The Book and its Covers...

I want to delve into the meat of this move—this changing of space and memory. Into the infinite electric white space of this blog and divulge secrets and wonders, the wisdom of moving and the sharp emotions of it. But the emotions are sea-glass: rounded and indistinct. My response to stress is invariably the same: retreat. And, especially when I find myself in the throes of something as monumental as a cross-country move—it is retreat, escape, numbness. Nothing.

And, unfortunately, both for this blog and for my greater self, it is not a retreat into the mind, from which I can sally forth weeks or months later, heavy laden with riches of thought and encouragement. No. I retreat into a fog of numbness. I disappear within a shroud of quiet. And I read. I simply devour books—any books I can lay my hands on.

Well, not any book. It must be a reread. I want familiar territory. I want to be home the way one can only be home within the covers of a favorite, well-worn, oft-read novel. Because when my world is new and sharp and foreign, I long for Jane Austen’s England, Beryl Markham’s East Africa; even Hogwarts or Forks will do. Anything that will fly me out of my discomfort and land me squarely on ground I’ve tread before.

When I was a child, there was a public service announcement encouraging kids to read. In it a cartoon alley cat, wearing an admiral’s jacket, would leap and swing between the far-flung worlds of space and sea and country; proclaiming what an adventure reading could be. I’ve always been a reader, but it wasn’t until fourth grade that I fell madly in love with it. I can’t for the life of me remember my 4th grade English teacher’s name, only that it started with a “Z” and that she was a slightly terrifying, energetic woman of small stature with short grey hair. When I try to picture her I’m left with the impression of short, quick movements that snap like a firecracker, energy spraying out of her fingertips—her eyes wide.

I’m sure she wasn’t this way at all, but I love that, whoever she is, she has become in my mind a tenacious witch of a woman. She was all energy. And we had homework; homework that we needed to do on our own, each week. Each Friday we had to turn in an index card with the title and author and a short summary of a book (of our choosing) that we’d read that week. I hated this assignment. I’m bad at anything that involves time management, and to have a whole week to accomplish it and to necessarily choose it for ourselves—I would invariably wait until Thursday night. But what I owe Ms. Z is perhaps the magic of immersion in a book that I’ve found. The immersion and the finding are both key and neither can out-weigh the other. It must be a book that has *miraculously* found it’s way to me and it is also key that I lose myself in it entirely.

*Some Kind of Sorcery!*

To lose oneself in a book: when the world disappears completely. When you spend your days in a medieval castle or on a Victorian fox hunt; in the trenches of Verdun or in a plane over Mumbai; deep in the Louisiana Bayou or exactly in the center of Shibuya intersection; ancient China, whaling boat, river rafting barefoot and freckled; encountering first love, loving a soul-mate; finding oneself. An alternate universe; a terrifying future; a mansion of Long Island; a tenement in turn-of-the-century New York.

To be able to feel the pebbled path through the soles of leather-bottomed boots; to feel the sure, hard iron of the stirrup across the ball of the foot; to know the stinging, rough pull of the mainsail and wind-whipped hair—spray of sea—and taste salt when you lick your lips; hear the creak of the old wooden stairs as you creep into the forbidden wing of the manor; sink deep into the expensive, expansive sofa on the Upper West Side, letting the designer flats slip off your feet as you sip a cold, bright white wine.

And yet, all the while I am here, in my pajamas, smack dab in the real world—with IKEA furniture and two napping boys—crushed Cheerios on the floor, bright loud plastic toys.

This is miraculous. This is the breadth of landscape and universe that exists in the small space between the covers of a book.

So forgive me for not reappearing from my summer vacation with anything more than this. I’ve been busy revisiting old landscapes dear to my heart. But I’m beginning to emerge into my now. Into the space where I actually exist…

Oh Windy City, City of Broad Shoulders, let me lean on you now…

Update or What I Did Over Summer Vacation...

Another year, another city. What did I do this summer? Well, in addition to having an absolutely wonderful summer with friends and family in Atlanta, and finally beginning to settle in and feel like I was at home, we also moved to Chicago. In the middle of August, we found out that Gordon would be starting a new job on September 7th. And off we went into the middle of the country, with only enough time to hire movers and wave goodbye on our way out of town. No processing. No emotional impact. Safer that way. So I’m waiting patiently for it to hit me. Wondering if it will, when it will. Some days I think it doesn’t matter one iota where I live, and some days I know for certain that I will miss people and moments so much it hurts once I finally face the fact that I’m in a new city. For now it feels like vacation. I’m still living out of a suitcase, figuring out where things go, no idea where the closest dry cleaner is.

And, in many ways, even when on vacation, my days are always the same. They’re days of blankies and bandaids, spiderman and pots-and-pans-orchestras: filled with the magic of childhood and littered with the debris that accompanies it. We spend our days at the playgrounds or going for walks around the neighborhood. My life is constant in that it still revolves around the two little blond heads in my double stroller.

For now, I’m content. And whether that is me not having processed anything, or me just taking one little step at a time—waiting patiently for nap times and bed times and first glasses of wine (hooray for 5 o’clock!)—here in Chicago just as I did in Atlanta and in San Francisco before that, I am glad that I am still standing, still smiling, still just me. Gordon’s words are coming back to me again: “wherever you go, there you are.”

Here I am.

Coming Home

Home. Over the past year this word has become a puzzle to me. Something I've tugged at and stretched and picked at, trying desperately to unravel it. To make it cover me where I am. To make my home where I am. Ode to a snail--who carries his home on his back. But we are not snails. We are yard sales of miscellany and collected bits. We overflow into storage rooms and walk-in-closets and corners of basements. Our things proliferate. But even the metaphor of home--even the intangible feeling of what makes us glow inside, what brings a flush to the cheeks--even this is difficult to cultivate and carry.

I'm thinking about Home a lot right now because we've moved again. A spur-of-the-moment move half-way across the country. And we're back in an apartment, and walking everywhere. We're in a city again. I love it. I miss other things. I wonder, as I did less than a year and half ago when I moved to Atlanta, what it's all about. Who I am when I physically move myself to a different space. I'm at the intersection of space and "the now." It's just as confusing and mystifying as the intersection of space and memory. These are the Shibuyas of emotional import.

What makes me who I am? What makes me ok being who I am, where I am. Why is it so difficult for us to be in a new environment--even if it's better? We are creatures of habit I suppose. Especially me. Give me a warm seat and a good book and I won't move til it's done. I could eat the same thing for breakfast lunch and dinner for weeks at a time. And now I'm in Chicago and Gordon works all day and I still haven't gotten myself out of boxes.

I find myself paralyzed. Unable to DO anything. All I want is to sink myself into something that will consume me and take me completely away from here.

And yet.

And yet.

"And yet all the while you are you, you are not me.
And I am I, I am never you.
How awfully distinct and far off from each other's being we are!

Yet I am glad.
I am so glad there is always you beyond my scope,
Something that stands over,
Something I shall never be,
That I shall always wonder over, and wait for,
Look for like the breath of life as long as I live,
Still waiting for you, however old you are, and I am,
I shall always wonder over you, and look for you.

And you will always be with me.
I shall never cease to be filled with newness,
Having you near me."

D.H. Lawrence, "Wedlock"

Treasure Hunt

Two months gone and so much learned. William James made famous the concept of “stream of consciousness” saying that thoughts are like a stream—you step into them once and draw your toe out and when it dips in again it’s somewhere entirely different—the waters themselves are different. And that’s where I find myself now. Two months gone and so many thoughts: so many ideas gone, so many MEs. It makes me wonder what it is that keeps me constant. “I am as constant as the northern star, and I said, constantly in the darkness, where’s that at? If you want me I’ll be at the bar…”

I am considering the past. And I miss it intensely. And I feel blessed in this. What an enormous blessing to miss the past—to have a past worth missing. It doesn’t mean, certainly, that the present isn’t wonderful, but only that you have lived the past well. That it was memorable.

Well, perhaps you must, like me, have pasts in your life that are not wonderful to conjure in order to feel such a blessing in thinking of certain pasts that make your mouth water with longing.

In any event, it is nice to be back here at the keyboard, typing out the things that I love and miss and long for. To remember the people and things that have been so wonderful to me.

Today Henry played dress up. For the first time since his third birthday (which was on Sunday), he dressed up as something other than Spiderman. He was, today, a pirate. He wore his pirate captain Halloween costume and his new eye-patch. He carried his new plastic compass, telescope, and dagger. “Don’t fly me, I’m not Peter Pan, I’m Captain Hook!” he exclaimed as we read the JM Barrie classic and discussed treasures. He carried a plastic spoon and buried his Spiderman figurine (“right here in the floor—like we’re pretending it’s dirt”) who he said was his treasure after we had talked about what “treasure” means and what it could represent. “For instance,” I said, “you are my treasure. It’s what we love most.”

Henry’s third birthday. At the party, many, many people (all of them parents) congratulated me on Henry’s third birthday, reminding me that it was my anniversary of being a mom. True. It was. And it was a marvelous day. A day of looking back at how much I’ve grown, how much I’ve changed. I had a moment, looking in the fridge, wondrously filled with fresh food and fruit and leftovers. I remembered so clearly a time when my fridge held nothing but beer and condiments. What a healthy change. But mainly—where would I be? I love and treasure Gordon so intensely. Not a day goes by that I am not grateful and cognizant of the gift he is to me. But the boys—Oh My God the boys! My heart doubles and trebles with love for my boys! My grown boy and my “big” boy and my baby boy! Blessings rain down on me! I am saturated! I sit back amazed at the way love grows and grows, exponentially. Soul Kudzu. I am so in love and so blessed. My treasures are innumerable. My cup over flows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. (Psalm 23)

It’s been a week of remembering and lamenting. It’s been a week of triumphs and questioning. In fact, there have been two long months of this—and they have gone unrecorded. Forgive me. I hope it will not be so long again.

The Magic of Childhood

When I was a child, my grandfather would often preach at Park Street Church in downtown Boston when he was in town from California. I remember so clearly running wild through the ancient cemetery that the lobby let out onto, watching fearless squirrels gather acorns fallen from the enormous oaks. Boston was, to me, a magical land of lush gardens and old brick buildings crouching low on the busy streets. Tall glass skyscrapers and cement monoliths, all sitting atop the troglodyte world of the cavernous T train system. It was going down trash-strewn stairs into the tile-lined tunnels, dark beneath the earth; the screech and hiss and rumble of trains approaching—the rats scattering beneath the tracks; something so ancient, and something so modern. I traveled under the roads and the bay in dirty train cars with old, hard smears of bubble gum and the odd assortment of New Englanders. Immigrants speaking different languages, prim middle-aged women dressed from the Land’s End catalogue carrying canvas library totes, punks and skinheads, and the multitude of college students in worn army jackets and thick wool scarves and torn levis. This was where I encountered the greater world—greater, anyway, than my small, homogenous New England town with it’s little town green and single strip of stores. Boston was rich with history and beauty and it felt worn and dear as a favorite coat. Most of all, it was thick with the mystery of the adult world which I was excluded from. Busy people with lives so foreign to mine, buzzing about their day and intersecting my life for the space of a train stop or two. Then they were off, or I was, and the lines of our lives spun onto different routes. Exiting the tunnels, I’d emerge back into the sun and the city, finding myself somewhere entirely new, like being birthed.

I moved to Atlanta when I was 13, which is just about the age when the magic begins to wear off of childhood—the small tears and chips on the corners appear and, more than that, we realize they’ve been there all along and we were just not aware of them. I think for this reason, Boston remained an untouched perfection, dewy with wonder. It was a fairy tale put away on an unreachable shelf. It was the motherland from which I had been exiled. It lay untarnished, the patina of childhood still firmly in place. It is no wonder that it was not all that I expected when I moved back ten years later. But while I was there, for moments or hours, or sometimes days, Boston occasionally became exactly how I remembered it.

When I walked, the first time, to my interview with the head hunters that would eventually help me get my job, I didn’t know that I’d find myself walking past Park Street Church. But as I turned the corner, just there onto Tremont Street at the edge of the Boston Commons, there was a man who played the saxophone in front of the cemetery fence by Park Street Church. Rounding the corner from South Station, the notes would hit me and lift me straight up. Give me butterflies. I would be giddy with memory and magic and the way in which his playing united the entire street into a cityscape—even the sun was a conspirator in it’s near perfect slant through the old oaks--the way it fell just so on the bricks of the sidewalk. And everyone within hearing was suddenly captured in the net of his music, as if they were all there just for me, a sound stage I’d walked on to. A movie set. Everyday that he was there and playing I would smile so wide I felt like I was being turned inside out. Because I was the guardian of a sweet, sticky little secret: this Boston that I found myself in, weaving in and out and around with the breath of the sax, it filled me. It nourished me. It made the smallest, most interior part of me shiver with joy.

It was as if all of what I had missed, all the magic of New England that lived in my memories, was rolled into this one instant on Tremont street, brought back to me with the flow of the music. The feelings of a New England fall and then the winter that I remembered so clearly: the changing colors, the early dark, the chill in the air, the sting in the nose; chapped cheeks, slush seeping through the seams of shoes; that slightly metallic smell of a scarf that has been wrapped tightly against lips and nostrils—beaded and hot with moisture; the smell of snow; days spent fort building and clumping heavy wet mounds together into snowmen; the sting of snow as it crept over the collar of my jacket and hit my neck while I made snow angels; the oddly sharp pain on numbed skin when hit with a snowball; the crunch and give of day-old snow.

New England still held these wonders for me, unchanged in their beauty. These moments where time bent back on itself and I was wide-eyed and enraptured once again. But mostly, Boston was a city where I worked, and couldn’t afford to live; a place still closed off to me even when I had come back all this way after many years. Inaccessible. It was as if I was trespassing. As if it was no longer mine.

But those windswept moments on Tremont Street, with the saxophone reaching out to me, pulled me into the world, included me in the web of humanity from which I felt so distant. I was caught up in that precise moment: asphalt gritty beneath my foot, swing of my quick walk, rush of air on my cheek, rough wool against my chin, and music, music, music floating me back into a time when I was realer than I’d been in awhile.

My Year of Pain and Beauty

Atlanta in April. The trees are all wearing leaves again—spring came upon us quickly this year. One of the things I missed most when I lived in San Francisco was the changing seasons. There was something about the lack of seasons there that allowed time to slip past unnoticed. We wore the same clothes all year round. Our hottest weather was in October and everyone would scramble to buy a sundress or unearth a pair of shorts. The few places in town that have patios were packed with long lines whenever the weather got above 70, but no matter how warm it was during the day the evening would bring fog and cold and wind. Summer was often one of the coldest stretches—hats and scarves, misting rain, thick wool sweaters. It was the only time that really felt like fall to me. Pumpkins would appear on doorsteps and I’d remember that it was October, that time was passing. But for the most part, time was a line unpunctuated by anything particular. Time both swept by continually and appeared to never move at all.

I moved to San Francisco when I was 23. I had lived one tumultuous year in Providence, trying so hard to love and be loved. I was with the wrong boy, and it was a year of finding this out. Of continual heartbreak and occasional beauty. But it was undoubtedly my biggest year of growth. Boston had been to me everything I had hoped. And it had been less. And it had been more.

I moved to Providence with Adam, someone who I was desperately in love with. Someone who felt like my soul mate at times. Someone who felt unfeelingly distant and aloof at other times. I lived in Providence, in an apartment which had its own sad story, but that is for another post. We moved in and made it ours as much as we could. But there was sadness in the corners—smeared reminders on top of the fridge. I worked in Boston, a place I had been longing for since I moved away when I was thirteen. Every morning, I took the train from Providence up to Boston and walked to work: a landscape architecture firm on Mass Ave, right across the street from the Berkeley School of Music. I would go to work where I was the only administrative employee for a firm of 23 landscape architects and I would think and think and think as I performed tasks. The longer I was there, the more my job grew to encompass. I was, when I left, involved in marketing, award proposals, RFPs, preparing bids for new jobs, reorganizing the electronic libraries, accounting, and my original job—front desk person. It became important to me. It was a good job with a good company and I was needed. I edited and formatted almost everything that left the office. I was only there for 10 months, but several things happened in that space that changed me and the course of my life.

But again, I digress. I want to write about coming back to Boston; to a place that had been magic to me when I was just a child, taking the T into the city on the weekends with my friends. The trains, the tunnels—walls smeared with soot and graffiti—the musicians who always seemed to be playing Simon and Garfunkel (is that possible?) the feeling of being a very small girl in a very big city. The feeling of being capable. This is something I had lost through years of self-doubt and discouragement.

And suddenly, there I was, back in the New England of my youth. But at first, it wasn’t how I remembered it. It was expensive and cold and dirty. But the romanticism had worn away. The people were rude and the wind was bitter and the subways were just dirty. Mostly, however, it was the feeling of being capable that failed to reappear. I don’t know what I was expecting. To reencounter myself? To become, again, the girl who was so fearless and confident? This had been worn away by many years in the South, a foreign place to me where I had never found my legs. It took many months for me to find her again, but find her I did. It was my year of pain and beauty.

When did it become beautiful? Only after the pain. In that raw and broken space where life feels so real and sharp that it’s like burlap on bare skin.

There are so many small moments that added up to that amazing change in me. So many lonely hours spent wishing I knew myself. Wishing I liked who I was. Hard wooden park benches where I escaped for lonely lunches hoping to avoid being noticed. Awkward seconds spent in the elevator that inched by like hours, feeling insecure and shy and ugly. Was I fat? Was I stupid? Did I have any value at all? A collection of minutes waiting under the large clock in South Station, wondering if Adam would show up. Wondering if perhaps he hadn’t waited for me and was already on the way home. Wishing someone could sweep into my life and fill it up to the brim. Riding crowded train cars, yawning distance between me and the people I rubbed shoulders with.

But at the end of it, when I began to see it all differently, see myself differently, I wallowed in the hurt and fear and crazy until I owned it. Until I became part of the world again as just me: a small girl in a big city wondering who I was and being ok with not knowing.

This was such a crucial time in my life, so rich in blessings and epiphanies, so drenched in beauty, that it deserves many posts. Over the next few days I’ll be writing snapshots of these moments—each pregnant with potential. Each moment an essential piece of who I am as I sit, now, on my front porch in the waning light of an Atlanta spring evening, still trying to know myself. But very sure that I’m on the right path.

Fly me to the Moon

Apparently, anything higher than 120 units per cubic meter is considered an extremely high pollen count. Today in Atlanta, the pollen count is 5,733. The ground is carpeted in yellow dust; the cat making pollen angels as she rolls on the deck, coming up chalky yellow like an elementary school teacher too long at the chalkboard. I’ve been pinned in the house all day, sneezing and itchy from every small foray I’ve made into the outside world: feed the cat, retrieve Batman from the car, get out into the heat and birdsong and sun and leave my life behind for just a moment.

We may have been held hostage inside, but our Indoor Day passed just like any other with the exception of Henry being denied access to the outside world. There was frantic running and chasing and jumping, but there were also lulls of energy for snuggling and napping. There was quiet when miraculously both boys slept at the same time for an overlap of 45 minutes. But mostly there was noise and drama: car chases; fires; trains falling off bridges; Batman and Spiderman repeatedly saved the day. Also, there was hiding and finding; snacking and sorting and whining, tears and time outs and meltdowns.

Henry is now ensconced in his “bat-cave” (a blanket stretched between the coffee table and an upturned laundry basket) holding his “Spiderman car” while he sucks on a binky and nuzzles his blanket. Right now, at 2 and a half, he is a contradiction. He is a puzzle of interesting words and phrases and nonsense; of truths and myths; of baby and little boy. And I love him like this—all mixed up and still snuggly and still mine. His skin is so soft it makes me ache with love, but his legs are punctuated with dull blue and fading light brown bruises, a little scrape on each knee.

Leaving the Batcave, Henry walks towards me and informs me that we are bats. "You are the mommy bat and I am the baby bat. Are your bat wings working on the computer right now?” he asks.

“Not anymore,” I say, putting my computer down, “now they’re free for hugging.”

“And for flying?”

He climbs onto my lap and faces me and we flap our bat wings and talk of going over to the neighbor’s house for a bat dinner.

“What are they having for dinner over there?" I ask.

“Um, stars. Stars and moons,” he says, still flapping.

“Sounds perfect!”

Bon Appetit!