two kitties/small city

Old.

 

Maggie (2007) Watercolor on paper. --Sue Rubira

It's going to happen. It's happening already. It's been going on for some time. Maybe five years ago, I noticed that when I looked at photos I'd ask in confusion, "Who is that?"  before the eye settled and realized it was me. The doughy under-chin. The turkey neck. The dark roots. The fat. The one, brave age spot on the right side of my face where the Montana sun beat down through the window on the passenger side.

Even my mother, through the fog of dementia, recognized that I have her mother's hands. She'd never said it before. I can only assume that she saw how my thumb knuckles seem to be swelling or lengthening - doing something strange, anyway - as I get older. And yes, my hands look like my grandmother's. Not when she was young, but when I knew her in the last part of her life.

Now, I let people take pictures of me and simply don't look at them. I'm not one of those hovering over someone else's camera display pressing the trash can button. I know that in ten years, I'll think I looked great. I think, while I pose and smile, of my youth and beauty and how I wasn't confident enough at 103 pounds to wear a bikini. That I thought I was fat when my weight climbed to 117.

Every pair of pants I try on, I'm still 42. Not 22. I can lose weight but I'm not going to lose my scars, or the extra skin that folds over them. I'm not going to spend $10,000 to get any of it removed. All I have is the memory of what it used to be like to be able to wear almost anything I tried on. My biggest problem in any dressing room was that my waist was too tiny relative to my bust.

I ran a 10K this past weekend and posted a photo of me crossing the finish line. It was all I could do not to caption it, "Fatty at the Finish." But I held it back. The girls are watching. What message does it send to train for something for so many months if you are only going to degrade yourself once you've met your goal? And, when I look back at the photo in ten years, what will I be thinking?

Will I be thinking that, at this weight (whatever it is, because I only weigh at the doctor's office and most of the time I make them keep the number to themselves) I could run seven miles; that I was stronger than I'd ever been at that point? That the race weekend was an incredibly happy weekend with John, the man I would marry just a few weeks later? That it was the perfect weather when we stood, that same weekend, under a blooming dogwood tree and held hands while we watched the old fire trucks and the floats and high school marching bands go by in a parade? Will I remember the play I saw in the city with my friend the next day? Or how John and I sat on the bed and talked all night afterward, playing with our cats and simply being happy?

 

The Upside of Anger.

 

I stole that title from the movie. I've always loved that movie.  Joan Allen plays her character caustic and brittle. So much pent up anger about their unsuccessful marriage that, when her husband suddenly disappears, she finds it imposible to consider any explanation other than an affair. That his gorgeous, Nordic secretary left at the same time to return to the homeland only confirms the suspected cliche. His body is discovered many months later at the bottom of a well in a wooded section of their property. It's impossible for the viewer not to ask  -- out loud and even many months, or years, later -- what might have happened if she had set her anger aside and gone out looking for him. Or even picked the fight she'd really wanted to have before he'd gone.

I've spent so many years being angry  - often without really knowing why. Sometimes I did know why but had to force it down. My sister thinks of me as a grudge keeper, and perhaps this is true.I think of it less as grudge keeping than of hurts kept to myself. All in the interest of keeping the relationship civil. At least we can keep it civil, if we can't keep it kind.

Of course, anger in occasional doses is a healthy emotion. A reaction -- they say in all my books -- to being taken advantage of. To not feeling valued. Sometimes things happen and suddenly I get that bitterly familiar taste in mouth and I'm not sure what to do with it. Do you chew, spit, or swallow? Break it up into little pieces and push it around the plate or spread it thin over something sweet?

Just once, I want to take the other road. Not the high road. I fantasize about that every once in awhile. What it would be like -- just once -- to tell people what I really think and feel. Civility and my own dysfunction aside. I might say:

--You've raised your children to be a bunch of little assholes.

--This moment is about me, not you.

--You exhaust me and everyone around you with your anxious drama.

--You're sick. You need help for your alcoholism/anorexia/histrionic personality disorder/(insert dysfunction here.) And I don't want to be around you until you deal with it.

--You're spoiled and rude.

The short list.

I imagine that if I ever really did that, people would just stand back and stare. They're used to me being a doormat. And, of course, they love that about me.

The Charm.

I never had a "real" wedding. I didn't think anyone would show up for me, is the truth. Or thought that the people who would might hurt me.

I find myself, now, in a very strange place. I don't *really* have anybody, anymore. Apart from my sister, of course.  Not having anybody makes it easier but it also makes it harder. Easier not to have to tell my grandmother that I'm about to get married a third time but harder because big events like these sharpen the edges of friendships that have faded over the last few years.

I got married in Hawaii the first time. In a long white dress and veil in a beautiful outdoor chapel on the edge of the sea. Surrounded by people I mostly don't know anymore, I said my vows into the harsh light of a setting sun. I couldn't see a thing. By the end I was so sick to my stomach, I didn't attend my own reception. It might have been something I ate. In the middle of the night we snuck out of the hotel and drove to the emergency room. My then-husband had a severe allergic reaction to something. We passed a pack of wild dogs on a golf course in the dark.

My second wedding was in the living room of our Montana home the day after Christmas. I spent the morning vacuuming on my hands and knees with a Dirt Devil handheld because the housekeeper forgot to tell us she broke the belt in our regular vacuum and there was no time to run to town and find one. Afterward, we rode up the hill with a "Just Married" sign and a bunch of empty soup cans tied to our ATV. My old friend from high school made us a carrot cake with Hershey's Hugs sunk into a thick layer of cream-cheese frosting and we listened to our contractor give a toast about how M. was, as a man, the "new head of [our] Christian household." My sister promptly dropped a champagne glass and broke it. We were all a little gobsmacked by that 'Christian household' thing.

My third wedding is on May 25, 2013 at 11 a.m. at The Old Stone Church in Winchester, Virginia. There will be a simple cake, vegan cupcake and punch reception afterward. All my people are gone, now. I keep hearing that in my head. My parents. My grandparents. My step-brothers. There are once-close friendships I'm less sure of today than I was just two years ago. My still-good friends are few and feel very far away. After twenty years of waiting, whether anyone shows up or not, I'm finally going to marry my best friend. And I can hardly wait. If you're reading this - you're invited.

Food Issues.

Image ripped off from Tangelo Studio. The piece is for sale.

 

I want this piece of art. In another life, I was that woman, bent back over the table. I lived in a big house. For six years, I made dinner.

You could look back and pick out the reasons why. In the kitchen, I could be alone. M. never wanted to hang out in there. I could do whatever I wanted to do, so I did almost everything in there. I canned cherries. I wrote about what I saw and what I didn't see.

I made things. I made something out of nothing. I cooked food because it was the only trick I had in my pocket to make him happy. I opened my stomach as if it had a hopper and ate food I didn't want because it was all we could do together. We both got fatter. I learned to ask him for help if I wanted him to go away. So I guess I had two tricks.

When I came here, to Virginia, I put all of that stuff away. Or, maybe I just got weird about it. I ate with John but we mostly ate out (in the beginning.) I sometimes cooked behind his back, waiting until he left on a work trip to attack and destroy the kitchen. In one of our few real misunderstandings, he called just after I'd made myself a steak under the broiler. He said something like, "So you like to cook but you just don't enjoy doing it for me?" Meaning, "I want to understand that there's something about doing it for another person that took the enjoyment away for you, right at that time in your (my) life."  So soon after my divorce, I could only hear M. in that remark. I heard, "So...you like to cook but you just don't want to cook for ME?"

But if you know John, you know he meant it the other way. The, that's perfectly ok, baby, I am happy kinda way. Because he loves a fancy dinner just as much as he loves a bowl of cereal which is as much as he enjoys eating at Burger King. And if I'm in the kitchen he's in the kitchen because he loves ME and he's spent the day crawling around repairing a giant industrial machine that's so loud no one can really talk while they're at work. And I'm the one that has to remind myself to slow down and listen instead of running away to do something stupid - like put the laundry in the dryer - instead of listening to the person I love, who loves me, tell me what he saved up in his heart all day to talk to me about.

More often than not, when John's cooking he shooes me out of the the kitchen. For him, it's the surprise factor. He wants to plate it and show it to me in all it's majesty.  Even though he's not a vegan he says that he enjoys the challenge of cooking vegetables. He said once, "I think anyone can just cook a good hunk of meat, but how many people can master the ins and outs of vegetables?" He steams vegetables and rice in the steamer or sweet potato "steaks" with mustard sauce. He whips up green smoothies with kale and fresh fruit for my breakfast, serving them with a side of oatmeal with mango and cinnamon on top. He stands over the sink and eats the rinds of the fruit telling me he ate for himself while he was making mine. Cinnamon toast. Vegan chocolate chip pancakes with fresh strawberries on top. I told him once I'd still love him if he didn't serve me breakfast in bed and once during a busy stretch he didn't. I still loved him, but I did miss that love on a plate.

I've been cooking with a mania ever since I found Veganomicon at my library a few weeks ago. Not in secret. This is vegan food I want to eat.  I've made a velvety Carrot Bisque, Potato-Kale Enchiladas, Snobby Joes, Mushroom pate, Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies. My Instagram feed is ripe with the ideas.

I've cooked so well for so long that I know exactly how this all works. That I can switch the walnuts to pecans in the Mushroom pate recipe. That the Carrot Bisque will never be right without fresh ginger. But I learn things from this book, too. I learn that if you dip the tortillas in a pie plate filled with tomato sauce and then roll the filling inside them, the wetness of the tomato sauce will hold your enchiladas together like glue. Fucking genius.  One week I play a game with myself - trying to use every vegetable I've bought and not waste a single cent of the $60 I spent at the store. The next week I spend $30 on artisan salts.

The unseasonably cold weather makes it easy, too, because the gas oven heats the house. The new fridge bumped to the other side of the kitchen makes the work space flow better than before. I still enjoy the wide open space of being home alone. When it happens I stay up and wake up later. Writing, exercising, working at odd hours. I start cooking in the middle of the afternoons and make enough to freeze and eat during the times when John is away. This week he's away for seven days straight.

I focus on that - trying to lay it all up for moments exactly like this one.  I know the day is going to come - and soon -  when I will be unable to force myself to drive to the store to get a box of cereal.  And many times I won't know why that happens. At others, I will find out that this old house is just too cold and my body wants to hibernate. Or that I didn't have enough to eat the night before and my blood sugar is low. It can all be sorted with a microwaved bowl of homemade soup. When its ready, I eat one bowl of soup from the batch and freeze the rest in my individual serving containers. The next night, I make another soup. Or a casserole. Alone in my kitchen, but not lonely. Right as rain.

Bad People.

One of my favorite lines in the film, The Hangover is when Stu tells his girlfriend Melissa, "You're...such a bad person! Like, all the way through to your core!"

 

There's a much longer buildup to all the reasons why Stu's scene is actually the best possible outcome for the relationship. In that moment, it was absolutely the right thing for him to do. And I think I sort of envy the fact that he said it out loud.

Dementia and the Telephone.

My mother turned 73 in the same month she forgot how to use the telephone. We'd talked, my mother and I, about how I might help. Could I find her a phone that was less complicated than the cordless, Caller ID, answering machine number currently installed?

I did research at The Alzheimer's Store - fine, as long as you didn't click off into the products designed for more advanced stages and get emotional - and then my sister and I discussed the picture/memory phones. Though we didn't say anything out loud, both of us we're probably thinking that it would only re-open the door to another problem - my Mom's constant, tearful calls to my busy doctor sister while she was at work. Mom didn't seem quite ready for the dial-less Alzheimer's patient "hotline" designed to prevent those continuous, unnecessary calls.

And then, just like that, the calls stopped altogether. It had larger implications for me, the one that lives far away. I'd get around it by calling early in the morning or late at night and I'd let it ring and ring and ring - sometimes for as much as three minutes straight - to allow her the time to press the right button.

Sometimes my sister would dial me during her visits to the nursing home and help hold the phone to my Mom's ear. Once, the nurse called saying my mother was extremely upset and could I call? By the time I got her on the phone, my Mom had completely forgotten what the problem was. There were times she would struggle to keep up a conversation for more than a minute or two. Other days we'd have a relatively lucid conversation and she'd express her dismay that she hadn't yet met John, but that she "liked what I was doing."

It's hard to know what she meant by that - that she "liked what I was doing." You see, she's *never* liked what I was doing. For decades. I was her black sheep, her scapegoat, perhaps the one who reminded her (I think) of her own hidden mistakes. I yearned for a parent to give me some loving direction, but I did not have that parent. I fled as soon as I was strong enough to go it alone. And maybe a little before then.

After I left home, I had to force myself to call. I flailed my way through my twenties to the background noise of disapproval. I dreaded our phone calls and dragged out the space between them as long as I possibly could. I was amazed by friends who talked to their mothers every day. I talked to mine for one hour a week. I limited my time and could tell by the way she sucked her breath in over the telephone that she didn't like me; didn't like what I was doing. She did not try to help.

It's hard to know if she got what she wanted out of life. Looking at the way it is ending, I can't imagine that she did. It's cruel to say it but it's true. But maybe I can say it - because the scapegoat is the most emotionally honest person in the family. And as long as I'm being honest, there have been many moments during this process that I have felt she didn't deserve the time and love that I've given her over  the last few years. There have also been many moments when I've been relieved that she allowed me to be the kind of daughter I always wanted to be.

And though that only came in brief flashes, relative to the years of our relationship, I find that I really miss being able to talk to her. I feel incredibly guilty about not being able to see her for six months while I was working in Florida. And I'm also in the Christmas spirit, because it's the first Christmas in four years that she's been sick, but [relatively] stable and in a protected environment.

I think alot, lately, about how my life will end and if anyone will be there to take care of me. I want to think it will be John but it's difficult to imagine it. Not because I don't love him or trust him but because I cannot imagine the surrender after so many years of taking care of myself. Even when I wanted some help.

There is a kind of real surrender required before real care can begin. You have to hand someone all your money, your car keys, even the decision about what kind of clothing you'd like to wear to bed. And it's difficult to wrap your brain around the idea that, one day, your biggest task will be to re-learn a kind of childhood. Someone holding the phone to your ear, cradling your independence in the other hand.

 

July 4.

Photo by Sebastian Bibb-Barrett.

 

July 4, 1976.

The Bicentennial. We passed Bicentennial quarters up and down our third grade lunch line. My mother celebrated her 37th birthday with a big party in the back yard. My Dad dragged a table out on to the deck and turned it into a bar. We kids ran wild while the adults drank and talked and played volleyball. Bob Vest sunk our sailboat in the lake. Or maybe I just imagine-remember that he did. The party is one of the few memories I have of my parents enjoying themselves, together.

 

July 4, 1977

Just days before my mother's 38th birthday, my great-grandma "D." passed away. That year the party had to be cancelled. We loaded into my Dad's Suburban for the long drive from Detroit to Iowa and divvied up the back seats into war "zones." The air in the farm church was still and hot. My great-aunt Jean told me that the black lace net covering the coffin was there to keep the flies off the body.

 

July 4, 1981

My Dad and new stepmother took us camping at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. I woke up in a cold pool after a night of heavy rain. Because my stepmother was too frugal to take our sleeping bags to the laundromat to put them in the dryer, we had to get back in them later that night.  On the beach, watched a man nearly drown in the storm-heavy surf and then smoke a cigarette, first thing after his rescue. My Dad drove us back to Philadelphia drunk, bumper-tamping people in front of us in the end-of-holiday traffic. No one said, "Let me drive."

July 4, 1991

President George H.W. Bush brought the war machines to K Street for a victory parade celebrating the end of Operation Desert Storm. It was hot and crowded and we all felt trapped. My cousin's fussy toddler wouldn't let anyone hold her -- except a perfect stranger. We tried to pretend we didn't hear the woman quietly ask her daughter if she thought it was a sign of abuse. You can't say out loud, "Nah, the kid's just a total brat."  Not in front of the kid's parents. The tanks sank into the hot asphalt and commuters cursed those ruts for years afterward. Everyone who was in DC that day remembers the fireworks as the best they've ever seen.

 

July 4, 2004 - 2007

These years are a blur of boats and barbecues and kids. I remember someone spending $1500 on fireworks. After I balked at the waste, I was categorically excluded from the fireworks budget negotiations. Each year I sat and watched the family shoot potatoes into the lake using a special gun made of PVC pipe powered by hairspray and a cigarette lighter. One of those years, I watched the adults shoot the potato gun one foot from a baby's head. One year, I really didn't feel well at all but did not yet know what was wrong with me.

 

July 4, 2008

There is a photo of me, taken on that day, holidng a baby I don't recognize in a room I don't ever remember being in. When I see the photo, it bothers me alot that I am unable to remember where I was or who I was with. Later, I work out that it must be Lucy, at the house we rented for the family reunion.

 

July 4, 2012

I drove from North Carolina to Miami. The second leg of a trip from DC that would bring me to Florida for six months to work. My white kitty shit himself one hour from our house. The mess was all over the inside of the carrier and the other cat. I stopped at a gas station in rural Virginia to buy baby wipes and paper towels."Are you having a problem?" the attendant asked. Later, when I told the story to my friends, I'd tell them I had replied, "Yeah I'm having a fucking problem!"

Louise Bourgeois: Femme (2005)

Femme, 2005
Fabric, glass, stainless steel and wood
24.7 x 35.5 x 14.6 cm / 9 3/4 x 14 x 5 3/4 in

Photo: Christopher Burke

Bourgeois maintained the presence of childhood trauma in her work, even toward the end of her life. It's amazing, when you think of it, just how important childhood can be (should be?) in determining the enduring course of our adult lives.

A Point of No Return - Frederick Buechner

Last week, I stood on the porch and tried to figure out how I could get out of the shadows. It's not that I've been depressed. It's more that the web has been torn and I can see things for what (I think) they might really have been. Not how I imagined they should have been, or what I told myself were the reasons that could explain what happened in those dark and fragile moments.

Something in the night air told me to go back upstairs and open Beuchner.

A Point of No Return - (Buechner's diary entry for May 27).

The world is full of people who seem to have listened to the wrong voice and are now engaged in life-work in which they find no pleausre or purpose and who run the risk of suddenly realizing someday that they have spent the only years that they are ever going to get in this world doing something which could not matter less to themselves or to anyone else. This does not mean, of course, people who are doing work that from the outside looks unglamourous and humdrum, because obviously such work as that may be a crucial form of service and deeply creative. But it means people who are doing work that seems simply irrelevant not only to the great human needs and issues of our time but also to their own need to grow and develop as humans.

In John Marquand's novel Point of No Return, for instance, after years of apple-polishing and bucking for promotion and dedicating all his energies to a single goal, Charlie Gray finally gets to be vice-president of the fancy little New York bank where he works; and then the terrible moment comes when he realizes that it is really not what he wanted after all, when the prize that he has spent his life trying to win suddenly turns to ashes in his hands. His promotion assures him and his family of all the security and standing that he has always sought, but Marquand leaves you with the feeling that maybe the best way Charlie Gray could have supported his family would have been by giving his life to the kind of work where he could have expressed himself and fulfilled himself in such a way as to become in himself, as a person, the kind of support they really needed...

"Man shall not live by bread alone," and this just happens to be, among other things, true, and very close to the same truth that Charlie Gray comes to when he realizes too late that he was not made to live on status and salary alone but that something crucially important was missing from his life even though he was not sure what it was any more than, perhaps, Marquand himself was sure what it was.

There is nothing moralistic or sentimental about this truth. It means for us simply that we must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously. Everybody knows that. We need no one to tell it to us. Yet in another way perhaps we do always need to be told, because there is always the temptation to believe that we have all the time in the world, whereas the truth of it is that we do not. We have only a life, and the choice of how we are going to live it must be our own choice, not one that we let the world make for us. Because surely Marquand was right that for each of us there comes a point of no return, a point beyond which we no longer have life enough to go back and start all over again.

--Frederick Buecher

After reading this (and this), I slept better and woke up the next day I got up and went to the gym, as is my habit. I ran hamster circles around the track chanting a new, strange mantra: "Make the most of it." As in, "This is it, we don't get more." And in the shower I thought about my dog - not just this moment - but all the other ones.

I thought about all the trips to New York and Miami. Every time I went away I'd get a call from the neighbor that my dog had wandered down the highway. What that meant was that he wasn't being properly secured, a necessity at our house.

You see, a friend's dog had been tragically killed after running through our orchard not long after we moved in. I remember the day. I was working in the art cabin at the top of our road. I looked out the window and saw this dog running Lab-happy through the trees. Being an animal person I normally would have run out to try and catch him and pet him but I was in the middle of something, I guess. Two minutes later, the dog was dead. Hit by a car on the highway. We were devastated - both of us - and heartbroken when our friend put him in the back of the truck to take him home and bury him.

So the other day, as I was showering post-run, I thought about that and acknowledged (I always knew, just wouldn't look it in the face) that he didn't secure my dog on purpose. Full well knowing what could happen. It happened all the time on our highway.

On the simplest level, maybe it was a way to try and keep me home. He didn't like me working and if he made it a stress to be away... On another level - and this is the point of the whole story - I realized in the shower that he really didn't like me, and that possibly, the reason for all of this sh**, is that he just wanted me to leave.

The same day, a friend mentioned an article he'd read about my step-brother who said, in the New York Times, that he was an only child. Though I completely understand PR and the value of keeping our family life a private matter, it bothered me. Not just that my sister and I didn't exist, but that he couldn't find a way to mention our brother*. Talking with J. about it over dinner, I spit out, "Everyone just erases me."

And I thought about all the other stuff that has happened recently and I reaffirmed that maybe it's painful, but boundaries are the way to set the web trembling for other people who need to find their balance. My lines are drawn on the page in permanent maker.

You still have all of my love but you don't get to not know me anymore. You aren't allowed to discount the work that I do, the education that I have, the value of my creative skills. You don't get to pretend that my web of global connections doesn't exist, that the only thing I'm good at is making dinner. That you wasted the six years you had with me trying to make me less - less smart, less strong, less capable - well, that's your problem. I'ma go be awesome (in my relatively small way) on the East Coast again. and I'ma do it without you, if I have to.

And then, I felt better. Like, instantly better. And I've been in a great mood all week - everyone noticed. I'm still sorting the connections between the dog, Beuchner, and Any Human Heart, but it was instant healing.

The dog's fine, by the way. He lives with a lady and has a better life than I could ever give him.

 

 

*Though, to be fair, if our brother is still alive - and still a drug addict - I wouldn't want him to know where I'm at, either.

No Man Is an Island - Frederick Beuchner

Abandoned house we spotted (and loved) in Harper's Ferry, WV.

"No Man is an Island," Dr. Donne wrote, intire of it self; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannoir of they friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefor never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."

Or to use another metaphor, humanity is like an enormous spider web, so that if you touch it anywhere, you set the whole thing trembling. Sometime during the extraordinary week that followed the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, the newspapers carried the story that when that crusty old warhorse, Andrei Gromyko, signed the memorial volume at the United States embassy in Moscow, there were tears in his eyes; and I do not think that you have to be either naive or sentimental to believe that they were real tears. Surely it was not that the Soviet Foreign Minister had any love for the young American President, but that he recognized that in some sense every man was diminished by that man's death. In some sense I believe that the death of Kennedy was a kind of death for his enemies no less than for his countrymen. Just as John Donne believed that any man's death, when we are confronted by it, reminds us of our common destiny as human beings: to be born, to live, to struggle a while, and finally to die. We are all of us in it together.

Nor does it need anything as cataclysmic as the death of a President to remind us of this. As we move around this world and as we act with kindness, perhaps, or with indifference, or with hostility, toward the people we meet, we too are setting the great spider web a-tremble. The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place we search for that unfound thing too, even though we do not know its name or where it is to be found or even if it is to be found at all.

--Frederick Buechner