Conscious nonlaboring

"You need to blog the shit out of this," my friend Tortilla told me, twice in as many days. The same exact words, urgent, intense. And, well, that I can do! I am now MADE of time.

So: Thursday I got laid off, after just shy of 14 years at NerdCo. (It's not my intention to burn any bridges, plus I'm still amused by my own pseudonyms.) It was swift, not entirely unexpected, and remains a little bit surreal. They called a clump of us into a meeting, one of the larger conference rooms with banked seats; whipped through a series of HR bullet points in a slide deck (with a black background and color scheme, very Goth); and distributed our individual packets of severance and compensation info. I think it took eight minutes flat before I was back in the hallway outside my office, looking for boxes.

I've been through worse. I was laid off once before, from a retail job, and before I left the store weeping I had to submit to a search. So this was altogether more dignified. Then, too, my last period of unemployment--a month, where I actually collected unemployment!--had been just after I'd left grad school, with my oh-so-employable MFA. My student loans had come due; I had made one payment. And so I was dead broke, insurance-free, and had few skills beyond running a cash register and picking up customers' abandoned sodas and Kleenexes off the floor. I had at least abstained from any facial piercings to conform to the Draconian mall-bookstore dress code.

I job-hunted then like that was my job, in a clammy terror the entire time. And a former fellow clerk knew someone who was looking for a writer, someone to craft software training manuals. They took me on as an intern. The first day, I did not even know how to turn on my PC, had only ever mastered my third-hand Apple IIC at home. "Have you set up your email yet?" the woman in charge of onboarding me asked, and I said "No!" brightly, and then watched her like a hawk to find out where the power button was. Nearly 20 years ago, and I owe virtually my entire technical career to that moment, and to a series of lucky accidents and friend-of-a-friends.

With most of those two decades nestled in the bosom of NerdCo, I am pretty well buffered while I contemplate my next steps. I've socked away enough, established sufficient history, that I can remain calm and approach a fresh job search without the same panic I felt at 25. This feeling itself is new, something I need to get used to...but truth be told, I feel worse for my colleagues: for the others who were laid off, who have shorter career trajectories--and in most cases, little shorties to take care of, at home. And I feel for the colleagues who remain, shouldering the work left over when hundreds of us were Raptured outta there. Monday is gonna be rough.

But not for me, not in the same way. That's the trippiest part, the notion that, for a while at least, my time is my own. For two days I packed up my motley assortment of crap (vast 1960s table lamp/ Mariners bobbleheads/editing textbooks/gigantic coffee mug), gave and received hugs, gratefully accepted the immense margarita my team took me out for. My immediate manager was actually out of the US for a conference; he didn't even know what had happened until I sent out a farewell email. He called me Thursday afternoon, shocked and apologetic, and was surprised to catch me still at my desk.

"Well..." I said, looking around at the inflatable garden gnome/throw rug/favorite yo-yo/vast postcard collection I had yet to cram into boxes. "I'm still packing." My boss continued to express regret, empathy, etc. Then he said:

"Okay, well...don't do any more work on [Labyrinthine Project] or [Onerous Task], okay? You can just hand those off to me or Tortilla," he noted, utterly earnest. For a brief moment I thought about hitting the Mute button and laughing hysterically, because OH, OKAY, I WON'T. And he is either the noblest man in the world, or sweetly severely deluded, but if he thought I'd accomplished a single thing besides the packing, hugging, crying, and margarita-drinking since 11:08 AM, he was...misled. Maybe it was jet lag? At any rate, he was gracious and supportive, so I chose to find this remark hilarious, and still do. Not a bad way to go out.

That night, I had a pint of ice cream for dinner and watched three DVRed episodes of Billy on the Street--something about all that screaming was soothing, in a way I can't explain. Yesterday, I went in with Krispy, another RIF-ee, to make our final purchases of every possible thing you could put a NerdCo brand on in the company store, and then turn in our laptops and worn, raggedy corporate IDs. We went out for happy hour beer and nachos.

And then I, a legendary insomniac, came home, took a two-hour nap on the couch, and then rallied enough to move to the bed. I'm not exaggerating at all, to say that I am a terrible, terrible restless sleeper. For weeks, for years, I've lain in bed unable to shut my mind down--that little hamster running on the wheel, planning ahead to the next meeting, the next draft, the next deadline, oh god I have to set up that conference call, who has the blahblah spreadsheet, don't forget to update the database, on and on and on. And come morning, I'd be that person who hits the snooze button three, five, twelve times...or resets the alarm for twenty or thirty minutes, who tosses around sluggish and desperate, and for whom no amount of hot shower or coffee really kicked me into high gear, nine days out of ten.

Last night, I slept like a corpse. Smooth, sweet, dreamless dark, straight through til morning. I only awoke when Frankie decided, at his Swiss-accurate 7:30 on the dot, that just because we were now indigent was no excuse for his being able to see the bottom of his bowl, and could I please make with the kibble immediately, thank yew. I felt like a completely new woman. And oh, I am sure that new stress, different stressors, will surface soon enough. Eventually, I will lie awake grinding my teeth about entirely different professional challenges! But for the moment, in the moment...I am going to be just fine.

I just wanna get some kicks

My Facebook feed lit up this week, with pictures of everybody's kiddos returning to school. Little dumplings in the primary grades. A high-school classmate's daughter, following in our footsteps as a newly-minted Garfield freshman--an effective sobering agent in case we awoke feeling remotely spry or youthful. My cousin's oldest son, launched into our 1980s football rival, Snohomish High. (I say "rival" only in the sense that we were somehow cruelly classified in the same division and had to play each other, because GHS football stunk up the joint.)

I must say, you parentals are so prepared for the Pinterest nation we live in now! Posing the kids in, say, the same spot, year to year! Giving them a little sign to hold, stating their hopes and dreams! That is actually going to really help in 30 years--they'll be able to tell what the heck is going on, and gauge their progress towards becoming a ballerina-veterinarian, or whatever.

I mean this sincerely. Not having progeny of my own, I went digging through yon family archives to see if I could find my own first-day pictures. We were much more haphazard with the photo milestones, it seems. Maybe this was due in part to the nature of real film itself? My mom's persistent inability to center a viewfinder on the scene in question meant that she'd fire off one or two weirdly composed shots AT BEST; processing was a whole 'nother order of expensive. One set of these back-to-school, September-morn prints states on the border that it was developed the following January. We were parsimonious, with our Kodak moments--it was better if you could get school-Halloween-turkey-Christmas-birthday-neighbor's litter of kittens on one roll.

At any rate, I couldn't find them all. I found enough, however, to compose a mortifying photo essay and time capsule. Dig it:

 





Kindergarten. I remember resenting the immense nametag and, presumably, care and feeding instructions? pinned to my left shoulder. I got my mother to pin it to the jacket, which I promptly shrugged out of and hung on the designated little peg in my similarly-labeled cubby, because what was I, a moron? I KNEW MY OWN NAME, sheesh. Room 10, Mrs. Bacon, yadda yadda, I AM HERE FOR THE EDUCATION LET'S GO.

Third grade, which would put Sis in kindergarten. Nice socks with sandals, there, Northwest Stereotype Girls. This dress came with a little red blazer, I guess so that I could easily take my look from "Highland Park Elementary" to "night" with a simple adjustment. Also, check out the rabbit ears, with which my grandpa was coordinating NASA satellites.

Fourth grade. I think this is the first year Mom was likewise working in the public schools, and as you can see we are all SUPER EXCITED by this academic development.

Look at that folder, though. No mere Pee-Chee for me: I selected that majestic mountain vista myself, y'all. This is only the very first evidence of my persistent belief that the right accessories (spiral-bound notebook/leather journal/antique desk/sleek laptop/sushi-shaped pencil erasers) will generate the greatest American novel and/or confer the PhD themselves. The globe is very intellectual-looking also.

I know there's a sixth-grade picture, lost somewhere, because I used it as a painful "thinspiration!" photo stuck on the fridge for far too long. I'd selected every element of my ensemble myself, too: white jeans, a navy-and-white-striped Oxford shirt with a Nehru collar, and brown suede platform-wedge loafers that I...might consider wearing today. Feathered hair. I weighed 113 pounds, but was angling to get back down to double-digits, because "100" was way, way too much. I was 11 years old. Oy. Ladies, girls, kids, everyone: don't do this to yourselves! If I did have a daughter, or a son, I hope that'd be the one thing I wouldn't pass on, the decades and decades of obsessing about exactly this. You're beautiful and perfect and your body is a miracle machine, full stop. Regret nothing! Except maybe the outfits!

Okay, PSA over. Eighth grade. 80s fashion was a slippery slope, and I'm afraid both Sis and I were rolling rapidly downhill at this point.

Won't someone please think of THE CHILDREN, and then STOP THEM? Is her Colonel Sanders tie worse than my twee little grosgrain-ribbon choker? My teddy-bear ski sweater? I think her hair is entirely my fault--I'd braided it, wet, the night before, to make it wavy. Later, Sis was brave enough to undergo a perm; timid, I continued to farf around instead with ribbons, barrettes, and the occasional novelty shoelace as hair accessories. I...don't know. It's a tie, in which nobody wins. Though if you look closely, you might note that my pinstriped jeans give me a slight edge. Kudos also to Mom, who's gotten a new 35mm camera so she can better capture random shadows across our squinting faces, plus a crystalline focus on the landscaping behind us.

So, so, so, so.

I'd taken a long weekend in Portland, but I couldn't kick free of my depression. All the usual remedies, the coffees and panini and okay-twist-my-arm shoe shopping, weren't doing it, and Saturday night I slumped in my room, despondent and already past vacation midpoint. In 36 hours I had to turn around and go back, pick up the threads of my stagnant life, work and commute and cleaning the bathroom, and I felt like I'd accomplished nothing.

But Michelle had this idea, to drive us out to Cannon Beach and just have some sand-and-sea times, use the long car ride to talk ourselves hoarse, flesh out exciting Big Life Plans to look forward to.

I was skeptical. The ocean seemed like an epic journey, growing up--so distant, an entire vacation plan in itself, the Oregon coast even farther afield than the gritty little sibling towns of Moclips and Pacific Beach we'd visit in Washington. It occurred to me, en route, that it had surely been nearly 30 years since I'd seen Haystack Rock, and probably 15 or more since I'd even been to the coast in my own state. With my Grammy, when she was still alive.

But it was a mere 90 minutes from Portland. And once there, I was astounded at how I'd ignored or forgotten or not taken advantage of it, this fucking extraordinary place, this natural marvel I am so, so lucky to be a few hours' drive from. The roaring surf, the limitless horizon. The salt-sticky wind in your hair. That amazing smell.

We sat in the sun on stripey towels and ate brie and bread and drank blood-orange San Pellegrino. We waded in the light-glittered water, which was cold for an instant and then perfect. We drove on a little further, down to Manzanita, and poked through shops and bought a shit-ton of saltwater taffy and olde-tyme penny candy, and gave ourselves diabetes on the way home. We grilled simple hamburgers on the deck and ate outside and took Pumpkin the hound for a walk in the sweet, balmy dusk, and it turned out to be the best day I've had in a long, long time. The day I so desperately needed. I am so, so grateful. Thank you for that again, Michelle, my friend.

Far too young and clever

I've been thinking about the late, great Casey Kasem all week, and I needed just a bit more room for my  #throwbackThursday this time.

"American Top 40" aired Sunday nights, when I was in the prime listening demographic. Six to ten p.m., or 7-11:00 maybe? My mom was still rigid about school night bedtimes, but at some point in my middle-school years I was allowed to--or figured out that I could--listen to my crappy clock radio on the lowest possible volume, while lying in bed.

I'd get misty while Casey called out the long-distance dedications. I could not wait, to have, and possibly then break up with, an Actual Boyfriend to whom I would devote the syrupy regret of a pop song. Casey Kasem willing, I'd do so in a forum broadcast to everyone in the United States. Learn from my romantic tragedy, fellow tweens! Heed my hard-earned relationship wisdom!

I rooted for my favorite songs to move up in the countdown, as if I had money riding on it. I guess in a way I did, hoping that my latest obsession would crack the top 20 and thus appear on the wall behind the cash registers at DJ's Sound City, four rows of 45s in their paper sleeves. The other bins of singles were a crapshoot, but I knew that one slat-wall would be fully stocked. The cashier could just turn 180 degrees and hand down the record. If it wasn't top-20, though, you had to wait. If you had particularly esoteric tastes, you might wait a long time. This was the 80s, luckily, already a wondrous and bizarre mishmash of pop trends, where stations on the AM band played Kenny Rogers cheek-by-jowl with Alice Cooper and the Beatles and the Knack.

But I think about it a lot, the patience that's no longer required. Was delayed gratification ever that much sweeter? (Usually, I think this after I've gone on a nostalgic iTunes binge, snapping up every crazy one-hit wonder I can think of, most of which are preeeeeety terrible.)

Anyway. Casey Kasem and "American Top 40." A primitive map, for the adolescent culture I was on the periphery of. Teenagers! Here were things that teenagers did: listened to music, bought records, affected the surge and sway of the pop charts. Casey was my guide. And, ever the straight-A student, I took notes, writing down the most thrilling countdown moments on my calendar.

I knew I'd saved one somewhere--for the calendar illustrations (vintage children's-book illustrations, if you're wondering. Nothing racy, ew! I was in 7th grade! And a nerd!). I didn't realize what an excellent anthropological document I was preserving, though. Here's April, 1983. I was thirteen.

 



I've always enjoyed the Oscars, though I was nonplussed by "Gandhi" winning Best Picture. "Tootsie" was my pick, and I'd evidently seen it twice, which I hope did not adversely affect my performance on that Western Hemisphere test in Social Studies. But I digress. Check out Sunday the 24th. Dexy's Midnight Runners, with their fiddles and their overalls, had hit number one--in the USA!--with "Come On, Eileen." The mildly suggestive lyrics were luckily obscured by the lead singer's incomprehensible mumbling, and so I think we even convinced my mother to buy the whole album, on cassette, from Columbia House Records and Tapes. I hope we got that one for the proverbial penny.

But I suspect I slipped out of bed to write this, to find a pen and scribble down this milestone, lest I forget. I had a babysitting job on the horizon, and I have a pretty good idea now where that cash was gonna go. It was spring, it couldn't BE any more 80s, and it was totally awesome. Thanks, Casey. Rest in peace.

What silence equals

I don’t get it. Certainly, running the US broadcast on a multi-hour tape delay gave NBC’s editors ample opportunity to decide which parts of the Sochi Opening Ceremonies to cut—seemingly, too much of the wackadoo good stuff, like Get Lucky. And yes, speeches, welcome, thank you, swifter higher blahblah boring…but to patch together Thomas Bach’s remarks while neatly trimming his emphasis on dignity, tolerance, respect…? That can’t be sheer clumsiness. It’s got to be deliberate. Sure, Putin is a creepy dude, but is the fourth-place American television network so intimidated that they can’t bring themselves even to let someone else politely criticize his brutal, discriminatory policies?

Or are we a lot closer to them than we think?

I was a competitive figure skater as a teen. Oh, I wasn’t any good—I started too late for that. But I spent my adolescence in several mildewy local rinks, twirling and daydreaming and landing on my ass more often than not. Most of the kids I skated with were girls. Most of the coaches I knew were women. But I worked with three male coaches over the years, in summer clinics and training camps…and all three of them were gay.

Plenty has been written elsewhere, about the USFSA, the various Olympic committees, and whether they’re constantly searching for The Great Straight Hope, in men’s figure skating. I don’t have the tools or the inclination to analyze this, now, to explore why and whether gay men might be disproportionately drawn to the sport. I mean, sequins and Stravinsky don’t have some inherent magical gay-making power. And I have no idea whether the men I knew were out at the time: to their other friends, their families, out in their public lives away from the rink. Looking back, I don’t remember it being a topic of discussion, either…more of an open secret. They were gay. We all just knew, and didn’t care.

Tony taught me my first rudimentary spins, the coiled etchings of my blade on the ice like a plate of spaghetti. (Tony also lost his shit and screamed at me when, during rehearsals for the annual ice show/recital, I botched his vision, tripped, and collapsed in mortified, giggling paralysis.) Ryan was a brilliant choreographer, a prankster, a wiseass. Ryan swapped books with my mom, danced with me at somebody’s wedding. Alexi spoke English as a second language. “More slow, please,” he’d beg me, when my breakneck teen-girl blithering proved impenetrable. They were my teachers, friends, fixtures in my world. They were just people.

This was the mid-to-late 1980s. A history lesson in another disproportionate percentage: two of these stories end badly. Tony died of AIDS-related complications while I was away at college; first he vanished, then he died. I heard at roughly the same time that Ryan was sick. That’s how I was told, in that circle: a half-whisper, low tones, already too late. Someone was Sick. Ryan is…Sick. “Oh, Ryan, be careful,” my mother had blurted, once, the lone time AIDS had somehow come up in conversation. I remember that he promised that he would. Whether he was or wasn’t, I couldn’t know. Maybe it already didn’t matter. Ryan hung on, fought like hell in fact, for 17 years…but died a decade ago at 42. Younger than I am now.

I associate the “SILENCE = DEATH” message with the ACT UP movement in the same late 80s-early 90s period. I’d remembered it as both a demand for more research into HIV and AIDS, better medicine, a cure…and an exhortation not to remain silent—to protect each other by practicing safe sex, keeping everyone informed, being aware of one’s HIV status. But it turns out that, all along, it also meant being open about one’s true self, gay, straight, bi, trans…so that by calling attention to prejudice, oppression, danger, we can fight against it and root it out. From the Silence = Death Project’s manifesto: “’silence about the oppression and annihilation of gay people, then and now, must be broken as a matter of our survival.’ The slogan thus protested both taboos around discussion of safer sex and the unwillingness of some to resist societal injustice and governmental indifference.”

This is why I’m watching the Sochi Olympics, why I couldn’t bring myself to support a boycott. Russia’s discriminatory policies and human rights violations are an offense, and they deserve—NEED—to be called out on the world stage. I’m proud and protective of the brave athletes from around the world who are willing to defy these wrongs, in whatever large or small way they can: Ashley Wagner rainbowing it up. Alexey Sobolev making Bob Costas invoke the name “Pussy Riot” on national television. Brian Boitano, realizing that saying nothing is just another form of silence.

And this is why NBC’s decision to excise those portions of the IOC President’s speech so grates upon me. Matt and Meredith spent a lot of last night’s narrative talkin’ ‘bout Putin: how these were his Games, his message, his stage…almost as if he were single-handedly pulling every cable on the floating schoolgirl, twirling inflatable onion domes, and light-up hockey players swinging from the stadium roof. Putin, Putin, Putin! But if we don’t talk about why we’re talking about Putin—or why he is intimidating, sinister, sitting up there in his box like a reptilian cyborg—then we’re silencing ourselves. We’re silencing the good people fighting for change: those who are gay, those who aren’t, all of us just people like the coaches I knew. And silence = acceptance. Silence = the continuing wait for a cure. Silence = discrimination, imprisonment, getting beaten to death on the street or trapped inside a burning nightclub. So don’t give in, don’t give up. Be loud. Shout and cheer, for your team, your athletes…and for their humanity. For everyone you and they know and love.

 

How to end a dry spell

Such a goofy, giddy atmosphere in Seattle yesterday, like a particularly localized bizarro Christmas. Seahawks banners were taped up in every window of the ballet studio, and to the Campfire Girls’ card table outside the market (though by the time I made it out with my nacho fixins, they’d packed up their mints and raced home with their moms to make the kickoff). Someone had draped 12^th-man flags on the pedestrian bridge over Holman Road and strung the handrails with blue and white twinkle lights plugged into an outlet on the city’s dime. People in Hawks jerseys thronged Chuck’s Hop Shop and the Sunday-morning biscuit truck outside. Driving through the anticipatory mayhem I had a weird momentary thought: that I wished I was a child, just a bit, to be experiencing this unique civic holiday from that perspective.

I was nine years old when the SuperSonics won their lone NBA championship. Seattle was still effectively a small town, known for boom-and-bust cycles of lumber and airplanes and little else. 1979 was closer, then, to Elvis at the World’s Fair and Here Come the Brides than I am to nine, now. Bill Gates and, yes, that Paul Allen had just moved their fledgling company up from Albuquerque. There was one Starbucks. Just the one! Think about that for a second.

So the Sonics were still somewhat accessible, to normal people. They made appearances at my elementary school assemblies, gentle giants signing autographs. Some crafty local made sock dolls in team likenesses; my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Eskenazi, had one of her favorite player, Dennis “DJ” Johnson, complete with frizzled-yarn Afro and his trademark freckles—somebody’s grandma had painstakingly embroidered a dusting of French-knot specks across his knitted cheeks. Based on a (shockingly accurate) self-portrait of the period, I had a Sonics t-shirt:

 

And so we were invested, at least somewhat.

We were with our dad, Sis and I, the night of Game 5. I don’t think we actually watched it, on the green-tinged 19-inch tube TV in the living room (though I’d love now to have the brass-and-veneer midcentury-mod Media Cart it sat on). But someone had hired a skywriter: I remember running around the yard in the long light of early-summer evening, and the little plane spelling out SONIC BOOM in puffy cloud trails in the air. And I remember afterwards, the shouts and horn-honking and people whanging pots together, house to house. Dad piled us into the pickup—just the three of us sliding around on the bench seat in the cab, never a thought of belting in because safety hadn’t been invented yet either—and drove us to Mercer Island, where Kathy still lived with her parents. He’d marry her, that fall. I cross Lake Washington every day now, but it seemed an epic journey, a vast distance, at the time. There were carloads of other celebrants on the highway, snapshots zooming past: a shirtless man hanging out of a VW Beetle whooping for joy, his own Sonics tee whipping and snapping in his hands like a flag.

“Wait,” Dad told me, “wait…” until we reached the I-90 tunnel…and then he let me lean over and pound on the horn. Honking in the tunnel! A delirium of echoing, illegal racket! Other cars took it up and we shot out the far end in a cacophony of blaring joyful noise that I’d instigated, thrilling and dangerous, champeens of the world.



 

Parable

At Starbucks this morning, the woman in front of me proceeded to order twelve different complicated beverages, from a clipboard. NO NO NOOOO OH MY GOD COME OOOONNN. Who does that, at 9:45 a.m., in everybody's way? So I smiled pleasantly at nothing while irradiating the girl with my eyes. Beaming hatred down on this woman, seething and writhing internally because I had to wait on my mocha. Five whole minutes! Maybe six! HAAATE.

Then the sixty-something woman behind us both touched Clipboard on the arm, and sweetly volunteered to help her carry the three trays of beverages to her car, in the pounding December rain.

Okay, Universe, I get it. Take a breath, unclench. Look up. Be Zen. Christmas is coming.

Put your glad rags on

I don't have much to add, to any eulogizing of Tom Bosley--he had a good run, a large part of which he spent portraying a nice dad on a sitcom encoded into my DNA and that of many of my thirty-to-forty-something peers. Linda Holmes, over on the NPR blog Monkey See, says what I would only more gracefully; I was especially taken with this bit:

There's always some temptation to put disclaimers on a remembrance of a TV
actor, as if some apology is in order for thinking fondly of something you spent hundreds of hours enjoying as a kid instead of spending all your time
mourning obscure actors appearing in the truly great plays of the world.

May you rest in peace, Mr. C...and now let me pull this back to focus on a more personal memory. Coincidentally, the Hub cable network (revamped Discovery Kids, I guess) has been airing family fare all week, including ancient sitcoms from the pilot on. So I came home one night this week to faded, Chuck-Cunningham-era 1974 episodes of Happy Days, when Fonzie sported a grey windbreaker (I KNOW!), and the credits went like this:



Bill Haley! Oh my god, the sound of that jukebox working: the coin dropping down, the flip of the 45, the needle crackling into place*...and then the drummer just tears it up, man.

*We used to make fun of my Grammy, Sis and I, when she'd offer us change for "the nickelodeon." Now I look at this entire sentence and can imagine that, if I have any readers under 21, I might as well be writing about hoopskirts and Conestoga wagons.

Anyway. It makes my eyes well up, because in 1974, when my parents were still married and Sis was an infant, my mother took a "ceramics" class one night a week. It wasn't throwing clay on a wheel, but the kind where she and the other (presumably frustrated) suburban ladies chose from molded forms and painted their own color schemes. We had multiple garden gnomes and mushroom-patterned kitchen canisters and the like, for a while there. So, once a week Mom got a night off and Dad would "babysit," what modern child-having persons might call "parenting."

I don't remember whether I went to bed on those nights with adequate nutrition (unlikely), or brushed teeth (less so). But I do know that, whatever my bedtime was supposed to be, my dad let me stay up until, oh, 8:02. Through the Happy Days credits, and we would dance. Rockabilly swing dancing to Bill Haley and the Comets; he'd twirl me around, spin me in and out like a yo-yo, jiving in front of the television. We would seriously cut a rug--the harvest-gold shag that carpeted our sunken living room, in fact. Me and my dad, rockin'. I was four years old.

"This is a show about when Daddy was a boy," I can remember him telling me. He must have loved it; the protagonist was even named "Richie." I'm not sure when I started to suspect that Happy Days was not quite a documentary lens on the 50s, what with Fonzie and the shark-jumping and Mork and what have you. I watched it through to the bitter end, though, into the 80s, when Ron Howard wanted out and so the writers packed Richie Cunningham off to Vietnam, what the hell, and then there was Arnold's and...pizza? and the little girl from Poltergeist. And the finale with Joanie and Chachi's big wedding. Okay then. I bet Joanie got to dance with her dad then, man. Unfair.

It's a sweet memory, though, even as it stings. My mom used to harrangue my dad for his tendency to get me "all wound up," in her terms, immediately before bedtime: rasslin', or various furniture-jumping acrobatics. "Rich. Rich! You're getting her all wound up!" I'm sure frenetic swing-dancing also qualifies, as something unlikely to send a preschooler off to restful slumber. But it's the only time I can remember dancing with my father, and I know I'm lucky just to have that.

Okay, an antidote to The Maudlin: here's Bill Haley and co. in a live performance at breakneck speed. It's not entirely clear what this show is from the notes, and even less clear why there are several little girls (and their apparently grown partners) dancing their asses off in front of the band. But look at them go! Talk about rug-cutting. If the band slows down, we'll yell for more...but it doesn't look like there's any chance of that happening.

Our appliances were also that color

My Grammy suffered from a congenital inability to tell a joke. She could be witty, or quick with a biting remark...but the formal structure of setup-beat-punchline eluded her all her life. Her attempts at scripted levity all went something like this: "A man walks into a bar, and the bartender says...no, wait. A priest! A priest goes into a bar...and also one of those...um...rabbis! A priest and a rabbi, and the bartender says...no, no, that's wrong. No, wait: first the priest says...oh, hell. I've screwed it all up."

So she was funny, in a way, with these epic, backtracking stories--just never in the manner she intended. You had to give her credit, really, for soldiering on. A couple of her weird non-sequitur punchlines became family jokes in and of themselves, a quick shorthand we'd repeat like a hilarious mantra. The most famous of these came about in front of all her coworkers at the UW budget office. The joke itself was a hairy old chestnut indeed, about the world's cheapest hit man, Artie, plying his trade as a bargain-rate strangler. Stop me if you've--no, never mind. Suffice to say, Artie does his thing and the next day's headlines read:

ARTIE CHOKES THREE FOR A DOLLAR

Well, Grammy tried to tell this one to her colleagues, and I can only imagine the narrative weaving around towards its inevitable end. But she got there, eventually, and said: "So, the next day in the paper, all the headlines read...







(pregnant pause)








"AVOCADOS THREE FOR A DOLLAR!"

Well. Blank faces all around. Interestingly, Grammy could remember this humiliation and repeat it to us later, as a personal anecdote; her mental block was exclusive to telling a proper joke in the first place.

And this one became legend, somehow. I've been saying "avocados-three-for-a-dollar" reflexively for probably 30 years, at the slightest prompting: both when I botch a story of my own, and every time I see a little mesh bag of avocados (with a much higher price tag) at the supermarket. It's part of my family lexicon. We have to say it; it's ingrained, like "Jinx! Buy me a Coke!"

This is my own longwinded meandering way to wonder if any of y'all are watching Fringe as avidly as I am? Because in last week's episode, set in the blighted alternate universe (not watching? just...go with it), Olivia marveled that Frank had procured apparently rare and precious avocados for their dinner. "Where did you get them? How much?" she asked dubiously...and you KNOW what I shouted at the teevee with absolute delight. Hi, Grammy! Miss you!

Homewreckers

I wasn't afraid of the typical stuff, as a kid. A girl in my Brownie troop lived half a block from a cemetery, and we'd ride our bikes through the place and admire the more ornate headstones, sitting on the ones that had benches, distributing the tiny weedy daisies that grew in the lawn on the plots that seemed wanting. I had no worries about ghosts. I don't plan to be buried, but I figure you could do worse than to have a couple of dopey third-graders disrupting your Eternal Rest while wobbling around on their Schwinns and reciting selections from their favorite Bill Cosby albums. (Heather Lerwick--where are you now? If ever you Google yourself, surely this will be the weirdest hit!)

But I wasn't fearless. Oh, I had very specific and deeply held anxieties, over which I lay awake in dread on many a night. Would you like to hear about them? The three things that haunted my dreams and stirred me to helpless panic? Come scootch over here real close, and look upon the first face of terror:

That guy. That guy!

What is the deal, with the Cat in the Hat? Come on, he is PETRIFYING! He just shows up, while your mom is away, and she didn't even lock the door so he just COMES IN and starts WRECKING the place. Balancing shit! Spilling shit! Letting a pair of Things run amok! Strewing wanton chaos and mess in his wake!

Okay: my mom was a compulsive neat freak, taking her own anxieties out on dirt with furious aggression. We wiped out the sink after each use, played with one toy at a time, and knew to open the fridge with a sleeve pulled down to prevent fingerprints on the handle. She's mellowed considerably since then, thank Prozac...but there was a time when the slightest mess provoked her displeasure, and if mama ain't happy...well. Cat-induced mayhem boded ill.

And so at a tender age I was vaguely afraid of the Cat in the Hat, worried he'd show up to get ME into terrible trouble some rainy afternoon. (Although this line from the Wikipedia plot summary is splendid: The Cat's antics are vainly opposed by the family pet, a sapient and articulate fish.) On some level, I understood that a gigantic, bipedal, English-speaking cat sporting a stripey chapeau was...unlikely. (Thank heavens I wasn't subjected to Mike Myers's mutant visage as a kid; that gives me nightmares now.) But I soon had new demons to dread:

AAAAAAAAAAHHH! Laurel and Hardy! Coming with pickaxes, yet, to DESTROY YOUR HOME. (Yes, Mecklenburg, I can hear you laughing from here.) They were a silent menace that played on an overhead screen at the local Shakey's Pizza, accompanied by jaunty-funereal organ music as they smashed china and furniture and upright pianos to smithereens. Laurel and Hardy were real, if consigned to the realm of Olde Things, and I found them completely terrifying. All right, all right: the Cat in the Hat was a drawing...but these two maniacs could still possibly appear on your doorstep and tear the house down around you, giggling wordlessly, blinking their tiny black evil eyes. Laurel and Hardy: shudder. In a college film seminar, I had to watch "Big Business," and was hard-pressed to explain why I was peeking through my fingers in American Film Comedy. Not funny not funny not funny. Not.

Even less funny? Ohh, dude. Look at THIS:

OH MY GOD, NO. I was nine years old when 1941 came out, probably old enough to know better...but holy mother, look at that poster. That particular poster, in the back of some comic book or magazine I had, scared the bejesus out of me. SO MUCH DESTRUCTION. They are FIRING UPON the amusement park! Normally a fun place! They're blowing up the movie theatre showing DUMBO! That house, at the end, ruined and pulverized and pushed off the cliff into the sea! Merry Christmas! Ha ha ha! Wheeeee!

Oh dear lord, I could not handle it. Still can't; never seen it all the way through. The whole reason I started this post was because this blasted-ass terrible movie popped up on cable this evening, and I was lulled into false complacency by the merry jitterbugging in the USO. Before they SMASHED THE ENTIRE TOWN TO FLAMING SMITHEREENS, and I realized what I was watching and fumbled for the remote, whimpering into my mac and cheese. Not funny!

Also, now I am prone to wondering if there is a homeowners' insurance clause for Wanton Cinematic Mayhem. Acts of Laurel and Hardy?

Suzy Dorm-maker

It seems to come earlier every year, doesn't it? We're only in mid-July, but this week I got to indulge in one of my most favorite and hallowed annual traditions: perusing the current Bed Bath & Beyond flier, College Prep edition.

I've been analyzing my deep fondness for this publication all week, trying to sort out why--twenty years past outfitting a dorm room--I remain hypnotized by the exhaustive matchy-matchiness. The matching! Everything coordinated with everything else! Stuff bundled together in thematic sets: the towels that go with the duvet that complements the desk lamp, shower caddy, and collapsible laundry hamper. Plus two reversible accent pillows!

Maybe it's because we didn't do that, when I went off to college. Do people do that, now, collect the entire striped or polka-dotted Dorm Room in a Box and ship it off? (Did they do then?) I trundled off to Sarah Lawrence with a particle-board footlocker and the Laura Ashley knockoff comforter my mother gave me when I was 13. I hadn't chosen it: she and my grandmother had gotten a wild hair, I guess, and redid Sis's and my rooms with new linens one random afternoon. I remember that I found the cornflower-blue quilt with its teensy garlands of flowers a little twee; I was jealous of Sis's set, which had grids and squares in different grays, with deep burgundy accents, very modern, Totally 80s.

Everything else, I amassed piecemeal: milk crates, the obligatory Indian bedspread, a wooden rack from the Village Tower Records (!) to hold my cassette tapes (!!). That very first night in the dorm, I realized that I hadn't even packed a pillow. I bought one during a tour of SoHo the next day, and managed to get it shut in the doors of the 6 local on the way home. Stand clear of the closing doors. Yeah, honey, that means you. Yes, it's a wonder I survived.

At any rate, I didn't (and don't) really need a pink chrome wastebasket, let alone one that matched my blowdryer. I was perfectly content developing my own sense of style, instead of buying it in a kit. So why do I find the damn catalog so compelling?

Maybe it's the idea of starting completely fresh, acquiring a room and a life and a personality ready-made for your convenience...like a Witness Protection program of housewares. I occasionally dream about college, still, and in most of these dreams I'm not even taking classes or racing to some forgotten final; I'm moving in. I'm putting my books on the shelves, finding a sunny corner for the Venus flytrap I bought at the Woolworth's. It's all about the anticipation, nesting while I wait for My Future to begin on Monday.

Although...now that I've said that, I realize: a Venus flytrap? (Yes, I had one!) Strands of Christmas lights, a carved incense burner? Even in dreams, my stuff, my self, deliberately doesn't match. It might be easy to purchase a coordinated fantasy to inhabit, an identity in a color scheme...but even in my deepest subconscious, I'm not actually doing it. Better, after all, to keep fiddling with it all through the decades, building myself brick by brick by red sofa by thrift-store picture frame.

Where can I get a Venus flytrap, these days?

The will to go forth

Miss me?

I have excuses, oh, plenty of them and all boring as hell, I'm sure: I was readjusting to the antidepressants. I got sucked down the Facebook vortex with everyone else--why contemplate an entire blog post when I could blurt out a single sentence? I got a new job. My cat was sick. I turned 40. Beneath all of these is the simpler and even more boring excuse, in which I just...didn't...feel like it. Didn't feel like writing, didn't have sufficient motivation to put one paragraph in front of the other.

In recent months, and even the past two weeks, the world felt a tad bit worse, in fact: randomly cruel, though not explicitly to me. Several friends lost parents. One friend lost a child, a happily anticipated baby that simply stopped, halfway to term. And I grieved for these friends, recognizing but unable to alleviate their pain, and ohmygod what was the point of anything, anyway? This sucks. Life sucks!

And then one of these bereaved wrote in her own blog, posted about the progress of her grief: she was still devastated, and heartsick, and she was...out of peanut butter. Also lunchmeat. Also cheese. She was bereft, still doing some daily crying...but she had to gather her wits and her Kleenex and make a Costco run, because, you know, the kids needed sandwiches.

I'm not doing it justice, what that story did to me--how moving I found it, how beautifully banal that task. Costco! Death and heartbreak and a brick of Kraft singles, because no matter how painful or poignant or random fate can be, eventually you have to get up. Run the errands, feed the family, write it down.

It reiterated the philosopy about death that I've privately held for some time: that, if you wake up in the morning, if you're still Here, then there must be something left in this world that you're supposed to do. Originally I attached some pretty noble/vain aspirations to myself, out of this...but at 40, I've allowed that perhaps My True Purpose On This Earth is not necessarily to cure cancer, or attain the Presidency, or even write that blockbuster bestseller that gets me on Oprah. Maybe my purpose is smaller in scope, or meant to be taken a day at a time. Maybe today's task is only to put something between two slices of bread. Nourish someone. Nourish myself. Find the words, write it down. Tomorrow, maybe it'll be something else.

Anyway, I'm back. I thought: if she can do it, I can. If my friends and loved ones can push through their own respective sorrows, keep thinking and writing, can move and inspire me...well, I have nothing much to complain about, do I? Life is heartrending, and hilarious, and Warren Zevon was right: Enjoy every sandwich. So. I'm trying.

* * * * *

I let my yard go completely to pot, last summer. We had a ridiculous heat wave, a streak of 100-plus-degree days that roasted everything in the garden, including the Endless Summer hydrangea I'd nursed along for several years. This spring, it remained resolute, nothing but twigs, D-E-D dead. So I let the whole planting bed go to hell, figuring I'd rent a rototiller this fall, tear everything down to dirt, resod the lawn, start over.

One evening last week, when I got home from work, something caught my eye from the front porch. A glimmer of blue among the weeds:

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.