In the corner

They showed Dirty Dancing at the 1988 JEA convention I attended in San Francisco, VHS on a bleary projection t.v. in the hotel ballroom one night. I enjoyed it, sure, but at the climactic moment of the big final dance number, I don't know what possessed me: I leaned over to Holly beside me and stage-whispered:

Do you think they're going to do THE LIFT?!?

Oh, she was annoyed.

I don't know...I was more rattled by the passing of John Hughes, but Patrick Swayze seemed like a good guy and never took himself too seriously. He fought a very dignified battle, poor man.

Four stages

1. My dad drove a succession of pickup trucks throughout my lifetime: a green '49 Ford, I think, in my babyhood--at speeds over 30 mph, it shimmied all over the road and I loved it like a carnival ride. Over the years his trucks got gradually less Sanford-and-Son; his last was a silvery-gray extended-cab, camper shell, decent stereo, and I can't think of the make or model.

But someone in my neighborhood owns a similar truck, and even a year later every time I glimpse it coming down my street my heart jumps, for an instant, and I am ready to run out onto the sidewalk with happy surprise. It has been so long, where the hell have you been?

2. I was crazy for baseball even as a little girl...though I wanted only to hit, was uninterested in defensive play. I didn't get to play Little League; girls' teams were rarer, then, and anyway no one was available to take me to after-school practices. My grandfather indulged me, though, pitching to me for hours in the front yard where we'd marked out a long, narrow diamond.

Dad played beer-league softball one summer. They had somehow mustered up real uniforms, stirrup socks and all, not just t-shirts, and in my eyes this qualified him for Cooperstown. I had a snapshot of him in full regalia for years, a crooked picture I'd taken myself, pressing the shutter too soon, Dad half in, half out of the doorway. Chiaroscuro. I can't find it, now, can't remember if we went to any of his games.

Me and Mom and Sis and Mr. Sis went to the Mariners' second home game, this season (retro-Griffeymania precluded our getting four seats together for the opener). It was a beautiful evening, and an M's win; we had peanuts and beer and stone-cold overpriced hot dogs, and it was a blast like it always is.

Privately, though, I keep thinking about how, for nine years, I'd invited Dad to drive up and go to a game at the Safe with me. Outdoor baseball the way God intended! We could go to a night game and I would put him up here overnight. Or I would pay for a hotel room if he preferred. Or I'd take a day off and we'd go to a day game and he could drive back that afternoon, if he insisted. Kettlecorn and jumbo dogs and foam fingers and the best seats I could afford, any time, any month, year after year I offered--begged, really--but he never took me up on it. Couldn't spare roughly three summer hours in the ballpark, no matter how I asked, and thinking about this I am less sad than furious. Furious.

3. It's a babypalooza around me, lately. My personal trainer, three ladies in my book club, one of the writers on my team. I am enjoying going a little berserk, for all the showers. For the most recent one, I was at a schmancy toy store, and among the hand-carved wooden push toys and the organic felted-wool blocks made by a Guatemalan women's collective, there was inexplicably a chunky plastic toy tractor, with attendant chunky plastic farmer. Bright yellow and green, officially John Deere-licensed. Dad was a tractor buff, and a brand loyalist; one of the biggest Christmas scores I'd made in the last decade was when I bought him and Kathy a four-place setting of John Deere logoed plates, wheat sheaves around the rim, tractor shining in the middle. So when I saw this lurid toy jumbled on the shelf, I laughed, first. Then in the space of ten seconds I was weepy, fumbling for Kleenex in my purse, practically running to the register to buy something definitely else.

4. A dream, this week: that Dad and Kathy are renewing their wedding vows. They are making an enormous production out of it, too, a big ceremony, caterers...and among their wishes is that Sis and I dress in matchy-matchy fashion, much as we did in 1979, ringbearers in prairie dresses. It's all very awkward and uncomfortable as we fret and change clothes and try to arrange carpools to the venue, running late...and something else is bothering me about the whole scenario, too, but in the dream I cannot put my finger on it. It is only upon waking that the nagging sensation lifts, that I remember oh, yeah. Right. That.

In lieu of brunch or jewelry

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend, and the conversation somehow turned to mothers: our own, other people's, how the state of motherhood for her is imminent. And I allowed myself to vent, a little bit, as we riffed on the annoying habits of Mothers We Had Known In Some Capacity. I skewered my mother for what is--when I am feeling charitable--a fundamental aspect of her character, and--when I am feeling otherwise--her most maddening flaw: a congenital need to vocalize every. single. little. butterfly thought that happens to alight for an instant in her brain. This often takes the form of rhetorical questions, in life ("Why is there so much traffic?" or "What is it like, this restaurant to which neither of us have ever been?") and, more torturously, during movies and t.v. shows ("Wait, who is that guy? Is he the murderer? What did he say?") I'm pretty sure that my mother, most of the time, is paying scarcely any more attention to what's coming out of her mouth than I am; she just can't help it, likes to hear her own voice, the bright noise of syllables tumbling over each other, dit-dit-dit-dit, like the flurry of hash marks that denoted Woodstock's dialogue in Peanuts.

This is one way in which we're completely different, Mom and I. I like to craft and hone my words, whether spoken or on the page; I consider (and probably overthink) every sentence, given the opportunity. I dwell on other people's words, too, and this has led us to some crises, my mother and I. She has a formidable gift--and maybe this is simply the province of moms, something they all can do--for blurting out a comment or opinion that will cut me to the bone, excise a little chunk of my soul with surgical precision...and after nearly 40 years I honestly believe that she doesn't intend it to hurt, doesn't realize when it might, as unconscious as she seems to be to her own every verbalized momentary notion. Again, as is my nature, I will hoard and mull over a wounding remark, stewing for a week or three months or 21 years, depending. In recent years, when I've had the courage to confront Mom, after some interval of aforementioned stewing, she is always apologetic and contrite; she'll swear she never meant to hurt me...and then she'll more quietly admit that she doesn't remember saying whatever it was that caused me to have my latest private tantrum breakdown.

Mom's traveling right now, two weeks overseas; she won't be here to celebrate Mother's Day proper. Maybe that spurred me to open the floodgates a little wider, at lunch? I snarked on my absent, vacationing, dreamily oblivious mother; it was like my 20-minute set onstage at the Improv, and together my friend and I rolled our eyes and laughed and agonized. Mothers! Can't live with 'em, can't throw 'em from the train. What are you gonna do? You are gonna suck it up, and then you are gonna take them out for Eggs Benedict on Sunday like everyone else in America, or like I'll have to do next weekend, the end.

When I got home yesterday, there was a letter from my mother in the mail.

Not a postcard from Croatia, either: an envelope, a greeting card, mailed locally. I admit that I opened it with some trepidation, thinking What now? What'd I do? Had she psychically known that I'd been taking the piss out of her that very afternoon?

But I was wrong. Today, May 9, would have been my father's 65th birthday. That was what my mother had written me about: she anticipated that this would be a difficult day for me, and she wanted to tell me not to be too sad. That I had been a good daughter, and that Dad had known this too.

She'd thought about this, and she'd written it out beforehand, in between packing and consulting her guidebook and obsessively checking twenty times (a trait we do share) to make sure she had her passport and her blood pressure meds and, like, six pairs of reading glasses in her carry-on. She'd considered this in advance, and then she'd timed it, left the letter and instructions with her housesitter so that it would be mailed a week after she'd left. So it would arrive on the right day, when she knew I'd need to hear it. She knew, before I ever knew, that I would need to hear it.

And this is my mom in a nutshell, really. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, she's blithely orbiting Planet Margo, nattering, distracted, and I'm convinced that she is paying no attention whatsoever. And then she will have a moment like this, of purest grace; she'll set the bar that high, and then clear it by at least a foot, sailing effortlessly over it, and I am astonished and touched and humbled by her gesture. Made small, and then redeemed, by my mother's gaze when suddenly it falls on me after all. Mama, you don't often connect with a pitch, but when you do, you get all of it. That ball is still rising.

I know she'll read this eventually, when she's home. I hope she can read between my lines, and will know that these words, like any others, I have been carefully shaping and pruning for 24 hours now. I hope she'll take this in the spirit it's intended, a portrait as honest as I can make it: perhaps not entirely an ideal rendering of her, but one in which I flatter myself far less. I love you, Mom. Thank you for being you. Thank you for being. Your mimosa awaits.

Chestnuts

When I used to work in a bookstore, I had one particular customer interaction over and over. Someone would come up to the counter with a book whose price was written in obscurely tiny type, or buried weirdly in the bar code, or occasionally they'd be brandishing an impulse-buy object whose price sticker was peeling or lost. Every one of these shoppers would say the exact same thing: "I can't find a price on this. Is it free?"

Then they'd stand there, grinning smugly, pleased with themselves...because by God, they were really going to put one over on the ol' mall chain outlet! I always wondered what they wanted from me: mere praise for their scintillating wit? Or did they expect me to throw up my hands in bewilderment, all well, that is not how commerce has worked for at least the last century or so, but YOU GOT ME THIS TIME, sir or madam! I mean...did this fly in other stores? I was a cashier there for five years; how many times was I on the receiving end of this line, in half a decade? Fifty? A hundred?

Enough times to remember it, and enough times that once--just the once--I lost my patience. It was late, technically after closing but this one guy had been dawdling around, taking his sweet time even when my manager had pulled the gate halfway down and stood brandishing the vacuum cleaner ten feet away. (That was another common trope, the I Do Not Understand Hours Of Operation customer. Once I had someone ask me if I couldn't just count the money out of the safe while they were still browsing a little; possibly this was just the most hapless holdup ever.) Finally dude approached the counter with some allegedly price-less item. "I can't find the price on this. Is it free?" he asked brightly.

And I don't know what came over me, because I looked this man right in the eye and said, brighter still, "Wow. I have NEVER HEARD that FUNNY JOKE BEFORE!"

Beside me my colleague Alan dropped wordlessly to the floor--ostensibly to get a bag for the man's purchases, but really to stick his head into one of the under-counter cubbyholes and laugh. I guess I am lucky that the customer was not prone to Mall Rage; he stood there so gobsmacked that I don't think he said another word, just meekly paid whatever the (probably easily identifiable price) was and scurried out. I should have told him it was a hundred bucks and split it with Alan, maybe.

Anyway. I have been thinking of this story all week, because I have been the recipient of a lot of similar well-intended information or advice...that only a cave-dwelling nincompoop would find illuminating. It started with the doctor's appointment, my scheduled-two-weeks-ago session with the clinic psychiatrist to explore a new Crazy Pills prescription. Alas, when I showed up, they'd scheduled me for the wrong shrink, the other one, who does not dispense meds. No, I'd have to go through the referral and scheduling process again; come back in three weeks, thank you, sorry.

But I still had an hour on the clock with Shrink #1, so she asked me to stay and tell her my problems. And I realize that, in a single first meeting, we were not going to do any deep digging. I have a therapist for that; I've been going to Dr. Professional Friend for, like, 12 years off and on. But I'm a grade-grubber at heart, so I tried to be a good little nutbar and get the abridged version of my present depression on the table. In turn, the doctor gave me several suggestions, among them "get more exercise!" and "go out and make new friends!" I didn't know how to respond, truly. Was I supposed to leap up off the couch and scream "I'm cured!!"? Because, you know, I might have entertained these ideas once or twice before, and I certainly see their validity, and yet I cannot seem to do them, PERHAPS BECAUSE I STILL FEEL LIKE SHIT AND AM HERE FOR SOME DRUGS HELLO.

Three weeks. Ironically, I was so annoyed at this comedy of errors that anger has been a strange motivator; I'm more irritated than depressed. Perhaps my wrathful disdain will continue to build, and I'll be perktastic by May?

Another delight this week was that my regular physician sent me the results of my latest bloodwork; my fasting glucose is high (as it was back before I lost--and then regained--a bunch of weight), and she wants me to schedule another appointment, to come in and discuss pre-diabetes prevention with her. (Thanks, Dad, for this legacy to go along with the nose. AWESOME.) I like my doctor, and I believe that she does in fact have my best interests at heart...but I was disheartened, myself, by the "Pre-Diabetes For Dummies" flier she inserted with the lab results; it encouraged me to lose weight, reasonably enough...but then came with its own set of lowest-common-denominator-dipshit suggestions for how one might do this, including "park further away from your destination!" and "switch sugary sodas and juices for diet drinks...or water!" Because as we know, all fatties are inert, except when lifting an arm to stick a burger into their blubbery maws.

I did manage to bring this up with my trainer, this morning; we had a nice chuckle. Between the three sets of fifteen pushups I did, bitchezz.

Clearly I need to flesh (haha) this plan out into a self-help bestseller: Lose Weight and Feel Great, with the easy Everyone Else is An Aggravating Moron program. It will cost one hundred dollars, and that will be printed in 36-point type, right there on the front cover.

Looking up

I carry on. I'm still not feeling 100%...but the sun has tried to come out a few times in the past couple weeks (today a notable exception, ugh). The cherry trees up and down my block have blown out in full pink puffy madness. I dug out the weedy, bereft planters on my deck and front porch and filled them with pansies. I went to one baby shower yesterday and have another on the calendar for next week, and you really cannot put up much of a fight in the face of cake and presents and bubblegum cigars in pink and blue, dinosaur-patterned sleepers and an inflatable bathtub in the shape of a big yellow duck. My spirits, they are lifted. Possibly with some grunting and straining, scrabbling up the side of a cliff, hanging onto roots...Wile E. Coyote passing me on his rocket sled on the way down...but I'm getting up there.

This, as much as anything, gave me a boost this week: an outbreak of "spontaneous" musical theatre in a Belgian train station.



Sure, it's rehearsed and expertly coordinated. I've watched it five times (shut up) and can see, now, that even some of the "bewildered" onlookers we're shown at first are in fact plants, who drop their bags and rush in as it keeps going, and going, and going. But when the schoolkids come boiling down the stairs? I am totally powerless to resist them, or the white-haired grandma singing and dancing her heart out, or the dude trying to stay cool by the ATM, but he can't help clapping along. Love. It. Nothing like this ever happens to me, but I've always wanted it to--perhaps because of that steady diet of movie musicals when I was a kid.

The train-station locale helps, too--there's something about such a place, a cathedral to banality most days. You rush through your commute oblivious to the beauty around you--the spectacle of the space and of the tide of humanity storming through it--until something makes you look up. What? It reminded me of my favorite scene in The Fisher King, where Robin Williams's homeless, addled character spots the girl he secretly loves, coming through Grand Central Terminal.



I first saw this when I was in college, at the Bronxville NY cinema packed with probably hundreds of commuters who took the Metro-North in to Grand Central every day. I'll never forget the sound they made when this scene came up, when everyone started to dance: aaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh, a collective sigh, a little chuckly swoon of romance vocalized by every person in the room. All of us recognizing something we'd forgotten to look up for, for far too long. This is what it's like, I thought then and think now, to be in love in New York (and with New York). When you're in love, Grand Central looks like this all the time.

So. Dancing in train stations. It's probably for a commercial of some sort--many of the related YouTube links go to a similar all-hands dance-off in a London station, shot for T-Mobile. But don't tell me. I'd rather it was a prank for the sheer joy of it, the Belgian version of one of Improv Everywhere's missions--a gift freely given, something to make others walk away wondering, and grinning to themselves a bit every time they remember. It's working for me: it reminds me that I can't be unhappy forever, in a world where this happens, where people come together to turn out these little moments of wonder amidst the everyday grind. Look Up More, they say. I'm trying.

(Allow me to also recommend some other favorites from the IE folks: Frozen Grand Central, The Moebius, Romantic Comedy Cab, and Will You Marry Me?)

* * * * *

Coincidentally, The Sound of Music was on ABC Family last night. Is that considered an Easter movie?...maybe because it has lots of nuns? Anyway, I ended up watching the first third or so, up through the "Do-Re-Mi" number in fact. It was an interesting experience; the songs are practically embedded in my DNA, but I had pretty much forgotten any and all of the dialogue and scenery between them. Maria wanted to join the convent because she used to spy on them over the wall as a child and enjoyed their singing? That is...not the most substantial commitment to faith I've ever heard, let's just say. When I was a kid I wanted to be a librarian, but because I thought they got to live in the library. Later, I discovered the holes in this theory. Maria.

But it was fun. Sis prized the soundtrack album, on vinyl, a bit before she discovered Madonna and Run-D.M.C. I remember when the movie used to get an annual network airing--around Christmas, if memory serves--nuns again? It was a Television Event, and we'd get jammies on early and gather around the set, maybe even have popcorn. But! It's a long movie. Mom was a stickler about bedtimes, and I can remember at least once, probably on first viewing, being sent to bed precisely when the VonTrapps were fleeing the Nazis. Seriously, Mom! Come ON!

"They get away. Go to sleep," she'd say, turning out the light. Yeah, that worked. Sweet dreams! Heh.

It was all yellow

I haven't been around much, maybe you've noticed. If I have any readers left, I mean. I wish I had a better excuse--or any excuse, really, some singular thing to pin this on: the weather, these long long months of unusually sleety, snowy, relentless Seattle gray. Missing my father. The heartbreaking demise of one of the local print newspapers, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, whose weighty, creaky, neoned globe revolving slowly overhead used to scare the crap out of me when I was a little girl--I never trusted it not to fall. A soy allergy, like Sis is currently being tested for. Something. Something to point at, to identify and then eradicate from my life in one smooth gesture, problem solved. Doctor, it hurts when I go like this.

I've fought depression, off and on, for years; I have been periodically medicated, with pills and sometimes with, you know, loaves of bread. Also brie. And I know that I have some legitimate reasons to be blue--2008 was a tough year. For a while, now, I've wanted to feel whatever it is I feel, to allow myself unmitigated, unmuffled emotions: of grief, yes, but also of excitement at the new job, relief at leaving the old job, screamy joy at a friend's adoption referral finally, finally coming through. I have these little spikes of happiness like that, out with the girls for pizza and beer or whatever, laughing and laughing and carrying that feeling home like a little coal. But more often than not, lately, it winks out overnight. I have insomnia, thrashing around at 3 a.m, 3:45, 4:17, 5:02...and then at 5:30 my bed is the most magnificently comfortable place on earth and I can hardly bear to leave it. I think--I know--that I would feel better if I went to yoga. I would feel better if I made a beautiful risotto, an hour of chopping and patient stirring. I would feel better if I wrote. I do none of those things.

A couple weeks ago I had a moment, an instant I can describe as a genuine physical and even visual experience. I'd gone to one of my coffee haunts, armed with a notebook and good intentions, fortified with caffeine and a donut. I sat down in front of the blank page, and I glanced around the room at all the other people, the couples and families, the folks intent on laptops or entertainment listings, everyone seeming opaque and obscenely happy...and I felt depression rushing back over me like a physical entity. I saw it, a shock wave rolling over the horizon, this undulating ripple that was going to knock me to the ground, and all I had time to say to myself was "oh, no." Oh, no. There it was. Here it is.

So. I made myself an appointment today, to go back to the doctor and suggest, a little grudgingly, that perhaps it is time again for a chemical cocktail, some new crazy pills to even things out a bit. Considering that antidepressents worked fairly well for me in the past, with minimal side effects, I'm amused and perplexed by my own reluctance, by how stubbornly I have tried to bully and bluff my way through. I'm grouchy! I don't want to take my medicine! Even if they made it in grape flavor! God! Why can't everyone just leave me alone oh my god come back I am sorry help. Shut up, serotonin, god!

Having actually made the appointment is, surprise, half the battle--the shade rolled up a little, it's Friday, the Gordian knot in my chest loosened one loop's worth. This morning at Fancy Gym, they were handing out wee bunches of daffodils at the front door, celebrating the first day of spring. I took mine to the office and plopped them in a vase on the corner of my desk, where I could see them all day just at the corner of my vision: sunny, dopily defiant, a tiny blaze of yellow unfolding in a plain white room. The belt around my lungs has loosened one more notch. I can take a deep breath, and another.

(photo stolen years ago from, I think, one of those P-I photographers--sorry, person, and I wish I could credit you now)

Remember who your dad really is

Yes, I am quoting the Bush twins. Roll with me, and we'll see if I can bring this thing around.

* * * * *

It’s been three weeks already, since I was driving to Mom’s and listening to This American Life—episode 372, The Inauguration Show. So, pre-Inauguration, technically. It was the final act that got me: the segment where multiple reporters interviewed people all across the country for their thoughts and feelings about the new President coming up over the horizon. They talked to barflies and ecstatic, astounded civil-rights activists, a smattering of OMG SEKRIT MUSLIM!!!1! paranoiacs, a kid in Kentucky whose friend registered as a Republican and voted for Obama just to mess with the party’s collective psyche. And then there was the guy who was excited for the new administration not because of any identifiable political agenda—or none that he cared to discuss—but because he had been teaching himself to belch the new President’s name.

Did we want to hear his first name? Just his last? Or the whole magilla? “Don’t distract me with your laughter,” the man said gravely, and the reporter obligingly stifled his giggles while the subject gulped preparatory air. A tense moment, and then: “BuuuUUHRACKOBUHMUH,” a froggy exhalation. The reporter dissolved, and me? I burst out laughing and crying in the same instant, because it was gross, and juvenile, and totally, exactly something my father would have done. Used to do, in fact. Dad had a belchy repertoire--sections of the alphabet, a few names he favored: Ralph, Bruce. No one we knew, but names that lent themselves well to the medium. Of burping. Rrraaaaalllph!

I stumbled into Mom’s for our lunch date looking…emotional, and bless her, because as soon as I began fumbling to explain this asinine, hilarious, heart-tugging pang, she knew immediately where my mind had gone. “You thought of your dad,” she said calmly, patting my back in a hug, and I laughed on, and wiped my eyes, and then pulled myself together enough to get down on the floor and install her digital cable converter. Which I am sure I would also need to be doing for my dad if he was still alive.

I don’t know, really, what Dad would have made of President Obama. I suspect that he would not have been thrilled, would be dubious and wary at best, however troubled he’d been by Dubya’s hellish muddle in Iraq. Sis reports that stepmom Kathy declared, in one of their recent conversations, that Dad would have really admired the Vietnam-vet contender, “McClain.” Um. No Beltway wonk she, ol’ Kathy. So I can’t guess how Dad might have filled out his ScanTron bubble, given the opportunity. But I can easily picture him shotgunning a store-brand diet soda and standing precipitously in the kitchen, a little bug-eyed with held breath and anticipation, grinning, mischievous, in the pregnant pause before he let fly.

* * * * *

In recent weeks, I’ve started dreaming about my dad, though he’d never previously been a fixture of my REM-cycle universe. A couple nights ago, I dreamed that I had gone down to La Center to visit him. I was riding around with him in his truck, for a lunch outing or something, and it was taking too long and frankly quite tedious and I was fretting about needing to get back…somewhere, home or work or something. But part of the reason it was taking forever was that he was adamant about making a little side trip to go visit his grave. This was not bizarre, in the dream, only awkward and exasperating. It was only upon waking that I had some questions, not least of which was “should I have let the dead man drive?”

Also funny was that when we eventually arrived at the cemetery, someone else was having a huge blowout funeral picnic barbecue event of some sort, crowding all the plots with their Igloo coolers and memorial quilts and what have you, and Dad was even more annoyed. Because they were all in his way. How could you even find the damn stone in this mess? And finally, there was some sort of Eternal Flame monument in his area of the cemetery, but it was decidedly NOT eternal, because it had a slot for change or dollar bills like a vending machine, and you had to feed it some cash to get the flame to belch briefly alight. Which my father grumpily did.

I woke from this feeling jolly, rather than bereft. It was comforting, in a way I am hard-pressed to describe: that nine months in the afterworld had changed Dad not at all. Nor had our relationship changed in the slightest. He drove, he complained reflexively about traffic and immigrants and What Things Cost, and I feigned patience and let his most offensive statements roll off my shoulders and away, surreptitiously checking my watch. As ever, I was quietly amused by his bluster, the terrible jokes he’d gotten off the Internet. There we were, tooling down the highway, exactly the same and still ourselves.

Our land

Holly said to me today (over the squawks of baby Ian) that when I didn't even post a word about the Presidential Inauguration, she knew I had to be busy. Which is true. Arguably not as busy as she is, with a three-year-old and a seven-week-old in the house...just different parameters. Two weeks ago I started a new job, though still within the bosom of NerdCo, and I think that is all I will say about that, given the current clime. I am grateful, and happy, and damn lucky, the end.

But yes, I took Tuesday off to witness the peaceful exchange of power in America, and honestly that ritual is always an extraordinary thing. In years past, sometimes, perhaps an extraordinarily boring thing, but still.

I stepped off my front porch in the foggy, frosty pre-dawn hours and settled my stars-and-stripes into the flag bracket on the front of the house, because my patriotism is my privilege. Even when I have disagreed with and despaired of my country's politics, I have flown a flag. That flag is mine; that flag belongs still more to the thousands upon thousands of men and women who have died to protect the ideals it represents. I also recognize that the flag is only a symbol, a swatch of fabric I picked up at the Home Depot, in a package stamped with an eagle. I will defend to the death your right to burn that flag, and I will proudly suspend it from my home on those days when I feel brimful of pride and hope and renewed faith in this remarkable experiment of a nation I've grown up in.

When the sun fully came up, I saw that the neighbors across the street had put out their flag, too. We have been known to get competitive with our Christmas-light-stringing, so this sight tickled me. We're all in this together.

But I'm getting off track. Or am I? Mom came down from Mukilteo, and we threw the coffeemaker into hyperdrive and stared reverently, ecstatically at the television for three hours. We tittered at Dick Cheney being wheeled around like a supervillain, because, okay, we're a little mean. (He is, on the whole, much meaner; Mom and I have never, for example, shot any friends in the face.) We adored those beautiful, composed little girls--Malia, your Flickr pool is going to be amaaaaaayyzing. We kowtowed our unworthiness to the marvel that was Aretha Franklin's hat, because damn, that was A SERIOUS HAT. And when they asked the attendees to rise for the oath, Mom and I stood up. Like dopes, we stood in front of my living-room sofa, irritating the cat with our nth rearrangement of her favorite fleece blankie, and we held our breath and hung onto each other and wept and laughed and believed in change, for a minute, for a week, and maybe for eight long years, we hoped. We hope.

And then we went out for pancakes.

* * * * *

I know he will disappoint me, eventually, sooner than later. He'll let me or you or us down, he'll make a small mistake or a huge one. He'll get mired in something ugly and unmanageable, because politics is a dirty business and President Obama, like any president, is just a man. Human, falliable. I've let myself down in at least ten small ways since Tuesday alone, and like everyone I groan and smack my forehead and consider where I might lay the blame...and then I get up the next morning and face the blank slate of potentially doing it all over again, some good, some ill. But the grace period is hanging tough, so far. I admit it: each time I hear the phrase "President Obama" on the nightly newscast, or see it in print, or type it myself like I just did twice, I get a little tingle. Yep! It's still true! That totally HAPPENED! To see him sitting behind that desk; to hear him moving forward on closing Gitmo and lifting the global gag rule; to read his official statement in Salon yesterday:

"On the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we are reminded that this decision not only protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, but stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters. I remain committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose.

While this is a sensitive and often divisive issue, no matter what our views, we are united in our determination to prevent unintended pregnancies, reduce the need for abortion, and support women and families in the choices they make. To accomplish these goals, we must work to find common ground to expand access to affordable contraception, accurate health information, and preventative services.

On this anniversary, we must also recommit ourselves more broadly to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights and opportunities as our sons: the chance to attain a world-class education; to have fulfilling careers in any industry; to be treated fairly and paid equally for their work; and to have no limits on their dreams. That is what I want for women everywhere."

Well. I am going to coast on this for a while, I am. Godspeed, Mr. President.

Come on, it's lovely weather

Snow day! If you're a local reader, you know that we all tend to go bananas here at the merest hint of winter weather. Yesterday was a case in point; snow threatened, the schools were closed, I was the only person from my team to make it to the office...and then in Seattle proper, absolutely nothing happened. Hope you enjoyed the free Cloud Day, kids!

Today is a different story. Snow started sifting down in the wee hours of the morning, a deceptively delicate powdered-sugar dusting that just...wouldn't...quit. Worse still seemed the snowy bedlam pouring down on the east side of Lake Washington, to the point that one of the genial local news anchors lost his shit after watching the twentieth person swerve around the "road closed" signs and orange cones to try to climb the steep on-ramp to 520. (And fail, it goes without saying.) "You people are idiots!" he fumed, throwing his pen in the air, thumping the desk. "The road is closed! There's a bus in the ditch! There might be people working on that ramp right now and you're going to hurt them!"

"Alan, you need to move on," said his lady co-host eventually. It was impressive.

So. I sent my "oh, hell no" e-mail to my colleagues, before the NerdCo servers foundered under the onslaught of stranded geeks trying to log in from all over the city. Snowbound! Free day off! I spent several hours under a pile of blankets and cats before realizing the true impending crisis of my incarceration: I was out of toilet paper. Of course. Time to dress up like a wintry mental patient and flounder to the store. I was glad I still had a pair of old Doc Marten boots--not ideal, but better than encasing my feet in plastic bread bags like one of my grandmothers used to insist on.

And there is something to be said for the atmosphere, the rare and gripping challenge of walking in the snow in Seattle, trudging along for a purpose. There is the amazing silence, nothing but the sifting, sighing snow around your ears and the crump, crump of your own footsteps--it feels as good as it sounds. Occasionally there's a jangle of wind chimes, or tire chains. Occasionally also the shivery whine of an engine trying to turn over, revving and revving, stranded in the intersection: oops. Or the sound of tires sliding, behind you--not as comforting.

But there were kids out and about, on plastic toboggans and sleds and snowboards, and two teens sharing a single set of skis, one each. Another girl struggled to glide with what appeared to be a couple lengths of ornamental crown molding strapped to her feet; not sure how that played out as I crumped past. Kids pelted their mothers with snowballs, hollered "Push me!" or "Pull me!"

The Java Bean next to the market was open, praises be. Armed with coffee, I wandered the aisles, soaking up the general party atmosphere and buying both necessities and...not: donuts and good cheddar and chocolate-chip-cookie ingredients, because what else are you going to do on a snow day, besides drink cocoa and eat crap? Besides, I'd get my workout lugging it all back home through the drifts. The man behind me in line was buying a 12-pack of pilsner and four rolls of giftwrap. "You can see how the rest of my afternoon is going to go!" he said jovially. "Gradually, the packages will get messier, and messier..."

And so I crumped back home, shifting the heavy bag from hand to hand, waving at the poor bastards in the UPS truck who so kindly let me cross in front of them--I hope you don't wrap yourselves around a telephone pole today, fellas. I felt rosy and virtuous and slightly mummified, sweating in my wool cocoon. It was a relief to swap my snowy clothes for sweats and slippers at home. It is still snowing; I am on Christmas vacation as of next Monday but probably, really, tomorrow, and technically today, too. Giddy-up, let's go. <makes whip-cracking sound>

Work ethic

My regular Starbucks barista cheerfully took my order, but when she reached for the pastry case she froze, then stood very still, holding onto the register with both hands. "I'm sorry," she said, still mild, still pleasant. "I need a second...I'm just having a minor contraction." And you could just about hear everyone's pupils dilate in line behind me, spontaneous High Alert: should someone...call...someone? Were we going to be on the 5:00 news tonight?

"Do you need to be...uh, excused?" I said uncertainly. Because, honestly, I can do without the apple fritter if you are about to birth a child next to the bean-grinder. "Is this just Braxton-Hicks, or is a big day...imminent?"

It was the former, it turns out. She's got a month and a half to go, though her other babies came early; she's trying to stay active and work, but I guess certain strains and indulgences--like stretching for my donut--trigger a response. So we were all amused, and enormously relieved, frankly, and people scuttled away with their coffees and got on with the day, somehow enlivened by the near miss, the possibility of a new person blossoming into the world. I am still thinking about it, somehow, like we we all weathered an exciting, happy accident together.

I'm thinking, too, of Holly, who's been plagued with false labor herself for days on end. Three weeks to go, little Secondo! Turn yourself around, there, get pointed earthward for the journey. Auntie Him is waiting here with the rest of 'em, so eager to meet you.

The whole world looks upon the sight

I spent several of my primary-school years at Wing Luke Elementary in south Seattle, a diverse school in a high-poverty neighborhood. My mother had enrolled me there both for the lure of a magnet program for gifted kids, and because we had volunteered for Seattle's pilot school-desegregation program, a year before it became mandatory. (For what it's worth, Seattle was one of the only large cities in the nation to desegregate its schools without a court order.) Starting in the second grade, I took a bus 45 minutes each way from a north-end neighborhood that was generally whiter and more affluent (though we weren't the latter).

The bus ride was tedious, but I liked the school. Wing Luke was a nearly-new building at the time, a modern school laid out in an open-classroom format. Multiple grades were grouped together in four wings of the building known as "pods;" the giant rooms could be roughly sectioned off with bookcases and folding screens, for grade-appropriate instruction in math and spelling, but then they'd bring us all together, first through fourth graders, for things like movies and art projects and field trips. I remember it being a particularly vivid and engaging atmosphere. Loud, maybe. Very loud. But fun.

I had--or shared--several wonderful teachers during my Wing Luke years, teachers who brought a multicultural perspective to their lesson plans before that term had been invented. They did this very cleverly, through two main channels: holidays, and food. So: for Hanukkah, Mrs. Eskenazi taught us to gamble for peanuts with a dreidel, and also plugged in a Harvest Gold electric skillet at the front of the room and made approximately a hundred potato latkes. Brave woman. On Chinese New Year, Mrs. Chinn arranged to have a lion dance team come in, weaving through the little desks, and gave us each White Rabbit candy and a red envelope with a new 1978 penny inside. For Boys' and Girls' Day, in Japan, we made fish kites and ate seaweed crackers from Uwajimaya. If you are guessing that these lessons appealed to my essential nature, you are correct: parties, presents, and special foods? Yes, please! Sign me up. I remember going home to my mother and, on more than one occasion, demanding to know why everyone didn't celebrate everything. We'd been missing out, on these holidays I'd never even heard of! I had been deprived!

The layout of the pod classrooms allowed our teachers to impart another significant lesson, when we studied the Civil Rights movement that year. Our classroom had two drinking fountains; one had good water pressure and one, for whatever reason, was leaky and slow, its handle difficult to turn. There were also two exterior doors: one led directly to the playground, for maximum recess-time capitalization, while the other was on the far side of the room, on the street side of the school. If you left through that door, you had to walk the long way around the building to get to the jungle gym and hopscotch grids, the window in the gymnasium where they dispensed jump ropes and kickballs first come, first served.

So. For a week, in 1978, our teachers performed a variation of Jane Elliott's blue eyes/brown eyes experiment--they segregated the fountains and the doors. They were fair, at least: if you got the good door, you got the crap fountain and vice versa. I don't remember which combo went to who, now, only that they put up the requisite signs we'd seen pictured in our social-studies textbooks: WHITE. COLORED.

You couldn't do it now, in today's litigation-mad society. Someone would sue the pants off someone. But I have no recollection of telling my mother about this, or of any other adult intervening. For a week, we endured; we followed the rules. It didn't turn as vicious as the Elliott exercise is rumored to. If you screwed up, a teacher would reprimand and correct you, but gently. Plus the spoils and disadvantages were equitably distributed, so that if you had to trudge around what seemed like half a block to get to the playground, well, at least you could easily slake your thirst later. I wonder, now, if they expected us to resist--to protest. For whatever reason, we didn't.

We had seen the photos in the books: the signs, but also the young people, dressed up fancy to our eyes in dresses, in suits and ties...and being blasted by fire hoses, bitten by dogs. It was a few years yet before we learned of kids being jabbed with lit cigarettes, beaten within an inch of their lives, blown apart in a church basement, for daring only to demand their dignity. They were kids, so many of the Civil Rights activists in the 1960s. It's the point David Halberstam makes in even the title of his chronicle of the movement, The Children--that these were mostly college students, high school students, some even younger. I have been flipping back through that book a lot this week. And I have been thinking, time and again, of my teachers.

I don't know if they were disappointed, that we went along with their experiment so easily. I remember being redirected, a few times, to the "right" fountain or door, and what I experienced was primarily a sense of personal embarrassment and shame, at making the mistake. I was a teacher's pet kind of kid, terrified of breaking a rule--even an arbitrarily imposed and morally bankrupt one. Then again, we knew: this was a temporary inconvenience. What had been plain fact, in our parents' time, had in a generation become merely bewildering: a bizarre restriction that made no sense to us and, at any rate, was over with in a blink. Or mostly over, I guess...because I have not forgotten it in 30 years. Because the lesson has been on my mind, now, for all of this extraordinary week.

I have been thinking about my friends with kids, too. How for this next generation coming along behind me, an African-American President will be a plain fact; how the caveat once appended to so many children's aspirations--you can be anything you want to be in America...except--has overnight become a dim weird relic of history, lumped in with my and my parents' past, the benighted past when we did not know any better. Someday, someone's kid will find this moment in our history bewildering, fusty, dare I say...boring. And I could not be any prouder or more grateful for that thought.

The following photographs were taken by 17-year-old Nita Vidutis (yes, a kid) at an Obama rally in Manassas, Virginia, the Monday night before the election. They've been posted everywhere--I got them originally from the YWCHB blog--but are entirely worth seeing again. Look at these kids' faces. Look at their fathers' faces. Oh, look. Look.

Priorities

Perhaps you have noticed?...that in the 48-hour period since election night, every. single. media outlet, newsmagazine, and tabloid television program has done a Puppy Segment? Thursday evening I was at the gym during the prime nightly news/infotainment clip-show hour, and I could simply look up and down the bank of TVs at the front of the cardio room and, every couple of minutes, see at least one correspondent wrassling around in a back yard or shelter or kennel, dropping the microphone and getting licked to death and snorgling a chihuahua or a labradoodle or a cocker spaniel. It is abundantly clear, what we have all seized upon in this monumental moment of our nation's history; obviously, I am guilty of the same, see below. And for two days, at least, I have decided to surrender to it, find it hilarious, and think of it as one of the things that makes America great. We are in dire economic straits, in the U.S.; we are conducting two wars; we have made a huge step forward in our nation's civil rights history on one front, this week, and stumbled badly, shamefully, on several others. The road ahead is steep, and rocky, and it is going to be hard, for us and for President-Elect Obama.

But for a few days, it has been like living in a bright glowing parallel universe. People smile and make eye contact, share their tables and their newspapers in the coffee house. I went to the blood bank this afternoon and it was packed, a madhouse of volunteers eager to give something of themselves, to endure a quick needle stick and then some cookies and apple juice, in the name of civic responsibility. And for a few days--before we all pick up the rope again and pull, before we put our shoulders to the wheel--the news is only sweetness, a refuge where in every headline and on every channel we're all picking out puppies, puppies, yaay, OMG puppies!!1!

Morning in America

Before I go to bed, one more word to two more little girls:

Sweethearts, go get that puppy!!!



Grammy, Nan, Daddy, Phyllis, Barb: I wish you were here to see this with all my heart, I do.

Pride and joy

The expression on this little girl's face?

That's the closest approximation of what I'm feeling, right now. (Via the hilarious/blubber-inducing Yes We Can (hold babies) photoblog. Oh, there are more of them; this is just the one I fixed on first.)

Oh, please. Please. Please.

People get ready

This election cycle has frayed my last nerve. The enormity of the moment, the glimmer of light at the end of an eight-year, grim-ass dark tunnel, the sheer duration of the battle...all of these combined have left me dropping my emotions all over the street like canned goods out of a ripped grocery bag. I am hair-trigger weepy, starting at 6:30 this morning when I saw two people standing on an I-5 overpass in a driving rain, holding aloft a gigantic banner that bore a single word: HOPE. I looked at Joan Walsh's recommendations for an Election-Eve cry on Salon, and teared up at each one of them, had to go back to the Donuts and Bacon campaign (via Mike) just to get my wits about me. So when I read this afternoon that Senator Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, had passed away, I had to put my head down on the desk again.

I was raised by a single mom and, effectively, by her mom; my grandmother was inarguably a far more influential and active and engaged presence in my life than my father ever was. I referred to her often as "my third parent." This is far from the only parallel that leads me to believe that Barack Obama understands something of my experience, can speak to and for me...but this among many things strikes a deep chord.

My Grammy weighed less than 100 pounds soaking wet, and upon every visit would ply you with lemon-poppy seed cake until you begged for mercy. She was also fiercely protective of her family, proud of our accomplishments to a mortifying degree, and unabashedly liberal in her politics. Like Obama's grandmother, she would have been 86.

In November 1992, I was in my first quarter of graduate school and had just moved into my own apartment, so recently that I was still assigned to the polling place nearest the house where I'd grown up. On election day I stopped by "home," and together Grammy and I walked down to the defunct middle-school library, cast our ballots for Bill Clinton, and went home to cross our fingers and bite our nails, because there was no Internet to hover on. I had an afternoon class that day, and most of us adjourned to a campus pub afterwards, where Democratic bedlam rolled out in expanding waves from every announcement of poll returns. At some point I called Grammy--via pay phone--to shout my joyous, tipsy disbelief, the entire bar roaring "Na Na, Hey Hey, Goodbye" to George H. W. behind me. Here's what she said: "The bars are open, on Election Day?" Apparently, the blue laws in Washington had been more draconian in her time.

Tomorrow morning I'll go alone, to the basement of United Evangelical, probably in the torrential downpour the weather peeps are predicting. I am casting my vote for Barack Obama, and I'll be thinking of my Grammy, and his, and my aunt PJ, who was a devoted campaign volunteer before cancer swept her under and away. Of all the people, these few among them, who dreamed of and fought for this moment but did not live to see it. And I am awed: by how privileged I am to do this. By the epic significance of this instant in American history. By the future that I am putting my hand to, there in the booth. By the hope I have clenched in my fist.

We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Paved with good intentions

Oh, all RIGHT, already, WHATEVER, shut up, you:

On the plus side, I clocked just over 2,000 words of unintelligible mess today, so for 24 brief gleaming hours, I am ahead of the game. Two things convinced me to subject myself to this again: one, Erin, who noted that, while she hasn't always hit the 50,000-word novel goal, she has always come away from the experience with at least a good short story. I'm thus trying to look at this as a mining operation.

And two: the lady profiled on the front page of the NaNo site today, who finished her 2007 novel with minutes to spare and immediately after expelling a tiny brand-new human being from her body. My excuses are made of far flimsier stuff.

Between the lines

The broad supermarket windows are papered over with Halloween coloring-contest entries, and while the clerk bags my spinach, EggBeaters, bagel, frozen yogurt, I listen to several little kids bouncing up and down in front of the display and claiming their own handiwork. "That's mine," one girl says, glowing. "Ten years old," she emphasizes, underscoring a talent she hopes we realize is beyond her years, and when I collect my groceries and go over to look, I see that she has written the same next to her name on the form. Maddy! 10 years old! Maddy has embellished the line drawing of trick-or-treaters further by inscribing one of their plain paper bags with "BOO!" and some possibly bat-like squiggles in dark-green felt-tip. And time obligingly collapses, thirty years accordioning down so that for a second I can feel it too: that pride and validation, the fifteen minutes of fame that come from seeing your careful crayoned submission scotch-taped above the rack of Presto Logs and the food-drive barrel.

Outside half a dozen kids are swarming over the hay-bale corral of pumpkins in front of the store, selecting the perfect victim for a jack-o-lantern. I glance at them and one of their weary dads looks so much like my uncle that I do a double-take right there in the parking lot, almost speak to him before realizing, stupidly, that no, he looks three decades older than that nowadays, and don't we all. It's his birthday today, and my mother's too. Happy birthday, Unc. Happy birthday, Mom.

Hello, weenie

I made a point of going up to Herkimer and securing a window seat today, because it was the Greenwood/Phinney district's annual Halloween celebration, where the kids are welcomed to trick-or-treat up and down the main drag of businesses. I'm a little skeptical of how the process has evolved since I was a kid, because it simply can't be as thrilling, never mind scary, to go door-to-door in broad daylight on a crisp fall afternoon. But at least they're not relegated to a mall...and the spectacle offers some prime hilarity, which I suppose is all the better for being well-lit.

Anyway. So I took up a stool at the street-facing counter for nearly 2 1/2 hours, laughing helplessly at the hordes and hordes of kids in synthetic manufactured costumes, and painstakingly homemade costumes, and indifferently assembled "costumes" that I do not think, really, should count. I have a couple rules about Halloween; one of them is that, if you are old enough to grow your own mustache, you are too old to be begging for free candy on the sidewalk. (For the girls, if those high heels are your own, same thing. Or, you know, the mustache--though if you are thus tonsorially...gifted? challenged? you probably ought to receive a mini-Snickers and some sympathy.) I gave the five teens outfitted as the complete Scooby Gang a pass, though, considering that Fred agreeably put on both a blond wig and an ascot. Although, Shaggy--come on, you get a D for effort, because a Shaggy costume just involves rolling out of bed and putting on the contents of the laundry hamper. The dazed munchies are optional. Probably you will need that pillowcase of candy later, Shag.

On the other end of the spectrum, a word of advice, to parents of the smallest trick-or-treaters: the cute floppy feet attached to the costume pantlegs, or the ruffled fairy anklets, or the long gauzy strips of princess-gown hemline? Do not put that crap on your charges who have barely mastered plain regular walking. That kid is going down, casting a debris field of dropped candy for a three-foot radius, and there will be tears. Toddler total-faceplant tally, just those directly in front of my window? Three. "OoooOOOHHHhhh," me and all the other spectators in the windows moaned, each time a little plush tiger or bumblebee or dinosaur smacked the concrete headlong. Owie.

But good grief, storebought costumes have gotten fancy since I was little. Whatever happened to the old ones, where you got a thin molded plastic mask and what amounted to an acetate romper, usually with the character's name and face printed idiotically right in front? I can remember bumbling down the block in those, already a little freaked out by the darkness and certainly unable to see, since my glasses wouldn't fit underneath the mask. The elastic band snarling in my hair, my breath forming cold condensation on the flimsy plastic...good times. We coveted those! I can remember pawing frantically through the display at Fred Meyer in search of a Princess Leia...and the crushing disappointment of getting stuck with Chewbacca. (Sis, that year, was a three-foot-tall Darth Vader. Hee.) But now the costumes are plush and voluminous, sequinned, bedazzled, equipped with hats or wigs, fake foam muscles, giant spiny lizard heads that bob above the wearer's own. Too much! Too easy! I want to see you work at it a little, kids, come on.

So I was pleased, in the ceaseless tide of princesses, fairies, fairy princesses, and superheroes, to see a few kids marching to a different beat. A little-girl Hulk, pushing her younger sibling in a stroller: right on. A boy dressed as Angus Young from AC/DC. A...prairie bride? another princess? tall and gangly, but with checkered Vans clearly visible beneath the six-inch ruffled hem of her ivory gown. A boy who I think was meant to be a Barack Obama campaign bus, clunking down the street inside a blue-painted cardboard box with paper-plate wheels, festooned with all manner of Obama and Biden and HOPE stickers. Ten more days, little man! Rock the vote! Also, a pug in a pumpkin suit. Come on, that's hilarious! A pug! In a pumpkin suit!

My runner-up favorite: two boys, probably 14 and so hovering on the border of trick-or-treat legitimacy...but allowed a pass by me, for dressing in drag. One had a long red wig and hideous skirt; the other was galumphing gracelessly in white-go-go boots, updo, and glasses--yeah, waitaminute. Yes. Yes! Sarah Palin. An eighth-grade drag Sarah Palin. So, major points for going as the scariest thing this liberal-enclave neighborhood can envision right now.

But I've saved the best for last: the girl, probably 11, whose Girl Scout uniform I recognized in a glance, that shrill kelly green. "That's cheating," I thought idly, as she got into the candy queue in front of the coffeehouse. "That's an extracurricular activity, not a costume." Then she turned around. The jaunty green vest of merit badges, the little neckerchief thing, were shabby and streaked with gore, her face painted gray, eyesockets hollowed, lips and chin gruesomely bloody. A ZOMBIE Girl Scout! Oh please, please let her have thought of this herself. Please let her have come to this in total exasperation after years of flogging cookies in front of the supermarket and being forced to camp in the rain. The Ghoul Scout stared blankly right into my face, dead-eyed, through the Herkimer window, never breaking character. "AWE. SOME," I mouthed at her through the glass, before she turned and shuffled away, undead, triumphant. Oh, zombie Girl Scout, you are made of win. Happy Halloween!

So happy to see that thing

I have been remiss in not mentioning this year's Tomato Nation Fall Contest, where the great Sarah Bunting unleashes her readers on Donors Choose. People sponsor dozens of projects in underfunded K-12 classrooms across the country, in increments large and small...and last year, Sars whipped up more than $100,000 freaking dollars. She also danced around in Rockefeller Plaza wearing a tomato costume to reward us all, but that bit is really just the condiment on your bacon-and-lettuce sandwich, because A HUNDRED GRAND. FOR THE CHILDREN.

Times are tough, I surely don't have to tell you. Cartoon moths are flying out of my wallet just like they are yours, and everyone else's. But Sars puts it quite succinctly in her call to action this year, and this is the part that stuck with me:

...maybe you want to give money to your presidential candidate of choice, and the bailout crisis…well, the average taxpayer is going to get punished, without having even done anything wrong.

So is the average public-school student. The government is going to help these investment firms eventually; in a few days Congress is going to ram something through and bail out the big boys. Little boys? Ain't getting squat. Your senator isn't debating who gets what science books or overhead projectors right now, or how much money to earmark for waterlogged Galveston schools. No, it looks like that's on us.

One of the excellent things about Donors Choose is that, if you donate $100 and/or fully fund a project, you get a little packet of notes and photos from the teacher and kids in question. I contributed to a couple projects last year--a set of novels for one class, a set of art supplies for another--and got a tide of responses, one of which I've kept on the fridge since. It's on day-glo orange paper, each word written in a different eye-popping color of oil pastel crayon, and signed by a kid named, to my delight, Eugene:

THANK you FOR THE ART supplies I AM SO HAPPY TO see THAT Thing

Me too, Eugene, me too.

Today was payday, at last, and tonight I clicked through the projects and got choked up in spite of myself, and donated half again what I'd intended going in. I put a few of my dollars toward yoga mats for preschoolers, and an entire stack of Judy Blumes for an elementary class (because ol' Judy is the patron saint of 5th-grade English, bless her), and bowling lessons for a group of special-needs kids, because I am famously a worse bowler than Barack Obama and maybe if someone had intervened when I was still in the primary grades I would not find the lanes so humbling today.

So. Dig through the couch cushions, empty out the spare change in your car's ashtray, and get clicking. Do it for Eugene, and the little bowlers and yogis and readers, or photographers, or playwrights, or budding scientists just itching to dissect owl doots. If that's not enough of an incentive for you, maybe this will be: this year, if we crack the same total, Sars and her tomato suit are headed to Washington, D.C. to help George and Laura pack. Or to be wrestled to the ground on the White House lawn by the Secret Service, whichever. The suit looks nice and cushy and padded, probably for the best.

OverPowelled

Rose City, part II.

I'd set aside my Saturday in Portland for touristy crap, which may or may not be the kind of touristy crap the average tourist anticipates. The hotel was a scant few blocks away from the Portland Saturday Market, a nearly year-round cavalcade of artists and buskers and food booths that sounded promising...but on my way there I stumbled across Voodoo Doughnut, an establishment I'd already seen profiled at least once on t.v.

Voodoo Doughnut is an extremely...alternative donut shop, which will also marry you should you request or require it--they have a sliding scale of ceremonies with or without donuts. They are also famous for their outrageously indulgent donut toppings, like breakfast cereal, or bacon atop a maple bar. They are also also famous for their snickeringly provocative donut names. When I got to the front of the long line, I just pointed at the one I wanted, twirling around in its glass case: chocolate cake donut, with chocolate icing and Cocoa Puffs on top. The clerk sang out its name for the benefit of all: "One Triple Chocolate Penetration," she shouted, causing the man behind me to erupt in astonished/alarmed giggles. Probably I should have turned around and chatted him up. Do you come here often? Anyway. The donut was hilarious in concept, if fairly ordinary in execution; cereal atop a donut apparently gets damp/stale quickly. I will have to return to assess the bacon maple bar on its own merits.

On to the artists' market. It was kind of a gloomy, overcast day, so I'm not sure how representative the booths I saw were...but there was a little more of the patchouli-and-B.O. crowd going on than I tend to prefer. I did spend some time lingering over an artist's psychedelically colored pen-and-ink rendering of Johnny Cash, flipping the classic bird. I would seriously hang that on my office wall, so it's probably for the best that I didn't have $30 cash on me. Oh well.

And then: I noticed the first of what were ultimately several stained-glass artists' booths. Oh dear. I have only mentioned obliquely, I see now, what my father did for a living--he designed and built custom stained-glass windows for nearly 30 years. Took an extension class at the local community college when I was a little girl, and built an entire business and a considerable reputation from it. He put windows in businesses and churches, in Street-of-Dreams houses and in McMansions for people with more money than taste. It always amazed me, that my dad, who if we are being honest was strapping and kind of loud and prone to fart jokes and could potentially be classified by Jeff Foxworthy as a redneck, had ended up making a living this way: this delicate, translucent, elegant art form. It was a secret in plain sight, a hidden depth that I saw him practice every day but that I was not smart enough, not soon enough, to ask about.

This is a prelude to my saying that, for several years, Dad had been a presence at the Vancouver, Washington farmers' market on summer weekends. He loved the intrigue of bickering with the market's governing board--oh, man, the epic wrangling over choice booth real estate, insanely boring and what I wouldn't give for a fresh earful...but more than that he lived to banter with the teeming hordes. He couldn't have been making serious income just from the suncatchers and the metric ton of glass marbles he sold out of a couple antique gumball machines, but he used the attention to secure larger commissions. Dad was a salesman down to the bone, a cheerful master of wearing you down with corny patter until you succumbed: to buying whatever it was, to forgiving him something, to being his friend for life. I never went down to Vancouver to see him in action, but I didn't need to. I knew exactly how he would be.

Except maybe, too late, I did need to see it, because I stood there in front of some random person's booth in Portland, hyperventilating, throat tight. There were suncatchers and kitty-cat potholders and, I don't know, blown glass bongs arrayed all around me, and hucksters everywhere manning their tables, hamming it up, messing with the crowd in genial booming voices, and for a minute I thought I would have to run. Knocking over incense burners and bags of organic dog treats, crashing through the line at the falafel stand. My heart hurt.

It helped when, after considering for a moment, I decided that this particular stranger's stained-glass doodads were cheap-looking and ugly. Thinking that, I could proceed.

* * * * *

Later that afternoon, Mecca. Powell's, where to my complete incomprehension I had never previously been. And seriously, what the hell? Why didn't Dad ever take me to Powell's, summers when I was bored out of my skull in La Center? He would have earned points for eons, would still be redeeming points with me from beyond the grave. Missed opportunity, Dad.

Anyway. There's a smell that good bookstores have, a clean papery scent of books that is definitely not to be confused with the musty funk of used books left to mildew in the basement. Powell's smells wonderful. "Have I died?" I wondered to myself, and for two and a half hours I was one of those people kicking the plastic shopping basket ahead of me across the linoleum, unwilling to lift it the entire time. I did have a pre-programmed boundary, in that I had to be able to carry it all back on the damn train. That helped me to get out with my life and only $150 in the hole, hilarious water bottle included: pretty damn decent.

I did find myself getting verklempt (for the second time that day) in the children's section, where I hadn't even intended to go--I wandered down the pink staircase instead of up the purple one, or something, and there I was. It stretched on for half a block in front of me, shelves almost higher than I could reach, and oh, oh, all the books. I've written before about how I was constantly being hustled out of the public library or the tiny mall bookstore as a kid--not because the adults in my life were cruel, but because they were unfortunate grownups with boring grownup shit to do. So, the sight of a children's book section larger than my house made me actually tear up a bit. I wanted nothing more than to go back through time to my ten-year-old self, hand her a $100 bill, and say "Meet me here in two hours. Have fun. Go!"

I'll just have to make up for le temps perdu.