extra ordinary things
Fall fills my heart in such a way that it feels bound to burst open – all those oranges and greens and restlessness and the smell of woodsmoke. Saturday morning found me hiding under my covers from the world, because that kind of fullness can be overwhelming. I’m not sure I can hold my chest together.
But I’ve learned that left unchallenged my hiding can go on for hours, can envelop a whole morning, so I called up Julie and committed to Eugene by noon. In the truck I listened to fall music, Neil Diamond and Cat Stevens and the soundtrack to an old musical called Pippin. Pippin is what I play when I need to remember the primacy of the small and the close-by.
So I slid into the weekend: roasted carnival squash and chanterelles only hours out of the woods, a club full of costumed revelers dancing in masks and stilettos, Julie’s room that fills with Sunday morning sun. Heading north again I drove through Corvallis for a game of kickball in the park with Operaman and his kids. They buried me in leaves and there was the season all around me – leaves holding me up and leaves sticking to my sweater and the quiet atmosphere of a leaf pile filling my lungs.
Fall is a good time for crying, for being busy, for shoring up. For getting prepared while staying present. This is how it has to feel if we’re going to be ready for what’s next. I don’t know how else the geese would summon up all that will for flying, besides being certain that stillness in the fall might cause them to come apart at the seams.
so much for that.
I went to the doctor’s office. I got weighed. I undressed and draped myself with the little white sheet. And then the doctor came in and told me she wasn’t comfortable doing the procedure.
She explained that it is very unusual for her to do a LEEP on someone for whom she hasn’t done the preliminary procedure – the one with the ugly name, the one that I had at Planned Parenthood a few months ago when I had no health insurance. She said that looking at the results of this procedure she wasn’t convinced a LEEP was necessary, and that even though a LEEP is not a huge deal there is always the risk of infection or various other complications, and there is a certain amount of maintenance that needs to happen afterwards. She recommended that instead I have a second round of the preliminary procedure I’ve already had.
This was, at first, aggravating. I was ready to go. I had taken the day off work. I had made peace with saying goodbye to eight millimeters of my cervix, and all dysplasic cells contained thereon. The preliminary procedure is purely diagnostic – it doesn’t get rid of anything sketchy – and I was awaiting the relief of a certified non-sketchy cervix.
But I liked the doctor, and I believed her. She has been doing her work for twenty years. She also explained that if the results came back troubling, she would make sure I got a LEEP appointment ASAP. It was the first time in my adult life that I sat and had a careful, non-rushed conversation with a medical practitioner whom I was sure would be seeing me again. It was great.
I mean, "great" except for the next part, with the stirrups and samples and whatnot. But whatever. Now it’s the weekend.
on the d.l.
I got a cheerful message on my voicemail last week. Have a good weekend! And oh, what’s up with your cervix? It was followed, less than a week later, by an email from a different friend asking What’s happening with your cervix these days?
My cervix has never gotten so much of this sort of attention before. It might be blushing. I realize it was weird of me to introduce my cervix here on my blog a couple months ago and then not mention it again. It’s kind of what happened in my head.
A couple weeks after the annoying procedure (which has a name so clinical and awful sounding that I don’t even want to write it) the nurse practitioner phoned up to tell me that the results confirmed the earlier test: highly irregular cells hanging out on my cervix. She told me to go get another procedure called a LEEP. This name sounds better but actually stands for Loop Electrosurgical Excision Procedure, which really isn’t all that enticing either. She said to do it in one to two months.
I was, at this point, within sight of having health insurance. So I waited. I’d like to say that was the only reason I waited, but it wouldn’t be entirely true. Brains react in strange ways to medical news and I just didn’t want to deal with this. I wanted to ignore it and then I wanted it to go away. I realize that is not rational and that it is, in fact, rather self-destructive. Which isn’t how I meant it. But there it is.
Several of my friends pestered me about it during this time, for which I am very appreciative. It clearly worked its way into my reluctant brain because one night I couldn’t fall asleep and I realized I was thinking about it, how I hadn’t taken care of it and it had been a while since the news. I started to get a little panicky. I got up and checked my calendar. It had been six weeks. Not downright negligent, but fairly stupid. Scheduling the appointment would take time. It was hard not to think about the possibility that one particularly ambitious little fucked up cell might float off to settle somewhere else in my body. I was a bio major but there is no logic when it comes to one’s own health.
My insurance kicked in October first. The benefits orientation was the eighteenth, and I waited for this because health insurance is confusing and there were several options. The paperwork took four more days. Yesterday I got an email confirmation, and I took an early lunch break, and I called my new HMO. They were nice. They were friendly. I was worried that I might have to see some in-system doctor to reconfirm my earlier diagnosis – part of my procrastination had been fear that this would happen. Instead I explained the history to a nurse, who told me not to worry because these things happen slowly. And then she told me that one of the doctors had a cancelled surgery on Friday and I could take the time slot.
So there it is. Just like that I’m going to get it done tomorrow. The whole thing takes hardly any time at all – just a scary electric loop slicing off errant cells in a place that’s a little tricky to reach, and then I feel crappy for a few days and check up on things often. And hopefully that’s the last time my cervix makes the blog.
ride
Since Beth, I’ve fallen for five guys. Plus or minus. I was thinking about it on the el train. I am trying to learn.
The first, the very first, way too soon (and that was the whole point) was graph. That’s not his name but he wrote it like that, with a lowercase letter, like he was bell hooks or e e cummings. He was a sculptor who lived in his van so he could spend all his money On His Art. He was incredibly hot yet oddly insecure about women, which – since I hadn’t dated a guy in four years – was ideal on both counts. It wasn’t about us liking each other so much as it was about him feeling lonely and me wanting to delay my sadness about Beth. It was just fine, and it was just fine that it ended.
And I went to the Netherlands, and looked around for a nice Dutch boy to marry so I could stay in Amsterdam forever. Instead I met Serge, a writer from French Holland who thought he was F Scott Fitzgerald. He called me bebe from the moment he met me, brought me to jazz clubs and tapas bars. He loved all the obvious things that young self-absorbed writers love, bullfighting and cocaine and women and hearing himself talk. The first time he propositioned me was by text message. Soon enough I flew home. Being Zelda is fun but if you try to stretch it out you’re likely to die in a mental hospital.
So I swung the other way, tumbled over myself for Chicagoboy. He had resurfaced from my past, the one in which I favored kind and friendly types, and was delightful rather than just distracting – a dorky engineer programmer who played silly folk music. He seemed like such a gift out of nowhere and I fell for him wholly and wholesomely. I was looking for where to go next and Chicago would have done well, but this he found understandably Insane.
And so I found someone more conveniently located, but I overshot. One door was as insufficient for sanity as one thousand miles. Disaster was a joy and a frustration from the first, and so familiar that his bad decisions still wreck me – wreck me in the way that your parents’ bad decisions can, because you see yourself in them and you want to think you know better.
Which brings me, a bit worse for wear but with lots of good stories, to Operaman. We are good to each other in satisfying ways; when he’s next to me it is thrilling and when he’s not the absence has gravity. He sent a package to my hotel in Chicago. But some days it seems he has nothing left for this. And sometimes I think that relationships have their own math, that when it’s working it gives you time and energy and makes the crappy stuff bearable. But sometimes the balancing of it all just defeats him, and I feel like one extra weight. And I don’t like being a weight - as much as I don’t like being so light that I’m nothing.
And somewhere in all that one would think that I might have learned what to do next, but it just keeps being different every time. The fact that it’s been a fucking trip is enough, I know. But it wouldn’t kill me to have learned something too.
I love the el train.
banallegory
The CVS on Lincoln Ave sells liquor. Within five blocks of there you can also get Noodles in the Bowl and Burritos As Big As Your Head, according to the signage. Or you can go to one of two dozen bars, each playing different music but every one of them spilling girls out onto the sidewalk, girls with short skirts and heavily slurred speech. My hostel is right near DePaul University, and tonight DePaul University is getting Wasted.
I don’t know if it’s rush or homecoming or what, but the streets are filled with stretch SUVs and party trolleys. There is a lot of celebratory honking and hooting. Maybe someone won a game.
I could go for a beer but I don’t really feel like talking to people I don’t know, so I ducked into a diner. The busboy offered coffee but I chose a milkshake instead.
I like Chicago. I landed nine hours ago and I’ve figured out the transit and seen a show and eaten deep dish pizza. I’ve eavesdropped a lot. But something about this street tonight feels unappealingly dull: I know what every bar will look like inside, and who I would talk to, and what they would say. Tonight I would prefer the surprises of people I know, rather than the unexpected predictability of novelty.
second city
At the asscrack of dawn tomorrow I am leaving for Chicago. I’m going to Chicago for a conference, and I’m going two days early for a little fun, and I’m going at the asscrack of dawn (on a Saturday) because as a City employee I have to use the City travel agent, and that is the ticket that this now-despised travel agent procured for me. I am staying, over the course of five days, in three different places: a hostel near nothing (because it’s a Saturday night and everything was booked), a hostel near everything (voted Best Hostel Ever by everyone), and a grand hotel with the word Plaza in the name (which the kind people of Portland are paying for while I’m at the conference).
During these five days I am planning to see approximately three thousand things. I’ve gotten generally mellower in my old age about travel checklists – these days I’m usually content just to sit in an unfamiliar coffeeshop and read some locally themed book – but I’m itchy for a big city and all it has to offer. So, thanks to the magic of the internet, I have a bright pink folder full of street maps and train time tables. I have a route from the contemporary art museum to the lake, and a schedule for the half price theater ticket booth, and a walking tour of Louis Sullivan buildings.
Portland is a beautiful, exciting place that is just right for my home. But it’s not Chicago. I don’t want to live in Chicago but I’m excited for an injection of Big City energy, clanking el trains and all-night eateries and a lake as big as the sea. I’m excited for a professional conference, because I finally feel like I know what I’m talking about and I might even know someone there. And – not to sound twelve, but here it is – I’m excited to stay in a hotel, because I love hotels, the big bed and the big TV and the little bottles of bath wash, the lobby and the bar and the view. And this hotel was built for the Chicago World’s Fair. So it doesn’t get much cooler than that.
And I’m excited to get on a plane, to figure out the sort of things that airports give me space to figure out. To watch an inflight movie, and to finger the route maps in the back of the plane magazine. I wonder if they will bring on the usual daydreams about Lisbon and so on. It hasn’t been bad, so far, working full time. It’s been different every day. I write grants and make maps. I go to Chicago.
being good
I nearly took the bus this morning because so little light was coming in my bedroom window when the alarm went off, even for the third time, that I assumed it was the dark kind of grey morning with cold rain and wind that sticks in your spokes. But I thought about how I’ll be out of town for the next five days and not biking, and I decided to bike while I could. I cruised across Madison towards the river, past the Santa Fe apartment complex and the street that is always inexplicably filled with Mercedes Benzes, and a woman on her porch smiled at me. My helmet has antennae on it so people smile at me quite a lot.
Climbing onto the Hawthorne Bridge the city looked beautiful and backlit, with light falling down from thin blue patches in the clouds and the West Hills all misty. It was a perfect morning to be biking. And then there they were on the far side of the path, the Breakfast on the Bridges crew, who usually show up only on the last Friday of the month. They serve pastries and hot coffee in fancy china teacups, and bikers arcing over the Hawthorne screech to the side for a bite and a chat before plunging down the offramp into the City. Apparently the group that hosts these free gatherings won a Light a Fire award, given by Portland monthly magazine for generally making the city more kickass, so here they were even though we’re only midway though October. And it filled me up with wonder, and a powdered donut.
And waiting at my office was a beautiful piece of writing from a friend I miss every day, and I love reading the things my friends write and this one had the sentence The hills were made for rolling. And there was also a poem from a different friend, a friend who does not read this blog, and it was a Mary Oliver poem, the very first Mary Oliver poem I ever read, Wild Geese.
Wednesday was hard and Thursday was better and Friday seems nothing but marvelous so far, seems like just the reminder I needed. What a blessing this all is. I get cranky about it sometimes and that’s allowed, that’s going to happen. But I sure don’t want to dwell there. This part out here is much better. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile the world goes on.
forty one minutes to gin
If you’re going to PMS, you might as well really DO it. You might as well accidentally come across yet another recent letter to your boyfriend from his ex, which doesn’t sound accidental except that they are so numerous they literally fall on you when you pull a book off the shelf or clear the table for dinner in his apartment. It’s not the sort of thing that used to get under your skin because there’s no shortage of nonsketchy letter-writing exes in your life, but since you’re PMSing you might as well take the opportunity to realize that you’ve apparently contracted a new case of jealousy, herpes-like, from the last boy you spent time with. You might as well have a long uncomfortable teary conversation with said boyfriend in which this letter shit does not even come up because you realize it is just you, being crazy in a way you don’t want to be, and besides the time gets filled up talking about priorities and misunderstandings and being at a loss for what to do.
You might as well wake up groggy at six the next morning and get stuck in two and a half hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic, listening to a cd audiobook of the most uncomical thing Steve Martin ever wrote, the middle of Shopgirl, in which the eponymous shopgirl falls into a prolonged depression and gets treated poorly by two different men in two different ways. When I found it at the library I was really hoping for something a little more Jerk-like, Man With Two Brains, that sort of thing, but no dice. You might as well be late for work.
If you’re going to have PMS it only makes sense to drag yourself through the morning by thinking about hot soup for lunch. That way when the sandwich place, by only twelve thirty, is entirely sold out of soup, you can throw your hands in the air and order a sandwich as Portland’s first hard rain starts pouring down out of nowhere. You can sit in the window with your no-meat sandwich and read the book you picked up because of its title, Lucky, which is actually about, I kid you not, rape.
And then you can come back to your office, and Surrender. You can say, This is one day, and it’s humpday, after all. And – as Joshua pointed out – we are already on the downhill side of the hump.
by way of explanation
Last night in the Powell’s coffee shop I scratched out this next blog entry in a notebook, as has become my habit since my laptop broke. I brought it to work today to surreptitiously post. But before I did I found an email in my inbox asking, “You told me many moons ago that if I wrote a guest entry for your blog, you would post it. Well, can I still cash in?” So the guest blog follows. And let us never speak of this again.
synchronicity
Some days after work I go to a movie and some days I get drinks with friends and some days I take the streetcar up to Powell’s, and today I did this last one, in the light that at six was already not light enough to call daytime, in a breeze that was already full enough with dry leaves to call fall. I was looking for a book of beat poetry for Beth who mentioned she’d been wanting to find one, but instead I ended up flipping through my same familiar heroes, hoping for used copies of titles I don’t yet have. It’s how I ration books when I want to have them all on my shelf: I wait until they are returned by someone else. This way a ten year old volume from a favorite author can still be new to me. A dead author can still be prolific. I can always feel the larder is full.
I’m picky about my used books – they need to feel right in my hands, they need to be free of highlighting and yellow edges. Underlines are ok. Inscriptions are, too, though they make me sad. The font and the layout and the paper have to look real and intentional, and not like a poorly planned reprint. The book has to smell right.
I flipped with a certain resignation through Mary Oliver, excited for all her new work that will fill the next many years but sure there would be nothing for today. No one sells back Mary Oliver.
And then there was American Primitive, one single used copy in a row of nine new ones, one single copy without the fake seal on the front saying Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. I’ve owned this book twice at least but I have trouble holding on to Mary Oliver. She writes the kind of words you want to give away because you wish they were yours. Here are some now.
Fall Song
Another year gone, leaving everywhereits rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,the uneaten fruits crumbling damplyin the shadows, unmattering backfrom the particular islandof this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhereexcept underfoot, molderingin that black subterranean castleof unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seedsand the wanderings of water. ThisI try to remember when time's measurepainfully chafes, for instance when autumnflares out at the last, boisterous and like us longingto stay - how everything lives, shiftingfrom one bright vision to another, foreverin these momentary pastures.
Guest Blog
I spent Columbus Day on the ridges of Mount Hood. I had been planning on spending the federal holiday at work, as if it were not a holiday, working in an empty office. Just to add one tiny, silent protest to the many and several states that refuse to recognize the holiday. But, really, the irony of working all day for free for the very government against whom you're protesting was just too much. And besides, it was a long summer with not nearly enough hiking, thanks in part to a bum knee that took MUCH longer to heal that expected (O vieillesse enemie!). So, with my companion Mary, I headed for the hills... I was pleasantly surprised that, at the first turn, I learned the story of Tecumseh. How when he and his army were finally defeated, no one could find his body. The theories abound, and I was particularly intrigued by her insistence that he might return one day, and: if we ever meet him, we'll know it / he will still be / so angry. I hoped that if today, this Now, was the moment, that he wouldn't choose an early deserted trail on the slopes of Mt. Hood. And though I did spend some time lifting my eyes to the God of the mountains, I spent much of the time slowly and deliberately learning by heart a Fall Song. It seems that the idea of making children memorize parts of plays, poems, etc., was ejected from American public schools sometime around our parents' generation. In many parts of Europe, the practice is still quite common. In this, I'm with the Old World. Memorization brings such a familiar intimacy with a known and loved work: How many times have you heard the Fall Song? Have you ever considered just where to place the emphasis on that tricky phrase "that now is nowhere / except underfoot"? Have you ever noticed that there are two lists of three items and the first time she uses no connectors at all, just commas; the second time she uses "and" between all three? Do you have a least favorite part? (Mine is "in the shadows" - so ordinary and adds nothing. Do you think she just needed to fill that space with something, for the rhythm?). In the end, it takes little time at all and I was able to recite the Song much of the way down the mountain. If they were impressed, my audience did not show it - the boulders did not move, and the trees did not stir from their misty naps. But the best part for me is that the whole memorization experience itself ingrains the time and place and moment - the particular island of time - in my mind. I can happily add a new entry to my slowly growing list: Fall Song - Mary Oliver - Ridges of Mount Hood - Columbus DayNo Man is an Island - John Donne - Lake South America, California mountains - Full moon near the solsticeDam Hetch Hetchy! - John Muir - Suburbia near Washington, DC - FallDon Diegue's soliloquy in Act I scene 4 of Le Cid - Corneille - Place Pie, Avignon - FallLe Corbeau et le Renard - Jean de la Fontaine - Pond in Bow, NH - SpringStar Spangled Banner - Key - Bicycling around my house at age 8 - near Richmond, VA
what you've been saving
When I lived in New York I had a housemate DV whom I found on Yahoo or in some other stupid risky internet way. He showed up to check out the room-for-rent in my two bedroom and he was wearing black nailpolish and he told me he was in the design field, and after walking once around the place he handed me a check. He was new to the city and he didn’t realize that it was harder than that to get a room – that I would be meeting several people and asking probing questions and then making a calculated decision. But he handed me the check with such certainty, I just said Great.DV was a kickass housemate. He made super home fries and he played guitar and we had unreal New York parties. When we got kicked out and moved on to different, separate apartments we stayed friends, and we stayed friends for years until he had a falling out with a good friend of mine he’d been dating. You know how those things go.But I think about DV regularly, and this is why.When I was applying to grad school I needed a portfolio. I’d never put a portfolio together before, and I didn’t know what to put in it or how. DV and I didn’t hang out often but I called him up. He sat me down and said Go to this store. Get this type of folder. Get these plastic sleeves. Then he told me to bring everything portfolio-possible I could think of to his new kitchen table. I laid out sketches and photographs and collages I had made, and a heavy plaster of paris sculpture as big as a carton of milk. He flipped through the flat things and said This is good, They’ll love this one, This one is sweet but maybe not for a portfolio. And when we got to the sculpture he said Absolutely. He said to leave it there on his table.A few days later he called and told me to swing by a photo store in the neighborhood. He had taken my sculpture to his office, because it had an accessible roof with neat industrial looking gravel and he thought it would be a compelling place to photograph the thing. He had waited for perfect light, and then taken careful flattering shots. He had picked the best ones and brought them to the photo store and had them enlarged. I slid them into my portfolio and sent it off to grad school. I got in.The next time I saw DV I tried to pay him for his time, which as a designer was worth quite a lot. He wouldn’t have it. And when I tried to pay him for at least the enlargements, he said this: When I was learning to do this, a lot of people helped me out. Help someone else out when you know what you’re doing.It was very simple and clear and there was nothing to argue with about it. DV was this way to his core. If he could do something that would help someone, that was that, and there was no collateral. I think a lot of us were not raised this way. I think a lot of us were raised to guard the things we have vigilantly, even if they would be easy to give, even if the holding on isn't helping anyone.And I don’t think that comes from a bad place. I think it comes from wanting to stay safe, which is a healthy thing to want. But sometimes, for me at least, it comes from an idea of what’s fair - as if fairness means you get back what you give and you keep what is yours. But I think of DV whenever I find myself keeping accounts, and I try to say I don’t need that back. I try to say it about books and drawings and jam, and about time, and about people. I’m lucky to have had this. It will be hard to let go of until I do, and then it will be easy. And it’s been six years but I’m hopeful that one day it will just be second nature, to give things away and not feel, even secretly and deep down, that they’re bound to return.
sliding doors
Do you remember that movie? Early nineties maybe, with that actress whose name I don’t remember. I do remember that I like her and that she’d be a lot prettier if she gained thirty pounds.
But I remember the mediocre movie because I liked the premise: a woman running into a station alternatively just makes or just misses her subway. And then the story splits, and you follow her through the two different futures that unfold depending on whether she made the train. She catches her cheating boyfriend - or doesn’t; loses her job – or doesn’t; gets a stylish new haircut or, conveniently for the movie viewer, doesn’t. All because of one second at the subway.
I think about this movie a lot. It’s embarrassing, really. I think about it in small calming ways all the time, like when I get one red light after another. Green lights and maybe I’d get hit by a bus, I think. Green lights and maybe my wallet would have fallen loose from my bike rack. Green lights and maybe I wouldn’t exchange smiles with the biker next to me, who will turn up at the conference I’m going to next week, where we will talk for hours and fall madly in love. The sliding doors world seems swimming with possibility and impossible to judge.
I have the job I have now because I was able to show up for a second round interview on two hours notice, two days after Christmas, on a day when a snowshoeing trip fell through. I started dating the guy I’m dating because of how good he was to me when I sprained my ankle, which happened because for one time ever I decided to play a single kickball inning at first base instead of third. I live in Portland at all because on the day I decided to stay in New Orleans I got an email from a guy who found me on Craigslist and offered me a room in his house, even though I couldn’t get there to meet him first, and I didn’t have a job, and I couldn’t afford the rent. Who does that?
And it’s possible, of course, that I would have gotten the job anyway, fallen for Operaman over some other thing, come to Portland eventually with or without a place to live. But sometimes – like when I’ve been grantwriting for six hours and need to send my mind somewhere distracting and curious – I like to think about how each little thing got me right here, to this place I like quite a lot, and how differently that might have gone. And how the brown socks I pulled on this morning, and the way I ducked into the Ethiopian place for lunch instead of getting falafel, and whether or not I answer my phone which is right now ringing, sends my life out into some unwritten unknown all out of my hands. The odds of almost anything in particular happening are really next to nothing.
