Bo Knows
Bo Pisko just made me his friend on Facebook. The thing is, Bo Pisko and I were never friends in real life. As far as I recall, all that Bo Pisko and I ever had in common was two years of Madame Cauley’s high school French class. We didn’t sit next to each other or harbor a secret crush for each other or work together on any of Mme. Cauley’s infamous skits. (Aujourd’hui, mes invitees sont deux filles qui ont rencontre les etrangers d’une autre monde!) We were roughly the same level of unpopular, I guess. I think he was friends with some of my friends.
I am a newcomer to the world of social networking. I don’t know why I joined up. I don’t have an internet connection at home and I don’t have a lot of time to kill at work and I’m not looking for new friends. I’m certainly not looking for new “friends.” And I’m still in touch with most of the people who were ever a big part of my life in a positive way. I make calls and send emails and even write real on-paper letters all the time, so I’m not generally sitting around wondering What ever happened to so-and-so?
“Getting back in touch” with people I don’t wonder about was interesting for approximately five minutes. I was only planning on connecting with my actual, current friends, but I quickly found a few folks I was curious about – girls I went to summercamp with when I was fifteen, teachers from the Costa Rican town I lived in before grad school. But soon I was looking at the friends of my friends – looking, mostly, at where people ended up, and at how all the Jewish girls I went to high school with now have hyphenated Jewish surnames. Rosen-Goldberg, Liebowitz-Stein.
And I had a few “huh” moments, like, Huh! That girl married that guy! And Huh! That girl lives in Mexico! And then I felt pretty much done with social networking.
But now people are finding me.
First it was the guy from my freshman floor, the one whom I hooked up with but neither of us told anyone, and now he’s an artist in New York, and married. Then it was the boy from my international student group in Amsterdam, whom I haven’t spoken with since I left the Netherlands. And now Bo Pisko.
It’s kind of neat, I guess, to feel attached to this thready net of people out there in the world. It makes me think of an essay I was reading recently by an Indian woman who thought she was ambivalent about having children, but realized she was just ambivalent about having children in America, where people are so isolated. She moved back to India in order to raise her children in a place where they could feel connected – in a place where, if they traveled to a faraway city, they would still be welcome in the home of someone who knew someone they once knew.
I like the idea of knowing people in lots of different places, even if I don’t know them well. I like that I can flip through the photo rolodex to find someone who might be able to tell me about acupuncture or Nebraska. And, I admit, I like seeing what’s become of people I once knew, even if I only ever knew them a little, because seeing what people make with themselves is one of the pleasures of knowing people at all.
So for the moment, at least, I’m leaving my online shop open. I’m calling Bo Pisko my friend. He was a pretty nice guy, as I remember. Maybe if you’re ever going to Virginia, you can tell him you know me, and you can stay with him.
sprø
Sometimes I have a long week of overthinking things with Operaman, letting my head spiral out of control about where we’re going to be and who’s going to do what and when, and how it could all possibly come together.
And then I send him an email that says I heard there’s Scandinavian Folk Dance on Friday night at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Salem and he writes back Wanna meet there at seven?
And I think, everything is going to be just fine.
it's all right if you don't
I started out Friday with my feet up in stirrups and finished in the audience of an outdoor opera starring my boyfriend’s ex-wife, so it’s hard to say if the day got better or worse.
I used to think that I was good at challenging situations, that I handled them with grace. But in retrospect it appears that the situations I was calling “challenging” weren’t actually all that rough. Unemployment is trying. Breaking up is lonely. Buying a house is scary. And the sun sets and rises again.
But the part where I’m sitting next to Operaman and his kids, and the parents and friends of the woman he was married to for seven years, and I’m beating back a landslide of questions that just aren’t going to get answered right then, or maybe ever – questions about exactly how important or not important it has ever been to me to have kids of my own, and about how best to interpret O’s recent application to a med school in Illinois – that part has no grace at all.
That part looks more like me sabotaging a perfectly nice evening in the park, and then staying up half the night staring at my waterstained ceiling. That part looks more like me getting in a car the next morning and speeding to the gorge with three friends, drinking a lot of beer and screaming along with Tom Petty, generally acting eighteen. Eighteen wasn’t any easier but it’s been long enough now that I can pretend.
Wasn’t I just supposed to meet some cool guy with a spirit of adventure and a four season tent? Weren’t we supposed to have exciting late-night conversations about all the things we wanted to do with our lives? Things like overseas travel and meaningful work and some kind of big family, however that is defined? But instead here’s this man with his own life already – and here’s me, with mine. And I feel a little pissed that we’re meeting up with such mismatched pokey plans, each already well underway. Everyone at thirty has a life already. No one is sure how much of it is negotiable.
And I guess what I'm actually pissed about is that mine is feeling more negotiable than I would have expected, and his is feeling less negotiable than is called for. It doesn’t seem like a wise way to proceed. Wisdom, though, has never been my specialty. And I’ve now figured out it’s not grace. Optimism, perhaps? Naivety? Improvisation?
rest your head for just five minutes
Last night in the dark I reached out and my hand landed right on the bathroom lightswitch, and I thought, this is my house.
I know where the lightswitches are, and I know how the floors feel under my bare feet. It takes me fifteen minutes to water all my plants in pots, not counting the ones in the garden out back – the purple pole beans I eat right off the vine, and the long skinny eggplants.
Huge progress has not been made with the house, to be honest. It’s summer and I’ve been outside and out of town. But little projects are happening one by one. PD and I pulled all the fake wood paneling off the dining room and kitchen walls, and then we pulled off the fiberboard that was hiding behind that. What used to feel like one small dark room now feels like two big bright ones. In the wall-peeling process we uncovered an awesome brick chimney.
Different project days resulted in the construction of a makeshift table for the back yard, and the un-boarding of the door that leads there. We’ve acquired a toaster oven (since the real oven died) and a dozen old Ball jars, now filled with black-eyed peas and amaranth.
And I met with the heating guy who I think will be my Heating Guy, because he was friendly and brought a copy of his license and, unlike the last heating guy I talked to, believed me when I said I don’t like the house too hot. He walked around the basement with me, poking into the electrical box and pointing out possibilities. Maybe next winter won’t be so cold.
Sometime before next winter I need insulation and gutters, at least. And the heating means rewiring, but that’s where it all starts to feel overwhelming. So for now, one small project at a time.
Last week a friend biked by and waved from the street to me on my porch, where I sit to read magazines or talk on the phone. And this week I met my across-the-street neighbor, whose house has no foundation at all. She’s raising the house right now to add a new one, jacking it up a quarter of an inch at a time. That helped me feel my house is easy.
Last night it was hot, an unusual hot for Portland – somewhere in the nineties and dry and still. I lay on my new bed with new sheets and waited for a breeze. All the hot darkness around me felt safe and right.
I will tell the wondrous story
It took a surprising two and a half days before the first completely surreal moment of my trip to Wisconsin with Operaman and his family. We were running some errands and he popped in a CD of the music for church on Sunday. The kids joined in the song. And the wholeness of the scene hit me like so: I am in the passenger seat of an SUV driving through suburbia, drinking bottled water while the kids in back are singing along to Christian music.
Oh, shit.
I managed to pull myself together rather quickly. We do not live in suburbia, I reminded myself. We are just visiting, for the fiftieth anniversary of Operaman’s parents. And if the rental company hadn’t screwed up the reservation, we would be driving the compact car we reserved. And the Christian music is playing because Operaman is going to perform it. And the tap water in Wisconsin is gross.
This moment of complete dislocation was thankfully just a moment. Most of the trip was crazy and awesome. There was lots of Wisconsinalia – cheese curds still warm from the dairy, water skiing in the lake, two-stepping at the Friday night fish fry, custard twice a day. And there was lots of family – big, loud family – O’s parents and his three sisters and his one brother and all of their spouses and most of their kids, family that filled and spilled out of the cars we drove around and the tables we ate at and the rooms we slept in.
And it was exhausting sometimes, to be honest – every night a late night and every morning an early morning, and all that driving from Rome to La Crosse to Prairie du Chien, and constantly watching my wording so as not to exclaim Fuck! in front of a room of nieces and nephews. And it was my first time traveling with O’s kids, or any kids, and traveling is hard on kids, and I’m not sure I was always so understanding of that, because I was tired sometimes too. But a couple times his daughter fell asleep on my lap, and that felt good.
It felt good, too, when we sped along the Mississippi in the hilly corner of the state untouched by glaciers, and when the sky darkened with a distinctly unOregonian thunderstorm, and when the dusk brought a field of lightening bugs. It felt good when O’s dad told me stories about being a pilot in the Air Force. It felt good when O’s youngest sister hugged me goodbye, and stepped back, and announced We Like You.
It’s not the most natural thing in the world, for a smartass only child who prefers solo travel to suddenly share confined quarters with a shifting population of kind midwestern relatives for five days. But I suppose it is also a bit of a challenge when the sarcastic Jewish girlfriend of your divorced son/brother shows up at your Evangelical church service, even if she joins in for I Will Sing of My Redeemer. I think we all did pretty well.
What Am I Doing? I texted PD when all this felt like the wrong kind of crazy.
Making a life, she reminded me. Making A Life.
