-black night, haunted by the impending loss of a love that had barely blossomed. Somehow I was able to read my scribbled directions and navigate my way to the artist’s home. And there it was: A big old farmhouse overflowing with gleaming jack o’ lanterns. Every window exuded an amber glow that seemed to warm the chilly black night, and I could hear the sound of fiddles (actual fiddles!) and general merriment within.


Painting by Barbara Strawser

Apparently, I’d just missed my mom singing folk songs with the fiddlers. Every room was full of paintings and conversation with an eclectic bunch of local artists, family, and art lovers. I found my mom and Barbara in the kitchen and set to work helping them peel and core apples to bake with brown sugar and raisins. Working late most nights, living alone in the city within a block of falafel and Mexican take-out places, I hadn’t had much use for the kitchen lately. But it was comforting to find that my hands somehow remembered what to do with a baked apple.

I drifted from room to room just looking at the paintings and occasionally chatting with someone about my job. Josh barely crossed my mind. I felt so blissfully out of context as I wandered the pages of this storybook landscape. As the evening came to a close, Barbara approached me. Was I driving back to Philly tonight? Could I possibly give her friend Sebastian a ride? Sebastian lived only a few blocks from me, and it would make driving through that Sleepy Hollowesque gloom a little nicer. I agreed.

Sebastian, it turned out, was a little on the haunted side himself. Way more than me, actually. He’d recently lost his wife to cancer, and it was all so raw and vivid for him, still. He loved her so much, he could barely fathom that she simply wasn’t there anymore. He wanted to talk. I’m not much of a talker myself, so that was fine with me. And as we drove back to the city, we turned the Halloween hitchhiker paradigm on its ear as this lonely, deeply haunted man spoke of his lost wife and his various thoughts and philosophies about it all.

She’d wanted a dog, he said, toward the end when there wasn’t much more to do but huddle up at home to ride out the disease. She’d wanted a sweet little lap dog to give her that uniquely canine rush of pure, joyful love that the grieving humans in her life just couldn’t provide. But when they went to the local animal shelter, the only dog available for adoption was a big, goofy mixed breed with a scraggly coat. And that was it. She fell instantly in love with that dog. “Honey, Honey, are you sure?” he’d asked. She was sure. So sure. That was her dog, and she poured every ounce of love she could spare into the big furry guy. Sebastian had never been a fan of big dogs himself, but he loved that dog still, as much as she had.

I drove. I listened. It broke my heart and renewed my faith in love and humanity all at once. It was right out of Wings of Desire or something. And then he asked me about myself. What do you say after a story like that? “Boo hoo, I just met this cute guy who’s about to leave the city”? Hardly. So I tried to answer his questions as breezily as possible, but I think he still got a sense of the sadness I’d been holding. “Life is process,” he said thoughtfully. I’m not sure if he said that to comfort me or to comfort himself. I’m not even completely sure how he meant it. But for some reason, I did find that phrase incredibly comforting, and it’s stayed with me for years. Life is process. Indeed.

Back in the city, we went our separate ways. And a few nights later, I saw Josh for the very last time. It was a Halloween party, appropriately enough, at my co-worker’s place where Josh was still couch-crashing for a few days more. He dressed as Waldo from Where’s Waldo. I dressed as Velma from Scooby Doo. (Neither costume was much of a stretch for us.) The party was hilariously fun, but I found myself a bit distracted and sad.

When it was over, Josh and I wrapped ourselves in a sleeping bag on the living room floor for our last night together. The next morning, we had breakfast at a diner with the other roommates. Then we returned to the house alone, put on a Cowboy Junkies CD, and got right back in that sleeping bag for one last afternoon of soul cuddling. Still in his Waldo shirt, he told me he was so happy we’d met. It seemed like he was going to say something more, but his voice cracked, almost like a sob, and he just held me. He drove me home in the dark, reaching over to grab my hand at every opportunity. I watched as his car disappeared into the night. Gone. As if it had never happened at all. And I was alone again with the rest of the city’s lost souls.

I suppose I’d hoped, maybe even expected, to see Josh again. He hadn’t been very forthcoming about future plans, and after all my years of dating I’d learned to tread lightly on such matters. I did send him one letter, but I never heard back. I kept a widow watch at the mailbox for about a month before finally letting go.

I tucked the memory of Josh away like a memento; the perfect jewel of our experience just dangling from a strong, simple chain. We never would have made it as a couple. He was only 23 and we weren’t that much alike, really, in retrospect. Him leaving right as we were beginning to grow fond of each other somehow created the illusion that it was this Great Love. But the fact is, all relationships start out with this level of intense early bliss. They don’t typically end right at the crescendo like that.

Sadly, the very best relationships end like Sebastian’s. One partner fades away and the other is left with an overflowing heart of memories, sorrows, and joy. Haunted. It’s his story that I always remember this time of year. The truest, saddest, most beautiful ghost story I’ve ever heard. And it’s his insight that gets me through the gloomy patches of my own. Life is process.

“And You May Find Yourself Living in a Shotgun Shack”

October 13, 2001

I can’t believe our wedding was almost eight years ago. I’d love to regale you with all the hilarious mishaps, but the thing is . . . there weren’t any. It was deliciously perfect, complete with autumn leaves gently fluttering about as we walked down the aisle to This Mortal Coil’s “Song to the Siren.” We said our own vows under an archway of branches and sunflowers by a river in New Hope, Pennsylvania. My sister made our rings; my other sister gave the funniest, most moving, Oscar-clip worthy toast ever; and my uncle’s jazz quartet played on. Everyone important in our lives was there, from Mr. Black’s old grunge bandmates to his 90-year-old grandmother to our parents, cousins, and all the various best friends from each stage of my crazy singlehood. “Happiest day of my life” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

And then. Marriage.

In the beginning it was all beach trips and restaurants and joining the throng of bespectacled couples like ourselves at Scarecrow Video on Friday nights. Then one day, you wake up and this is outside your living room window, right where the driveway used to be:



No, I’m not speaking metaphorically. This actually happened. An 8-foot-deep, oil-contaminated, festering pit took up residence on our property. And, okay, it didn’t exactly happen overnight. But it happened pretty quickly, and at the worst possible time.

Our marriage had already taken a bit of a bruising from a little miscarriage situation, one after the other during that first year-and-a-half. But just when we least expected it, I got pregnant and the darn thing decided to stick around this time. We were cautiously ecstatic.

When my company closed its Seattle office and I lost my job, it felt like a blessing in disguise. I’d been waffling over whether to return to full-time work after I had the baby; now the decision had been made for me. We had some money saved up to support a single-income lifestyle for a while. And I’d have two months all to myself until the baby would be born. Everything was comin’ up Millhouse.

Sort of. Even with no job, there was a lot of work to be done . . . particularly on the “property management” front. We were having an incredibly rainy winter (even for Seattle), and our basement was flooding almost daily. Then, just when I’d lined up a contractor to install drains and a sump pump, our ancient furnace started going out on a daily basis. I kept calling the oil company to fix it. Finally, we discovered that rainwater was getting into the underground oil tank and putting the furnace out. And if water was leaking in . . . well, then, oil must be leaking out.

What happened next was a series of phone calls, questions, arguments, and procedures – the details of which I’ve mostly blocked from memory. I remember the removal of a frightfully decrepit oil tank along with a few tons of contaminated soil. And I remember struggling to make sense of all the information coming in, scribbling it over and over again in my notebook, trying to put it into some kind of order. As an amateur property manager, I was in way over my head. But I must have been faking it pretty well, because Mr. Black was always asking me questions and getting irritated with the answers (as if I knew what I was talking about in the first place).

What it all boiled down to was this: The contamination was extensive and predated our ownership of the house by many years. The company that removed our tank wanted to just keep digging and digging until the soil tested clean, but we’d blown through a significant portion of our savings to pay for the few tons they’d removed already.

Eventually, we would hire a geologist and an environmental lawyer and find a more efficient way to get it cleaned up. But during those first confusing weeks, with our savings dwindling and my due date approaching, neither of us was in a clear enough frame of mind to arrive at a good solution. Mr. Black wanted the previous owner to pay for the cleanup. I wanted to hide under a pile of coats à la Homer Simpson. Out of our league, frustrated, and scared, we fought like a sack of cats.

I’d like to say that the arrival of our son made everything all better, but anyone who’s lived with a newborn baby for even a few hours will recognize that for the damn lie it is! Oh, don’t get me wrong – we were amazed and joyful and madly in love with the little guy and all that good stuff. But there wasn’t a whole lot of sleep going on, either. We were in those clueless days of early parenthood when it takes both parents and a Dr. Sears manual just to change one diaper. And the crying. Oh, the crying.

Meanwhile the pit lived on, baffling all the friends and well-wishers who stopped by to see the baby. One afternoon I was standing at the window with my friend Ana, explaining the whole absurd situation for the umpteenth time, when we saw a large orange hamster slip through the chain link fence that surrounded the pit. It waddled closer and closer to the edge, sniffing.

Ana ran outside to divert the little bugger, but it was too late. We braced ourselves for the worst and peered into the bottom. No sign of the hamster. Before there was even time to look at each other helplessly, we heard children’s voices calling down the street.

“Daisy Mae! Daisy Mae!”

Gulp. I held my three-week-old baby close, hoping it would buy me some sympathy. As my neighbor and her two grandchildren approached, I blurted out my confession.

“I’m so sorry. Your hamster fell into our hole. Oh I feel just terrible. Please let me buy you another one. I’m so sorry.”

The grandmother, who’d been carrying Daisy Mae in her purse when she’d made a break for it, seemed suspiciously not disappointed by this turn of events. She just smiled and insisted it was okay, wouldn’t hear of me replacing the hamster. Meanwhile, her grandchildren pressed their faces up against our chain link fence, looking for their lost pet.

“Look! There she is!” one of them exclaimed. And there, swimming furiously through the pool of oily rainwater at the bottom of the pit, was Daisy Mae. We watched in amazement as she made it to the water’s edge, where she dug herself a little hole and huddled inside. What now?

Ana tried lowering various items into the pit for the hamster to crawl into – an old hanging basket, a bucket on the end of a pole. No deal. More and more neighbors kept coming over and trying different hare-brained schemes, but Daisy Mae wouldn’t budge. Ana called the fire department and the Humane Society, but rescuing a hamster was apparently pretty low on their priority lists. A few neighborhood cats hovered like vultures around the edge of the pit while Daisy Mae huddled tighter into her hole.

Finally, I called the company that dug the pit in the first place. I explained the situation and waited for the guy to tell me to take a hike. Instead, I heard him yell to a co-worker “Hey Bill, we got another pet rescue!”

Within a few minutes, Bill arrived at our place with a ladder, rubber overalls, and hazmat gloves. By now quite a crowd was gathered around our pit. The children had climbed our neighbor’s tree to get a better view. Bill climbed down into the pit, scooped up Daisy Mae and put her in a bucket, and returned to the crowd’s triumphant cheers. He handed the oily little rodent to the grateful children and their less-than-thrilled grandmother. Right about then, Mr. Black arrived home from work with a giant question mark over his head.

Yes, we were a long way from that perfect October afternoon by the river. It would be months before the pit would be filled back in; years before our soil would be clean and even longer before we’d reach a settlement agreement with the previous owner. Meanwhile, there were money problems, more miscarriages, and the uniquely terrifying challenges of parenthood.

With all we’ve been through, it’s hard to believe it’s only been eight years. Even though we were in our early thirties when we got married, it’s sort of like we’ve grown up together. We’re not done with life’s challenges, not by a long shot. But together, we learned how to do this “grown up” stuff at all.

We’ve come out on the other side still very much in love, but a little scrambled. Maybe a little wounded. Maybe a little more benignly detached than we want to be. But there’s such a strong, simple, understated fondness here. We simply belong to each other. We’ve seen each other bleed, cry, and suffer humiliating defeat; we’ve given each other our imperfect best; and we belong to each other. In other words, we’re family.



Sigh . . . look at those crazy lovebirds. Happy anniversary, honey.