make a wish and blow
I just talked to a girl friend who’s been on-again-off-again-something with another friend, and today was his birthday. And as she tells it, he asked her to spend his birthday with him, so she kept the day free and spent a very, very long time making a very, very kickass cake. The kind of cake with eggwhites, and filling.
And yesterday she tried to get in touch with him to find out the plan, and he didn’t respond. And this morning she tried again, and he basically said he was hanging out with another girl and he’d call her soon. And then he just didn’t. And now it’s seven in the evening.
And my friend’s been hanging out all day with her awesome cake, feeling shitty but not wanting to be mean to a guy on his birthday. And this guy is not a bad person or an asshole and I like him quite a lot. But honestly I don’t understand how so many guys make it past college with so little respect for women, and so little accountability to other people. Because yes, congratulations, you’ve figured out how to manipulate people to get what you want. But really? Lots of us figured that out a long time ago, and then we chose not to relate that way to people, because even though it gets us what we want it doesn’t make us who we want to be.
And fine, if what you’re looking for is someone to be at your beck and call, to be a confidante and a companion when you need them, and then to disappear physically and emotionally when you don’t, then what you’re looking for isn’t a friend who is a girl, or a girlfriend. It’s a girl on call. Also known as a callgirl. And the thing about callgirls is you pay them. Because nobody worthwhile does that shit for free for very long.
poster of an old rodeo
Beth’s wedding was harder than I expected, which I guess was naïve. It’s just that I loved Beth in the kind of way that is so big you know it’s not going to happen that way again. Like how you can’t love somebody again the way you loved the first person you loved, when you thought that if you ever woke up without them you wouldn’t make it through the day. And then you do. Not that most of us ought to be with the first person we loved, but still. It’s a crappy lesson. You don’t get to love anyone quite that way again, and it’s too bad. It’s not necessarily smaller love, I feel obligated to say. Just different.
And Beth wasn’t the first person I loved, but she was the first person I loved and made an intentional life with. And this weekend I visited her new life, in Seattle, which is different in all the big ways but which still contains odd objects that feel misplaced from my own: dishes and towels and a doormat with ladybugs. And I’ve done that before too, and it’s always disorienting but doable.
But the wedding was hard – not before and not during, when it was joyful and right and full of squaredancing. Just after. When I left and couldn’t keep from crying, the wrong sort of crying for a wedding, and I felt selfish and stupid. Joshua drove quietly and found me the country station.
It was a good weekend. I canoed on Lake Washington. I visited the new sculpture park. I practiced my Spanish. I ran around with Zoe the dog, who used to be my dog. And it was a good weekend for all the things that weren’t about me this time, and which I feel lucky to have been there for. This Adulthood though, it asks so much sometimes. At some point I wouldn't mind feeling equipped for it.
this day still
I live in Oregon, so tonight I wore my fancy flip-flops because I went to the opera. I miss dressing up sometimes. But in exchange, at least, I’m never underdressed.The show was Ruddigore, a Gilbert & Sullivan comedy with barons and bridesmaids and quite a lot of dancing, much of it performed by Operaman. It’s the last show he’s doing for a long while, because he’s moving out of town and going back to school. It was a good way to go out. He was one of the principals and he was awesome. And at the end after his bow he stood up and blew me a kiss, and the woman next to me spun around and said, Was that for you? It was pretty cool.Sometime last fall I guess – after the long summer of unexpected unpredictability – I got in the mood for a small span of sameness. One house / one job / one relationship was the unfamiliar craving. And over the course of a few bumpy months I discovered all three, to one degree or another. But the boy I liked had different plans, and the house I found had him in it, and the job I got I did half-time, and poorly. So I entered the era of Keeping Things In Mind. Keeping In Mind that I’m good at this kind of thing. Keeping In Mind that when I'm not, I need to suck it up. Keeping In Mind that when I can't, there are some extraordinary folks who have my back.A few months ago during a long self-absorbed phone conversation with one of them (who fielded more of these calls than even a generous friend would welcome) I summed up my predominant mood of the winter. I am not kicking ass, I told him.OK, he replied. But are you taking names?And yesterday I put peas in the ground, and today I ordered tall socks for my kickball team, and tonight I gave Operaman one kiss goodbye. One sweet kiss with nothing but all the best wishes I have in me. I love the peace of this part – the part where you are thankful for shared time and space, and the part where you then both head back out into the universe, bigger and surer and new.Tomorrow, when I wake up, it will be summer. Not the one I planned, of course. Some other one I can't even imagine yet.
11:06
Did everyone feel that? It was the sun, being still.
It didn’t last for very long. It’s shocking how disorienting motion can feel when stillness is really the rare thing. But there it was. It’s all the respite we’re getting. Here we go again.
Hazzah!
solace
Tomorrow is the longest day of the year. There’s something so marvelous about that, particularly up here in Oregon. My friend from southern California came north a few weeks ago and had trouble adjusting to all the daylight. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, not even if you came to me mid January offering a year of uniform days, each with at least a little sun at the end.
I like to remember that I’m spinning through space. I like a reminder of the forces and movements too big for me to understand or register directly. Some days – some months, it turns out – I feel so totally at the mercy of the invisible that there is nothing to do but watch it in awe and keep lookout for the familiar.
I miss the winter snowfall and summer thunderstorms of my northeast life, but each year I understand better how change comes out here. Each week passes in the leaves of plants and the cloudiness of the sky and which vegetables I’m eating, and in the light - whether it’s there when I wake up in the morning, and there when I get home in the evening. Whether I rent a movie and hunker down by five, or sit sipping beers at some patio table until hours before I wake up again.
Today was the second kind of day, and tomorrow will be another, and again on out until October. But tomorrow in particular is a reassuring marker, a little buoy somehow coming around again, right when it was supposed to. I’ve had this odd and embarrassing craving recently for collegesque conversation about the unknown, because it seems to have returned in all its unsettling splendor. People are not making sense to me lately, and I’m not making sense to me either, and I feel a new warmth for the improbable. Because really, how much more improbable could it get than what we’ve got already?
But solstice promises one long, clear, steady day, everything in place for one stretched out splendid moment. All that motion and still things line up.
location location location
Yesterday I picked a bag full of cherries from Julie’s Eugene tree, and this morning when I tied it to my handlebars for my ride to work, the bag grew cloudy with condensation because my cherries were breathing. Small sweet cherry breaths. Which was some consolation after this weekend of leavings – Jamey for his trip out east and Pede to join her guy indefinitely in California and Julie to the midwest for a while. All this leaving and I’m not going anywhere. Which is Fine By Me.
My summer weekends are filling one by one: Seattle for Beth and Sarah’s wedding, Liz’s house for Talley’s visit, a yurt somewhere in southern Oregon for Sharon’s birthday, a festival called Pickathon that you know is good just from the name, Night Rides and Bridge Rides and tubing. This is my Northwest Summer and I want it no other way. I had plans for a long overdue trip to New York but now I’m thinking September, if then. Why leave something so good?
At work today my coworker gave out magnets that she’d picked carefully for each of us, and mine said Too Much of a Good Thing is Wonderful. Hear, Hear. (Here, Here?) Now I just need to get everyone else to stick around, too.
Dune
There may be something better than driving to the coast at midnight in Julie’s red coupe. But I can’t think of it.
Certainly not when you consider the details.
That the windows are down, for example, and the warm air is rushing in, and the clouds are occasionally breaking apart to reveal patches of sharp Coast Sky stars.
That we are singing, loudly, The Girl is Mine. That, when the brilliant Michael-Jackson-Paul-McCartney duet finishes the first time, Julie leans forward without hesitation and hits replay. That I say, Can we sing this song together at my wedding? and she, again without hesitation, says Of Course. That she then says, I get Michael, which I barely hear because at the exact moment I am saying, I get Paul.
That in the two bucket seats behind us are two boys who work at a bicycle shop. Because when we thought of the trip at ten o’clock she wanted to invite Noah, a sweet young biker boy who’s been chasing her, but I did not want to be a third wheel. (Bikes don’t have third wheels.) So she called him and said We’re going to the coast but you need to bring a friend and I yelled A Friend Over Twenty Five! and she said into the phone A friend over twenty five and after a minute she looked up at me and said, How About Twenty Four?
That we wade in the water until our toes are numb, and sit on blankets drinking wine and lemonade and eating smoked mozzarella and crackers that the boys – at some point in the one hour between when they learned of the trip and when we picked them up, late on a Friday night – managed to arrange.
That we stay until the sky gets light, laughing and watching the waves break. That two days later we are still finding sand in our hair.
flight
Operaman just texted me.Do you like to ride bikes late at night sometimes? his message said.Always, said my reply.So then he called. I figured if anyone was up for an impromptu late night bike ride, it would be you, he said. We haven’t spoken in weeks.But earlier tonight I canceled my original plans because Disaster had had a bad day, the really bad sort of day after which you hope your friends will cancel their original plans. We threw a frisbee around and stuffed ourselves with raspberries, and then he couldn’t decide if he actually wanted to keep hanging out or not, because we are negotiating this post-Whatever part, and that is sometimes difficult. Just decide, I said. But he refused. So I left. I left quickly so as to avoid adding to his bad day by shaking him and yelling Not Deciding Is The Same As Deciding Only Stupider. But I suppose he would have been equally fine with either outcome. I suppose that’s why we’re post-Whatever. And why Whatever is all we ever were.Anyway I wandered over to Powell’s and blew two hours of pay on three paperback books, two used and one indulgent new one because a cute boy at the coffee shop recommended it to me. And there I was headed to Muddy Waters to crack it open when the text arrived, so here I am at home instead, filling fifteen minutes before hopping on my bike.It’s been a long and busy week requiring both focus and courage, and it has come out rather well. And now I am going biking. And I am not biking to figure anything out or to run away from anything or to process or plan. All week I have felt remarkably and refreshingly Easy. It’s June in Portland and I have new used books and raspberry seeds in my teeth and a glorious three speed bike, two speeds of which I haven’t even explored yet. Think of the Possibility.
Cyked
The ride from northwest to southeast is about what you’d imagine if you knew there was a river through the middle: ten fast freefall minutes down and fifteen plodding minutes up, with a gentle arc in the middle over the rippling reflection of bridgelights. I find bike paths along the way, all by accident, because I have grown brave enough in traffic to improvise my routes, right turning on red and veering past curious marquis. The first half has taxis and lit locked storefronts for scenery; the second half is quiet tree lined streets with porches and parked cars. Every minute of it is perfect. It is just past eleven and I am home safe, and a light sweat is drying coolly on my shoulderblades, and I am about to sleep well.Friday night I joined a few hundred other bikers at the corner of Clinton and twenty-fifth for the Midnight Mystery Ride, and among the crowd were pierced punk kids on fixies and khaki-shorted geargeeks with camelbacks, and my former housemate Winslow, and Adam the nice boy who now lives in my old room. We rode until two and ate hotcakes at the Hotcake House. Then I slept for five hours until Cycle the Wellfield, when Jamey and I biked about in the rain learning secrets of Portland’s water system from earnest City employees in day-glo vests. It was the kickoff weekend of Pedalpalooza but this sort of thing happens here all the time – donuts handed out for free to bike commuters on the bridges, little nods from strangers on the street.It feels just right, this city in June – one step past expectation, but nowhere near the crescendo. Portland June is the fourth date with someone you can’t wait to see again. It’s the second hike with a new pack. It’s the first full bite of a peach. And it’s hit me, at last and embarrassingly late, that there is no sense longing amidst all this juicy goodness. Longing is for February, March, and maybe April. Portland June is for delight.
plenty
Sunday morning I got a knock on my new front door. At my old house, a knock on the front door meant either one, a friend, or two, UPS for Winslow, or three, someone claiming to represent God. But my friends don’t know my new door yet and Winslow doesn’t live here and God and I are doing fine unmediated, so when I heard this knock I nearly ignored it. But just in case I opened the door, and there was a neighbor with a big flat of tiny plants that he and his wife started from seed.
He had seen me watering, so he brought them over. Broccoli and also! More tomatoes. So many tomatoes now that I will be canning for weeks, stewed tomatoes and tomato sauce, so many tomatoes that I will wander through the garden filling my mouth with Sweet Millions and Yellow Pears, biting at Glaciers like apples. I will slice tomatoes onto dark leaves from my bedroom basil; I will salt tomatoes with white discs of mozzarella. I will eat bowls of cherry tomatoes for dinner.
There are people who appreciate things that are rare because of how rare they are, but I tend more towards relishing the abundant. It’s not something I choose, any more than one chooses any of one’s likes and dislikes, but I count myself lucky for it. I’m thrilled that common things bring me such pleasure. Orchids are lovely but it’s easier to have a good day if you like dandelions. And I wouldn’t mind an artichoke, if only for the flowers. But I have tomatoes, one after another in conical wire cages, gray-green and growing and smelling like minerals. Come by in July and we’ll feast.
one go
We drove down I-5, Nate and I, in his white VW van, me in the passenger seat in my mom’s green and white striped tank top from the seventies, and Nate behind the wheel with no shirt at all – just his seat belt on his skin in the sticky heat. And there is a shadow of a life I might be having, me and some hippy boy out on a highway, weekend ending but heading away from home. It wouldn’t be Nate though, Nate who’s no hippy, who’s less a friend even than one of those people you know for years without knowing; a former classmate who happened to be driving where I wanted to go, past the grassfields and buttes and the Brownsville Pioneer Museum.
This weekend was the kickoff of the one hundredth Portland Rose Festival, so I saw fireworks on a stretch of grassy lawn by the river, and had a whole sunny Saturday of biking bookended by brunch at one end and tapas at the other, and the Starlight Parade down the Park Blocks. I slept off the marching bands and pineapple mojitos and was digging new garden beds bright and early on Sunday, nestling spaghetti squash and zucchini starts into freshly turned soil, watering the spinach and chard, pushing watermelon seeds knuckle-deep into little hills of earth until Nate and his van pulled up.
I wiped my hands on the grass and threw my small bag into the big back and we talked about John Muir and Los Angeles and the heat at eighty miles and hour all the way to Eugene, where he delivered me into Julie’s courtyard garden with cherries overhead and strawberries underfoot. And today I’m watching my friends present their masters projects, and I’m having long stringy thoughts about the invisible landscape and community and Publishing, and I’m wondering if this is what I’m supposed to be doing, Figuring Things Out, Scholarship etcetera, or if I’m just supposed to be in a van somewhere, feet on the dash, hand out the window, playing with the wind.
