Glibbertysmidgeon

This weekend I went for a 30 mile bike ride up the West side of Manhattan to the George Washington Bridge.

Seth led James and I on a nice, flat spin along the Hudson, and to a stop at Dinosaur for a lunch of killer barbecue. Kris stayed home with the baby. I felt a bit bad about enjoying all that exercise and good food while he was stuck at home, so I ordered him a big plate of pulled pork, and stuffed it into my fanny pack.

When I got home, I grabbed a shower and took over parent duty for a few hours until Scarlett went to bed, and then I took a book into the tub for a long soak and a read.

I haven’t felt so relaxed in months.

On Monday, my mind felt remarkably clear, and I had a great attitude. I was able to get all of my tasks done and even whip up a pan of lasagne for dinner.

I know that I’m feeling good, at least in part, because Scarlett is getting over her ear infection, and is sleeping at night again. Part of it is because I’m getting over my sinus infection, and I’m sleeping again.

But it still seems like a couple hours in the saddle have done more good for my state of mind than 4 weeks of Zoloft.

It’s good to be back.

I don’t think anyone would be surprised to hear me say I’m an idealist.

Though it may be impossible to live up to my ideals entirely, I don’t see that as an excuse not to do what I can.

One of the things that keeps me here in New York is the subway system. I can’t remember a time when driving didn’t make me feel guilty. I must have learned that carbon monoxide is a bad thing before I was old enough to drive. Back home, I did my fair share of driving to the grocery store (.25 miles away from home) and the laundromat (across the street from the grocery store), but I also avoided driving when I could. I biked to school and to work all through college, and generally mooched rides whenever possible.

Despite all of the things I do that I know harm someone, somewhere, for some reason- like wasting the paper cup that holds the latte I’m sipping right now- I tend to choose certain battles and stick with them.

They’re specific, often quixotic choices, but they’re mine.

For example, I only buy soda from a fountain. This is because bottled soda and water are created by privatizing access to water in small towns or poor countries, and then denying local residents access to their own water. In some locations, the results of this behavior are deadly.

Except Orangina, which I order from FreshDirect by the gallons.
I have never seen Orangina at a soda fountain. If I ever do, I suppose I’ll be forced to consider having a fountain installed in my house so that I can create Orangina myself using local water.

For now, I just give Orangina a pass.

Being a parent has created a whole new generation of idealism compromises.

On choosing organic, parenthood scores well. There are wonderful baby foods out there that are completely organic- we use Happy Baby, which is also frozen instead of canned, so it tastes great and has more vitamins. Also, they’re do-gooders (or claim to be) so that helps ease the guilt of not making my own baby food at home.

Scarlett sleeps on an organic mattress, covered by an organic wool absorbent pad, topped by an organic cotton sheet. Of course, lately she’s taken to sleeping with a pillow to help her sinuses drain. That pillow, stolen from her parents’ bed, is made of some unidentified synthetic fiber, and is wrapped in a case made from non-organic cotton. It’s a temporary solution, and one I’m feeling, suddenly, like I’d better fix right away.

I am deeply ashamed of my failure to move from disposable to cloth diapers.
These insidious little landfillers are so effective, so convenient, so AVAILABLE that I have been able to put off learning the essentials of cloth diapering, such as which style to buy, how to use a “doubler” and what kind of cover is best. I cringe inside every single time I change a diaper, and every time I need to order more, I hesitate. “Shouldn’t I call a diaper service instead?”

Then the baby poops, and I set that thought aside and rush to order another case of Pampers.

For years I have resisted the disposable cleaning products trend. I use environmentally friendly spray, real sponges and washcloths, and a real broom and mop to clean my house. I even have a squeegie to for cleaning my windows. Why use a paper towel when a real dishrag will work just as well? But it’s a short hop from disposable diaper wipes to disposable anti-bacterial wipes.

To me, the Swiffer has long been the poster child of disposalism.

A cheap plastic handle and a cheap plastic swivel head, designed and constructed to make me buy box after box of textured napkins that cling to the dirt, and go into the trash. You don’t even have to bend over!

Today, I have reached a new low.

I started off blameless enough…I know that the Swiffer handle itself was abandoned in the apartment when we moved in. But I bought that box of toxic chemical sheets myself.

With Scarlett starting to crawl, I have started to get desperate about the dog hair situation, and nothing clears out the fur faster than a quick Swiff before work.

I am on the horns of a serious idealistic crisis.
The evil empire! A Swiffer in the house!

Thankfully, I wrote this blog entry.
While Googling to find out what they call those chemical paper napkin refill thingies, I came across this eco-friendly Swiffer-like thing.

Now I face a new dilemma.
If I buy the eco-friendly Swiffer-like thing, what will I do with the Swiffer I have?

Do I throw the evil chemical patches in the trash to go poison a landfill? Should I use them first?
Do I give them away so someone else can throw them into the landfill?

I cannot unmanufacture these things.
There’s no easy way to win back your soul once you give in to disposalism.

I have been trying to figure out how to listen to This American Life at my desk for three weeks.

I listen to the radio online, but I have to get through the corporate firewall to do it. Normally, when I go to an external website, I get a login screen, where I type my user ID and password, and then I’m allowed to view the site.

But This Life is wily.

When I click on the link to their free streaming content, the link spawns Windows Media Player without triggering the firewall login. Without that login, Windows Media Player falls into the black hole of doom.

I had to find a way to trigger the firewall login.

For a while, I solved this by right-clicking on the link and copying the URL from the Properties dialogue box. I pasted that URL into a new browser window, and voila, the login.

Then This Life struck back.

They created their own, proprietary media player, which spawns automatically when you click the link. Now, when I try my right-click trick, all I get is the URL to the lousy .gif.

Damn you This Life!

I realized that it was time to come out to my friend, James.
I had to confess that I don’t know how to Podcast.

It was a humiliating moment, but also a liberating one.
After an informative half hour with James, I found Odeo.

Now I can subscribe to my favorite shows, then log in to Odeo and listen to them at my leisure.

This whole adventure made me realize that I’m not the geek I thought I was.
I guess I have to accept that I’m just a smart girl who likes to hang around with the geek crowd.

I’m a geek hag.

I looked in the mirror and realized I have become one of those TV makeover people. The before picture.

How did I let this happen?

I promised myself that if I ever became a parent, I would never become Ugly Sweatpants Mom. But there she was, staring back at me from the mirror.

There was a time when I could not imagine myself a mother.
A time when I thought motherhood was wiping up drool and flipping grilled cheese sandwiches with the sound of children’s television programming in the background.

Eventually, thanks to moms like Katie, I decided I’d be one of those moms who took time to ride a mountain bike.

That’s when I promised myself I’d never become Ugly Sweatpants Mom, and I’d never be one of those mothers with nothing to talk about but baby, baby, baby.

Um…

So! How ’bout those Democrats?

Today I walked Sophie by the fountain at Grand Army Plaza. After a bold fall day in the high sevenites, the cool night air tasted sweet.

I watched my dog nibbling a long blade of grass and looked around my life.
I live exactly where I should be living right now.
My dog, my marriage, and my new little banana…

All is well and all is well.

Today I feel blessed.

I want to go and see An Inconvenient Truth, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.

Okay, what I really want is to HAVE SEEN it.
I want to know what is in the movie; I want to be able to discuss it intelligently with my friends.. but I’m afraid to actually sit through it. I know I’ll walk out crying, with one more horrible, heavy truth lying cold on my heart.

I’ve considered buying a ticket- just to show my support, and then going home to ask a friend for the half-page synopsis. If I could only believe that my $10.00 contribution to the success of the film might still, somehow, save us all from Global Warming.

In recent months, I’ve begun reverting to the old ways- devolving into the Ostritch Girl I was raised up to be. When I was a little girl, I hated when my Dad watched the news.

I didn’t want to know about the wars going on in other countries or the people who lost their homes in the big storm. I was not interested in police shootouts or drug raids.

I couldn’t fix my Dad’s depression or my grandmother’s frailty; I couldn’t find Dad a steady job or provide a place where we all could live and never have to move. My own problems had already shown me how small and powerless I was.

I just wanted to read my Black Stallion books and imagine that everything could be solved with a child’s patience and a long, bareback ride.

I understand why someone would rather watch American Idol than listen to the truth about what the U.S. is doing to innocent people at Guantanamo Bay.
I understand why it’s more appealing to mow the lawn than to have a serious discussion about the proper balance between national security and individual liberties.
I understand that it was bad enough to watch the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and our government’s disastrous inabilty to respond- but how are we all supposed to digest the additional insult of the 2 billion in tax dollars that have been blown on waste and fraud in the rebuilding effort?

And the bad news just keeps coming.

• Trans fats may cause diabetes.
• Bird flu has been transmitted from human to human here in the U.S.
• Tuna is no longer safe for pregant women.
• I’m STILL the only person in my family who has health insurance.
• The suicide rate in New Orleans has tripled.
• There are many, many reasons to believe our elections are being cheated.
• The phone and cable companies are trying to kill my blog and all it’s little friends.
• Every day we find that another of our elected officials is actually a criminal.
• The President has issued 100’s of “signing statements” indicating in each one that he finds himself to be above legally enacted U.S. laws.
• The East Coast is flooding.
• Oil prices keep going up.
• People keep dying in Iraq.

…and the hurricane season is here, and the levees are not repaired.

It’s enough to make me want to stick my head in the sand.
Or into a children’s book.

I have tried to write about New Orleans every day for a week.
This disaster has stripped me of all perspective, and I can’t find any sensible place from which to address it.

The magnitude of our loss is heartbreaking.
The human suffering is unbearable.
The lack of preparedness is an outrage.

But the thing I can’t seem to process is this:

When did America become a place that would stand by and watch our poor, our sick, and our elderly die?

I realize I’m not the only American who is feeling betrayed and abandoned because of our government’s slow and apathetic response to the flood. (They had two days’ warning to get them out, for goodness sake! )

As much as it comforts me to know that the citizens of the U.S. are still kind and empathetic people- I just don’t know how to live with the realization that our elected officials do not share this basic respect for human life and dignity.

Gloria Steinam read this essay on NPR, and I was forced to look it up and read it again for myself.

Her love of humankind, and her optimism really inspired me.

Check it out.

We had two parents, just not at the same time.
When Mom and Dad divorced I was two years old, and my sister was only a baby, so neither of us remembers the two of them as a pair. We have lots of memories of them as separates, though.

Like the time Dad shaved off his beard, and we couldn’t recognize him anymore. We stormed into Grandma’s kitchen and demanded, “Where’s my dad?” and the stranger sitting atop the woodstove wearing Dad’s black cowboy boots laughed and laughed.

Or the time Mom told us we were going to visit Santa Clause. We went on an airplane trip and I remember looking down on the puffy clouds below and asking her if we could ski on that snow. The foil package of peanuts was so salty that it burned my mouth. When we landed we were in Colorado, not the North Pole, and I was bitterly disappointed.

Mom tells me that some of our visits with both parents during those early divorce years would have been defined by certain authorities as child snatching.

When we were with mom we were WITH MOM. We didn’t phone our dad- we didn’t even know his phone number. (Did he have a phone?) We liked visiting/living with Mom because she let us choose our own breakfast cereal, and she said silly things.

In answer to the question, “Where are we going?” she often replied,

“To the moon!”

When we were with Dad, we didn’t know if Mom lived on the next block or on Mars. Sometimes she would materialize at our front door bearing gifts. Once she brought an EZ Bake Oven, and a battery operated sewing machine. We sewed ugly Barbie clothes out of old socks and dirty T shirts until the batteries wore out, and we fed Dad chocolate cake after chocolate cake until all the tiny cake mixes were used up. Then they both became gigantic appliances for Barbie.

When we had a place of our own with Dad there were always cows and chickens around, and when we were really settled we had pigs. Dad used to pretend to sit on the pigs, and we girls squealed with laughter when the pigs scooted out from under him and he pretended to fall on his bum.

Sometimes, though, we weren’t with either of our parents. Those were the times when we relied on our aunts and uncles.

Aunt Barbara tells me stories about how us kids (she had three of her own) used to help her weed the garden when we lived with her. I don’t remember that, but I love that she still sends me teddy bears when I’m lonely, Hershey Kisses when I’m sad, and Cinnamon Bears when I’m afraid.

Then ones I remember best are Uncle David and Aunt Eunice. Donna and I moved in with them the summer before I started the sixth grade, and it was a tough change. It was scary enough moving into their 100 year old farm house with its peeling, water stained wallpaper and its eerily tall doors; it was terrifying to have to learn how to have manners like they did.

“Patti, don’t use your finger to push your peas onto your fork.”

I couldn’t figure out how to eat peas for months.

Aunt Eunice taught us about doing our laundry, taking showers every single day, and combing our hair properly. She bought me my very first bra. Sometimes, she did unexpected things. Like the day I told her that I’d learned how to make mini pizzas in Home Economics class.

“Would you like to make mini pizzas for dinner tonight?”

Aunt Eunice dutifully recorded the necessary ingredients and went off to the store. I will never forget the queasy mix of emotions churning in my stomach as I carried that plate of mini pepperonis to the table that night:

Ashamed Who would want to eat these stupid pizzas, when we could have had Aunt Eunice’s cooking?
Sheepish I wasn’t accustomed to being treated like an adult.
Shy David and Eunice’s real daughters were right there, but everyone was paying attention to me.
Mixed in with all of those greenish feelings, was a little bit of pride, and a lot of disbelief.

After that school year ended Donna and I went to live with Mom for real, and we didn’t have to go and stay with any more aunts or uncles. I was relieved to be back with my ‘real’ family because- no matter how well I was welcomed- I always felt like a burden and a misfit when I lived with my aunts and uncles. But I missed the farm. My year there had made it’s mark on me; I continued baking apple pies the way Aunt Eunice had taught me, and I never pushed my peas onto my fork with my fingers again.

When I brought Kris home to meet my family he met both Mom and Dad, and he met my outspoken little grandmother as well. But I also made sure that he got to spend a lot of time on Aunt Eunice’s farm. After all the moves and adventures of my life, I knew there was one place we could go where he’d see one piece of my life story that is still there, right where I left it. It didn’t hurt that he got to eat plenty of home made ice cream while he was there.

Over the years, Aunt Eunice has given me so much more than a place to crash during that one rough patch. Aunt Eunice has given me a home for life.

I got an email from my mom tonight inviting me to visit her online journal. Her site is quixotically named, “The Many Moods of Granny.” Though she does have one beautiful granddaughter, she is still a young woman, and a newlywed herself. I have to wonder about this title. Is this a hint?

Congratulations, mom, and welcome!

Real Friends Fight

You can be honest, share your side
What really can you have to hide?
Lay down your fear and useless pride
And let truth light this dark divide

I wrote this poem four years ago to a girl I had thought of as a close friend.
She has never read it, because we are still not speaking to one another.

For the first three years, this really stung me.

When she went on the annual ski trip with all our friends and I didn’t. When I saw her name on the cc list on emails. When I caught a glimpse of some girl wearing her hair in that french braid thing, like she always did. Pretty much any time her name came up in casual conversation I got a sick little angry stomach ache.

Any time I thought of her, the frustration and betrayal came flooding back like it was brand new. I kept telling myself that if only she had let me explain my side I could have fogiven her, but that just made me mad all over again. In fact, each time the anger came back, it was bigger than the last time. I just got madder and madder.

Eventually, I had to let it go.

The thing I’ve learned about people is this: They are who they are.
When I make a friend, I have to choose them for who they are, and not for who I wish they would be.

I have a different friend, Scot, who is the perfect casual friend. He’s a great storyteller, and a whiz at the barbecue. He is so relaxed that when he enters the room it feels like summer vacation. You can actually catch relaxation from him.

But you can’t expect Scot to show up at any particular time, and you can’t count on him to help with the dishes. I ate a lot of burritos with Scot, but when I needed a ride to the hospital I called someone else.

That’s how it is with friends. Some friends are mostly good for a trip to the movies, while other friends are people you can spend a whole summer backpacking in Europe with. The trick is in figuring out which circle of friends each fits into.

I always knew Grudge Girl had a fear of confrontation, and I’d always been able to live with that because I didn’t need to have any confrontations with her. There at the end, when she suddenly gave me a piece of her mind, I was glad to hear her yelling at me. It seemed to me that this was the beginning of something good, and I was looking forward to that chance to be honest with her right back- once I was off work.

But that didn’t work out the way I’d hoped. Every time I tried to talk to her about the fight, she changed the topic:

“What kind of yogurt do you want?”

And every time she changed the topic, I felt betrayed.

I see now that I am the one who’d made the mistake.
I should have realized that she was a friend who’s good for mountain bike rides and hikes and ski trips, but not the best choice for engaging in emotionally loaded conversations. At least, not in those days. I know people do change.

The ironic part of this story is that all of that anger only hurt me. Every time I got mad, it was my day being soured, not hers. I’m sure that Grudge Girl was completely unaffected by my rage- she didn’t evcen know about it. This is how I learned that forgiveness is not something nice you do for a person who has wronged you.

Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself.

“You look sad.” A security guard broke into my thoughts, “Here, have a candy”

I was sad.
I was walking to work thinking about nuclear proliferation.

I’d been listening to a discussion on the radio about last night’s Meet the Press episode, in which several experts on the subject warned that there is a 50% chance that the U.S. will be attacked with a nuclear weapon in the next 6-10 years. They stressed that we are not doing nearly enough to prevent this from happening.

The greatest danger of another catastrophic attack in the United States will materialize if the world’s most dangerous terrorists acquire the world’s most dangerous weapons. …al Qaeda has tried to acquire or make nuclear weapons for at least ten years. …officials worriedly [discussed] in 1998 reports that bin Laden’s associates thought their leader was intent on carrying out a `Hiroshima.’ These ambitions continue.

September 11th Commission Report

The gist of the discussion was that we should forget about Iraq, and spend all our energy taking inventory of the nuclear material in the world, and locating the stuff that has gone missing if we don’t want it to come and find us.

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER, (D-WV): And I’d ask you, sir: Is the material missing from Russian nuclear facilities sufficient to construct a nuclear weapon?

MR. GOSS: Senator, the way I would prefer to answer that question is: There is sufficient material unaccounted for so that it would be possible for those with know-how to construct a nuclear weapon.

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: Can you assure the American people that the material missing from Russian nuclear sites has not found its way into terrorist hands?

MR. GOSS: No, I can’t make that assurance. I can’t account for some of the material so I can’t make the assurance about its whereabouts.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Nunn, that’s chilling.

From a clip played on Meet The Press

New Yorkers live our lives accepting that we are all targets. Until now, I’ve been at peace with this fact.

But life has been changing for me. Dreams are coming true. I’ve got more to lose than I’ve ever had.

During this hopeful moment, where I am painting my new apartment, settling into my marriage, building my career, and looking forward to a future filled with writing, travel, and family, I found the prospect of a nuclear attack horrifying in a more deeply personal way than ever before.

Forget about building equity.
Forget about eating organic and exercising.
Forget about saving for the educations of my future children.
My home, my body, my future could all be obliterated in the blink of an eye.

Is it a rational decision to stay here, or should I be looking for a job in Norway like my friend Ben?

All of these thoughts were rolling like dark marbles in my mind as I approached the office.

The securtiy guard shook two Mentos into my hand, and I popped one into my mouth.

Minty candy won’t bring about world peace.
But the friendly gesture did help me get this day off the ground.

It’s 10:30 p.m. and I am scrubbing paint splatters, bits of spackle, and old paint chips out of the tub. I tug off my socks and set them atop the pyramid of paint cans standing below the towel rack so that I can step in. Warmth seeps into the aching bones of my tired feet. The bleachy smell of the SoftScrub mingles with the steam and, surprisingly, wakes me up. The surface of the tub- along with the entire surface of the bathroom- is gray with soot from the construction. As I sponge warm water over the walls and corners of the tub, clean white porcelain emerges looking unexpectedly inviting. My shoulders relax just a little, and I realize I’m looking forward to taking a bath in our tub tonight.

Kris and I opened boxes for two hours, and we still haven’t found the shower curtain.

Maybe we won’t find it tomorrow, either.

I can’t feel my right thumb.

This makes it difficult to open my yogurt container. This puts me in a foul mood right off the bat, as I missed dinner last night, and breakfast this morning. If I don’t eat something very large today, I’m likely to become quite grouchy.

I believe it’s an overuse injury- the thumb, I mean.

Yesterday, we were painting our new apartment from 11 a.m. until 1 a.m. with only one break for Chineese takeout around 4. We could have gone longer, I think, but when my arm fell off, it made such a thud that the new future-downstairs-neighbors started banging on their ceiling and we decided to go home.

It was my idea to do the painting ourselves. Our contractor had bid on the job, but I thought we’d save some money and have a little fun getting artsy. I’ve painted lots of places, and I knew I was letting us in for some work, but I didn’t expect it to be this hard. Now that I think of it, I’ve never tried to paint an entire apartment while working full time with no help from friends. We have spent two entire weekends on it- morning to night all four days- and we’re miles from finished.

To complicate things, I have friends coming in from Washington State on Friday, and I’d planned on hosting them in our new 2 bedroom apartment, instead of our current 1 bedroom rental.

So we painted hard. Really hard. The palms of my hands are sore from holding the roller, and my legs are bruised and aching from all those trips up the ladder.

For two solid weeks, we’ve done nothing but go to work, visit hardware stores, eat, paint, and sleep. We haven’t packed. We haven’t shopped (hence the missed meals). We haven’t cleaned our home. I did laundry in the new apartment while we were painting. But then the washer started leaking, so I had to give that up.

When we left last night, there were at least two more days of work remaining.
As we staggered to the car, Kris said,

“It’s not turning out the way I’d hoped.”

He was speaking of the faux finish we had just spent 6 hours applying to our living room walls. Reluctantly, I agreed. It’s too dark, and too busy. We were going for something more subtle and warm.

With two closets, three ceilings, and a houseful of trim still unpainted, the idea of redoing the living room was just too much.

“Maybe we should call Mike”

We called our contractor this morning, and he agreed to meet us at the apartment tomorrow night to plan.

I should feel relieved. No more painting, no more late nights. No more empty fridge. We can stay home and pack now.

But I feel blue. I keep thinking to myself,

“You should have known this would happen. ”

“If you had hired him from the start it would probably be done by now AND you would have had time to pack. ”

“Now Kelly is coming and it feels like you’re going to be ill from all the stress and lack of sleep.”

” Now you won’t be moved on time, and she’ll have to stay in the old apartment. Everything is half packed and it’s just going to be a wreak.”

Then, my inner critic winds up for the knockout punch:

“Because of your bad judgement, you’re going to spend the money, and you’ve wasted all this time. You could have had these last two weekends, but now you’ve lost your weekends AND your money.”

I want to crawl inside a hole.

Nobody knows how to beat up on me better than me.

“If I get sick, I don’t want to go to the doctor, I just want to die.” This is my father on health care. He has called me “…just to chat, while I still can.”

Dad hasn’t paid his phone or electric bills in a while, and expects them to come turn it all off any day now. I told my father that I worry, knowing that he lives like this. He assures me that he’ll go out and get a job soon. “The only time I think about money”, he explained with a chuckle, “is when I don’t have any.”

I didn’t find that answer very comforting. Since I didn’t know how to answer, I returned to the topic of health care.

“If only our country provided health care to everyone”, I complained, “Not just the people with good jobs, like Kris.”

“All those countries”, he responded, “like England and Canada and Germany, who have state health care-“

“All the first world nations except the U.S.”, I interrupted sourly

“The rich in those countries”, he continued with an air of pride, “come to the U.S. to get their health care.”

“I’ve heard that too,” I conceded, “maybe we do have the best doctors and hospitals in the world, but what good are they doing for Donna?” I told him about my sister’s mammogram, on which she made payments for most of 2004. What would she have done if it had found something?

Last week over lunch, some friends told me similar health care stories from their friends in France who are fond of complaining about how long they have to wait to get a doctor appointment, and how far they travel to visit specialists.

“But,” I answered, “can’t the wealthy just pay extra to get the best care, like they do here?”

My two friends admitted that, in fact, for people with money, the health care system in France is about the same as it is here in the U.S. “It’s just for the poor that it’s different,” they agreed. “In France, the poor can go to the doctor.”

I tried to explain to my father how frightening it is for me to know that my father, my brother, and my sister are all without health insurance. After working full time while going to college for 8 years, then paying on the student loans for another 10, I finally have a safety net of my own. I have a good job, and my husband has a better one. Kris’ job gives us both health care coverage. He gets paid vacation, paternity leave, dental and vision coverage. But these won’t help me if something should happen to a member of my family.

I picture my father alone in his small trailer house in the bitter Missouri winter. He is sitting in his easy chair with his little dog on his lap, smoking a cigarette in a room lit only by the fire in the woodstove.

How fragile my safety net feels to me with the weight of my whole family, heavy with possibilities, hanging dark over my head.

Kris is playing songs for me like he used to do when we were first dating.

He sits with his hands in his lap, shoulders relaxed, and his face lit blue by the computer as he listens with his eyes in the distance. Folksy songs and sad songs interspersed with sunny Beatlesy-sounding songs that remind me vaguely of Jan and Dean. A modern Irish folk song. One piece is just the piano, with a brief harmonica solo, and the sound of dogs howling faintly in the distance. Eeerie and beautiful music, subtle and sweet- I’ve never heard of any of these bands. He is showing me a compilation CD he got for Christmas.

“Anne really knows what kind of music I like”

I smile and close my eyes. It’s Friday night, and I am stretched out on the couch letting the week seep out of my bones. It feels good to just be here, letting him take me on a field trip. He tells me about the Irish folk band, The Pogues- how they’re bringing their traditional sound to the younger generation much like the Dixie Chicks are doing with young country fans here in the U.S. If I stay here and listen, he will show me other new songs; Burning Flies by Looper, or a new CD from the Thomas Mapfumo band.

Kris’ taste in music is like his taste in food. His range is tremendous, but his palate is highly specific. He loves hiphop as much as he loves 80’s New Age, folk, pop and country- as long as it’s good. He would no more buy a Spice Girls album than eat at Applebee’s, but he loves the power of Christina Aguilera’s voice, and we do have some Dixie Chicks and Kimberly Locke songs in our collection.

Tonight’s field trip is really good. These songs are fresh and surprising- I wonder where he keeps finding out about this stuff.

Though I live in the largest, most diverse city in the U.S., when I spin the dial on the car radio I get Ashlee Simpson on four stations, and I’ve never heard The Pogues.

I used to think that I could fly.

When I was young, my cousins and I played on Grandma’s farm down in Oregon. After the harvest when they burned the hay fields, the three of us would spend our afternoons chasing wind devils. Those tiny spirals of wind, like mini-tornados, became visible when they carried the ash. We caught our share of wind devils, be we never assumed that our failure to fly was because flight was impossible. Though our toes never left the earth, we chased those grayish funnels with the enthusiasm of dogs chasing squirrels, certain that sooner or later we would time our landing right, and we’d be up, up and away.

In those days I also believed that an invisible owl lived in the head-sized knothole in the old oak that stood in front of the barn. I used to talk to that old owl and there were times when I felt sure I’d heard him answer.

When I was really small, I believed that everything buried in the earth returned to heaven, so my sister and I wrote letters to God and buried them behind the garage. When we went looking for them later they were gone, and we were pleased that God had gotten our messages.

In high school, my beliefs were somewhat less optimistic. I believed that married people secretly hated each other, and that nothing good was ever going to come of my life. In those days I lived with my mother and her fourth husband, and I’d seen enough to know that our kind of people didn’t win the Publisher’s Clearinghouse, and we didn’t go to Disneyland. When my high school counselor told me what classes would prepare me for college, I took them. I may have been a cynical girl, but I was still an obedient one. I took two years of typing and three years of Spanish before it occurred to me that I could go to beauty school instead of college. After that, I filled my elective periods with ceramics class and A.V. I liked throwing pots and developing black and white film, so I took both of those classes a second time. I didn’t have any plans to become an artist- those kinds of dreams were for The Lucky People, not for the likes of me, I just liked taking the classes.

My future- when I imagined it- would be stunted by a drunkard husband or several sullen children who talked back to me and refused to make their beds. I would probably work at the Safeway store or J.C. Penney, and if I was lucky enough I’d have a dog.

One year after graduation, I was on my way to having just that kind of a life. I was working at a Chevron station in Washington State, and trying to figure out how to get away from the young man I was dating- the young man who punched me in the gut and called me a slut, and who had recently given me my first black eye.

When I applied for the job at the Chevron station I’d heard that they hired a lot of college students. At my interview, I made sure to tell the owner that I was thinking of attending Western Washington University in the fall. When he called me back he said that while he’d really enjoyed our interview, he was looking for a full time cashier. I quickly told him that I’d decided to work for a year so I could become a Washington resident before starting my education. After that year passed, the station owner took me for a walk around the lot.

“Kathy and I, we think of you like a daughter.” He said, calmly filling his pipe. “We’re both concerned because you’re not going to school.”
He told me if money was the problem, that they would lend me money that I could pay back, interest free, after graduation.

Nobody had ever spoken to me like that. The next week I registered for classes, and filled out my financial aid paperwork.

When I graduated, I went to Disneyworld.

Note: This piece was published in the March, 2004 issue of Penwomanship.