Absolute beginner

In the spring of 1989, my First-Year Studies professor, Bella Brodzki, organized an outing for our class to go see Maxine Hong Kingston read at the 92^nd Street Y. It was the first time I’d been there; the first time I’d been to a reading not on campus; the first time I shelled out precious dollars for a hardcover copy of her new novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, for the purpose of getting it signed.

We’d read The Woman Warrior in class, a book that for whatever reason had resonated so deeply with me that it unlocked the quintessential Sarah Lawrence experience, the quintessential Bella experience. I’ve told this bit of the story at prospective-student events for two decades now: how I read my little mass-market paperback to shreds, the pages warped with highlighter ink and held together with rubber bands. (Yes, I still have it.) Bella assigned a 10-page paper, and I wrote and wrote and wrote in a fever and hit something like the 12-page mark with maybe a third of my ideas still lodged in my brain. What to do? In one of our conferences, I asked Bella this, on the verge of panic.
 
First, bless her, Bella laughed. Then, she said the most transformative sentence I’d ever heard, and perhaps that I’ve heard since: “I’m not going to tell you to do less work, Kim.”

It was a lightbulb moment—the realization that I was entitled to have an opinion; the thought that someone else, an adult, an intellectual, a woman of letters that I respected and admired and was a bit worshipful of/intimidated by, wanted to hear it. Keep going. Keep thinking. I had friends who’d gone on to huge universities, who’d been told outright that their professors and overworked TAs would stop reading at the prescribed limit, mid-sentence if it came to that. Your idea should fit within designated dimensions.

I don’t remember just how I wound that paper down—15 pages, 17? Bella praised it lavishly. I’m sure it’s still in a drawer in my home office, and I know I drew upon it on through my graduate degree. But the experience, that door blown wide open for me at 19, has never left me.

Back to our trip to the 92^nd Street Y. Bella had checked out a campus van to drive us to the city. That image is hilarious to me now: petite, birdy Bella piloting a hulking 15-passenger van down the Cross County Parkway. (She forever claimed to be 5’3”, a lie I indulged because at 5’1” I loomed over her, even in my Chucks.) At the reading, someone distributed copies of several of MHK’s typed manuscript pages, with scribbles and strikethroughs and notes in the margins. As an aspiring writer, I was taken by these: here was another adult who inspired and awed me, and whose scrawled and typo-ed drafts were not so unlike my own! I blithered something to this effect to poor Ms. Kingston in the autograph line, later…and mentioned the raggedy, rubber-banded The Woman Warrior I’d left at home, afraid it would fall apart in her hands. She let me ramble and signed my book. My first signed book. (She did not personalize it, heh.) Her use of the Chinese character for her maiden name impressed me then. The blue ballpoint amuses me today.

Back in the van. It was night, dark and chilly in early-spring New York City; we first-years swayed and dozed in the stuffy blasts from the heat vents as Bella drove us home, like a mom, like all of our moms. She had the radio on, and somewhere during the ride they played David Bowie.

My Bowie horizons were expanding that year, too. I’d had Let’s Dance and Tonight on vinyl, in high school. (I was fascinated by the short-film video for Blue Jean, with its finger-snapping club audience, too cool to applaud.) But my roommate had arrived with both an Apple Macintosh and a stereo system complete with CD player, two signifiers of unimaginable wealth to scholarship-dependent me. Elizabeth allowed me occasional music privileges, and from her collection I’d made cassette copies for my own sad little single-deck boom box: Elvis Costello and the Attractions.* Talking Heads, Naked and Little Creatures. The Rolling Stones, Hot Licks. And a David Bowie greatest-hits collection.

I came back and back to that one. At one point I had the track list memorized, the exact order I’d copied down in block print on the cramped Maxell label, its particular sequence of Changes to Starman, Fame to Fashion to DJ to TVC 15. When I replaced that tape with a Best of Bowie two-disc set, years and years later, I noticed where it differed. (Now, I can look it up—can look anything up. My roomie’s album might have been the Fame and Fashion compilation, and I’ve scrambled the order in my head. It doesn’t matter. I knew it by heart once, sang along word for word and knew what was coming next.)
 
So. Driving at night, listening to Bowie. I vividly remember hearing it, that click of recognition, thinking, “Ohh, I love this song!”…but if I'm being honest, I can’t remember which song, now. One of the gentler ones. For the purposes of this story, this memory, it ought to be Changes. Me at 19, in New York City, visiting a cultural and literary landmark, learning to write, meeting a Real Writer. Feeling, for a moment, like somebody’s child still, lulled in the back seat even as all my horizons were vanishing at once, so so fast, so many doors opening onto infinite possibilities.

But I can’t be sure. Maybe it was Space Oddity, Major Tom stepping out into those very different stars. Maybe it was Ashes to Ashes.
 
I’m happy, hope you're happy too.
 
 
*Advance notice: If and when Mr. Declan McManus shuffles off this mortal coil, I am going to need a couple days off work. Stay well, Elvis!

Beside the golden door

I've been thinking about my maternal grandmother a lot, this week. She was born in rural North Dakota in 1922, to immigrant Norwegian parents...but lost her mother at three, and from that point much of her childhood was scarred by tragedy, deprivation, and outright violence, abuse, and neglect. By the eighth grade, she'd exhausted the limits of the local one-room schoolhouse for farm kids. To continue her education--and it must have been largely her own idea, because certainly no one was championing her talents at home-- she'd need to move to town, Williston, to attend the high school.

I've been to Williston, both as a small child and more recently, as the oil boom has rendered it utterly unrecognizable. In the late 1930s, I don't know that there was any such thing as an emancipated minor, so my grandma had to find room and board with a series of townie families. One of these was a Syrian family.

I'm *almost* more curious about their story, now--how on earth a Syrian family landed in Depression-era bumf*ck North Dakota in the first place. Grammy didn't talk about her childhood much, understandably, and so I don't know these people's names, their faith (though I suppose they might have been part of the Syrian Christian minority, because how exponentially more difficult would it have been to be Muslim in the rural frozen north?), how they'd come west, or when.

But the fragments of fact I know are these: that a family of Syrian immigrants, whose own lives couldn't have been easy, took in a malnourished wretch of a 14-year-old and fed her. Put a roof over her head. Introduced her to pita bread, which she spoke of with great fondness (and probably to garlic and garbanzo beans, too). Taught her that dandelion greens were edible (like Katniss, you guys!). Taught her to cook (...after a fashion). Let her work it off with babysitting, and claw her way to a diploma and a future.

There were other families, I know. Other jobs, before she wrote her sister in Seattle and pleaded a toothache (a lie), begged her to wire money for a dentist, and promptly cashed it in for a train ticket the hell out of Dodge. Probably, many or most of the same things would have happened to her. The same dominoes toppling, the same butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon to lead her to Seattle, to her husband, her daughters, me. But somewhere back down the line, I owe a debt to some Syrian refugees I'll never know. They took a hungry, desperate, terrorized child into their home, and helped save her life. The only response I can live with is to pay it forward.

All the fun we had last year

My BFF in elementary school was the coolest person I knew, a wry sophisticate permitted to use the oven by herself. She also had a finger on the pulse of comedy and culture in the wee small hours—or Army-crawled into the den to watch Late Night on the sly—and so she was the person who introduced me to David Letterman.

I couldn’t stay awake. I was famous for conking out at another girl’s slumber party at 9:30 PM, on the hostess’s mom’s bed (perhaps the only reason I didn’t wake up to my hand in warm water or my training bra in the freezer). But I gleaned some of what I was missing from BFF’s recaps: the Velcro and Alka-Seltzer suits, a guy living—living?—under the seats, someone pelting the audience with frozen peas.

It was BFF’s idea to start an epistolary campaign, appealing to Dave on a weekly basis to put us on the show. Viewer Mail! I remember the plan, though I don’t think we ever put pen to paper. Maybe it would have worked. In someone else’s retrospective this week, I witnessed a blasé thirteen-year-old playing her nose as a Stupid Human Trick. So maybe they’d have booked a pair of idiot sixth-graders from the far coast, based on their sheer, dogged persistence. Which, it turned out, we did not possess.

*****

I’ve kept a longhand journal/diary/scrapbook of some kind since I could write in sentences. Cut from a magazine and pasted into a volume circa February 1994, unattributed, is this:

On the set one night, during a commercial break in the middle of the show, the band was playing so loudly that it was impossible for Teri Garr, one of the show’s favorite guests, to converse with Dave. When she all but shouted at him: “How are you doing?” Letterman grabbed a pad on his desk and scribbled a note that he passed back to her. The note read: “I hate myself.” When Garr tried to reassure him that he was, in fact, a wonderful guy and talented star, he grabbed the note back, underlined “I hate myself” twice, and shoved it back at her.

That hit me SO HARD, spoke to me SO LOUDLY, that I kept it. Memorized it, nearly—enough that 21 years later I could track it to its source: an excerpt from Bill Carter’s The Late Shift, about the early-90s late night wars. (I remembered that the anecdote featured Teri Garr, and looked her up in the index: score, a direct hit.)

I was 24, scrabbling at the edge of the cliff-drop to Adulthood: about to finish graduate school, about to move in with my Serious Boyfriend. I needed a real job. I owed Sallie Mae thousands upon thousands of dollars to be parceled out over a decade, an unfathomable length of time. Together, Serious Boyfriend and I had watched Letterman’s departure from NBC and his triumphant ascension on CBS. I admired Letterman, relished his twisting a thumb in the eye of the boss, the network, that had forsaken him. I found him attractive in a way I couldn’t explain to myself: so gap-toothed and goofy looking, so irritable, this smart-funny-angry man, almost as old as my father, good lord, what was I thinking? Thus, more perplexing still was the idea that I had anything in common with a Successful Celebrity Grown-up Person. Letterman was the newly anointed king. He ruled late night, from beneath the colossal marquee at the Ed Sullivan Theater—maybe someday your name will be in lights. What excuse could he have, to not want to get out of bed in the morning? Here’s part of what I wrote, under that clipping: “What can I learn from this? Other than the fact…that [at $14 million a year] David Letterman can afford a lot more and better therapy than I can.”

(Another thing we had in common, at the time: Neither I nor Letterman had started a course of antidepressants yet.)

*****

Here’s another journal entry, September 22, 2001. I was housesitting for friends whose honeymoon trip to Paris had been canceled, ruined; they drove down the coast instead, in the first glimmer of fall, and I lay awake in their strange bed (with the flattest pillows I’d ever seen, like a pair of two manila envelopes against the headboard, how did you guys ever sleep?? and would I ever sleep again, did it matter?) and watched their television.

Monday, Letterman returned to the air, with what I still feel is one of the finest, most riveting and wrenching hours of television ever, period. He spoke honestly, with grief and rage and pride, saying he wouldn’t have come back if not for Giuliani’s urging all New Yorkers to return to work if at all possible….It was stunning, perhaps the only honest thing I’d seen on TV all week.  

His first guest, Dan Rather, crumpled into tears twice—this, after being in his anchor chair some 15 hours a day for a week. More heartbreakingly, he apologized for it: “I’m paid not to do this,” he sobbed. And twice, Dave took his hand to console him. “You’re a professional…but good Christ, you’re a human being.”  

And then, his second guest: Regis. God bless Regis, who was grating and typical and borderline tasteless, and very needed after the anguish of the first half-hour.

*****

I already owned and loved a copy of Phil Spector’s “A Christmas Gift For You,” before the man went kookoo-bananas. I’ve grieved a couple breakups to Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” that Serious Boyfriend from graduate school among them. It’s not an anti-Christmas carol, exactly, but it turns the usual sentiment inside-out somehow. It is beautiful, that Wall of Sound orchestration: it rings like a cathedral bell. And it describes that marshmallow world from Love’s other song on the record: Holidayland, awash in sleighbells and twinkle lights and falling snow. Celebratory crowds hustle down the sidewalk rosy-cheeked and bemittened; everybody is having the best time ever…except you. Trapped in the memory of happier times. It’s a song about holiday depression.

Letterman calls it the only Christmas song worth a damn, legendary crank and depressive that he is. And that suited how I felt, the first couple years alone, watching Darlene Love belt out regret while they made it snow in the Ed Sullivan. Always the last episode before Christmas proper, the Darlene Love show periodically aired on my birthday, which added another layer of personalization to it in my head, a ritual exchanged just between us. At first I commiserated. I wept. But. Over the years, I’ve memorized the Christmas episode, a liturgy I know by heart:

• Paul impersonates Cher singing “O Holy Night” (This year, I shouted at the TV: under a Victorian lamppost, Paul! Paul! You forgot the lamppost!)
• Jay Thomas tells his Lone Ranger story (They’ll believe ME, citizen!), and then participates in the Holiday Quarterback Challenge to knock the meatball off the top of the Christmas tree
• Some other hapless guest…is a good sport, basically
• Darlene comes out and blows the doors off

Somehow the show became a purification ritual, for me. I laughed at the familiar beats, could recite it along with the television. How would they introduce Aaron Heick with that big bari sax this time—fly him in on a wire? Have him strut down the center aisle? At some point, I put seeing that episode, live, on my bucket list.

*****

Last December, I was still jobless. I’d taken the month off from the job search; I knew that hiring managers were all on vacation themselves, and I wanted to stretch my unemployment benefits into the new year. I had a couple free hotel nights and a ridiculous amount of airline miles about to expire. I was about to turn 45. Back at the office, I’d had a different magazine clipping taped to my monitor for months, this one a quote from Amy Poehler: “I will tell you that the good news is, both personally and professionally, I have a large case of the fuck its right now.”

So I got on a plane, and I queued up outside the theater at 9:20 on a Monday morning to hand in my request for the ticket lottery. They were taping two shows that Thursday afternoon, and I’d done my research, knew one had to be the Christmas episode. Eventually they let us into the lobby (heated) and then, one by one, behind a panel to talk to the audience coordinator in the (ice-cold) foyer. (I was delighted to confirm that tiny truth myself, that Letterman keeps the joint like a meat locker.) I hinted and winked and underscored Thursday on my application, and now can’t help kicking myself just a little, woulda coulda shoulda been more blunt—because my friend David and I got Thursday tickets…for the first taping.

It was still worth it. “My” David wasn’t overinvested steeped in the traditions of the show like I am; he enjoyed himself well enough, I think, but I was on high-alert, thrilling-detail overload: How could the set be so small? How could this tiny space contain the Beatles? There’s the Christmas tree! There’s the meatball! Speared on a cheapo Empire State Building souvenir! Which pierces a pizza from next door! There’s Alan Kalter, come to warm us up! There’s Pat Farmer, sans Oprah transcript! There’s Biff Henderson! There’s a person whose job apparently is to swap Paul’s empty mug with a full one during the act break!

They led us out past the next audience, clumped in the lobby waiting for the Christmas episode. I wanted to squeeze some stranger’s arm and call them a lucky bastard, wanted to hang around somewhere between Rupert’s Hello Deli and the dumpster, see if I could hear anything. But it was colder outside than in, and I was working on what turned into a nasty sinus infection, and I didn’t want my traveling companion to think I’d lost my entire mind. I’d had my Christmas, with my extended, estranged, adopted TV family. And if it didn’t go exactly as planned? If I didn’t get everything I’d wanted? It was still pretty goddamn great. Isn’t that the point?

*****

I don’t have a proper conclusion for this. I’m not sure who it’s for...like, I don’t expect David Letterman to pick my blog post out of the sea of media tributes and accolades he’s racked up this month.

Another thing that’s bugging me: today, May 20, is the anniversary of my father’s death. I don’t keep track of such things, I try not to—but Mom was quick to remind me, this week. I know it’s pure coincidence. I certainly don’t equate Letterman with My Absent, Remote Father Figure. And then you put the sexual attraction factor in there and EWWW, GAAHH, WHAT IS EVEN WRONG WITH YOU. But I will admit that I am having some muddled, confusing farewell feels, tonight.

“Your whole personality has changed!” Mom told me recently—after leaving my last job, she meant. “You’re SO much happier, and more relaxed, and pleasant to be around!” I was glad that she thought so, glad that she’d noticed…and then there was a tiny part of me going “um, thanks?” It was a little left-handed, that assessment. Tell me how you really feel! How do you like me now?

But she wasn’t wrong. I have changed. I don’t, can’t know Letterman…but I feel a bit like I grew up with him. I identify with him. I too am weird, and intelligent, furious, hilarious. Moody. Fallible, and terrified of it. And, eventually, redeemed. Mellowed. A work in progress. And he was there, on the periphery of the living room, for an awful damn lot of it. Letterman’s had a profound influence on broadcasting and comedy for a generation. Maybe it sounds silly, and sentimental, to attribute my personal growth to him as well. He has also influenced a random ding-dong in the Pacific Northwest! But as Norm MacDonald noted on the show last week, the truth is not sentimental. And my truth is that I am sincerely grateful to a man I’ll never meet, who doesn’t know me from Adam, who will never scream at me via bullhorn from a sixth-story window (though a girl can dream). It has been one hell of a long, complicated, fucking funny ride, sir.

Thanks, Dave.

 

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.