My sweet horsie, Lark. Here for interest only, and completely unrelated to the rest of this post.
All I want to do is get off of WordPress and onto some other easy-to-use site. And yet here I am, languishing on a platform I hate for the sake of occasionally posting here. It’s a placeholder.
This feels like where we are in the pandemic though, yes? Languishing. Waiting. We aren’t really holed up tight (but we will be again, I predict), but many of us (hello) are not ready to emerge fully.
It’s too people-y out there for me right now.
So here I sit, stuck on WordPress (although go visit me on Medium, where I hope to focus my other writing, poetry and non-food-related musings) if I ever start writing those things again. It’s also ok to click the “follow” button there, and I sure would appreciate it. Nothing will come to your inbox unless I publish, which, if I’m honest, is unlikely for the moment.
Happiest of Sundays to you. Take care of yourselves.
Seeing through the ice, darkly – leaves under ice in Susquehanna State Park.
At the exact moment this blog is published, 4:26 pm on March 14th, I will turn 50. As you read this, if you come across it on that day, I will be on the sand in Assateague, listening to the waves and looking at wild horses. Arguably my happiest place, and the only place I would like to be on all of my momentous occasions (anywhere near the ocean).
As I write this, though, 11 days earlier, I have sprung up from my yoga mat to make notes. I was following yoga with Adriene’s hip and heart practice in an effort to become a more open person with better balance on a horse, and once the video ended and I lie there breathing quietly, the YouTube automatically forwarded to Ethan Hawke’s most recent TEDTalk.
I thought, well, I’ll just take a nice extended savasana and listen, but only a few minutes in I found myself reaching for my phone to take notes. I have been reflecting in the past several months about creativity, my own in specific, and curiously watching the well dry. I have felt disinclined to write poetry and have not completed a painting (or even put together a canvas) since mid-2020.
And as 50 approaches, I have begun to consider the next 50 years (my grandmother is 102, so that’s not outside the realm of possibility). Among other quotes, this one stands out for me:
“The time of our life is so short, and are we spending it doing something that’s important to us? Most of us not.”
Just this morning KWeeks and I were talking about doing what we love – getting up every day and going to work that is not just a way to fill the endless daytime hours before binge-watching TV and falling asleep on the couch but is instead a buoyant expression of what we love.
Because as Ethan Hawke says above, “If you get close to what you love, who you are is revealed to you.”
I am lucky enough in my life to have the time and space to move ever closer to what I love – to unravel the tangled past and dive into things that are troubling, joyful, and deep. But there is no formula or self-help book here – no treatise of any value that gives legitimate steps to finding out what you love and thus meeting yourself. Ethan Hawke continues, “There is no path until you walk it.”
I returned to the mat, listening to the last parts of his talk and reflecting on my own life and considering the conversation with KWeeks. I want the next 50 years of my life to be spent getting closer to what I love, peeling away the layers of my experience to become more fully revealed to myself. It is only this, as Ethan Hawke says, that allows us to connect with the world and the people around us more fully, this act of walking our own particular path, that we make, that is what marks our place in the infinite, swirling universe. I know as spring comes the groundwater of my creativity will begin to dampen the earth again. I will be filled up, as the well itself.
I imagine as I write this the feeling of sand between my toes, gritty but melting away beneath me as the sea swirls around my ankles. The salt wind brushing the hair from my face as seagulls whirl and cry above. The hand of KWeeks in mine, in that moment and for the next 50 years.
Against all odds and at the impossible age of 50, I am hopeful, on the path and laying flagstones ahead as I walk it.
Twenty-two years ago today I met my husband, and eight years ago on Tuesday, February 16, he died in a single-car accident about 1/4 mile from our home.
I was teaching at New Options Middle School in Seattle (now Salmon Bay, and the best school ever) and had just received a call from the garage looking at my car. It was an unseasonably warm and sunny Friday afternoon, a Friday when I was scheduled to chaperone the school’s Ski Club trip to Snoqualmie Pass.
Instead, I found myself sweating in long underwear after school, listening to the mechanic as he said things like, “The wheels could have fallen off,” and “You cannot drive this car anymore.”
Claire. I had only had her for a week. A powder blue car whose make and model I forget but who was a replacement for a car that was totaled when I was hit-and-run from behind by a drunk driver on the way home from another Ski Club outing, late the previous Friday night. Insurance gave me $1600 for that car, and I spent it on Claire, the only car I could find for small cash, a car that had been apparently submerged at one point and was now in possession of rusted-out wheel bearings and an axle or two of uncertain stability.
I canceled Ski Club chaperoning. I called a tow truck. I called a rental car place. I got a ride to the mechanic.
I emptied Claire out and sat like a hobo with all of my possessions on the concrete wall in front of the mechanic to wait for the rental car people to pick me up.
Eventually, the tow truck showed up and pulled into the lot. I turned around to look into the shop and saw a tall, lanky man with bleachy, spiky hair leaning on the counter. He had a cast on his left arm from his wrist to his elbow and had the practiced lean of a person who was not really in an hurry. I turned back around and sat for a few minutes, sweating and fretting about the money I was about to lose, then turned back around to see him still there.
I stood up, hopped over the concrete divider I was sitting on, opened the door, and stuck my head in.
“You looking for me?” I asked.
“I guess I am,” he said.
I canceled the rental car and let Dane drive me to the car lot, where I had him turn on his tow truck lights and park smack in the middle of their business. I stormed into the office and demanded my money back. I was aware of Dane watching me as I harangued the guy behind the counter, aware of him watching me as I climbed back into the tow truck.
Our first date wouldn’t happen until February 16, 1999, a date where he picked me up in a wide Lincoln Continental, white with crimson velvet interior, an auction car. We listened to Portishead on the way to the bar, and when he walked through the front door he reached his hand back for mine without looking, a surprisingly intimate gesture for a first date.
We played darts, drank beer.
We built a life together, and then that life disappeared on the side of the road in the middle of the night, 14 years later.
As time stretches away from the night he died, I am beginning to forget some things. Specific dates, times, things we fought about, what we did every day in our life together.
But I knew when he reached for my hand on that first date, the way you know things in your bones, that we would make a life together. We lived an entire life together in just 14 years – lost parents, had a baby, lost a house, lost jobs, lost a baby, moved across the country – so much loss, but joy, too. Love.
As I write this I feel a literal ache in the place where my heart is. In many ways, this beautiful life of mine now is what it is because of Dane. He loved me, and he loved our child, with every part of himself – all of the broken bits and the joyful, exuberant parts, too. I think of him most this time of year, but he is not often far from my thoughts.
I feel lucky to have been able to understand what is really important in life, early, to get an idea that we think we have time, but it’s no use dwelling on how much or how little.
And that our days and lives are made up of small, quiet moments, not huge gestures. Reaching out for a hand. A greeting kiss. Your beloved’s hand on the small of your back. The idea that you have a person in the world who is home for you, no matter what.
On this bittersweet day, I remember Dane. His smile. His sweet blue eyes. His laugh. The way he loved me.
I remember that my people are the most important thing. And for that, and for Dane – the whole messy, tragic, and joyful experience of our life together – I am also grateful.
I don’t have many encouraging words right now. I am in quarantine, unexpectedly, and the 8th anniversary of Dane’s death is approaching. The winds are high, and my anxiety is leveling up exponentially as we barrel full-steam into an unpredictable year. So I offer these words, to myself and to you, on this extraordinary inauguration day.
For this days, and all of the others to come, HOLD YOUR OWN.
Thanks to Gina Hogan Edwards for posting this extraordinary reminder today of what is important.
Every year, and KWeeks makes a little fun of me for this, I record all of the books I read. I do this for several reasons, not the least of which being that I have the short-term memory of a fruit fly, and I will literally forget what I have read from January to December.
That’s not such a big deal until the third time you think a book looks really good, so you buy it…and it’s already on your bookshelf. And you have already read it. Sometimes more than once.
This year I also began keeping track of how many male-identified and female-identified authors I read, plus how many writers of color I reach for without going out of my way. This year, I read:
47 books by women
24 books by men
18 writers of color
My total number of books was 77. The discrepancy between my total and the above numbers is because I read multiple books by the same author. The percentage of authors of color is 25% of the total – in line with the demographics of the U.S., but not nearly enough, IMVHO. This past year I just kept reading like I do to get a baseline, and I hope to incorporate less white-centric books in 2021.
I won’t bore you with the entire list, some of which is completely forgettable, even written down, but here are my top 13 books, in the order in which I experienced them.
I was going to put stars by the ones I really recommend, but I just can’t. They were all so fucking good.
Top 13 for 2020 – a mix of non-fiction, one exceptional book of short stories, and fiction. Some stunning writing in this list, and I recommend each one of these unreservedly – purchased from your local bookstore, not Amazon, natch.
I already have a list longer than my arm, but tell me what I missed last year – what books should have been on my radar, and what should I look out for next year?
