Frozen Grapes Are Not Dessert

This past weekend, my daughter’s Girl Scout troop went camping for two nights. While last year we all went tent camping, this year we went yurt camping, which I recommend because there are, at least in this case, beds and mattresses. And you get to say yurt a bunch of times.

When I’m camping, whether by tent or by yurt, I try to make bargains with my body. The biggest one is, Let’s get through the night without having to get up in the middle of it and I’ll do something nice for you later! Tent camping with my family, it’s not a huge deal to crawl out of bed at 2am. The sound of the tent zipper breaks through the quiet, but for the most part, everyone stirs and rolls over and I’m staring up at the stars and it’s slightly chilly and I’m glad I’m sharing a little part of the night.

In a yurt with a dozen 8-year-olds and 3 other adults, suddenly it feels like breaking out of there without waking everyone else up, and potentially creating a line ten children deep in the dark at the door of a plastic outhouse, requires the subterfuge of Ethan Hunt and the wizardry of MacGyver. Just ignore it, I tell myself. Count slowly. Measured breaths. Change positions. What time is it? If it’s close to dawn, I’ll wait it out. 1:48am.  But I’ve been up for hours! Have I even been asleep at all yet? Okay, I am an adult. Mind over matter. 1:54am.

How many times in life do we figure we’ll just wait it out? We’re less than comfortable. We’re less than happy. The solution is right outside our door, but we’ve fashioned an unscalable wall, an unvaultable chasm, made a pointless bargain, created a problem out of an easy answer. I have a skill set for this that’s remarkable.

I saw an Instagram meme recently that said, “You are far too smart to be the only thing standing in your way.”

A year ago, I was pretty much on top of my game. Previously, I had felt sick and tired and nauseous, dealt with horrible hives and random rashes. It was draining and limiting and I was done with it. I decided I wasn’t going to live that way any longer, so I cleaned up my diet, started exercising, started sleeping better, started feeling better. I promised myself that this was the new me. Actually, I didn’t even promise myself because it was so bleeding obvious that I would choose to feel good over choosing to feel bad. For about a year, it was the new me. But then I got a little cocky, or maybe a little lazy. Or I thought, I’ve got this figured out now, so I can stray just slightly from this path, and I know how to get right back.

Halloween came, and I bought the kind of candy I like, too. Because a fun-size Snickers never hurt anyone. And neither did an Almond Joy. Or a Reese’s. And Christmas came and I remembered that peanut brittle is both gluten free and packed with protein (packed! peanuts!). And even though I had found that 45 degrees is one of my favorite running temperatures, and even though Colorado nearly always has a least a couple 45 degrees days in any given winter week… well, I got the flu right after the holidays. And then it was suddenly February. And it is really dark and pretty cold in February, after all. Some weeks it’s not 45 degrees at all. Or if it is, there’s still snow on the ground and is it my fault when some neighbors don’t shovel and ice builds up? And when spring came, and I tried to dust off my running shoes, my hip hurt. So I took some time off. And then it still hurt. So I stopped altogether.

Somehow, even though I knew how to get back to the right path, I felt sick and tired and nauseous and my knuckles hurt when I made a fist, and I had a little rash under my wedding bands that never quite went away, reminding me that before, in the previous not-good stage, I couldn’t wear rings at all on my achy swollen fingers. Why am I not fixing this? How am I not taking the known path straight to feeling better? It’s 1:54am; the solution is right outside. What is wrong with me that I don’t begin?

So as of Friday, I have given up office chocolate, because I can’t be trusted with it. I don’t have to feel awkward about the 1200 calories worth of wrappers that the cleaning crew surely, and ought to, judge me by. I always expect that people are going to be somewhat scandalized by this sort of choice. No one ever is. My closest co-worker said, “We’ll keep track and I’ll make you a 30-day medal shaped like a Butterfinger.” Clearly he didn’t feel abandoned, forced to eat candy alone. I told one of my good friends and she said, “I want to start doing better, too. What day are you available to walk this week?” Just like that. As if it was just that easy.

Today, on my fifth day without a mini chocolate anything, I cut open an avocado to throw into a hearty lunch salad and I remembered a well-halved avocado is actually kind of pretty, in that botanically-amorphous is-this-a-fruit-or-a-vegetable way. And I like avocados. And hearty salads.

My Butterfinger-medal-making coworker asked me today, as I was leaving work, “Do you sometimes feel like we come here for 8 hours, but then our day actually begins at 5pm?” School has started back up and with it fall schedules and homework and bedtime skirmishes and relentless alarm clocks. I was, in that moment, beyond exhausted, miles to go before I sleep (I mean that only as a Frost tribute and metaphor since my body’s given up sleeping of late). Miles to go. Promises to keep.

I met my friend for a before-dinner walk, our children thrilled by an unexpected play date. And I felt better for it. A lot better, actually. We talked, they played. We broke a light sweat as thunder rumbled just over the horizon. I came home to the dinner my husband had made while we were out, because sometimes I forget we’re a team who can divide and conquer, and then I took my daughter to dance. I stopped at the library to pick up a book that she had placed on hold, and I talked to a far-away friend, tucked under the library’s outside awning, as the thunder grew closer and an unforecasted downpour turned the air earthy and metallic, cleaned off the pavement and created puddles that children jumped through, their parents protecting their newly chosen library books. I had to run to the car in the downpour, back to dance class, catching a sneaky puddle midway across the parking lot. But I didn’t feel tired or harried or just a little bit ill. I felt connected and appreciative and content.

I don’t know if I’ll magically get some sleep tonight, fortified by avocados and good friends, a little exercise and a cleansing rainfall. But I think I’ve remembered, at least a little, that if I can magically create a problem out of an easy answer, I’ve also held the solution all along.

It’s me… just deciding not to stand in my way today.

 

 

 

You guys, I don’t want to come across as an obnoxious braggart, but today I took a load of fresh laundry out of the dryer, folded it and put it away, all while it was still warm. It’s going to be a rude awakening for my clothes when they get worn, since they’re used to waking up slowly in a wrinkle-remove sauna cycle each morning, before we just jump into the day.

If I asked the last ten people in my phone’s text history what one thing they would like to wrangle from the universe, I would be unsurprised if 9/10 said “more time.” We live in a society that prides itself on how busy we are. Even while we decry our busy schedules that keep us out of the house 5 nights a week, we secretly feel like they’re proof we’re not falling behind. We’re proving ourselves to be good parents, interesting people, multi-faceted hyphenates who can easily fill out a hobbies and interests section of any form that comes our way. And yet, we say, ad nauseam, if only we had more time.

No matter who we are, we have a list of things we would like to accomplish this morning, today, this week, before we turn 40, before the kids grow up. Bucket lists. It’s an equal playing field. Working parents, stay-at-home parents, single professionals, students balancing part-time and full-time jobs. We all wake up with lists that we will not accomplish today.

Last night, my daughter was up several times with a stomach ache. This morning, she still felt sick, and added to that, we were both tired. I felt conflicted. It’s only week 2 of school and I was 85% sure that once she was up and about for a while, her stomach pain would pass. We’re fairly experienced on that front. I hadn’t brought my computer home over the weekend. To work from home, I’d have to fetch it. I searched through a laundry basket of clothes that hadn’t gotten put away last week and now held the also-rans of my closet, unchosen in the first round. I need to find time to do laundry, I thought…

And so, I didn’t work from home. I took the day off. I texted my multiple bosses. No one seemed alarmed. My daughter felt better before lunch, but we both just took the time.

My ambitious plan for my unanticipated day off, of course, included a list that would ultimately fall short. But 5 out of 5 beds have clean sheets, and 4 out of 5 beds are refitted with their clean sheets (for the 5^th, the cat claimed the sheets before I could get them on the bed, and if there’s one rule in our house, it’s that, like a sleeping baby, you don’t disturb a sleeping Tres.) I daydreamed about putting sheets out to dry in the summer sun (a simpler time fantasy that would probably prove frustrating in reality) but to do it justice, I did harvest some garden produce.

I went through the dozens of nail polish bottles that accumulate in a house with three girls and I threw away anything that seemed more viscous than liquid. I went through approximately eight months of Birchbox samples and divided them into lip, face, hair, and lotions/perfumes. The top of my dresser has been sighted. I felt like a shipwrecked crewman, Land ho! I knew it was there, but it’s nice to have confirmation.

And look at this! The right-hand counter by the kitchen sink! Absolutely clear. (Immediately after this, my daughter tried to put an empty snack bowl on this counter. I told her no.)

I did not clear out my children’s sure-to-be-too-small fall wardrobes. They will definitely still be sporting highwater pants for the first few weeks of cooler weather until we begin to weed those out by trial and error. Our shoes are still a haphazard pile in the entryway. And the two dozen bags that seemed essential to summer – daycare bags, pool bags, concert picnic bags, sleepover bags – are all still sitting nested within each other, spilling out into the living room.

But it’s amazing what a clean counter can do for a tired psyche. Tomorrow it’s back to it but in this moment, I feel as zen as if I had actually spent today watching clean sheets rustle in the summer sun.

Who knew Monday could be a friend. 

“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn.  How did it get so late so soon?”      — Dr. Suess

On long car trips when I was young, my brothers and I were allowed to take our turn traveling in the ‘way back’ of our boxy brown station wagon we’d named Jason. Nestled in amongst the luggage, it was a cozy nest. Every summer we would travel to Ohio by way of Pennsylvania, visiting both sets of grandparents. There would be summer night porch swings and fireflies and crickets, bug bites, strawberry shortcake for dinner, and the heavy, sticky, thickness of summer humidity as thunderstorms rolled in.

For a few weeks each summer, we were tucked away first in my father’s old bedroom, his long ago horse’s saddle still waiting for him, a confusing contrast between his life now, with me, my brothers and our station wagon and the boy we hadn’t known. Or I’d sleep in my mother’s old bedroom with the white, spindle-legged three-way mirror vanity, where I could see endless reflections of myself replicated down a corridor of glass. I can remember going to bed after my usual bedtime, but while it was still twilight, listening to the adults still awake, distant laughter and words I couldn’t distinguish, dogs barking, the sounds of summer whose bedtime hadn’t yet arrived.

I realize that in fact, those childhood summers may not have been quite as idyllic as I remember. I perhaps applied my mind’s Stardust filter, but the warm glow is palpable. To my parents, they were probably full of concerns about car maintenance, squabbling children, and issues of family dynamics that I had no inkling of, at least not then. Summer may be most magical in retrospect, but that only makes its magic less tangible, not less real.

I always think that each summer is going to involve time standing still. Summer, my tired spirit whispers. A hammock by a stream. A favorite book and a cold, sweating glass pitcher of lemonade that the bees refuse to bother. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book in a hammock by a stream. And yet it exists in the peripheral of my memory, much like wartime London or Colonial Williamsburg. I’ve been there in my head so often, I can almost imagine the tin hats, the wagon-rutted streets and the cool water splashing over my ankles. Such is the faulty, magical memory of a reader, and a daydreamer.

As an adult, even as my children achieve the deep tan of childhood that no amount of sunscreen can prevent, I now see summer as a utilitarian reset period. I mean, not only that. There are still some Stardust filters. But by the end of May, I am holding on by a thread. School lunches have gone from thoughtfully packed representations of the food groups to “if you don’t want to buy lunch today, you have two minutes to find something to fill out this mini bagel I threw peanut butter at…”

At the end of May, I am not at my best. But during the summer, I get my mojo back. Long summer nights mean more time, fewer rules. We’re all spun up like tightly wound tops during the school year. But in the summer, we get to spiral down into a slower and slower loop until we’re no longer the bleeding, blending siren of colors of a mini plastic cyclone, but a body at rest. There’s a glowing, perfect moment when you can feel your shoulders relax and your jaw unclench, air fill your lungs. That is the reset. Anything is possible again.

This summer, I did not reset. I am no longer the spinning top, but somehow when the spinning stopped, I didn’t take that deep breath. I didn’t recharge. I spun to stillness, but not rest. My body has stopped accepting sleep as currency, and so I struggle through each day more exhausted than I have been in years. I assume I was more tired than this when the girls were babies, although I can’t specifically recall (probably because I was so tired). Regardless, the only thing that is moving me forward is the thought that I’ve been more tired than this and made it through. (I must have been.)

And so this year, I have a new plan. A non-reset plan. A when instead of a phoenix, I still just have ashes plan.

It’s time to remember that my children are 8 and 10. If they have to put baby carrots into their own snack bags, they can do that. And if they house the butter knives on the far right side of the silverware drawer instead of the far left, it’s fine.  And even if they mix the primary silverware with the backup silverware… that’s still okay (I will convince myself it’s okay). If every now and then dinner is a choice between the multiple fun and exciting cereals in the cupboard, everyone will just appreciate spaghetti all the more.

Summer is magic, I think. And not just because of the childhood nostalgia we hold for it, while the adult us works through it, promising ourselves happy hour patios and twilight front porches. I say it because even now, I can hear the crickets, louder than any other nighttime sound. And a dog barking a brief hello, a street or two over. My youngest read me a book about leopard habitats that probably isn’t on the AR list, and no one worried about whether it counted, and we both pictured leopards, asleep by day in the African trees. 

Summer is a break from the expectations we assign ourselves. We can spin down. We can daydream. We can reset, if the option avails itself, or we can use it as a soft start evolution of our self-imposed expectations.

Maybe I’ll start a melatonin regimen, we’ll get a new mattress, this soul-sucking election cycle will end, and one day this fall, I’ll wake up a new person. Maybe my reset is just a little delayed this year. In the meantime, no child has ended up in therapy from not having their lunchtime sandwich shaped into a heart…. have they?

A couple of my co-workers and I break up the day sometimes by playing the Top Three game. Or sometimes it’s the Name Your Favorite game. Name your all-time favorite author. Name the top three bands whose catalog you’d take with you if you were stranded on a deserted island. My response is almost always, But what mood am I in? I’m not very good at the game. I don’t like feeling boxed in. Don’t try to define me. Or make me define me. I’m complex. Or indecisive. Whichever. Depending.

Recently, though, the question was, If you could go back to any point in your life, what would it be?

This is different than what would you do differently, or happiest moments or most important days. This isn’t changing the past, but reliving it. Having just revisted my college days, it felt particularly apt to wax nostalgic.

I wouldn’t go back to high school. I hadn’t figured much out at that point. I don’t have any angst about high school, but they weren’t my best years. I made a mess of my early twenties and it took me years to recover financially and in self-confidence. No need to relive that.

And as much as I love looking back at photos of my children as babies and toddlers, I would not live those days over again. They’re miraculous years, full of wonder and discovery, but they’re incredibly hard. There’s little sleep and a lot of doubt. You’re catapulted from one lifestyle to another one that’s diametrically opposed. Babies have those big eyes and adorable wrist rolls, no doubt about it. But there’s beauty to having children to whom bath time is just a routine morning shower and who can do whatever dark magic it takes to make the tv work on Blu-ray.

My early thirties were reactionary. My youngest didn’t sleep through the night until she was 18 months old. Since she’s only 19 months younger than her sister, I basically didn’t sleep for 3 years. It takes a toll. Even to this day, I haven’t relearned how to get a full 8 hours. Specifically, 2009 was a tough year for a lot of people, and both my husband and I found ourselves laid off and struggling with how to communicate with each other in our new set of fears. We had just figured out the daily grind of parenting, how not to break these children that we’d been entrusted with. We had two children under 2 and now we had to figure out how to parent without a net, dancing on a thin financial tightrope. We coped by turning all that angst inward rather than meeting it as a team. Angry, disappointed, so awful tired. It wasn’t a good time. We made it through, grew the tightrope into a solid plank, and then rebuilt the foundation. But I’d never want to go back there.

If I could go back to any age, I might visit me at 19 or 20. I was studying abroad, traveling, learning about cheap wine and good friends. It was an extraordinary time. Maybe it was all the cheap wine, but it has that sort of soft focus vignette feel. The sort of spell you can never weave again because there are so many different and such very specific ingredients. Even looking back, I know it wasn’t all foreign capitals and sleeping til noon. I was really poor, but so was everyone around me. I didn’t have any money, but I also had next to no responsibility, other than getting myself to class often enough to be counted as a participant in the process. My heart tumbled a few times, sometimes more seriously than others. It was the time for it. And maybe that’s part of the answer to the question. Maybe the times we would go back to are simply the ones we see in the best filter, the softest light.

Those college years had a lot of merit, but meandering through my timeline I realized that if I could go back to any point in my life, I wouldn’t. I’d choose now. In contrast to 19-year-old me, there is very little soft focus in the present. It’s stark sometimes, actually. It’s constant dirty dishes and constant laundry, and neither ever get completely put away. It’s rewashing that load of clothes that never got put away, because now it’s covered in cat hair because the ungrateful cats are anti-team players. This phase is about still having a pile of end-of-school folders and papers sitting in the living room, even though school begins again in three weeks. It’s me texting my husband at 7:30 on a Friday morning after multiple temper tantrums, “I don’t think I have it in me to capably parent the little one. I feel like every morning I wake up and I fail at this.”

And then at the end of the day, picking up with, “You don’t even want to see my magic trick (/song/play/dance/explication of the history of man),” my youngest hurls at me, “You just want to read.” And God help me, she’s exactly right, and the honesty of it cuts to the bone. I. Just. Want. Quiet.

Doesn’t really sound like the best of times, does it? But it is. I wouldn’t take back high school’s neutrality, or even the aching feet of 19-year-old me trekking up one more winding cupola in Rome. I might get a little misty at the thought of once tiny hands growing far too quickly to capture again in plaster and handprint art. But I am raising two daughters who are fierce and opinionated and not just head strong, but strong. I have a partner to whom I can text my worst weekday morning fears, and know I’m not dancing on that tightrope alone. “I know,” he replied. “It’s hard.”

“I know. It’s hard.”

Those four words are everything, aren’t they? Those words get it. We’re building something, and it’s messy and it’s sometimes stark and sometimes has jagged edges. We’re figuring out families and careers and mortgages and 401ks and 529s and IRAs and acronyms we haven’t even discovered yet. We’ve had our plans fall apart, and we’ve rebuilt.

This isn’t the age I’d relive because it’s easy. I’d choose it because we’re sometimes a mess, but I’m proud of this family. I’d choose it because at bedtime, after a day of fearsome valleys and intimidating peaks, my youngest sneaks downstairs one last time, wraps her arms tight around my waist and says, “My life would never be better without you in it.” It’s an apology and a promise and a confusing double negative. But back at you, chica. To the moon and back.

For so much of our lives, we’re living in four, maybe five, year increments. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college. You get used to the idea that life stages are short-lived. You make amazing friends, have wonderful experiences, or terrible experiences, but there’s a sense that this too shall pass. Four, three, two, one…

I’ve lived with my husband for 13 years now. That’s longer than anyone else in the world except my mother, father and brothers and in a handful of years, it will be longer than each of them, too. Just like with parenting, we’ve had peaks and valleys. We’ve haven’t always liked each other every moment of every day. Our house is messier than we’d like. Our tempers sometimes shorter. But we’ve created a little island of experience. Our island. We can share our worst days and our worst fears. Spoken out loud, they aren’t quite so scary. Every day, there are little things. The way when I hold them close, my daughters’ hair smells like the fruity pomegranate shampoo they love and how it changes color in the summer sun. Red for the older, blonde for the younger. And how they fall over each other, trying to tell the most details about their day. They won’t always, I know. Watching thunderstorms roll in, and the complicated dance of coordinating packed lunches and pool day bags and water bottles… stand on the front steps, arms out, sunscreen on. Such little things, but it’s our island.

For me, instead of counting down to the next, this stage is about counting up. Counting up anniversaries and birthdays and new backpacks and stories told and books read.  And even as I’m counting up, my children are counting down. Two more years in her current school for my oldest, she reminded us at dinner. And she got up to put her plate away, and her legs were childhood tan from summer days at the pool and evening bike rides, but already nearly as long as mine. Counting up inches, counting up years.

I can’t bottle them up, these days flying by. But when it’s hard and messy and has jagged edges, as it is and does and will from time to time, I can remind myself that I wouldn’t go back. I’d choose now.

They say to trust in the magic of new beginnings. In the summer of 1997, I had already decided to go to school out-of-state. Many of my high school classmates were going to Ohio State, and Bowling Green, Miami of Ohio and Ohio University. Others scattered across the country, but no one else from my high school headed to the Pennsylvania state school that I had chosen.

At Freshmen Orientation, I met another girl who, in the sea of strangers, seemed like a familiar. Since otherwise the roommate assignment process was a random jumble lottery, we decided that we would trust in fate, and each other’s apparent normalcy, and room together (for the next four years, as it turned out).

For those next four years, that little town in Pennsylvania, too far away to be suburban Pittsburgh, and confusingly dual-state named – Indiana, Pennsylvania, hometown of Jimmy Stewart (you literally have to say it altogether) – was home. Somehow, even in those first days as we loaded suitcases and plastic egg crates into the service elevator and set up our first home away from home, our college family was already drawing inward toward a cohesive core. Through the magic of new beginnings, instead of being strangers in a strange land, we found new orbits, and we were kept steady by the gravitational pull of us, on us.

Princess Diana died the first week of college. I can remember watching the news on the TV/VCR combo in our dorm room. My 18^th birthday fell a week or two after college started, and my new circle delivered a pizza, with candles. I can still picture the matching bedspreads (but reversible so we had options) that my roommate and I picked out. We put up a wallpaper border, because why not; this was home now, after all (though it frequently fell, almost as if putty wasn’t the glue we assumed it would be). We were perhaps the last college generation of calling cards and land lines, of DOS login screens and 24mm film developing. All of that seems so long ago, a little fuzzy around the edges… and yet the friendships, the people, are current and vibrant and real, still in my orbit, still gravitationally imperative to my sense of balance.

To say that college friends are family is, I think, in no way hyperbolic. For years, you are living together, eating together, studying together, procrastinating together. I can very literally say that those friendships were a testament to blood, sweat and tears. Not a lot of blood, thankfully, but some (I tend to go woozy at the sight of blood, so it’s just as well it was infrequent). But they did include an Even Stephen policy on exercise, and there were definitely some tears, a lot of laughter. In the same way that our immediate family experiences are a mix of the day-to-day and the peaks and valleys, so are our college days. I was incomparably lucky.

In the last 15 years, I’ve seen some of those friends quite a bit. Some a handful of times, and some just once or twice. Some, I had not seen since graduation, even though we’d kept in touch, celebrated new jobs and new children, mourned losses and disappointments. After years of talking about a reunion in broad terms, two of those friends set a date and said, This is it. This is the day and we will see you all there.

RSVP’ing should have been easy. It should have been an automatic, come hell or high water enthusiastic YES. Yes to the people, absolutely. These are the sisters of my heart. But years that are so highly charged with every possible emotion come with baggage as well. Not every moment is a glowing golden memory. They shouldn’t be. What sort of shallow person would such a one-dimensional life create. But knowingly walking back into those less golden memories in some ways felt like risking a confrontation with ghosts not entirely laid to rest. What shades and of who would I see, faded by years, and yet in sharp relief against that thick wall built and then intentionally wiped clean?

But my friends know better than me, and thank goodness. Don’t be ridiculous, they said, in varying ways. Of course you’re going. Which found me on a plane headed to Pittsburgh. Well, not right away. My flight was first delayed by 5 hours in the airport, and then by another 2 on the tarmac, and then, finally in flight, we lost power to an engine and had to do an emergency landing in Kansas City. “Just when we thought this flight couldn’t get worse, folks,” said the pilot. “We’re going to be landing soon and safely, but not in Pittsburgh.” It was late. I was already supposed to be in the heart of my circle. The only food option was a bagel shop, and I don’t eat wheat. After another couple of hours and some false hope, the flight was canceled and somewhat questionable lodging provided near the airport. I called my college roommate.

“I don’t know,” I said, tired and discouraged, with a headache I’d had since the tarmac delay now in full force, and still hours away from Pittsburgh. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Of course, you’re still coming.” I took a taxi to the hotel, unwilling to wait for the tiny shuttle bus to clear an airplane full of frazzled travelers from the curb at Kansas City International. I’m fanatical about hotel rooms. I check for bed bugs and toilet ring and smell the towels for bleach. It’s a problem, I know, but not something I can control. Except that night, I just didn’t care. I kicked off my shoes and walked right across the hotel carpet. I pulled back the covers and slipped into bed. It felt like I wasn’t 18 anymore.

The next afternoon, finally making it to Pittsburgh, my roommate’s husband picked me up from the airport to take me the next 2 hours to campus where everyone else had already gathered. We know each other mostly through photos. We’re Facebook friends and I have his number in my phone, but I flipped through those photos quickly to make sure I remembered exactly who I was looking for. It could have been awkward, I suppose, that two hour drive. Except that he’s basically family, even if we’ve only met once before. At one point he said of his wife, “Well, you’ve known her longer than I have.” And the truth of that is somehow the realest, most important part of this spontaneous reunion. I have known these friends more than half my life, and that percentage will only continue to grow as we get older. These are the people who were there at the new beginnings; collectively, we are our secret keepers and broken heart tenders. A mirror to our laughter.

It’s hard to explain what it felt like when we were all finally together again. Because what it felt was… normal. It felt like we might all get together every weekend, except there was probably more hugging. It felt like we’d always felt together. An unbroken orbit. There were children and there were spouses, but they were already woven into the whole because that’s the way family works.

People change less than places. We went back to campus and they are in the midst of renovating, which is a bit tragic. It was this great old red brick and ivy architecture centered by an old and lovely Oak Grove with wagon wheel paths. It was the sort of place that was calming and peaceful because it felt like it had been just that way for generations, and would be the same for generations more. You were walking the same paths as women who had worn long skirts and puffed sleeves at the turn of the century and men in newsboy and Gatsby hats a couple of decades later.

And now they’re knocking it down and replacing it with that stereotypical brick and tan clapboard townhouse look that doesn’t have nearly the same sense of tradition. As we walked, one of my friends, our group’s patient conscience and subtle jester, said, “They did it wrong.” And he’s right. It hurts to see in some ways. If we go back again and our old dorm room isn’t there for us to marvel over its tiny dimensions, or to smell the familiar, even after 15 years, smell of stairway tread rubber and still air… will it still feel like going home again? If Frida Kahlo isn’t looking over our shoulder in the picture bathroom, or Klimt paintings hanging in the lobby, will just the geographical coordinates have the same significance? I lost my childhood home to a front end loader in a heartbreaking end to an era, and I have to say that now my childhood town is a place I once lived, but it has lost its pull. There are people I love there, but the place is gone. Hiraeth is the nostalgia, the grief for lost places of our past. In some ways, in going back, in seeing what has already begun, the hiraeth for our college haunts seems inevitable, even as I celebrate the friendships that will never crumble like the concrete steps that have seen so many student footsteps come and go. It felt like a celebration of the people, but a letting go of the place. A continuity juxtaposed by a conclusion.

I won’t say that we aren’t older. Because we are, though in my eyes, we looked the same. But I think we are also more comfortable in our own skin now, which makes us perhaps just more substantive versions of who were then. We’re not the same, but we’re not so different.

We’ve known each other longer than we’ve known our children and our partners and we’re still steady in our original orbit, our gravitational pull on each other the most important and unchanging magic of our long ago new beginning. 

 

You know who I wish was running for President? Mother Theresa, may she rest in peace.

Or maybe Gandhi. Also dead, but you get the idea. Pretty high approval ratings (except maybe with the British at one point). And I’d be okay with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, actually.

Except there have been questions about the financials of Mother Theresa’s charity, and criticisms that she admitted feeling disconnected from God in later years. Was Mother Theresa, perhaps, a hypocrite with questionable financials and/or morals?

And Gandhi. Don’t get me started on Gandhi. That radical pacifist advocated such extreme non-violence in response to the Axis nations of World War II, he went so far as to say sacrifice of self and country was preferable to freedom obtained through violence. And really, how impressed would Hitler have been with principled non-violence? I get that it was your thing, Gandhi, but how different our world would be.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, now, seems pretty solidly logical. And intellectually amusing. Except… logic is nothing compared to society’s rampant truthiness. Take your science and stuff it, Neil. And he’s a self-described agnostic. We really shouldn’t bring a lack of religion into politics. Imagine the chaos! So, he’s out.

What we need is someone more trustworthy than Mother Theresa, more principled than Gandhi and more affable than DeGrasse Tyson. Also, we’d like to feel like we could have a beer with this person while simultaneously trusting them with our nuclear codes and to know every nuance of every foreign government, those in power and any possible coup. We will feel entitled to every detail of this person’s personal life from here on out, and also from birth til now. And their children’s. We will watch amateur video of things said at barbeques in 1992 and judge accordingly. It would also be helpful if this person could see the future, but just when there is more than one possible course of action and/or resulting reaction. So, every time, I guess. Times a million or so. 20/20 hindsight is one thing. But we will settle for no less than 20/20 foresight, thank you. Why is it that we never have qualified candidates?

Or, on second thought, forget all that. We’ll settle for anyone but these two, but only now that we’ve settled on these two. #nevertrump #neverhillary

And I get it. I do. You hate Hillary Clinton. She’s a liar. She fiddled while Benghazi burned. She’s practically a moderate Republican in a pantsuit who stole the election from Bernie with her insider connections. And Donald Trump. He’s a racist, misogynist, nativist whose isolationist policies are the only ones we’ve heard spelled out with any clarity, while the rest of his platform is built on the hate and anger and fears he’s stoked to a bonfire, and the bombastic phrase, “Believe me.” And like with the Pied Piper, so many do.

Fantastic. We all know where we all stand. Entrenched. Partisan. Angry. Mystified. Righteous. How could this have happened?

31 million Americans voted in the Republican primaries. 29 million Americans voted in the Democratic primaries. There are about 225 million adult Americans. So… by my English major math, using some rounding, approximately 75% of Americans didn’t vote. If you did, good on you. Colorado holds a caucus. I went. So, I figure if I want to complain about the excruciatingly polarized state of the race now, I’m allowed.

What might have happened if another 60 million Americans voted in the primaries? What might have happened if another 120 million Americans had voted? I’ve seen a meme several times lately that reads, “If Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are stranded on a desert island, who survives?  America. America survives.”

I get it. It’s not your fault. You hate both of them. You can’t be blamed when it all goes to hell.

Here’s the thing, though. Trump and Clinton didn’t become their parties nominees in some sort of Hunger Games style throw down. They were nominated by a majority of their party’s approximately 30 million primary voters. In other words, about 7% of the population, on both sides. Everyone else, on both sides, received even less than 7% of the country’s vote.

So, throwing around a bunch of curse words and bumper stickers now is kind of pointless. If you voted, great. If you voted, but you know someone who didn’t and didn’t move mountains to convince them to also vote, then that’s only half credit. I’ll stop patting myself on the back for just going to the caucus, I suppose. If Americans were actually terrified of the two choices we have, they shouldn’t have let 25% of the country make the decision for them. If they truly don’t think that these two people represent us as a country, different choices were on the table. All we had to do was vote. Single digit percentages of adult Americans on either side would have changed the outcome. Three out of four Americans didn’t bother. Primaries are tricky. I get that. There are registration rules and deadlines and polling places and sometimes you need a stamp.

I think what our election cycle says about us as a country may well be, We prefer being angry to being engaged.

Anger is easy, after all. Engaged requires a little more. Anger is reposting a meme, writing “bitch” or “orange toad” in a comment thread. Haha. Good one, Bob. Point definitely made. Engaged means having a discussion, questioning our own values. God forbid, listening to the other guy. Our neighbor, our classmate, our nominees. Their nominees.

We don’t have perfect politicians. In fact, we have far from perfect politicians. I’ll concede that point. Some days it’s hard to justify leaving Britain at all. We’re sorry. We obviously weren’t ready. But as a government by and for the people, it’s on us to hold our representatives accountable by holding ourselves accountable. It’s the only way the system works. We’re imperfect and hypocritical, occasionally passionate, but also intellectually lazy and partisan. We want our politicians to be better than we are. And they aren’t. We want them to fight for the things we want. But we don’t vote.

French philosopher Joseph de Maistre said about democracy, Every nation gets the government it deserves.

How potentially terrifying.

Let’s work on it. Maybe even without hashtags and angry comment threads. We might even be able to serve as an example to our politicians. Or, here’s a thought, vote for new ones. We’re only stuck if we choose to be.

 

Continue reading We, You and Me

My children haven’t had well-visit doctor appointments since 2014, late 2014, which isn’t really the same at all as January 2014, but which my pediatrician suggested I remedy the last time I was at their office. I mean, we’ve been there for other things. That time when the stick-on craft jewels ended up in an ear. That little case of idiopathic dermatitis. Stomach issues. It’s not like we’ve been strangers.

But fine. I acknowledged the kindly judgement as our doctor flipped through their charts for “the last well-visit.” I scheduled appointments. I confirmed them. A quick click of an email link. And then I promptly forgot about them. 8:20 rolled by this morning. 8:40 rolled by. The times meant nothing to me. About 12:30, I thought, “Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot!” And… we’re rescheduled for a month from now. Not early morning, anymore, but the smack dab late-middle of the day reserved for those who can’t adequately plan ahead. It was just as well. Had I been wearing my good mother hat, I would have tipped from moderately late on several work projects to really late. Although, as we all know, you can’t be a little bit pregnant or a little bit late. Yes, yes. I know, I know! Let me just lay my head down for a minute and contemplate that wisdom. Or cry. Whichever.

I’m currently in the midst of establishing a running routine. Again. Every route is all uphill. I’m at that return-to-fitness point where every time I run, I contemplate every other form of exercise I can think of. I’ve never tried that circus acrobatics aerial silks trapeze thing. I might love that. I might be great at that. Or hiking. I like hiking. In theory. It’s just the getting there, and the crowded trailhead parking lots and the high possibility of thunderstorms on mountain tops by mid-day. Running you can do anywhere. You start as soon as you leave your front door, and it’s over as soon as you get back to your front door. It’s attractive that way. Full circle. Efficient. But what about Pilates? You don’t even have to leave the house for that… or maybe I should just start vacuuming more often.

While I’m running, I’m dividing my neighborhood into halves, and then quarters and then blocks, making deals with myself from stop sign to stop sign and wondering how Pandora’s music algorithm suddenly puts Journey’s Open Arms in the middle of a curated 130 beats-per-minute playlist. The running app voice feedback always sounds like she’s bored with me. I don’t blame her. She’s had to hang out for 11 minutes just waiting to give me my mile split times. Honestly, in all that internal rationalization and plaintive whining, I find a lot of comfort in my shadow. While I’m wheezing, she’s running smoothly. While my feet are on fire and my throat dry, she just keeps going. She’s steady.

Symbolically, shadows get a bad rap. Duality and darkness. But shadow me? I like the silent, supportive, ambiguity of that chick. She sticks with me. Shadow me, the one who scales hills without wheezing, isn’t a hypochondriac and doesn’t snap at her husband and children. She’s perpetually 26, the me before I was tired all the time, and knows how to pronounce French entrées and calls her mother and her best friend regularly and remembers to send Father’s Day cards, even when it’s busy at work. She actually actively listens as her child reads 20 minutes a day, and she doesn’t forget key talking points, or even basic words, just as they are needed. She’s great. Instead of my imaginary friend, she’s my imaginary me.

I’d like to think that I am capable of being all those things. Perhaps not at the same time. Maybe not even all in the same week. But as much as I am the woman who forgets doctor’s appointments and stress eats Almond Joys from the work vending machine, I also sometimes get it right. My celebratory pancake game is strong, and I filed our annual Girl Scout troop report on time. I sometimes remember to stick notes in my childrens’ lunches and I’ve run a 10k (that one time).

Sometimes I get it wrong. Sometimes I get it right. Sometimes I only just show up, dry shampoo and flip flops, and call it a win. As long as I keep chasing my shadow, I figure I’m in motion. Occasionally, even forward motion. If nothing else, it helps burn off the Almond Joys.

Whenever there is a mass shooting, the hash tag #prayfor appears. And certainly, prayer is a good thing. Self-reflection and positive thoughts are good things, if you’re not into prayer. But I have to agree with the New York Daily News after San Bernadino, “God isn’t fixing this”. God may weep, as Jesus did. But it’s up to us to fix it.

By all means, pray. But also, call out our hate culture. Call out those who profit from it. Call out demeaning, stereotypical jokes and rhetoric and call out misinformation. Resist the urge to oversimplify just to assign easy blame. Vote. Speak up. Give a damn. Some things are worth rocking the boat. Pray for Columbine and Tuscon and San Bernardino. Pray for Aurora and Newtown and Roseburg. For Colorado Springs and UCLA. Pray for every child who asks, But could that ever happen here? and does lock down drills in their elementary school. But don’t stop there.

I’m so tired of that Mr. Rogers’ “look for the helpers” quote. It was comforting the first half dozen times. Now it’s just another sign of another black day, as ubiquitous as the red banner scrolling across our Internet and television screens. I’m tired of that J.R.R. Tolkien quote about peril, grief, and love shining brighter. I’m tired of looking for the bright side and I’m tired of being told that good is stronger than evil, in the end.

Good may hold advantage over evil. That’s such a distinct choice. But I’m terribly afraid it will smother in apathy. The 24-hour news cycle marches on and with each new, more horrific body count, we grow anesthetized to the reality of what those numbers mean to families across the country. We’re appalled, but not so appalled as to consider compromise about gun legislation. After all, criminals don’t heed laws. We’re heartbroken, but not so heartbroken as to make equality the absolute standard of our land. The two are completely separate issues.

We’re adept at memes and hash tags. At signing online petitions. But we’re less skilled at seeing how our everyday choices contribute to our world and our news reel. We’re not evil, but we’re not Fred Rogers’ helpers, either. And until we do better, that question, Where does it end?

Well, it doesn’t.

For the sometime runner, running is a complicated relationship.

The thing about running is that it is not like riding a bike. Or maybe it is like riding a bike, but it’s like riding a bike through a route that begins with a pit of molasses up to your knees, and then is followed by weighted tires, followed by a bed of nails before finally getting to the maintained trail.

And yet.

Every time I get to a point where I am running a solid three miles or so as a regular route, in good head space with reliable oxygen levels and muscle coordination, I feel good. I’m never particularly fast. I never go particularly far. But there’s a fresh mental clarity and a mind/body link that I don’t have in the off-season. I tell myself that this time, feeling this good, I won’t let myself get derailed. What is winter compared to this feeling of fit freedom? Last fall, I leafed through catalogs, debating winter running gear. 45 degrees is pretty pleasant running weather, even in a t-shirt, so probably just this vented slightly puffy pull-over would be enough for Denver’s fairly mild winters… I felt confident. Maybe a little smug. Right up until the day I realized… I’d quit. Again.

The problem with quitting running is that you don’t realize you’ve done it. Until you suddenly do the math and it’s been 6 weeks since you laced up.

In April, I had a no nonsense conversation with myself and decided that it was acceptable to take the winter quarter off. But it was now April, and therefore as a three-season runner (which I told myself I definitely was), it was time to begin again. And so I did. And then we had an April with double the average snowfall. And April is generally Denver’s second snowiest month, anyway, after March (Denver really knows how to do spring.) And so, my restart fizzled. And somehow another 7 weeks flew by, endangering my three-season status.

But to the sometime runner, spring begins a siren’s call.

First, you start seeing other runners. And you look at them with wistful jealousy, rather than thinking, “sucker,” and driving on.

Then, you start looking at the fall’s running routes fondly, feeling slightly proprietary.

And then, when dance music comes on the radio, you start thinking about new playlists. Elle King. Walk the Moon. Andy Grammar. Suddenly, they’re just asking to be compiled. And so you put on last year’s playlists at your desk, letting them seep back into your blood, even as you create new ones in the back of your mind.

This week, our school’s child care was relocated to a neighboring elementary school, taking me directly through last year’s running loop. “I used to run through here,” I said to the girls. “Really?!,” they said. “So far?”  It’s not really so far, as the crow flies. But my heart repeated, Yes. Really. This far. This far. And I turned the radio up as Maroon 5 came on.

My youngest has had a bit of a difficult transition into summer. She has too much time on her hands, and needs more focused activities, and so she begins to act out. She’s as frustrated with her behavior as we are, not quite sure why it’s taking over her actions. Talking it over last night, while explaining why, yes, it would be an early bedtime again, I told her that sometimes when we feel things slipping a little out of control inside us, we need to be really aware of making choices to live our best lives as our best selves, including going to bed early and getting enough exercise to tire our minds and bodies out each day. And hearing myself, I knew…

It’s time to run again.

This morning, I woke up slightly sniffly. But also a little impatient. Siren song. There’s a satisfaction in lacing up running shoes that shouldn’t be discounted.

My youngest was the only other person up, so I told her I was going running. “Can I go with you?,” she asked.

And so we went.

About a hundred yards in, I remembered the pit of molasses. The siren song calls for the end-of-fall runner we were, really. This spring runner isn’t exactly the same person. It’s like you’re running in the shadow of the runner you were, trying to catch up.

But looking at my daughter, I thought, Worth it.

I pictured myself pushing through. I sang along to the lyrics of Work that Body (in my head, because my throat was dry as dust and the top of my mouth was like the Sahara.) I waved Eva back when she biked farther than I was prepared to re-route for. And when the helpful disembodied voice told me that I’d hit a mile, I thought, Are you kidding me? I revised my 2-mile plan in my head. But said firmly to myself, I will run each step of the loop back  home. Maybe I secretly appreciated the necessary pause to discuss crosswalk etiquette with my pace setter, and maybe in the final 500 feet, I thought my soles were on fire.

Maybe I’m a sometime runner. But it’s summer. I’ve got a new playlist and I hear the call of it.

Go.