Live from the 'Bean

Junkie

2012-02-11T08:33:00.000-08:00

I have overdosed on caffeine exactly twice.

The first time, it was at the Queen Bean -- the coffee shop where I initiated this blog. The exchange seemed innocent enough. I'd ordered a hazelnut something or other, and the barista said, "You want all four shots with that?" Me (thinking 'Why not? It's early, I've got work to do...'): "Sure."

It didn't hit me for an hour or so. For a while I was zipping right along with my writing, and then all of a sudden, something happened. I started to get panicky. I couldn't hit the keys fast enough, or with any sort of accuracy. I stuttered through a few sentences. Everything around me seemed too loud. I started thinking about my impending deadline, and how much work I still had to do, and how I am not typically a person who does well under pressure, which led me to think that maybe the whole story should be scrapped.

Well. I closed my laptop and called it a day. At home, I went on a cleaning binge.

The second time went much the same. This is because I'm a slow learner, and hadn't fully made the connection -- until it was too late, and the caffeine was working its magic. I then proceeded to do two things you should never do during a caffeine overdose:

1. Drive a car. It was a completely surreal experience -- everyone was going too slow, and the traffic lights seemed to operate with random timing. The dulcet tones of Terri Gross were irritating; I wanted to reach through the dashboard (and time, and space) and take her by the throat. I tapped the steering wheel, then pounded it. I jiggled my knee, whacking it against the steering column. Really, it's amazing I made it home without driving straight through the car in front of me.

2. Pluck eyebrows. Enough said.

The strange thing is that I am an admitted caffeine junkie. It used to be Diet Pepsi; these days, it's unsweetened tea with sugar-free lemonade -- my own version of an Arnold Palmer -- which I brew each morning and suck down straight through dinner. I hit Starbucks twice a week; three or four times in an absolute emergency. I have been known to pull into a drive-through on my way home from night class to grab 32 ounces just to keep me awake. This would be at 9:30, when I fully intend to be snoring by 11. But apparently mainlining small doses of caffeine is nothing compared to the sucker punch of something with "all four shots."

This week, I knew I was going to have serious "time management issues" -- to borrow a phrase from the lovely Tim Gunn. I had research papers to grade, lessons to plan for, an event at my house, a night class to teach, things to bake... and incredible amounts of caffeine to consume.

I might have overdone it a bit yesterday - Starbucks plus an unscheduled stop at a quick-mart when my students left for their half-hour music lesson. Exhausted, I leaned one arm against the wall as I walked down the hallway at work, carefully sidestepping a zillion backpacks. At one point it seemed my eyes weren't working properly -- I read the same sentence five or six times without being about to pick out all the words. At home, it was straight to bed.... where (wait for it... wait for it...) I couldn't sleep. Suddenly, the caffeine from nine hours earlier had kicked in.

***

This morning, there is a bit of commotion in bed -- suddenly, neither of us has the right amount of covers, and both of us have a deep suspicion that the other is hoarding our share. We stop, regroup and remake the bed in early-morning darkness. Baxter, who is blissfully unaware of the powers of caffeine, stops by to visit. He had a tough day yesterday, too -- a long walk and some serious playing with his new toy. But now he is wide awake, up on the bed with me, licking my face.

I glance at the alarm -- 5:53 on a Saturday morning. It takes a good five minutes to accept my fate, lumber my way to the kitchen, and pour a cup of coffee.

Ironing Out the Kinks

2012-01-22T21:58:00.001-08:00

When I was eight or nine years old, I learned how to iron. I recognized it for what it was: a rite of passage into womanhood, and also an additional, unending chore that I would start that day and never, ever finish.

"We'll start with pillowcases," my mom declared, handing me a freshly laundered stack. This is how I grew up: No matter what was going on in our lives, we placed our heads on starched pillowcases each night. My mother was from Detroit; for long years, I entertained the idea that this was the typical behavior for people from Detroit. It was comforting to think of an entire city slowing down each night so the women could iron in the luminescent glow of the television.

Beginning that day, I started ironing just about everything, down to my t-shirts and tank tops. Like my mother, I didn't see wrinkles as a natural state. I saw them as an abomination.

The late '80s was a time of starched shirtdresses, and I came of age at just the right time. My first real job? Ironing clothes for a woman down the street whose entire wardrobe was 100% cotton right out of the Spiegel catalog.

I brought a miniature iron and ironing board with me to college and used them fairly often, at least my first year in the dorm before I shed cute lacy blouses for borrowed flannels. My roommates must have seen me as an oddity -- Sarah unpacked not an ironing board but a full-sized playground swing, which we hung from our loft. Others contributed an espresso machine and about five million packets of Kool-Aid.

When I met Will, it was safe to say he had never ironed anything. Once, on a dress-up occasion, he arrived wearing a new shirt. He'd removed the pins and the cardboard collar form, but hadn't bothered to launder or iron the shirt. "Do you like?" he asked, turning in a slow circle. There were so many stiff creases in odd places that he could have stood in for the Tin Man.

I sighed, already manuevering the ironing board out of the hall closet, and ordered him to strip.

These days, the ironing board is a permanent fixture in our lives. We have an office with a desktop computer that we never use, and instead, we more or less use the space as a laundry room. I hang clothes to dry in there, and Will douses his work clothes with liberal sprays of Wrinkle Release -- but still, we vie for use of the iron in the mornings, never seeming to plan far enough ahead to iron for more than a day at a time. It's not unusual for us to argue over who needs the iron first, who needs it more, etc.

There is no sedate ironing in front of the evening's reality shows; no I'll-iron-it-on-the-off-chance-I'll-dress-up-this-week. The chore I once learned with pride has become just a chore. Most weekends, in fact, I refuse to iron at all.

And the pillowcases? Sorry, Mom -- they're wrinkled as anything.

Assorted Noises

2012-01-14T20:06:00.000-08:00

Will doesn't mean to cough so loudly, or so often.

That's what he tells me, anyway.

It seems curious that a person would have to cough with such regularity (every two minutes or so) and at such fantastic volume.

"Be reasonable," I plead with him.

"I'm sick!" he replies.

It seems like we are talking about two different things.

* * *

We have arranged to have the interior trim of our house painted, which amounts to a dozen doors, window casings and lots of 1940s-style molding. "It's probably best for me to take the doors off, sand them down and paint them. Maybe I could do that in your garage?" Dave, house painter extraordinaire, asks.

"Um," I say. "That might not work."

"Why? Do you have a lot of stuff in there?"

I consider. "Have you ever seen Hoarders?"

He laughs. "Well... let's see. I could take the doors off, bring them back to my place, and work on them there."

We shake on it. The doors removed, our house has a strange, echoey sound to it. I'm not particularly bothered that the mess in my hall closet, where I store our extra toiletries, is on display. It's actually kind of nice to wake up in the morning and be able to look directly into our walk-in closet. But it's somewhat disturbing to go through life sans a bathroom door. (Read here for more on my feelings about bathroom etiquette.)

Will and I have taken to announcing when we'll be in the bathroom, turning up the volume on the TV when necessary, and using the restrooms at our respective places of employment.

It's only temporary, thank goodness. And sort of an adventure -- the closest I'll probably come to camping.

* * *

For Christmas, Will bought me noise-cancelling headphones. I'd requested them, mainly because I do the majority of my writing in public places, and I like to be able to drown out some sounds. Also, no doubt because they don't know me, random people like to strike up conversations with me about the weather, their grandchildren and their parole issues. I love to be able to point apologetically to my headphones and shrug. Whoops -- I missed what you said, and sorry, I'm not taking off my headphones.

They work marvelously.

And they've arrived at just the right time, since at this exact moment Will is in the bathroom, hacking away.

Ten Proofs for My Continued Existence

2012-01-08T19:32:00.000-08:00

1. I just took three Advil. I feel pain; therefore, I am.

2. Library books returned, $16 fine paid, audio book of David Copperfield renewed.

3. My dog has been spotted in my neighborhood with a blonde woman in fake UGGs.

4. Persistent Starbucks charges on debit card totaling $4.35.

5. Long hair in the sink, tub and drain.

6. 92-point word, JUTES, played against my father.

7. Name paged over intercom at work repeatedly during 5-minute passing period.

8. Someone "window shopping" on www.ruelala.com routinely fills my shopping cart with size 9 shoes.

9. Folded laundry, paired socks.

10. Novel manuscript continues to grow, little by little. Currently: 105,000 words.

Novelty items

2011-10-30T12:47:00.001-07:00

On Saturday, Will met me in the parking lot of the big box grocery store, armed with our weekly list. I was coming from one direction and he was coming from another, so it was a relief to see his Honda pull up next to me, to see that I hadn't been stood up.

This was a significant moment. For the third time in our thirteen year history, we were shopping for groceries together.

I remember the first time well, because we were a new couple. Walking the aisles of a grocery store together, pushing a cart together, looking at chips and dip and bottles of beer together -- it all seemed significant. We had entered the Shared Grocery Bill phase of our relationship.

I cannot actually recall a second time, but it's been thirteen years. There must have been a second time.

This time, our third shared grocery experience, Will produced the folded list. Half of it was in my handwriting -- yogurt, cereal bars, ingredients for the pumpkin chocolate chip mini-loaves that have been my staple this season. The bottom half was in Will's handwriting -- burritos, steak, parsley flakes.

"That's it?" I ask.

"I reserve the right to make twenty-seven impulse purchases," Will says, and commandeers the cart.

This explains, to some extent, the reason why I generally do the grocery shopping by myself. I make careful lists, noting the events I'll be baking for, checking the inventory in our pantry. I stick to the list, watch the prices, and approach the register with an estimate of the cost. I am, after all, half German and half Dutch.

Will is the impulse buy king, which, I'll admit, makes life interesting. It's always a pleasure to find boxes of Junior Mints tucked into the freezer door, or a cheese I've never heard of and can't pronounce waiting on the counter. He tends to see my list as a set of gentle suggestions, not imperatives. "Couldn't find these things," he'll report, indicating cream cheese or tomato paste. Once I sent him off with a list of four items and he came home with nine, including one item from my list.

Also, the trip tends to take somewhat longer with Will, due to constant doubling back and rerouting. "Did we miss the cheese aisle?" he asks, baffled, as we wend our way to the frozen food.

"We just came from there," I point out.

"We did?"

At the register, we split up according to our strengths. Will plucks items from the cart and plunks them onto the conveyor belt. I arrange them according to size and shape, thinking of how I'll bag them.

When I look up, I notice the woman behind me rolling her eyes at her husband, and I instantly understand this eyeroll is directed at me. But I forge calmly on. Excuse me for liking things to be in a certain order.

While I bag, Will strikes up a conversation with the cashier, who couldn't seem less interested. But it's obvious that for Will, this is a novelty experience.

"Let me ask you -- what's the biggest order you've ever rung up?" he persists.

The cashier considers. "Eight hundred dollars, and they paid cash."

"Whoa!" Will throws up his hands. While the line waits behind us, he considers. "I bet it was some kind of group, and they were heading out on a camping trip or something."

The cashier shrugs, tears off the receipt, and I notice the couple behind us is openly chuckling now.

I place Will's final impulse buy -- cheddar cheese and sour cream chips -- into our cart, and as we head for the door, I suddenly realize that Will and I are something of a novelty ourselves.

I've Always Been a Writer

2011-10-16T20:15:00.000-07:00

I wrote my first novel when I was nine years old and my family was driving cross country from California to Wisconsin, with infrequent stops along I-80. I filled up an entire wide-ruled notebook, using the front and back of each page. When I got to the end of the notebook, I figured the story must be done.

I used to write at night in the top bunk, a flashlight balanced against my pillow.

In high school, I wrote long, tortured poems about the boys I loved who didn't love me back. I finished my school assignments and in my extra time I wrote poems on sheets of binder paper and passed them to friends in the hallway between classes.

I majored in literature and writing in college. I started each assignment early - I really did. I was a nerd's nerd. I wrote for the student newspaper, the yearbook, the alumni quarterly. Sometimes my writing wasn't noticed. Sometimes it earned me praise. Sometimes it got me into trouble.

After college, I freelanced, writing about real estate and bridal showcases and county fairs and yard sales. I wrote press releases for companies I knew were dishonest; I wrote a "Marketing Tip of the Day" column -- marveling that anyone would pay any attention to me, a person who knew not a lick about marketing.

Then I married a writer.

I took a job teaching English, thinking, this is only temporary. Thinking: I'll teach during the week and write on the weekends, on holidays, during the summers. I would write five pages in a spurt and walk away from it, returning never. I started teaching a creative writing class and when my students pretended to write in their journals for ten minutes, I really did write in mine, finding for the first time in years the discipline of writing, the routine that serves as a launching pad for creativity.

I took a leap of faith and the burden of new financial responsiblity when I enrolled in an MFA program. I burned my brains out writing, I sweated every sentence, I grappled with character and plot, I cried and laughed and loved every second of it.

One day I wrote a three-page scene about a wrestler on the mats, with his girlfriend watching from the stands. I owed my mentor twenty-five pages and was three pages short, so I included this scene with my submission, adding, I don't know what this is, exactly, just an idea I had. He wrote back: It feels like there's more to the story. Why don't you keep going?

So I did. I wrote hundreds of pages, keeping maybe one out of every three or four. I spent more time with these characters than I did with my own friends and family. I researched the 1970s, Wisconsin, wrestling, Vietnam, forensics. Will gave me tips on wrestling, even showing me the "arm bar" on our cat, Copper. I shared the story first eagerly with sisters and friends and then cautiously, wondering exactly what I was writing. There was always a chapter, a paragraph, a word that needed revising.

Last January I signed with an agent, someone who read my book in a weekend and fell in love with it. I was teaching again by this time, and writing on weekend mornings. In August my revisions were finished; in September it was submitted to publishers. Somewhere around this time I stopped sleeping and took up full-time worrying. What if my book - my baby - wasn't good, or wasn't good enough? I was glad for the distraction of 175 junior high students, their drama, their pestering questions.

And then I got the offer, from Mira Books. They wanted to publish not just Face of the Earth, but my next book, too -- a book that right now is a collection of vignettes waiting to be linked. I told my family and the friends who had been with me from the beginning, cheering me on from the sidelines. My parents took Will and me out to dinner at a place that doesn't rhyme with "Crapplebees." I hesitated to say anything publicly (and by that I mean here, and on Facebook), because I was still pinching myself. Was this really happening? Was it happening to me? Amidst the emails of congratulations, one friend wrote, "You were always this."

He's right.

I've always been a writer.

...For no reason at all.

2011-10-02T22:40:00.000-07:00

The man at the table next to me looks like he’s just come from the gym. Actually, he looks like he lives in a gym, because those are seriously the biggest biceps I have ever seen, and he has the smooth, hairless look of someone who regularly oils up for bodybuilding competitions. He boots up his laptop and pulls out a book titled “Refrigeration 1994.” In 1994 I was a senior in high school. I have one of those senior pictures with the big number blocks 9 and 4, and in the picture I have huge, very curly hair. My last purchase of pink lipstick probably dates to 1994, also. My hair has changed considerably, and I have to believe that refrigeration has changed considerably during that time as well. When he reads, he rocks forward and back from the waist as if he’s in a catatonic state. He would have been right at home in an audition for Cuckoo’s Nest, a background character scuttling out of the way of Nurse Ratched. He wears a wedding band. His fingernails are very well groomed; they put mine to shame.

At the next table over is a man reading today’s edition of New York Times, out loud to himself in a not particularly quiet monotone. The name on his plastic Frappuccino cup is “Mark.” He reads nonstop, one word after another, pausing only to follow the jump to an inside page.

An intense-looking blonde woman comes over with her coffee, sees rocking man, reading-to-self man and me (woman avoiding novel revisions), then turns and heads for an outdoor table.

A fiftyish-woman comes in sporting baggy overalls and gray pigtails. She reminds me of a carnival attraction –the young woman with the old face. For no reason at all, she grins broadly at me, and for no reason at all, I grin right back.

In general, I’m against sequins on jeans, but what walks through the door next gives me immediate pause. This woman is older, sixtyish, wearing black heeled sandals, black jeans with tiny sequins on the pockets, a black and white shirt with a black scarf wrapped around the waist, and a black cardigan. She has a serious diamond on her finger. Her companion (tallest woman to walk into this brach of Starbucks today, I’m convinced), is also wearing black and white, which leads me to believe they are caterers or wedding planners or hostesses at a restaurant downtown. They are fantastically overdressed and impeccably groomed for a Saturday afternoon latte.

I start to wonder what I’ll look like when I’m in my fifties, sixties. Will I go the pigtail route or the sequined jeans route? Will I ever have my life together enough to have my fingernails and toenails painted at the same time?

I take a long sip of my latte, which has cooled considerably, and wait to see what comes through the door next.

Darkness, My Old Friend

2011-09-26T06:46:00.001-07:00

Last Friday, I sent seven emails between four and five a.m.

Last night, I sent five more just after midnight.

Normally, I'm asleep during those hours. These days, I curl into a ball, my thoughts spin, and eventually I give up, deciding to read myself back to sleep, snuggle with the resident beagle, or just get started with the day.

I've begun to think of sleep as a long-lost friend -- someone who has been avoiding me, maybe, or someone with whom there is unfinished business.

***

The thing is, I love to sleep. Every roommate I've ever had can attest to this. In college, I used to try to make myself stay up late, but at a certain point I became silly and useless -- usually hours before the rest of my friends became silly and useless.

Occasionally I assign my students this sort of journal entry: Imagine if you had to leave home suddenly, without knowing if you would ever return. What items would you bring with you? If it were assigned to me, I would write: "My bed" followed by "at least two down pillows" and finished with "a duvet with an Egyptian cotton cover." Wherever I'm headed, I'd like to be able to sleep when I get there.

***

"Are you okay?" a friend asks. Her voice trails off: "You look..."

Old. Just go ahead and say it. Tired and old.

***

If only I could mainline caffeine, I would be fine. I would be able to make it through Job #1, teaching four sections of junior high Language Arts, a typing tutorial, and leadership. I would be able to make it through Job #2, teaching five hours of class a week at a community college 45 minutes away. I would have the creative spark to tackle Job #3, revising my novel for publication (which, to be honest, is more important than the first two right now).

"I like your hair today," says the barista at Starbucks.

"Thanks," I say, privately horrified. I can't remember exactly how many times I've seen her this week. This is usually when I begin to break off relationships with proprietors -- when things become too familiar. I become too embarrassed by the private attention, and disappointed in my own predictability. A venti skinny vanilla latte, hot as you can make it.

***

At 4:30, I'm suddenly awake. My alarm clock is set for 5:30, so I pray for about 15 minutes that I can please, please, please fall back asleep. Baxter, perhaps noticing my change in breathing, jumps up on the bed next to me and gives my cheek a big, meaty swipe with his tongue. I'm officially awake.

My neighborhood is not. It's still dark and too early for the paper to arrive on my doorstep. In the distance, a car alarm bleats and suddenly my neighbor's sprinkler system sputters to life, surprising me.

I take a few deep breaths. Ready or not, it's time to start the day.

Bathroom Etiquette

2011-09-11T22:20:00.001-07:00

In general, I believe in an open-door policy. I'm all for transparency -- in government, in personal life, in conversations with parents about their seventh graders.

But not when it comes to the bathroom.

Last year, my friend K. and I discovered that, in addition to a million other things we have in common, we both observe complete silence when in the bathroom.

I'm not exactly sure how we discovered this fact, but once it was... well, out in the open, we had a few thousand examples to illustrate our point.

"I swear to you, the second I sit down --" I began.

"I know! I mean, all I need is just a minute --" K. continued.

"And then, inevitably, he'll have a question that just can't wait. Like, 'Where do we keep the spatulas?' or 'Have you seen my belt?' -- really crucial stuff."

"Yes!"

We stared at each other, amazed. We had been living all this time, miles apart, in parallel universes.

***
In our eleven-plus years, the hubs and I have come to some sort of agreement about bathroom etiquette. We've had to, since for our entire history we have shared a bathroom. The agreement works something like this: Under no circumstances* should he attempt to talk to me through the bathroom door (*possible exceptions include house on fire, home invasion, or appearance of Publisher's Clearing House van). In turn, I try not to enter the bathroom during the "hair" phase of his morning routine.

It mostly works.

When it doesn't, we have no choice but to scream at each other.

***
At work, I face many of the same problems. The women's bathroom in the office has four stalls and two sinks. During our breaks, we file into the bathroom one by one, and inevitably, inescapably, someone will talk to me through my stall door, through toilet paper unwinding and toilets flushing, through paper towels dispensing and water rushing in the sinks. Sometimes there are comments about the weather or about yet another stupid policy behind handed down by our bosses (aka, the government). I submit to this as best I can, inserting, "mm-hmm" and "yeah" to every question I'm asked. But don't try to ask me about a student's grade, or about a novel I'm teaching. This is not the time to argue, not the time to engage.

Every time this lapse in bathroom etiquette happens (once a day, five days a week at least), I suddenly remember the contract Will and I have with each other, and wonder if it can be imposed upon my colleagues as well.

Imagine the possibilities:

I could draft a simple version, slide it into their mailslots, and collect signed contracts by the end of the week. I could circulate a petition, then post the collection of signatures inside each stall. We could institute a small fine for violators and encourage self-reporting.

Because I, too, have a dream. It is not a lofty one. I would simply like two or three minutes of uninterrupted quiet to do... well, whatever I wish.

The Least Interesting Topic of All

2011-08-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

Last week I was asked to submit a short bio of myself, to be sent out with my novel to potential publishers. I was feeling pretty great about all three hundred pages of the novel, but to write a short paragraph about myself? Hello, palm sweats and nausea.

When I started this blog it was mostly out of curiosity. What in the world would I say? Could I keep it going? Would anyone other than my husband read it (without me asking every four seconds, "Have you read my blog yet?")? I have some friends who write excellent blogs (one is here) -- and although this intimidated me, I started to see this little site as a public writing exercise, a chance to experiment in a new genre.

When I write fiction, I have an internal editor that kicks in, that starts shaping the words as they come out my fingertips - moving a word here, a sentence there, trimming adjectives like stray eyebrow hairs. In the back of my mind, I'm always thinking about useful things like plot and character and where the story is going and how I'll know when I'm there. But when I set out to write about myself, the early drafts are always a muddled mess. I'll read them over and think: Thank God I didn't post this.

So yesterday morning at *bucks, I sat down to make a short list of things to include in my bio. Now, I'm quite aware that this bio was supposed to focus on my writing, but in my muddled-mess-of-a-first-draft, this is what came out:

"Who wants to know that I wouldn’t miss Project Runway for the world, that I limit myself to a single episode of Hoarders per month, that I read everything that I can get my hands on, including ingredients and usage instructions on the backs of beauty products? That, when I have a waist, I have an affinity for wide belts and when I don’t, I rotate through an unhealthy collection of cardigans? That I believe I truly should have been a spelling bee champion at least once in my life, and would sign up for an adult spelling bee in a heartbeat? I can drop literary references and play the snob; other times I sit mute, afraid to be the smart girl in the room. Nothing is better to me than the five minutes in the morning when Will and I are still in bed and Baxter sandwiches himself between us like a sturdy-limbed two-year-old. I have always loved to bake, but have only recently learned to cook. In a recent period of unemployment, I wrote a letter to a local baker, offering to be an unpaid intern for a few weeks. I almost sent it. I have trouble deleting things from my inbox. I’ve had a bad run of luck with laptops. I can say no – but it hurts."

Stop: Breathe.

My laptop was smoking, and the woman next to me had subtly shifted her shoulder so that her back was to me.

Okay -- this is the non-essential information, I told myself, drawing an imaginary line in teacher-red ink through the paragraph. Now you have to focus.

Once, a student told me he couldn’t write about himself for his personal essay, because he basically couldn’t stop himself from lying (exaggerating, he said) to make himself seem better than he was. "I just want to be interesting," he told me. "I want someone to read this and think: Yes! We need him at our college!"

“No, you have to be honest. Be you,” I remember telling him, “but be the best you.”

But now I can sympathize. What is the best me?

Forty-five minutes later, my skinny vanilla latte drained of the last drop, here's what I came up with:

Paula T D is a writer, latte drinker and all-around slave to public education. Her first novels – written in the back seat of a station wagon where her parents let her jostle around from California to Wisconsin and back, unprotected by a seat belt – were sadly lost in one move or another. Face of the Earth is her first novel to survive. Previously, her writing has appeared in deCOMP, Cantaraville, The Shine Journal, Staccato Fiction and The Sycamore Review, where her short story “Casualties” placed second in the Wabash Prize, judged by Tobias Wolff. A recent graduation of the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine, she has been invited to read at the AWP Annual Conference and Bookfair in Chicago, 2012. In her down time, Paula takes long walks with her husband and their beagle/child. She often records her thoughts here: www.livefromthebean.blogspot.com.

Whew. And now, I wait for the right person to find it.

Neighborly

2011-08-22T21:18:00.000-07:00

We have new neighbors.

The house in question has been empty for the better part of two years, bringing all the usual things that go along with vacancies -- towering weeds, telephone books tossed onto the porch, and foot traffic in and out the backyard gate which was always, always open.

Will and I had been in the house years before -- in one of the long periods of vacancy sandwiching its brief period of occupancy. We were with our realtor, riding in his impersonal, neat-as-a-pin sedan, and we parked across the street at another house for sale.

"It looks like they've converted the garage to a den," our realtor said, snapping on light switches as we trailed behind. It had been converted, indeed -- into a strange, wood-paneled room with built-in stone benches lining three of its walls. It was the perfect arrangement for a hunting lodge in the mountains, or the meeting of a secret society that required a password, special handshake and torchlit votes.

I shivered.

Our realtor, walking ahead, discovered a burnt patch in the hardwood floor. (Animal sacrifices????) "Um, guys," he said, holding out both arms as a barrier, so we wouldn't go a step further. "It's a no. Believe me, you'll thank me some day."

We nodded, defering to his wisdom. It was sobering to realize exactly what was in our price range.

We ended up buying the home down the street -- a solid little house that proved a blank slate for our lives. But I've watched that other house, feeling somewhat reassured when it was occupied and vaguely uneasy when it was not.

Then one Friday a For Rent sign was posted in the front yard. Within a week, the new neighbors were moving in. I watched the scene from the kitchen window. It was difficult not to stare, the way it would be difficult to sit in the stands and not watch the circus perform. People and furniture spilled out of trucks, no fewer than twelve children ran circles on the yard, a horse-trailer was parked on the street, and a boat was parked diagonally across the driveway.

"Looks like the whole family is helping with the move," Will remarked, joining me at the window.

I nodded grimly, beginning to suspect the truth.

By Sunday night, there were still six pick-up trucks parked along the block. I counted eighteen people crowded onto the front porch, in the sort of temporary seating that I feared would be permanent. The sheer number of people was overwhelming, as was the way those people stopped and half-turned in my direction whenever Baxter and I walked by. What about the hunting lodge? I wondered. Why couldn't they all gather in there, maybe raise a glass of mead and sing of the adventures of a hero?

"Have you met our new neighbors?" asked D. from the house on the corner, watering his lawn.

I confessed to only watching them from the window. "What about you?"

I observed him closely. D. is the most upbeat, positive person I have ever met, but he struggled to get this one out. "I think they have thirteen kids," he said, and his smile, although still a smile, was bleak.

I'm a neighborhood watch coordinator; it's my job to shake hands and make friendly, and eventually, that's what I'll do. I'll suck it up, I'll get over my snobbishness, I'll back away from the window, cross the street and extend my hand. Eighteen times, if that's what it takes.

Letters to Mrs. D.

2011-08-15T06:43:00.000-07:00

I ask my students on the first day of school to write me a letter. Not only does it set the tone for what English/Language Arts is all about, but I've learned it's the only time all year a junior high student will be completely honest.

Step one. Tell me about yourself, I say.

This is where I learn who loves football, who just moved to town, who has gone to five different schools, who has three brothers and two sisters, who has pets, who plays the ukelele. They are surprisingly candid: I have two parents but both of them hate me. They are resigned to circumstances: I'm from a broken home, and all I can say is that I've survived it.

Step two. What do you love and what do you hate about Language Arts? And don't hold back, I tell them.

The responses are varied: I love L.A.! It's my favorite class! It's easy for me because I already speak the language (there is always, always, at least one who says that). I love to read books, but I hate to read any book a teacher assigns. I hate all books except one, and our school library doesn't carry it. I love to write stories. I hate to write essays. I don't hate hate L.A. I like writing essays because for some reason I'm good at it and always get an A. One student tells me: Last year I completely screwed around in your class, but this year I'm making a fresh start. It's a new me. Another writes: Yours is my fave class!!! But why do you assign SO MUCH HOMEWORK? A third tries this reverse bribe: I'll turn in all my homework if you make that bean dip again! A new student writes: I can't tell yet if I like you. (Fair enough.)

Step three. And now, I say, set three goals for yourself this school year:

It's shocking how many of them plan to be valedictorian (37), to get an A in Language Arts, to get no grade lower than a B in every subject. Some are more practical: I just want to pass. I just want to graduate. I'm just going to try to stay out of trouble.

***

One of the eighth grade boys lurks near my desk at the beginning of lunch. I'm trying to answer an email that needs just the right wording.

"So, you like to write?" he asks me.

"I love it," I tell him.

"What have you written?"

And for some reason, I tell him what I haven't even told my colleagues. "Well, um. I wrote a novel last year, and actually... well, I'm hoping that it gets published within the next year." My heart beats a little faster, saying that.

He nods, shaking his head so that the hair hanging in his eyes is somewhat dispersed. "Cool. That's cool."

"What about you. Do you like to write?" I ask him.

"Yeah," he shrugs. "So far I've written five novels and seventeen short stories."

"Oh. Well, that's great," I say. I wonder what my paltry one-as-yet-unpublished novel sounds like to him.

He shrugs again and wanders off, throwing these words over his shoulder: "I'm going to write a lot more this year, though."

Sometimes teaching makes me smile.

You Won't Feel a Thing

2011-08-07T22:25:00.000-07:00

Everyone, it turns out, has a gall bladder story.

It's like an appendix -- one of those extra parts we apparently don't really need, something that can be removed without much difficulty. Between my three sisters and me, we have a grand total of zero appendixes, and that's even counting the sister who started with two. For a while, every time the phone rang at night, it was with news that someone from Will's family was in the ER with a hot appendix. Now I keep a careful eye on Will's own abdomen -- it's only a matter of time, I tell him.

"You know, your grandfather had his gall bladder out," my mom says, in what is probably intended as a pep talk. "That was in 1999." See? Proof that a person can live for 12 years without this extra bit of tissue. Then she begins listing family friends -- Pam too, and what about Katie? She got out of the hospital only last week.

Armando, our brother-in-law, had his out, Will reminds me. Yes -- I remember. The waiting area, the hospital room, cracking jokes with Dad before Armando even came out of the anathesia.

I mention this to Mona, the sole person on earth who can tame the beast that is my hair. At the moment I have silver foils sticking out of my head; I look like a pale, somewhat lumpy Christmas tree. "Oh! Well you know, I had my gall bladder out..." she begins. What follows is a medical horror story that pauses only when it's time to stick me under the dryer, resumes for the shampoo, and finishes during my cut.

It's only a laparoscopy, everyone points out. I'll be back on my feet in no time -- my sister's co-worker, I'm told, was back at work in three days. No one mentions that the last time I was scheduled for a laparoscopy I spent seven days in the hospital.

I'm in no hurry to be cut open again, and besides -- I've had exactly one really bad stomach ache that may or may not have been my gall bladder. Who gets a tonsillectomy after one bout with tonsilitis? I'm too cynical not to ask: Would this option be suggested to me if I didn't have double health insurance coverage?

Will provides the theme music for my musings: "Losing My Gall Bladder" to the tune of "Losing My Religion." Meanwhile, I start to wonder if a bad gall bladder can get me out of chores like taking the trash out, washing my car, emptying the dishwasher.

***

I want to explore other options first, I tell my doctor -- like a change in diet. I'm 35, and it's time to kiss fried and fatty goodbye. I quote some passages from things I've read online about people who have just as much pain after gall bladder surgery as they did before, and other people who live with their gall stones, pain-free.

"I understand your concerns," my doctor says.

For the first time ever, I have her full attention. We're sitting in chairs, facing each other. It feels empowering to sit in a doctor's office fully clothed, in control of my dignity.

"Let's say I have one or maybe two more attacks, and there are no other obvious causes..."

She nods. "Then it will be time to come back."

I agree. We shake hands on the deal and I head back to the lobby, feeling suddenly much better.

A gall bladder is a terrible thing to waste.

Speaking Too Soon

2011-08-05T07:19:00.001-07:00

Although I was mostly feeling better by the time I finally had my sonogram -- to see if there were other possible causes for my gastroenteritis -- I went ahead with the procedure anyway. Let's just say that for someone who is already complaining about stomach tenderness and "unexplained gas" (sorry for the high-tech medical jargon), an abdominal ultrasound is a painful, painful thing.

You basically lay on your back while a plastic wand smeared with cold, translucent jelly is butted up against your ribs, and you think cheerful things, like: I wonder why she keeps looking at that spot. Is that my pancreas? It must be my pancreas. Fabulous - I have pancreatic cancer. I've got six months to go, maybe. But I feel fine! Almost fine! I'm going to have to go "out of network" to get a second opinion, and how does one begin to do that? How many days of sick leave do I have again?

"Lay on your side," the technician says, and so you do. It's a very strange sensation, like an alien abduction must be. There's nowhere to put your arm, although you try a dozen different possibilities. Over the head is weird, on top of the breast is uncomfortable. Maybe if you can reach the arm back, behind yourself... "If you can keep still," the technician reprimands gently. You busy yourself by staring at the monitor, which looks exactly like the screen for a pelvic ultrasound, except there's no baby in there. Other things surface randomly - kidneys, the gall bladder, the liver - like bubbles rising to the surface of a pond.

The technician is infuriatingly professional. It's her job to do the procedure; it's the doctor's job to interpret the results. She doesn't even allow a "hmm" to pass her lips; there's no hope of getting a "Looks good!" either. "I'll send the results to your doctor," she says at the end, snapping off her gloves.

Half an hour later, I was home, listening to my answering machine. Someone had left a message that essentially asked, "Hello?... Hello?... Hello?" for thirty seconds without providing a name or number. I listened to the message again, suddenly convinced that this was my doctor's voice. She was calling me with THE NEWS.

Shaking, I dialed my doctor's phone number, which goes not to her office but to a call routing service. "I think someone may have tried to leave a message for me," I said, lamely. "I just had a test done, and maybe someone is trying to tell me the results?"

"I can leave a message for the doctor, if she hasn't gone home for the day," a female voice says smoothly.

"Yes -- thank you. It's very important."

At this point I'm too keyed up to read, write or look at curriculum. There's nothing to do but turn on Millionnaire Matchmaker and wonder how people get so messed up.

An hour later, I dive for the phone when it rings. It's a physican assistant from my doctor's office, the one who gave me a T-DAP shot last week and told me jokes while we waited to see if I had a reaction to the vaccine.

"Hi, Paula," he says. "I see that you called for your test results. Doctor told me to pass on a phone number to you, so we can go ahead and get you scheduled."

"Scheduled?" I repeated, a pen in my hand.

"Yep -- hope you don't have any plans for a while. It looks like you'll be getting your gall bladder removed."

The Summer of Sick

2011-07-31T21:35:00.000-07:00

I used to work with a person who cornered me daily to relate horror stories of her Crohn's disease -- and while I tried to listen and be sympathetic, I also started inventing ways to avoid her. Sorry! Not now! I'm trying untangle all these cords going into my monitor! Or I would roll my eyes, apologizing for the fake phone call I was fielding just as she walked past my cubicle.

It was simply draining, listening to the sad litany of her complaints.

And so, dear reader, I sympathize with you. I doubt you've been thrilled by my tales of strep throat, toothache and Will's man-child illnesses. So I hesitated to write this post.

A week ago, S. asked me what was next for my blog.

I shrugged. "No idea."

"What about your abscess? You could tell all about your five-and-a-half hour tour in the ER."

Um, yeah. I laughed uncomfortably. Just thinking about it made me want to take a Percocet. (What's to tell, anyway? Innocuous-seeming bump on inner thigh quickly becomes horrific mass, the dimensions of which made me gasp when viewed in the bathroom mirror. "How are you feeling?" Will asked, and I burst into tears. "All you need is a pore-sized opening in the skin," the internist explained much, much later, when the waiting room had filled and emptied twice and all the serious cases had been dealt with, "and just a teensy bit of bacteria to get in there, and then, voila!" I languished in the trauma room, clutching the skimpy gown to my body and waiting for the painkillers to kick in. In the meantime, I pleaded with God. I promised to throw away my razor. I apologized for thinking a plague of boils wasn't as bad as a plague of toothaches. I wondered if euthanization was a better option than making small talk with a nurse during the painful "lancing and draining" procedure. And then I went home, sat for three days with a hot compress and downed 72 antibiotic pills "just to be safe.")

So it seemed logical to wait for other inspiration, something not abscess related.

Like a nasty bout of gastroenteritis, which struck just as my gaping wound was healing.

"Oh -- you're back again," said the physician's assistant at my doctor's office. "We didn't expect to see you so soon! What's going on?"

"Well, it's just that..." I hoisted myself carefully onto the bed in the examination room. "It sort of feels like something is inside me, sticking its foot in my ribs. Not a baby. Well, maybe an alien baby."

She chuckled, strapping the velcro blood pressure cuff around my arm. "I remember that about you. You always have such creative complaints."

"I'd rather be boring and healthy," I confessed, wincing as the cuff inflated, squeezing my arm.

"Blood pressure fine," she said, tossing me a paper gown. "I'll send the doctor in to see you."

There was nothing to do except stare at the ceiling, wait for my diagnosis and pray for an end to the summer of sick.

Spatially Challenged

2011-07-15T22:10:00.000-07:00

From my dad, I have inherited the ability to pack things really well. Every summer, he would pop the back of the station wagon (and later, minivan) and begin the slow process of cramming in the belongings of a wife and four daughters who would be traveling for a minimum of three weeks. My sister B, who also inherited this trait, recently confided that it had allowed her to become a master Tetris player.

For me, too, this skill has come in handy over the years:

I have no formal grocery experience, but I can bag like the best of them.

I have the belongings of a 2,000 square foot home but have arranged them neatly into 1,100 square feet.

I can fit two weeks worth of trash into our black bin, useful for those weeks when we forget to drag the can into the alley.

Last week, we had approximately 20 hours between getting an estimate on new carpet and having said carpet installed, which posed a time problem and also a slight geographical problem. We basically had to take the contents of three bedrooms and cram them into our living and dining areas, which are hardly spacious to begin with.

I rubbed my hands together, ready for the task. "Okay," I said to Will. "I think you need to let me take the lead on this one."

Will threw up his hands, conceding defeat before the battle began. (I obtained Will's permission to tell this story: When we moved into our first apartment, Will spent the day packing his belongings while I was at work. When I came over that evening, intending to load my car with his boxes, I found that he had packed all his clothes, books, CDs and bedding into one giant appliance box -- which was too large to fit into my car and too heavy to budge, even an inch.)

First, I took stock of the more troublesome items -- a six shelf bookcase with a few hundred books arranged alphabetically; three dressers; a massive CD unit, with CDs organized more or less chronologically; two desks; my beautiful cherry red file cabinet; a seldom-used treadmill and one bed that was too large to go down the hallway. Second, I formed a plan: If I had to live in a 400 square foot studio with all my current belongings, just how should they be arranged?

What followed was a furniture moving marathon too tedious to relate here, with the AC cranked up to counteract a 106-degree day. We worked in 20-minute shifts, stopping to guzzle Arnold Palmers and comfort our pets, who were increasingly freaked out. The result was that every available inch was stacked with something, and by the end of the day, there was just enough space on the couch for two humans, one beagle, and two cats.

The next day, I had to leave the house for a few hours to meet with the dean for a new teaching gig beginning this fall. I returned with Taco Bell (the perfect food for when your kitchen has disappeared) just as the carpet crew arrived.

In the meantime, Will, unbeknownst to me, had invited some neighbors over to pick plums from our burgeoning tree. Now, the plum tree is actually located outside, but for unexplained reasons, it turned out that at least one neighbor traipsed through our home and out the back door that day, past the reassembled furniture, the heap of clothes from the bottom racks of our closets and the dresser dumped in the middle of our kitchen, which happened to be where it fit best.

I gasped, learning this. "Through the house? You mean, someone was in here?"

Will grinned. "Don't worry. He said he liked what we had done with the place."

The Mother of All Toothaches

2011-07-05T16:59:00.000-07:00

I'm not afraid of going to the dentist. Twice a year I plop myself into the chair, allow my head to be lowered to an uncomfortable angle, and submit to a battery of abuse - scraping, scrubbing, speed flossing, sometimes drilling, strange tastes and the occasional freezing shot from the Water Pik. Maybe the worst for me is the X-ray - an odd-shaped piece of plastic wedged so awkwardly in my mouth that I instantly feel like gagging.

And yet, I know -- I'm one of the lucky ones. Plenty of people have no such luxuries.

Eight days ago, I started to feel a slight throb in my lower right jaw. Just a teensy throb, hardly consequential at the moment. We were in New York, a stolen two-and-a-half day idyll before Will's conference in Philadelphia. I pushed the throbbing to the back of my mind - I'm good at ignoring things -- and soldiered on. And then, that night, I couldn't sleep. I lay awake in our room on the 19th floor, listening to the city not sleeping below me, and tried to isolate the pain. It really did seem like my entire body was throbbing, and unaccountably so. We'd climbed some steps, sure, and walked quite a few blocks, but that's nothing I can't handle. My entire head seemed to ache, too, like my forehead had become a pulse point. Eventually, I took four Ibuprofen and slowly drifted off.

But the dang pain just wouldn't go away. I confessed it to Will the next morning over breakfast: "I think I might have a bit of a toothache."

"Oh, no!" Will dropped his fork, mid-bite. If anyone can sympathize with tooth pain/dentist phobia, it's Will, a man who did not visit the dentist for eleven years, a man who once lost a hefty chunk of porcelain to a piece of sourdough bread in Monterey.

"It's okay -- it's not too bad," I insisted. I'd brought along a Ziploc baggie of Ibuprofen, but needed to stop for more as soon as we made it to Philadelphia. I had a brief vision of the ulcer I was creating - first a tiny hole, then eventually the sort of fissure I could punch a fist through.

The painkillers took the edge off, and for two or three days this was remedy enough. I met up with friends, favored the left side of my mouth when I ate, timed my doses, and tried my hardest to fall asleep at night.

By the fourth day, I had to admit defeat. I'd toyed with the idea of calling a dentist in Philadelphia, but hesitated, not knowing if this were truly an emergency and not having the slightest clue what my insurance covered when it came to this sort of thing. Because at this point I was really thinking: Exposed nerve. Root canal. The pain was so intense that I couldn't bring the lower half of my jaw to meet my upper. I walked around the city slack-jawed, cringing if anyone or anything came within a foot of my face.

I called my dentist and explained the situation. The next morning when Will headed into a conference, I hiked myself down to CVS and obtained a five-day supply of Vicodin. I have a love-hate relationship with Vicodin. I love how it lets me forget, if only for a couple of hours, that I've been experiencing pain. I hate how it wreaks havoc on my stomach (nausea, anyone?) and my sense of equilibrium. Will was instructed not to laugh as I made my way to the bathroom by holding onto the wall in our hotel room.

Eventually, I settled into a sort of rhythm, designed to last until Tuesday morning, when I could see my dentist at home. Every three hours I dosed myself: 1 Vicodin, three hours later 4 Ibuprofen, then 1 Vicodin and so on. If I missed a dose, I was alerted by pain radiating down my neck -- my own built-in alarm clock. There's a quote I half-remember from somewhere: "A headache? I had the kind of headache God smote you with in the Old Testament." I had the sort of toothache that could easily have been swapped for one of the ten plagues. Bring on the locusts, the flies, the hail, the boils (okay, maybe not the boils) -- they had nothing on this toothache.

This morning, I was twenty-five minutes early for my dentist appointment, a Paula record. I thought I held it together on the outside, chatting about my trip through teeth that didn't meet, although inwardly I was begging: Me next! Call me next!

I submitted to the wedging of large, sharp-edged plastic into my tender mouth and waited anxiously for the results. "Hmm," my dentist said, "Nothing there."

I dug my fingernails into the plastic armwrests. Look more closely! There must be something wrong!

"Why don't we take a look at your bite?" she suggested.

Was she insane? I couldn't bite. People in the throes of pain should not be asked to accomplish such unreasonable tasks. But I submitted again, grudgingly, to a series of "tap, tap" and "side to side" instructions.

"Are you biting as hard as you can?" she asked, skeptically. "It doesn't seem like you're biting at all."

I estimated that I was a good thirty seconds away from crying.

"You know, this might be the problem. Head back," she instructed, and before I knew it, sans any sort of numbing agent, a tiny silver drill was whirring away in my mouth. Only, it didn't hurt. It actually felt ... okay.

Here's the problem, as it was explained to me: In March (yes, four months ago), I'd had a crown installed. It didn't seem to fit exactly right at first, but after a day or so, I got used to it. Nothing hurt, nothing seemed problematic. In fact, it was ill-fitted, meaning that I hadn't been biting down correctly for months, and the entire area around this crown (basically, the lower right section of my mouth) was inflamed. It might take a week, but now that my bite was corrected, the pain would gradually subside and I would soon be back to normal. With any luck, I would be able to chew something more complicated than a piece of gnocchi or cereal completely saturated by milk.

"And if it's still hurting...?"

She snapped off her gloves, then gave me a pat on the shoulder. "Then just give me a call."

Culinary Adventures

2011-07-01T05:36:00.000-07:00

Famiglia Italia - 8th Avenue, New York City, 2 a.m.
After a full day of travel and fine dining on Southwest's peanut and Cheez-It packs, we arrived in the city ready to eat. This pizza was fantastic, especially when seasoned by terrific hunger. We got it to go, and practically ran across the street to our hotel, kicked off our shoes, and feasted on a buffalo chicken pie on top of the bedspread while an episode of Law & Order played in the background. Bliss.

Tick Tock Cafe, 8th Avenue, New York City, 9 a.m.
I went for the bowl of fruit, already feeling that my arteries were clogged. It was basically a chopped up grapefruit with a few bruised grapes. Yummo!

Street Vender, 5th Aveue, New York City, 1 p.m.
We took a walk down Madison Avenue and eventually ended up in the Reading Room at the New York Public Library (yes, the Ghostbusters room, as one of us recognized). Then we hit the streets again and oh, the humidity. Needing a refreshment, we bought drinks. Will scarfed down a dirty water hot dog and I bit into the hardest pretzel of my life. It literally needed to be submerged in my Diet Pepsi to be palatable, and once submerged, it was disgusting. I date my raging toothache to this horrible brick.

Somewhere near the post office and Madison Square Garden, New York City, 8 p.m.
Cheese pizza = a thin crust, a swirl of sauce, and easily two pounds of cheese. A teensy-tiny bathroom. Once I was enclosed in it, someone immediately began pounding on the door. "You'll have to wait!" I called, contorting my body to reach behind me for the toilet paper. Pounding persists throughout the flushing, zipping, washing, and drying. "Sorry," a twenty-something girl says when I step out. "I just really couldn't wait." Pizza grease gets me, too.

Cooper's Tavern, 8th Avenue, New York City, late
We decided to stop here for a nightcap, since we were approximately 10 feet from our hotel and thus would not have to worry about stumbling down the street afterwards. Will ordered a margarita that was heavy on the triple sec and tequila, and I went for a Midori sour that came not in a tumbler, but in something more like a pint glass. I couldn't let it go to waste! Besides, I was fine to walk through the lobby to the elevator bank! Life was good! And it wasn't until the next morning that I realized I'd left a hand-scribbled outline of my novel at the bar.

Beck's Cajun Cafe - Reading Terminal Market, Philadelphia, 8 a.m.
Beignets! Heaven dusted with confectioner's sugar. De-lite!
Muffuletta! This for Will, who kept tempting me with bites. Would you like a little olive with that sandwich?

Chinese Restaurant, Arch Street, Philadelphia, 8 p.m.
The sign in the window boasted that this was the 8th best Chinese restaurant in the US, and as we appeared to be the only white people (read: authentic cuisine), we went inside. We ordered two iced teas. "In a can?" the waitress said. I grimaced: "How about brewed?" We were then served two massive tubs of tea; the sort of large take-out containers that usually hold a quart of soup, except pierced through with a straw. Every other person in the restaurant was drinking out of a glass, and I tried to figure out where my ordering had gone wrong. Paige arrived when I had picked out all the chicken from my kung pao plate, and demanded to know why we were drinking tea out of a tub.

Will ordered the sweet and sour chicken, which arrived as tiny bites of chicken minus any sauce. A few minutes later, he got the waitress's attention and asked if his order included any sauce. "Yes," she said, confirmed in her belief that we were mentally challenged. She seemed in no hurry to rectify this situation.

Capogiro Gelato Artisans, various locations around Philadelphia, various times of night.
Yum. My favorite combination: Sea Salt and Nutella. Will, always braver, went for the Avocado.

El Vez, 13th Street, Philadelphia
Fried plantains (not for the bananaphobic), corn on the cob slathered with chipotle, mayonnaise and fresca queso, guacamole that could convert the avocadophobic, red chile and chicken enchiladas with crema fresca and cotija cheese, more than my share of a pitcher of margaritas which left me feeling I could pronounce any of the terms on the Dia de los Muertos montage on the wall. El Mercado! Amor Eterna! Excellet company: Paige, Beth, Rick and Will.

Portofino, Walnut Street, Philadelphia
Bottle or two of pinot grigio, fried calamari, spinach salad with walnuts and gorgonzola, fettucine alfredo (toothache persisting with some urgency...), 17 glasses of water.

Dunkin Donuts, Market Street, Philadelphia, 8ish a.m.
Large iced coffee with cream and sugar, vanilla creme donut, loads of guilt.

CVS Pharmacy, Market Street, Philadelphia
20 Vicadin tablets for the low low price of $4.95! I haven't cured my toothache, but I've forgotten to care.

Vending Machine, Downtown Marriott, Philadelphia, 2 p.m.
After a day of the Constitution Center and wandering downtown, I'm parched. A Diet Pepsi at the vending machine will cost me $2, but I decide the expense can't be avoided. Exiting the elevator, I head left to the machine. "Excuse me!" called a hotel maid. "Excuse me, but you're going the wrong way! Room 1915 is to the right!" I explain about my urge for overpriced cancer-in-a-can, but the conversation stays with me throughout the trip. 23 floors in this hotel and thousands of guests, but somehow this person knew exactly who I was and where I should be.

Le Cestagne, Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 6:30 p.m.
Sarah's pick, which ended up having just the menu for a girl who was suddenly subsisting on a mooshy-foods-only diet: flan di Parmigiano con crosta di pistacchio and gnocci di patate alla Sorrentina, which translates to high levels of food coma deliciousness.

Home, Modesto, CA, 6 p.m.
Will and I realize we have no food in the house. Lamely, I offer to call for a pizza, but it's the wrong choice by a mile. Finally, Will heads to the grocery store for what sounds like heaven: cereal and milk.

If you go...

2011-06-26T17:07:00.000-07:00

If you ever find yourself heading across country or around the world with my travel companion, you should know:

1. Talking is permitted, but discouraged.
The W takes flying very seriously. Why not? We're hurtling through the air at many miles an hour in a quite heavy piece of metal - at least, that's how it's been explained to me scientifically. The best thing for all parties to do, he figures, is keep quiet. Stay in your seat, headphones on, reading or sleeping. There is no need to strike up a conversation with a neighbor -- this can be done once the landing gear has safely been lowered. There is also no reason to talk to one's travel companion -- you'll be seeing each other for the duration of your trip, and any chit-chat can wait. Once, nearly twelve years ago, he turned to me somewhere over the Great Plains and said, "Bag." What? I hesitated -- purse? Shoulder bag? Laptop bag? Little plastic bag from the airport bookstore? No. "Bag. Bag!" he insisted. He was referring to one of the sweet little vomit bags tucked into the back flaps of the seat in front of us. Sadly, I failed that test, which proves the talking-is-unnecessary theory.

2. If you try, you can hold it.
I tested this theory on our recent trip. The W has an iron bladder, whereas I feel the urge to pee every hour or so. After our flight from Sacramento, we had a short layover in Phoenix, during which I grabbed a cup of gelato (so what? It's vacation) and the W grabbed a burger, fries and medium iced tea. On the plane, he was served a plastic cup of cranapple juice and later sipped from my water. It was a four-hour, fifty-minute flight, and somewhere over St. Louis, I gave in and waited fifteen minutes for a chance at the smallest bathroom of my life. You need to get up? I asked. He shook his head, frowning; I had violated rule number one. In Newark, we waited for half an hour for our luggage, discovered the Air Train was down for maintenance, took a RailLink bus to the train station (where the bathrooms were locked and I suddenly had to pee again), took the train to Penn Station, walked to our hotel, checked in, and the W graciously said, "You can have the bathroom first." By my calculations it had been eight hours at this point. The W officially has superhero status.

3. Walk faster, if possible.
The first time the W and I went to Europe (Paris, Athens, Istanbul, Rome), I realized that we walked at two completely different paces. The W walks with purpose, and I sort of slump along, not seeing the forest for the trees or the city for the skyscraper. Occasionally he turns around to make sure I have not disappeared down a manhole, and occasionally I catch up to him to point out things and request a bathroom break. Sometimes this means we get separated by large groups of people and sometimes I'm left to call, "Hold the elevator!" On our current trip, I trailed a good 20 feet behind him at the airport, holding my carry-on in one arm and pulling my suitcase with the other. In addition to laziness and curiosity, my footwear keeps me behind - a high heel or a delicate sandal, compared to the W's steady brogues. He has developed more patience for this over the years, I'm happy to report. Now when he turns around, it's to give me a smile, a shrug, and a look that says: Walk faster, if possible.

4. No need for a map.
The W could be dropped out of an airplane over an undisclosed location and find his way, blindfolded, to his destination. There are reality shows dedicated to this now, but the W does this not for fame or monetary gain. He simply can't help himself. I, on the other hand, once got lost in Venice. In Venice - a tiny island with signs every three feet (er, meters) directing pedestrians to St. Mark's Square. Even if I do get a slight grasp on our location, it's lost the minute I stop paying attention. Tonight, we stepped out of the restaurant onto a crowded street and I realized I had no idea where I was. (This used to cause me no small amount of panic, for which I would like to publicly thank the people who make GPS possible.) The W, however, knew just where we were, including which combination of left and right turns would lead us most directly to our hotel. As I marveled at this (from five feet behind), he turned around and said, "You know where we are, right?" It felt like a trick question. But then I saw the sign: 8th Avenue. "Yes! We turn right," I said, triumphantly. The W gave me a pitying look, and took me by the hand. "Two blocks to the left," he said.

So there you have it. My travelling companion is quiet, a urine camel, speedy and a flawless navigator. And I am one lucky girl.

You've Got Karma

2011-06-17T09:59:00.000-07:00

The day I turned sixteen, I picked up my blue-and-gray striped uniform and started working at McDonald's. From that day until I left for college two years later, I clocked in for three nights a week and three weekends a month. In my sleep, I confirmed drive-thru orders. In the shower, I tried to scrub off the filmy coating of vegetable oil that accumulated over the course of an eight-hour shift.

I was basically assigned to the drive-thru because 1) I could speak English and 2) I could do more than three things at once. It was far better than being assigned bathroom duty or the never-ending task of wiping down trays, but the problem with the drive-thru was that I had exactly sixteen square feet in which to operate, and one or two coworkers in that space at all time, with a carful of hungry customers breathing down my neck at the window.

At the time (and probably, still), McDonald's customers could fill out a comment card about their experience. Was the food hot? Order correct? Employees friendly? It seemed a rather unfair system, since we couldn't rate the customer back. (Was the customer rude? Was the customer able to read the menu? Did the customer pay for a Value Meal entirely in pennies?) In fact, all we could do was smile politely, if tightly, and keep up the pretension that the customer was, indeed, always right.

One day I showed up for work, and Monica, who worked the 6 to 2 shift, cornered me. "Oooh, Paula - you got carded," she said. Her eyes were full of a mixture of sympathy and superiority. In the hierarchy of this particular franchise, Monica might have been a step below a shift manager, but this was only semantics.

Now being carded was serious business, but unfortunately, I had trouble with Monica's thick accent, and what I heard was, "Oooh, Paula -- you've got karma."

I wondered about this for the next few hours of my shift, in between asking, "Would you like to add a hot apple pie to your order for only 99 cents?" and restocking paper cups. What did it mean that I had karma? My understanding of the concept was basically limited to "what comes around, goes around." Had I offended one of my co-workers, somehow pissed off a customer? I couldn't recall spitting in anyone's Coke or serving food that had hit the floor. It must mean, then, that I had done something wonderful, and the universe was going to reward me. It was true - I was an excellent employee: always on time (my mom's doing), professional (I didn't get involved in disputes with my coworkers, mainly because my attempts at speaking Spanish were universally mocked), and I had one of the best drive-thru accuracy records on the crew. Of the 40 billion served, I was probably personally responsible for several million. Yes -- good things were surely coming my way.

When I clocked out for my ten-minute break, the store manager cornered me. "Paula, we need to talk in private," she said. Private in this environment meant wedged between the cook station and the walk-in freezer, where we stacked half-empty boxes of promotional Happy Meal toys.

"Okay," I said, wiping my greasy hands on my pants.

"You probably heard that you got a card."

A -- card? Not... karma? The sympathetic looks of my coworkers suddenly made sense.

"Do you want to read it?" She asked, and then handed it to me before I could say, "No, no thanks."

What I read was basically a diatribe against my hair - it was ugly, it was dirty, it was a horrible representation of this fine dining establishment.

I swallowed. I have had the same hair for much of my life - blonde, long, generally in a ponytail, washed every night of my life no matter what was happening, and basically, I've always considered it my best feature. I handed back the card wordlessly.

My manager studied me carefully. I think this was actually the first time she had ever looked at me, other than to notice that I had or hadn't completed a task. "You always wear your hair like that, right?"

"Yeah." Baseball caps were part of our mandatory uniform, so there weren't too many hair options available. Every day when I started my shift, I tucked my blonde ponytail into the back of the hat and that was it.

"Well, Paula," she said, ripping the comment card in half, then half again and again, until dozens of shredded pieces floated from her hand into the trash basket. "I think we should just forget all about this."

"Thanks," I said, and wandered off to the employee lounge, where I spent the final two minutes of my break shaking, wondering what cruel person had taken the time out of his or her busy schedule to humiliate a seventeen-year-old girl. It probably wasn't a person who went straight from school to work and home again to write essays and cram for tests, and yes, try to wash the residue of grease out of my hair. It probably wasn't a person who banked 75% of her paycheck to cover private college tuition. And if there was any fairness in the world, it probably wasn't a person who had good things coming.

Talk about karma, indeed.

Revolution

2011-06-06T06:52:00.000-07:00

My parents are getting cell phones.

The news almost floored me. For much of my adult life, my parents have been virtually unreachable. They have a home phone, yes, but whenever they worked or traveled or went to dinner or stepped into the backyard, they were basically off the grid.

They didn't even... wait for it... have an answering machine.

I took it upon myself to rectify this one Christmas, purchasing them the same new model Will and I had recently bought for ourselves. Testing it a week later, I received the same frustrating series of endless rings.

"It doesn't work," Dad informed me later (when I happened to catch him on the phone) after several minutes of interrogation.

"What? It's brand new. Let me have a look at it."

"Well, the problem is, it picks up too soon," Mom explained, her voice startlingly loud on the other extension. "We need more than four rings to get to the phone."

"I'm sure that can be adjusted," I said. "I'm coming over."

"No, I'll work on it," Dad promised.

He's generally good at fixing things, but this particular project has been a decade in the making -- a decade during which I fielded dozens of phone calls from friends and family: Do you know when your parents will be home? When does your dad's flight get in? Can you tell your mom to call me before ten tonight? It was not unusual to find that one or two of the messages on my own machine were actually bits of information to be passed on to my parents.

Dad eventually did purchase a cell phone, but it was solely for emergencies, turned on only when he traveled and banished to his desk drawer for long periods of hibernation when he did not. "It's for your emergencies, then," I tried to reason. "If one of us had an emergency, you'd never know." It must have been difficult to refute this logic, but my parents offered their own puzzling bits of rationale -- the phone takes too long to charge, charging that phone is expensive, if you overcharge the phone the battery will need to be replaced and that's expensive, and sometimes it's hard to find the phone in the first place.

So when I heard the news at dinner on Friday, I squealed. "You're getting a cell phone? I mean" -- ignoring my Dad's raised finger of protest -- "a cell phone that will be turned on and that I'll be able to reach you on at any time?"

My mother considered this cautiously before replying, "Yes."

It was taking a moment for the information to sink in. I tried to find the catch. "Okay, so you're each going to have a cell phone and you're going to carry it with you? So this whole summer while you're traveling, we'll be able to check in with you?"

Will put his hand on my arm to steady me - in my excitement, I had nearly toppled a glass of water.

"Well, now," Dad grinned at me. "Let's not get carried away."

Secondhand Goods

2011-05-24T22:35:00.000-07:00

I'm not afraid of secondhand shopping. It's how I remained clothed during college ($2 men's flannels at the thrift store in Le Mans) and how I furnished my first apartment ($10 mission-style nightstand at Goodwill) and how I found the extremely cool urn that now graces my patio. Sarah and I once had a good-natured, decade-long battle over a yellow bag sold at a yard sale in Sioux Center.

Not to mention the books... probably a thousand of them, conservatively.

But I can also say no to secondhand; I can paw through someone's collection of records and walk away. I can praise a card table full of overpriced handmade jewelry ("lapidary art," I was informed) and make a graceful exit without producing a twenty.

This is more difficult for me, though, when I'm at an estate sale. At this point it's not just clutter from someone's garage or outgrown clothes -- it's basically a person's entire life on display. It's what's left behind; it's a wake for the pots and pans and Christmas decorations and figurines and empty picture frames that accompanied this life.

I'm strangely drawn to these displays, moving reverently between coffee pots and lamp shades, trying to imagine something of the people who lived here, who used these objects. I can't meet the proprieters eye-to-eye, because I know who they are: children, grandchildren, volunteers from church, employees from the company handling the sale. I can't help but think of what's next -- the house put on the market, or passed on to a descendant who will paint over the pastel walls and rip out the pink carpet. Anything that doesn't sell will be transported by a non-profit or tossed in a dumpster. In my own life, I'm not very sentimental. When I'm inhabiting, even for a few moments, someone else's, it's a different story.

This is why I own a rickety six-foot metal cabinet with rusty splotches. This explains the mailbox I mean to paint one day and use as a planter. It explains the houndstooth handbag I bought last week for $2.

"That's a very cool bag," commented the woman behind me in line, leaning over for a closer look.

I almost gave it up to her; I'd dithered between the suitcase and a small porcelain owl, neither of which I needed. But she was right: it was a cool bag, big enough to handle a change of clothes and a jumble of toiletries, a paperback or two. And then I did what comes all too naturally to me: I brought it home and set it to the side and promptly forgot all about it.

Tonight, putting together the clothes I'll need for a marathon teaching/class picture/graduation ceremony/dance day tomorrow, I realized the bag was exactly the right size for this purpose, and out it came once again.

At the bottom of the bag, I'd initially spotted some wadded up tissue, the sort of thing you might find in a new purse. Or that's what I thought. Emptying the bag for the first time, I pulled out not a ball of tissue, but a handful of disintegrating white panty hose, the hose of a newly dead stranger.

I gasped and flung the offending hose into the garbage can, shaking off its touch like I would the ghostly strands of a spider web.

And cured myself - for a week or two - of secondhand shopping.

Amendment to Teacher Handbook

2011-05-08T22:09:00.001-07:00

In case your door lock breaks, and you are trapped in a classroom with 34 middle school students:

1. Don't panic. This very rarely helps.

2. Instruct students to stop screaming.

3. Phone the office. Get voicemail of clerk who has gone home for the day. Phone alternate number and beg for someone from maintenance or janitorial.

4. Wait. Convince students that banging on the tiny rectangle of reinforced glass is unnecessary.

5. Wave to crowd gathered outside.

6. Phone the office again. Wonder if secretary's giggling is related to your specific situation.

7. Vaguely recall someone from maintenance asking if door was working properly. Vaguely recall saying, "Sure! Everything's good."

8. Say prayer of thanks when janitor arrives, tugs on door knob, and proposes the only logical solution: the window.

9. Line students up single file to jump out of window, emergency fire-drill style. Hope that no one is putting this on You Tube.

10. After clicking heels together three times to no avail, climb on top of counter, pass belongings out the window, and jump. Be sure to stick the landing, throw your arms in the air and pronounce your stunt a perfect 10.

Repeat as necessary.

Al Capone Was Here

2011-04-30T08:42:00.000-07:00

My leadership class voted: for our end-of-the-year day away, we would visit Alcatraz, eat at Hard Rock Cafe, and buy overpriced trinkets at Pier 39.

I hadn't been to Alcatraz in years; Will, my friend Alisha and another chaperone had never been. There were some logistics to consider, including the transportation of 22 twelve and thirteen year-olds through commuter traffic, all of us catching the same train at the same time, a long walk from the Embarcadero station, a boat ride, and a weather report that referenced "heavy winds."

But we made it, arriving at The Rock without a single student overboard. (Dear M, from the front office, had suggested that perhaps a few students could be left behind at the end...) It was sunny and clear, atypically beautiful San Francisco weather, and after a much-needed bathroom break (one of us, in particular, had been holding it since her morning latte, five hours ago), we climbed the hill and donned headphones for the audio tour.

Alcatraz, for anyone who doesn't know, was home to Al Capone (tax evasion), the Birdman (killing a prison guard), Machine Gun Kelly (kidnapping, failing to have proper permits for his signature weapon), and a host of other prisoners who vaguely resemble the gang from Shawshank Redemption. They lived in the tiniest of cells, ate their pasta with real silverware in the dining hall, staged uprisings and escaped on rafts made of stitched together raincoats. Or at least, three of them did, and maybe even made it.

Will and I brought up the rear, making sure no stragglers from our tour took a wrong turn. We were at the tail end, about to turn in our headphones, when an older man stepped out of the shadows and said, "Anyone want a private tour of Robert Stroud's cell?"

Um... yes!

I know what you're thinking: Don't take private tours from strangers, Paula. But this guy was seventy at least (yeah -- I could take him), and there ended up being six people in the private tour - Will and me, two of my students, and another couple who had possibly taken a wrong turn to the bathroom. Plus, this guy was clearly an authorized tour guide, because he had a set of keys, wore a badge that I couldn't actually read, and seemed to know what he was doing.

So we headed up a skinny set of steps marked "Authorized Personnel Only." The guide produced a massive key and unlocked a heavy gate, then locked it behind us when we had passed through. Was that really necessary?

"Regulations," he explained.

I started to get nervous.

My students were snapping pictures like crazy and high-fiving each other for being the Chosen Ones. Everyone else in our group had probably filed into the theatre for a screening of Capone-era footage, but we were in a secret wing that was basically off the Alcatraz map. It concerned me that the place was disintegrating: brush against a wall, and flecks of pale green, undoubtedly lead-based paint flecked off.

We found ourselves in the medical ward: a dentist's office, a pharmacy, a primitive operating room. I battled a sudden urge to give everything a good once-over with some Formula 409. How old was that fingerprint in the grime?

"This is where Robert Stroud, the Birdman, lived for eleven years," the guide said, and we entered a room that was spacious by Alcatraz standards. He could have entertained a dozen other prisoners here, easy. "He was your basic psychopath," the guide explained. "He killed a guard at Leavenworth... practiced cannibalism... wasn't even allowed any birds at Alcatraz."

Huh. I glanced at my students, but they hadn't reacted to "cannibalism." Maybe they didn't know what it meant; it hadn't shown up in our Vocabulary for Success workbooks.

We also got to see Al Capone's cell during his last, syphilis-ridden year on the island.

Will was giddy. "This is Al Capone's toilet!"

I also took note of Al Capone's shower, which was not as uncomfortable as one might expect.

"Here's where they filmed The Rock," the guide continued, leading us into a wider room lined with huge cells. There were a few rusty gurneys and wicker wheelchairs locked behind bars. "Over here is the TB ward. We kept them segregated from the rest of the population."

"Oh -- did you work at Alcatraz while it was in operation?" Will asked, at the same time I asked my students, "Do you know what TB is?"

"I worked out of my garage for 31 years," our guide said, vaguely. "I've been volunteering here for three years because They want to know where I am at all times."

Huh. Will and I exchanged a long glance. I looked back down the hallway to where a gate was locked behind us. I remembered the trouble the rioters had gone through to get that key.

I glanced at the time and gestured helplessly. Probably time to go... a boat to catch...

We shook hands all around and my students took a picture with the guide, their own private tour guide, as proof that they had a much cooler experience on the island than anyone else.

As for me, I was glad to be out in the open again, stumbling down the crumbling hillside to the dock. There's no way I was missing the boat.

Hail to the King

2011-04-25T22:58:00.001-07:00

Forgive me for not writing - but it's not really my fault.

Blame can be placed on the usual suspects -- three demanding pets, 136 Language Arts students, my novel revision, and of course... Henry VIII.

Here's what happened: I finished the excellent BBC series Wire in the Blood and, while scrolling through Netflix in a deep state of despair, I discovered The Tudors.

My grasp of British history is weak at best, despite tons of Shakespeare and a 2009 trip to England that included an excellent Beefeater tour of the Tower of London. The various Richards, Edwards and Georges are basically interchangeable in my mind (but so, to be honest, are Buchanan and Pierce and Fillmore).

That said, I have a sick obsession with Henry VIII, his six wives, the lone son and the daughters who were so inconsequential that they only stayed on the throne for half a century.

I was hooked by the end of episode one. Castles! Crown jewels! Jousting! And if the TV-MA status was initially off-putting, it's amazing how quickly I started yawning my way through the boudoir scenes of the king and his flavor of the week. All right, let's get to the good stuff -- like when Henry denies the supremacy of the Pope to get his divorce, thereby bringing the Protestant Reformation to England.

Essays to grade? Not when the Queen is exiled to the Fens.

Sleep to be had? Nah -- not when the country's best executioner has been summoned for Anne.

And illogically, I started rooting against history. I knew what would happen; I had memorized long ago the sad demises of the six wives (divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived), but still I found myself hopeful. Catherine is too noble to be set aside! Poor Anne would give him a son if she could! Maybe there was some way sweet Jane could survive that difficult childbirth...

Between seasons two and three, foiled again by the Treick stomach, I spent a night shivering/sweating and dizzy with vertigo, unable to sleep because of my tangled 16th century nightmares of beheadings and courtiers. I'd drift off for a moment, then wake with a gasp, thinking, If if could happen to Sir Thomas More, it could happen to me.

Seasons three and four, tragically, were available by DVD only. I was forced to stalk the mailman, grasping the mail greedily as he approached. In the meantime I checked out a stack of books from my public library, which for probably my whole life has housed an entire shelf on the Tudors. It's possible that this obsession isn't normal, I thought, when the librarian asked if I was writing a research paper on Henry VIII. Walking through the park, I casually mentioned to Will that Anne of Cleves was granted the status of "sister" after Henry annulled their marriage. Will smiled tolerantly at me; perhaps he was wondering when I would finally change the subject.

Maybe "The Tudors" falls into that ambiguous "for better or worse" category; one of the strange future things about our spouse that we simply cannot predict. But Will rose to the challenge. Later that day, there was an early birthday present waiting for me - the last season on DVD. And that's where I'll be for the next week.

Some Day, Correcting the Wrong Person's Grammar Will Get Me Killed

2011-04-10T21:48:00.000-07:00

I speak for my fellows: it's hard work being a grammarian.

We are constantly cringing, wincing and clutching our dictionaries to our chests. We battle dueling forces: the urge to blurt out a correction or the willpower to just keep quiet.

We talk Strunk and White; we quote from the scripture of Eats, Shoots and Leaves. We get emails from co-workers who should know the difference between there, their and they're; we can't take seriously a superior's remark that a situation is "unexceptable." (Wouldn't this necessarily mean that there is nothing to which she can take exception?) We vote for the candidate with the best grammar; we cannot, in good conscience, support someone who says "irregardless".

We are an ungrateful lot. We have a hard time accepting a thank you note that reads, "Your awesome!" By the same reasoning, we refuse to be offended by graffiti that reads, "Your a bitch." Not us, no; we are merely grammarians.

We stand tongue-tied when a colleague asks us to "pronunciate" a word; later, a student asks, "Does spelling count?" and we are baffled. Of course it counts. Can there possibly be a situation in the entire course of human history in which spelling has not counted?

We are often moody, wary, loathe to get involved. Who, anymore, wants a grammarian for a friend? We turn the same critical eye inward, flogging ourselves for typos in emails, offering extra credit for students who find our mistakes. We have a creed: Proofread twice, print once.

Stopped at a red light, we laugh at the message on a license plate holder with a grammatical error; isn't that akin to a misspelled tattoo? The driver, who possibly failed grade-school Language Arts, who likely has not read any good panda jokes, flips us an angry gesture. We stop chuckling, suitably warned.

Correcting the wrong person's grammar may well get us killed.

A Short List of Things I Know Nothing About

2011-04-06T17:41:00.000-07:00

1. Pregancy/childbirth.

2. Kissing up to the boss.

3. Dogs over 41 pounds.

4. Meat.

5. Doing my taxes.

6. Bananas, pickles, mushrooms (except the accidental taste of cream of mushroom soup).

7. Planning ahead.

8. Housewives - Real or imagined, Orange County or New Jersey.

9. Learning to let go.

10. A really good list of anything should have a logical end, preferably on a round number (10), but I'm feeling otherwise knowledgeable. I could at least fake a little bit of knowledge on most topics, at any rate. With a little luck, I could reach the low-hanging fruit ("I'll take Shakespeare for 100, Alex") and knock the socks off any fifth grader. So long as those fifth graders haven't learned to itemize deductions.

A Seat by the Window

2011-04-03T20:17:00.000-07:00

I have few requirements when I write at Starbucks. A venti skinny vanilla latte, so hot that I can only tease myself with it for the first ten minutes. Background noise that doesn't intrude too much on my foreground, typical of Starbucks' moody hipster blend. And always, always, a seat by the window.

Here's what I see today:

Two teenagers (seventeen?) sitting on the brick wall that surrounds the convention center fountain, sharing a cigarette. It's a boy and a girl, and I would guess that this is new love, this is we've-just-kissed-for-the-first-time-within-the-last-twelve-hours love. He rolls up the sleeve of his hoodie, reaches into the fountain and comes up, dripping, exuberant, with a handful of change. She takes his offering, laughs. They wander off down K Street. It's 7:19 a.m.

A fiftyish man carrying a plastic bag and - no kidding - a Walkman. He stops by my table on his circuit to the bathroom, sees my laptop and says, "Did you ever work for HP?" No, I say, smiling. He says, "They offered me a job once and I should have taken it. I should have taken it," and shuffles away. Five minutes later he comes out of the bathroom and asks, "Are you still here?" Yes - I think so.

A beautiful woman wrapped in a striped scarf. I aspire to be this woman. I would at least like to have this scarf.

A man in an NFL windbreaker with pop-up Dwayne Wayne glasses. He takes a call on his cell, which means he has to stop walking and lean against the car closest to him. This happens to be my car. I stop myself from rapping on the window and throwing him a gesture; when the call ends, he moves on, leaving a clean smudge in the middle of my accumulated Valley dust.

Pigeons. Tons of them.

A red Ford Contour that just stopped, stopped, in the middle of the street, despite traffic and a green light at K and 10th. I had recently watched an episode of Hoarders where the family's "treasures" (like boxes of expired cereal and yellowed magazines with curling pages) had taken over their house and the husband had to sleep in the car - so I instantly recognized the problem here. This was a hoarder's car, filled to the brim with crumpled McDonald's cups and things wadded up in plastic bags. The driver him/herself was a mystery, since the passenger window was completely blocked by trash. After about a minute of cars honking and swerving, the Contour moved on.

A large, kindly man with puffy bags under his eyes. Much older than me, I would guess, but as I age myself I find it impossible to estimate the age of someone else. The last time I was here he came by my table three or four times, leaning into my airspace, asking me what I was writing, what I thought of the music, had I been to the local, organic grocery store that just opened up a few blocks away? In other words, flirting. Today he gives only the tiniest, most embarrassed glance in my direction - he's with his wife.

What I don't see today, and almost miss: the crazy man. I probably overuse the word to refer to everyone from Charlie Sheen to the parent who thinks her daughter will still pass my class, despite empirical data and a very blunt email to the contrary - but this man is genuinely crazy. He holds a constant, one-sided stream-of-conscious conversation, like Kerouac would have sounded had he sat in a Starbucks and composed On the Road orally. Last week I had the pleasure of finding myself at the table next to him, which meant I had a front row seat for the "Riders on the Storm"/"Hotel California" lyrics, the muttered comments about Donald Trump, OJ Simpson, Tiger Woods, technology and everyone who walked past us. (I had a suspicious feeling that the "bull dyke" comment was somehow related to me.) Today it's quiet without him, and almost a little boring.

Which means I'd better get to work.

Laverie Automatique

2011-03-18T10:17:00.000-07:00

In 2002, Will and I were in Paris for five days.

It was my first trip "abroad" - the first five days of a month-long trip that would encompass seven countries, five flights, a two-day "cruise" and miles and miles (er, kilometers and kilometers) on our EuroRail passes, but after only four days of the Louvre and Orsay, brasseries and patisseries, and a day trip to Versailles, we were filthy.

We had already worn everything in our backpacks and I hadn't yet learned that washing my underwear in the sink wouldn't kill me. And, if the "one-day transportation strike" ended on schedule, our flight for Athens would leave the next day.

So we wandered over to the "laverie automatique" just across the street from our hotel - chocolate bars, paperbacks, and bottles of Vitel in tow. Look out, punks - here come two dirty Americans with their laundry.

It was mostly uneventful. We figured out what coins needed to go where and how to purchase detergent, and settled in for a quiet morning. We chatted briefly with two Americans from Seattle, discussing the relative merits of one Rick Steves.

And then, the most spectacular thing happened: Two Parisians got into a heated argument over their laundry.

It was the same sort of argument that happens in American laundromats every day, I'm sure. Someone, impatiently waiting for a dryer, removes another person's clothing from the dryer before said clothing is actually dry. Or wet clothing is heaped on a counter while the waiting person nabs a washer that has barely stopped spinning. But it was impossible to tell exactly what the situation was here, because it was all in rapid-fire French, and my fingers couldn't have spun quickly enough through my French-English dictionary to catch even one word in twenty.

But I didn't really care what they were saying. The translation itself was beside the point, and may have detracted from the real drama of the scene. How exciting can words like laundry, wet, dry, mine, I was here first, etc., really be?

For Will and I, chugging our Vittel and nibbling gleefully on our chocolate bars, this was entertainment at its best. For the last five days the most exciting exchange we'd had was with the hotel maid, who came into our room while we were napping to remove - mysteriously - the quilts from our bed. This fight - between a man and a woman - raged all over the laundromat and involved his clothes and hers in various stages of cleanness. Their voices had fabulous range - from dramatic whispers to raspy screams to strident demands. At one point, a woman holding a toddler by one hand and a laundry bag by another, poked her head in and immediately walked out.

I would have loved to stay all day, but at some point our meager load was finished, our backpacks were repacked with clean clothes, and the rest of Paris was waiting. I wondered how long they stayed there, engaged in a verbal duel. I wondered, all day, who won.

It's a funny thing when I think about it now. I remember walking along the Seine at night, and our picnic of bread and wine at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. I remember the Monets and Manets, the extravagences of the Louises, the graffiti as seen from my window seat on the RER. But nothing says Paris to me like a passionate argument in the laverie automatique.

My Pepper Spray Works!

2011-03-06T20:58:00.000-08:00

B and I, minding our own business on our daily walks, have been attacked by all sorts of dogs – the blue-gray hound with the high-pitched wail, the chocolate brown dachshund who lurks, waiting for us, beneath a parked car, and twice by the snarling pit bull with the oblivious owners.

After the second incident with the pit bull, I gave in. Clearly, pleading with the owners, screaming at the top of my lungs (a surprisingly girly sound), and calling Animal Control had little effect. So we changed our route. B and I now cut down another street and make our way to the park – where we still might by accosted at any moment by a variety of other off-leash menaces.

At least, this is my fear.

The dogs who run up to us in the park are often benign, tails wagging, no doubt attracted by B’s friendly demeanor and his wet brown eyes. If we’re with Will, he’ll take care of the approaching dog, calling him off, yelling at the owners (who always, always, seem shocked that their dog won’t obey their commands. “But he never does this! I don’t know what’s come over him!”), and in general, offering protection.

But at least half the time, it’s just B and me. And B is never scared – at first. He looks with mild interest at our neighbor’s snarling German shepherd, he wags his tail when a little Yorkie tries to take a bite out of his ear. Ever since the second pit bull incident, I feel like we’re walking targets. I’m extra vigilant, constantly scanning the area for the enemy.

And so I bought pepper spray – a purple, phallic-shaped canister that bulges strangely in my pocket. It works quite well, as I learned from pulling the trigger in my kitchen and then coughing for an hour.

Only a week later, I used it on a dog – a German shepherd mix that charged at us from out of nowhere when we were on the edge of the park. B, in typical B fashion, didn’t notice, but I heard him coming – picked out the particular jingle of a dog collar, the pounding of feet on soft grass. I whirled around, holding the pepper spray like it was a gun and the dog was an intruder in my bedroom.

“Stop!” I yelled, figuring a warning was only fair. The dog was maybe 20 yards away, and it was impossible to read his intentions. “Halt!” I ordered in my best Nazi imitation. No reaction. Well, you stupid dog, you give me no choice. I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger.

When I opened my eyes a second later, our attacker was about five feet away, spinning in a confused circle. He kept snapping his jaws in the air, like he was chasing a fly. He turned to face me again and I gave him another shot for good measure. After a yelp, he took off in the other direction.

My heart had somehow crept into my throat. I slid the pepper spray back into my pocket, and then I felt a tug on the leash. B was looking at me – enough, already. It was time to get moving. From a little farther on, a tree was calling to him.

Up for Air

2011-02-27T16:56:00.000-08:00

Send out query letter for novel, do laundry, walk the dog, read for five minutes, plan lesson, brave the commute, teach lesson, collect assignment, curse self for assigning 105 written responses, walk the dog, make dinner, decide to let the dishes soak indefinitely, read response from agent: Not the right project for me at this time, search for clean clothes, call DJ for junior high dance, schedule field trip to Alcatraz, grade final drafts of research paper, feed the cats, write a blog post that never gets posted, realize library books are unread and overdue, send out new query letter to different agent, bake “Too Much Chocolate” cake, indulge in sugar coma, call parents of miscreant seventh graders, enter grades, make dentist appointment, take aspirin, search for new job online, stare at empty refrigerator, walk the dog, record agent response: Not taking new clients at this time, spend day sick in bed reading Uglies, attend before school parent meeting, teach, tutor after school, attend steering committee meeting, spend five precious minutes with Will, marvel at cost of filling the tank, take more aspirin, show up unannounced at dentist, leave two hours later with shiny new crown, clean bathroom, wonder how two people can produce such a mountain of laundry, submit new query letter to different agent, spend evening writing, realize Facebook status has been static for some time, miss Alisha, walk the dog, spend weekend grading papers, accidently step on cat’s tail, spend evening coaxing cat from under bed, chaperone junior high dance, worry about Egypt, sit alone at lunch, call parent of misbehaving seventh grader, take a deep breath before opening email from agent: I love the novel! I’d like to talk to you about representation.

Exhale. And come back up for air.

Overheard

2011-02-13T08:17:00.000-08:00

From the woman in front of me in line, smallish, grayish, crazyish: "He was doing so well, had this nice girlfriend, and then one day he just snapped and started spitting on her and slapping her, and I said, 'What on earth, Gerald?' and oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize there was anyone behind me."

From the barista, with a blonde stripe on his mohawk: "Sorry about that." And then: "What size would you like that tea - small, large or extra large?"

From a man with his nose buried in 101 Things You Should Know About 2012: "No, go ahead. I'm not saving it for anyone."

From two girls next to me, punching in numbers on scientific calculators: "... expression for the compression factor... solve for P over T..."

Older woman, grandmother-helpful, from the counter: "They're out of cookies, John."

Older man in armchair browsing A Photo History of Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. "What?"

Older woman: "They're out of cookies. They're OUT of COOKIES."

Man in armchair: "Oh."

Older woman: "Would you like something else?"

Man in armchair, flustered: "Ah, no. Forget it."

From fiftyish woman wearing a babydoll dress and go-go boots: "I don't know if I should date that guy from the restaurant. He's a little too New York for me."

Fiftyish woman's much younger companion with wet curls and her back to me: "Where do you meet these people? Seriously?"

Fiftyish woman: "I go out. You know -- Starbucks."

From long-haired employee who once helped me order a rare book: "You can buy these mugs at any '76. Half-gallon size. And they're really a steal because they only charge you for a large drink when you fill up."

Short man with bulging muscles, Incredible-Hulk-style: "Is anyone sitting here?"

Woman in three shades of purple, to bored husband with toothpick in his mouth leafing through Golf Digest: "Look at this chair. Don't you just love this chair?"

Impossibly young girl in killer heels: "So I saved his note so you can see his handwriting. It's girl handwriting. Don't you think so? Isn't there something wrong with a guy who has such girl handwriting?"

Barista: "Erik? I have your caramel apple Americano with salted toffee on the bar..."

High-pitched voice over PA system: "Attention, customers. The store will be closing in fifteen... ten... five minutes. It's time to make your final purchases."

Clarity

2011-01-30T22:54:00.000-08:00

When we were living in our first apartment (a second story walk-up bordered on the north by the junior college campus and on the south by twin seedy apartment complexes), Will experienced a brief moment of clarity.

Let me explain.

Will has poor vision, which is putting it kindly. He's worn glasses as long as he can remember, a fact borne out by childhood photos, where he's a happy, tow-headed, four-eyed kid. Contacts don't work for him; ditto, Lasix. He's something of a celebrity when he visits his optometrist. Once I overheard the receptionist whisper to another: "You see that one? He's a negative twelve." She caught my glare and hushed up immediately. Please, there's nothing wrong with his hearing -- or mine, either.

Anyway, this isn't a sob story. Will wears expensive glasses in even more expensive frames, and never thinks about it. He drives, he writes, he makes a fabulous stromboli, he rereads Mario Puzo novels. He's used to his few moments of blindness each day - fumbling for his glasses on the nightstand, reaching for the shampoo in the shower. With his glasses on, we're nearly ocular equals. I only get to show off my perfect vision when I spot road signs miles in advance.

But on one otherwise inauspicious day, Will had his moment of clarity.

He was standing at the bathroom sink in our apartment, his glasses on the vanity. If he had looked out the window over the sink -- if he had been able to see out the window, that is -- he wouldn't have been greeted by a pretty sight. Our bathroom overlooked the corrugated roof of our carport, a huge dumpster that attracted rats, flies and the occasional diver, and the canal where once, after a cerveza-feuled Cinco de Mayo celebration, a dinky Geo Metro missed the turn, crashed through the railing and dangled crazily over the water. All of this was watched over by a massive, seldom-updated billboard which for years boasted 59 cent cheeseburgers on Wednesday. The golden arches were our very own version of Doctor T. J. Eckelburg (fittingly, an oculist).

In other words, Will wasn't missing much.

And then it happened - a chest-wracking, body-shaking cough that rattled him so deeply that for the briefest of moments, he could see clearly. 20/20 vision, without his glasses.

"Wow," I said, when he told me the story, a towel wrapped around his waist, his reapplied glasses fogged. "So, what did you see?"

He had looked out over the canal and spotted the row of delivery trucks for a linen service; he could read every single word detailed on their trucks. As proof, he repeated the company tag line to me.

"Huh," I said, impressed and depressed at the same time. I'd once coughed so hard that I literally saw stars, but this was a new one. In a way, I felt sorry for him. A single moment of clarity, and this was what he saw?

When we talk about it now, we have different theories.

Maybe there hadn't really been clarity -- maybe it was just his memory filling in the blanks. After all, with his glasses on, he'd probably seen those trucks a few hundred times.

"Or it was a mini-stroke," Will suggested.

"Or a mini-stroke," I agreed.

Either way, we both shy away from the word miracle, which today means the moldy figure of Elvis or Mary on a tortilla. But "mini-stroke" seems unlikely and too cold, the clinical explanation of a medical textbook. I like to think of it instead as Will's one moment of clarity.

Premonition

2011-01-23T21:48:00.000-08:00

From the files:

The summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, I worked at a conference center in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a short drive from the boardwalk and dozens of sorbet flavors at Marianne’s. It was a last-minute decision; the job I’d lined up had fallen through, and I was completely unwilling to spend my summer asking “Would you like fries with that?” a few hundred times a day.

In many ways it was the happiest summer of my life. I made lifelong friends, I wrote daily letters to my roommates and my boyfriend, I reconnected with a man who I would, four years later, marry. I ran the treacherous “Loop” every day and was perfectly content to alternate between three or four t-shirts for an eight-week stretch.

But otherwise, it was the worst summer of my life.

On one of my weekly phone calls home, I learned that my parents were coming to visit – to spend a day in Santa Cruz, to replenish my supply of books, and to bring the things I’d forgotten to pack: aspirin, clothes hangers, my denim jacket. I was excited to see them – but about a week before their visit, I started having The Dream.

In The Dream, there was a car accident, one in which my parents’ navy blue minivan went hurtling off Highway 17 or 101 South, or any of the twists and turns on Lockhart Gulch Road. It was slightly different every time, but the outcome was essentially the same: My oblivious parents were killed on impact. The Dream haunted me, creeping into my subconscious the minute I closed my eyes, making me a nervous wreck during my daytime hours.

I tried to talk my parents out of the visit. It’s halfway through the summer already, I reasoned. I’ll be home soon. I really don’t need the hangers, anyway, and I can mooch the odd aspirin here and there. I could reread all my Chaim Potok books – no problem.

I didn’t know how to say: Don’t come. There will be a car accident. You won’t survive. We don’t believe in things like that, in premonitions.

The day of their visit I sat on the picnic benches at the entrance to the conference center, waiting for the bad news. I wondered how I would find out, how I would in turn call my sisters.

But of course, they were fine. Their minivan came around the bend and we spent a lovely afternoon together. That night I called, and sure enough, they had made it home. It was like 20-pound weight, some massive sack of flour, had been lifted off my chest.

So much for premonitions.

Later that summer, I became horribly sick. I spent four days sweating and delirious on my twin bed before I was helped to a clinic in Scotts Valley. I had lost fifteen pounds and needed to be pumped full of fluids. Still later, a friend and I were in a car accident of our own in Capitola; when I stepped out of the car, unhurt, a BMW zoomed around the corner, missing me by inches. A week before I was scheduled to head back to college, a phone call was patched through to me at the gift shop. It was the single worst phone call of my life: Jeff, a good friend, had died. A freak thing: an asthma attack. I spent the next days in tears; I couldn’t get a hold of myself until a friend suggested, kindly, “Paula, honey? Why don’t you try to write about it?”

When I did, I could see that I had changed. I wasn’t the same person I had been. I had shed the skin off the old me. What was left was hard and raw and tight, like a fist.

History Lesson

2011-01-12T20:19:00.001-08:00

And so, the moment I've dreaded has come: my eighth grade students are writing research papers.

It's a painful experience, full of blonde hairs in the shower drain and nagging headaches. Sometimes I feel like the personal cheerleader of all 105 of them; on those days, my throat is hoarse by second period. The rest of the time I'm a doomsday prophet, warning them that the end (Rough!Draft!Due!Friday!) is coming and that right soon.

Don't, I remind them for the 100th time, write this paper like you're texting your BFF. I don't want '&' or 'UR' or 'cuz. I also refuse on moral grounds to read any paper that begins "My essay is about..."

When they leave the room, I clear a head-sized hole in the debris on my desk and wait for a sign.

But we press on, through hooks and transitions and thesis statements and supporting details. There are private moments of victory: A student who has rewritten his thesis statement seven times gets my blessing to move ahead. There are staggering moments of defeat: Suddenly, a girl in my fifth period gets teary-eyed when I suggest that it's probably best to mention historical facts in chronological order. What's this? I want to tell her, Tom Hanks-style: There's no crying!

After school, the students in my English-learner tutorial continue slogging through their drafts. I can help them one-on-one in this setting, so it's a slow but ultimately more rewarding process. Their topics all somehow connect to World War II: Iwo Jima, Pearl Harbor, the Manhattan Project, Kristallnacht. Half the struggle is getting them to understand and/or care about something that happened sixty-five years ago, before even their grandparents were born.

I shudder when one asks, "What's the big deal about an atomic bomb?"

He might not mean anything by this; eighth graders often say things just to be saying things. Witness the thirty-five voices that scream, "Telephone! Telephone!" even after I've answered. "Yes, thank you," I always say, dismissing them. But I can't dismiss this boy.

Well, it is a big deal, I say. It's an incredibly big deal. Thousands of people died instantly. Others died later, sick in all sorts of ways from the radiation. Those who survived were susceptible to cancers, leukemia, horrible tumors. Even today, nothing grows on that land.

Suddenly, I realize it's deathly quiet. The boy writing about the Treaty of Versailles is watching me. The girl who has misspelled "Kristallnacht" ten different ways in her essay has turned around completely in her seat.

"What's radiation?" someone asks.

I'm no Einstein, but I try my best.

"So, is that all the stuff in the mushroom cloud?"

Basically, yes, I tell them.

We're all quiet for a minute.

"I saw a picture online of a girl with all her skin burned off," one of the boys says, reverently.

"I don't understand it," says the Kristallnacht girl, her pencil point digging stubbornly in a hole on her desk. "Who does it help that that girl died?"

For this I don't have an answer. Or I do, but it's one of those "in the wider scope of history" answers that doesn't really explain anything.

It's 3:50 and officially time to go, but everyone lingers. The moment feels so real, that for just a second, I want to grab them by their t-shirts and tell them everything I know, every single thing, every crazy fact and bit of trivia and "book knowledge" I've been accumulating for thirty-odd years.

But instead, I smile. "See you tomorrow," I say, and with a wave, I release them.

Sickboy, Redux

2011-01-01T15:27:00.000-08:00

"Hey, come here a minute. Look at this," Will says. Fresh out of the shower, he stands in front of me.

"Um..." I say, frowning. His entire body seems to be glowing, like he just performed some serious exfoliation. "Come into the light."

He stands in front of the floor lamp, and in a sharper light I see that his entire body is red, bad sunburn red.

"Any chance that's from golfing?"

"NO!"

A quick check of WebM.D. (never, never look at this site) convinces Will that he's come down with a vicious case of scarlet fever.

Scarlet fever? This rings a bell, but in my mind it's in the same category as the plague - as in, something that died out years ago. "I think that's what the little boy in The Velveteen Rabbit had," I tell Will.

"What happened to him?"

I grin. "They had to burn all his toys."

Fifteen minutes later we're at the urgent care center, signing in. I've packed a bag of goodies - sudoku, two books, some knitting and a journal, the basic necessities for a minimum two-hour wait. We settle into chairs in the reception area, trying to gauge the various complaints and syndromes of our fellow occupants. Safer to sit by the person with an ice pack on his head than the woman with a ferocious cough, for instance.

In the triage center, Will fails to impress the nurse with stories of a rash that went away and an unwarranted sunburn. "So, other than the rash, you have basically no symptoms?" she says, her pen poised over an NCR form. It's possible she has just a hint of a smirk in her voice. Can she not see Lobster Boy??

With nothing better to do, I tag along when Will is called in to see the doctor. Dressed in a paper-thin smock, his "sun"burn is shocking -- his skin blotched red and purple. When he puts his hands on his knees, he leaves white palm prints that linger for several seconds.

We get Dr. M -- our lucky day, the nurse proclaims, since Dr. M. is an expert on rashes -- and several possible diagnoses. One possibility is scarletina, which results from strep. (This is not -- Dr. M stresses -- scarlet fever, although he does chuckle at my Velveteen Rabbit anecdote.) Another is erythema infectiosum (aka Fifth Disease or "slapface syndrome"), although this is most commonly found in children. Or it could be a case of roseola - another disease more common to infants. Is it possible this is related to a person's level of maturity?

Dr. M runs the tests, and Will is cleared for strep. Unfortunately, if it's Fifth Disease it's simply viral, and will just have to run its course. There's no telling how long Will is going to look like a burn victim. Dr. M orders a blood draw, just in case, and tells us he'll call with the results.

Sometime during this conversation, my sister in Washington calls, frantic for news of Will's scarlet fever. Sigh. My mother -- who has no cell phone and has forgotten her Facebook password -- still finds ways to communicate.

At home, we order a pizza. I'm thinking of Will, sure, and the fact that he hasn't eaten anything more than two pieces of toast in the last 24 hours, but also, frankly, of me. It's been seven hours since breakfast at this point, and I'm ready to nibble on my pinky finger.

Dr. M calls with good news -- the bloodwork was normal, meaning he found nothing bacterial like scarletina and Will's kidneys appear to be functioning. His official diagnosis: slapface syndrome. He'll be contagious for a couple of days and it's possible that if his temperature rises, he'll break out in a rash again. Will grins, pocketing this get-out-of-all-physical-labor-free card. In other news, he does have a "basically harmless" genetic condition called Gilbert's syndrome (French: gil-bears), which means his body doesn't process bilirubin.

This wait-and-it-will-get-better approach is somewhat comforting, but also somewhat of a drain on Will's sole caregiver, I must admit. When the pizza comes, I almost cry from its comfort. I even convince Will to eat a bite or two.

Sickboy

2011-01-01T09:04:00.000-08:00

Will is sick.

Driving home from work on Tuesday, he called to say that he wasn't feeling well. He was weak... he was tired... he was, I judged, basically incoherent.

"Use the Zicam," I ordered. And then I dosed myself - a few spritzes to the tongue, the gums, the teeth -- just in case. Immediate sensation = awful. Aftertaste? Not too bad, as long as you don't mind the deadened taste buds.

It seemed to do the trick for me, but Will is a tough bugger. When he's sick (18 hour days on the couch sick), he's really sick. None of this cough and sniffle business, oh no.

"Let me check your throat," I ordered, taking up the Mag light. "Lay your tongue flat. No, flat. Flatter. Your tongue is in the way. Nope, still in the way. Would you like me to report on the status of your tongue instead?"

Wednesday, after drifting in and out of a Bones marathon, he pronounced himself, grudgingly, a fan. I whooped with joy. Usually I have to ration my Bones intake when he's around, flipping quietly from ESPN when he leaves the room.

Thursday he decided he was feeling better and therefore golfing 18 holes was simply unavoidable. I objected: You'll be tired. You can barely stand up as it is. You probably need one more day of re-runs.

Thursday night, he pronounced that I was probably right. He felt miserable, but managed to cook Chicken Parmesan nonetheless, while I ran circles around him with the mashed potatoes and garlic bread.

Friday, he called me into the bedroom. "Look at this -- what is this?" he demanded, thrusting his arm in front of my face. His skin was spotted with a million red dots, like someone had taken a fine-point red Sharpie to his body while he slept.

"Flea bites?" I suggested hopefully. No, not flea bites - our pets are flea-free, and besides, I'd be covered with them too.

"Hives," he said grimly.

"Probably a rash," I soothed, but checked the cupboards anyway for Benadryl. All I could find was a generic children's version, which I'd been prescribed for a canker sore. (Liquid Benadryl +liquid Kaopectate = canker sore magic.)

"I'll go to the store and get it," he offered, which I took as a good sign.

The rest of the day I stood by for hourly hives reports (Bigger! About the same! Going down a little!), temperature checks (108! No, I guess it's 100.8!), toast and orange juice runs, and general CNA duties. I listened to his snores, shifted him regularly to avoid couchsores, plied him with offers of a drive to the clinic, and in general played the role of long-suffering wife.

"I'm feeling better," he announced this morning, rolling up his flannel PJ pants for a shot of pale, hive-free legs.

"Oh, good! Maybe we can..." I consider my unfinished vacation to-do list, a sad reminder of my high expectations. "Well..."

But when I looked over, he was snoring again.

The Undead

2010-11-19T20:24:00.000-08:00

We're morbid people, Will and me.

It might bear mentioning again that when our relationship became serious (book-collection-merging serious), we were amused to see that we each had a copy of the atrociously-written and endlessly fascinating Helter Skelter. We watched The Bridge when it came out on Netflix; over the years, I've converted him to SVU.

We've become rather callous people.

On Wednesday night, we were taking the beloved B on his evening (and only) walk, first in pleasant near-darkness through the streets in our neighborhood and then through sudden crushing darkness in the park. It might have been midnight and not daylight-savings-induced 5:30, the way everything was so quiet. You know what I mean, I'm sure -- the kind of odd inner-city quiet where you fear you might have missed the rapture, although you don't believe in it.

We performed our customary scan of the park -- no potentially dangerous people lurking near the public restrooms, no off-leash pit bulls, no solitary cars parked in leafy shadow. But when we were halfway through the park (a slow journey, with the sky growing darker by the second as the lovely B sniffed each blade of grass excitedly and, at least a dozen times, lifted a back leg delicately), I spotted something strange in the newly mown grass of the softball field. Right field, to be exact.

"What's that?" Will and I asked at the same time.

"Not a dog," I confirmed, coming closer. It was difficult to make out the shape; maybe if I had the night-vision goggles I've requested for the past thirty Christmases... but with ordinary human limitations, I could only see so much. "Maybe a person?"

We were within a hundred yards. Seventy-five. Fifty. It could have been a person, I decided. A small person, without a head. I cleared my throat, whistled, called, "Here, boy." The lump in right field remained completely still. "It's just a coat left behind," I said finally. We kept walking, leaving a trail of disintegrated leaves in our wake.

On Thursday, home early, we decided to give the long-suffering B a proper, leisurely walk, and this time we ended up in the park with plenty of daylight left. There were a few people by the swingsets and a few more in the infield, pitching, batting, fielding and in general displaying more energy than I've had in months. And there was also, most definitely, a face-down person in right field.

We looked at each other. "Is that the same...?"

It was a man wearing dark clothes, except for a jacket with a thick cream-colored stripe across its back. That's what I'd seen the night before, the stripe almost iridescent in the darkness, the rest of his body only vaguely suggested in the dusk. We inched closer to investigate. It's difficult to "inch" with a beagle lunging five feet ahead, but we needed a closer look. There was definitely a head, although the jacket collar was pulled up past his ears. One arm was wrapped around the back of his neck in a quite unnatural position. I know; I tried it right there on the spot. My mind raced: No one would lie down that way on his own. He must have been... posed.

"Call 911," I gasped to the man with the ubiquitous cell phone.

Will chuckled. "And say what? 'Come quickly, there's a man lying in the park'?"

"He's been there for two days, he's not moving, he's face-down..."

Will considered. "I'll call the non-emergency number."

I waited anxiously while he dialed. The man had not moved.

"Hmm. Busy," Will reported.

Wasn't this always how it went in the movies? Danger at hand and no one home?

"I'll tell you what," Will said. "I'll come back in a little while, when it's dark. If he's still here, I'll call 911."

Fair enough. Twenty minutes later, Will left our house in my car. I sat paralyzed, too dazed to even pick up the remote. I was imagining myself at the edge of the park, wrapped in a cashmere shawl, my hair wind-tussled. "He was just lying there," I would say to the detective with the tiny notepad. "We were so worried."

I snapped back to reality when Will's key turned in the lock. "Well," he shrugged, "no one there. So I guess..."

"... he wasn't dead," I finished. Why did this feel like such a disappointment?

We stared at each other for a long moment.

And then we laughed hysterically.

Put Your Right Foot In

2010-11-14T20:57:00.000-08:00

Let me just say: I love to dance.

This doesn't mean that I have a natural sense of rhythm or movement, that I can bust any decent moves, or even that other people like to watch me dance.

I do most of my dancing while I clean, dustcloth in hand, or while I cook, sampling from a wooden spoon. Think of it as a less graceful version of Julia Roberts' love-interest-neighbor in Sleeping With the Enemy, who sang and leapt to "When You're a Jet, You're a Jet" with his garden hose as a prop.

But dance in public? Not so much. I need a bottle or so of chardonnay to boost my confidence first.

On Wednesday, I attended my first ever junior high dance, not as a chaperone, but as the event coordinator. It was my job to make sure the DJ arrived on time, the kids had fun, and all the stepped-on Skittles were pried off the floor at the end of the night.

While the other adults hovered near the snack table or stuck to the doors, as far from the speakers as possible, I drifted around ther periphery of the mob -- 100 or so 12- to 14-year-olds who had crammed themselves into a tight, sweaty circle of approximately twenty square feet. Around the edges of the circle, kids were standing, barely moving to the beat. The real dancers were in the middle, their faces slick and shiny.

A boy from my second period class was sitting with his back against the back wall. "'C'mon, get out there," I motioned, trying to encourage him. He shook his head, but later I saw him ask a girl to slow dance -- no doubt the moment he'd been anticipating/dreading since dance posters went up the week before.

As I wandered the periphery, I kept bumping into one tiny dark-haired girl, who was busy spinning in dizzying solo circles. Whenever I passed, she would call, "Come dance with me!" And I laughed, smiling, thinking, No way, sweetheart. But I admired her guts. She didn't care that the cool kids were in a tight, grinding bunch -- she was dancing her heart out and having the sugar-fueled time of her life. She reminded me of myself, doing the Charleston in my kitchen or jitterbugging my way down the hallway, terrified pets scattering at my approach.

I took a break during a slow song and pulled up a folding chair to the snack table. "Who's that girl out there?" I asked, gesturing. Although the floor had cleared except for about twenty couples, the girl was still out there, swaying with her arms hugged to her chest, as if her partner was a slim, invisible boy.

"Seventh grader," one of my colleagues replied. "She's in special ed."

Hmm.

I kept watching her, noticing how she kept dancing even after the music stopped. You go, girl, I thought. Put that whole body in.

Mayhem

2010-10-24T19:41:00.000-07:00

This morning I went out to get the paper and was struck by how plain our front porch looked - barren, even. But why? There was the porch swing, the horseshoe chair... and then I realized: my flowerpots were gone.

I peeked around the corner -- still two cars in the driveway. Hmm. I was hit by a moment of deja vu. Two years ago, also on a Sunday morning, I'd stepped out to find Will's car gone although he was most definitely at home, mummified by layers of sheets and blankets. I'd interrupted his sleep to ask him, casually, "Did you park somewhere different last night?"

He'd rolled over, instantly awake. "WHAT?"

Today, I wiped my feet on the mat, calmly walked down the hall, and located Will beneath tufts of the comforter. "Um, hey, Will... did you move anything off the porch last night? Maybe because of the rain?"

He rolled over and groaned. Not again.

He pulled on clothes and we stood together on the porch, which was decidedly bare at second glance, and I allowed myself a few minutes to morn the loss of my flower pots.

Not that they contained actual flowers (or any plants really; I lack the commitment and responsibility needed to keep either alive). But they had beautiful, filigreed metal stands and last spring, in a spurt of renovation fever, I painted the terra cotta pots a glossy shade of chocolate brown, then sponge-painted over them in black so they looked antigue and, well, cool. Martha Stewart, eat your heart out. Then I "planted" them with willow branches in a mixture of potting soil and landscape bark. They were beautiful; they made me happy every time I stepped onto my porch -- happier, I was suddenly convinced, than a car could ever make me.

Inside, Will and I studied Baxter gravely. How could a dog with a ferocious howl that alerts us to everything else in the neighborhood (passing cats, neighbors watering their lawns) and sleeps a mere five feet from the front porch have missed this entire occasion? Perhaps out of guilt, Baxter declined his morning scoop of food.

Later, I went online to fill out a police report. THESE REPORTS ARE NOT INVESTIGATED, a pop-up window reminded me.

No problem. I don't expect a manhunt or anything.

I just want it on record for when I spot the planters on someone else's porch, park my SUV down the street in modern Nancy Drew fashion, and insist to the police dispatcher that I've got the "perps" in my "sights".

Down Time

2010-10-20T22:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I left school after two periods and made it home just in time to enjoy the stomach flu in the privacy of my own bathroom.

Monday, I taught six classes, stopped at Walmart after school to pick up supplies for a school event on Friday, attended a neighborhood association steering committee meeting, took B for a walk, shopped for a suit for Will, typed out committee minutes and fell into an exhausted sleep.

Sunday was Mom's birthday party.

Saturday was the wedding.

Friday was an all-day event with 400 first to fourth graders in blistering heat. I was home by 3:30 and asleep by 4.

The last few weeks have been spent planning for the event, guiding twenty-three seventh and eighth graders to make posters, bring materials and arrive at the assigned place at the assigned time.

Then there's teaching my Language Arts classes, including some literature I've never read before, much less taught. There's grading and grading and grading.

There are the weekends where I sit at Borders with my laptop and hate myself for not being able to write a word. There are queries sent out and library books returned because I didn't even have time to crack the cover.

Then two funerals, two weeks apart.

There was August 16, when I started teaching full-time for the first time since 2007.

There was August 9, putting on my new suit and telling myself I could do this, I could be bright and well-spoken and as impressive in person as the resume I'd turned in a week ago.

There was my graduation party - the last time I remember relaxing. And four days before that, three weeks of traveling in New York and Boston -- and Maine, where I workshopped part of my novel, gave a reading and presentation and walked across the stage.

From June 8 to July 8 I taught summer school/dodged bullets/graded crappy half-assed papers/tried to hold it all together. Then packing, delivering a disappointed B to my sister's house, driving to the airport, dozing fitfully on a red-eye flight to Maine.

On May 27, I finished my novel, sighed, breathed, felt happy and empty all at once.

STOP. Is it possible that this was the last time I was happy, the last time that life wasn't pushing in on me from all sides? Is it any wonder I've been exhausted, disconnected from my friends and colleagues, unable to read a book from start to finish (well, I did read The Corrections in a listless five-week span), barely able to construct a sentence? There must be a way to find balance -- to find equal parts down time and "on" time, to be goofy, word-loving private me as well as the busy, polite public me.

If only I could split myself into two people and do everything well. And then maybe the real me could just walk away from the other, imposter, Paula. Walk or run.

Wisconsin, Part IV

2010-09-20T16:36:00.000-07:00

Friday night, after the funeral, we gather back at the farmhouse. There's a cousin picture to be taken, so we line up on the hill in front of the barn, as always. Does no one remember, Mark asks, when Grandma called out, "Everyone smile and say 'shit'?" We laugh, smile, squint into the sun.

We're in a bit of a rush; Rachel and Orlando's lives in Indiana are beckoning. These are the first goodbyes.

We've all changed into jeans and sweaters; free from the constraints of skirts and suits and heels, we wander the house, drifting together to watch a heated game of marbles at the kitchen table, falling away to study black-and-white portraits of ancestors who have been gone so long that their very names are lost. We look for resemblances -- can't you see Uncle Don in this face? Doesn't Sara have this exact chin? What happened to the curly hair gene, anyway?

We dine on leftovers from the funeral luncheon -- white bread, cold cuts, pre-sliced cheese, some fantastic salty-sweet German potato salad. Julie (sister of Sara, our somewhere-down-the-line cousins) brings over wine -- her own vintage. The kids, too exhausted to sit still, pad from one room to the next clutching rubber duckies in their fists.

Mom and I sit down with Omi's diary, which someone has unearthed. It's a multi-year diary, each page a date in the calendar year, the lines encompassing Dad's grandma's life between 1957 or so and 1973, the latest entry I can find. Sometimes her entries are solely practical -- "very cold" and "snowstorm" show up repeatedly. Mondays are clearly her wash-days. Birthdays are noted, as well as who came to visit and who left to visit elsewhere. Aunt Caroline's death three months after a terrible car accident is recorded; later, heartbreakingly, Omi writes of the death of her husband: "Dad dies in hospital in Manitowoc -- sick only one day."

"I remember that day," Dad says, prompted by the entry. It was the only Sunday that his grandpa didn't pick him up for church; during the whole service, Dad worried that something bad would happen.

Later, the girl cousins wander through the bedrooms, opening drawers and reminiscing. Our fingers trail over dusty surfaces; we're all aware it's our last time in the house. In the downstairs bedroom, Beth asks, "Remember the fruit candies Grandma stored in here?" I do; once we discovered their existence, we snuck into the room at every possible moment. It didn't matter a bit that the candies were stale, hard and possibly years-old.

In an upstairs drawer, we find a stash of Grandma's costume jewelry which leaves a greasy residue on our pawing fingers. We're mystified by the flapper-length necklaces, but instantly remember the white plastic beads. I can even conjure up the dress Grandma wore with them -- navy polyester with a white geometric pattern, a strange square apron-like flap of material in the front. Grandma's clothes were removed years ago; only Grandpa's shirts and dozens of ties hang sadly in their closet. In other drawers, we find dozens of crochet hooks and knitting needles; Heather finds a "charge plate" to the Boston Store -- the tiniest, oldest and coolest credit card any of us has ever seen. Kim discovers an old camera; it occurs to me that there might be film in it still, forgotten moments from our fathers' lives. "I've got to get going," Mark says, for the dozenth time -- he's got a drive ahead of him tonight. But he follows us anyway, gagging at the sight of his feathered hair in 80's-era photos.

Eventually, working our way in a circle around the upstairs, we reach the attic door. "You go first," I say, pushing Beth ahead of me. I've had many a private nightmare about these narrow stairs, the wooden door that creaks slowly open, the floorboards that aren't use to a footstep weightier than a rat's. All I need is to have someone pull shut the door behind me and extinguish the light, and I'll go crazy, Grace Poole-style.

If possible, the attic is more terrifying than it was when we were children. The overhead light illuminates only a tiny circle of stacked boxes; the rest of the room is hidden in inky blackness. But we're smarter than we were as kids, or possibly only more technologically advanced. Armed with flashlights, cell phones, digital cameras and the impressive flash on Heather's camera, we inch our way around the space. "I found a drum set!" Beth calls from a recess under the eave. I lift a plastic bag to reveal a telephone table which I proceed to fall in love with. "Tons of Christmas stuff over here," someone calls, and Kate asks, "Wouldn't it be cool to have one of Grandma and Grandpa's ornamenets on our trees?" A minute later, Joel calls out, "I found a gun!" "Put it down! Put it down!" we shriek in a chorus of female hysteria; this is how accidents happen, this is how a cousin gets picked off in the dark. "Relax -- it's a BB gun," he says. "I wonder if it's the gun," a few of us say, simultaneously, remembering the pellet once plucked from the white of my dad's eye. Other treasures slowly emerge: a rocking chair covered inch-deep with dust, the long-fabled fainting couch, covered feet-deep with empty boxes.

It occurs to us suddenly that the protesting floorboards may not be cut out for our collective weight, and that at any moment we might be whooshed downward in the fashion of Korah, Dathan and Abiram, through the second-floor bedrooms into the first-floor living room.

Overwhelmed by so much history, exhausted by the day's events and fearing the development of black lung, the cousins abandon our noble quest. "I'm really leaving this time," Mark says, and after a round of goodbyes, does. Kim and Heather have a drive ahead of them, too; Joel and Kate (who successfully and admirably navigated the treacherous attic steps in her high heels) have children to send to bed. I'm exhausted by the mere mention of their plans - to leave at four in the morning for a day-long trip back to Georgia.

One by one, we splinter away. Aunt Barb is making airport runs on Saturday; Uncle Ed is proceeding with a planned trip to Haiti. Uncle Don and Aunt Myrene are the next to go, taking their leave on Saturday afternoon. I fly to San Francisco on Sunday morning, ungraded papers and unwritten lesson plans looming. Beth and my parents, catching flights from Milwaukee on Monday, are the last to go.

I should have been used to it, the chain of goodbyes. By the end, I should have been prepared. But the second my feet were on the back porch, my hand on the metal railing, I felt the lump rise in my throat. Goodbye, Grandpa, I thought. Goodbye, house. Goodbye, apple trees and cellar steps and towering barn. Goodbye, childhood second home. At the car door, I turned around one last time and whispered, "Goodbye, farm."

I know Dad heard me. I'm pretty sure that's why his hand came up and brushed against my back at that very moment.

Goodbye, goodbye.

Wisconsin, Part III

2010-09-20T06:05:00.000-07:00

The Native Americans, it was said, used every part of the buffalo.

Grandpa came from a different tradition (German immigrants, struggling farmers, Depression survivors), but he had the same philosophy. Nothing should be wasted. Everything had another purpose, a chance at future usefulness.

To stand in his garage for one moment was to recognize this, to stand humbed before a life of so much carefulness, so much appreciation for the value of things. Gallon-sized ice cream buckets stood in teetering stacks; nails on the wall were carefully spaced to hold coiled lengths of rope and every imaginable tool. His workbench had dozens of tiny compartments for nails and screws and washers of every size. If we had been ordered, right at that moment, to build a giant ark to keep our family afloat for forty days and forty nights, we would have been ready.

"Look at that," one of my cousins marveled, pointing to a wooden device suspended from the ceiling which held, horizontally, a number of shovels and other tools with mid-length handles. "It's such a Grandpa contraption."

We stood, marveling.

"Actually, this reminds me of someone else's garage," I said, and pointed across the room to where my dad stood, staring at what I'd come to think of as the spot. "His."

One of my favorite stories about Grandpa was repeated at his funeral -- how, at age 95, his sons bought him a golf cart so he could get around the farm better. Grandpa paid his customary attention to the details, in particular the warranty on the vehicle's battery. "Only five years," he'd noted, critical of the value of this investment. The battery proved durable, but Grandpa was right. He did outlive its warranty.

In the attic, my cousins and I found every box that had ever been shipped to the farmhouse, complete with its packing peanuts and layers of disintegrating tissue. I checked the return addresses - some from Germany, most from the various adddresses of the sons through the decades: Kamala Court, Brookfield; Tucson, Arizona; East Graceway Drive, Napoleon; Carlton Avenue, Modesto; Bakersfield; San Jose; Lookout Mountain, Georgia. Other boxes contained wire hangers, magazines, paper plates and plastic cups still wrapped with cellophane packaging. I counted no fewer than seven vacuum cleaners.

Why would they save all of this? I wondered, although I suspected the answer had much to do with practicality and less to do with sentimentality. My practicality has taken a different form -- I have a small house, and therefore no room for sentimentality. If I won't use it or wear it within a year, it doesn't belong in my life. I don't clean; I purge. I've become an avid "freecycler" -- if someone else can use what I can't, they're welcome to it.

But in this attic, this weekend, I could afford sentimental attachments. I could allow myself to believe that every object had significance. The hangers crammed into boxes had once held Grandma's housedresses and Grandpa's everyday flannels, the boys' starched Sunday shirts, their too-big confirmation suits. Maybe this was the teapot that Grandma brought out for company; maybe it had been packed away in the attic when it was clear she wasn't coming home, and wasn't ever going to serve a crowd again. This wreath probably hung on the front door, an entrance which was never used by family. These were the very toys my dad and uncles had played with -- puzzles, the carrom board, the miniature tractor, the complicated erector set.

We vacillated between wanting nothing and wanting everything; between saying, "Everything's valuable" to "It's all junk." We were standing with one foot in the present, one tippy-toe feeling for balance in the past.

Where will it all end up, all those carefully saved things, the accumulation of more than a hundred years of living? After the weekend, we would all be gone, back to those far-away addresses, our busy lives. It's simply not practical to think of cramming suitcases, filling a U-haul -- even if those arrangements could be made, there would be nowhere to unpack or unload the contents. Disparate lives simply cannot be merged.

But I think it's wrong to assume that because the china is no longer with the tablecloth (and for that matter, neither is the table) that these things no longer have use or purpose. Grandpa and Grandma may have saved things with the family's health and well-being in mind, but now their belongings can go to others. An upstairs bedrame might be perfect for a little boy's bedroom in Sheboygan; a girl passing through a flea market in Milwaukee might fall in love with Grandma's swan vase -- someday, she might pass it on to her daughter. "It's very old, very precious," she might say. "Who knows what sort of life it has had?"

Wisconsin, Part II

2010-09-19T18:31:00.000-07:00

Grandpa died on Monday, September 13, 2010, the day after he attended a birthday party for his brother-in-law, my beloved great-uncle Al. Earlier in the day he had been spotted in his golf cart, rolling down the gravel driveway to the mailbox. Later, he was found in the garage, his body still warm.

He was 101 years old.

Grandpa was a simple, h0nest, hard-working man. He read his Bible, he occasionally watched professional wrestling, he tamed wild cats, who would come running at his slightest, "Here, missy, missy." He could shake a dice like no one's business; it was uncanny how he always got the exact number he needed to send our marbles back to start. He was the gentler parent, the kindly grandparent who said goodbye with a quick smack on the lips.

When Grandma died (after surviving uterine and breast cancer, the bone cancer proved too mch) in 2002, we all wondered What Would Happen to Grandpa. Sometimes this was phrased as What Should We Do with Grandpa. But Granda didn't want anything done. He was content to live alone, travel the short distances between church and home, home and his sister's house, again and again. He gamely submitted to the long plane rides from Wisconsin to Arizona and Arizona to Californa to visit his sons. He refused any suggestion of going into a nursing home - instead, he took his vitamins and chose his steps carefully, perhaps knowing that he was one bad cold or one broken hip away from hospital care.

Dad, hearing about Grandpa's death, was consumed by the sort of guilt a son has for a parent who dies alone, far away. He tried to work out the time frame: What had Grandpa done that day? Had he been on his golf cart to get the mail? Had he eaten lunch, dinner? How long had he been lying on the ground in the garage, had he called for help? What if he had been found sooner?

But consider the alternatives, Dad. Someone sees or hears him collapse, rushes to his aide, performs CPR or other life-saving measures. Paramedics are dispatched, Grandpa is loaded onto a gurney, rushed to the emergency room in Manitowoc. Doctors examine him. Tubes are hooked up. Medications are ordered. A hospital stay is necessary; possibilities of long-term care are discussed at the foot of his bed.

No, Grandpa wouldn't have wanted any of that. It was best to go the way he did - simple, fast, a misstep that led to a fall, or his heart suddenly given out, having beaten longer than most other human hearts ever will.

We learned more details later. Grandpa was in the garage, sorting apples for the applesauce he made so often and ate every day. Had he made it back to the house, Grandpa would have washed the apples and settled down for an evening of peeling them, one by one, before placing them in a pot of boiling water. Or maybe it was a task for the next day; applesauce-making might have occupied several hours. When it was time, he would have walked down the ramp to his bedroom and begun his vocal twenty-minute evening prayer in German, names of his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren popping up in English every so often.

After his funeral, we went back to the farmhouse, which bore marks of Grandpa at every turn. Each object was a relic from a different time - his magnifying glass and Bible on the table near the davenport, his recipe cards stacked on the kitchen counter, his closet hung with plaid shirts.

Out in the garage, we paused over the spot. Bushels of apples on the floor, gallon-sized buckets with sorted apples on his walker and on the garage counter. Dad and I spotted the newspaper at the same time - The Sheboygan Press, dateline Monday, September 13, 2010. Someone (Grandpa?) had placed a weight on top of the paper, so it wouldn't flutter away, caught by the slight breeze in the open garage door. "Well, now we know," Dad said. "He'd already picked up the paper."

There was nothing to say, so I squeezed him on the arm.

Wisconsin, Part I

2010-09-19T06:57:00.000-07:00

Fourteen years ago, I wrote a "sense of place" essay about the Treick farm in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. I'd spent childhood vacations there, chasing cats in the barn and sneaking into the attic for a peek at decades-old issues of Time and my dad's old report cards. It was where my dad and his brothers grew up; it was what they had each, one by one, left behind. It was where my Grandpa was born and where he was still living, 101 years later, when he died on Monday.

At the time, I thought my essay was wonderful.

Dr. Schaap gave me a B. In his notes, he wrote: "It will be a good essay one day."

I know now what he meant then. Understanding a place -- really getting a sense of it -- requires distance and perspective. Time must pass, things must happen, in order for an experience to have value. Otherwise a place is just a collection of objects and memories. In other words, it's only a place.

I'm writing this in the San Francisco airport, while seating zones one and two are boarding. I can wait a few more minutes; what's the point of being wedged into seat 21B for a second longer than necessary?

Since I heard the news on Monday night, I've been both anticipating and dreading this moment. The flight, the separation from real life, the reunion with far-flung family in a place that holds a strange, almost mystical attraction for me. I'm coming, I told my Dad. It doesn't matter the price. I'm coming to say goodbye.

Maybe he thought I meant a goodbye to Grandpa, but that's not really the case. When I saw Grandpa this winter (this winter of his fall, the head injury, the trip to the ER on a Sunday morning), I knew it might be the last time. My goodbye was a real goodbye; there are no certainties, especially when you hit the 100-year-mark.

There will be a viewing, a memorial service, family gatherings with fatty foods and laughter and tears. We'll say goodbyes again after a couple short day, and those might be real goodbyes, too. It's horrible to put into words -- but our next gathering may well be another funeral; it's what brings everyone together in the end. But we won't gather again in Manitowoc, Wisconsin - this I can say with reasonable confidence. What will there be for any of us, anymore? The land will be there, of course, but it may not contain a rambling farmhouse, the garage and sheds, the silos, the bar with its date, a proclamation: 1849. All the stuff will be gone, too, to one place or another -- the marble boards, the closets full of Grandpa's plaid shirts, the plastic containers he was always saving for some practical, mysterious purpose.

I'm trying to avoid cliche, but I know it's going to be true: only when it's gone will I finally have a true sense of the place.

Self-Service Furniture

2010-09-06T13:16:00.000-07:00

Our first apartment – all 500 square feet of it – was basically a spread from the 2000 IKEA catalog. The walls were lined with BILLY bookcases, the living room was lit by tall paper-shaded lamps that resembled cigars. A bulky blanket shed clumps of red wool that collected in the far corners of the room.

And then there was the TIMRA. We needed a TV stand, and this was about as basic a TV stand as IKEA offered. The TIMRA boasted four bulky wheels, two retro steel bars and a whole lotta beech veneer – which was apparent from the moment we sliced open the box. “This is beech, not birch,” I moaned. “We have to take it back.”

Will gave me his most gentle smile, the one that said without saying, I love you dear, but I’m not driving 90 minutes back to Emoryville to exchange this thing.

An hour later, the TIMRA assembled and wheeled into position by the cable hook-up, I’d made my peace with it. The TIMRA was clearly a temporary fixture in my life. It would hold the TV and VCR, the Playstation (three guesses which of us brought a Playstation into the relationship), stray cat toys, melted candles and random pieces of mail that defied categorization. And soon, we would replace it with real furniture.

Fast forward ten years. Not only did the TIMRA survive the three air-conditionless years in our apartment, but it also made the move to our house, where it has sat for the last seven years, all but buried beneath DVDs of Seinfeld and the Godfather. And at least once a month during this decade, I pestered my dad to build us an armoire.

“Think of your favorite daughter living with beech veneer,” I pleaded. He was always amenable, even sketching plans for what would be the world’s coolest armoire, but somehow always ran short on time. When he wasn’t busy, we were. When he could find the right wood, I was too poor to place an order. Eventually, I stopped pressing the point – mostly because styles had changed. The plans would need to be redrawn, since it would no longer be housing a 30-inch deep TV.

This weekend, overwhelmed by the possibilities of three days off in a row, Will and I made a spontaneous trip to IKEA. I composed a mental list as Will drove: a new slipcover for the “Baxter chair,” some sort of shelving for my classroom, wall art for Will’s office. New potholders, wrapping paper, plant pots. Other random, bright, cheap things. Swedish meatballs.

And then, wandering through the IKEA showrooms, marveling at the 200-square foot apartment and the coolest kids’ bedrooms on earth, Will and I saw it at the same time. A HEMNES TV stand – solid pine, black/brown finish, three drawers, perfect for the flat screen TV we will someday own. We gasped. Our eyes met across an EKTORP sofa.

“What do you think about –”

“I love it.”

Later that night, the unassembled pieces of the HEMNES strewn across the room, I didn’t love it quite as much. I was beginning to wonder, in fact, if it wasn’t easier to just box the thing up again and drive it back to West Sacramento, receipt in hand. There were no less than 31 steps to assembling this beauty, and each step was accompanied by vague pictures of boards and screws that all looked basically the same. It was a warm night and we had the windows closed while the air conditioner hummed. Otherwise, our neighbors might have overheard something like:

“Where did the other allen wrench go?”

(Deleted swearing.) “It looks like we’re missing a dowel.”

“It looks fine like it is. Let’s just leave it that way.”

“Wait – which side is the front again?”

“This thing is impossible! How can an average person put this together? I mean, don’t you figure we’re smarter than the average IKEA customer?”

“Apparently not.”

“Maybe we only need two drawers, anyway.”

“You know, I have a renewed respect for the TIMRA. Simple, elegant in its own way, already assembled.”

At one point, I decided it was best for everyone involved if I took Baxter for a walk. The walls had started to close in on us – and with all the scattered materials and shredded cardboard, there was nowhere to sit, anyway. Will took advantage of my absence and somehow – miraculously – assembled the entire rest of the thing in twenty minutes. Perhaps he had only been toying with me for the past three hours?

Anyway – the HEMNES is beautiful. Black, sleek, practically gleaming in its newness. I mentioned this to Will, who stared at me blankly.

“The what?”

“The HEMNES… hello?”

“Oh, that,” he said. “I guess I’ll always think of it as the TIMRA.”

Weekend Writer

2010-08-30T17:09:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, I started teaching again. The plan was for me to teach during the day and write three nights a week. Or two – at least two. Okay, one. Absolutely one.

Here’s how it’s going.

Week one was crazy. I spent ten hours a day at school and the rest of the time in front of the TV, too exhausted to move. My body was asking me: Really? We’re doing this again? My dog, transitioning from two walks a day to one, was asking the same thing.

So it wasn’t until Friday of week one that I packed up my laptop (Will’s, really – did I mention that my laptop died? Could the universe please stop sending me messages?) and headed for the Borders café. I almost made it, too. But somehow I ended up in the bedding aisle at T.J. Maxx. I don’t need bedding and I haven’t been inside T.J. Maxx in the better part of a year –but suddenly it seemed crucial that I be there. I fingered 500-thread count sheets discounted to $29.99. I tried out pillows – a favorite pastime. Finally, I snapped out of my funk, marched my behind to Borders, ordered an espresso with an extra shot, and went at it. Well – sort of. It had been exactly twelve days since I found out I got the teaching job and my life went into full-blown chaos, so I’d been away from my manuscript for a full twelve days. I was kind of scared to return to it. It was like suddenly returning to a friend I’d been avoiding, and there was a stiff awkwardness to my rhythm. I had a checklist for my novel revision, but those things all seemed too overwhelming to implement. Read over for references to the 1970s. Um, no. Instead, I fiddled with a few sentences, possibly making them worse. The next morning I hit Starbucks, which was simultaneously overrun by youth soccer players who definitely didn’t need caffeine in the first place. It was slow going, but I did get somewhere.

Week two. All I thought about was organizing curriculum, planning writing proficiencies, and how in the world I was ever going to fit in with my new colleagues. Exactly no writing happened again until Friday night. Will went to a football game, and I escaped again to Borders. I ended up writing something entirely unrelated to my novel, more as therapy. And then I read over things. Not bad, I kept thinking, grinning to myself. Who is responsible for this genius? Oh, right – me. I had managed to forget entire lines, if not scenes, of my novel.

Week three. It’s only Monday, and I’m in Starbucks, sipping an unsweetened ice tea lemonade and eavesdropping on the conversation of a couple next to me and trying to figure out how I know the man sprawled on the chaise lounge. I’ve even opened my novel file – it’s right underneath this one. This – in the world of the weekend writer – feels like a huge accomplishment.

Watch out, world. Here I come.

Animal Kingdom

2010-08-22T20:24:00.000-07:00

This is what it’s like to live in a house ruled by animals.

One warm night you are asleep next to your husband, your body cooled by a slight breeze through the open bedroom windows. The down comforter, truly useless in such circumstances, is heaped between your body and his. One cat is perched on your hip – it’s where he prefers to wait, if not actually sleep, during the night. You have already rolled to the side, forcing him off your hip, twenty times – but he keeps coming back. Somewhere in the darkness the other cat is also waiting. Your dog, meanwhile, is under the bed making the strange helpless yelps that indicate a good dream.

You are aware of all of these things sub-consciously, while lost in a dream that is a strange amalgam of seventh grade curriculum, lines from your revised novel and conspiracies from the book on your night stand.

And then, all feline hell breaks loose.

One of your cats has apparently tried to jump from one windowsill to the other, sending a lamp crashing and all three pets scuttling into frantic movement. One claws your arm as he makes his way over your body into the safety of the hallway. You sit up. In the dim glow from the backyard solar lighting, you locate the lamp, balancing precariously between a table and the wall. Thankfully a glass of water from earlier in the evening is undisturbed. Your husband, despite the tremendous crash three feet from his head and being trampled by at least four feet, is still asleep.

You feel it is your duty to alert him to the fact that you are awake. You nudge him. “Did you hear that? One of the cats knocked over a lamp.”

He begins speaking as if you are in the middle of a long conversation, which is confusing but familiar. In half-wakened states, he likes to take charge of situations. What he tells you now begins with, “What you don’t understand is how it started.”

“You’re sleeping. You’re not making any sense,” you argue. All you want is for him to lean over, pick up the lamp, and fall back asleep. The lamp is closer to him. It is only fair.

“You’re the one who doesn’t make any sense,” he says. While this might be true in a general way, it is not true now – but you decide to give up. The cats have abandoned the bedroom perhaps for the rest of the night, but the dog is back, leaning his wet nose into the palm of your hand, which dangles over the edge of the bed. “I’m going back to sleep,” you tell your husband, with great dignity. He gives a general snore in response.

You fumble for the alarm, pressing its Indiglo switch. 3:06. Your alarm will go off in less than three hours, and unfortunately, you realize you are now wide awake. The dog licks your hand idly.

You close your eyes. You will yourself back to sleep. No – you are too uncomfortable, and everything must be adjusted before sleep can resume: sheets, pillow, hair, which lies hot on your neck. Much better. Now: sleep.

Count sheep. Listen to the cats, still traumatized, prowl the hallway. Husband’s breath, dog’s sigh, a truck lumbering by, blocks away. Check the clock. 3:09. Is this even possible? Have you disturbed the space/time continuum?

Come on – you need this sleep. There’s so much to do tomorrow – walk the dog, fold laundry, grade poems, plan what in the world you’re teaching this trimester. Oh, damn. Nevermind. You are now officially wide awake.

You fumble for your book light, reach for your book. You have been on page 105 in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest for the last three days, bogged down in the inner workings of the Swedish Secret Police. You sigh and read until 4:30, when your eyelids droop again.

The next thing you know, of course, your alarm clock has begun its maddening beeps – gentle, then insistent. Sunlight floods the room. The dog stretches, ready for breakfast. A cat has once again settled onto your hip, and the other cat once again sits in the windowsill, his fur pressed against the screen.

You stretch, then pick your way through strewn blankets and pillows to the other side of the room, where you right the toppled lamp.

The Official End of Summer

2010-08-15T13:55:00.001-07:00

On Friday, a small group of us gathered for dinner at a friend’s house. We numbered six; five of us (including, as of tomorrow, me) are teachers. Will is the lone man out, but since he’s an expert on high school sports, he moves smoothly through our conversations.

I was almost too tired to put on a smile. It was the end of a whirlwind week that began on Monday, when I put on a suit and summoned my friendliest expression and interviewed for a job teaching seventh and eighth grade Language Arts. I didn’t tell Will I was interviewing; I had only mentioned, with extreme casualness, that I applied in the first place. Teaching isn’t my long range plan, but short term, it allows me to pay off bills, get ahead and pursue the long range plan (writing) in the future.

On Tuesday morning, I got the call: The job was mine. “I’m so excited!” I said to the person in Human Resources, and this was true. But my mind was already reeling – thinking of what needed to be done to set up a classroom, and the freedom I was leaving behind. While still on the phone discussing my units and benefits, I emailed Will: “Got a job. Dinner’s on me.” That afternoon I drove to the school and picked up my keys.

Wednesday was spent signing papers at the district office and filling two Walmart shopping carts with all the stuff I was going to need – all the stuff I’d essentially left behind at my last teaching job, since some of it had been purchased with school funds, and besides, I was done with teaching, anyway, wasn’t I? Notebooks, lined paper, pencils, crates, manila folders, Sharpies, dry erase markers. I ended up spending $160 on items ranging anywhere from ten cents to two bucks apiece.

Thursday I spent cleaning in my new classroom, sorting into piles of things that may be useful (ancient curriculum binders) and things that definitely wouldn’t (three mismatched shoes). I met my new colleagues. I drew posters, determined to cover as much of the light gray walls as possible.

Will had Friday off and helped me move desks, hook up my computer and – surprising both of us – complete an art project for my “Word Wall”. I ran copies, skimmed through textbooks, made frantic lists of things to do over the weekend. So I was exhausted when we finally got in my car for the trip to Hughson – if I allowed myself to close my eyes, I would have been asleep instantly.

But the company was fantastic, our friends’ remodel so gorgeous I offered my housesitting services, the food melt-in-my-mouth delicious. Four kids wandered around the periphery, kicking soccer balls and racing each other. The sun went down and the night was gorgeous, the sky a velvety black dotted helter-skelter with stars. The kids started it, dragging blankets to the backyard, and we adults joined them, settling onto our backs. We spotted the Big Dipper, the North Star, a few planes that might have been UFOs – you never know.

In a week, we would all be back in school, back in the rhythm of bells ringing and pledging to the flag, passing out papers and collecting homework. Our time would not be our own. My time would belong to hordes of twelve-to-fourteen year-olds and I’ll be lucky, I know, if I escape grading papers for an evening or two of writing.

But it’s just a change of circumstance, not a change of essentials. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself.

State of Mind

2010-08-01T13:58:00.000-07:00

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I’d never been to New York before our trip this summer. My personal experience with the city was limited to a view of the Manhattan skyline from the Newark terminal and a wait in an endless line at JFK. (I was also passed a counterfeit $10 bill and the most rubbery chicken sandwich of my life at a Burger King at JFK, but since I have almost forgiven New York in general for the incident, it only bears noting in parentheses.) Other than airport vendors hawking “I [heart] NY” t-shirts, I really could have been anywhere.

This unintentional avoidance of New York was becoming a source of shame for two people who consider themselves travelers and, for that matter, writers. We’ve stood at the base of the Jungfrau in Grindelwald, Switzerland; we’ve taken a boat up the Bosphorus in Istanbul, where Europe meets Asia; last summer, I got a healthy sunburn on Great Blasket Island, which is considered so remote that Ireland no longer lets its residents live there. Not visiting New York City was just plain silly.

But even though it was my first official visit, New York felt instantly familiar to me, from the moment we stepped off the train at Penn Station. I’ve seen, after all, a few thousand episodes of Seinfeld and Law and Order, not to mention dozens of movies with New York as a backdrop. A glance at my bookshelves reveals my recent mental journeys to the city: Motherless Brooklyn, Netherland, Lowboy. And of course, during the fall of 2001, Manhattan was an ever-present fixture on my TV screen.

So in a way I’d grasped the essence of New York without ever physically being there – the swarms of people of every race, religion, nationality, social class; the crowded, clacking subways; the overwhelming glitz of Times Square; the stately museums with stern-faced docents…

What this west-coast, dry-heat-loving girl had failed to envision, however, was what it would be like to experience the city under oppressive humidity and crushing heat. I saw New York through the sweat that had dripped into my eyes: Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, the almost airless subway tunnels. I sweated through every shirt in my bulging suitcase; I sought refuge in front of the dinky air conditioner in our hotel room, blasting away at a constant 68 degrees. I watched, with a growing sense of despair, as www.weather.com recording rising temperatures, with record highs predicted. For Saturday, July 24, the local news warned of 97 degree heat. “Stay inside if you possibly can,” the weatherman advised. It didn’t sound like a bad idea to me.

Oddly enough, no one else in New York seemed to be sweating. While twin semi-circles of sweat sprouted under my breasts, everyone else walked happily – if purposefully – down the streets of the Upper West Side. I checked carefully for beads of sweat on foreheads, for swamp pits lurking in underarms and at the backs of knees. While I fanned myself with a pizza menu on the subway platform, wishing I could stand over a grate Marilyn Monroe-style, New Yorkers calmly read from their Kindles. Even Will (who had showered three times a day when we were in Wisconsin, cursing the humidity all the while) didn’t appear to be bothered.

“I’m dying,” I croaked, when we were exactly halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge. Moving another step was impossible; I was going to have to stay there forever, suspended between boroughs, watching bodies float by in the East River. I flicked sweat from my face, noting that my bangs were completely plastered to my forehead. I felt for my water bottle – only a few, precious swigs left. “I can’t go on,” I gasped.

Will didn’t hear; he was ten yards ahead of me and presumably nestled in a pocket of clean, cool air. He turned around, grinning. “Isn’t this fantastic?” he said. “I could see us living here, couldn’t you?”

I didn’t answer. I was thinking of how I would love to visit New York again – maybe in the fall, when the leaves in Central Park were changing red and gold, maybe in the winter, when I could schlep through the snow and slip on the ice and see a glorious cloud of white air emerge from my lips with each breath. While sweat slid over my eyeballs, I stood perfectly still, with visions of mittens and snow boots dancing through my head.

Now that’s my idea of New York.

Samuel Adams Showered Here

2010-07-21T12:22:00.000-07:00

Boston, it turns out, is an expensive place to stay.

Will and I have a basic theory when it comes to travel: the accommodations should be clean, somewhat quiet and close to public transportation. The rest – a comfortable mattress, a soaker shower head – is only a bonus. Last summer, we spent a night in a room approximately the size of a small walk-in closet in Stratford-upon-Avon, so small that only one of us could be standing at a time, and the other had to curl up on the twin-sized mattress or wait in the hallway. And yet we shrugged, laughed, spent that last day trekking through the countryside to Anne Hathaway’s cottage and allowed ourselves to be regaled again by the Royal Shakespeare Company at night.

As we travel, we constantly store up the small details that will make their way into Will’s review on TripAdvisor – the friendliness of the proprietors, the promise of the venue versus its reality. If it doesn’t work for us, we’re going to warn others away. If it meets all our needs, we pass on the tip to other bargain-hunters.

After much searching through Boston’s pricier hotels, we found ours. Not a hotel, technically, but a small apartment – one of a series of small apartments, etc., controlled by a single company. It boasted a bedroom, living/dining room, pocket kitchen and a full bath, close to the orange and green lines of Boston’s T.

“It’s received some mixed reviews,” Will admitted as we pulled our suitcases along cobblestone streets.

“Well, we won’t spend much time in it, anyway,” I assured him.

There were a few bumps to begin with – the man at the front desk had a difficult time locating our reservation, although it was directly in front of him on the desk. He insisted we pay in advance, but then seemed reluctant to return my Visa. We were given keys to open the front door of an apartment building a few blocks away, but once we’d located the address, the room number on the key didn’t match any of the room numbers in the building. Will called and an employee came down with replacement keys.

And then there was the smell. I’ve taught public school for eight years, so it’s a smell I immediately identified – mold.

“The carpet is wet,” Will marveled, stepping out of his shoes. That turned out to be no great mystery – to survive in an apartment with non-functional windows during a Boston summer, the swamp cooler was an immediate necessity. Everything in its path – an expanse of Berber, the contents of our suitcases – quickly became damp.

I don’t know what was worse – the pungent mold stench that hit us fresh each time we entered the apartment, or the fact that in five minutes our nostrils had adjusted and the smell seemed completely normal. Each morning, we went through a five-minute nose-blowing (me) and coughing (Will) routine that could not have been healthy.

It was an odd set-up – we returned from a sweaty circuit of the Freedom Trail to find our bed made, although nothing else had been touched. A small loop of my hair was still in the drain, our towels still wet and crumpled. I popped a Fanta into the freezer for a quick chill and the freezer handle came right off – it was affixed with nothing stronger than a swab of rubber cement. At night we cuddled up on the vinyl couch in front of a flat-screen TV, the experience somewhat muffled by the fact that the volume had to be at its highest level to counteract the swamp cooler. Last night, wending our way to Legal Sea Foods, we passed a Marriott, Sheridan, Westin and The Colonnade, laughing. This morning, I made a concerted effort not to notice the way the plaster above the shower enclosure was peeling, or the way the bathtub seemed to list to one side, ready to drift down the Charles River, maybe. It’s an old building, I reminded myself. Besides, the founding fathers had to deal with much worse – no taxation without representation, massacres, etc.

So we shrugged it off – the location is good, the price is right and changing hotels would be a huge hassle at this point. Anyway, we were less than a day from our train to New York and our completely honest review on TripAdvisor.

Things Observed from an East-Facing Window Seat on the Downeaster from Portland to Boston

2010-07-19T06:52:00.000-07:00

(or Lists I Make on Various Forms of Transportation to Amuse Myself when I Can’t Sleep, Part 82)

-- Two marmots picnicking on grass outside the Portland station. They were lovely, wild, fat-bellied things and may not have been marmots at all. Woodchucks, maybe, Will theorized. Or prairie dogs. Look it up, he instructed, but somehow I couldn’t log on to the train’s free WiFi.

-- A fellow passenger, a monk, with a black robe, a bald head and thickish glasses. Two other monks were seeing him off at the platform in Portland, and he called them on his cell phone when the train was pulling away from the station. “But why were you crying?” he asked, gently. “I’m going to see you again.” He got off a few stops later, at Durham.

-- Old Orchard Beach: ice cream stands and surf shops and a somewhat rickety looking roller coaster, a fantastic water slide, tanned bodies, Crocs and brightly painted murals.

-- Christmas tree farms. A man standing uncomfortably close to the train platform. Heaps of railroad ties. A baseball field in West Medford. Woods. Ocean. Lakes. Swamps thick with lilypads. John Deere tractors. Shoes, laces tied together, looped over a telephone wire. Trees that had fallen or were kneeling, about to fall. Field hockey practice in Dover, New Hampshire. Cemeteries. Backyards. Trailer courts. Graffiti (we all want to get our names out there, don’t we?), even in the smallest blinks of towns. On the back side of a tin shed: SHY. Initials? A moniker? A lament that I share, all too often? Elsewhere: SOUP and OUST.

-- My own reflection: mascara smudged, my bangs fallen flat, chapped lips (my lip balm inconveniently stored in my suitcase, which was inconveniently lodged in the overhead bin).

- Empty buildings, self-storage units and smockstacks in Haverhill (“Have-rill”), Massachusetts. A funky-looking bookstore (Bookends) in Winchester.

-- A man who looked like (but sadly, was not) David from my writing program. I caught a glimpse of his dark hair and flannel shirt on the way into the bathroom and waited for him to come out, waited so long (about 15 minutes, according to Will’s wristwatch) that I began to really hope it wasn’t him at all, because he might be embarrassed to make eye contact after such horrible intestinal issues or to be publicly exposed as a cokehead.

-- Will: in his favorite Royal Robbins garb, Nick Hornby book splayed facedown in his lap, hands clasped, mouth open, sleepy smile on lips, glasses perched on the bridge of his nose.

- The New York Times’s Style section wedding pages, which I went through with a pen, circling all mentions of “Harvard” and “Yale” and “Princeton.”

- The inside of the bathroom (technically not observed from seat). Until this moment, lowering myself carefully to the toilet seat, I had not noticed just how rocky the train was.

- Boston: the Charles River, a funky bridge, lots more grafitti, mammoth concrete loops for underpasses, overpasses, onramps and off-ramps. Brick everywhere. Blue sky. My home for the next three days.

All Good Things

2010-07-19T06:47:00.000-07:00

I’m sitting in a laundromat in Brunswick, Maine, watching the clothes that I have been toting around for ten days take a much-needed bath. Will is out scouting shampoo and batteries; in the trunk of our rental car is my suitcase, bearing amongst other things my MFA degree, barely twelve hours old. I’m one iced coffee from Dunkin Donuts and a few hours away from taking the Downeaster to Boston.

Last night I said goodbye to the friends I’ve had for two years, the ones who freaked out over the printing of our theses with me, the ones who understood when other people just didn’t get my writing. Wearing my gray-and-silver heels and a beautiful borrowed necklace, I sweated out a few beers and half of an all-meat pizza on the dance floor. I laughed, for maybe the last time, at what MFA students look like while they’re dancing.

And now it’s time to move on.

For me, literally, this means a return to California, to my house and dog and the cats I sometimes forget I have. It doesn’t mean – not yet, anyway – a return to full-time teaching; I’m hoping instead to polish up the novel I finished in May and send it out to the world. I want to take everything I’ve learned, about writing and about life, and apply it to whatever comes next.

It hasn’t fully sunk in yet that I might not be returning, ever – but I can already sense the nostalgia that’s coming.

When I resigned as a full-time teacher at the end of the 2008-2009 academic year, it took another year for that fact to hit me. In the meantime, I stayed in touch with some of my colleagues. I bumped into my former students on Facebook. It wasn’t until I went to graduation this May that I realized I had really left. I didn’t recognize most of the faces around me. No longer a staff member, I stood outside the gate, catching only a few snatches of commencement speeches that the microphone (and the wind) floated my way. Until that moment, I hadn’t really looked back. I had only considered what I was headed toward; I hadn’t really considered what I was leaving behind.

It might take me some time, then, to really miss my MFA program and the strange cast of characters (myself included, I suppose) that populated it. Give me a week, a month, a season, a year. Give me until January, when I’m not taking a propeller plane to a snow-covered northern landing strip, my winter boots taking up half the real estate of my suitcase. Give me until next July, when I’m not thinking about how my hair will react to humidity, or once again waging the dorm vs. hotel room debate.

All good things, I know, must come to an end. Even bad things do – even this moment right now, where I am waiting for the rinse cycle under the intense scrutiny of a strange woman with copious amounts of facial hair who is trying to ascertain if I am, indeed, writing about her. Yes, even this will end – with the sound of a buzzer or a natural disaster that wipes out the Northeast or the arrival of Will. Some experiences, of course, are more miss-able than others.

But right now I’m bracing myself, just a bit, for what I know is coming sooner or later. When it finally hits me that Stonecoast is in my past, I want to be prepared for the impact, like a fighter clenching his stomach muscles, unwilling to take the full brunt of the blow.

What's Next

2010-07-05T23:38:00.000-07:00

At the end of May, I finished my novel.

Well – a first draft. A good first draft. I’ve had to let it sit for a while, and I’m looking forward to getting back to it in a month or so. I open the file occasionally and read over passages, surprised at what surprises me, now that I’ve read the book a dozen times straight through.

I spent the first week of June editing a 184-page-manuscript – a volunteer effort, but something that you can bet will show up on my resume.

I printed out my thesis, which meant two trips to Office Depot and, somehow, five trips to the post office.

And then I started summer school. It’s my fourth straight summer of marking time on chalkboards, which probably makes me even less intelligent than some of my students, who assure me that they spend each summer making up the work they failed all school year long. Not every minute is horrible – sometimes five minutes at once goes by and I haven’t looked at the clock.

The rest of my moments feel stolen – working on my graduate presentation, reading an article in the New Yorker, picking a few weeds here and there, making lists of things to pack and then quickly misplacing them.

I’m a few days from getting on a plane and leaving my life behind for three weeks. There are a million things to do – last minute straightening, so I come back to a clean house; the actual act of packing – and somehow I’ve spent my fifth of July in a state of inertia. Even bringing in the sun tea required great mental effort. Flipping channels, I found the AMC marathon of Mad Men and have barely moved since.

I know what it is – transition. I’m never really good at that.

For a long time I was plotting my enrollment in graduate school, and then it happened. I spent the last two years looking forward to a completed manuscript and graduation – and now it’s practically here. As of the 17th, I’ll be an MFA graduate. The scariest thing may be what’s next – a return to teaching? part-time jobs while I rewrite/search for an agent/move forward in my writing life? If I sit still for too long, a weird panicky feeling settles on my chest.

Get up. Move. Keep going.

Last week, I gave Mona the go-ahead to experiment with my hair. Sure, go a shade darker on the bottom, I said. Why not? And now I’m a half-blonde with black hair that sticks to my neck in the heat.

I think I might hate it, I told my sister.

Nah, she said. You needed some more edge. You’re a writer, after all.

I laughed at the time, and too rushed to do anything about it, I’ve still got the hair. It’s funny how sometimes the decisions are made for you. Maybe this is just a case of hair as destiny.

The World from this Window

2010-05-27T10:34:00.000-07:00

At Starbucks, I grab a seat at the window, and while writing the epilogue to my novel, I also make the following observations:

A woman comes through the drive-thru at Starbucks with pink curlers in her hair. She looks young (younger than me, anyway), and I puzzle over this for far too long. I thought curlers went the way of bobby socks and poodle skirts. I thought going out in public with curlers was the domain of elderly women in housedresses, support hose and lipstick-stained teeth. I thought What Not to Wear, after years of noble fashion warfare, had put a stop to this sort of public behavior altogether.

Two women come in wearing long, floaty skirts and elaborate hair arrangements that involve numerous clips, claws and bobby pins. I imagine they are part of a religious group where long hair and skirts are mandatory. Either this or a traveling theater troop, and they have raided the costume trailer. Although they order at the same time, one woman’s order comes up quickly and the other is lost in a line of white cups (made with 10% post-consumer recycled fiber). “Bless you, dear,” says the older woman when the barista finally hands over her mocha. I place them back in the religious group. This makes me wonder if I wonder if anyone looking at me would place me into a religious cult. I belong to that strange sect that worships caffeine, values silence or mind-numbing noise, types fast and loud, and doesn’t feel embarrassed to be caught staring.

It’s been raining on and off for days, so business is slow at the carwash across the street. A few cars do come through – drivers without access to weather reports? I’m tempted myself – my car was dusty before the rain, and rivulets of water have created muddy streaks down the hood. I wonder if car washes are half-price on rainy days, or if this is proof that I have no future in marketing. And then I wonder if the Pacific Northwest – where the Beths live, unaware of each other – has any sort of thriving car wash industry at all.

Earlier today, over breakfast, I browsed for editing jobs on monster.com, and noted one promising lead for which I met many of the “required” qualifications (B.A. in English, experience in editing), but when I got to the “recommended” qualifications, I noted that ideal applicant should also be fluent in Portuguese, Arabic and French. The world is a big place, so I’m sure that ideal applicant exists, though whether s/he is willing to work for what amounts to slave labor seems less certain. But you never know – I make assumptions about people all the time and am constantly proven wrong. Perhaps the woman with her hair in curlers was on her way to translate at a multi-lingual conference on bioethics; she would rather be following her passion – ballroom dancing – but takes the occasional translation gig to pay the bills. Fiction is fun.

After all this musing about others, it suddenly occurs to me that the man at the next table is wearing a sweater that my husband owns. I haven’t seen Will wear this sweater in a year, but maybe he should. It looks nice on this man, even paired with light-washed jeans and ratty loafers. I’ll have to remember to tell Will. When the side-effects of a venti skinny vanilla latte kick in, I ask this man if he would mind watching my things. I have to ask him three times, because the first time he apparently doesn’t register the question, the second time he’s completely puzzled, looking me up and down as if we are former colleagues and he should remember my name, and finally on the third plea he says, “Um, sure.” Only in the bathroom does it occur to me that there is no other copy of this novel, at least not the last twenty pages or so. I do the quickest hand-washing job ever and rush back to my seat.

My neighbor Rob is in this Starbucks, in the corner table without a view – the place for serious work. He’s writing too, a project for which he will presumably get paid and for which he has great enthusiasm. All I can see from this angle are his shoes – black Converse – and a stack of napkins, slightly wadded. I am tempted a dozen times to interrupt his concentration with a stupid joke or a witty observation, which is proof that I have the potential to be a horrible person, but since I ultimately resist, I am happy to observe that I do have at least one redeeming quality.

The Great Flood of 2010

2010-05-20T20:25:00.000-07:00

Will and I don’t clean out our garage like normal people.

In fact, I have to draw on my fiction-writing sensibilities to imagine how other people accomplish this task. They clear their schedules maybe, setting aside a few hours on a sunny Saturday morning in which to move, sort and reorder their belongings. While they move objects onto the driveway, neighbors pass by with children in strollers and dogs on leashes. Pleasantries are exchanged. Afterwards these normal, happy people collapse onto the couch with a sense of accomplishment, a cold beer in their hands and a baseball game on TV.

Will and I prefer a different approach: We wait until the washer malfunctions, then wade through ankle-deep water to salvage what’s left.

The washer malfunction is a strange fact of our lives. It is a rather-new, deceptively competent-looking machine. It works like a charm 99% of the time and then every few hundred cycles – once a year or so – something backfires. Since the prime laundry-washing hours for a night owl are between ten p.m. and midnight, we usually discover the flood while we’re winding down for the day. We drop everything else, curse the faulty washer, and begin the task of moving everything to dry ground.

In the seven years we’ve lived in our house, we’ve performed this task six times and therefore have it down to a sort of science. Our garage is too small for either of our vehicles, even Will’s Civic – which is strange, since homes in the ‘40s presumably had larger cars. So instead of accommodating a car, the garage is a repository for our stuff – notes from Will’s seventeen years as a journalist, texts from my eight years of teaching, cleaning and paper supplies, half-empty gallons of paint, random garden tools. The garage is also functions as a limbo for the things we don’t really want anymore, but haven’t absolutely destined for Goodwill – wedding gifts we’ve never actually used, clothes we haven’t worn in a while.

It’s a mostly silent task. Will opens the garage door (a feat I’ve never mastered), most of the water spills out onto the driveway, and we start dumping things on the lawn. By this point our neighbors – sane people, all of them – are asleep, their homes dark. Each time I’ve expected a police cruiser to drive by and idle at the curb, but this has never happened. (There's no trouble, Officer!) Spread out on the lawn, our belongings are a sorry lot. If I had to imagine the people who owned these random things, I would never picture the two of us.

Some things are lost for good, like the bag of cat food and a twelve-pack of toilet paper – things that actually belong on shelves, but through laziness and general apathy end up on the floor of the garage, now weighted with water and rendered completely useless. The real joy is the cat litter, which takes on the mass and consistency of a load of cement. It has to be scraped off the floor, then wrapped in layers of plastic bags. I try not to think about the bodily functions of my cats as the litter oozes between my toes.

The first time it happened, we were emotional wrecks – Will angry at the disruption, me weepy over what we’d lost. By now we take it in stride, which in a way is even worse. We’ve resigned ourselves to the situation; we’ve accepted the possibility that our benign-looking washing machine will one day turn on us. (Annie Dillard, if I recall, had a similar experience with a typewriter that one day exploded, showering her writing table with sparks. After this single incident, it worked fine.) And so, an hour-and-a-half later, the garage is drying, our belongings are reorganized and a shopping list of toiletries is affixed to the refrigerator. Will and I call dibs on the first shower; in what has become our pattern, he lets me take it.

For a week or two afterwards, we’ll watch the machine carefully, opening the garage door for a quick peek to catch it in the act, like a disobedient child. And then, inevitably, we’ll forget. Nah, we think, listening to the whoosh of the rinse and the rumble of the spin cycle. It’ll never happen again.

The Back-Up Dog

2010-04-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

Baxter is sick.

It is probably not his intention to cause me worry and heartache, but I’m worried. I’m heart-ached.

Last week we spent three days in Santa Rosa with my sis, her husband, and the lovely Sabine. Baxter survived the drive – he was eerily quiet in the car, actually; so much so that occasionally Will and I muted the radio to listen for his breathing. He even survived our ill-planned stop in Richmond for sustenance, although he was plainly eager to be on the road again.

While Will and I chatted up my sister and cooed over Sabine, Baxter inspected every inch of their backyard. He burrowed under hedges, rooted through ivy, stared curiously at the goldfish, and then proceeded to drag all of Sabine’s belongings from the deck to the yard. In short, he made a happy fool of himself. It wasn’t until late that night, the adults in bed after laughing ourselves into exhaustion with the New Yorker caption contest game, that he finally relaxed.

Day two included long walks through a hilly Santa Rosa neighborhood, a few sunny hours at Doran Beach and then a lazy afternoon nap. That night I pronounced that Baxter was finally acting like a “real” dog – he wasn’t frantically sniffing or insisting on our attention. He even ignored the allure of Sabine’s diaper and cuddled up, real-dog like, at our feet.

On day three, he wouldn’t eat. This was unusual for Baxter because he’s a beagle, and beagles will eat anything and everything, whenever the opportunity presents itself. Occasionally this means non-edible things like food packaging, but it absolutely means his dog food, served in his doggy dish, at six a.m. sharp. When he finally ate later that day, I chalked it up to the general excitement of new people, the break in routine…

And then on Sunday, back home, he ignored his healthy serving of Beneful. He ate grass instead and threw up, before finally turning to his food. He slept as if were catching up for a lifetime of lost hours. On Monday he seemed fine, if lethargic. On Tuesday, he wouldn’t eat again. “No walk until you eat,” I told him, exhibiting my fine parenting skills. He ate, and once on a leash he went right for the grass again, so he could vomit the food his cruel mother had force fed him.

It was time to call the professionals.

I dropped off Baxter at the vet at nine o’clock, which gave me about forty minutes to make a fifty minute drive in another direction for class. I couldn’t linger for anything more than a “Bye, buddy” – and I was off. I mourned him the whole way. Later that day I was back home with no one to greet me (we have two cats, yes, but for the purpose of this blog there was no one to greet me). I called the vet for a check-up – probably your basic gastroenteritis, but they wanted to keep him over night. I did a load of laundry without worrying that Baxter would snag a sock and run under the bed. There were no toenails clicking on the hardwood, following me from room to room. It was empty-nest syndrome.

“I miss Baxter,” I said, getting in to bed next to Will. I hated to think of him in a cage, too keyed up by the presence of other dogs to get any sleep. I could picture him doped up on anti-nausea medication, pumped full of fluids for his dehydration, letting out the occasional whimper. The evening had assumed a surreal quality – there was no hike through backyard darkness while Baxter gave his last pee of the night. It was too quiet in our room without Baxter settling onto the old quilt and performing his ritual of grunts, moans and snorts. This, then, was what it was like to be dog-less.

Earlier in the week I had been joking about the “heir and a spare” concept – it generally worked for the royals, as it does for most parents today. And apparently it worked for pet-owners – just think of all the happy people who walk more than one dog each night. That’s what I needed just then, a back-up dog.

“You’re not crying, are you?” Will laughed.

“Nnnnhommm,” I mumbled.

“You know he’ll be back tomorrow, right?”

I sighed. It would be a long night until then. “I know.”

Reasons to Dislike the Woman Sitting Across from Me

2010-04-07T10:57:00.000-07:00

1. Poor cell phone etiquette. Perhaps she has not noticed that the room is otherwise quiet, that the rest of us are typing madly and importantly on our keyboards, and she is the lone nattering voice, drowning out even The Bangles’ “Manic Monday”. Because I can’t help but overhear, I must also report that her conversations are not even interesting. As a connoisseur of eavesdropping, I know when something is worth recording (i.e. jotting down in my omnipresent notebook or laptop), and her loud, monotonous conversation bores me.

2. Failure to act in the best interest of others. This woman has no sense of community. For proof I offer the following scenario: It was a mild-weathered Saturday afternoon and those of us who appreciate power sources for our laptops over hiking or cycling were indoors, typing away. Logging on, I found that I couldn’t connect to the Internet. Not a big deal – I should be deeply ensconced in the 27th version of my novel anyway, not checking to see if one of my lit sisters has sent me a witty piece of correspondence. I have also come to the point in my life when a few minutes away from the Equifax alert system doesn’t send me into a cold panic. And yet, perversely, I kept trying to connect. Then a fellow caffeine addict leaned over and said, “Are you connected?” “Nope,” I reported, trying for cheerful. A third patron professed unconnectivity, and voila! We had a problem on our hands. The manager, once alerted, looked doubtfully at the WiFi thingamajig and said, “Is anyone connected?” And SHE, the woman sighing importantly across from me at this very moment, said, “I’m online.” Liar! It was impossible. We – the disenfranchised three – pressed her: “Really? You can refresh your page? You can send and receive email?” She gave us this very annoyed glance and said, “I’m sorry. I’m very busy. I don’t have time to talk right now.” Talk? We didn’t want to talk. We wanted validation that the Internet was down. “Well, as long as one person is online…” the manager said, trailing away to other responsibilities. I wanted to wrestle away the woman’s iMac, forcing her to acknowledge that she was looking at an Excel file and NOT the Internet, but I took a deep breath and let it go. Breathe in: citizen of the world. Breathe out.

3. General selfishness and display of coffeehouse bullying. So this morning, inexplicably, all the tables were taken. I shuffled in with my laptop case and noticed that one table was littered with food wrappers and an untidy stack of newspapers. “Excuse me – do you know if anyone is sitting here?” I ask the man next to me. “There was someone there, but I guess he left. That was maybe ten minutes ago.” Aha. I stacked up the papers, brushed the crumbs onto the plate, and prepared to set myself up, when SHE appeared, swooping out of nowhere. “I’m sorry, I’ve been waiting for that table,” she announced. Waiting where? In the bathroom? At another table on the other side of the house? It’s not like we’re in a gym, signing up for time on a treadmill. It’s every woman for herself here. It’s catch as catch can. It’s snooze or loose. So back off, lady. While you were staring at this empty table for ten minutes, I made my move. I will now proceed to type beautiful prose and get on with my life, thank you very much. Except – I didn’t do that. It was like being in grade school all over again. I caved to the bully. Here’s my lunch money – er, coveted seat near the window. While I was standing there not sure how to respond (be gracious, be eloquent, Paula), a man at the facing table announced, “Hey, I’m leaving now. You can have my spot.” Now we face each other over our laptop screens and she jots important notes on a napkin and I type this, my small form of revenge.

I Don’t Understand How Time Passes

2010-03-16T11:02:00.000-07:00

Will tells me it’s been a month since I’ve updated this blog. A month? That can’t be. I mean, I know I’ve been busy… but a whole month? So I took a break from my other writing life to figure out where I’ve been. And here’s what I found:

-- I’ve been working on my thesis. Slow, painful work that I haven’t even invited others to read. This involves quick spurts of activity – days where I write ten or more pages – and then a sluggish half-week of revision where I realize that at least half of the “spurt” has got to go. It’s fun.

-- I’ve been blogging elsewhere – at Her Plot Thickens, a group blog with two of my whip-smart writer friends. I insist you check it out!

-- I started a sort of internship/unpaid teaching assistant position at California State University, Stanislaus, and suddenly I’ve found myself immersed in American Modernism. I’m teaching on Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot (insert gulp here).

-- I’ve subbed for 5th through 12th grade – Special Ed, 7th and 8th grade Language Arts, Reading Lab, 6th grade Math/Algebra/Geometry/Algebra II/Finite Math (don’t even ask what they were supposed to be doing… I have no idea), American Government, World History… Most of it is a blur, which is a good thing.

-- I’ve walked Baxter a few dozen times, at least. Once he got out and led me on a wild-beagle chase through our neighborhood and beyond. That was ten days ago and I’m still catching my breath.

-- I’ve collected manuscripts from my compatriots in the graduating class of July 2010 for Stonecoast Lines. Now I’m editing, formatting, stressing when the publisher doesn’t call me back…

-- I’ve cleaned (not enough), cooked (probably too much) and generally neglected the laundry.

-- I’ve worked out at four to five days a week, visited the post office a half-dozen times, and stopped by the library once a week at minimum to recharge my mind.

- I’ve read: not just the stuff I’m teaching, but also A Thousand Acres, A Short History of Women, Olive Kitteridge, Motherless Brooklyn, Americans in Space, When Will There be Good News?, and I’m nearly finished with Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. This book is seriously hilarious, and I often have to put it away at night so I don’t laugh myself into a state of permanent awake-ness. Right now I’m at the part where a fired employee dressed as a clown returns to the office with a paintball gun.

-- I tried (and failed) to keep up with LOST. I discovered a few weeks into the season that Project Runway had started without me. I learned the “essential seeds” for any diet on Dr. Oz.

--I’ve been accepted as an ETS rater (rating college entrance exam essays, etc.) and start soon. It remains to be seen if I will like grading essays – that task used to be the bane of my teaching existence. Now, apparently, all anyone has to do is dangle a money-shaped carrot in front of my eyes and I’m in. I’ve also started to apply for post-graduate fellowships, teaching positions, etc. It’s tiring. I can only write so many cover letters and statements of purpose before I degenerate into silliness.

-- I celebrated Grandpa’s 101st birthday in February. A week or so later, I was on hand to bring him to the ER when he fell and hit his head. I spent a full day with him when my dad was out of town, alternating between FOX News and Animal Planet. I left with a huge headache.

-- I’ve emailed Paige and Beth recklessly, helplessly, laughingly, knowingly. I’ve told Will long, detailed stories that he politely pretends to listen to. I’ve forgotten birthdays, forgotten to comb my hair, forgotten to pay the pest control service. I took a cold shower when the “stem” in our hot water faucet broke. I’ve daydreamed about the shoes I might wear when I cross the stage to get my diploma.

-- I took a two-day, 720-mile trip to Oregon and back with my dear friend Alisha, and loved every minute of it… even the minute when we realized the alarm didn’t go off and we would have to rush to breakfast as we were.

-- I’ve sipped chai lattes at The Queen Bean, like I’m doing at this very moment. Sometimes – like right now – I’ve eavesdropped on conversations. I’ve chuckled to myself. I’ve passed judgment. I’ve stored up tales to repeat to Will over dinner, to Alisha over Guinness, to the dear faithful readers of my sadly not-up-to-date blog.

A Trip to the Discount Store

2010-02-14T22:17:00.000-08:00

This girl isn’t afraid of discounts.

I grew up in hand-me-downs, spent my college work-study checks at thrift stores and still make a monthly trip to Wal-Mart for “the necessities.” (I go before six a.m. – there’s less chance of being accosted by toothless panhandlers my own age in the parking lot or by the swarms of unattended, sticky-faced children who roam the aisles.)

On Saturday, I went to another discount store, one I’d only been to once before, a few years ago. I remembered the experience wasn’t exactly pleasant, but I was fuzzy on the particulars. In any case, I was now in search of the same item I’d bought then – a new pillow. The store was basically the same as I remembered – racks upon racks of flimsy clothes made from stretchy synthetic fabric, rows of shoes that looked cute but wouldn’t survive more than a single wear. I made a beeline for the back of the store – home décor.

I’m sort of particular about pillows. My neck needs support – not too firm, not too soft. I love a down pillow, although not necessarily the accompanying sneezes. It’s an awkward thing to try out a pillow in a store – especially when there’s no bed, and thus no way to exactly replicate the experience. I was left to lean my head into the shelves – which was not, I reflected, entirely unlike sticking one’s head in an oven.

Well. I found a pillow I liked, and so immediately grabbed a second one, entirely voiding the purpose of seeking a discount. But Will would like this, too, and even if Baxter had only thrown up on one of our pillows, at some point we would need another.

On the way up to the register – the line, I recognized with a sick feeling, had wound its way halfway through the store – I passed a display of area rugs. Hmm. We do need a new rug at our entryway. The braided rattan rug I loved at the time has sadly proved impossible to clean. This rug, a plush shag that the cats would love to dig their claws into, was only $14.99 and the sort of beige that would hide human and dog footprints. Why not?

And then, I faced the line. Clutching two pillows under one arm and sort of inching the rug forward with my free hand, I waited with a few dozen other Modestans who love a good bargain. Each transaction at the register (only two were open… why? WHY??) took a mini-eternity. I realized that half the population of my line was already clutching a bag; apparently, they were previous dissatisfied customers. I eyed the pillows carefully, considering. But they had felt so good on my neck, at least for the twenty seconds I stood with my head angled into the shelf.

At this point the women in front of me caught my attention. They were a family of four very large people, and they were arguing volubly about the cost of their potential purchases.

“I need these pants,” one of the women said, and – I couldn’t make this up if I tried – held up a stretchy pair of navy blue leggings printed with pink heart-shaped peace signs. There were approximately 600 peace signs on this pair of pants. If she had scratched at one of them with her two-inch acrylic fingernail, I bet the decal would have flaked right off. We’re talking quality product here.

“You’re already getting the balloon pants,” another woman pointed out. Balloon pants? I leaned forward, curious. There was indeed a pair of leggings emblazoned with rainbow-colored balloons nesting in the shopping cart.

“I need those, too!”

I was trying to figure out why in the world anyone would need either the peace-sign or the balloon leggings, let alone both (Tryouts for the circus?), when suddenly the experience I’d been blocking out for the last twenty minutes came rushing back into my head.

I remembered my previous trip to this discount store.

It was three years ago, summer,one of those hellishly hot days when you escape the heat of the parking lot for the chill of air conditioning and feel momentarily sick and disoriented. The store had just opened; curious, I decided to give it a walk-through. I was wearing a pair of flip-flops, my warm-weather uniform, and I had only taken a step inside the store when I slipped. Talk about a slip. It was kind of like being on a Slip-and-Slide (that dangerous, lawn-killing piece of plastic that rarely made an appearance in my childhood), only I was sliding past a row of shopping carts, a laughing security guard and a dozen people waiting in line for the register, all while toting a massive shoulder bag. I eventually caught myself on a display case, which because this is real life and not a movie, did not topple dramatically. It seemed like the whole store was holding its breath during my performance, and when I finally righted myself, straightening my shoulders, they let out a collective sigh. A long, wet, flip-flop shaped streak stretched across the floor behind me.

“Are you hurt?” the security guard said. He tried to cover his smile with a look of concern.

“Only my pride,” I said, laughing it off. I’m sure I was all shades of red, and would have loved to turn and walk right back out (this time avoiding the puddle of mystery moisture), but that felt like admitting defeat. Instead, I wandered the store, and found in the back a very lovely pillow for only $5.99.

On Saturday, I lugged my purchases inside and displayed them for Will.

He admired the pillows, but looked curiously at the rug. “Uh-oh.”

“Oh. Whoops,” I said. The dimensions were entirely wrong. Somehow I had vastly underestimated the size of my own entryway.

So, I guess I’ll have to return it.

Humiliations Galore

2010-02-03T22:19:00.000-08:00

Will and I like to play a certain game when we’re out in public – restaurants, bookstores, theatres. It has no official title, but here’s the gist of it: we get points whenever someone recognizes us. At the end of the night, the person with the fewest points wins.

This game was my brainchild, forged during an anniversary dinner where no less than four people (coaches, parents, athletes) stood at the side of our table and chatted up Will, for an average of five minutes each. At the end of the night, I commented bitterly, “Will: 4, Paula: 0.” Then I put in a formal request for eating meals out of his jurisdiction.

My husband, for seventeen years, was a journalist at a daily paper with a circulation of around 90,000, give or take. For the last dozen years or so, he was on the high school sports beat, which put him in regular contact with the coaches, parents and athletes at about fifty-five high schools, not to mention potentially thousands of other readers who read his daily articles and weekly columns. In 2000, we decided to escape California for a European vacation. With Dad D. and Heather as my witnesses, we were in a hotel lobby in San Francisco when I said, “The best thing about this vacation is that for a month we’re not going to see anyone we know.” And then the elevator door opened and a husky guy (wrestling coach, I later learned) stepped out and said, “Will!”

Fast forward a decade.

Will and I were at P. Wexford’s Tuesday night, well into our second pints of Guinness and a punishing trivia loss, when I leaned across the booth. “Do those people at the next table look familiar?” I’d been watching them out of the corner of my eye for a half pint now; I was sure I knew the man from somewhere, and the woman had a friendly, could-be-familiar face.

Will squinted in their direction. “Yeah, but I don’t know from where.”

We continued to answer trivia questions wrong. Apparently we should have brushed up on our Puxatony Phil knowledge, and one of these days I need to memorize birthstones by month.

And then suddenly, the man leaned over. “Will! I don’t know if you remember me… Steve Garfield*.” (*Name has been changed to protect my fragile ego.)

Ahhh, shit. Suddenly, it all came back to me.

A while back, I interviewed for a part-time English teaching job at a local high school. This man was the vice principal; he led the interview. To tell the truth, it was the salary I craved, not the job. Right now I’m substitute teaching and finishing my thesis… I can’t imagine what life would be like were I to bring home a few hundred essays a week to boot. But at the time, I was completely committed. I wore a suit, sharp heels, carried my most expensive purse. I fielded questions like a pro. I rattled off my accomplishments as if they were nothing – six years of yearbook, four years as department chair. I have a cleared credential. I am CLAD certified. And then… I didn’t get the job. Actually, I didn’t even get a phone call saying I didn’t get the job, I had to call them.

“Look, I probably didn’t get the job,” I said by phone after four days. Steve had mentioned that a decision would be made within two or three days. “And that’s fine. I just figured if I did get the job, I needed to start planning right away. That’s just how I work.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We can’t divulge the status of employment applications. That’s an issue for the HR department.”

“I’m not going to come down there with a gun or anything,” I said. “I just want to know.” After all, I’d waited for an hour for my appointment (English teachers do love the sounds of their own voices), then interviewed for another forty-five minutes. An hour and forty-five minutes of my life, and I wasn’t entitled to a quick “yes” or “no” by phone?

Tonight, at Wexford’s, I suddenly prayed hard for invisibility. I was wearing jeans, flats, sparkly lip gloss. Maybe I wouldn’t be recognized?

“Oh, and I remember you,” Steve Garfield said, nodding at me. “Paula interviewed for an English position,” he announced to his companion, to Will, to the world at large.

I smiled back, took a drink. “Yes – hello.”

He made small talk with Will. I checked my cell phone, pretending I had a busy social life.

And then, inexplicably, the conversation came back to me. “You were really good in that interview,” Steve Garfield said. “You know, I think we interviewed” – don’t say it, please – “about a dozen people that day. Very competitive.”

I smiled. Will paid the bill.

“Nice to see you again,” Will and I said in chorus, standing. We shook hands all around.

“Keep us in mind, Paula, if you’re ever looking for a job,” he said.

I smiled again, held in my words until we were outside, out of earshot. And then I let them fly. Keep us in mind???

But on the way home, we laughed. Will pointed out that there could be one person on earth that you just don’t want to see, and sure enough, when you turn a corner, there he is. Why is that, exactly? Why doesn’t the universe serve up a dose of a long-lost childhood friend or a college roommate now living half a country away, someone who could cheer me up or remind me that I’m not such a bad person after all?

We left with a tied score tonight. The me from a few months back would still be burning with humiliation as I type these words. But the me from today shucks it off her back. I’m a writer now, after all.

Thoughts from a Cruising Altitude of 39,000 Feet

2010-01-24T09:08:00.000-08:00

1. I wish I could sleep on planes. Even for a minute, or twenty, or three hundred. It’s stupid, but I’m convinced that if I close my eyes, if I’m not absolutely vigilant, there’s no way the plane can stay up. In fact, the second I start to relax and close my eyelids, I immediately snap back awake, worried. Who’s flying this thing?

2. I wish I could read on planes. I read everywhere else – waiting in line at the grocery store, lying in bed, sitting with a bowl of cereal in the morning. I’ve been tempted to read while stuck in traffic. But on planes I can’t seem to focus on plot and character. Instead, I alternate between Hidenko and Sudoku. On this trip, one round of “Fiendish Sudoku” lasts me all the way across Utah.

3. I love the individual mini-screen. Thumbs up, Delta! I keep flashing to the “My Flight” screen to see what I’ve missed. We’ve passed Grand Junction and are flying just south of De Beque. Somewhere in the last ten minutes while I was worrying about whether or not our plane had properly functioning landing gear, our cruising altitude had increased from 39,003 to 39,010 feet. Pretty cool.

4. The man in the seat beside me, Leo, is traveling with nothing other than a jacket. Hello? No book or magazine? No sudoku? No crossword puzzle? I once drove cross country with someone who intended to talk the entire way, so naturally I was worried. But Leo isn’t in a talking mood, either. Instead, we play a dozen silent games of in-flight trivia. I feel bad that I keep winning and briefly consider throwing a game, because everyone should be happy. Everyone should know they are doing well at something, right? But in the end, I just can’t do it.

5. Nothing is free on Delta Airlines. Not the charge for an extra bag ($50), the headphones ($2), or the snack packs ($3 to $5, depending). “Delta Airlines has gone cashless,” a flight attendant chirps into the PA system. “All purchases must be made with a credit card for your convenience.” My convenience? Really, nothing about air travel is geared for my convenience, much less a $1 Visa charge for a $2 purchase.

6. In the first half-hour of the flight, we are fed two packs of peanuts and our choice of beverages. Three hours pass before it occurs to the flight staff to come through with another round. By this time I’ve chewed fifteen consecutive pieces of gum, trying to suck out any possible nutrition or moisture. A flight attendant passes and I say, “Excuse me? Do you think I could get something to drink?” She is clearly annoyed. “We’re coming right through.” It takes her twenty-five minutes to reach me, though, and by this time my lips are one cracked blister. Leo doesn’t look too happy either. “I guess I’ll buy the snack pack, too,” I say, surrendering my credit card.

7. Once the plane lands, I can finally relax. It’s hard work, mentally keeping the plane aloft, and not for weaklings. Everyone stands at once, snapping open overhead compartments and jostling for space in the aisle. I stretch, curling my toes inside my boots. What’s the hurry, people? We’re all getting off this thing sooner or later.

On a scale of one to ten, how do I rate my driving?

2010-01-01T09:18:00.001-08:00

“Your brakes are soft,” Will says. We’re pulling out of a parking lot; it’s his first time behind the wheel of my car for a while.

“Oh, they are?”

“And they’re squeaking, too. How long has this been going on?”

“I don’t know. A couple of weeks.” Maybe longer. Somewhere around Thanksgiving I remember idling in stop-and-go traffic, wondering whose car had such squeaky brakes. And then we had a few drops of rain in December, so it was easy for me to attribute the squeaks to… well, maybe not wetness, but definite moist-ness. Denial is a powerful force.

“Babe…” Will says. I wait for the lecture, but get a sigh instead.

“I’ll get it looked at,” I promise.

And so on December 31 at nine o’clock sharp I’m at the Midas counter, being addressed as if I’m a child by a man with too much facial hair who writes “SATTURN” for the make of my car. Elsewhere in life I’m confident and competent; when it comes to all things mechanical I’m your basic stooge. Don’t let him talk you into new rotors or anything, Will had warned me. I parrot his words: “My brakes are feeling a little soft, so I just need the pads replaced. That’s all I’m here for today.”

The mechanic looks skeptical, but I initial for the free brake check and hand over my key. I glance at the magazines littering the table in the waiting area – nothing interesting. Even the weekly gossip magazines are months old, their rumors long since confirmed or shot down by publicists. I’m not even remotely interested in Tiger’s thirteenth mistress.

“I’m going to head out for some coffee,” I say. “Would you call me on my cell to let me know what you find?”

I take a last glance at my car in the parking lot, my beautiful, half paid-for, rain-cleansed car, which will soon be dangling in the air with its wheels off. This beautiful car replaced my last beautiful car, which I totaled in a wreck on I-580 in 2006.

And there it is – the lump. I try to swallow it down, that guilt from an accident three years ago which wasn’t entirely my fault. The truth is, I had a hard time getting behind the wheel again afterwards. I was remorseful, tense, bitter and far too alert, like I’d mainlined caffeine in lieu of breakfast. I regarded other drivers suspiciously, trying to determine the specific point at which they would suddenly weave through traffic to cut me off. I glared at drivers on their cell phones. I honked with little provocation. And over time, I eased up. I’m happy to report that I can now drive through town without needing a good massage by the end of the trip. But the worst part, the self-doubt, is still there.

Last week, playing a game called Split Second with some members of my family, it came up again. The basic premise of the game is that you roll a dice, ask a question that can be answered with numbers or initials, and everyone else has to answer as quickly as possible. The first right answer (or first closest answer) wins. My question was: On a scale of one to ten, how do I rate my driving?

“I need another card,” I said. “This is a stupid question.”

My family members are always supportive of each other’s psychological health and well-being. “No way,” they protested. “Get over it. Ask the question.”

“Fine,” I sighed. “On a scale of one to ten, how do I rate my own driving?”

I had the answer in my mind: Six. Optimistic but realistic.

My sisters were kind – they guessed a seven. Will, in the passenger seat the day I spun through three lanes of traffic, avoiding the concrete median but not the oncoming SUV, gave me a four. After we'd packed up the game, Will drove home, the issue sitting between us like another passenger. I turned up the radio so we couldn’t hear the brakes squeaking.

Back at Midas, the mechanic tells me I have a quarter-inch of brake pad left. “You could probably drive on it another month, maybe two,” he says.

“No,” I say. “Let’s do it today.”

“What we’re going to do is put on these really durable brake pads. You’ll be able to drive forever on these things, and they can withstand a lot of wear and tear.”

“Sounds good.”

He grins at me, the first sign of humanity he’s shown. “You’ll be able to drive the hell out of this thing. You can brake as hard as you want, no problem.”

I narrow my eyes. How much does he know?

Rite of Passage

2009-12-24T12:32:00.000-08:00

My niece Kylie wanted her ears pierced.

She was thirteen and her parents figured she had waited long enough, so that’s why Beth called me on December 23. Any chance I could pick them up and take them to the mall?

Ears pierced? I had to laugh. “What, you mean Kylie doesn’t have to wait until she’s 16?” I was referring to the draconian rules that governed my own childhood. My sisters and I couldn’t get our ears pierced until we were 16, or drive until we were 17, or go outside of the house – ever – until our beds were made. I was the third born, which meant that my older sisters did most of the parent-breaking-in before I even came along, but it also meant I had a long, jealous wait to catch up to these milestone dates. Of course, being the brat I was, I waited until I was 16 to get my ears pierced, and then went back a few more times for good measure. The extra holes have basically closed over by now, but Kylie was still able to spot them with her teenage eagle-eye.

“No, it’s okay with us,” my sister said. “She’s a teenager now.” And such a sweet, Washington-bred, farm-raised girl at that. The teenagers I know in California communicate only by cell phone and spend their class time doodling the design for their next tattoo.

All right, fine. But – the mall? On December 23? The crowds, the horribly overplayed Christmas music, the abysmal parking situation. Visions of road rage were dancing through my head.

But this is what you do for family – particularly family that lives out of state and only flies in once a year for a week.

I sighed. “Okay.”

An hour later (after circling the parking lot and stalking a family with small children as they walked back to their SUV) we found ourselves at Icing, and Kylie was sitting in the chair at the ear-piercing station. Another girl – a veteran, from the looks of things – didn’t even flinch as the piercing gun punched a stud through her cartiledge.

“Look at that – nothing to it,” I said. I was trying to remember if Kylie had been looking a little green earlier, or if this was a recent development.

A little girl who barely reached my elbow came up with her family. Her cheeks were tear-streaked. “Well, are you going to do it or not?” her mother demanded. “We’re not coming back here. You’re either going to do it now or not do it at all. You have to decide now. Ears pierced or no?”

The girl shook her head, and the family disappeared back into the mall.

I smiled brightly at Kylie. My sister was engaged in complicated negotiations with the Icing employee, which ended when she initialed a release form a dozen times confirming that Kylie wasn’t pregnant, didn’t have diabetes, and would seek medical attention if needed.

The employee went through the schpiel: Clean your ears four times a day with the solution on the tip of a cotton ball. Don’t touch your ears without washing your fingers. Make sure you don’t get your clothes or hair caught in the earrings. Twist them back and forth every day. Keep the studs in for six to eight weeks. (That last part – waiting six weeks – was always my downfall.)

The employee made two tiny dots on Kylie’s earlobes. “Ready?”

My sister and I grinned encouragement at Kylie. Kylie nodded.

The first punch was over in a blink. Kylie’s eyes got a little wider, but otherwise I didn’t see any reaction.

“See? You didn’t even feel that, did you?” my sister asked.

“Yes!” Kylie gasped.

Another punch and it was over. When she stood up from the chair, her step only slightly wobbly, Kylie looked a little older, a little more mature, more womanly. She was ready to take on the world – or at least, the crowds at Sephora.

Will the real me please stand up?

2009-12-15T16:02:00.000-08:00

I have an unusual maiden last name – so it was quite a shock to learn that there were two of me.

For the first twenty-four years of my life, I got used to my last name being misspelled and mispronounced wherever I went – unless one of my older sisters had been there before me, and paved the way. Oh, no, not another “T” sister, my teachers must have thought.

When I got married in 2000, I took my husband’s name and my place at the beginning of the alphabet, where I always felt I should be. But by that time I’d been writing for a newspaper for a few years, and it was my editor who suggested a more gentle transition to my byline. So I took my maiden name as my middle name and I’ve been writing under it ever since.

By best estimate, there are only a handful of us “Ts” living in the United States – all originating more or less from the same small town in Wisconsin, and before that, a small town in Germany. I collect information about the “Ts” outside my immediate family – this one is a photographer in Portland, that one is an orthodontist in Denver. We meet up in Wisconsin at increasingly rare intervals for fish fries and sauerkraut and stories. And it seems we’ve grown smaller, through attrition or marriage. My dad has two brothers and my generation numbers nine (including my three sisters and me); I have five first cousins on the “T” side, only two of whom are male.

You see? The name is dying out.

Or so I thought.

Last week, my sister Beth pointed out that there was another Paula T. on Facebook.

Curious – but the world is a big place, I reasoned. Some long-lost, far-flung Paula T. is out there, trying to re-connect.

Yes, added Rachel, a T-cousin in southern California. And the other Paula friend requested me.

What? It was time for some investigative work. Yes, there was indeed another Paula T., and she was friends with four of my relatives – and only those four. In fact, Paula T. had no other friends.

Curious, I fried requested the other Paula T., and was accepted. Her page was nearly blank, save for a 1986 birthdate and a hotmail address. No picture, no cutesy “about me” section, no links.

Hmm. I was beginning to feel uneasy about the whole situation. Could there really be two of us, within the same small circle? Nah — impossible.

I sent Paula T. a message: Hi! We have the same name and the same friends. Isn’t that weird?

No reply. Aha! I’d caught her and she knew it. The fraud! I sent the four relatives who had befriended Paula T. a message, letting them know that in fact Paula T. wasn’t me – just in case they wanted to guard their personal information.

Still no reply from Paula T. I started to stalk her, logging on at random hours to see if I could catch her in a chat. The situation was starting to feel bizarre. Was it just pure narcissism that led me to believe that out of billions of people in the world, there could only be one Paula T.? Or was some nefarious hoax at work, perpetrated perhaps by the person who stole my purse last December (and then attempted to make a $1500 purchase at Walmart) or the person who stole my laptop in June? Could someone really want to be me that badly, enough to collect my relatives as her own? I wondered what else she wanted to share – my husband, my pets, my bathroom with the six-lane ant highway? Perhaps my savings account and student loans and low metabolism, too? The zits I still get, even though I’m in my 30s? The tooth that needs a new crown? Come on – who wouldn’t want a piece of that?

I logged on again to Facebook and noticed that Paula T. had liked my status, the one that said “Paula is still taking antibiotics for strep throat, so does it make sense that I now think I have bronchitis?” Excuse me? How could anyone “like” that status? I was hoping to find out that the other Paula had good (similar to mine) taste, but instead she appeared to be evil, reveling in the tragic illnesses of her namesake.

It was time to excise the imposter Paula from my life once and for all. This was relatively painless – a click of the button and whoosh! we were out of each other’s lives. With only a few keystrokes, I had regained my identity. The world is a pretty small place when you get right down to it – not big enough for two of me, after all.

Night Run

2009-12-05T21:29:00.000-08:00

Tonight, Baxter and I took a walk. I needed to clear my head, and he needed to run through leaf piles. It was just cool enough for a winter coat and gloves. The streets were deserted, and I could see people inside their homes doing normal people things – decorating trees and watching TV and washing dishes.

It was good to be alone (save for the canine and the felines) tonight. I’d spent the day running errands, sitting in the bleachers at my nephew’s wrestling tournament, working in the backyard and then wandering through the house, straightening random things here and there half-heartedly. Will was pulling one of his marathon 20-hour work days and we communicated by leaving messages on each other’s voice mail. I didn’t feel like calling anyone else, but when the phone rang, I lunged for it, and gave the telemarketer from AT & T a whole three minutes of my life before hanging up.

This has been a tough week. The antibiotics finally kicked in and my throat started to feel more like a throat and less like a tiny orifice with a brillo pad wedged inside it. In the meantime, I’d lost a few days of writing time and it was hard to pick up the pieces. My sentences felt stiff and predictable, like the writing on the old USA network sitcoms, back when only people with no other options watched USA network.

Then the bad news began.

Another student, a beautiful, brilliant girl who sat in the back corner of my creative writing class two years ago, committed suicide. I can’t begin to understand it. If I had to name an emotion, it would be anger. I’m so, so mad about it – and so sad, too. I subbed on Thursday for two classes she was in, noticing how there was a sort of negative space in the classroom, something that everyone was stepping around and talking around. Our hearts were still aching from Dillon, only a month ago. I said to anyone who would listen, and many of them did: it gets better. And it might get worse again, but it always gets better. And there are always people who love you – even people you might have forgotten in the middle of things.

Then on Friday, I came home to a letter in the mail, a sort of “thanks, but no thanks” from the government job I’d applied for. There were other applicants better suited for the position… blah, blah. I told myself over and over that I wouldn’t be hurt if I didn’t get the job, because if I wasn’t right for it, it was better to know that up front, rather than at the end of some prolonged training period. I am the first person to rail against the incompetence of officials, elected or otherwise, and I wouldn’t want to be one of those incompetent people myself. But still – I guess I’m hurt. I haven’t found a way to reason myself out of that emotion.

So tonight, I left the house with a stack of clichés – a heavy heart, a lump in my throat, my brain fried. “Let’s run,” I said to Baxter, and we did, through dark streets and dozens of leaf piles. We ran past cats, too absorbed in our running to slow down for a proper sniff. We settled into a sort of pace, although Baxter the show-off always likes to be in the lead. I suppose if any of my neighbors had looked out the window at that moment, they would have seen a wild-haired woman in a bulky coat chasing a frantic beagle down the street – and they wouldn’t have been too wrong. But the thing is, I felt better with each mucky step. I wasn’t running from anything, exactly – and in fifteen minutes I was home again, setting the alarm behind me – but it did feel like I escaped something. Maybe it was a only a layer of skin, like the gray feeling that had settled over me, but by the time we were crunching through the leaves on my unraked lawn and climbing the steps to the front porch, I was believing what I’d been saying all week: There’s always a tomorrow, and if that one doesn’t work out, another tomorrow right around the corner. And also, there’s always the possibility of a night run, and ready-for-anything beagle to take it with you.

Day Four of the Slow Death

2009-11-30T20:21:00.000-08:00

Will has occasionally referred to me as the world’s worst sick person.

The thing is, I get a teensy, tiny, wee bit irritable when I’m sick. I’m sensitive to things that otherwise only mildly bother me: people, light, sound. I also don’t like to talk when I’m sick – it takes too much energy. I just like to lie on my side and try not to think.

Fortunately, I’m not sick often. But when I go down, I go down hard. And right now – I’m down.

It started on Friday, right before Thanksgiving #2 with my side of the family. I’m someone who never misses a meal (really – it’s never happened), but somehow instead of enjoying the witty repartee of my sisters and their men at the table, I was ready to curl up for a good eight-hour nap. And this was before the wine was uncorked. By five o’clock we were at home. Will headed out to work, and I went to bed – where I pretty much stayed for the next two days.

Every few hours, I stumbled out of bed and dragged myself down the hall. Good news! My kidneys were still working. Then I got another glass of water because my throat felt horribly tight, as if the opening was the same circumference as a pencil eraser. Walking down the hallway left me dizzy and sweaty. My temperature: 101.
Saturday passed in a blur of Food Network and the America’s Next Top Model marathon on Bravo. I tried to read and gave up. Baxter came to the bedroom every few hours and sniffed me.

“I’m going out,” Will called at one point. “Do you want anything?”

“There’s no point, because I’m dying,” I said from beneath three layers of blankets.

“What?”

“No.”

“Okay…”

Right before he closed the front door, I called, “Maybe orange juice.”
Later, I found the energy to put on jeans, mascara and shoes that were not slippers, and we went to the grocery store. We nearly made it to the frozen yogurt before I felt woozy again.

I called my mom that night. “I’m sick. My throat,” I hissed.

“Who is this?”

On Sunday, USA Network had a Monk-a-Thon that lasted until eleven p.m. I occasionally switched sides, worried about bed sores. Will came in and out, bringing news of the world. I ventured out a mile or so to Walgreens, where I located instant oatmeal and more NyQuil. At home, I stacked the bag on the kitchen table, too exhausted to unpack. With the newspapers, blankets and plastic bags everywhere, our house was beginning to look like an episode of Hoarders. My temperature: 100.3.

Last night, Will woke me up to tell me I was snoring. “I’m not snoring,” I insisted. “I wasn’t even sleeping. I was just thinking.” Even as I said it, I realized that I might not be the best judge of the difference between sleeping and thinking. I’d been cycling between the two for some time. And whenever I tried not to think, the words “swine flu” appeared on the insides of my eyelids.

“My throat is killing me,” I said.

Will checked it out with a flashlight.

“Do you see anything? Like blisters or swelling?”

“Hmm. I don’t know. It’s red. And I don’t see your tonsils.”

“What? I definitely still have my tonsils.”

“Okay. I’ll take your word for it.”

Wonderful. Something else to worry about.

But today, I woke up feeling 90 percent better. Fever: gone. Sore throat? Still here. It’s like something small is caught there, a sideways potato chip or a razor blade, maybe.

Sadly, even Ben & Jerry’s FroYo hasn’t been able to cure it.

Other People’s Spaces

2009-11-02T22:28:00.001-08:00

In David Sedaris’s excellent and hilarious essay, Nuit of the Living Dead, he sees his house through a stranger’s eyes – the random objects strewn around seemed proof that he was a deviant, a psychopath, a general menace to society. And then, of course, there was the mouse he was drowning in a bucket on the front porch.

Well, these days I’m the outsider, sneaking peeks at other’s spaces. It’s the nature of being a substitute teacher. I pick up the key from the office, lose my way once or twice around campus, and eventually open the door to a stranger’s private space. Well, not private, of course – but every classroom reflects the personality of its teacher. I can tell something about the teacher by the way the room is organized, the handwriting on the white board, the posters on the wall. I can’t help but study personal photos tacked to the wall. Is this him? Is this her? Young? Old? Married? Single? Kids? Pets?

Today I was in a classroom where every inch of the walls was covered in inspirational posters, the kind of inspirational posters that were popular in the 1980s. Cuddly kittens offering to be a friend. INSPIRE, one said. ACHIEVE! ordered another. Lots of hot air balloons, gorillas, the ever-present middle-school mantra: “What is right is not always popular; what is popular is not always right.” Last week, in Spanish I and II, the teacher instructed me to turn off the candle warmer before leaving. Candle warmer? Why didn’t I think of that when I was teaching? It’s a perfect, gentle way to mask the odor in those post-P.E. bodies. In my first (and maybe last, depending on my poverty level) experience teaching second grade, the class was a ship, the students divided into “pirates” and “mateys.” To bring the class to order, a tiny red-headed boy informed me, I should call out, “All hands on deck!” When I tried this, the response was thunderous: “Aye, aye, Cap’n!” (Later, I told a boy with a tummy ache, “Pirates don’t cry, buddy.” I was pretty pleased with myself, but this only made him sob harder.)

When I was teaching, in cozy little F5 on the corner of the quad, my room was a study in organized chaos. I simply couldn’t contain the papers. They were everywhere, on every surface. Collected papers, graded papers, papers to be filed, papers to be passed back. Yearbook ladders, yearbook proofs, random yearbook papers I was afraid to throw away. Block days in creative writing generally involved hand-written prompts on tiny scraps of paper which collected on the overhead cart, the bookshelves, the chalk trays. Sometimes I could hardly see the monitor for the Post-It notes I was always writing myself, the million little things that, if ignored, would upset the delicate balance of this tiny universe. When I had a substitute, I swept the stacks into the recycle bin, stashed the odds and ends (odds, mostly) in desk drawers, and left a bright, cheery note full of hopeful predictions about the day.

But I wasn’t really trying to hide my disorganized personality – I was thinking more of the comfort of the person who would be sitting in my circa-1970s office chair and trying on my life for size. The substitute would leave me a note about the day and that was it – we never crossed paths; he or she was essentially invisible to me. As I am now – Invisible Woman, curious about the stranger I’ll never meet, deciphering those clues on the wall distinct as any fingerprint.

In Transition

2009-10-19T08:54:00.001-07:00

When we first viewed the house, our realtor Mike told us that the neighborhood was “in transition.” It was the end of 2002 and we were sick of our one-bedroom, second-floor apartment with the treacherous steps and the murderously hot summers without air conditioning. By this point we had been abusing the “no pets” clauses for at least six months and our cats spent their days in the bathroom like stowaways on an irregular-shaped yacht. So we were more than ready to move.

What Mike meant was that homes were being snapped up by young couples – DINKS, the lot of us – and that the neighborhood was undergoing a renaissance. He had grown up in this neighborhood himself; he showed us in our floor plan which bedroom had been his, which had been his brother’s. I’m a sucker for this sort of nostalgia. After stalking the house like jealous lovers, driving by at all times of day and night to make sure she was still there, safe and alone, we made the offer. We packed up the cats, a few dozen boxes of books, and moved in. We met the neighbors on all sides, joined the neighborhood watch, and started to make our dull little box of a home into something we loved.

It wasn’t until Baxter came along that I really got to know the neighborhood, though. The most loved beagle on earth insists on two walks a day – nose to the ground, tail in the air, leg lifted frequently. I can credit Baxter with giving me more of an interest in our neighborhood – without these walks I might not notice people moving in or out, or know which cars belong where. I wouldn’t notice the wheelchair ramp being built, or the tacky Christmas decorations lingering nearly to Easter. I wouldn’t know every dog within a twelve block radius, or even be known myself.

“Hi, Baxter!” say the sisters whose names I don’t remember.

“It’s Baxter and his mom!” says the woman walking her black lab. I only know her as Kiya’s mom.

“I see you walking by here all the time,” observes the man whose lower jaw extends much farther than his upper.

“I love that little beagle,” says the homeless man in the park, his voice emerging from beneath layers of fabric.

“Are you taking your dog for a walk?” asks Crazy Lady with the bandaged leg. Just once I’d like to reply, “Nope, not today,” while our six legs hustle past. But I can’t, and it’s more than pity for the infected leg. It’s a matter of being… neighborly.

Maybe this is why I bristled when a friend said, apropos of nothing, that I lived in a bad neighborhood. Well, maybe not nothing – there was the stolen car two years ago and the break-in last June. It is true that our neighborhood was hit hard by the mortgage crisis; some of the homes snapped up at such a steal are now on the market again. But this morning, walking Baxter before the streetlights were off, I had this thought: We’re just “in transition” again. Right now we’re slumping in the other direction, maybe, but it’s a slow slump, and that feels okay for now. It could turn around at any time.

I’m thinking this as I pass Michael, my day-trading/weekend-garage-saling neighbor. He’s wearing shorts and slippers; the fat cigar in his mouth is keeping him warm. He calls out, “’Morning! This is going to be a great day, isn’t it?”

“Yes!” I say, voicing optimism that I rarely let myself believe in. “It’s great already.”

Coming Clean

2009-10-09T18:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve applied for a government job. No specifics… for two reasons. First, everyone who knows has tried to talk me out of it. (That’s right -- I’m talking about you, Patricia.) And second, getting excited about something is a sure way to jinx myself. Instead, I’ll be vague and let you imagine me interrogating terrorists.

There were some good reasons to apply for this job, though. It’s something I’m qualified to do, something I think I can do, and something I might actually like. It’s part-time (meaning I can write), pays well, and it isn’t substitute teaching. I’m not saying the students I meet are charmless, just that the experience itself isn’t always charming. Good for now, but not my long term goal, let’s say.

So. My testing date is set for November, a month away. “You’ll need that time to get your materials together,” the woman on the phone tells me. I scoffed inwardly, hearing this. I’m pretty quick, fairly organized – what could possibly take me a month? Well. That was before I opened the “personal history statement” and realized I would have to divulge every job I’ve ever held (two at a time, pretty much, since I was sixteen), the address of ever place I’ve ever lived, and the names of everyone who has ever had the (mis) fortune to live with me. My husband, parents, sisters, colleagues, friends… apparently, I have to list the names, occupations and addresses of anyone who has ever rubbed elbows with me. (If that’s you, and chances are good it is, I’m sorry. But will you please say something nice about me?) Look, I expected the drug screening, the fingerprinting. I wasn’t exactly prepared for the scrutiny of my driving record (39 in a 25, I confess), my sordid medical history, our marriage license, and now a thorough credit check. I have student loans; does this make me susceptible to blackmail?

And then, I had to admit to something that has been a joke amongst my friends and family for the last three years: Yes, I have had a negative employee evaluation. I was written up for not rebuking a student who said “crap” in my creative writing class, with the evaluator sitting in a desk in the corner of the room. Do you see why I didn’t take this seriously? At the time, I responded in typical Paula fashion; I wrote a letter that was attached to the evaluation, which sits now in a dusty file cabinet and may never be seen again by anyone. But still, I hesitated over the question. Lie, and hope that the background check doesn’t really include a close reading of my personnel file? Tell the truth, and be disqualified from the job for something that was, and still is, ridiculous? Eventually I wrote it down, though I have faint hope that the government will see the humor or the humanity of the situation.

The truth is, I’ve lived a stable, uncomplicated and fairly responsible life. And yet, it’s kind of uncomfortable to be under the microscope. The process of self-examination makes me feel guilty where no guilt is due. I even, irrationally, feel guilty that I don’t have more to confess. If only it was a phone interview or an email interview, I might be safe. Put me under the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights, and I’m not quite sure what I’ll say. But I’m ready to come clean.

This Dark Obsession

2009-10-04T21:31:00.000-07:00

I live with Modesto’s (Self-Proclaimed) Foremost Expert on Serial Killers. This is no indictment of character; after all, I’m a close runner up for the title. We speak an odd lexicon of Bundy-Gacy-Bianchi-Damher; when we merged our book collections a decade ago, I noticed that we each had a copy of the (horribly written but endlessly fascinating) Helter Skelter. One of our first dates in San Francisco, following a guide book, took us past Manson’s former digs off Golden Gate Park. Not that we admire serial killers, mind you - but collecting the data is a sort of hobby. Some people save stamps, others collect Holstein figurines...

This obsession is fueled mainly by television. If I have a spare minute, it’s not hard to locate something on A&E – a cold case file, a biography. I grew up on Unsolved Mysteries; I watch with the absorption of someone who has never personally been touched by this sort of tragedy. I watch – sometimes from between my fingers – and think.

This dark obsession has proved useful, as I’ve recently become a slow motion serial killer myself. First it was a squirrel, then a cat, a deer, a toddler, and now, in my latest story, a teenage girl. I feel a sense of responsibility for them – I’ve created them, and they’re entitled to die with some dignity. It took pages – agonized pages – for the deer to die, and afterwards I spent a half-day in bed, mourning it. Another time I asked a friend for his reaction to my story, and he could only respond, “I can’t believe you killed a cat.” I’m sorry. I don’t know what it is in me that tends to this dark side, although perhaps it’s fueled by my home environment.

Take this conversation tonight, with a friend who is planning to build a chicken coop. While she spoke I was thinking of the advantages of raising chickens – hardboiled, over easy, scrambled, benedict – but I could see Will’s mind leaning in another direction.

“Save one of the chickens for me,” he said.

“So you can raise it?” she asked.

“No, I’m just curious. Do they really run around after you cut their heads off?”

“Sure they do. I’ll call you over if you want to see it.”

Will blanched. “Well, um, I don’t actually want to kill it or anything.” He thought a moment, visions of Manson and the Zodiac Killer dancing through his head. And then he added, smiling in my direction, “Paula would have to do it.”

Stop, rewind.

2009-10-01T07:13:00.000-07:00

It’s the news I never wanted to hear – something happened to one of my students.

This something was a gunshot wound to the chest, and the voice on the other end of the phone was telling me, “We’ve set up a crisis center on campus and we need you to cover for one of the teachers.”

“What?” I asked, my mind reeling. And then stupidly, because this should have been obvious at this point, “Who is this?”

“It’s Mary. Can you come in?”

I hesitated. No. I like to keep my tragedies at a distance. But then, “Of course.” No matter that it was ten-forty-five and I was freshly out of the shower, hair a wet tangle, and that getting there in fifteen minutes meant slipping into yesterday’s clothes. I was covering for another teacher, because that’s what I am these days – a substitute teacher. I put in a few days a week doing whatever is needed of me and then I leave it behind and focus on my writing.

I hadn’t asked who the student was and while I was passing cars on the freeway, every worst-case scenario went through my head. A seventeen-year-old boy. It could be any of my former students…

As it turned out, that student was Dillon. As it turned out, the shot was self-inflicted.

Stop, rewind.

Play: Dillon, the happy-go-lucky kid in my second period sophomore Honors class. Not the best student, not the most dedicated – he often sat back with an amused smile and sort of observed everyone else doing their work – but the kind of person you just liked having around. And there were moments of brilliance – he could argue a point with the best of them; give him an opportunity to draw and whatever he produced was something that stayed on your wall for a year or more. Signed, proudly, Dillon.

He liked to write on my chalkboard: “Dillon is Mrs. D’s favorite!”

After sophomore year, he pestered me constantly, “Will you teach junior English? Will you teach senior English?”

Our paths didn’t cross in the classroom again until this year, when as a substitute I ran into him all over the place. “Mrs. D!” he’d yell, seeing me come up the sidewalk.

“Hey, Dillon!”

Little encounters, a few seconds out of the day.

The kind of thing you take for granted.

I’ll probably never know what was going through his mind, how he got to the point where this was the best option.

Stop, rewind.

Play.

I wish I could tell him: it gets better, no matter what it is. You’ll be an adult soon. You can make choices for yourself. You have the whole world in front of you.

The Weather Report

2009-09-26T15:50:00.000-07:00

Something about the heat today feels worse, more oppressive than usual. I have come to the determination that there are different forms of heat; that even when it is the same temperature two days in a row, each day feels different, has its own texture and nuances. Yesterday’s ninety-nine had the slightest of breezes, as if it was laughing at itself and didn’t want to be taken seriously. Today’s ninety-nine is like an airport interrogation – an enclosed room, a seething customs official, an expired passport.

In other words, it’s damn hot.

At seven this morning I stepped outside to get the paper and felt the heat of the day already. I braved it again an hour later, armed with a hose and bucket, determined to get the film of Central Valley dust off our cars. By the time I made my grocery run at ten I was scurrying through the parking lot like a bug – car to store, store to car – as if the sun could be avoided.

It’s too much, this heat.

I had grand plans of running this morning, maybe heading down to the college track and doing a few laps, then going for the ultimate burn by running the bleachers. Of course, to do this, one needs to wake up earlier than seven, and be out the door earlier than eight…

I told Will the other day, I think we’ve had six months of summer.

At least you were gone for a month of it, he replied.

Oh, don’t remind me – lovely little Ireland, where it rained every ten minutes just to remind us that we weren’t in control.

Will takes Baxter for his walk and comes back sweaty. I eat lunch and lay on the bed beneath the AC vent, sucking a piece of ice.

It’s the end of September, the 26th to be exact, and I feel justified in my anger. I’m sick of the two seasons we have here, the hot summer and cool spring. I’d give anything for a good thunderstorm, for leaves turning red and brown, for the chance to wear a scarf. In my garage sit a pair of snow boots, forgotten but hopeful. I walked through a department store last week, running my fingers over sweaters – wool, cashmere, cotton – and felt like crying.

I’m heartened, though; the newspaper predicts a drop to eighty-one by Monday. I allow myself to revel in the deliciousness of that number. Eighty-one means cool mornings, maybe even long-sleeve shirt weather. It means open windows and no air conditioning. It means no more excuses, time to pull out my running shoes.

I can feel it now, that change in the air. Or maybe it’s just the AC, kicking on again.

The Art of Repetition

2009-09-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I painted the exterior of my house. I did this because it was less expensive than hiring a painter, and also, which perhaps carried more weight with my reasoning process, because someone suggested I wouldn’t be able to do it. My house isn’t large, but it is somewhat complicated – a front porch, a back patio, overhanging eaves, lots of trim. I had done some painting in college, on various mission trips (somewhere in Chicago is a room with two different shades of white, because we ran out of paint halfway through and couldn’t match it), and so I set what felt like a reasonable goal: one week, Saturday to Saturday.

I should mention that this wasn’t a solo endeavor – long-suffering Will, who would have been happy to hire a painter in the first place, took that Friday off work. My nephews, for $50 apiece, were happy to help. Mom donated two afternoons and a lasagna. Dad, the world’s most obsessive perfectionist, was enlisted to paint the front door, and my sister and her husband braved traffic on 101 to help with the final coat of trim.

But for the first four days, it was just me – balancing near the top of the ladder, one arm steadying myself and the other wielding a paintbrush, I worked my way around the house, painting the eaves. Despite sunblock, I burned. Despite a bandanna covering most of my head, I ended up with large globs of paint in my hair. And despite my wish for solitude, I got to know my neighbors.

Everyone on the block stopped by to comment on my progress and admire the new color (desert sand), or ask if I was available for hire, or say the things they’d meant to say to me for years, if only our paths had crossed sooner. I learned that my house is never truly alone – the meter reader stopped by, a city worker climbed a utility pole for an unknown purpose and waved down to me. A man from the pest control service jingled through the side gate, nearly causing me to topple from surprise. The mail carrier stopped to chat each day. On Thursday, my neighbors lugged their garbage bins to the alley, waited for the garbage to be collected by massive rumbling trucks, and wheeled the bins away. The cats followed my progress from each window, sometimes extending a paw in my direction, as if they too wanted to help. Baxter did his best to be underfoot, preferring to sleep between my ladder and the wall I was painting. Whenever I looked down, he was looking up at me, his side embellished with a desert sand racing stripe.

And through it all I painted. I painted and reloaded my brush and painted and climbed down and moved my ladder two feet and started up again. When I reached a certain point, I went back for a second coat. Ladder, paint, repeat.

What I learned is that I’m good at mindless, repetitive things.

I would be a great factory worker – at least until, wandering in my thoughts, I lost a finger to a conveyor belt or an arm to a mangle.

What I learned is that I like a bit of solitude, and that when my hands are occupied and my mind is free, I can create.

I wrote a million stories in my mind that week. I invented a few worlds that didn’t exist, and populated them with people who were anything but flat characters. I put myself back in the situations where I should have spoken up, and this time around I did. I was unfiltered, uninhibited. I was queen of my ladder.

Left up there too long, the skin on my neck beginning to peel in raggedy strips, I would have gone crazy. I would have told stories to my plants and carried on conversations with the odd dragonfly. Will would have had to coax me down in the evening, or set a sugar trap in the kitchen.

But eventually, I ran out of eaves to paint, and the house was finished, and I went back to my regular, non-painting life. I haven’t forgotten, though, the curiously satisfying feeling of going it alone, stroke by stroke. It comes back to me every so often, like now – one key after another, word following word, and I sigh from the satisfaction of finishing a sentence. And start it up again.

Novel-Writing Girl

2009-09-20T21:12:00.000-07:00

The man seated two tables away seems compelled to talk – to the barista who brings him a fresh cup of coffee, to the family members who call him every twenty minutes on his cell, and to me, typing away and trying to look unapproachable. He translates his phone calls for me. “My wife,” he mouths in the midst of a set of convoluted directions. After another call, he told me, “My daughter. She just had a baby.” “Oh! Congratulations,” I say. “Well, she isn’t married,” he responds. I smile and look down, and after this, try to avoid all eye contact. It’s difficult because at this point he’s half-twisted in his seat, his shoulder open to me, inviting conversation. He seems to be only pretending to read his newspaper, which I can hardly criticize, since at the moment I’m only pretending to write my novel.

A man walks by and barks something incomprehensible and both of us – the newspaper-reading man and the novel-writing girl – look up, following the progress of this t-shirted man with a heavy backpack as he crosses the street in front of us and continues out of view. “Does he have an earpiece?” Newspaper man asks me and I shake my head. I had the same thought: Maybe angry t-shirt man had a Bluetooth device; maybe whatever conversation he was having was so important that he couldn’t be bothered to wait until he got to the office, or home, or his parole agent’s, and he liked to have his hands free just in case. But sadly, no earpiece; the important conversation that couldn’t wait was only with himself. I felt bad for him, and then sad for myself, because what is this piece of writing if not a conversation with another part of myself?

Back to Newspaper man, whose phone rings. It’s his wife, lost again in downtown Modesto, needing further directions. “From Graceada, cross Needham onto 14th and you’ll see it. The little coffee house on the left. What’s the name?” This last part to me; I wish I had an unfriendly face, or at least an inscrutable one, dark like a secret agent.

“The Queen Bean,” I say.

“The what?”

“The Queen Bean.”

“The Queen Bee,” he repeats into the phone.

Let it go, Paula. Let it go. But I can’t; the same impulse that caused me to labor with a pen over sophomore essays, scribbling comments and hash marks that my students wouldn’t read or care about, leads me to repeat, “The Queen BEAN.”

“Oh! The Queen Bean,” he says in the phone. “Cute.”

The barista brings him a sandwich stabbed through the heart with a toothpick. I begin to dread the arrival of his wife, who, despite muddled directions, will soon be here. The man takes a bite of his sandwich, then asks, without benefit of swallowing, “You come here often, huh? This is like your regular place?”

Yeah, I guess I do. I guess it is.