obscure as we are

reverb11: S01E02

2011-12-02T22:23:00.000-08:00

December 2 – Sangha (Tribe)
Where have you discovered community in 2011? What are the defining characteristics and essential qualities of your tribe?

i'm a rather solitary person, so it's difficult to think of myself as even belonging to a tribe or a community. growing up, i was never a joiner. i wasn't a girl scout or on sports teams; i didn't have a ton of friends or attend all those sixth-grade parties where your eventual fate is sealed. i had myself & books & music & the entire cities i built in my head.

and yet, somehow, despite my discomfort in most social settings, i look around and see that a tribe - a family - has grown up around me anyway.

i can't think about my community without thinking about the lyrics to "the perfect space" by the avett brothers. although, like i said, i was never much one for joining or group activities - i always envied the people that were. i always harbored this little side dish of jealousy for people who've had the same best friends since childhood or, hell, even siblings. i secretly longed (while simultaneously rejecting) the idea of being that girl at the mall surrounded by her girlfriends laughing at some inside joke.

but whenever i tried to be that person, whether i was 13 or 30, it just felt ... forced, and i've ended up losing more friendships than i have maintaining them. to be honest, whenever i thought of community, it kind of freaked me out. like it came with some sort of rule book where i had to eat dinner at a certain time or wear certain clothes or listen to a specific kind of music all while saying something insightful & intelligent on some low budget movie that everyone knew about but me.

my parents tell me that when i was younger, i would just go down to the end of the driveway while the neighbourhood kids were out playing - and i'd just stand there. i would stand there and wait until one of them came up to me and invited me to join in. and, if that didn't happen, i would just go back to reading.

and i kind of feel like my adult tribe grew up the same way.

when i think of the people closest to me, sometimes i don't even know how they got there: summer missionaries back when we were 19 or 20; an old college acquaintance with whom i barely had more than a passing dialogue half a decade ago; that high school kid that took out my trash when i was working for the newspaper. how did those people become these people - the ones that know and love me despite my quirks, the friends that understand that sometimes i just need a weekend to myself, my treasures who are always there when i reach out and who push me to toe the line, to blur the line, to erase the phucking line.

i realize i have a number of different communities for which i am grateful: my e-mail family whose commentary on life feels just like having a conversation; my work family who understand that sometimes we have to make dark jokes to keep our own lights shining, my biological family who still manage to have game night at least once a month; and to all the friends that have come before & will come after. i would never seek to diminish the relationships i have. i am blessed to be cushioned by amazing people.

but, when i think of my tribe, and i know this is my tribe because of how i can't imagine just walking away from them to go to something else, i think of a select few. i want to join in their lives; i want them in mine. when i find myself still building these cities in my head, they are inhabited by my soul siblings.

my tribe personifies balance, tolerance & [the perfect] space.

"i want to have friends that i can trust
that love me for the man that i've become
& not the man that i was
& i want to have friends
that let me be
all alone
when being alone is all that i need."

reverb11: S01E01

2011-12-01T21:40:00.001-08:00

my friend,

i've already been able to put my word for 2012 into play with this first entry, but i'll get to that later.

at the end of 2010, celia suggested we make vision boards for the upcoming year - foam boards on which we glued and taped visual representations of the things, ideas and words that we'd like to see present in 2011. so, for this year, i chose the word CALM.

as one year changed into the next, i wanted to usher in a year where my heart, mind, soul and spirit had a soft place to land - and, to do that, i knew then that i would need to surround myself with calming elements. my vision board contained quotes and photos of traveling, the poetry of mary oliver & a vinyl record.

and it worked.

i began my 31st year by traveling solo for the first time in washington d.c. (thanks, jace!) and will undoubtedly end this year back at the very place i began: my grandparents' red-brick home; my home. from january to january, i've traveled to ten states and purchased plane tickets to spend a month backpacking overseas. from 2011 to 2012, i've found myself calmer than i can remember previously being, surrounded by amazing girlfriends, swimming in laughter & wine & happiness, lying under the stars in previously unexplored oases in my own home state and breathing deep what can only be called insatiable joy.

all day, between decorating my grey-walled cubicle with dollar tree's finest wrapping paper & garland, i've thought of what i want to manifest within my life for the pending new year. it wasn't until i sat down to write this post - worried that i was doing it wrong, that the words wouldn't sound right, that i'd bitten off more than i could chew with a 31-day commitment - that the word i was looking for wrote itself on me: RELINQUISH.

re·lin·quish [ri-ling-kwish]
1. to renounce or surrender (a possession, right, etc.): to relinquish the throne.
2. to give up; put aside or desist from: to relinquish a plan.
3. to let go; release: to relinquish one's hold.

do you remember that photo i sent you a few months ago, about letting go of one's fear one t-shirt & sock at a time? well, i am building my new year around that photo & this word.

as i stare into my as-of-yet determined future, i want to relinquish whatever expectations i have for it and instead concentrate on being here now & embracing whatever this crazy/beautiful life presents to me. as one of only a handful of people who truly know me, you are, i am sure, all-too familiar with my guilt complex, and this coming year, i hope to relinquish control of the things that i cannot change, should not change, yet still feel an almost debilitating responsibility toward. i cannot fix whatever is broken inside my mother, so i am releasing myself from that burden. i am surrendering all the prettily wrapped ideologies i have as to who i think i should be in god & in my faith and instead i chose to embrace him or her or they in those quiet, yet vast, places within me where i happen to know they still exist. i renounce the 12 years of stuff that pack my closets, gather cobwebs in the garage & hide in drawers that i no longer need or use or have all the parts for.

and, i suppose, above all else, i just give up. i offer up my cracks & faults & glories & beauty & humour & fear & joy & doubt & confidence & inhibitions & all my pre-packaged plans.

planes

2011-07-26T20:20:00.000-07:00

i've always been enchanted by airplanes in the night sky. i'd always imagine where those people were going ... or from what they were running. either way, seeing those lights among the stars always filled me with a sense of romance.

tonight, the pooch and i were going for a long walk - since night seems the only reprieve from oklahoma's sweltering summer heat. somewhere on the other side of sparrow park, a group of musicians were playing banjos and guitar and the last refrains of earl scruggs' "foggy mountain breakdown" filled the otherwise stagnant air. and, as i always do, i looked up, confident i'd seen an airplane leaving, departing or just flying overhead.

i wasn't disappointed. there above me was the red and white of someone's adventure or misfortune; opportunity or escape. and, as i always am, i was filled with a melancholic joy.

there have been tens of hundreds of thousands of times i've imagined where those people were going and hoped upon a million dreams i'd one day be among them.

i recalled a particular night in selma, texas, where my childhood friend shannon and i sat out on the river and watched a plane fly off into the distance. i don't know if i vocalized it then, i don't know if i would have even known how, but all i could feel were the chill bumps on my skin and the quickening of my heart and the knowledge that simon and garfunkel's "homeward bound" was the perfect soundtrack to that unnamed sensation.

or a time when i was living in portland, oregon, and lay out on the deck of my apartment - scared, lonely and hopeful. i imagined someone on that plane was heading back to oklahoma and could send my love to the people i'd left behind. or maybe a new friend would be landing in portland and our common loneliness would lead us to one another. i waved up at the plane - just in case.

or tonight, sitting in the park, petting my pooch, and thinking about all those times before. sitting there in the same neighbourhood i've lived in for the past eight years; the same neighbourhood that has expanded and grown internally to embrace the woman i've become. i watched the plane until it left my vision for chicago or newark or gatwick; until it became just another light among the stars.

and my typically sad excitement was still there, only now with the knowledge in a few short months i will flying over someone else's night sky. flying toward countries where unexploded landmines still exist, the all-too-real reminders of war and independence; to countries whose beautiful castles and villages were destroyed in the name of ethnic cleansing, but who rose again and represent nothing if not beauty and resilience.

and i offered a delayed wave to the people above me and before me. because on that night when i journey above someone else's dreams, i hope - i pray - there's someone below who's waving up at me.

"above the planet on a wing and a prayer,
my grubby halo, a vapour trail in the empty air
across the clouds i see my shadow fly
out of the corner of my watering eye
a dream unthreatened by the morning light
could blow this soul right through the roof of the night." -- pink floyd.

the great affair

2011-07-18T19:55:00.005-07:00

"our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. but no matter, the road is life." – jack kerouac

because a picture is worth a thousand words.

zola packed and ready to hit the road.

the road.

the key to a successful road trip is having a traveling pal who is just as enraptured by the wrong turns as with the final destination. (wrong turn. winterset, iowa. john wayne's birthplace.)

new friends in an olde tavern. (new glarus, wisconsin.)

happiness is whenever, we can get together. (green city market. chicago, ill.)

shot-ski. (uberstein. chicago, ill.)

there is no greater comfort than journeying with the kind of friends who not only ask you what you plan on doing with your one wild & precious life, but join the adventure with you. (pre-florence + the machine show. chicago, ill.)

src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OMXkCklEkYQ/TiTz4ADkm3I/AAAAAAAAAQw/3d_QUR4BKoM/s320/DSC01759.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5630893577533168498" />

and then there was the warrior dash. 3.28 country miles laden with lumber-climbing, pole-sliding, fire-jumping, mud-crawling intensity with my besties. (i can say bestie because there's wasn't a clean part of us. that makes it ok. it also makes it ok because afterward we took showers in a truck stop).

each day i find myself more & less surprised by this crazy life i get to live, and the amazing people that come along for the ride. we really are all in this together.

2011-03-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

there's gotta be a fiddle in the band. two is better.

2011-03-06T10:10:00.000-08:00

i'm not a good dancer. i usually abhor crowded dance floors & large numbers of people moving in obscure gestures all around me.

unless, of course, the following criteria are met:

-- my dance partner is an octogenarian with more spunk than men half his age;
-- the venue is cain's ballroom;
-- the dance floor legitimately has saw dust on the floor - and it's being used for appropriate purposes; &
-- the music is 1930's western swing.

i can remember growing up to my grandfather singing bob wills' songs under his breathe. occassionally one boot-clad foot would start beating time to the music in his head, the melody of his memories.

there'd be western swing and gospel music playing from the cab of that old green chevy each time we drove to southeast oklahoma to visit family.

so, last night, when i accepted dancing hands that were withered and rough, i felt like i was living just a little for my grandparents. each couple i saw on the dance floor made me wonder what they were like as young people. maybe they met and fell in love while seeing bob wills perform at cain's. or maybe it was under far-less glamorous circumstances. there were so many stories twirling around me that i couldn't keep up.

there was a sense of magic to be surrounded by people who had lived my years times three - and still has these amazing smiles on their faces and literal bounces in their steps.

last night was a testament to what it means to keep living, and living well.

and it doesn't hurt when there's a fiddle in the band.

3 a.m.

2011-03-04T00:59:00.000-08:00

"mine is the night, with all her stars -- edward young.

i remain in awe of the night. there's something about being awake when everyone around you is sleeping; it somehow manages you make you feel both larger and smaller - and maybe a little like a spy.

i love the mornings. i feel most professionally productive after 4 p.m. i'm relatively useless between the hours of 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. but once everyone else starts settling in with pajamas, bedtime prayers, books in bed & goodnight kisses - i start settling in to me.

it's when the words start coming again - haltingly, tentative & a little shy, like they're not quite sure they're welcome anymore. they've been in hermitage, much like the person they belong to, but i think they're ready for a new season.

so while they're pushing through the new earth, i leave you with this:

"outside my head, i cast a shadow.
i'm not someone who's seen this side of me,
but it drifts across the ground so down i look.
i could spend my time wondering who i was.
and i could count the times that i had lost or won.
And i could turn toward you and ask you what you saw.
but what do these feelings mean ..."

i am a rock

2011-02-27T22:17:00.000-08:00

"but it is the way of my people to use light words at such times and say less than we mean. we fear to say too much. it robs us of the right words when a jest is out of place." -- jrr tolkein, the return of the king.

i read this quote tonight and it resonated in that place, the one i really don't like to go to because it just seems too real.

you see, i'm quite adept at covering emotions or otherwise awkward situations with humour. it doesn't necessarily mean i don't take those things seriously, or i don't think of them in those moments right as sleep becomes wake. but it's what i do. in most situations, for me personally, finding the lightness in things is what keeps me going. my pa also told me that if a person can still laugh, then everything will eventually be ok.

but that's not what this post is about. as things often go, one train of thought will lead you down a completely different set of tracks.

instead, i'm thinking about expiration dates.

mine tends to be two years.

i seem to be really good at pouring myself into something or someone for this amount of time. but once it's time to turn that hourglass back over, it seems to just break instead.

it's never a conscious action, and it's never a choice i make. or maybe it is. i often view my reactions to things as a shimmering version of myself hovering over my corporeal form - observing and just as curious as to what i'm going to do next.

it certainly doesn't mean i don't think about the consequences or the ultimate outcome; it doesn't mean that this is the way i want it all to go. my fingers have hovered over keyboards dozens of times, just waiting to hit send on e-mails that should have been written months ago - but i don't hit send. my bags have been packed - but i don't go. the words have been burning my tongue - but i don't speak.

then things just become sour and it's time to let them go completely. i haven't yet reconciled within myself how to make things fresh again once they've spoiled. i don't know that there's a chemical or emotional equation yet created for that kind of repair.

so until someone smarter than me - or more evolved - figures it out, i fear i'll continue residing on this little island i've created out of bones, memories, music & books.

"i have my books and my poetry to protect me/i am shielded in my armour/hiding in my room, safe within my womb/i touch no one & no one touches me/i am a rock; i am an island" -- simon & garfunkle

and your very flesh shall be a great poem

2010-11-15T20:47:00.000-08:00

i figure one of these days, no matter what i am doing now to curb the inevitable, my body is going to go downhill. things are going to sag, get wrinkled and bulge in unflattering areas. i can't fight gravity, she's much stronger than i am.

that's why i don't worry about getting tattoos. my body's a temple, sure, but it's also a story. it's my story. it's a permanent moment. i realize there are stigmas in regards to tattoos. i get it, i really do. but i figure if gravity's going to do her thing, i may as well be colourful as i head south.

i'll get two new tattoos when i go home for the holidays, so maybe i should have waited to write this ... but, i needed a story to tell tonight.

shaming of the sun (indigo girls), circa 1999.

forgive the photo, but it's the only one i could find of my first tattoo. this is the only tattoo i've ever chosen off a wall at a tattoo shop, but it still has it's own meaning. it represents the joy of being young enough to get excited about being old enough to finally do something.

it was just around my 19th birthday when an old friend and mine decided to visit my family in the texas hill country. just over the state line into texas we knew that all bets were off. we stopped, got a couple of tattoos and ended up driving to houston instead. easily one of the best trips of my life. we slept in my car in the parking lot of some apartment complex, saw a man get pistol-whipped ... a man i tried to aid with my grandmother's favourite blanket and a bottle of water. we took baths in gas stations, lived well on our meager college wages & listened to the indigo girls' "shaming of the sun" all weekend. we were young and we were free.

on the wings of a dove (ferlin husky), circa 2008

this one if for my grandparents, my lifeblood. my grandparents used to sing me this old southern gospel song "on the wings of a snow-white dove" whenever i'd wake up with bad dreams as a kid. they always knew. they still do. i wrote about that once before, here.

time to pretend (mgmt), circa 2008

at this point in my life i had idea just what the hell i was doing. i was lost. i felt trapped and that i wasn't living life, that it was just whirring around somewhere in the corner of my eyes. i was already regretting all the risks i wasn't taking. it was time to get out of my comfort zone and to truly get to the business of living ... and i did.

hannah (ray lamontagne), circa 2009

it had been a shitty year full of enormous changes that, when they started, i did not think i was equipped to deal with any of it. i was wrong. although for the longest time i felt this brittle hollowness, i saw a lot of life begin to emerge from within. this tattoo always reminds me that there's so much colour and life left to life, even if a thing may seem dead. ray lay says it pretty well below (this song was that year's mantra) and, subsquently, this picture was taken by my then 4-year-old niece, hannah leih.

"i climb the tree with my Hannahlee/my intentions they were pure/oh the breeze did whip and i lost my grip/ and i tumbled towards the earth/where you never would guess who it was that stood below/and his name i would never tell/but his eyes were clear/and his arms were strong/and he caught me as i fell."

ready to start (arcade fire), circa 2010

in case you're wondering, it's on my left rib cage. and it pretty much speaks for itself. i'm rather enjoying the journey these days. with all the changes over the last couple years, the one thing i've come to trust is that i have no idea what tomorrow, next week or next year is going to hold. i'm ok with that.

i gave myself 15 minutes to write this blog. time's up.

colorshow

2010-11-14T16:59:00.000-08:00

when i was nine years old, my best friend and i would sit knee to knee on her bed whispering about our futures. or we'd curl up under her patchwork quilt in that rural oklahoma farmhouse and speak in the kind of definitive tones that only youth can lend to the future.

my childhood self imagined this blog far differently.

i spent hours sending query letters to prestigious california law schools, planning a life that involved me having long blond hair, a blue car and a husband that wore a lot of black. i saw my life in distinct colours back then ... and that's maybe the one thing that hasn't changed.

because, let's face it, i'm a short-haired brunette with a mom-coloured SUV covered in climbing stickers living a single gal's life in the same red state i grew up in. but it's a life that's full of rich hues worthy of any tapestry.

you see, in this life i get the warm, autumn glow - reds & yellows & oranges - that come from knowing i have the deepest of friendships; the indigo nights that never seem to end after a heartbreak and the violet dawns that comes after. there are violent silvers of panic and grays of doubt but they're absorbed by the kind of greens that only bare feet are allowed to tread upon.

w.h. auden once wrote that all we are not stares back at what we are. and the 9-year-old girl staring at me through that prism of age is pretty glad i started hijacking rainbows.

"be loud, let your colors show ... there's a time (now) and a place (now), someone built to take the race ..." -- the avett brothers

technologically advanced

2010-01-07T22:48:00.000-08:00

i now have internet in my home.

for the first time in over six years.

here's to finally catching up with the rest of the world.

and blogging more. definitely.

Seasons Change

2009-12-06T08:22:00.000-08:00

there have been almost four distinct seasons since last I blogged, and we're coming upon the final one.

i'm not quire sure where to begin to put down into words the last nine months of my life. but i will. just not today. and maybe not tomorrow, either.

it never ceases to amaze me how life and the universe and those yet unknown parts of oneself conspire quietly ... or sometimes not so quietly ... to uproot everything you think you know about yourself and rearrange it, remove it; relocate and replace it.

when i fell off the blogging radar i thought i was entering what would be a dark time in my life. by all logical standards it should have been. instead it turned into one of the best times of my life. i found new parts of myself to explore, and liked what i found on the other side.

but it wasn't without its repercussions. no evolution is.

and it's only now, in the light of all the adventure and excitement and growth of these seasons, that i am beginning to see - to miss - the things i hadn't even realized i lost.

winter is appropriate.

"seasons change
and you grow a little older
nothing stays the same
the past becomes the future
seasons change
and you grow a little older
no one stays the same
and my heart grows a little colder"
-- Susie Suh

wild caving

2009-04-29T17:53:00.000-07:00

I am still working on the story that accompanies these photos, but here's a little glimpse of what I've been up to these days:

Josh, Daisha, Brandy and I after descending 95-feet into Devil's Den. I absolutely love this picture that Aaron took.

Daisha, me and Brandy before the caving actually began.

I don't know if you can tell, but Brandy and I are standing beneath a waterfall. Daisha just looks hardcore.

The Compton Pit Cave Crew: Josh, Jason, me, Brandy and Daisha. Aaron and Rhyan are in the cave too, but they were working while the rest of us were making mud men in tight little cave passages.

johnny cash was one drunk bastard

2009-04-06T07:42:00.000-07:00

In the late 1960s my grandparents, aunt and mother lived in a second-floor walkup in Frankfurt, Germany, across the street from the Thomas District Officers Club. My grandfather managed the club, so it was a convenient walk to work, but not nearly as easy to get his family to sleep at night with the pounding music he’d contracted to play for impressive bigwigs from Washington and the free and flowing liquor he always kept completely stocked for those unexpected 5-stars who sometimes dropped in.

My grandfather finally had enough of active soldiering after two tours in Korea and three in Vietnam and, frankly, so had my grandmother. Having previously been an NCO, he was encouraged to apply for the rank of Chief Warrant Officer, a specialist in his field.

His specialty: my grandfather put on a hell of a party.

Pa is a small-town farm boy through and through. And, back in his younger days, he loved nothing more than to drink a cold beer to some country and western music. Since he ran the officers club, he had sole discretion about what musical artists were brought in to play.

I’m not exactly sure how it came about, but apparently my grandfather caught wind that Johnny Cash was in Germany. And it wasn’t too long before Pa managed to book the Man in Black at his club.

“I went out to greet Johnny Cash and his people,” Pa said. “Johnny Cash was one drunk bastard.”

My grandfather assured me he’d seen his share of drunk bastards, and Johnny Cash was the drunkest of them all.

“He asked me if it would be all right if he had something to eat, maybe a steak,” Pa said. “And I told him he could have just about anything he wanted.”

By this point, Pa said, he’s wondering just what the hell he’s gotten himself into and how he’s going to explain to his commanding officer that while, yes, he does have a legendary musician sitting in his club that the man’s drunk and incapable of even the basics of normal behaviour.

“So, I go into the kitchen and start laying out a steak when Johnny walks in. He said he wanted to see the steak for himself, not unkindly, but, you know, just to see if it was what he really wanted,” Pa said, adding he placed the raw meat on a server dish and handed it to Mr. Cash.

Johnny Cash promptly begins gnawing on the raw meat, blood running down his starched white shirt. His people and my grandfather wrestle the meat from his hands just as a lower-ranking officer tells my grandfather they’re ready for Mr. Cash on the stage.

“I just knew my career in the military was about over,” Pa said. “I had some pretty powerful people sitting in my club waiting to be entertained and what was I going to deliver but a bloody Johnny Cash.”

My grandfather laughed as he remembered his story, shaking his head.

“But that didn’t happen,” he said. “The moment Johnny Cash picked up his guitar and took that stage, why, I’d never seen a more sober person in my life.”

Pa said Johnny Cash walked up to the microphone, nodded hello and let loose with Ring of Fire, perfect in every way.

“That man brought the house down,” Pa said, “But make no mistake about it, Johnny Cash was still one drunk bastard.”

“I fell in to a burning ring of fire
I went down,down,down
and the flames went higher.
And it burns,burns,burns
the ring of fire
the ring of fire.”
- Johnny Cash

nostalgia

2009-03-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

i stopped in at my favourite little corner store on 30th and walker this morning to pick up a spot of breakfast. as i was deciding between orange juice and water, my eyes instead found this:

squirt.

i hadn't had squirt since i was a little girl, so i purchased a bottle and a banana (a hopefully inoffensive breakfast) and set off for work.

the last time i remember having a squirt was about the age of 8, give or take a few years in either direction. and that semi-soda is forever linked with summer afternoons in southeast oklahoma, lazy days in holdenville, which is where the majority of my grandmother's family lives.

though it is probably incredibly illegal now, back in the late 80s, my grandparents would load up pa's old green chevy with a roll-away bed in the camper, an ice chest full of squirts and shasta colas, comic books and my brother and me. my grandparents would be in the front listening to t. texas tyler, some of which trickled back to us. but mostly my brother and i would be sweating in the oklahoma heat, in the bed of a truck, but not minding it a bit as we bounced around and laughed like innocents on that two-hour drive to hughes county.

when we finally made it, we'd unload to the hugs and shouts of Old PaPaw (my grandmother's father), our crazy country cousins and an entire town full of aunts, uncles and people we were merely related to by accusation.

we'd run around old papaw's farm like the wild kids we were back then, pig tails and shirt tails flying behind us. we'd pass out breathless under the cotton wood tree, taking a moment to relax in its shade, eating apples. and, of course, my brother would try and convince our cousins to stick their tongues on live batteries.

but those were some of the most glorious summer days i knew: porch sitting and telling tall tales. uncle frankie's stories about the time he killed a man, which, knowing uncle frankie, is most likely true. falling asleep on the porch to the sound of the wind and the stars and the crickets. waking up to gospel music, foot stomping and home-cooked breakfast on the ancient stove.

that was my childhood. that was my peace. and that's what i feel my heart returning to after all this time - the simplicity, at least today.

Take All the Sky You Need

2009-03-20T07:42:00.000-07:00

He said he needed to know what I wanted, but mostly, if it was him.

We lay face to face on his bed, searching each other for what little truth remained, as our toes touched beneath the sheets. His eyes refused to let me go, though I had difficulty answering their questions.

How could I tell him that I loved him but I was afraid of him, of the way he knew me better than I knew myself. That he was nothing at all like I had envisioned, and somehow the picture we have in our minds is hard to let go of. That he opened me and taught me new things with every conversation we had. And that he got me, understood those quirks and faults that make me who I am. But, in the end, I didn’t know if it was the kind of love that would translate to wedding bells and old age.

But the hardest thing to tell him was that even though I didn’t know those answers, I wanted them all to be true - and they could be if I could just let myself feel something. How I wanted to stare across that bed at him when 40 more springs had passed us by. But all of this emotion, the depth of my feelings, took me to places I wasn’t familiar – and it was easier to dismiss him than to love him.

I said he had my heart, but …

And I didn’t need to finish; he knew what was coming. We talked about it a little longer, but my hesitation widened that chasm already growing between us.

He turned over, leaving me to stare helplessly at that earthy tattoo on his back, the very one I’d traced so many times with my fingertips. I wanted to explain, but my words betrayed me. I wanted to put my hand on that crevice of his hip where it fit perfectly, knowing I’d lost that right.

I rolled onto my stomach, feeling the hurt roll off his body. For the first time in a long time, I cried – my tears staining his pillow. But I wasn't really surprised when he moved my way, wrapping his body around me on what we both knew was our last night together.

And with his lips against my neck, he whispered Ellis: I understand. Take all the sky you need.

“We can wake up this lullaby town
Burn through every red light we found
Lift a dust cloud
Break the speed of sound
you could break free
If you want to run I'll pack my suitcase
If you want to stay I'll make a front door key
And if you need space... to fly... free
Take all the sky you need …”
- Ellis Paul

God Blessed Texas

2009-03-11T07:42:00.000-07:00

The countdown's begun until an extended weekend in the Texas Hill Country on the river in a cabin with johnny d and Tyler while visiting with the fam bam. What more could a girl ask for?

Lullaby

2009-03-10T07:42:00.000-07:00

Every Saturday we have family dinner and game night. I’m not always able to make it since I live about 90 miles north of my family, but still, it’s comforting to know this family tradition lives on: take-out Chinese food or pizza; Yahtzee, Pictionary, cards, Taboo, Catch Phrase. The theme has morphed over the years to become what it is now, but the spirit has remained the same – as dysfunctional as we are, we still work.

Due to my grandparents’ declining health, we’ve started having game night at my brother’s house, which is only a couple of blocks away. Last Saturday, I was driving that short distance back, and just as I was about to pull into the driveway, I heard an old song come on the radio – one that filled me with such nostalgia that I had no choice but to keep driving until it was over … and then some.

When I was a little girl, maybe three or four but old enough to still have a clear memory, my mother used to sing me songs before she went out for the evening … sometimes. I would look forward to those nights, after my grandmother had given me a bath and tucked me into my Snoopy sheets, when my mother would come into the bedroom we shared and sit on the edge of our bed. I’d be foggy with sleep, but still awake enough to feel her presence.

She’d always start out with Dylan, singing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” in her husky voice before creating a lullaby all her own, all mine: Dylan, Janis Joplin, Mel Tillis, Juice Newton, Neil Young, Lynn Anderson, Waylon, Willy and the Boys. And though I fought desperately against sleep, against losing these rare moments with my mother, I’d eventually drift off with images of empty-handed painters and rose gardens and Coca-Cola cowboys walking across my heart like it was Texas filling my head.

After driving my hometown streets for about half an hour, my car silent now after Mel Tillis’s Coca-Cola Cowboy had filled it with memory, I pulled back into my grandparents’ driveway, killed the engine and leaned back in my seat.

And I missed my mother.

I missed the young woman she never got to be. I missed being able to enjoy her company. I missed the relationship we never had.

But for all that was lost between us, we will always have our lullaby.

“you’re just a coca-cola cowboy
you got an eastwood smile and robert redford hair
but you walked across my heart like it was Texas
and you taught me how to say, I just don’t care …”
- Mel Tillis

Dance A Little Longer

2009-02-26T07:42:00.000-08:00

After about two miles, I chose to listen to the sound of my feet against the pavement rather than Ryan Adams, because, let’s face it, he has the ability to break my heart into a thousand little pieces – and she’s barely hanging in there as it is.

I eventually fell into the comforting sound of my rhythm, and after another mile I had almost convinced myself that if I ran faster, ran harder, I just might be able to run from this page into the next chapter of my life. But as I rounded Mesta Park I realized the only way to get out of this particular labyrinth was straight through it.

When I finally made it home, the only thing I wanted was a bath to help clear the fog of spent emotion still clouding my head. I set it up just the way I like it: almost scalding water, book within reach, candles strategically located, lights off.

As I settled back against my bath pillow, I glanced around my tiny bathroom, looking at the postcards lining the walls --Beijing, New Zealand, Australia -- but it was that fading Polaroid picture my attention finally rested upon.

I am wrapped tightly in my grandfather’s blue paisley-clad arms, my brother sits snaggle-toothed and grinning on his shoulders – December 1980. The photograph seems to represent the simplicity I’ve been craving lately. As I rested, I thought long and hard about something my grandfather told me recently.

Two weekends ago I went back to my hometown, but to say it like that’s not quite right. More accurately, I ran home. I needed my brother’s laugh, my grandfather’s version of Amazing Grace at 7 a.m. and my grandma’s pragmatism.

You’re not the black sheep of this family, my grandma told me, you’re just the one that’s a little lost right now.

On Sunday morning, I woke up early, needing to run some errands before the day started. I walked down the familiar hallway to the living room and there sat my grandfather, reading the paper and drinking his morning coffee.

And waiting for me.

For as long as I can remember, this is what we do when I am home. So I kicked off my shoes and jacket, walked into the kitchen, poured a mug of coffee and asked him for the front page.

And then I waited for him.

You doing all right these days, Udine?

Not so much, I answered.

He nods and tells me this story: It’s in the early days of the Korean War. My grandfather is in a weapons support unit sent to provide fire cover while another company is relieved of their front line duties. The radio operator, however, gets his coordinates wrong. After hours of humping through waist deep water, dirty and running with blood, the radio crackles questioning where my grandfather’s unit is. They give their coordinates and are answered by silence.

You’re behind enemy lines, the mechanical voice says, get out of there. Get.out.of.there.now.

The men in my grandfather’s unit begin to look around. And now they see what they’d been missing – dozens and hundreds of pairs of North Korean eyes come into focus, hiding in the elephant grass. They’d been watched and stalked and now they ran.

My grandfather found himself almost face down in shallow water, looking over at a newly enlisted private – and praying. Praying for his young bride and hoping she found a man who’d treat her better than my grandfather says he ever did.

I thought then that maybe if I’d never married your Ma, she’d have had a better life, and I knew I’d welcome death to give that to her, he said.

He heard shuffling just above to his head and risked glancing up. There was a North Korean soldier walking through the grass shoving his bayonet into the ground – and my grandfather waited calmly for that spear to pierce his side.

But the soldier walked right to where he was hiding, placing one foot between my grandfather’s spread arms and one on the other side, stepping over him and never seeing him.

It took me a little bit before I truly realized the good Lord was going to let me a dance a little longer, but I promised Him then and there that’s what I’d do – I’d dance.

My Pa’s not one to show much outward sign of emotion, but he reached over and took my hand in his gnarled one, the fingers curled inward with arthritis but still retained the roughness of a man who’s put them to good use.

You do that now, Udine, you dance a little longer.

And he began to hum under his breath until he found the words he was looking for:

“Eats and drinks and smokes are gone
Ice on the steps and you cain't get home
Hang your things on the peg in the corner
Giggle and wiggle and dance a little longer

Dance around, dance a little longer
Just gotta hold you just a little longer
Bing and talk, joke a little longer
Just gotta hold you justa little longer

Rained three days and the barditch full
I cain't get home, it's a muddy old pull
I live on toppa that bad hill yonder
That's why I gotta dance a little longer …”
-- Woody Guthrie

Aloha, Little Buddy

2009-02-19T06:30:00.000-08:00

Today one of my very best friends is in the sky on the way to his new home - Maui. I miss him already. But I am moved by his courage to live his dream. So, aloha little buddy -- may all those dreams come true! You were always one of the best.

Naked Gun

2009-02-17T07:08:00.001-08:00

My friend D recently was hired by the U.S. Government to a position that requires both abundant brains and a firearm.

However, the process for him "getting into the field" is long and arduous. He's passed every part with flying colours, and now all that remains is an invasive background check and security clearance.

This is how the conversation went at 7:30 a.m.

D: Hey, Mr. So&So with the U.S. Government will be calling you within the next seven days to ask you about me. I'll call you later tonight and we'll discuss what you can expect.
Me: Don't worry, D. I won't tell them about how you like to get drunk and take off your pants.
D: Yeah ... that's what I was getting to ...

Brevity

2009-02-15T13:21:00.000-08:00

I have too many words right now.
So here's a picture for you.
And (hopefully) I'll get my thoughts reigned it within the next day or so.

Love Letters

2009-02-10T21:12:00.000-08:00

Last night, I stumbled my way in my side door, full of Pei Wei and good conversation, only to discover I had no electricity. As I am fumbling through my kitchen trying to find a lighter or a match, my foot smashes into a cookie tin on the floor.

I finally get enough candle light to pick up the object of my nearly twisted ankle. I’ve been pulling items out of drawers and cabinets for the last few days in an attempt to simplify my life, get rid of all the things I don’t really need. Needless to say that (A) my house is a wreck and (B) I had no idea what was in this cookie tin, but it wasn’t empty.

Having nothing else to do, I took the tin into my living room, all warm and glowing, and sat down on the floor – turning on a little R.E.M. from my Mac. I finally get comfortable, legs propped up, wrapped in a soft blanket and open my mystery.

Inside were love letters.

I’d completely forgotten about them. Dozens of hand-written letters and drawings sent from foreign countries as my then-boyfriend studied abroad and I earned my first paycheck as a journalist in Oregon. His address written in Japanese kanji, the stamp upside down. Brown parchment paper filled with the things that only young love can stand to say.

I spent the better half of an hour reading his letters to me, seeing what he saw all those years ago through the pictures he’d draw and enclose. I could only think of how different life would be now if we’d followed through with everything we promised each other in those long-distance letters.

We wouldn’t be happy, not even close. I can’t honestly say that we truly loved one another. Maybe we thought we did, but it was that selfish kind of love – not the kind that blows your mind. It was passionate, but in the kind of way where there was either intense pain or manic joy – nothing stable, nothing solid, nothing giving about it. Not too long ago, he and I reconnected after years of silence and contempt. We talked about everything from those days, and realized now, it just made us laugh. We weren’t bitter anymore. What we were to each other had just become another part of our individual stories.

But, god, if we didn’t believe in ourselves then. These letters proved it.

I was telling a good friend this morning that I feared the art of love letters was dead. That so often we fail to write out our hearts and rely instead on e-mail or text message or a Facebook comment.

No it’s not, she told me. Her husband still writes her love letters all the time – penning beautiful words that still make her cry.

I can be insanely cynical at times, but deep down, I am hopelessly romantic. I still believe in the fairy tale. And I was thrilled to hear that somewhere it wasn't dead.

And one day, I figure I'll know it's real when I wake up to find a hand-written letter left on the empty pillow next to me -- ink and paper and our lingering scents trapped in the fiber.

“I wear my own crown and sadness and sorrow
And who'd have thought tomorrow could be so strange?
My loss, and here we go again
I'll take you over, there
I'll take you over, there
Aluminum, tastes like fear
Adrenaline, it pulls us near…”
R.E.M.

Magic Ain't Real

2009-02-09T08:49:00.000-08:00

Warm days always remind me of him. Maybe because that’s where we began – summer nights wrapped up in neon,road trips and the perfect mixed CD. Even then I knew he was the kind of boy I’d never be able to figure out, but somehow whatever risk there was seemed worth it. He was a mystery and as much as it sometimes hurt, I never could quite walk away from his unknown.

He called me from a dirt road in the south, one of those country ones where the ruts are deep and the end is dead. He said men do one of two things when they finally find something worth holding on to: embrace it or run like hell.

He was always the runnin’ kind.

So I whispered the one truth that set fire to the only lie I ever told him: that I couldn’t allow my heart to be possessed by a boy who had a tendency of leaving it behind.

That’s where I was wrong, he said. It’s not that he left it behind. It’s just that he wasn’t quite sure he knew what to do with it. Because somehow, on those long stretches of highway between one life and the next, I always had this way of consuming his thoughts – and he’d rethink being in the all places I wasn’t.

I thought about those times when our hesitant lips would meet, even though we both knew he’d be gone by dawn. I didn’t understand how he could keep leaving, but he tasted like truth when we kissed – so I believed him when he said my memory tended to follow him whenever he left.

What I didn’t tell him during that long silence was that if only he’d say the word, I’d climb into his passenger seat, throw my bare feet on his dash and together we could travel the distance, seek the wonder, share the adventures. We were following the same path, but one of us always seemed just a little frightened by that.

I knew he’d read the book, the one that said it was good for a man’s heart to be undomesticated, so instead I paraphrased C.S. Lewis: You’re not safe, I said, but you’re good. But I also knew if we continued this conversation, if we actually said out loud all that was unspoken between us, it would just leave us feeling empty when we hung up the phone. It was time to disconnect.

Tell me this before you go, he said: Did you ever love me?

He belonged where he was. And I knew the words I was about to say would not only keep him there, but take him away from me entirely. So he became my biggest lie.

Nah, I said. What we had wasn’t love, it was magic.

And everybody knows magic ain’t real.

“Maybe I’m too young
To keep good love from going wrong
But tonight, you’re on my mind
So … you never know
Broken down and hungry for your love
With no way to feed it
Where are you tonight?
Child, you know how much I need it
Too young to hold on
Too old to just break free and run
Sometimes a man
Gets a carried away
When he feels like he should be having his fun
Much too blind to see the damage he’s done
Sometimes a man must awake to find that, really, he has no one ...”
– Jeff Buckley

In a good way, right?

2009-02-02T06:02:00.000-08:00

I have a bad habit of being absolutely captivated by certain songs. I will stop what I am doing and just listen, staring out windows or sitting through traffic lights until I have fully extracted all manner of joy and feeling from that particular song. Unfortunately Priscilla – my iPod—chose this morning to create the world’s most personally heartbreaking mix of songs on shuffle.

Me: Mates, Ray, REM Unplugged, Amos Lee. She’s killing me!
Kathy: In a good way, right?

Welcome to my good way:

Polar Opposites – Modest Mouse
“Polar opposites don't push away
It's the same on the weekends as the rest of the days
And I know I should go but I will probably stay
And that's all you can do about some things”

Hold You in My Arms – Ray LaMontagne
“When you kissed my lips with my mouth so full of questions
My worried mind that you quiet
Place your hands on my face
Close my eyes and say
That love is a poor man's food”

Blue & Gold Prints – Mates of State
“Your face, still drifting inside my head
The weight it is gone
The words that I could have said
I sang instead
When other girls only cried
I call it grace
I am a mindless child”

Tessallate – Tokyo Police Club
“Because dire times call for dire faces
So lovely dancer, call and answer
Trade our places in the night
We're running barefoot, you and I
Dead lovers salivate
Broken hearts tessellate tonight”

At Your Most Beautiful – REM
“I read bad poetry
Into your machine
I save your messages
Just to hear your voice
You always listen carefully
To awkward rhymes
You always say your name.
Like I wouldn't know it's you
At your most beautiful”

Almost Forgot Myself Again – Doves
“So close
Yet you're wasted again
I know, somehow
We'll find ourselves...
I don't know, I don't know
Then we'll be high again
I almost forgot myself there
It hits you so hard
And kills again
I almost forgot myself again
I almost forgot myself there
It's hitting me hard
It moves me again
Again...”

Bloggies

2009-01-29T23:52:00.000-08:00

Rigadoni awarded me this noble prize decreeing my blog worthy of reading. For that, I thank thee. Apparently the way it works is that I post this pretty little award photo, answer a series of questions and then award the prize to five other people, presumably those I think will also post this award. It's like a chain letter of blogging success. So, here goes:

Here are the steps:

1. Say one nice thing to the man in your life:
Really? This blog is contingent upon saying something nice about the man in my life? How strange. But, I agreed to participate, so: Dear Man in my Life, thanks for inspiring me. Who you are colours each word I write.

2. List at least 6 ways you measure success in your life:
1.) If I can say I've lived my life in such a way that makes my grandparents proud, then I will have considered it a success.

That's all.

3. Assign 5 other blogs this award:

Kathy
Megan
Micayla
Tyler (I suppose you can change that first question to woman ...)
Emily

Let's Get Out of This Country

2009-01-28T05:50:00.000-08:00

He said he didn’t know how to do it, but he couldn’t take it another day– and did I understand that? That feeling of being trapped in a life he didn’t own, in clothes that didn’t fit and constantly breathing the air of people whose dreams were entirely different than his.

It’s poison, he said. Anathema. To breath the same air of people who just wanted to suffocate you.

It was much too cold to be sitting on my front porch, but he couldn’t sit still. I’d already followed him from my living room to my bedroom to my kitchen back to my bedroom and now on the front porch just so I could keep up with him.

He tells me he sits in a cubicle all day, in front of a computer, doing work that doesn’t really make a difference in the world and fantasizing about things best left to the night. He says he drinks bourbon and smokes weed at home in the evening because at least that kind of numbing is on his own terms.

But yet, something compels him to stay. He doesn’t walk away from this life for the one he truly wants because of some perverse sense of loyalty – to his responsibilities, his parents, to some phucked up ideal on how a man his age should act.

He’s conflicted, he says. Because who can tell a person the right or wrong way to life his or her life. So he doesn’t like to iron his shirt and tuck it in – does that make him less intelligent, less motivated than the guy who does?

His struggle was obvious, straddling the fence between two worlds. He wanted to be a responsible adult, but he couldn’t figure out why not liking the corporate 8-5 made him any less of one.

I have an idea, he said.

He turned back into my house and sat down in front of my computer.

It’s now or never, baby girl, he said. Now or never.

He drafted his resignation letter. First, he drafted what he really wanted to say to each person in his office, saved that for posterity, then typed his final letter – saying simply in two weeks he’d be gone. He hit print, grabbed the letter, grabbed my arm and it was time to go.

His office looked eerie at this time of night with no one there, and I felt like a spy or a mistress. He sat down in his cubicle, spinning around in his chair. And grinning.

Hmm, he said. So this is what it feels like to make a decision for yourself.

I sat at his co-worker’s desk and watched him, failing to not eat the Skittles in her candy jar. It was quiet for a long moment before he stood and walked purposefully to his boss’s locked door, dropped in his resignation letter and walked back to me.

How do you feel, I asked.

Free, dammit.
I feel free.

"Let’s get out of this country
I’ll admit I am bored with me
I drowned my sorrows and slept around
When not in body, at least in mind

We’ll pick berries and recline
Let’s hit the road, dear friend of mine
Wave goodbye to our thankless jobs
We’ll drive for miles, maybe never turn off
We’ll find a cathedral city
You can be handsome, I’ll be pretty"
--Camera Obscura

29

2009-01-20T05:06:00.000-08:00

Today I woke up
And I was 29.
That is all.

"I took a train and came up from Carolina
I was looking for something to do
Nothing I found could ever quite occupy me
With nothing to gain there's always nothing to lose
Singing and dancing to them nighttime songs
Cry me a river till the morning comes"

Hello, I'm a Mac ...

2009-01-15T11:46:00.000-08:00

My taxes are DONE and my happy new Macbook is almost in my hands.

Books o' the Year

2009-01-14T15:58:00.000-08:00

Because I haven't really anything else to say, these are the books I read in 2007. Each year tends to have a theme I don't realize until I sit down and create a list of books read. This year the trend tended toward children's or young adult literature. I'm kind of a YA literature junkie anyway. There are certain books I reread every year, and I don't know what this says about me, but I read Twilight twice.

1.) The Secret Supper
2.) Harry Potter & the Soceror's Stone
3.) Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets
4.) Speak
5.) Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
6.) Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire
7.) Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix
8.) Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince
9.) Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows
10.) Notes on a Scandal
11.) Christine Falls
12.) White Teeth
13.) Bringin' Down the House
14.) My Sister's Keeper
15.) The Things They Carried
16.) On the Road
17.) Broken For You
18.) Trans-Sister Radio
19.) Glass Castle
20.) Eat, Pray, Love
21.) Solos
22.) Water for Elephants
23.) Hot Water Music
24.) Night
25.) The Abortionist's Daughter
26.) Blue Like Jazz
27.) Twilight
28.) New Moon
29.) Eclipse
30.) Breaking Dawn
31.) Remember Me
32.) Promise Not to Tell
33.) Snow Flower & the Secret Fan
34.) White Oleander
35.) The Book Thief
36.) Wayside School
37.) A River Runs Through It
38.) Goodnight Nobody (which confirmed I don't particularly care for "chick lit.")
39.) Raw Shark Texts
40.) Sin in the Second City
41.) Gospel According to Judas
42.) Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
43.) The Great Gatsby
44.) The Double Bind
45.) Double Fudge
46.) Life After God
47.) I Am the Messenger
48.) Looking for Alaska
49.) Monsters of Templeton
50.) The House I First Believed
51.) The Outsiders
52.) The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Lost in Translation

2009-01-13T14:19:00.000-08:00

Ich weiß nicht, warum ich es so, finde zu trösten, um auf Deutsch zu schreiben, wenn es Sachen gibt, die ich sagen möchte, aber nicht kann. Es ist fast, als wenn ich einen Kokon herstellen und innerhalb er sich begraben kann, dennoch erhält noch die Freigabe, die ich benötige. Es gibt Sachen, die ich kenne, dass ich tun muss: Ich muss über ihn schreiben, ich muss nicht auf Wochennächte trinken, ich muss manchmal, zu sprechen stoppen.

I need to find the dignity I hid in the back pocket of those jeans I left on his floor.

Morgen glaube ich dieser Weise nicht mehr, aber heute im Augenblick glaube ich ihr aller - jeder letzte Tropfen. Ich lasse mich nie verärgert erhalten. Ich versuchte, anzunehmen die Situation für, was es war. Aber, verwirrte ihn zu kennen in meinem Bett und mit ihrem Kopf gleichzeitig… brach er etwas innerhalb ich, der nur ein Haarstrichbruch war. Jetzt gibt es Stücke gebrochene Knochen, die heraus durch meine Haut stoßen.

But I am not the only one who spins a web.

"So fuck you, fuck you, fuck you
And all we've been through
I said leave it, leave it, leave it,
It's nothing to you
And if you hate me, hate me , hate me,
Then hate me so good that you can let me out, let me out, let me out
Let me out of this hell when you're around"
--Damien Rice

Ramblin' Boy

2009-01-05T07:31:00.000-08:00

“Look outside,” he said and hung up.

I opened my rarely used front door and there he stood across the street, leaning against his beat-up Blazer like he hadn’t been gone for the last four years.

I started then stopped. My first instinct was to run to him, wrap my arms around him and refuse to let go. But instead I just stared. He looked the same as he did then, maybe a little dirtier in his tattered jeans and one of those wrinkled pearl-snap shirts that I love. His hair was longer and curled around his ears, probably hadn’t been washed in a few days, and his face was scruffy.

I heard him laugh, that slow country sound born from long afternoons on his father’s combine. His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, but I knew they were rolling. He always found it funny when he left me without words.

“Come here and touch me,” he joked, as he made his way forward to give me a hug.

“You’re back,” I said, knowing he wasn’t.

“I’m here,” he answered.

He gave me a gentle push to get me inside and lay down on the floor.

“God, this is the most comfortable place I’ve been in months,” he said.

I continued to watch him, sprawled out there on my floral rug, thumbing through the tracks on my iPod until he found something he liked.

Dylan.

I wasn’t surprised. He tapped his foot and snapped his fingers, singing along to Tangled up in Blue.

“Can I stay,” he finally asked, already knowing the answer.

He began to tell me about where he’d been and I fell into his life.

Four years ago, after graduating law school, he went to Europe for a month – and never came back. England, Spain, France, Germany, Italy. Then India, China, Japan, Korea. Russia, Romania, Turkey, Hungary, Poland. Egypt, Uganda, Rwanda.

He couldn’t come back, he told me. So he made a deal with himself.

His parents were older when they had him, the only son of a successful rancher and small-town doctor. His mother was told she couldn’t have children, and when she realized she was pregnant at 45, as a medical professional she knew the risks. As a mother, they didn’t matter.

His father was 56 when he was born, four years away from diagnosed prostate cancer, which eventually claimed his life when his son was 10. His mother died while he was in college.

However, they left him a substantial inheritance.

The deal: he’d use some of his inheritance to travel but would put down roots when he was 30 – nine days away.

“And it makes me sick, really,” he said. “The thought of getting up every morning and putting on a suit, buying a fancy silver SUV, direct depositing a paycheck … I actually get depressed at the thought of living that kind of life.”

He came back stateside permanently last year, to put some feelers out with his former law school friends, fully intending to keep his promise.

And, he did make a call or two – then he bought the Blazer, sold his parents’ house and started in Washington State. He drove south, working odd jobs roofing houses in Eugene, Oregon; waiting tables at a steakhouse in St. Louis Obispo, Calif. Then he went east, staying with a cousin in Albuquerque; a temporary lover in Houston and his mother’s disowned gay brother in Clearwater, Florida.

From there, it was Georgia and the Carolinas and the east coast. He fell in love in Maine and ended up nursing his broken heart back to health in Wyoming.

“And now I’m here,” he said. “150 miles from where I started.”

“You’re a lot farther than that,” I said.

He looked at me, unsmiling.

“Am I,” he asked. “Am I?”

He told me to look at these and pulled books from his knapsack. Pages and pages of his writing, his art, his photographs.

“This is my life … it’s all right here,” he said. “This is who I am … whoever that is …”

But he’d lost me.

He’d lost me with the way he turned a phrase in his messy left-handed writing. The way he captured the faces of an elderly couple having lunch in Izmir, Turkey. The coffee stains across a photograph of a deserted drive-in theater in Alabama.

I don’t know if it’s possible to fall in love with someone for the briefest of moments, but there, on my living room floor, with years of his life spilled out around us, I loved him.

I loved the way he lived life – recklessly, passionately, without prior thought or reason. I loved his refusal to settle for convention, for safety; his resistance of normal. He created his own sense of normal and lived his life in the parameters he’d constructed.

For the next few days, he took me there – to all those places I’d only read about. His voice guided me to sleep, falling into dreams of white chalk cliffs of the Sacro Monte, as we watched the Andalusian women in their vibrant gypsy clothes dancing, dancing, dancing.

When I returned home one day, I found a note taped to the side door. In his typical way, he didn’t say good-bye, not really. He’d never been a good-bye kind of boy.

But he tried.

On the back of his coffee-stained, black and white photo of that abandoned Alabama drive-in, he’d written in his awful handwriting: “What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? It’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

He called sometime in the early morning. I saw his number but let the phone keep ringing. His voicemail said he wanted to properly say good-bye, but I couldn’t think of anything better than the Kerouac he’d left me with.

He’d somehow managed to leave behind his magic, and it filled the suddenly dull night.

“So I linger on this windy road
I hope your tears are dry
don't you never forget this ramblin' boy
no matter how hard you try
cause I am called the ramblin' boy
like the wind that is so free
yes I am called the ramblin' boy
so ramblin' boy I'll be …”
-- Donovan

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

2008-12-30T00:57:00.000-08:00

Brandy gets high before every show. She tells me that each time her nipple is squeezed between unfamiliar fingers, it’s a jar of baby food for her daughter; every lap dance a box of crayons or Kleenexes for her son’s kindergarten class. It’s not the life she wanted, she says, but it’s the life she got.

She tells me this while staring at me through menthol smoke, as though she’s daring me to judge her. I meet her eyes. There’s no judgment here. We’ve all got our demons.

She called me the Monday before Christmas, saying her brother mentioned we’d had coffee the previous week, and wouldn’t I stop by and see her when I was in town for the holidays. I hadn’t seen Brandy since high school, back when she was just Kael’s little sister – mousy, bookish and shy. It would be good to see her again, see how she’d changed. She said she worked the late shift, but it would be all right if I stopped by her work for a bit on my way home.

That’s how I found myself at the Golden Fountain on Christmas Eve, sharing a beer with a childhood friend in our hometown’s finest strip joint.

She’d run up to me when I walked in, embracing me in a topless hug while simultaneously shimmying for a middle-aged man in a dark corner. The entire place smelled like smoke and sweat, lust and guilt. Brandy grabbed my hand and led me to an even darker corner of the bar, stopping along the way for a $5 lap dance.

“When Jace was born, I had nobody,” she said. “Kael had left for college, daddy was dead. So, it was meth.”

Then, she discovered, she had to find a way to support her son and her habit, and working as a night-shift cashier at Wal-Mart wasn’t paying the bills or the dealers. So, one night, high on meth, she showed up at the Fountain, took off her clothes and found herself straddling a man passed out in a chair when she came down.

“But I had $500 cash dollars in my panties … and a girl can’t complain about that,” she said.

By her third month in, she was pregnant again - but she couldn’t remember how she got that way. Seven months later, her daughter was born a premature drug baby and the state of Oklahoma promptly swept in and took her children away.

She got them back in March, 10 months later.

“Funny thing is, I did a lot of talking to your mother in those days. I thought if I told her I knew you, she’d help me get my kids back,” she said. “But she didn’t. Can’t blame her.”

She stayed clean long enough to convince the Department of Human Services she was a fit mother, with a record of NarcAnon attendance and a switch to a day position at Wal-Mart.

It didn’t take though, she tells me. Not the support groups or the job or the staying clean.

I watch her chain smoking and fidgeting, occasionally bounding from our conversation to get on stage – Pour Some Sugar on Me is her song – or to answer the call of some drunken regular. A tickle, a tease, a wink. It’s what she does now.

They call her Aspen. She says that’s the last place and time she felt normal, a family vacation to Colorado before her father died in 1999. Her stripper name is in remembrance of him.

“Trust me,” she says. “I get the irony.”

She starts to tell me more, but quickly disappears from the table without a word. I look around, perplexed by her sudden departure, until my eyes land on Kael, her older brother. His eyes find me through the haze just as his sister returns to the table, having put a tank top on.

“My brother can’t see my tits,” she says coarsely. “He never comes here. But it’s Christmas Eve. You’re here and Kael’s here …”

Kael sits down beside me, handing me a glass of water. He smiles: “I know your rule about drinking in this town.” I smile back and it suddenly doesn’t matter that it’s almost Christmas and I am watching topless girls with nipple tassels gyrating to 80s rap. Because, somehow, I know it’s where I am supposed to be.

Brandy says she just needed be around someone who knew what she was like before. Before she was 25 and looked 40, before her teeth began to fall out and her arms were laced with track marks.

Before, she says. That’s all I really want tonight.

I stay until just before closing, Kael disappearing each time his sister takes the stage. She’s supposed to go home with him, but after her last dance she glances nervously between her brother and a balding man in a sports jacket and wedding ring.

Kael puts his arm around me and leads me from the bar, both of us looking back in time to see Brandy nuzzling the guy to a back room. Kael’s laugh is bitter, his eyes wet.

“Well,” he says, almost to himself.”God rest ye merry gentlemen, right?”

And he pulls me into the neon night.

“God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay,
Remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day;
To save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray”

They Come Alive At Night

2008-12-22T07:27:00.000-08:00

When I was a little girl, I had these little dolls – Glamour Dolls – and a dollhouse that set between the kitchen and formal dining room of my grandparents' house. Each night, before I went to bed, I’d put my dolls to bed as well.

And, as I was going strong on a Walton’s kick, I’d tell each one of them goodnight: “Goodnight Betty. Goodnight Linda Lou.” (I don’t really know if these were my dolls' names, but it sounds very much like something I would have named a 5-inch doll when I was 4.) Then I’d put them to bed.

Simple, right?

After about a week of noticing my dolls were not, in fact, still in bed when I came to wake them up and play with them in the morning, I approached my grandmother.

“Nemaw, my dolls are always sitting at the kitchen table when I wake up. They’re supposed to be in bed, where I put them the night before,” I told her.

My grandmother looks at me with all seriousness, most likely setting down her cup of coffee with determination. This next part, I remember clearly.

My grandmother pulls me onto her lap and begins rubbing my back.

“There’s something you should know,” she tells me. “When you sleep at night, your dolls come alive. The get up and they move around their house. You’ve just caught them having breakfast.”

I've just caught them having breakfast?!?

I’m pretty sure I started crying and I honestly don’t remember ever playing with those dolls again. Grandmas don’t lie. I was convinced my dolls lived and breathed at night while I was sleeping. I still have a phobia of certain things like the Burger King guy on the commercial and puppets..

This weekend, I drove to a nearby town to pick up some dolls, doll furniture and a dollhouse for my youngest niece. My sister-in-law had found them on craigslist and thought I might like to buy the set for Hannah.

I get to the lady’s house, she hands me a box, I hand her $20 and get back in my car. I open the box … and there are the exact same dolls I had a kid. I laugh and don’t think anything about it.

Until that night.

Around 3 a.m. Saturday night/Sunday morning, I thought I heard something moving in my house. I’m not really prone to excessive fear, and am generally the type of person to just get up, turn on a light and check in out.

So, that’s what I did.

I walked into the kitchen and there were the dolls, lying on the floor. I distinctly remember placing them on my washer when I got home that afternoon and could think of no reason why they wouldn’t still be on my washer. But now the box was on the floor and the dolls were by the refrigerator. Granted, not a huge distance from one another, but it was enough.

I grabbed the dolls, threw them back into the box, taped the boxed and ran out into the 2-degree weather in my underwear and locked the dolls in my car.

I’ll be damned if creepy dolls come alive in my house.

Post Script: My grandmother later admitted she would move my dolls when she woke up in the morning just to freak me out. She thought it was funny.

Oh Do Not Fly Away

2008-12-17T10:08:00.000-08:00

I was startled to see him in that fluorescently lit retail store in our hometown on a Tuesday morning when I knew we both had jobs in the city. I wouldn’t have recognized him if I hadn’t literally run into him, arms full of bread and soup and various other supplies I’d been sent for.

I could feel him smiling down at me as I bent to pick up my spilled wares. And as he reached to help, he said my name.

I looked into his face for the first time, and immediately dropped everything again as I wrapped my arms around him in a hug.

“It’s been a while,” he says, smiling that crooked grin that hasn’t changed in the last 15 years. “How is that we’re both in the city, but we never see one another?”

I don’t remember his eyes being that green or his voice being that deep or his laugh being that comforting. I remember glasses and braces and fart jokes; ducking out of last hour Trigonometry to speed through the country in his 1975 Jeep Renegade listening to Nick Drake, parking down by the low water crossing with a slice of pizza and talk, talk, talking before heading home or to softball/basketball/academic bowl team practice.

But no, I don’t remember the way my skin nearly jumped off my body at the sound of my name on his lips, and I always thought his eyes were brown … or gray.

We walked the aisles for a few minutes, finishing up our shopping and catching up. We made our way through the checkout line and out into the frigid December morning, the Wichita Mountains to the north covered in a hazy fog. We paused to say good-bye, hugged again and walked in separate directions.

“Wait,” he called out. “Coffee. It’s 19-degrees out here. We definitely need coffee.”

I smiled on the inside and the outside and pointed in the general direction of town.

“I hear we have a Starbucks now,” I said.
“And they finally built that Olive Garden after 13 years of rumours,” he added.

He met me at my house and my grandparents thrilled to see him again. They loved him all those years ago – acne, Star Wars, Orson Scott Card – and before I knew it he and my grandfather were in the garage discussing guy things while my grandma gave me curious glances over the top of her glasses as she directed me in the correct way to put up the groceries.

But I just hummed Nick Drake tunes under my breath.

We finally found ourselves on overstuffed chairs in the coffee shop, laughing about those lazy days years ago. We settled into a friendly silence, like wrapping up in a warm blanket and watching Casa Blanca. That’s how comfortable he was, how good he made me feel.

We hadn’t seen each other since I moved to the city, eight years ago. Despite our former closeness, we failed to stay in contact. I had heard through the grapevine he’d transferred colleges and eventually ended up with a good engineering job.

But those afternoons in his Jeep were a lifetime ago. And yet, and yet. Here we sat as though nothing had changed, picking up the thread of the last conversation we’d had.

It was midnight before I was to leave for college. We were sitting in the TV Room at my house, eating reheated Chinese food and making plans for when he’d come up to see me. And, because sometimes he could suddenly turn serious, he looked at me through his too-thick glasses and asked what I was running from.

I was startled into honesty.

And then there, in the warmth of the coffee shop and his presence, he asked me if I’d gotten far enough away, in that direct way he has of speaking - holding my eyes, refusing to let me go.

I don’t know how long I talked, but he never once interrupted me. He moved closer, resting his elbows on his knees and watching me intently. I talked about the triumphs and the failures and that, truth be told, I didn’t have a phucking clue. I talked about my desires, even the ones no one knows about – the little things I hide in my heart for fear of jinxing them by circulating them about the great unknown. I talked about my family, the pressures, the Great Perhaps.

He brought me a scone.

Then he started talking. About the songs, the craziness, the way it felt to bring his creations to life. He talked about his sister, his mother, his dead father he’s still pissed off at. He talked about the girls, the drugs and the getting straight. He said he didn’t have a clue either.

And we laughed.

Because what else could we do in a coffee shop on a Tuesday afternoon in the hometown from which we’d both fled – straight and fast. Laugh and talk and enjoy the warmth of each other, if only for a moment.

“Strange face, with your eyes
So pale and sincere
Underneath you know well
You have nothing to fear
For the dreams that came to you when so young
Told of a life
Where spring is sprung”
-Nick Drake-

Vitalists, Part I

2008-12-15T18:38:00.000-08:00

The first time my mother tried to kill herself, she nearly succeeded.

She was 19 years old and nine months pregnant, with a heavy weight sitting in her stomach that had little to do with the child growing inside. She’d spent a long cool season being miserable in a trailer in Longview, Texas, and while she didn’t want to hurt the kid growing inside her – she’d already named him Joshua, Jehovah is Salvation – she couldn’t justify bringing a little life into a world she herself couldn’t quite fit into.

So with a whispered prayer of forgiveness, she slid into the claw-foot tub with a bottle of pills and a bottle of whiskey. But one thing my mother failed to consider was how the women in our family come from a long line of what the old folks still call vitalists – strange women with strange abilities.

And I was already one.

I only have my grandmother’s account to go on, as I was still being formed in the womb, but she says a scream begat a fire, and the fire begat me. She said I came out mostly undamaged from my mother’s failed attempt at dying, except for my fear of the water and the burn of unknown knowledge on the back of my neck.

But first there was the scream.

My mother had as much settled into her decision as she had that warm bath of death. In her thinking, she was cleansing us both, saving us. But just as the first licks of water began to fill her lungs, her stomach began to burn. Weakly at first, nothing more than a discomfort, but then this building pressure until it was a raging inferno.

And as the scream of life trumping death escaped from my mother’s lips, as next door the Fletcher’s house exploded at exactly that same moment, shooting flames into the air – I decided to make my delayed entrance into this world.

A vitalist, indeed.

For Michael Shaw

2008-12-11T07:07:00.001-08:00

Dear K-Nash's father,

I was thrilled to learn you read my blog. The second-hand knowledge that you appreciate my mostly unused humour fills me with confidence. And joy. There's definitely some joy in there. So, in closing, I'd just like to say thank you, Michael Shaw. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Your daughter's friend/coworker/fellow blogger
AND
your son-in-law's old college pal

PS: Do you know anyone in Alaska? Because someone in Alaska seems to know us ...

Top Fives -or- Because K-Nash Threatened Me

2008-12-04T11:19:00.000-08:00

K-Nash threatened me to update this blog, so I am taking my cue from Rob Gordon and composing Top 5 lists of random information that you probably don’t care about.

Books Read in 2008:
1.) Twilight Series
2.) Water for Elephants
3.) The Book Thief
4.) Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
5.) Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal
Oh, and the Harry Potter books … but I was years behind in reading all those.

Songs Listened to According to iTunes (and on this particular computer):
1.) Jolene – Ray LaMontagne
2.) What’s Been Goin’ On – Amos Lee
3.) If I Am a Stranger – Ryan Adams
4.) Lover – Devendra Banhart
5.) Cigarettes, Wedding Bands – Band of Horses

People I’ve Received Personal E-mails From:
1.) Fluorescent Adolescent
2.) K-Nash
3.) Best Sister
4.) Widget
5.) My Mom

People I’ve Spent Time With:
1.) Best Sister
2.) Widget
3.) D
4.) Dino
5.) Myself (do I count?)

Places I’ve Spent My Time(excluding friends’ houses):
1.) Borders
2.) Stillwater
3.) Louie’s
4.) Belle Isle Library
5.) Guest Room Records

Places to Eat:
1.) Sala Thai
2.) Goperaum
3.) Kamp’s
4.) Zorba’s
5.) Red Onion

Ok, I'm done now.
-30-

Midnight Angels

2008-11-26T07:50:00.000-08:00

I don’t like feeling helpless.

But the smell of burning rubber and a deserted interstate Friday night left me feeling just that. I was north of where I was going, south of everywhere I knew with a shredded tire, a nearly dead cell phone and quickly running out of options.

The exit I took landed me parked outside a shady building called Brandt’s River Bar, a tacky little place just west of the interstate on an otherwise deserted country road. I sat there for a few minutes wondering, first of all, just where the hell I was and secondly, who would be willing to come rescue me.

I didn’t have an answer for either question.

My grandparents taught me better than to panic but the hour was growing later, the dome of sky darker and the crowd inside the bar a little rowdier. And still I sat there. I thought of all the boys who’ve changed my tire before – both of them. One was out of town and the other, well, we don’t talk too much these days. My brother was 100 miles away, but, in the way that big brothers have, wouldn’t think twice about coming to rescue his stranded little sister. Again.

But I didn't call. Helpless and stubborn – not the best combination.

I got out of my car and walked around it a few times, thinking maybe inspiration would hit or I would suddenly know how to change a flat tire. I’m pretty sure I was talking to myself. I do that when I’m trying to work something out in my head. That’s when I saw the burning end of a cigarette coming toward me, from a trailer home next to the bar.

Make that two.

Knit caps pulled low, bulky jackets, baggy pants, heavy boots – I made a mental note as I reached inside my pockets for something to protect myself with. I came back with a bobby pin, 32-cents and a 25-percent off coupon for Borders. Great -- I could get my bangs out of my eyes and buy a stamp if it were 1997.

I ‘m not entirely sure what I expected from these two rough-looking strangers, but it certainly wasn’t good will. That’s exactly what I got, though .

They introduced themselves. Explained that Brandt of Brandt’s River Bar fame was their grandfather, proprietor of the little hole in the wall bar since the 1960s. Yes, they could change a tire and would be more than willing to help me and did I want a Dr. Pepper from the bar – that’s what they were drinking.

Levi and David. They rigged a contraption to raise my car off the sloping dirt drive. Found a hydraulic jack when my own jack wasn’t able to get the job done. Helped me unload the boxes I’ve been carrying around in the back of my car for about two years and generally slapped me in the face with their unexpected kindness.

That wad of judgment in my other coat pocket was beginning to burn a little.

"So take it as a song or a lesson to learn
And sometime soon be better than you were
If you say you're gonna go, then be careful
And watch how you treat every living soul"
--Band of Horses--
____________________________________
On a sidenote: Megan, just read your blog and am preparing my speech. I'll post it over the holidays. Thank you for the honour! :)

Waiting For It ...

2008-11-17T01:42:00.000-08:00

And sometimes, this is where I put my trust:

I will stand my watch
And set myself on the rampart
And watch to see what He will say to me
And what I will answer when I am corrected.
Then the Lord answered me and said:
"Write the vision And make [it] plain on tablets, That he may run who reads it.
For the vision [is] yet for an appointed time; But at the end it will speak
and it will not lie.
Though it tarries, wait for it;
Because it will surely come.
It will not tarry.”

And I will wait for it.

Watching Television Properly

2008-11-10T05:56:00.000-08:00

Disturb Me

2008-10-29T07:43:00.001-07:00

Disturb us, Lord when
We are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore."
Sir Francis Drake, 1577

My hope is to be disturbed, unsettled, so that I cannot comfortably live in complacency.
My prayer is for more restless nights until I can dream bigger, beyond the here and now.
My heart is breaking for adventure, for newness, for soul searching.
My time is now.

Vehicular Slaughter

2008-10-23T02:00:00.000-07:00

Last night my grandfather and I talked on the phone for about an hour. During the course of the conversation, which included my plans for the future and, oddly enough, snakes, we also recounted my vehicular history. My grandfather is well versed in my driving record, as it was usually him who’d come pick me (or my car/truck/SUV) up on the side of the road after yet another wreck – whether it involved another car, a tree or, in one case, an entire herd of cattle.

I turned 16 in January 1996. About two weeks before my birthday, my father took me to get my first car. He told me my price range, which looking back may have been the one and only mistake my father ever made, and set me loose to pick my ride. This is what I chose:

Meet Yuley, a 90s Mitsubishi Eclipse. Yuley was my first taste of freedom, and unfortunately the driving (no pun intended) force behind the fact that I ended up pretty much ditching the entire second semester of my sophomore year in high school. I never went to school and ended up having to walk up to Mr. Whistler, the vice principal, and ask: “Do you seriously not notice I haven’t been here in two months …” He subsequently gave me three days of in-school suspension and a pat on my shoulder. I still, to this day, don’t understand how I got away with skipping nearly an entire semester of school and stay in the good graces of school administrators. I’d dropped out of the Gifted & Talented program when I started my freshman year, but once I returned to school, I found at least two teachers had nominated me for reinstatement. I’m baffled, still, but that’s another blog.

The summer after sophomore year, I decided I was moving back to Oklahoma, or else it was decided for me, and I would attend a small rural school with Best Sister. One summer day, Best Sister, AJ and I were out on Gatlin Road, probably coming back from AJ’s place. I can’t remember. I was still a new driver, and I’d never taken too well to it anyway. Somehow missing the signs for the curve, we ploughed head-on into a minivan going about 60 miles an hour.

We miraculously walked away unhurt, but I couldn’t say the same for Yuley. He was dead, and I had my first traffic ticket.

The adults in my life took care of all the details – insurance law suits, car loans, chauffeuring me the 30 miles to high school. Until my grandparents decided I needed another car. They sighed deeply and parted with their 1984 Dodge Reliant K – and presented me with this:

That’s Frank. A 1987 Dodge Shadow. Please note this is not really Frank, but perhaps a distant cousin. Frank was shit brown with faded maroon interior and did not come with a ready-made driver nor from elcheaporides.com. I don’t think I ever took a picture of Frank; I was a little embarrassed. After he came into my life, I introduced him to Best Sister and her then-boyfriend. They both smiled politely, but I knew they didn’t like him.

Frank was good to me for about six months before he started getting antsy – stalling out when I pushed him too hard, making all sorts of funny noises. So I did what any spurned woman would do -- I ran him head-on into a light pole as I (did not) make that tricky corner where Rogers Lane turns into Flowermound Road. But Frank had a little fight left in him, so I kept him around, until I woke up one morning and he was dead. We put him out to pasture and the grandparents came home with Winky.

I never really knew if Winky was a he or a she, but I think a name like Winky sort of neuters you anyway. If the name didn’t do it, then the fact that Winky was a hideous shade of periwinkle and a ’96 Plymouth Neon might have. Either way, it was totally comfortable sporting that “True Love Waits” bumper sticker, which rode its rear window from 1997 to 1999. Following my freshman year of college, Best Sister, Rigadoni, Gina and I were all summer missionaries at a church camp in southeastern Oklahoma. I get home one weekend, which we had off, to find Winky badly injured. My grandparents shook their heads sadly – a terrible windstorm, a tree and Winky was a little worse for the wear, but entirely functional. I could drive a car with a tree-shaped dent.

And why wouldn’t I? At least Winky had a little character now.

After my assignment at camp was up, I packed up Winky and headed to Texas to spend some time with my father. He came outside to help me with my bags, took one look at Winky and said” “No, Fawn. No.”

So he hooked me up with Oscar, a sporty yet tough Ford Explorer with all the fixin’s.

Oscar was great. No bruises, no scars, no baggage. The back passenger door wouldn’t open from the inside, but that was my fault. He had smooth leather seats and four-wheel drive. But we didn’t last too long, Oscar and me.

Best Sister and I were tag team teaching Sunday School at our small country church. Looking back, not the best idea. We were 19, in college and living on our own. We weren’t bad kids, just irresponsible. But that, too, is another blog.

We decided we were going to have a sleep-over for our junior high girls at a facility on the college campus. We would have invited them to our house, but we lived in the ghetto. Our entire hometown is ghetto, but this particular area was bad. I slept in the laundry room, which was cordoned off from the rest of the house by a floral curtain my grandfather begrudgingly rigged to separate me from the kitchen. Much as he begrudgingly kept silent when I moved into that ghetto in the first place. I needed space. I got a laundry room.

We picked up our girls at the church to take them into “town.” And I can’t remember how or why, but we ended up having to go back out to the country. I had three of our girls in the car and we were headed East on Highway 7. Just pass the TV station, there’s a hill you can’t see the other side of. I’m happily driving the 65mph speed limit and chatting with a carful of prepubescent girls when I top that hill.

And that’s when I had my first “mother moment.”

I flung my arm to side to brace the girl sitting in the front passenger seat and said, as calmly as I could: “Hold on girls, we’re about to kill some cows.”

And kill we did. Four and a half to be exact. One was pregnant.

An entire herd of cattle was crossing Highway 7, both east and west bound lanes of traffic. I wasn’t the only one to hit them, but I may have been the only one trying to extract three 13-year-old girls out of a totaled SUV covered in bovine intestines. But the girls were troopers. They weren’t scared at all; they wanted to do it again. We settled by going to Outback for dinner.

Note: I am a vegetarian. Possibly due to this event.

Oscar died protecting us. Made me glad he wasn’t an American-made, neutered, periwinkle Plymouth.

So, the insurance company gave me a check for somewhere in the vicinity of $11,000. My grandparents sighed (my grandparents did a lot of sighing) and handed me the check. Two hours later I returned with Green Lantern.

Best Sister was working at a car dealership in town. She introduced me to salesman. I looked at the price tag on the car, looked at the check in my hand, told him I needed that price lowered by about $3,000 and drove home in that almost-new Chevy Blazer.

“You just spent $11,000 in two hours,” Pa said.

Yeah, I know.

But Green Lantern was worth every penny. He stood by my side unwaveringly when a drunken man threatened to kill me if I called the cops after he rear-ended me at 2 p.m. on a Saturday. He held steady when I took that icy corner going entirely too fast. He took me to Memphis and St. Louis and Ark City, Kansas, and Austin and Dallas and Houston and San Antonio and New Mexico and all points in between. I slept in that car (it even had curtains for a spell), I laughed in Green Lantern, I cried, ate, drank, cursed, prayed, fought, vomited, kissed, broke up, and a host of other things in that car.

Green Lantern carried me home when I didn’t think I could take another step. He was waiting for me when I returned from Portland. He showed me the way so many times when I was lost. At the end of his life, after many miles on his poor, beaten body, it was time to let him go. Even super heroes need a break. RIP Green Lantern: 1997-2004.

So I stole Fiona for a song.

My then-boyfriend’s aunt needed some money. I had only so much I could spend, or that I’d be willing to go into to debt for. They had a certain price in mind. I gave them $6,000 less than they were asking for a 3-year-old Mazda Tribute with only 32,000 highway miles on her. She’ll be mine free and clear in March.

Fiona’s been good to me, if boring. We haven’t had any major obstacles to overcome. She starts every morning. When she gets a little sick, I fix her. She carries my life in her back and seems to be just fine with it.

I’ve never been behind her wheel when she was injured. Hit and runs who the cops found twice, so someone else paid for her to get a couple of upgrades, upgrades. We live a moderately happy life together with no drama.

And there you have it – my life on four wheels.

Heroes in a Half Shell

2008-10-18T14:28:00.000-07:00

Like many adolescents in the early 1990s, I loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles -- raised as I was on a steady diet of tomboyishness and science fiction. It seemed wholly feasible to my 10-year-old mind that a sewer rat and four unwanted turtles in bandanas could, in fact, be the anthropomorphic answer for an entire generation.

One dusky evening in Lubbock, Texas, I was outside playing with Ethan, a boy from the block. Block 1300 – we were those wretched apartment kids that many school districts these days say bring down test scores and spread their dysfunction among the student population. Ethan and I had been playing “TMNT vs. Vagasus”, the evil villain who closely resembled Arthur, a schoolyard bully with a kingly name who’d recently punched Ethan on the school bus.

That’s the thing about being a kid, you can confront your bullies through your fantasies.

But our friendly game was about to take a violent, if not ironic, turn. I was standing on the elevated concrete porch no larger than I was, brandishing my mesquite tree twig masquerading as a staff. Or bo, if you're a die-hard fan.

I was Donatello of the Purple Bandana.

Ethan decided he wanted to be Donatello and while we could share bullies and lunch, we couldn’t share an assumed identity. I was a stubborn child and not quite ready to relinquish my hold on this particular hero in a half shell. The discussion quickly turned heated and Ethan reached out to grab me, pulling me off the porch.

I lay there for a few moments in dazed confusion, not quite sure how I ended up staring at Ethan’s Converse or the first star visible in the sky over the rows of multi-family housing. Ethan’s face came into focus, a combination of childish victory and the concern of friendship.

And that’s when I felt the stab of pain in my left arm, which lay twisted at an odd angle to my side. I think I’d have been less concerned if there were blood, some outward sign of significant injury, but all that hurt was this broken thing attached to me.

And I began to scream.

My parents took me to the hospital where a kind young doctor set my arm and wrapped it all up in a pretty pink cast.

I was healed.

Eighteen years later, I find myself involved in the emotional equivalent of that dusky evening of my youth. Only this time, there’s no clean break – just a hairline fracture, a small crack that keeps getting bigger and that no amount of pretty pink plaster can set back into place.

How do you heal something with no visible sign of injury?

“Today is yesterday when you don’t know / How to rebuild the walls that someone has knocked down
To tell the truth, it’s hard enough without a lover / Who you only want to hide your darkness from
So you won’t let ‘em down
Cause if I am a stranger now to you / I will always be, I will always be…”
-- Ryan Adams --

Canoe Reed

2008-10-16T06:56:00.001-07:00

Since my mother was in town last night I decided to take her out to my favourite little Thai place, where the moment I walk in they greet me by my name and menu order: "Fawn! CU10, Wild Woods Curry!" It's like an Asian CHEERS.

However, before I went to pick Mom up at her hotel, she called and said the there was Happy Hour going on in bar, if I wanted to have a drink or two -- free margaritas 'til 7 p.m. This should have been my first clue. My mother doesn't drink, not at all. Red flags should have been popping up all over my body, but I've been off my game lately.

So I agreed to meet my mom in her hotel lounge and be introduced to some of her coworkers -- all of whom are in town for a law enforcement/domestic violence seminar this week.

I get there -- wearing glasses, a denim skirt, a thrift store T-shirt, stripey socks and cowboy boots, no less. I thought it was just going to be me, my mother and dinner. -- and my mother is practically bursting with excitement, looking around the room. I think: "Aww, mom's excited to see me. We haven't seen one another in a few months." But no, she tells me to sit down, hands me a margarita and keeps looking.

And then it hits me -- oh god, my mother is trying to set me up.

ME: Who is he?
MOM: He works for the FBI, or maybe he's a sheriffs' deputy.
ME: Erg.
MOM: He looks like that one guy, the cute one, in the movies.
ME: Erg.
MOM: You know, from the Meat Trix. What's his name? Canoe Reed?
ME: Canoe Reed? What? Keanu Reeves?
MOM: (exasperated) THAT'S WHAT I SAID! CANOE REED!!

I think my mom just created her own porno, and didn't even know it: The Meat Trix, starring Canoe Reed.

Hermitage

2008-10-13T11:10:00.000-07:00

I am retreating for a while, entering hermit mode -- my cocoon, as Emily calls it.

Sometimes rest is necessary.

"With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves."

By way of explanation:

Best Sister tells me I am hard on myself, that I beat myself up more than necessary. After 26 years in my life, she’s earned the right to not bother hiding the frustration in her voice, not even attempting to say those words with kindness. Although she did.

I lay on my bed weighted down by a need to purge, a need to confess. I didn’t want to carry this embarrassment and doubt around with me anymore – although it’s still growing in the form of a malignant nerve tumour in the pit of my stomach.

So I phoned the girls. Two friends with two completely different perspectives, on my life. But at least they have one, which is something I seem to have lost these last months.

I talked. They listened. They offered advice. My guilt didn’t go away, but I felt a little better by getting it off my chest. But I do that with guilt. I carry it around long after the expiration date.

And at the end of two hours, I realized what I had to, what was absolutely necessary for me to do. I had to let go. Entirely. I had to turn and walk away and realize this particular situation was not something I could control, wasn’t something I should even want to control.

It’s taken me a long time to get to this particular place in my life, and the truth is I am not as strong as I thought I was. I am not weak, but I am human, with feelings, that get hurt. I am an imperfect person who sometimes hides the hurt I refuse to acknowledge behind understanding or acceptance or, worse, friendship.

And when that happens, sometimes things just don’t come out right.

I can’t take back the unclear thoughts I tried to express, the clarity drowned by wine. I can’t make what I was attempting to say actually make sense now. Retrospect doesn't work here. But I can do what is necessary to propel myself forward instead of backward.

To do that, though, I must take myself out of this equation and get back to some personal basics. I think Jennifer Knapp said “it’s hard to see, when I only look at me.”

I want to see clearly again, and not be distracted by the corners of my eyes.

To hermitage I go.

Falling

2008-10-01T19:40:00.000-07:00

Last night we talked about the fall.

Over pints of Guinness and bad karaoke, what started out as a brief conversation about the change in the weather turned into an all night analysis of the concept of falling – and all its derivatives.

We each had a story. Hell, we each had 30 stories – from glorious physical spills and falling in love to falling from grace and falling apart. We commented abundantly on all the times we’d watched each other fall, but more importantly on all those same times we helped pick one another up.

Like now. On a Tuesday. In a lonely dive bar on the North Side.

I can’t remember who brought it up, all these ways we find ourselves falling, but D brought out his fancy phone and 30 seconds later we’re all standing around his chair, looking at the 52 definitions for falling on dictionary.com.

We each chose the one closest to our own situation, and then we chose our favourite.

Mine?

I didn’t choose the obvious one. It didn’t feel right. Instead, I chose Number 17: “to come by chance into a particular position: to fall among thieves.” Because that’s really where I am in life, or at least where I feel I am – finding myself in situations, in relationships, in bars on a Tuesday -- and not really knowing how I got here.

I think I have it figured out, only to have that rug of disillusionment pulled out from under me. And there I am, on the ground again. Another spectacular fall.

We talked about our bruises and our bumps and where they came from. We laughed about the times we tripped but could’ve easily righted ourselves. Because sometimes, those falls are worth it. We talked about the hard falls, where we were left picking up little china pieces of ourselves.

And we talked about how we’d keep falling again and again, because sometimes what follows are some of the best things that ever happen to us – where we find our strength, where we find our love, where we find our passion and our motivation and our limits and ourselves.

I’ll take another 10 minutes crying on the bathroom floor, naked and wet, because the fall hurt so fucking bad when I know what waits on the other side is something as beautiful as Falling Definition Number 14: “to envelop or come as if by dropping, as stillness or night. “

“You can convince yourself of anything
If you wish both hard and long
And I believed that life was wonderful
Right up to the moment when love went wrong
I gaze up at the tree-tops and laugh
I need somebody to shake me loose
I want to know what happens next
'Til I don't care at all
There I go
Beginning to fall”
-Elvis Costello-

Say Yes

2008-09-22T11:19:00.000-07:00

Somewhere around late college, I developed an intense skepticism of religion as a whole. I began to shed the skin of my faith, hoping for some sort of enlightening metamorphosis.

My problem was never really with God; I didn’t have anything against Him. My serious doubt lay instead in the people that claimed to serve Him, those that took their “faith” to the illogical extreme.

I believe in passion; however, I don’t believe a true love of God will lead one to start their own rock quarry so there’ll be no shortage of stones to throw. And more and more, this is what I was beginning to see in the churches I attended out of a sense of my own misguided obligation to be faithful.

So, I left it behind. I threw up my frustrated hands, determined if this was the religion/faith combo, I’d be much better on my own, thank you.

Looking back over the past few years of my life, there have been moments of great joy, intense pain. I’ve succeeded and I’ve failed. And through it all, there was a consistent lack of something, a perpetual black hole.

God sized, if you’ll accept that cliché.

It was hard for me to accept this missing part. For so long, I’d been a fairly outspoken critic of organized religion – and you still can’t convince me that theology is the way to heaven.

I don’t care if you’re Catholic, Baptist, Episcopalian, Pentecostal, Methodist, Nazarene, Jewish, Ba’hai – it means nothing to me. You won’t get anywhere on the coattails of confession or the number of times you were slain in the spirit by a slick-tongued evangelist.

You sure look holy, but what does it all mean?

But, God help me, I literally wanted something to believe in. Not in the “hmm, this faith thing could really benefit me in the long run” kind of way, but in the way where I wanted to surrender to something bigger than myself.

I still believe in faith without boundaries, still hold strongly to the fact that no specific doctrine is going to pass me through the pearly gates. I don’t want the plastic Jesus I can buy at the corner store, but the One who surprises me daily with the divine mystery of faith, who lets me curl up in His lap when I’ve nowhere else to turn.

The One who’ll say YES to this:

I’m a broken vessel. I’ve got jagged scars and dirt on my face. There’s some internal bleeding from injuries I still don’t talk about. There’s a good chance You’ve got a lot of work to do in this ragged little girl. But if You’re willing to take me as I am, I’m yours.

Say yes.

Diaphanous: (I Was Wrong)

2008-09-09T07:26:00.000-07:00

I wanted to write that I consider myself an honest person, but that would just be one more lie.

A friend told me recently that I was transparently vague, a diaphanous veil to opaque depths. I laughed at his metaphor, but quickly stopped because I could see the truth in his every word.

He gave me a wink and a glass of Merlot, and let both his words and the wine sink in for a moment. I wanted to defend myself somehow, although his words weren’t an insult. They were just fact.

We both deal in facts -- he’s just always been better at it than me.

I don’t know how long he let me sit there in silence. I could see him smirking beneath the porch light, knowing he caught me off guard. And that was his intention – to march around my Jericho, to watch the walls come crumbling down.

I had to smile back. He had me. I’m not used to being had.

I’ve always considered myself to be a transparent person, wearing my heart on my sleeve, emotions visible. Maybe it’s because I have a heightened sense of all I’m feeling, I think other people can view it just as plainly as I experience it. I talk a good game, but if you truly know me, you know the truth is most evident once you shovel the syntax out of the way.

Words are my therapy. Words are my defense. Silence doesn’t bother me -- it’s just the spaces in between that make me nervous.

And that’s where took me that night – to all those unspoken places.

Even as I reverted to the nervous habit of biting my nails, I felt truth coursing through me as he unpacked me right there on my own front porch, laying me out beside the empty bottles of wine.

And it’s unsettling – to see yourself from behind another’s eyes. To realize the façade has cracks; the mask is slipping off. But also that there’s a distinct beauty in fragility; that it’s liberating to be known.

That to lie to yourself is equivalent to robbing yourself of the fullness of life’s experience: the triumphs and the tragedies, the lovers and the friends.

I don’t want to cower in my shell. Until that night I didn’t realize I thought transparency was weakness, but I did.

I was wrong

So I pulled out my list – crumpled, stained and dirty – and for the first time since its creation, I replaced an item: Number 26 – “Learn to better hide emotions/feelings/concerns.”

It now reads: “Give myself the opportunity to be known wholly.”

Let this be my first step – I have warts. I have scars. Sometimes I cry for no reason. Sometimes I laugh at the wrong time. I use pretty words as a shield. Sometimes they betray me, or I betray them. I get burned by the volcanic eruptions of my own humanity.

I don’t always get it right, but I try.

“Now that you're older
Taking the time to look
Back over your shoulder
On the days confusion took
Now that you're wiser
Surely you've learned to read it
You should know
No surface shines brighter
Than the light that burns beneath it”
-- Zero 7--

Red Light, Green Light

2008-09-02T13:57:00.000-07:00

He told me to answer him this: Did I believe in redemption.

I watched him watching the road. At the red light, he turned to watch me watch him. We sat through two of them.

I said I'd tell him what I didn't believe: That any one person is the sum of his or her mistakes.

He put the car into drive.

"That's what I needed to know."

Book Post

2008-08-22T12:26:00.001-07:00

Because I've been reading a number of book blogs lately, here are the books I've read this month:

Eclipse -- Stephenie Meyer
Breaking Dawn -- Stephenie Meyer
Promise Not to Tell -- Jennifer McMahon
Sin in the Second City -- Kate Abbott
Snow Flower & the Secret Fan -- Lisa See (In Progress)

Daddy

2008-08-12T09:18:00.001-07:00

I asked my dad once if he regretted any of it, all that he got when he tried to put together the jagged edges of the life my mom and I had broken before him.

He didn’t answer at first. And he didn’t answer for a while. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, as we sat there in the backyard swing, listening to the cicadas lullaby that Texas sun to sleep behind the hills.

I knew my daddy well enough not to mistake his silence for hesitation. He’s a careful man, one who knows the power of the words he speaks. What he was going to say, he wanted to say just right. He never liked it when I had doubts.

So we sat there in comfortable quiet, smoking cigarettes and drinking Coronas. It was February in Hill Country, but it was warm. Mexican music floated on the air from the’73 El Camino on blocks two houses down. And it was just like all those other evenings on that porch swing, all those other hard questions I had to ask my father because I couldn’t figure it out on my own. Or didn’t want to. But he never minded the hard questions.

We don’t share the same blood, and we only share the same name because of a forged birth certificate that took me from being a Ryals to being a Porter. Standing side by side you’d never guess I’d call the man daddy – his dark curls to my blonde, his blue eyes to my dark ones. But if you were to hear us both laugh at the same bad joke, you’d know. We both diffuse uncomfortable situations with humour, and we hide our pain behind our laugh.

He finally put his arm on the back on the swing and looked me full in the eye. “No,” he said. “I don’t have a single regret.”

And I was suddenly four years old again, sitting on his then-strange lap while a man in a black suit asked me if I wanted the man holding me to be my daddy. My mother looked at me hopefully. My soon-to-be daddy just looked at me plainly and told me to tell the truth. He was only 25, but I remember thinking I’d never seen anyone look so sure of anything. But instead I just felt afraid. Because if I said yes, if I nodded my pigtails, there would be no turning back -- not for him.

When you’re four, you don’t know those kind of words. If I did, I’d have explained to him the way a house can shake with violence. Or maybe I’d tell him my mom could only walk so far because an abusive ex-boyfriend crushed her ankles once so she couldn’t run away. I’d tell him she’d never stay; she’d never settle down. And if he signed on that line, all he was going to get was responsibility for me.

But I nodded anyway, because when you’re four, you still have some hope left in you.

He signed his name on those adoption papers with confidence, with the bravado only a 25-year-old man can muster in uncertainty.

As I sat there, leaning into my father’s embrace 23 years later, I realized that’s the way I want to love one day, just the way I’d been loved my whole life – with no regrets, with confidence despite uncertainty, wholeheartedly and without pause.

And I had the answer I needed: The man who wasn’t my father stayed because he was my daddy.

Let It Be

2008-08-07T08:17:00.000-07:00

I view the world through the lens of dichotomy: the right a jade-coloured glass of cynicism and the left a bubble gum pink hue complete with scratch-and-sniff unicorn stickers. I’m sure the truth is somewhere in the middle, a hazy indigo perhaps. But me, I am an emotional extremist.

I posted recently about the kindness of strangers. And I think God and the universe are conspiring to tell me something, to break through the skepticism and my raised eyebrow of questioning.

Here’s the story:

I do this thing where the back of my neck burns when things aren’t going to go right. I can’t explain it and it’s a hell of a way to be perceptive. But it’s happened since I was a little girl and it’s about 96-percent accurate. And that’s the thing about knowing – once you do, you can’t go back and unknow something.

So when I woke up at 3:30 a.m. yesterday with this blazing fever on the back of my neck, I realized sleep would not be my bedfellow any longer, and I also knew I’d be having the adult equivalent of Alexander’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

All through the morning I felt like Atlas. By lunch time, I was a wreck. I went home for lunch and barely made it through the door before the tears started. I don’t cry so easily anymore, but these were big alligator tears and body-racking sobs. I have no idea why I was crying, still don’t. Maybe I just needed a good cry. Sometimes people do.

The back of my neck still burned, but I uncurled myself from the couch and realized all that sobbing had made me hungry. I washed my face, reapplied my make-up and got ready to face the rest of my day. My grandpa always used to say that the world couldn’t be that bad a place if you could still smile. So I gave it a few practice runs in the mirror and decided I’d make it.

Running short of time, I ran into Grandy’s for lunch. I should also note I went there for breakfast. I have a minor obsession with Grandy’s. The guy who usually works drive-thru yelled hello to me the moment I walked in the door. After all, he’d seen me only three hours earlier. I guess I am a familiar face now. I cracked a few jokes and when he handed me my lunch, I handed him my debit card.

He smiled and winked and told me not to worry about it.

Now, either I look poor and hungry these days, or the world just may be full of surprisingly kind people. But I will go all in and say I bet there’s a lesson somewhere here, that the Lord is showing me almost daily that there is still goodness in this world, that smiles and kind words can do more for others than we realize.

That sometimes the only thing ugly about this world is the way we look at it.

And when the broken hearted people living in this world agree,
There will be an answer, let it be.
For though they may be parted there is still a chance that they will see,
there will be an answer, let it be.

Salt of the Earth

2008-08-01T16:27:00.000-07:00

This is what it looks like when good people and good wine mix company.

These people are truly the salt of the earth: Zen, Kathryn, Fide, Mabray and Joe-Sway (behind the camera)

I don't know what we're laughing at, but I do remember there being a lot of laughing.

Some of my favourite people!

I Wish You Would

2008-07-28T15:08:00.000-07:00

This weekend I slept.

After spending months in the bowels of insomnia, I had forgotten what this fairly normal sensation was like. I counted. I hadn’t slept more than 16 hours in a regular work week. My eyes were foggy, as was my brain, and I don’t really want to tell you what brink my nerves and emotions were teetering on.

I needed release.

So I packed myself into Fiona, put a full tank of gas in my car, bought a bottle of water and some Sun Chips and I was off -- Stillwater bound. I needed my girlfriends. I needed to share this certain weight that has been sitting heavy on my chest for weeks, to share my heart with the girls that know me best and love me still. I needed to snuggle my best sister’s newborn baby girl, and lie face to face with Emily on her bed and say: “Look, I am no good at this kind of thing. I haven’t been here in a while. Help.”

And once the words that I have been hiding from even myself were out of my mouth, circulating in the open air, I felt incredibly calm, peaceful. I was able to analyze freely, overthink completely and have my best friend interject her own third-party opinions. But the real release came when I was finally able to admit it to myself. That was the hardest part.

I am amazed, sometimes, by my absolute transparency. I think I am being all cool and nonchalant, but apparently my every thought and emotion is written across my face. In permanent ink. Or hot pink spray paint.

So transparent that when, a couple of weeks ago, I brought up the subject with Micayla – upon my own realization – her responses sounded something like: “Yeah, I know.” She did? I didn’t even know! And as I was sitting in Emily’s bathroom Saturday (because, really, what better place is there to talk about something like this) and telling her – frantically, breathlessly and almost embarrassedly – she looked at me with knowing eyes and said, well yeah, she figured that’s what was going on.

Best Friends: -- 2. Fawn -- NADA.

And this knowing doesn’t make it any easier to walk myself through these feelings, but at least now that I know what I am dealing with – maybe I can get some sleep.

“I wish you would
I wish youd make up my bed
So I could make up my mind
Try it for sleeping instead
Maybe youll rest sometime
I wish I could…”
-- Ryan Adams --

The Kindness of Strangers

2008-07-23T09:18:00.000-07:00

Taco Bueno is my comfort food. And yesterday evening, smarting from a friend hurting my feelings and feeling quite dejected and rejected, I knew I was in need of some quesadilla therapy and a Dr. Pepper. (I’d show him! I’d drink soda!)

I pulled my funk through the drive-thru, ordered a cheese quesadilla, side of rice and my drink before advancing to the window. I rummaged around in my ashtray and floorboard to find the 49-cents exact change needed to complete this transaction. The drive-thru guy waited patiently while I lifted lids and counted pennies, smiling at my repeated apologies.

Then he handed me my food, smiled again – and closed the window. I sat there for a split second thinking I could just drive away without paying. After all, he said “Thank you. Have a good evening.” But my conscience got the better of me. I rapped on the drive-thru window and asked whether he wanted me to pay.

“Naw girl, you’re good. Go on.” Those were his words.

For no apparent reason, he gave me my dinner for free. And I was moved by this random act of kindness, almost to tears.

In the throes of questioning a person’s capacity for thoughtlessness, and one’s willingness to accept it, I was thrown a curve ball of unexpected kindness, of graciousness.

On my 30X30 list, one of my goals is to consistently express kindness and graciousness in situations where neither is necessarily deserved. I was humbled by this employee’s actions while I was wallowing in slimy pools of bitterness and planning ways of telling my friend just what I thought of his behaviour. Never paying attention to the plank in my own eye.

And it’s a fine line to walk, between showing a person kindness and blindly accepting his or her hurtful actions; between criticizing someone's actions even when they mirror one's own. I certainly haven’t mastered it – that’s why it’s on the list. I also haven't mastered not making foolish mountains out my emotions. There is no moral to this story; I’m just trying to figure things out.

But one day I hope to be able to look someone in the eye and say with the utmost sincerity of heart: “Naw, you’re good. Go on.”

"Day after day and the life goes on
I try to see the good in everyone
If I ever find myself here again
I'll give everything ..."
-- Doves --

Truest Words

2008-07-22T06:15:00.000-07:00

I have a writing partner. I keep him around because he’s honest about my work and has a scruffy face. He’s also a fantastic writer, so that’s why I let him hurt my feelings in the name of artistic advancement.

During a recent critique of my work, he was incredibly hard on a story I’d written. I could see his point. I didn’t like the story either. But I especially didn’t like someone else not liking it. So I sat there and fumed for about 15 minutes and then began writing another story out of pure revenge. (You can believe my writing partner won’t be seeing that particular story.)

He told me the story lacked truth. He was right. It did. That moment never happened. Nothing close to that moment ever happened. I took a chance, played around with words and themes, and failed. He compared it to the missing verse of a Bob Seger song. I wrote him into my story and injured him.

Writing is therapy, after all.

But my partner’s critique reminded me of a John Steinbeck quote, where the author says something to the effect of how man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the world, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts and emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

I desire growth above pride.

So I sit here now, channeling Hemingway’s truest sentence, Steinbeck’s walk toward growth and my writing partner’s eviscerating critique and trying to combine them all into the most honest words I know.

And this is what I am left with:

I could never love my mother, not really.

How the hell do I write that story?

The Heart Remains a Child

2008-07-16T07:46:00.000-07:00

I can’t sleep in the summer. It’s not that I don’t try. I just can’t. I find myself lying in bed (or on my couch) staring at the cracks in the ceiling, or writing, or having all the conversations I want to have with certain people, but lack the courage to do so.

This morning was no exception. Around 3 a.m. I woke up and was ready to go. So I baked some cookies, read a few chapters, listened to a record, watched some of the No Direction Home DVD and then decided it was late enough for me to go for a run.

And run I did. I ran in the way it would appear as though something was chasing me, like I was trying to exorcise some sort of demon and the only way I could do so is to run faster and farther. So I just kept running. It’s all I had.

About a year ago, I made this decision to change my life. I was tired of being a slave to my emotions, tired of the insecurity and doubt. I wanted to find out who Fawn was -- and quit living in the shell of her.

So, I did.

I went to Las Vegas and New York City. I created my 30X30 list and marked those two things off. I moved to a new house, quit my job and finally let go of that boy who (I thought) owned my heart. I went through a period of self-imposed hibernation so I could figure it all out. I reconnected with old friends. I made new friends. I laughed more, cried less.

And looking over this chapter of my life, I can see how much I’ve grown. Sometimes you have to go through the valleys to get to the mountains, but in the words of Caedmon’s Call: “Valleys fill first.”

My life is fuller now than I could have ever expected. My friendships are deep and rewarding. My old friends still offer new experiences. Friends I’ve made in the last few months have touched my soul in ways I could never imagine and brought out the best parts of me. I am as in control of my life as I want to be, and not (very) afraid to leave things to chance. I’ve rearranged my perspective and by doing so have opened my heart and mind to a world I didn’t even know existed.

So why, then, this morning was I running from the sound of my heart in my chest? The Bible says the heart is deceitful. The Alchemist agrees.

But I like my heart. I want to listen to her. I’ve lived in this body and with this heart for long enough that I rather think I should take her serious when she starts talking to me. She’s done whispering, she’s screaming now. She’s raging and rattling her cage.

She wants me to listen, but am I strong enough? Has all this changing and all this growing prepared me for this step? I’ve talked to Jesus and myself in the shower. I knew this was coming before it hit me, so why is it such a surprise? I thought I’d be more prepared for these emotions. I thought the butterflies would be a little gentler on my stomach.

But I am just like a kid again. My best sister tells me that this is the fun part. I don’t agree. But I'm no good at this. No matter how many times I’ve been here, my heart still remains a child.

“And I thought that I'd outgrow this kind of thing.
Tell me, aren't we supposed to mature or something.
But I haven't found that yet.
Is this as grown up as we'll ever get?
Maybe this is as good as it gets.
And years may go by.
But I think the heart remains a child.
The mind may grow wise, but the heart just sulks, and it whines
and remains a child, I think the heart remains a child.”

--Everything but the Girl--

Everything is Dark Except for the Lights

2008-06-23T07:06:00.000-07:00

I read that phrase yesterday evening as I lie curled on my couch, feet propped on two weeks of clean, folded laundry, listening to my newest record spinning away and content with having spent my entire Saturday and Sunday just as I wanted -- curled up in yoga pants and a tank top, eating ice cream and reading three books.

But that single phrase -- those seven words -- coursed through my head to the point where I had to pause before reading the ones that followed.

Everything is dark except for the lights.

I grew up in a military town with my deeply spiritual grandparents. In church every Sunday between parishioners being 'slain in the Spirit' and the altar call, there would be talk of the rapture, when Jesus would return to Earth and gather up His believers in the sky, whisking them away to Heaven to avoid the impending tribulation.

Frankly and literally, that concept scared the hell out of me.

Early one morning I awoke to a silent house and a silent town. Used to the artillery constantly exploding at the nearby army post, the sound of silence filled my little heart with apprehension.

I stood on my bed to peer between the white lace curtains, clutching Teddy to my chest. The street, still wet with dew and barely lit by the rising sun, was absolutely deserted. It was unusual for a Saturday morning when, typically, the first of the neighbourhood's garage salers would be making their rounds, when Mr. Fisher next door would be mowing his lawn and on the other side Dorie should already be in her lawn chair smoking the morning's first cigarette.

I slowly eased open the bedroom door. Looking across the hall I saw my grandparent's empty bed. I tiptoed a little further, softly knocking on Michael Jackson's head -- the entrance to my big brother's room. When he didn't answer, I opened it and saw his bed empty, too -- pajamas crumbled in the middle. I saw down in the hallway and began to bawl.

Jesus had come back and taken everyone but me.

I must have cried myself back to sleep because the next thing I remember was my brother patting me on the back and my concerned grandparents standing over me with a bag of Wright's Bakery DoNut Holes.

I ran to the front yard -- and there was Dorie and Mr. Fisher and the Floyds and the Wanawich kids. The sun was shining brightly in the sky and the artillery was booming as though it had never slept.

The world was as it should be, but on the inside, everything was dark except for the lights.

Like Drinking Poison, Like Eating Glass

2008-06-20T07:20:00.000-07:00

Ist es falsch, dass ich diesen gesamten Pfosten schreibe und ihn dann in Deutschen, weil ich schreiben möchte, aber nicht notwendigerweise übersetze, damit Leute ihn lesen?

Ich habe einen jener Tage. Und ich nicht sogar habe die Wörter, zum er zu beschreiben. Oder möglicherweise wünsche ich gerade nicht zu. Aber ich tue.

... aber die Schuld. Ich weiß nicht, warum ich schuldig mich fühle. Aber es geschieht immer. Ich sollte besser wissen. Aber ich tue nicht.

So schreibe ich Pfosten auf Deutsch, weil es mich Gefühl besser bildet.

For a little while, at least.

Strays

2008-06-12T07:40:00.000-07:00

My family always took in strays – stray dogs, cats, fish and people.

On any given Christmas growing up, you’d find at least one or two wrapped presents beneath the tree with no name on the tag, the standby gift for whatever friend my brother or I brought over to spend the holiday at our house.

We weren’t necessarily a functional family, but by God if we wouldn’t scream “I love you” as we wrestled each other to the ground, with all intents and purposes to inflict injury of some sort. You might get a black eye because someone noticed you were cheating at Monopoly, but you were welcome in the family if you could take the abuse.

One particular Christmas sometime around 1988, my grandmother sent me on a journey to the corner 7-11 for some forgotten item or the other. Bread, cheese, eggs – I don’t recall.

What I came home with was Crazy Larry.

Rumour has it he was once brilliant, but somewhere in his life, he broke down, and was now just a dirty shell in flannel who huffed paint. He was harmless, really, and generally ignored except for hurried mothers rushing their children by him as he lay sprawled on the sidewalk. Everyone knew Crazy Larry; everyone ignored him.

He happened to be sitting underneath a payphone when I walked into the store. He looked up at me, smiled, and went back to talking to his toes. I went inside, not thinking twice about the man in the parking lot, bought whatever I’d been sent to buy and returned to the frigid air outside.

“Merry Christman, kid,” Crazy Larry said. And I stopped. I turned. And I looked at him. In that moment, I saw him. Alone, dirty and hungry … on Christmas. While back home we had turkey and ham and potatoes and casseroles and eggnog and presents and a Christmas tree and stockings and carols and a fireplace and a rousing game of Yahtzee that I was missing.

I don’t know how long I stood there and stared at Crazy Larry, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. But I think eventually I began to make him nervous. I was a pretty intense 8-year-old.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”

To Crazy Larry’s credit, he didn’t ask any questions. He just got up and went. About halfway home he began to hum a little Christmas tune, and by the time we got to the front yard, Crazy Larry and I were a caroling party of two.

To my grandparent’s credit, they didn’t bat an eye when I brought a paint-covered stranger into the kitchen. My grandfather told him where the shower was, gave him an extra pair of clothes and said we’d be saying grace in about 20 minutes.

Crazy Larry showed up right on time, for all of us.

“Embrace what you have in common,
celebrate what sets you apart
It takes more than the color
that you find on a palate
to turn humanity into an art”
-Ellis Paul

Talking in Code

2008-05-26T23:58:00.000-07:00

I knew how the message would read before I even picked up the phone. I know your hints and suggestions; how your code words lead us down familiar halls to abandoned places.

So many days and nights, weeks and months and years, driving through deserted towns on desert highways. You and me and we pick up the hitchhiker of all that is unsaid.

You expected a response I couldn't give. I surprised you with my lack of expectation.

"I gotta go, and you're talking in code
Saying I know where you've been, and I know where you go ..."

It's all too familiar. We're too familiar to go back now.

I usually sleep facing south, because north is where you used to lie.
But tonight I changed directions.

"And I'm sleeping alone
In this house I don't own
'Cause if you're touring your mind
You'll get lost every time
And you'll sing me sad songs, to keep me awake
In that bedroom, where we hid away
Baby, I'm long gone ..."
-- Margot and the Nuclear So&So's

Like He Taught Me

2008-05-20T02:42:00.000-07:00

I sat on my porch tonight, watching 2 a.m. pass with the cars on the interstate. I listened to the sound silence makes: the distant sirens, the insects, the train, the beat of this heart in my chest.
With my feet outstretched on the rock wall in front of me, I shut my eyes.

If I couldn't sleep, then at least I'd rest.

The fear in my chest released its grip as I lost myself in the peace that surpasses all understanding.

Tonight he's better. Tonight he's alive.

And if he knew how I've stalled these past few days, balancing that fine line between hope and preparation, he'd give me that toothless grin of his and tell me I'm wasting my tears.

"Baby girl," he always said. "There's regretting and there's living ... and that's a fence you don't want to straddle."

So each morning this baby girl put on her big girl heels and looked the world in the eye -- just like he taught me.

I found joy in possible sorrow -- just like he taught me.

And tonight while he's talking to angels, I'm being still and knowing He is God.

Just like he taught me.

"All these men that you made
how we wither in the shade
of your trees, on your wings
we are carried to the sea
God, give us love in the time that we have."
-- Iron & Wine

Wings of a Dove

2008-05-01T11:07:00.001-07:00

For weeks now I've been pondering the presence of a lone dove outside my office window. Day in and day out, for the 8-plus hours I am there, he'll coo his mournful song. He's become such a fixture my coworker and I have named him. Huey. I always joke that he must have a message for me, that's why he keeps hanging around.

As it turns out, he does.

Last night I went on my long run, weaving in and out of my neighbourhood, pushing my body well beyond its breaking point. As the sun began to set over Heritage Hills, I heard Huey's song magnified as a small flock of doves took flight over the trees ... and I pressed on as a long-forgotten memory pushed me forward.

It was about 1985, I had a bowl haircut, a pink boombox and bad dreams. I lay in my childhood bed with the faded Snoopy sheets, shivering, certain the dream monsters were coming to get me. Biting my lip, I waited, paralyzed, for them to come.

And that's when the hall light always came on, shining beneath the crack in my bedroom door.

My grandmother always heard my silent cries.

She'd walk into my bedroom, smelling of cold cream and comfort, and sit calmly on the edge of my bed, stroking my tiny back. She never said a word, but would place a cassette tape into that pink boombox. Then she'd softly sing me these words until I fell asleep:
"On the wings of a snow white dove
He sends His pure, sweet love
A sign from above
On the wings of a dove ..."

Gas Stations & Road Maps

2008-03-03T15:22:00.000-08:00

It’s funny the things you remember.

I drove hundreds of miles through town with names like Seymour, Winters and Paint Rock – their downtowns deteriorating with their hopes of leaving. I’ve driven through these towns countless times over the years and yet one thing stood out to me as the same – the dusty gas stations with their dusty attendants.

It’s been about five years since this particular ribbon of highway spun beneath my tires, and as I pulled into the city limits of a little town called Eden, topped off my gas tank and went inside, I was struck by the absolute familiarity of the place. And each place I stopped thereafter was remarkable in its sameness.

It caused me to smile, and to think – how even when things in my own little corner of the world seem to be flying past me as though I were a mere spectator in my own life, some things just are.

So, onward I drove – with a big bottle of water in the seat next to me and big dreams in my head that I haven’t lost sight of after all.

If personal growth were measured in miles driven, then I’ve traveled far. I am not the same person I was when last I drove this rutted two-lane highway, and I probably won’t be the same the next time I do.

I took my time watching the dotted lines fly past – for once, I wasn’t in a hurry. I had time to spare with my window rolled down and the perfect iPod mix plugged into my speakers.

It was perhaps the most pleasant eight hour drive I’ve ever made. My legs were asleep; Funyuns were my sustenance, but it afforded me the first chance in months to be alone with my thoughts, my prayers.

I’ll get back to solving the world’s problems on Monday, but today I’m content with my gas stations and road maps.

“Get out the map
Get out the map and lay your finger anywhere down
We’ll leave the figuring to those we pass on our way out of town
Don’t drink the water there seems to be something ailing everyone
I’m gonna clear my head
I’m gonna drink that sun
I’m gonna love you good and strong while our love is good and young”

28 Years Ago I Am

2008-01-25T15:29:00.000-08:00

Twenty eight years ago last Sunday my 19-year-old mother screamed my way into this world.

She was waiting for Joshua Lane, certain I’d come out a boy - but what she got was Baby Girl Me, with one singular curl atop my head.

And what do you call that which you didn’t expect?

Was I Jennifer like every other girl born in 1980? No, my eyes were too dark for that.

Was I a Brandy or an Ashley? My screams were a little too loud for such a cute name.

I can picture my teen-age mother holding this demanding, squirming thing in her arms with a mixture of awe, fear and confusion.

Who the hell was I?

Then she remembered for the last nine months she’d had this same dream: a young fawn running through the forest, pausing to drink at a stream, staring up into my mother’s subconscious like the animal was trying to tell her something.

That’s how I became Fawn.

And my second name? It’s Udine.

She didn't want me to be typical. With a name like Fawn Udine, how could I be?

I can’t imagine answering to anything else. Because 28 years ago my mother gave me a fighting chance at being unique.

I am my name.

I am Fawn Udine.

"Born with the moon in cancer
Choose her a name she will answer to
Call her green and the winters cannot fade her
Call her green for the children who've made
Little Green, be a gypsy dancer ..."
--Joni Mitchell--

Geronimo!

2007-12-31T06:56:00.000-08:00

As my 28^th birthday looms just three weeks in the future, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around who I’ve been, who I am, and who I will soon be.

If you were to ask me 10 years ago what my life would be like in 10 years – this would not be it.

I thought I’d be a married mother making more money. (How’s that for alliteration.)

And I am none of those things.

Lately I’ve been in what one of my best friends calls my “cocoon.” I thought I was simply hibernating and going through one of my bouts of hermitage. But when Emily said I was in my cocoon, I knew she was right.

My life is going to change soon. I don’t know how I know that, but I do – it’s just that way of knowing things you can’t explain. For a while now, I’ve felt those seeds of change stirring in my soul, and I can tell from some surprising choices I’ve made lately, and the places I’ve chosen to return to – albeit in new forms – that just around a near corner, I am going to run into a new future.

And it’s about damn time.

For what seems like years now, I’ve been in this stagnant place. And, like stagnant places often do, it really seems like I was stinking up the joint. Things I once held precious, I had no qualms about abandoning. Passions that once were my lifeblood suddenly seemed like an obligation. The girl in the mirror, she was a complete stranger who, unnoticed, developed these fine little lines around the corner of her eyes.

I have absolutely no preconceived notions about where my 28^th year is going to take me – except to Eureka Springs with my best sister for four days. And I’m all right with that, if even excited about what my future holds.

But, if there is one thing I have learned through this process of what I shall call refinement, it’s this: I still have so much farther to go. Every little detail I tried to shove in a pretty box with a bow imploded. Each scenario I tried to mold to fix my expectations of what it should be crumbled. And I only felt hollow each time I tried on someone else’s skin for my life.

If what I’ve expected of my life is a precipice, I am totally jumping off.

GERONIMO!!

“I have much farther to go
Everything is new and so unpredictable
I should just kick my heels together and go home
But I'm not sure where that is anymore …”
-- Rosie Thomas --

Please Turn Me On

2007-12-13T07:03:00.000-08:00

Dear Electric Provider,

Hello there. Remember me? The next to last little brown house on the south side of the street? Yes, that's me.
I've been doing some thinking about our relationship. I know you've had some major problems lately, what with Mother Nature destroying herself and leaving you to pick up the pieces. Don't think I'm without sympathy. That's why, for five days now, I haven't really complained about your lack of attention, the coming home to a dark house. I've been patient; I've been kind.
But now, as I look out my front door, I see the houses just one block away. Their Christmas lights are mocking me, twinkling with the power of your presence. The bluish glows of their televisions are like a lover you don't really care about until you're lonely.
I'm not asking for much. I am humbly asking you not to forget about my little Land of Nod. I know I'm east of Eden and my little home isn't as sexy as its mansion counterparts one block over, but we are a deserving bunch, too.
As an added incentive for your attention, I promise I'll pay you your due on time and in full for at least, say, a month.
What say you?

Sincerely,

Owner of the Little Brown House

Today I Smelled Second Grade

2007-12-06T12:50:00.000-08:00

It's been said, and I am a firm believer, that smell evokes the greatest sense of memory -- because today I smelled second grade.

I was in the process of opening a box of labels in my office, when from the cardboard box arose the smell of Mrs. Carden's second-grade classroom at LBTCA. I was suddenly transported to that second-floor, box-like classroom with my America the Beautiful pencil box and uber-cool Trapper Keeper.

(It had neon fruit on it, and was the envy of my peers. I have my uber-cool brother for keeping me hip to what was in style -- from Trapper Keepers to high-top Converse rolled down and written on ... which always looked really cool with the dress uniform I was required to wear. It was how I railed against the powers that be.)

But for some reason this morning I was taken back to a similarly gray morning circa 1987. We had just finished our Bible lesson and I was placing the Word of God back under my desk when an older student knocked on the door to announce the annual Halloween dress-up contest.

Now, I went to a fairly rigid Christian school at this time, and so I am sure they called it something much more Bible Belt-appropriate, like "Fall Festival" or "Down with the Devil Day."

Then again, I wasn't all that interested in dressing up anyway (because people would look at me and I would be ripped from my happy place of not-quite-invisibility) ... but I was interested in the cake walk.

That being said, somehow between that moment and the day of the dress-up contest, I realised I was going to be "Little Miss LBTCA." My mom was into it, my grandmother was into it and even my dad got into making me a miniature beauty queen.

I was horrified.

There was a red dress, a jeweled crown and even a sash proclaiming my unelected title.

So there I went to school, trailing an incredible length of taffeta behind me while my brother kept casting strange sidelong glances at me --his little sister who was, beneath the dress, wearing his too-large "The Cure" t-shirt.

I was greeted at the entrance to the school by all my brother's girlfriends who wanted to brush my hair and let me try on their invisible lip gloss. I was paraded down the hallways and made to practice my winning smile. (I should mention my teeth were either missing or growing in crooked and the last thing I really wanted to be doing was smiling winningly.)

But I rose to the occasion and by the first bell had a near-perfect curtsy and wave down pat.

That said, when the costume judges made the rounds in the afternoon and asked for all the contestants to line up, I stayed seated and continued reading "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler."

I don't know why I did, I simply didn't feel like being examined so closely. I didn't like the thought of everyone looking at me. But, more importantly, I felt if I didn't win this silly contest, then I'd be letting down all of the people who'd hemmed the dress, made the crown, sewed the sash, brushed the unruly mess of blond hair and didn't mind my 7-year-old lips touching their lip gloss.

A grave sense of responsibility.

And I realized I am still that way today. In a conversation with my best sister last night over delicious Mexican food, I unveiled a formerly hidden skeleton and the guilt associated with it. She reminded me that I am no one else's keeper and cannot be held responsible for the decisions other adults make -- no matter how much I want to take that responsibility upon my own shoulders.

Inside the Mind: (Repost)

2007-12-05T08:38:00.000-08:00

I am sitting here in stiletto-heeled boots on a rainy afternoon waiting for a bus that will take me [where is it going to take me?] and I am wondering what you're doing but trying not to think about it too much [makes me think about it even more] I am thinking about a guy named Salinger and wondering why he shunned human contact and I watch a man yell at his bride [and now I know] And the rain keeps coming down.

The bus pulls up [sick, smoke, smell] and a man in a gray suit gets off [his eyes are hollow] and I wonder how he can see, or if he sees [what does he see?] And I wish my dad were here because he'd make a joke [but me, I'm just sad] And my mom would say hello [I don't say a word] And you would tell me a story [the man in the gaberdine suit is really a spy]

[So many hollow eyes]

And I wish I were exotic [dark, mysterious, alluring] and I wonder if people can see my eyes [mask of unkempt blonde curls] I practice walking like a movie star down the deserted sidewalk [I am Greta Garbo]

[And I want to be your dream.]

Pillowbook

2007-08-10T15:38:00.000-07:00

Sei Shonogan knew that sometimes it was just easier to make lists, which is favourite thing of mine to do, and that it didn't necessarily detract from what she was feeling. So, here is my latest adaptation of my own pillowbook.

Things I am excited about:
-- New beginnings, both professional and personal
-- Friends who know me well
--A Friday evening to myself
--Feet washing and mojito drinking

Things that make me sad:
--Saying goodbye
--Cardboard boxes filled with my things
--The distance
--Seeing a strong man become weak; feeling his age with him

Things that makes my heart flutter:
--Distant planes in a night sky
--Conversations late at night
--Discovering something new
--That perfect song on a summer night
--The way the sun shines through the trees in my neighbourhood during an early-morning run

C.S. Lewis said there are better things ahead than those we leave behind.

In this case, at least, I couldn't agree with him more.

Tree/Life

2007-07-25T13:05:00.000-07:00

I sat on the concrete drive in my backyard yesterday, not really caring that the cement was burning the back of my legs, or that my cell phone was ringing incessantly in my purse.
I just wanted to sit.
I hadn’t planned on it, there were other things I needed to do.
But as I pulled up to my house, I noticed a bird perched on the tiniest branch on the recently chopped tree in my backyard.
It was then I first noticed the crisp green leaves blossoming all over – evidence of life in every one.
As I idly picked at the skin around my nails – a nervous habit – I realized that I was, in fact, nervous. My hands were shaking and my breath was coming in those irregular gasps, the ones you breathe when you wake up in the middle of the night because you heard an unfamiliar sound.
The tree had evidence of life. It was growing.

When I first moved into my little duplex, I never paid much attention to the tree between loading and unloading boxes. One day my sister-in-law pointed out that half the tree was alive, but the other half was dead.
I didn’t connect with this on any internal level then, but took multiple photographs of the trees unique ability to be half living and half dead.

I stopped paying attention to the tree until one morning I went to get in my car, and the tree was neatly lying across it, struck down by either lightning or wind during one of the early summer’s fierce storms.

It looked like the living part had finally succumbed to death.

Eventually my landlord had the tree chopped down so only a scraggly trunk remained. Maybe it was all the rain that resurrected it, or maybe it wasn’t as dead I once thought.

And, as the late evening sun beat down on my face, I realized my life was like that tree.

For so long now, I’ve been half living and half dead, just waiting for the first big storm to crumble my brittle foundation.

And I didn’t worry about my broken half because I thought if I was living even a little at all, I was living fully.

But I want a full life of new leaves.

Instead of sitting there stupefied, I’d kick off my heels and do a little dance – a dance for the air I breathe, the opportunities awaiting me, a life of reckless abandon … that I’ve glanced over for meager security, for minor acceptance.

The truth is, I want a magnificent bolt of lighting to send such a jolt through my dead half that it breaks me, send me splayed on the ground.

Cut me down, so that I can grow up new.

you spend your days/watching the door
yeah you spend your whole life waiting but you don't know what for
you have everything you need right here still you want more
oh this is how we are fighting
this is how we are fighting
time
time
well I didn't come here looking for a soul
and I'm tired of watching dust collecting on a bowl
I'm a spirit trying to be human I'm just a spirit trying to be human
but I'm thinking this is how we are fighting this is how we are fighting
time
time
--Alexi Murdoch

Interconnectivity in Everydayness

2007-06-14T13:43:00.000-07:00

On the corner of Walker and 36th is a small convenience store – rough looking on the outside, and inside, with many a loiterer smoking cigarettes on the front sidewalk.

When I moved back from Portland and in with a former boyfriend, he always joked about this food mart, calling it the “ghettomart.”
However, this ghettomart is one of the main reasons I stayed in my neighbourhood, and now that I have moved slightly out of it, continue to buy my weekly 2-liter of Diet Pepsi there.

In particularly, there is Eddie.

Eddie is a Nepalese student attending the University of Central Oklahoma, but he’s ready to go home. After two years in Japan and a near degree in management information systems and business, he wants nothing more to return to his South Asia home.

“I’m ready to go now,” he tells me. “I’m tired of this place. I just want to go home. It’s been too long.”

He gets excited talking about returning to Nepal and working at his father’s travel business – having seen the world and ready to go back to the place from which he came.

Strangely, I found myself missing Eddie.

I’ve seen Eddie at least once a week for many months now. Every time I go into the corner store, he greets me with a smile and a “hello ma’am” – no matter how many times I’ve told him to call me by my name.

He’s been there when I’ve been sick and needed some medicine from behind the counter. He’s been there when I’ve been sad – eyes red and puffy – in dire need of Blue Bell therapy. He’s been there through bouts of insomnia when I didn’t want to go far, but wanted to get out of the house.

Eddie is constancy in my life.

I know that no matter what, when I walk into that store, I’ll be greeted with a smile, a hello and kind word.

And I think again about the interconnectivity in our everydayness and how sometimes we never realize the people who touch our lives.

Little Bear

2007-05-18T13:06:00.000-07:00

My feet pound the pavement as I circle the park where we first met, all those years ago.
I search for you in the green shrubs and dirty water, beneath the slide or kicking your feet as you swing.
You’re not there; I didn’t expect you to be.
You knew me better than I know myself, and that is what I miss the most. The ability to exist without words.
I know as soon as I finish this frantic jog, I will go to your home and find you sitting there, perhaps dinner’s been made and a movie rented. And I will pretend that this is all ok.
We don’t talk about it, maybe you don’t even think about it. But each moment with you like this leaves me lonelier than if there had been none.
For you are the most empty fullness I have ever known.

"Little bear, little bear you're getting out of hand
Getting out of hand
I think I'm going to lose you now
Oh little bear, little bear you know me too well anyway
Too well every day
I'm going home I'm going beneath the stars I'm going under the soil again
And I won't be back in a long time
so get out
Get out of this old house Before I burn it down
I wouldn't want to cause you anything
That might break your lovely face
In a thousand shattered china pieces
In this bracken world of broken pieces"
-- the guillemots

For Micayla

2007-05-15T08:37:00.000-07:00

Two men, not yet old, changed the lives we share.

With their good intentions and K-mart bouncy balls, they forged a friendship -- tested by fire, saved by grace -- beneath the hanging branches of a Memosa tree.

It's not so hard now, 20-plus years in the future, to recall the biggest problem we faced being stolen Barbie dresses or that adolescent angst. When the summer nights lasted forever beneath our fortress of fitted sheets, with American Pie playing on the tape deck -- and we knew every word.

Our childish voices full of wonder rising through the neighbourhood as we sang:

"Bye Bye Miss American Pie
Drove our Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry ..."

Dancing out there in the yard, too young to be embarrassed -- or too comfortable in our friendship to pretend to care.

Those afternoons beneath the cottonwood, a canister of pencils and a shared spiral-bound notebook where we invented a life for Dave, laughing at our genius and how we'd take the world by storm.

We were unstoppable, unbreakable, unaware.

But somewhere between there and now, we grew up.

I found a book buried in a box -- Kerouac's On the Road -- which we swapped for our 15th birthdays, the inside flap full of inside jokes I had to strain to remember.

Oh, but when I did ...

Me with my blue hair and you with your gypsy soul, riding through the country with the windows down. The Oklahoma summer blowing through, our hands waving in the air, eyes trained on the stars above. Tanned legs, spindly arms, smirks for smiles.

But Tuesday's Gone with the wind.

And if I knew a genie I'd call him Duke and for each of my three wishes I'd ask to bear your load. I'd pound on his little magic lamp until he came out, and I'd demand to take your place.

But with your voice he'd tell me this valley was part of the plan, and one you're willing to go through -- with hope and trust and obedience.

And again I'd be humbled by your strength, your Faith -- as I have been every day since that first one in '82.

My best friend, my sister, everything good in me bears your fingerprint.

"Did you write the book of love
And do you have faith in God above
If the Bible tells you so?
Do you believe in rock ’n roll
Can music save your mortal soul
And can you teach me how to dance real slow ..."

Funny pages

2007-05-15T08:13:00.000-07:00

Like a Death Cab song, we started out with nothing but crippling doubt.

We watched the planes come in for landing, lying on our backs beneath the twinkly towers.

And like a newsprint strip in the funny pages, we drew our unsure futures -- you with your charcoals and me with my words.

So full of hope back then, when we were younger.

But as the last red eye circled, and we packed up our things, we both knew in that unsaid kind of way that this was both the beginning -- and the end -- of everything we'd known.

We drove around the city, our truck lonely among the 18-wheelers and the rest of world with somewhere to go.

We had only that moment, and we held on as best we could before the dawn would bring us full circle.

In the morning you kissed me goodbye as I struggled with my luggage. We made promises and swapped our personal lives for our passions.

If we'd known the ending, maybe we would have let go then. But our notebooks told of a different future, and we were willing to let our nascent hope best our better judgement.

I started to walk away from you. I couldn't look back or I wouldn't move forward.

Eight hours later, in the wing seat, in the dark, I heard the low rumbling of the landing gear setting me down in a new home, and I wondered if somewhere in this strange city, a parallel universe existed where two lovers, much like us, were kissing goodbye beneath the airport lights.

"Suffered a swift defeat
I’ll endure countless repeats
The gift of memory's an awful curse
With age it just gets much worse
But I won't mind."
-- death cab for cutie

Dreams beget reality

2007-05-14T14:34:00.000-07:00

Cleaning out a very old e-mail account, I found this note I sent to a friend -- circa 2003. (?)

My Friend,

It is nearly 2 a.m. and I cannot sleep. My thoughts are river dancing through my mind. Words and thoughts toss and turn like the raging sea. I reach for a notebook and pen to capture them, but just as quickly as they have come - they are gone.

I sit here now, bathed only in the light from this computer screen, for it is all I know to do. Do not think it odd of me that I write you these thoughts. I had to think you would understand.

I walked through the empty YMCA parking lot, gliding over patches of ice that had refused to melt. I opened Green Lantern's doors and sat inside, watching the mist turn to flakes of snow before alighting on her hood.

Though somewhat cold, I couldn't bear to leave the serene beauty which fell before me. I was captivated by the stillness, the solidarity, of the moment.

I could smell the dying embers from the wafts of smoke that were ascending toward the darkening dome of the nighttime sky. The houses before for me were paintings of places I had never seen. Bicycles tossed carelessly in frontyards...a small rabbit seeking refuge from the angry winter's chill...and me, a writer.

Somewhere, in the realm where smoke meets the falling mist sits a girl who fears she dreams too small. Reality and Imagination fight using swords stained with desire. I cannot dream small, I cannot live small, I cannot be small.

Perhaps it is vanity or selfishness or an insatiable hunger that cause me dissatisfaction with a life that is ordinary. I can almost reach out and touch Alabama - feel the lush greenery and the stickiness of humidity - but when I close my eyes and open the chamber door of my heart, it is the foamy tide of a midnight beach and sand between my toes that I feel most vividly...it is a bottle of wine on a nearly forgotten isle...it is craggy cliffs and and foreign faces...Longfellow's poetry - "And the night shall be filled with music/And the cares that infest the day/Shall fold their tents like the Arabs/And as silently steal away..."

If dreams beget reality...on what plane do they meet?

Never Know

2007-05-08T11:49:00.000-07:00

As we hung up the phone, your voice still echoed in my ear -- as it has many a night for the last [XX] years. But even louder was my own voice, telling you all the things I never say.

I am a slave to my silence because it's just easier that way -- it maintains your expectations, and lowers mine.

But as the informercials begin to appear on television and sleep is someone else's company tonight, I sit here composing all the things I want to say.

But it all comes back to this:

I love you, and you'll never know.

Dichotomy

2007-05-07T19:17:00.000-07:00

It all began about midnight when I found a faded pink tithe envelope buried in a desk drawer. The words I had written on some forgotten Sunday at church with my brother and sister-in-law prompted me to unearth the compact discs I had shoved in a box in my closet and to dust off the Bible on my bedside stand – to revisit a part of my life that, like cob-webbed corners, exist but I choose to ignore. I don’t remember when I scrawled these words, but I remember how I felt that day – empty. These were the words:

“Sitting here among the Hallelujahs and Amens I feel desperately … nothing.
The words flow from my lips in habit, the Falls Creek-learned hand motions manifest from somewhere in my deep memory. I cast my eyes around the sanctuary, truly defined to white-haired elderly people.
‘My very soul cried out Thank You Lord For Saving Me.’ But it’s just another line to another hymn.
And I regressed back to when all this meant something to me; when my days, nights and thoughts were consumed with something I’ve since grown increasingly skeptical of. And I realize I am no more than a liar – a hypocrite.
For I still know the lyrics; I still know the routine. Sometimes I still get chill bumps on my forearms from the nostalgia of it all, but I do not feel anything.
Sitting on the hard wooden pews, I chastise myself for my everyday life. I criticize these people for their parochial outlook on life, on the world … but, I wonder, am I any different?
From the pulpit now, a visiting preacher stumps for the sale of his novel. After all, it only costs less than a tank of gas …
And I begin to tune him out.

So now I sit here, watching from my second-floor window, the last of the bar crowd make their unsteady way back home – stereos thumping, the pilfered bottles of beer being tossed carelessly from car windows as they drunkenly yell back and forth to one another incoherent sentences and phrases.

From my computer comes the sound of the music I rescued from their cardboard coffins in my hall closet – each line a supplication for God to reveal Himself to a desperate heart.

And I feel as though my life defines dichotomy.

Somewhere along the way I have lost sight of something I once considered indelible – a part of myself I thought absolutely unbreakable … and, well, absolute. A life of surrender to a Greater Power; a life of worship and praise and verse. An unshakeable belief.

Now, everything is shaken to the core, broken like the alabaster jar -- but empty of perfume.

As headlights from passing cars below cast weak rays of light into this room, I find myself questioning the process of reconciliation. I search tonight for something I have been missing, but something that is still so familiar to me. I haven’t forgotten the feeling; I just don’t feel it anymore … and, the paradox that stalls me every time is that I wish I did.

I wish I could.

balcony/stars

2007-05-04T14:04:00.000-07:00

The balcony we sat on -- second floor;
You and I -- first time.
We stretched out our legs, letting the rain lick our bare feet
As our lips touched, stained red with wine.
You kissed me once, twice -- and we were inside,
where the candles played tricks on our mind.
In bed we lay, peering out the open window
Sheer curtains stirred by the spring storm.
We named the stars; called them ours
Herman, Angel and Sam.
I saw our old friends last night
Guarding the sky we owned
Now only they can bridge
the spaces in between us.

Grandpa, tell me 'bout the good ol' days

2007-05-04T13:54:00.000-07:00

This is something I wrote sometime last fall, after I received a telephone call telling me my grandfather was in the hospital and things didn't look particularly good.

Lingering

The hardest goodbyes to say are the ones that linger, cradled in expectations without manifestation.

As I walked from the warmth of the movie theater last night into the chilly autumn air, laughing with the boys, I wondered how long I could keep the laughter flowing so the tears wouldn’t spill.

It wasn’t until I started the late evening journey south that my heart realized the gravity of the situation.And I was afraid.

The call hadn’t been a final one, but a gentle reminder – “Time may be short, come home if you can.”

So there I went, taking the back roads to my home, state Highway 81 through small towns whose lights had already been turned off for the night. Though the evening hour wasn’t late, the towns were deserted – the distantly lit city and the one red blinking stoplight my only company, where I idled for five minutes begging my heart to be still.

This, this was my grandfather’s world.

I pulled into the one gas station whose neon lights told me they were still open, buying a cup of strong, black coffee – that I don’t even like. But it’s my grandfather’s drink and I felt if I could somehow channel any of his remaining energy I might be able to give it to him when I got home – my present for all the times I hadn’t been.

And as I sat in my car, willing myself forward, I recalled the day my grandfather told me the world had passed him by and just become too small for his taste.

We were making the run to Wok N’ Roll for Sunday night dinner, the rest of the family waiting back at the house and he and I just wanting to escape – the firsts to nominate ourselves for the typically despised task of picking up dinner.

He drove; I rode - as we both watched our town fly by the truck windows, changing even as we made the 2-mile trek. Nothing about the town is what we remembered, and it was easier to forget where to turn than to remember how to get back home again.He was the first to break the silence.

“This world has gotten too small for me, Udine,” he said. “Too small for this old man.”

He must have sensed my question before I asked it because he went on to tell me how everything was readily available and how anyone could be found with the click of a few buttons and how, to him, what used to be a vast mystery was cheapened by technology and one-stop quick shops - nothing had any personality anymore, nothing was really very real.

But then he had smiled and laughed, his eyes the colour of a cloudless blue Sunday, twinkling still, as he began to sing “Goodnight Irene.”

And I realized just how small my own world was when I walked in the front doors of the house last night to see my grandfather lying on a pile of blankets on the floor, spending all his energy on a small wave and weak smile to greet me.

This morning, as we sat talking about Republicans and Democrats and a changing world, the strongest man I’ve ever known offered me a weak sigh, telling me when he looked in the mirror that morning he expected to see the person he was five years ago – but all he found in his reflection was an old man.

I couldn’t think of anything to say, but I remembered clearly how he would always tell me to remember just what my knees were for …

Yes, PawPaw – and tonight I’ll hit them for you.

Grandpa, tell me ‘bout the good ole days
Sometimes it feels like this world’s gone crazy
And Grandpa, take me back to yesterday
When the lines between right and wrong
Didn’t seem so hazy …
…And Grandpa, everything is changin’ fast
We call it progress
But I just don’t know …”

Skin

2005-09-16T08:09:00.000-07:00

When I woke up this morning, I was a little hazy
Stepping from the warm water of my shower
Smelling like clean
I wished I could put on something
Other than my own skin.

Portland is Such Great Heights

2005-08-01T07:44:00.000-07:00

Currently Listening
Give Up
By Postal Service

see related

The lyrics to Such Great Heights remind me of Portland.

I am back on a rain-soaked and cobbled street, sheltering myself from the drizzle. I am walking the few blocks back to my apartment from Powell's; I may or may not have just stopped off at Whole Foods for dinner. I am missing home, but I am loving the way the streetlights shine on the slick road. I enjoy watching the people - those single and those in love, those lonely and those just happy to be alive - walking toward and away from me. I notice my gait is keeping time with the Postal Service playing through my earphones. I am preoccupied when I shouldn't be and somewhere deep inside I realize I am not seizing this opportunity as I should.

Now, two years later, I am wishing I had done all the things I think I would do now.

This Summer

2005-07-22T11:47:00.000-07:00

I want to sit with a friend in the last of a fading day and talk. Or not. When summer doesn't feel so treacherous, it's just warm and nice. I want to watch the sun go down and feel connected to someone. I want to swat away irritating mesquitos and laugh about their imperviousness.
I want a little house with a little yard.
I want to find that part of me that enjoyed those things again.

Breathe

2005-03-30T23:22:00.000-08:00

i went to a place that you were not
but thought i saw you there
the flickering light wasn't anything more
than the ghost of memories past.

haunted and healing
i sit in the sun
soaking in its heat
and carbon dioxide

it feels good to breathe again.

Empty

2005-03-25T20:21:00.000-08:00

Ellis Paul on the radio
And you on my mind
The first hints of spring
And I'm returning to
late night drives.
My house is clean
and my dishes done
But it, and I, are empty
without you.

A Brief Memory of Portland

2004-12-27T07:38:00.000-08:00

In a Simon and Garfunkle song, there is a line that says, "Michigan seems like a dream to me now ..."

I understand the sentiment for Portland seems like a dream to me now.

Reading on CNN.com today about a holiday shooting outside Meier and Frank, I think of how often I walked the cobblestoned streets in front of that department store, how often I, myself, shopped there.

Although I am aware I lived in Portland for some time, there are little things that I have taken from there - and that saddens me. I makes me feel like I wasted months upon months of my life instead of embracing them.

I can remember some smells, some sights -- but as for solid memories, I wonder where they are lingering.

Then again, I just had one, didn't I?

Just Existing

2004-11-17T15:58:00.000-08:00

Currently Playing
Our Endless Numbered Days
By Iron & Wine
see related

A few days ago a guy I know told me that, while staring at his ceiling, he got depressed. He said as he lay there staring up, he realized that all he was going to do for the rest of his life was exist. Just exist.
He added while in Mexico, many of the kids, dirty and poor, would wave and wave at the Americans, calling out unfamiliar Spanish phrases and begging with sad, dark eyes.
All they will do, he said, is stand in streets and wave.
What life boils down to, he ventured, was simply existing. Living and breathing and working and laughing and crying and loving and hating and cheating and fearing and conquoring can be summed up in one word, one action.
So, now as the rain pours down outside and I watch it, filled with hope and rejuvenation at things to come, can my life be boiled down in to that one word?

Hmmm

2004-09-22T08:26:00.000-07:00

Currently Playing
Scarlet's Walk
By Tori Amos
see related

I knew this guy in college who was absolutely everything I ever wanted - intelligent, well-read, kind, funny, creative, ambitious.
We spent a good deal of time together, discussing life, the future, music.
We fell into an easy, never awkward friendship that always gave me joy and I would look forward to spending time with this person.
And, basically, that's where it ended.
Sometimes, when Mercury is in retrograde or some other time, I wonder about the what ifs and what might've beens.
I wonder if I was too flippant or he too shy.
It's not something I think about every day or even all that often, but today, as I was driving along a busy interstate, hastily looking over my shoulder to merge, I wondered about him - whether he was driving a busy interstate, or still lingering over morning coffee reading the paper.

BTWE (Part 1)

2004-09-02T11:24:00.000-07:00

Currently Playing
The Unforgettable Fire
By U2
see related

- A Sort of Homecoming

The world must have exploded because we were BTWE.

I knew this girl once, and it seems like only yesterday she and I were running barefoot in the creek behind her farmhouse, living out our own "Island of the Blue Dolphins" fantasy.

But that was 16 years ago.

She was the same girl who, when we were about two-years-old, tossed me a bouncy ball from beneath a memosa tree and we talking in toddler jibberish. That was the same day my grandma bought me pink jellies from the now defunct TG&Y.

Throughout time and space, this one girl would impact my life more than anyone else has, and maybe ever will. But I don't know where she's at now.

Well, ok, I know exactly where she's at. I know vague pieces of her life that I've picked up from mutual sources along the way. But, we're not welcome in one another's worlds anymore.

And, that's all right. Life changes people. Lies change people, or break them, however you want to look at it.

But sometimes, especially in late summer, when I smell something that reminds me of 1982, I will conjure up a mental image of a girl with long brown hair and bright blue eyes standing barefoot beneath a tree and smiling with her bouncy ball.

Come in from the Cold

2004-08-26T07:53:00.000-07:00

Currently Playing
Hits
By Joni Mitchell
see related

It makes me happy
to drive along the City streets
in the morning
And the old black man
in his straw hats
and dirty jeans
Never fails to wave
and curse
but wave nonetheless
And all the hurried people
cell phones and deadlines
weave in and out of their lanes
But the sun glinting
off forgotten industrialism
always fills my soul.

Mornings

2004-08-09T08:02:00.000-07:00

Currently Playing
Hatful of Hollow
By The Smiths
see related

it doesn't bother me
when you steal my side of bed
and the covers
and i think every morning
should be spent
reading, and ironing
with feets tapping in time
to the music of the video
we're creating
Only we don't really know it.

Ghost Buildings

2004-08-02T09:51:00.000-07:00

Currently Playing
Oh, Inverted World
By Shins
see related

I think that bricked-in windows on old buildings and the fading ghost signs barely visible that once proudly advertised markets and merchants are both the saddest and most beautiful things.

Driving along Classen headed toward Builder's Warehouse and the interstate yesterday, I saw an old building with both ghost signs and bricked windows. I had to pause and wonder of what granduer it once knew, what lives worked within it walls and if they ever knew that one day they would't matter anymore to the general public; that they would not be noticed from the windows of VW Beetles and Chevy Blazers. I wondered what ambitious young man or woman in the early part of the century had dreams of striking gold from this venture, or what family no longer runs the faded family market.

And, I wondered, will my life - like theirs - one day be a fleeting image; a ghost?

Merging

2004-07-29T09:43:00.000-07:00

Currently Playing
Lost Sides
By Doves
see related

- Your Shadow Lay Across My Life

Oklahoma City in the rain. Skyline shrouded in a beautifully depressed shade of gray. A motorcade of angry faces glancing at their watches [tick tock, tick tock] late because the driver of an overturned semi had a bad day.

My one headlight bounces off rain-slick streets as my balding tires carry me closer to the 8-5. I don't mind the grind. I don't mind the delay.

I'll watch the rain, growing heavy, bounce off the guardrails where I'm stalled. [Fly by traffic, much like life - me, I'll sit and watch until I merge]

Reaching Out to the Familar

2004-07-27T21:44:00.000-07:00

Currently Playing
Without You I'm Nothing
By Placebo
see related

- Every You Every Me

Reaching out to the familar

I'm trying to get back to somewhere that's familar, here in the few moments before one day fades into the next and I've lost it completely.

So long has this pen been frozen that it feels foreign in my hand, the words that it forms are like a language I've never known - but it feels right.

The lamp's on low, good music on the stereo and the walls are no longer red.

So much is still tied to that red-walled apartment one town over. Many memories still burn with intensity ... when remembered ... though nothing is the same. And it shouldn't be.
The scenery has changed, the names and faces are different; the name I now utter is not his, but yours.

But somehow, for some reason, I cannot escape the year or more spent in the throes of both depression and self-actualization.

There is a song by a band whose name escapes me that says, "...sometimes you have to lose everything to find out ..."
Find out what, I now now wonder as the voice in the song whines from my father's hand-me-down speakers.

My life has changed dramatically in the past year. I've gone from being someone I loathed, but knew to being someone I like, but know not.

I'm in this pattern of graet change, a cyclical whirlwind I can't control but don't want to stop. I'm sure many areas of my life could stand some rearranging or definition, but like Ellis says, "I like the tension when there's room for doubt."

A few faces remain from that period, and I am sure everyone goes through something like it. Van Gogh has his "Blue Period" and Joni Mitchell had her "Blue" album. What then shall my personal shade of blue be called?

Those times were rough and tumble; I went through days, weeks, months and years when I couldn't recall being happy, wondering if I'd ever been. Now, I'm going through times when I can't recall being unhappy.

Who knew, agreeing that hindsight is 20/20, that those were the some of the happy times?

O life! you're ironic at best.

Good Weekend; Manic Monday

2004-07-26T11:02:00.000-07:00

Currently Playing
Sleeping With Ghosts (Bonus CD)
By Placebo
see related

- Centrefolds -

Good Weekend; Manic Monday

Saturday I was reminded of another day, maybe two or three years earlier, on which I drove the same gray streets, listening to the same CD with a then-good friend. That day has been known as "the good day." But, that will be another blog when I feel more like a writer and less like a journalist.

Friday night I went to Z's and pillaged his hard drive of good music. From that evening was born: Drunk Mix, Whiskey and Water Mix, Kalyn Free for state Rep. Mix, I Love Lube Mix and Cuff Stuff. The CDs range from the Mountain Goats to Placebo to Steve Earle ... and its good, good stuff. God bless Z and his impeccable taste in music and willingness to give me access to it. Heaven holds a place for him
Again I will say that Z is one of my favourite people, and I always have such fun with him. It's rare and wonderful to have such a friend that you just feel completely yourself around and who will be completely honest with you -- whether you want to hear what they have to say or not. Thanks Z.

Saturday afternoon my parents made a mini-surprise trip up to the City to see me. Actually, they went to Yukon to see a car show and thought it rude if they didn't stop by and see their daughter when they were so near. They were amazed at the cleanliness of my house -- "Fawn, you are growing up..." my mother said, somewhat shocked, I think. It was a beautiful cloudy day of reading and dreaming. [Note to Self: Get journal back from Zach.]

I have been frustrated with myself lately because I can't seem to write for myself anymore. I know I have vented frequently about this topic, and I also know I just need to buckle down and write. Maybe today I will buy a new notebook and a new pen and spend the evening writing by candlelight like I have done so many evenings before.

But today, o blasted Monday! has been evil. I spent $268 in traffic court when I was only supposed to have paid $157. Why, you ask? Let me tell you.

I received a ticket in June for going 35/25. When I went online to pay it on Friday, I noticed they'd charged me for going 11-19 miles over the speed limit, when in fact I was only going ten. The lady who answered the phones told me to come in Monday and contest the ticket; it didn't matter that my original court date was Friday.

LIAR!!!

I get to the court and after waiting nearly two hours, it's my turn. I did, in fact, get my ticket reduced ... however, I had to pay warrant fees and court costs due to it being after my original court date. Sigh.

The total cost of the ticket = $157.
Fawn being overcharged = $40
What Fawn actually paid = $268

What's wrong with this picture?!?!

At least you are taking me out to lunch. That makes me happy.

Help Me

2004-07-12T16:30:00.000-07:00

Currently Playing
Court & Spark
By Joni Mitchell
see related

- Help Me

If I were Joni Mitchell I would get out my guitar and sit you down in an overstuffed chair. I would look you in the eye and sing "Help Me." But I'm not Joni, so I will continue to get the courage to ask you about your freedom.

Are you going to let me go there by myself
That's such a lonely thing to do
Both of us flirting around
Flirting and flirting
Hurting too
We love our lovin'
But not like we love our freedom

Notes to Self ...and Others

2004-06-30T14:05:00.000-07:00

Currently Playing
Join the Dots: B-sides and Rarities, 1978-2001
By The Cure
see related

- Pictures of You

Dear Late Nights at Work,

Though you suck, you enabled me to sleep through the entire night for the first time in a long while. For that, I thank you. It made my day go a lot better ... even when the rain on the interstate threatened my disposition.

Dear Squeaky,

You're not as bad as I thought you were. I am sorry that I formed an opinion of you before I truly got to know you. OK, so I don't really know you, but nonetheless, I think you are a genuinely nice person that I didn't give a fair chance.

Dear You,

You don't know it, but I have made up my mind to listen to Paul McCartney. I am going to just let it be - whatever this is anyway. I simply don't have the energy to wait around, nor do I have the patience. I admit, it's a character flaw. In fact, you remind me of the lines of a Rilo Kiley song: "and if you want me, you better speak up, i won't wait ..."

Dear Sarah Eliza,

I miss you. I miss Oregon. Thank you so much for all the talking lately. It's always nice to have a bond with someone, especially if they are in a similar place in life. Thank you for your friendship and for just being the awesome, beautiful woman that you are. Just keep this in mind: "We aren't as bad off as Bill!"

Dear Cure,

I want to see you in August. Will you somehow make tickets magically appear in my hand? *holds breath, closes eyes*

Dear Self,

Well, kiddo, looks like everything is working out for you. Just stay on your toes and take life one day at a time. Life's too short to be consumed by things that don't matter in the end ...

Heart's Last Call for Orchids

2004-05-24T13:17:00.000-07:00

My aversion to artificial air coupled with the balmy night [this state has forgotten the spring season] pushed me from clean linen sheets to wander the city's roads, hoping my insomnia would soon be gone.

Weaving through Midcity streets, I refused to take aim at any certain destination and simply allowed my vehicle to go where it chose. With the windows down, I could smell the lingering odors of the weekend mixed with the smell that can only be known as May.

After about an hour's worth of driving, preferring residential streets this night as opposed to the interstates, I found myself, perhaps subconsciously, driving a street all too familiar. There, directly to my left, was a light on in the second floor window of the home we used to share. I know it wasn't you; you haven't been there in months - and before that, it held only the tangible objects of what used to be, though both of us had stopped calling it home long before our lease ran out.

I was surprised, but only mildly, that I didn't drown in any powerful emotion ... except for when I saw the flowers in the window.

Then, I could almost feel the temperature drop 20 degrees until it was an unusually warm afternoon in February and we were eating lunch at Kamp's. Neither of us talking, there was no need, as I scribbled away in my vertical handwriting and you created art out of a red felt-tipped pen and a paper napkin.

Upon returning home, for it was still home then, you said you should head back to school. While you were away, I placed pink orchids in every window -- they're your favourite flower -- and opened up the patio door to let in the fresh air.

And there, last night, watching unfamiliar shadows move about our house, I could almost smell that day, feel that moment.

Thinking the heavy air had gotten to my bare skin, I moved to wipe away the moisture, and found myself surprised to be wiping tears away instead. This is the first time I have cried since I made up my mind not to, two days after you left.

But they weren't tears for you. And they weren't tears for me.

They were full of release, of cleansing, of peace. I let them wash me.

With a smile and something akin to a salute, I moved on.

Last night was my heart's last call for orchids.

My Life as a Firecracker

2003-12-17T12:02:00.000-08:00

Its the fourth of july in december, and I light the fuse. It sizzles and smokes, tossing small sparks onto my bare skin, before it explodes with a pop and a flash. then, to my eyes, it's dead. the fire has gone from the cracker and it's an empty, hollow thing.

I went to the Positively 4th St. Smokeshop today to pay the newspaper piper _ as is part of my meaningless job_ and as I was buying the junkfood that sustains me, Ray, the shopkeep, looked at me with something akin to compassion, understanding, or, maybe pity in his aged eyes.

"Haven't seen you in awhile," he said, smiling his yellow-toothed smile.
"Yeah," I said softly. "It's been a little crazy here."

I placed my soda and candy bar on the counter and reached into my special bag for my change.

"So, when ya goin' home?" he asked.

Tears welled in my eyes, as they've been resting there since last week. I bit my lips and it looks like I have some sort of mouth fungus because I have been biting it so much lately _ the once tender flesh is scabbed and dry, bleeding when I dn't know it is.

"I'm not sure," I say and determinedly bite down on my lip, stopping the impending tears.
"Well, it's the holidays," he says.

I nod.

"Where's home again? I mean, I know you got that southern accent, but I forget..."

I clench my fists and take a deep breathe, but it's not enough to stop the torrent of emotion from spilling over.

I whisper, "I don't know where home is anymore ..."

Ray nods, his eyes never leaving me though I avoid their kindness at all costs.

"Isn't it funny how an hour changes everything," he asks.

It's a question I am not supposed to answer. He continues.

"Life, it's like a firecracker. It goes through, what, at least 20 stages of development to make it what it is. Then, in a few seconds, it's gone. It's purpose has been fulfilled. A little noise, a little fear, and then, it's finished."

I clumsily pop my knuckles and bounce restlessly from one sneaker clad foot to the other. I look outside _ the rain, the people _ and I just want to stay in this small, dark shop with it's magazines and newspapers and it's seclusion. The thought of returning to my yellow-walled office with its phones and computers and endless questions about my unusual silence left me with dread.

Ray continues, noticing my my timidity, but gently skirting over it.

"It's [life] like that sometimes. You plan things, you hope for things, you put them through development, only to have this just blow up after all that work. Or, we're like that too. We go through so many changes, and let's face it, we fail. We're human, we fail. We hurt people and they hurt us and we feel like all of out changing, or our trying, isn't worth it. We make other people feel that way too. And so, we don't really know what we're becoming as we go through the process _ all we really know is when it explodes and we're left empty."

It pops. It fizzles. And the spark goes out.

And my life is a firecracker.