random request
Some of you have gotten this via mass email, but I’m posting it here to reach the six people per month who accidentally end up on this blog thanks to the unpredictable quirks of search engines.
A year and a half ago when I was training for the marathon to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, my friend Dave put a post about it on his blog. Several of his friends and coworkers – people I had never met – read it and made donations.
One of Dave’s friends, Jen, not only made a donation, but also told her mom about my run. Jen’s mom Carol is a runner. She had run in the Anchorage marathon 25 years before. Hearing about my run, Carol wrote me a long email detailing every hill and turn of the course as she remembered it. It was an incredibly sweet and helpful thing to do, and all from the mom of a friend of a friend.
Two days ago I got an email from Jen that her mom has been diagnosed with leukemia and lymphoma. She is currently in good health, and has decided to run-walk the Vancouver half marathon in May for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. I can’t really imagine looking that diagnosis in the face and deciding to complete a marathon.
When I was training, all the donations made me feel like I was really reaching a whole network of people… not just doing a lot of crappy running. So if any of you feel like giving a small contribution – even five or ten dollars – you can find Carol’s site here. The money funds important work that could benefit any of us, and the act is a way of letting a total stranger know that she is supported – just the way she did for me.
break my own fall
Wednesday five pm creeping along in the least stressful holiday rush hour ever, southwest into the sunset. Other cars add half an hour but the farms look pretty as ever and an east coast girl will never take this for granted: interstate highway that looks like country road.
Thursday ten am Packers game playing while Operaman and I load the car with V8 / Goldfish / Rittersport. Rolling Out Of Town for real.
Thursday eight pm Tofurkey sandwiches in the common room of Odell Lake Lodge, curled on a couch reading the New Yorker while kids play Monopoly. There’s a piano. There’s woods. Shivering on the porch with other guests, boots crunching circles in the snow and light caught in clouds of smoke and breath.
Friday eleven am blueberry pancakes, eggs bacon and tea. Wooden chairs at a wooden table in a window over the lake.
Friday midnight empty lodge. O and I and a fireplace for a Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources double feature.
Saturday two pm the Sportsman’s Café in the town of Oakridge population 3700. Everyone else in camo.
Saturday eight pm pick up the Little Os. Meet O’s no-longer-in-laws during the handoff. Really? Really. Swing by Goodwill for a ninety-nine cent scarf. Swing by downtown, wrap the scarf around a bronze dog for holiday photos. Photos that I take.
Sunday noon at mass. O at the organ and me in a pew with my arm around the girl. Really? Really? Really.
Sunday eight pm sipping hot spiked cider with my favorite Eugene girls, neither of whom has had the good sense to move to Portland yet. No room in this cubicle for how much I wish they would.
Sunday eleven pm me and Bliss back on the highway speeding north, fog so thick that only ten feet of dividerline surface in the headlights. Swimming in satisfaction and rest and the perspective of long drives. I Do Not Need To Figure Out My Whole Life Today. Good weekend, ground beneath my feet, head off somewhere else. CD spinning, the Buzzcocks and Fatboy Slim and Starland Vocal Band, made on the spot by Operaman for my drive. Labeled, Do Not Fall Asleep, Jenn!
(thanks)
Jaime roasted her first turkey. Jaime roasted turkey and Joshua made stuffing and Jane made one of those greenbean casseroles with little dried onions on top. Alex was hung over, even still at noon, so she boiled frozen pierogies. They were delicious though.
I made cranberry relish, because I like the taste of tart and I like an excuse to use citrus zest and I like cooking things that leave brilliantly colored stains. And because one of the students in the class I taught last winter was from a cranberry farming family. You wouldn’t believe how bizarre cranberry farming is. I’ve seen pictures.
When you cook cranberries – the fresh kind, grown right here on the Oregon coast and never frozen – they make gentle satisfying Pop sounds, pop pop pop as they turn from firm round berries into relish. The little slivers of lemon and orange rind hang suspended like a party.
There are few things I love more than a slow meal with friends, overflowing plates and drifting conversations and candles. I grew up in a house of three. My mom usually cooked but my dad didn’t always make it home in time for dinner, and we often sat a small TV right there on the table like a centerpiece. I love a meal that lasts so long you go back for thirds, a crowd so big you switch seats twice and still don’t talk to everyone. I love the way you can call across the room to clarify a story. I love how you feel a hand on your shoulder as someone goes to find the corkscrew.
Dessert was a Pie Off and Operaman judged, blindfolded and tin-foil-crowned at the head of the table. Apple, pear, pumpkin, pecan, and ice cream. Afterwards he played piano. I wanted to sing Christmas carols but the crowd said Too Soon so we ate more instead. And I love this part of being an adult, the part where you get to make new and bigger family, family that reaches out in all directions, that once in a while coils up and crams in a room, laughs and drinks wine and eats five kinds of pie.
alternatively
I might be just the smallest bit oversensitive, at the moment, to someone suddenly wanting to check out. I might be just the littlest bit overwary that expressing interest in a person will cause him to freak out, given my recent record. There is the most marginal possibility that Operaman has not, in fact, decided we are done; that perhaps – according to a conversation we had last night – much of this general downturn came from a single misunderstanding about what I am looking for, followed by a few weeks of not getting that sorted out.
And so I grudgingly admit that my advice-giving friend who advised Just Ask Him may indeed have been onto something. I Just Asked Him, and when he didn’t seem to understand what I was asking I Just Asked Him two more times in different ways, which was excruciating. But then he understood, and he answered me, and I listened.
And this weekend was good for me in terms of figuring out for myself what I need here, and for accepting that if I can’t get it I need to move on. But O pointed out that there’s a whole part in the middle there. A part where I have to express my needs, and make sure that expression is clear and understood, and give him a shot at meeting them. Holy shit! Excellent point! And you know? I don’t think I have ever, ever been very good at that.
On the plus side
as soon as I posted that, I received this unrelated email from my friend Sarah.Tonights agenda:
dixie ... 5:30 (or whenever you get off work and can crack open a tasty PBR or Hamms)
catch the max ... 6:15
get our greg oden bobblehead doll ... 6:30
get a $7 beer in the rose garden ... 6:31
tip off ... 7:00
start drooling over how cute joel przybilla is ... 7:06
find a bar with killer karoke ... 10:00
low bar
A couple weeks ago I called an old friend whom I can always rely on for brutally honest insight – the kind that you need to hear, but the kind that you can only stand to hear from someone who will deliver it with humor and love.
Why is Operaman doing thing X? I asked him. Does it mean he just doesn’t like me?
And my friend – a person who does not need coercion to give his opinion if he thinks it will be helpful and/or entertaining - told me that he could come up with an explanation, or that I could keep myself awake nights trying to figure out why O is acting the way he is. But perhaps we would all be spared unnecessary heartache if I just asked him.
Which, at first, sounded like the sort of immediately-obvious advice that my friend is known for. Brilliant!
But which, a couple weeks later, I think is bullshit.
Because here’s a thing I’ve figured out in the past two years. And I don’t mean this in a cynical way, in a twice-bitten / fuck you / woman scorned kind of way. I just mean there it is, no way around it, whatcha gonna do. People Lie.
People in relationships lie all the fucking time. I don’t mean the deliberate deception kind of lies like I have to work late. I mean the vague bluffing kind of lies like I think we can make this work. Of course I’m still attracted to you. I can’t wait to see you again.
And I don’t think it’s so common because people are mean. I think most people, when they say these things, want to believe them. They just don’t stop to think about the consequences for the other person who might believe them too.
So whatever Operaman may be saying to me, when it comes down to it he’s not particularly compelled to spend time with me. He finds less and less time to come up, and finds more and more reasons not to invite me down. And I don’t know why he calls and emails and texts and generally talks to me all the time with affection and warmth as if there’s nothing out of the ordinary, as if it’s perfectly normal to be really into someone without ever actually seeing them. I don’t know why and I guess it doesn’t matter.
I’d love to be in a great relationship right now, but at this point I’d feel lucky to date someone who would just break up with me. Break up with me and tell me about it, and not make me do it myself.
sewn
It’s dark now by the time I leave work for the day which I thought would be sad, but which has turned out to be oddly, wonderfully exciting – all those people bustling home through the streets lit by storefronts and strung-up trees. It’s as if everyone suddenly and simultaneously swung nocturnal. As if all the things we might feel obligated to do in daylight have been dispensed.I holed up, tonight, in one of my favorite coffee shops, a place with warm lamps and steamed-up windows and very good cake. I read a book and I eavesdropped. I drank a large cup of tea called Roots that smelled of orange peel.I have been feeling, these past few weeks, a rather doomed-by-definition Compulsion To Relax. People I know are nesting. They are buying new bedspreads and wintercoats, and a lot of them are having babies. Meanwhile I have finally gotten my shit together enough to work on making my life here look more like me. Portland took a while, and I didn’t arrive with much by way of reserves. Now that I’ve unpacked my paints and found good work and found good pubs, I need to remind myself that Making Up For Lost Time is not a sound proposition. It's still just today for today, and the next time I wake up it’s just going to be tomorrow.I have needed to remind myself of this in all things. My job is a good job, a good and worthwhile job, even though after one whole month I haven’t yet changed the world. My house is a good house, and I don’t need to feel embarrassed about it, even though I would rather live somewhere with a garden, somewhere I could invite people over for dinner. My relationship is a good relationship, and it challenges me and brings me joy, and all the parts of it that are out of my hands are Out Of My Hands. And if some days I feel like I Need To Know, if some days I feel like I can care or not care accordingly, I remind myself I have learned this already. Enough times, I think.Until Thanksgiving this is my plan: relax and be glad to have my feet underneath me, drink lots of tea, kick up leaves. Move as much as seems appropriate in fall, but not more. Have fun in the dark.
sooner or later
And this is how the universe works for me sometimes:At ten p.m. I realize that it is nearly time to Fall Back. And I am sad, because for a number of years now I’ve had a tradition – one of my favorite traditions of the year – to go out and do something fun and silly on the night of Fall Back, something that might be considered A Waste Of Time or something that might be considered Risky, and then to return to my house and turn back the clock. And then it never happened.You don’t usually get to do that. It feels almost magical: It’s two a.m., and you live for an hour, and then it’s two a.m. still.But tonight I haven’t planned ahead, and I don’t know whom I can call who wouldn’t be busy or away. And so I resolve to have an inward hour, to get my room in order while doing some mental housekeeping too. It will work because it needs to, but I'm not very excited about it. But I make myself stay awake.And then, at 1:40, my phone rattles its text message rattle. “Don’t suppose youre both awake & want some breakfast?” says my phone. And I am. And I do.Ten minutes later I am in a booth at Holman’s, laughing and drawing and awaiting grilled cheese.I don’t know why it works like this but I’m so grateful for it sometimes I can hardly breathe.And here I am back home, and I never even left.
