I don’t know if I’ll get to keep this up and post tomorrow.

I’m going to a Curriculum conference. I’m terrified of driving in unknown cities. I hate driving in unknown cities.

I’m also at a crossroads for a big decision. This whole thing could have been a massive wrong turn. Maybe something will get better in the next two weeks. If not, well then.

I haven’t officially signed up for Nablopomo as I usually do. I’m still not sure if I should. I miss my blog, but I’m so tired at the end of the day.

I worked on homework all week. I still have a little more to go. I’m very tired.

We had our Halloween party last night. And our Halloweeniversary. Nine years. I love him more every day and I didn’t think that was possible.

It was so wonderful to see everyone. I love giving parties but like going to them a little better because I can actually talk to people. I couldn’t do everything I usually do, though I did manage my strawberries and cream hand of glory and the still beating heart of your long lost love. Gary brought cat sick soup and dog biscuits. We had cheese fingers and mummy pizzas from Laura and Caroline. Two amazing cakes (a professional one from Rick’s bakers and a brownie graveyard that was way cool from Lisa) and Kathy and John brought clam chowder. There is still some food left. My soup, while good was very spicy. I think next year I’ll make about half as much soup.

I think everyone understands about school for me. About how important it is *to* me that I do well. I’m not as young as most of the others in the program so I feel like I have to work twice as hard. Luckily some of the real world experience I’ve had helps. I really do miss my friends though. And I miss how much easier it was to just do everyday things–like go to the doctor. I need to go to the dentist too and haven’t been. I need to sleep for about a week too.

I still wonder at times if I’m going to live through this though. It feels like what I imagine Miltary school to feel like–juggling two things that need 100% effort. If you add in James and the Bean, well that makes three.

Ok, back to homework. I’d like to keep a record of the rest of this year, better than I have been. I wish I’d written down every day with S at Woodland but I was overwhelmed. We’ll see…

Dear R;

I’m sorry I got so busy with school these last few weeks that I wasn’t a better friend. It was such a big change for us that I had trouble keeping track of everyone and what they needed and what I wanted to give them. I hope the food I made you over the Spring and Summer helped a little bit and made things easier. I really wish I could have seen you more often, but I know you were really sick and it bothered you to have people see you.

I hope you know how much we loved you. You are an amazing man. You turned your life completely around. I’ve never met a gentler or kinder soul in my life. You were so sweet with Em and she loved seeing you every time you came over. I don’t know how we are going to tell her that her Uncle R isn’t coming back, I don’t know. I don’t know how to tell myself.

You were really there for my mother. If it weren’t for you her house would have fallen down around her ears. I think ours would have too, you could fix anything, everything and I think you did. You and your brother did more for Carl than anyone and helped my mother survive his loss. You have just always been there, a gentle quiet presence helping out wherever you could. There is so much more to say about all you did, but that always embarrassed you. But you really did so much for them, they were lucky to have you and know you, so very very lucky. Did I tell you all of this? I think I did, I hope I did. We talked about so many things these last few months. Sometimes just the weather, sometimes more important stuff. I keep wishing we had more time, wishing I could cook you one more Thanksgiving dinner.

I’m glad I got to talk to you when you were able to talk for awhile. Was that only two weeks ago? Sometimes time goes so slow and then it starts going too fast. I know I’m not going to meet anyone like you again R.

I am a better person for knowing you. I hope I can be more like you and I’ll try. If there is a heaven, I know you’ve got some cats there with you now, check on mine for me will you.

I have to stop now, I need to cry and miss you some more. Take care of yourself would you? We all miss you.

Your friend

J

I know I lived here. I know I had these friends and experiences. I have them all locked in my head. I remember some very very clearly. But there are very few pictures. There are many pictures of my friends, some of them I took, but very few of me.

This makes me sad. When I moved to SF I told so many stories about my life here–the hat party, the music, the friends with whom I went through many more experiences than most kids in Arkansas had at that time,. And there aren’t any pictures of me–of Pop Culture in the Park, that poetry and music fest I put on, nearly single handed. There aren’t any pictures of me at the Icehouse, though I did help to get it going–I know I spent the time in the permits office and the Fire Department arguing to keep it open.

J pointed out that I was like the soundman–crucial but unobserved. Did I mention I ran sound for the Descendants at Lily’s? Or wrote for the Grapevine? None of those things show up either. Who photographs the soundman?

I left Fayetteville and then many things seemed to start here. It makes me wish I’d stayed another year or so, but then I might not have left and I needed to. I had a big life in San Francisco. I did many interesting and strange things. I wouldn’t trade those years for anything. I might ask for a refund on a few of them, but I’d keep most.

I don’t think there are many pictures of me there either.

And there aren’t many pictures of me now. It’s almost like I don’t exist sometimes.

Maybe it is time to take a break from the internets for awhile. All this reminiscing where I don’t seem to be makes me feel like I’ve been amputated, or …excised…maybe removed..

Edited later after a facebook discussion to add:

Sometimes in your life you can actually hear the door slam and the window open. It’s been a shattering month. Despite the pregnancy losses, mortality and the simple dividing line between living and not, was never so obvious as recently. We knew that C was dying. We’d been visiting weekly, sometimes more. We knew he was fading; indeed he’d been visibly fading in the 2 and a half years since we moved back. But the last few weeks from the hospital to the hospice to the last night–as his voice grew fainter, as he could “see” us only for minutes, then for seconds, as his breathing became more and more labored–mortality became less a concept and more a reality.

The longest time he held on “really seeing” while we visited was when he looked at my daughter’s face.

And then one night: nothing.

I’ve never had an easy relationship with my family. We’ve never understood or quite possibly been comfortable with each other. But the last two years and the especially the last two months–well I discovered , I realized that at the end of your life all you have are those whose lives you have touched in some way. That whatever the estrangement, you are stripped bare. In the end we breathe, shit and cry and hope for love, just like an infant.  While I still felt apart–truly I couldn’t feel any other way–I’ve only seen his children a handful of times since 1987–I wished for his and their ease and comfort. I was sorry for all the suffering. I was glad he wasn’t alone and hoped we’d helped him know that.

I don’t know what he regretted at the end. I do know that by that point so much of my anger had fled. And I fully realized how thin the thread is that holds us all to life and to each other.

And as I scramble and claw at middle age I realize but only with the help of E’s dying grandfather and an angry 25 year old man that what has been scaring and confusing me isn’t what is actually important. It isn’t what will make the next 40 years meaningful or fill it with love and purpose. It’s so very hard to let go of how things have been and embrace how things must become. I have spent most of my life on the fringe in some way or another. Divorced parents before that was very normal, a dead parent before that was likely for most people, bookish, political, dreamy and odd. Sometimes horrendously outspoken, other times terrified. I gravitated towards others like me and reveled in the acceptance and freedom of those all dressed in black or screaming angry lyrics, or pounding poetry into the air with a vehemence most 20 year olds didn’t cultivate. And I wandered into technology, a lone female capable with a shell script or screwdriver, after being forced by money away from Chaucer’s canonical bosom. My music, the people I loved, the meaning for everything came from the fringe.

And however I might fight it, however it might terrify me–I don’t really live there anymore. We have a mortgage (now declining in value), yard work, 2 cars to take care of, pets, a nine year marriage and most importantly a young daughter. We go to PTO meetings and volunteer at her school. We’re still left of center and more Buddhist than Christian but don’t discount anyone’s beliefs, nor feel the need to chastise them. In our youth my husband and I were rebels. Now? We’re like a lot of other grown up rebels. We aren’t terribly unique. More open minded than usual perhaps, more likely to try new music or a new activity, slower to grow all the way up perhaps. Now though it becomes obvious that different isn’t so very different. Because we all grew up. And now the things that set us apart from the person next to us aren’t as important as the things that make us the same. 

Once or twice a year the last 4 years I’ve ended up back in my old types of haunts or around younger, much younger, denizens of the the fringes. I’d stay up too late, get far too intense and unfortunately….become maternal. The youth and age inside me fighting for dominance. I’d have conversations I’d had repeatedly 10, 20 years ago. But as a parent now I start trying to “hear them” and “help them.” Which isn’t the point. While far younger than me, they certainly don’t require that from me. They need to push against me–not me in particular, just older adults, just people where I am, who have had experiences (like college, a career, a child) like I have had. This isn’t a bad impulse, just badly applied. I need to find an outlet for this–someplace I can do good. Some situation, where me paying attention, caring and nurturing even, is appropriate and helpful. Like it is with my daughter and her friends. As I hope it will be if I become a teacher.

So while that young man was rude and said some horrible things obviously designed to hurt me, I’m grateful he did. He didn’t prove the point he thought to–my age and experience does qualify me to decide that. However, he did show me where I don’t belong anymore and what I don’t need to be doing. Even only once or twice a year. Having an intense, soul searching conversation with a 25 year old on their turf and an intense souls searching conversation with a fellow 40 year old on your own shared territory are two wildly different things. One is the wrong thing for me to do, the other is right. It may actually be a moral question.

So, if I need to volunteer my time at high school debate tournaments, political campaigns and my daughter’s school and work at this new career of being a teacher–that is likely where my time is best spent. It is where I am supposed to be. I’ve been afraid of giving my energy to those things whole heartedly–afraid to love it all again. Why? I’m not entirely sure — I know now though that I must and will become comfortable with my age, my position as one growing into  an elder who can both guide and withstand rebellion, and that I must leave behind those jaunts back into my 20s– that I’ll be embracing rather than refusing, rather than fighting–maybe I will stride towards the final destination, the final breath, and end surrounded by love, memories of my own and other’s children and how I hopefully loved and helped them. I’ll end with the knowledge I made a difference. An everlasting yea rather than a relentless denial of what comes to us all.

The door slammed closed the other night, but the window is open wide and the vista beyond welcoming, terrifying and necessary.

~T.S. Eliot from The Wasteland

Again and still it is hard to find the desire to say the things I used to say here without much effort. I have always written easily and frequently, until about December of last year. A horrid thing happened and simultaneously my desire to write about anything going on mostly left. I keep coming back to it because it was such an apalling situation , unfathomable, vicious and bizarre–like a bomb going off in our family psyche. The situation has not resolved itself, it probably can’t. It sure did change a lot of things.

Other things are changing though. Big changes.

I’ve had a very intense health scare. Don’t know what we can do about it either.

I started back at the gym. Up to 1. 5 hours 4 or 5 times a week. It’s been about 2 months now. It’s helping my auto immune issues, some of them. It’s helping my energy issues. My body looks better and I’m stronger. J is going to start going with me, but meantime he keeps breaking boards and getting new belts. And becoming such a part of the community here. We’re both learning to not hang back so much, to join more.

Yes we have volunteered for the Obama campaign. Our choice from the beginning. I don’t talk about politics much on here, but it has a big part in my life, always has since I worked on my first mock campaign for Jimmy Carter and worked on John Anderson’s real campaign even though I was too young to vote. I may write more about the issues of this campaign her, depends on if I can not just implode at the insanity of some of the right’s attacks.

The Bean’s grandfather is in hospice care now. It’s been getting steadily worse since June. I’m very sorry for his prolonged pain. For my mother’s prolonged pain. For his children’s. It goes on and on. J has been so incredibly kind in his visits to Carl. We haven’t taken the Bean up to the various hospitals because it’s been scary. We’ll all be going up this weekend, and then once a week at least.

The Bean has started first grade. It’s very exciting. It’s also shocking we have a first grader. She’s growing and changing so fast. She had some great camps this summer –drama, soccer, swimming, musical theatre. She makes friends so easily and is so confident. I had a couple of counselors stop me, one in particular and tell me how polite but also how very kind she is. That he hadn’t met a kid so very sweet like her before. I am so proud of her. We are so proud of her and so lucky to have such an amazing bean. a

And I’ve started school. Orignially I enrolled in an intro level class in Education. After talking to an advisor I guess I’m fast tracked. I’ve got 2 pre requisited to get under my belt, a portfolio, a test and by this summer, hopefully, I’ll be in the Master of Arts in Teaching program. And by the next summer, well I’ll have my initial license. Then a bit after that…an ESL endorsement as well. It’s a lot harder to go back to school now, with a family, as an older student and so long out of school. I almost didn’t do it, but J kept pushing me to try for this dream I had back in high school. Yes I always wanted to be a high school English teacher. I wish I’[d done it then, but maybe just maybe I’ll be able to do it now. And if it turns out not to be the thing? At least I will have tried. I know from recent events–it isn’t what you do so much that you regret, it is what you leave undone. And finally that MA in English will get some use. I hope.

Hope things get better, hope things get more connected, hope for the future, hope for ease, hope that perches in your soul.

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