Alecto's Ophelia

Before time had a clock

David said, Susan said, we can wait but the boys cannot, meaning, we can put the relationship on the back burner and come back to it if we have to but the boys are young and in need and they cannot wait; they need your attention right now and I thought, oh, shit, dude, you've both got it so wrong. The boys are young and they will bounce a bit and they can wait a little while but you and Susan, you can't wait, not one minute more or everything will come apart at the seams and you'll never in a million years get it back so start there right this second. Drop everything and turn around and face your wife. 

This was before there was a David and Alecto, back when there was just a David and Alecto who were very good friends in the office and Susan and the two small boys were disembodied artifacts of another life lived in the South of Jersey on Friday through Monday when he wasn't leaving his home at 5:30 AM Tuesday and arriving in Stamford just before 9, living at the Sheraton and driving home on Thursday nights, probably arriving sometime after 10 PM which even though you have five nights at home and two nights on the road, it still feels more like a 50/50 split. 

I can't remember if I thought this was insane at the time or not. In retrospect I realize Susan had decided it was insane. Later I asked him how they got to this place. Why are you doing this if she's so unhappy, not really thinking too much about the kids or the impact of the kids at that point, just the marriage. She worked after the first baby was born and maybe kept working until he was eleven months old and they had a family vacation. During that week, this baby who was apparently a real handful calmed the hell down and they came to the conclusion that daycare just wasn't working for this kids. Sometimes daycare really doesn't work for kid. Too much, too much, you know? In this baby's case it was over stimulation that was probably experienced as constant strafing. The kid was in his own personal war zone and when they took him home at night he was batshit crazy from it all. I think there were alternatives. I know there were alternatives but as parents when you go from one extreme to another in a week of quiet and your monster child becomes a peaceful little guy you can make some pretty quick decisions regarding life changes and so she quit her job and he upped his game, upping his game meaning he left the office and went into consulting which changed the dollar potential significantly and took him away from his family. All of this was agreed to up front. 

Nobody ever really sees this coming especially when we're young and you know, she once capped his income probably in a very casual conversation and that cut him to the quick and so I think he's still got something to prove even though she's long gone and they're both long grown. 

later there was another baby with significant medical problems who may or may not have died in the first few days except for a more or less untried medical procedure which managed to do what it was meant to do and after four years of maintenance the boy was pronounced good to go as long as he took care of himself for the rest of his life and the first baby was diagnosed with what appears to be an epidemic in New Jersey but is NOT transmittable and for the love of god, people, is not caused by vaccines. In 2012 the prevalence rate in the US was 1 in 68 and in NJ it was 1 in 41. In 2016 those numbers hadn't changed. I'm not sure why this is relevant but it feels like it ought to be. 

Susan and David were unraveling. She's lonely, he said. You talk to her every night, I replied. I said, when I was on the road all the time I never called home, I disconnected entirely. It was the only way I could do it. I don't really know why but I know it didn't work. I also know my husbands weren't lonely. That wasn't the problem. She's disconnected, I said. She's trying to reconnect. He said, she wants it to be the way it used to be but it can't be. When he was home he did all the things he was supposed to do that fathers are supposed to do. When he was not home he received all the news right down to the smallest details of their days. When she picked out carpeting he was consulted. Why can't she just make this decision on her own? Well, she can, but she doesn't want to. 

In the bitter end when they'd relocated to Connecticut and discovered that it only made things worse, she took the boys and fled south to her mother's home. Panicked, I said, don't! Don't let them cross the state line! You'll never get them back! No, he said, it's fine. I just want them as far away from me as possible. 

I would have to go back all the way to the birth of the second boy to find the unraveling I think. The need that could not be met, the reality of life sinking in, of not being enough, of not understanding that you have to turn around and face what's hard to keep it alive combined with the instant out of actually not being there. This misguided belief that we have time. The boys are crying because you're not here, she told him. I said, that may be so, but why are they crying? My children never cried when I was away because they didn't know to cry. No one told them it was bad or wrong that I was gone. It was just a fact of life. Lots of fathers are on the road five days a week and they go home to their wives and children on weekends. It isn't optimal but it is a life. No one is crying. So why are they crying? Who is telling them they should be so sad? Who is so sad that it has spilled over onto the children? 

One day in Vegas the older boy called his father. It's an emergency, he said. Mom is crying and she can't stop. 

This was my introduction to time running out. I didn't like it when he traveled. When it was happening I didn't understand my reaction; it didn't make sense. I traveled, or had traveled extensively and understood the ebb and flow of it. He wasn't traveling a lot and there was a week and a half where we both traveled at the same time; I went to Tel Aviv and he went to Hong Kong so no one was home alone and I was probably busier than he was in terms of work and social obligations after the fact and my company had provided me with a global phone so we could talk at the end of my day but I was a wreck. And then later he went to Zurich for a week, I could have gone with him, should have gone with him (for the life of me I cannot remember why I did not go with him) and spent a week on the couch in a state of misery. My two older children stared at me in disbelief. Each time he traveled I felt as if a wall slammed down, severing a major artery creating a flood of relationship lifeblood rising in the conjoined basement of our hearts. I thought we'd drown and I felt ridiculous. I told him that. David, this is stupid. I have no idea why I feel this way. I'm so sorry. Please come home. Later in the week. David! Oh my god! This is awful! Please come home! What's wrong with me?! 

I wasn't lonely and there were no children to suffer. If anything, my children had the relief at not having to struggle for my full attention.

The truth is, David was the only road warrior I ever really paid any attention to because he was the only one of us talking in a way that I'd have been listening. That doesn't quite explain it. I'm sure everyone else was talking, it just wasn't with a whole lot of energy so what I heard didn't stick. We were young so many of us were still single. I remember Rick had a small child but he wasn't married and he struggled for the right to see his daughter. He was from Toronto so I'm not certain how the laws differ in Canada but I know he battled the courts for a solid year for the right to have an overnight visit and was denied continuously because it wasn't good for the child to be away from her mother overnight and I can see that if the child is nursing then that's a bit of a problem but after that it was still an uphill battle. So I remember Rick's conversations about his desperate attempt to have a meaningful relationship with his daughter from day one. I remember another Rick looking for love and just not finding it. He was in his late forties I guess which seems so young now. A Texan with two boys from his first marriage, eventually settled on a mail order bride and the whole world gasped when he did this but, what the hell, you know, if you're committed to having companionship then you do whatever it takes. I don't know how that worked out for him. I hope he found some sort of connection. I don't think it was long term because when he passed away in his early fifties of heart failure (of course he'd die of a broken heart) the messages on his Facebook page were put up by his boys. I knew Sparky's family and one day Florkow and I drove to his home town to see him in a musical and got a good, solid dose of what Sparky's life really looked like. It was epic. He was the life blood of Our Town and somehow, despite seeming to compartmentalize home from work, had a rich and wonderful life under all that. He still does. He's gone since the end of 2007. Gone gone, or floating in the ether, or whatever, but that life is still there and still pretty magnificent. 

Florkow and I. We were coming apart at the seams but I don't think it had a damn thing to do with traveling. If I had to put a single reason on it I'd slap alpha female with no modeling in terms of how to fit ourselves into the world much less properly choose a mate and make that work. When the scales tipped we were more committed to being who we were than being the wives the world said we ought to be. I'm not sure either of us could have been even if we'd wanted to be. Probably would have died trying. Now that I think of it, I nearly did and she might have come close. Mothers though, we got it about that part, we just had to tweak, no, rewrite the manual. 

It wasn't until I got to the Acme Ajax company last February that I started to listen to the road warriors a little differently. I don't think it was intentional, I think I was just primed for it. It started with Paul who is probably my age and has probably been in the field most of his adult life. He leaves his home on Monday morning and returns on Thursday evening. I have no idea how many years he's been doing this but it's simply a fact of life. I listened to him talk about his life and he talked about it a lot. He talked about it like it was the most important thing, the only thing that mattered. He also talked about his job in terms of the consulting company he worked for and some of the difficulty he faced but not so much. Only enough so that when he left I understood. In any event, he talked about his daughter who was maybe eight or nine and adopted from China and therefore she went to a school specifically for Chinese-American children meant to ground them in their own cultures so that they had something besides just being tossed into White America. His pride was palatable. The details surrounding her education and accomplishments, her joy, her growth, her attachments, her milestones, and even her difficulties were shared freely. On Mondays we heard a fresh set of stories collected personally from Friday through Sunday and during the week we got the play by play he received on the phone at night. We heard about his wife and his house and his neighbors. We heard about how he managed his social life during weekends and how he managed to balance himself. About three months into this I realized I was hearing a replay of David's life except for one small detail, Paul was fully engaged. Paul's wife also seemed to be stable. On the surface it sounds like Paul's marriage is stable. I can't say that's the truth because I can't see past what I was hearing but that's the best assessment I can come up with. 

The same was relatively true for two other senior members of the team except they didn't have quite as much to share but that doesn't necessarily mean very much. Some people just share more. There was a single woman who had two houses in two separate states and went to home to each every other weekend. I'm not sure how this happened but somehow she came to invest herself in both communities and didn't care to give up either. I rented the condo for a while, she told me, but then I missed the neighborhood and I didn't really have to have the rental income so I just decided to go home twice a month and then twice a month to the little house and I can't bring myself to sell either of them right now. When I retire I guess I'll have to make a choice, but not just yet. 

The younger consultants, the Millennials, the boys who worked so damn hard, two of them were recently married, maybe two or three years in and their wives worked locally and they were getting ready to have babies. Are you going to stay on the road, I asked? Yes, they told me. This is our life. It will be hard but we are already used to it. I asked if their wives would stay home and they laughed. No, they said, they will not stay home and if we asked them to they would be very angry with us. In our culture we seem to oppress women but once we're over here they do whatever they want. One said, apparently we're going to have a nanny and the other said, I don't know what we're going to do, she'll tell me when we get there. The first one said, my wife is a doctor, I don't argue with her. Why not? She has access to sharp things. 

Every Thursday afternoon they would leave the office and disappear into their lives reappearing late Monday afternoon, mysteriously having recharged themselves as opposed to returning home and having what remained sucked out of them which is the state I found myself in at some point during my first marriage. 

There is a whole world of Travelers out there. Some do it very, very well, others crash and burn. I think it's a matter of perspective mostly. I don't think the way I did it the first time worked particularly well. I think it almost worked, but not quite. Compartmentalizing was how I handled the pain of separation and the pain of separation occurred because I couldn't accept the separation. 

When I signed up for this business with the Communication Company there were two things going on. First, I really needed to work. The job ninja came and went while I was on sabbatical so by the time this job came along I really didn't have much of choice. I was lucky in that it didn't involve air travel and if I had to get home, I could. Seriously. Get in a car and in a couple of hours, I'm home. And if the shit really hit the fan I could make this a commute, it would just be ugly. Leave at 5:45, return at 8:15, go to bed at 11 (which is what would happen) get up at 5, you're living on 6 hours a night. The second thing that was going on was that this was a seven month contract. Good through the end of December. That was scary and also a relief. That meant that there was a limit to the number of nights I'd spend at the Basking Ridge Marriott and a limit to the amount of time I'd spend away during Elizabeth's senior year. The scary part was I'd have to start looking for a new client in September and I might go out of the frying pan and in to the fire. I could end up in California. For five years. But I was safe for now and I was adjusting and Elizabeth was adjusting and then a funny thing happened.

My boss started making I love you noises. My boss's boss started making I love you noises. The guy I actually do the work for started making A LOT of I love you noises. My boss started saying things like, we really don't want to lose you, you should consider moving to New Jersey. And then the shoe dropped. My boss's boss said, we're keeping you for thirty months which is the limit on contractors around here. This was in the context of why she loved me, what she loved about my work, where else she wanted me to do it, and why the department needed what I was doing. I smiled and walked back to my purloined cube where I proceeded to shake for a while.

Thirty months at the Basking Ridge Marriott.

Thirty months takes me to November 2019 at which point Elizabeth will be halfway through her third semester of college. I got in the car at 6:15 and drove north. I only cried for the first thirty minutes. I put it away for a while because there was something called a microburst in my town which is a small downdraft that moves the opposite way of a tornado. I don't know how long it lasted but it did significant damage. Also, we aren't supposed to have them here in the Northeast but what the hell, we have all kinds of shit in this town. The power was out when I got home (I knew this at the intersection a mile and a half from my part of the forest because the light was out which means everything north of that intersection is dead and gone, often for days) and Elizabeth had just come back from Peter's with the last pre-made sandwich they had because she waited too long. At this point no one really knew how bad it was and the estimate was return to power at 11 PM so I tethered my Mac to my iPhone (seriously, the fact that I can create wifi for another device with my iPhone on 3G just sort of blows my mind), powered up Netflix, lit some candles and we huddled around season 11 of Supernatural (still plowing through that). When my battery was at 65% I called it a night and we wandered off to bed secure in the belief that power would return any minute now. 

When the utility truck pulled up outside our house all bets were off (we own the transformer from hell).

We had power before dawn, the rest of the town was up by the next night. I don't know when the wreckage was finally cleared. In any case, all of this was a solid distraction from the thirty months plus I was working on Friday and Elizabeth had to go into camp early because other counselors were trapped on their own streets. 

On Friday night I said, Elizabeth, here's the deal with the Communication Company.

Blink blink.

So you'll be gone my entire senior year. 

Yes, but if you really need me here I will turn it into a commute.

OK.

But you'll have to tell me if you need that. You can't just go around not talking.

I know.

OK. But here's the other thing. At some point I may want to relocate to New Jersey.

What?!

Elizabeth, you'd be in your sophomore year and I'd pack up your room exactly the way it is now and create exactly the same mess just in another house in another state.

No!!! You said you'd keep a safe place for me!

OK, I did, but can we talk about this?

No! I do NOT want to talk about this.

OK, we won't talk about this. Not now.

WE WON'T TALK ABOUT THIS EVER.

Right. 

Yesterday we had a lovely day together. We started with breakfast at the local marginally edible food place and then went to the mall because she wanted a haircut and then left the mall because the haircut place was out of business but we made an appointment at a real salon which actually cost less than the mall place (go figure). After the late afternoon appointment at the real salon she wanted to go to dinner at one of the places by the water where we used to go after Ailey last summer and they started serving at 4:30 so we could do that - this is the place that introduced me to skate and I'm still scarred. The menu at this place is still weird as hell and I struggle to find anything on it I'm willing to eat but she goes there for the mocktails and the desserts. We sat in the hot sun because apparently that's what we do and the kid talked to me. I didn't say anything about moving to New Jersey. I was still trying to figure out how to extend my stay past thirty months but there was no point in even going there. 

She was talking about where she wanted to go to school and suddenly she'd gone from the 60k tier right down to the mostly viable and then the absolutely viable and then she said something I still can't wrap my head around, she said UCONN Stamford which is the regional branch and I said, WHAT?! Not that I have anything against UCONN Stamford, I just didn't see this coming. I have one more child interested in pursuing a degree in social sciences and I want to put my head in my hands and mutter, to what end? 

So if you're going to UCONN Stamford, you're kind of counting on being a Fairfield County resident, aren't you? And you don't exactly care to take up residence in your father's apartment. Got it. I'd probably slice lengthwise too. 

In 1991 when I first hit the road, time had no clock. The children could wait, the marriage could wait, the 401k could wait, completing my education could wait, the career planning could wait, taking care of my body could wait, taking care of my mind could wait, all things, almost could wait because time was a big flat playing field. The only things that ticked were things like mortgage payments that were way too big, debt that seemed have gotten terrifyingly out of hand, and a few scattered medical near disasters. I'm not suggesting that the clock necessarily needed to be ticking or that I would have been or could have been doing anything differently given the circumstances. I think about what it would have looked like to have taken better care of my mind earlier and how my life would have turned out if I'd been able to do that but the best I can come up with would have been that I'd have stabilized earlier. How much earlier? Too much earlier and I wouldn't have Elizabeth. What else would I not have? See? It's hard to second guess that kind of thing. My point is there wasn't a ticking clock except for a few things which always seemed like they were about to blow. They still do, you know. It's always been the same damn things. I just get there differently. Yes, I need to take a good, hard look at that. 

In 2017, twenty-six years later, everything is ticking. If I could find a way to turn off that clock I think it would better for everyone. Elizabeth and I talked about retirement the other day. I said that I didn't understand why people had to retire at a certain age. This came up because we were talking about my doctor who is well over 80. It's fine. His mind is sharp, he does not want to stop practicing and I don't see why he should. I would imagine his malpractice insurance is obscene but he's still practicing for a number of reasons. I hardly believe he's in it for the money. I am terrified of the idea of retirement. I've already had a taste of life without structure or purpose. It wasn't pretty. I got back into a building doing something I love and my quality of life skyrocketed. Why do I have to stop doing this in ten to twelve years? I have every intention of being better at it in ten to twelve years or better at whatever it morphs into. And I don't want to hear any shit about corporations don't want to hire old people because young people are better. Yes, they're cheaper but there's a reason they've hired 53 year old me. Turning 65 doesn't make me effing expire. Something has to be done about this. Yes, I know, there are only so many jobs to go around and I have to get out of the way for the next generation. Bullshit. I got here first. This cannot be a fixed number. I'm not buying that. Economically speaking, that doesn't make sense; things are always in flux. I believe very firmly in the laws of supply and demand. Anyway, my point is that I don't think the clock should be ticking. It just feels stupid. A set of rules imposed because? Well I don't want them anymore than I wanted the Good Wife rules in 1991. 

It just seems as if our entire lives, in this culture anyway, are dictated by a set of rules which are driven by a timeline which seems pretty damned arbitrary and I have never felt quite so strongly such an incredible sense of wrongness about it. 

No. I don't believe I'm going to go back to the barn after all. 

as an aside, if you google 'horse in the forest you get cowboys. if you google 'woman on a horse in the forest' you get bloody erotica or fantasy which is a close second. This will do just fine because in my world she doesn't grow up to be the Marlborough Man, the chick in the corset humping the horse's neck, or the post-adolescent in the cape with elf ears, way too much product in her hair, and a dagger she's most likely going to put through her own thigh. She's going to decide not to go back to the barn because she either isn't going to hear the clock ticking or she just isn't going to care. 

The balance of Ireland and Paris

 

"Don't make the baby cry"

Don't make Elizabeth cry, she'll never be able to stop. We never really knew why, it's just that she felt whatever she felt at such an epic level that we didn't know what the hell to do about it. All you could really do was sit there with your arms around her while she buried her head in your chest and let loose pain and despair that really seemed too big for her little body. 

So we learned to look for the warning signs; the very slight tremble at the lower lip, the widening eyes, and if the lashes were even remotely damp it was almost too late. Gather her into your arms and tell her it's OK. Tell her you love her, tell her she isn't bad, say whatever you have to say to bring her back to earth. And then, when she looks like her feet are on the ground again try saying what you needed to say differently. It isn't that she doesn't want to hear. 

Later when David left, Elizabeth went to Heidi and Heidi tried to get Elizabeth to talk to us. We really weren't aware that Elizabeth wasn't talking to us until Elizabeth started saying things to Heidi that we didn't know and I suppose that's not all that unusual but Elizabeth felt ways about things and we didn't know these things. Elizabeth was discrete. We knew that. She would never say something to me about her father and never say something to her father about me. Not even small things we were saying to each other anyway. She wasn't taking any chances. Why, Elizabeth? What are you afraid of?

I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.

Lucia was mean to her. Of course she was. Even with nine years between them siblings are still mean. Elizabeth didn't say a damn thing until years later. She'd have taken it to the grave except she knew Lucia was well past getting in trouble and I wasn't likely to do anything other than be sympathetic. 

Later, especially when Elizabeth stopped dancing it became painfully obvious that Elizabeth had really stopped talking. We knew she wasn't talking when Portnoy was gone because as bothered as she was she was through with him and that was the end of it. The hurt bits would pop up every once in a while and she's smack them back down again and I wondered if she was doing that for me or for her. Lucia's thinking was she was more mad for me than she was hurt for herself which doesn't negate the hurt but somehow in her head there isn't room for both. 

Elizabeth, you need to talk.

No I don't.

Why not.

I'm a very private person.

Elizabeth. We all respect that but there's private and there's entirely shut down.

I talk to some people, I just don't talk to you.

Elizabeth, how do I know if you're OK?

This is a repeating conversation and then she tries and she really does not know why she can't. 

One day, maybe a week before she left for Ireland with her father she blew. I don't even recall what set her off but she got so mad she got in her car and drove off to see her sister. Well, this is fine. This is a good thing. This is what sisters are for and HER sister, her Lucia is oh so good at listening. Nice, right? What a wonderful thing to come out of all those years. Well here's the catch. Lucia lives damn near close to forty miles north of here, thirty of which are highway miles and of those thirty highway miles half of them are not very nice highway miles. Until the day Elizabeth snapped and drove to see Lucia, Elizabeth had logged precisely 1.2 highway miles, those highway miles being the most benign miles this part of the state has to offer. My bad, haven't gotten around to getting her out there yet. Hey, eighty hours logged with the lunatics off highway was impressive. 

Lucia is not going to give her sister up and I wouldn't ask her to. What she did tell me was that Elizabeth carries EVERYTHING. Her stuff, my stuff, her dad's stuff, her friends' stuff, the world's stuff, the cheeto jesus, her boyfriend's stuff, even the DOG'S stuff. It just builds up in there because it has nowhere to go. 

Don't make the baby cry.

I don't know. Maybe we should have let the baby cry it out more often. My gut says that's not really what it is because there was something going on early on. She just had no freaking skin. We really did need to learn to phrase things differently with her so she could hear them without feeling like she'd let the world down but I know we missed an opportunity along the way, I'm just not sure exactly what it was. 

Lucia says, you have to get her help, Mom. 

Will she go?

Yes, she said she will go.

Later I asked her. Will you talk to someone, Elizabeth?

Yes, but I won't do it for the rest of my life.

I'm not asking you to do it for the rest of your life. I'm not actually asking you to do anything. I'm asking if you would like to talk to someone. I'm asking you if you are ready to ask for help and if you are ready to ask for help I will get it for you.

Yes, I would like to talk to someone.

OK. I will find you someone and also, Elizabeth, this will be entirely your thing. I won't pry. You'll be safe. 

So off Elizabeth went with her father to Ireland and I remember having a brief conversation with him about how he'd planned the trip. He said something about dialing it back a bit and not putting as many things into the agenda as he would if it was just him and I said, that's a good idea because you know that would drive her crazy and I thought, good, this will be a nice easy trip and she will see some castles and the countryside and she will meet her family and it will be a lovely week and then they will head for Paris and everyone will be very happy.

And then the text messages started pouring in. From her father.

At first I thought, why is she doing this? Why has she got her head buried in her phone looking for wifi spots constantly. We talked about this. It doesn't make sense. He had a mobile phone specifically for Europe and she'd disappear every night and talk to her boyfriend. He resented this. I wondered about it. We'd talked about disconnecting and being with her father. It didn't make sense. She did it in Nicaragua because she had no other option but she also is disciplined and capable of doing it. None of this made much sense. He grumbled about having to go back to the hotel at 10 PM because she needed downtime. I was confused but I hadn't put the pieces together yet. 

And then the miraculous happened. She lost her phone. I know that might not sound like such a good thing; I mean we're talking about a relatively new iPhone 7 and the kid slips on some very steep stairs on an island, loses her grip and the thing skitters into the ocean. She is inconsolable, not because she doesn't have it right that second but because of the cost of the thing. She is clear that she will replace it. She doesn't know I've insured the thing. I order the replacement the next day which she will have when she gets home but for now she has nothing to distract her except the mobile at the end of the night. 

This is good and not so good. It is good because it brings everything to the surface. Two days in and the kid breaks. She explodes in a small shop in Dublin thirty minutes before they are due for dinner at his cousin's and she can't pull it together fast enough to make it to dinner on time. Eventually they get there and the only text I receive is: We're good

My response is: no you're not. we have to talk.

What comes out is that they've been getting up at 8 every morning and hitting the road. Every evening at 10 she folds. He is unhappy every evening at 10 because he is not ready to fold. He wants to sit in a local pub and listen to music. He admits that she might not really be comfortable with that schedule having had no downtime between finals and getting on a plane. I suggest that most people would be unhappy with that schedule under any circumstances. We talk about over stimulation, over load, too much too much, and other people's needs. He talks about the uprising of 1916 and the importance of her heritage. I tell him she probably doesn't care and that school was out on the 22nd. He says, SHE WANTS TO GO TO STARBUCKS AND MCDONALDS!!! I tell him they are familiar and comforting. 

He wants to know why she never said anything.

I said, she did. She says every night at 10 that she needs downtime and you get mad about it. Reminds me of Portnoy. Probably reminds her too. 

There's this thing I talked about called consideration and asking for it but I change my mind. I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, oh, no, oh HELL no. oh FUCK no. This is common courtesy. You just don't do this to another human being. Just because you have this idea of how something should be does not mean you get to inflict it on someone else. But we do that. We do it all the time. We don't even think about it. We just launch ourselves into the world, our adventures, our agendas and we carry people with us in our wakes. Many of us have no intention of inflicting harm on other people. Some of us are assholes, there's no doubt about that, but I think the majority of us really don't know. 

And the thing is, she doesn't talk. 

I grew up, my brother and I grew up basically without rights. We went where we were taken and our job was to suck it up no matter how hard it was. We built up one hell of a tolerance for discomfort but we also failed to learn to ask for what we needed or even recognize that we might need something. And I'm talking the really hard stuff, like being too cold or too wet, or too tired, or too sick, or really hungry. Contending with that as a child will do a real number on your head in terms of being able to recognize needing something that doesn't fall on the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy. 

So I wonder how that translates to teaching your children to recognize and ask for those things. I desperately want to give those things. I want her to have them. I find myself often hard pressed to even name them and when I can name them I question the validity, not for her but for myself. 

He does not want to hurt his daughter, he just has no idea what she needs. She doesn't know how to talk to him so she sucks it up until she explodes and I'm reminded of this five or six year old who got so mad at the beach (when he told her it was time to go back to the house) that she smacked him in the ass with one of those three foot beach shovels. She was using her phone as a way to disconnect from the overstimulation and when she lost that she lost every coping mechanism she had. Yes, I told him, even sitting at a sidewalk cafe is stimulation. Good, bad, or indifferent there is only so much you can or should pack into a day. 

I reminded him of the two weeks we spent in Ireland in 1999. What time did we leave each hotel or B&B, I asked? What time did we go back to each room? Were we EVER out late? Once in Belfast, once in Dublin and both of those out of necessity because we arrived so late. We circumnavigated that country (ies). We certainly didn't hit all twenty-six counties but we got to anything close to the coast and we hiked inland every single day. I lost count of the castles and the passage tombs in the middle of farmer's fields. The amount of time spent on Giant's Causeway and in and around the area is the reason we were so late getting into Belfast. The point was that we went to bed early, slept long and hard, woke slowly, ate slowly and began each day slowly. Nothing was rushed. 

Why not? Because at the end of day two when it started to feel rushed and overwhelming I dug my heels in and said: HALT! And we rerouted the entire trip. 

After a very long conversation by text we decided he'd completely scrap the Paris itinerary other than the Airbnb apartment he'd booked. We decided they'd fly into Charles de Gaulle, head to the apartment, pick up some food, and then he'd hand her his iPad and ask her, now what? 

Now what looked like this:

1. They got locked out of the building because they couldn't make the outside key work (they were eventually rescued but this turned into an all day and into the evening drama but it could have been much worse)
2. When they finally got into the apartment she headed straight for the small bedroom and assumed possession. He thought he was getting the bedroom and she was getting the pullout couch. He sent me a text and asked what to do. Let her have it. 
3. She immediately found a movie to watch on the iPad (he thought she'd be looking for places to go - no, Dude, she's in a dark room unwinding)
4. He went out to find food and wine and left her with the mobile. While he was shopping the key was removed and he was locked out of the building. The mobile was dead and neither of us could reach her. Eventually he got a snapchat message through to her on the iPad
5. They reached the host who said her sister had the key and would be back after dinner (10:30) and would return the key and show them how to use it.
6. Elizabeth continued to watch movies. Happily.
7. At 10:30 they walked into the city in search of their own food...

Today she put them on a river cruise around and through the city. Last I heard she did not want to get off. The ticket is for the day so technically she can stay on I suppose if it backs up and goes the other way.

All she ever wanted to do was go to Paris. She didn't have any other big dreams, at least none that she was putting out there. For four years she's been waiting to go and talking about Paris and here she is in Paris absorbing the reality of it. We all do this sort of thing in our own way; what we should never do is inflict that on someone else. For you, sitting on a boat in a river staring up at the Eiffel Tower might feel like a wasted day (her father is probably dying a little inside minute by minute), for her, based on her body language and what I know about my daughter it isn't so much about the doing as the being. She has landed firmly in the city which holds the key to the art she left behind. Anything could happen. 

La Sylphide is at the Paris Opera Ballet right now. I would walk through a wall to get her there. My stomach was in knots and I'd started crying when I sent him the link. They were back on the boat after trying to get into Notre Dame and failing having been a bit too late for taking their time selecting a replacement pair of sunglasses. He'd sucked it up about Notre Dame because she was happily just wandering. The only tickets available for tomorrow night were, well, the really expensive ones. I said I'd split it with him if he'd just walk her into paradise. We worked through the ticketing process together while he was on the boat right next to her oblivious self; on his phone, on my computer we figured out what was needed in the allotted eight minutes and now he has less than 24 hours to work out how to print them and he can do that. 

His Ireland. Her Paris. We just need to think beyond ourselves which includes the ability and willingness to speak and sometimes be spoken for. 

 

And then I gave my baby an assist to the dark side

I don't know if there is relevance in explaining my hatred of the Toyota Prius other than to explain briefly that it is the badge of conspicuous consumption in this part of the country akin to the purchasing of indulgences (my other car is a broomstick, cough, I mean a two ton, 8mpg SUV, plus there's at least a Boxter in the stable even if it is getting a little long in the tooth, and I threw out a perfect good BMW (which I WILL replace with next year's model) to buy one of these things brand new because it was fashionable to be seen in in the Whole Foods Parking lot. One of the dealer options was a coexist bumper sticker placed just so on the back left side of the rear bumper).

If it's not the purchasing of indulgences by the Horribly Entitled, then it's the battle cry of intolerance of the most intolerant subspecies since the Religious Right; the Alternative Left, recently most guilty of having spawned the Bernie Bros whom I personally hold responsible for putting #45 on the throne. If you can't see the driver, the way you tell the difference between the Horribly Entitled and the Angry Crunchy (Alt Left) is by the placement of the coexist bumper sticker. The Horribly Entitled purchased the factory option which appears on the back left of the bumper, and the Angry Crunchy Slaps it wherever it fits between the dancing bears, legalize pot, and Obama 2008 stickers which have been replaced by Bernie but not by I'm With Her. It is possible that in some states the Obama stickers have been replaced with Kill Her with Fire stickers but I haven't actually seen any of these. 

In a nutshell, this is what ruined the Prius for me sometime after they'd multiplied like plague bunnies and reached a state of ubiquity. Ubiquity happened when I wasn't looking which is pretty much how it always happens because these are things I pretty much don't care about. Cars. Right. The first Prius sold in the US was in 2000 and was a plug in. Elizabeth was born at the tail end of 2000 and I wouldn't have given a rat's ass, wouldn't have heard the first thing about peak oil, and had a four and a half mile commute across Stamford so I could work crazy hours and still get home in time to hang with the kids before bed. My priorities did not even touch on the concept of fossil fuel. 

I became aware of the Prius in 2006 when I'd been in this town for about six months which was long enough to watch the Angry Crunchy collide with the Horribly Entitled and even enough to get caught in the crossfire periodically. I hated their smug little cars with their smug little gas tanks and their electric hybrid engines which I absolutely did not understand. They reminded me of colorful versions of the Yugo which caused more cognitive dissonance than I care to think about. 

Do you remember the Yugo? There's actually a book written about it titled The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. I remember it was incredibly ugly, disturbingly small, frightfully inexpensive, ran like crap when it did run, and mostly didn't run at all. Our neighbor and landlord in the original forest shelled out maybe two grand for this dishwater grey box with four wheels, two doors, and the outlines of a hatch (it never actually opened).  And under the hood, an emaciated pig suffering from tertiary syphilis begging for mercy. When I first heard of/saw the Prius this is what I thought. Ah, great. The Yugo has returned and is selling itself for MORE money this time with added features and an actual paint job and THIS time Larry David is driving one. He looks ridiculous. Why is he doing that?

This is what I thought, and then Southpark, which I was still watching on a regular basis came out with an episode called The Smug (great clip, sums up the attitude perfectly) in which the amount of smug on the west coast has hit critical mass and started east where it will collide with the critical mass coming over the mountains and end the world. Or something. If Kyle and his friends don't do something. And then Kenny gets killed (YOU BASTARDS) and it all works out. So, right. Prius, a Kenny killing, Smug creating, Crunchy, Angry, Yugo like electric thing causing the deaths of perfectly good BMW, which, while they weren't the best idea to begin with were already here and ought to be used up before they ended up in landfills. And also, can anyone tell me what happened to all those Hummers because they are just GONE. It's like an alien ship showed up one day and whisked their offensive tushes away.

Right. So all of that has led up to me, in 2017 just thinking the very worst about these damn things and their drivers except for Dan the Bikram Master who definitely fits in with the Angry Crunchies except he is neither Angry nor particularly Crunchy. He eats well, probably avoids Twinkies for the same reason most adults avoid Twinkies, he's an athlete but he doesn't moan mantras when he teaches a yoga class (singing afterward does not count) and his political rants are just that, political rants. They are justifiably intelligent. I think if the battery in his Prius died he'd probably throw his hands up in the air and get something else. 

Fast forward to Elizabeth preparing to be alone for four days and three nights each week as I prepare to go to Basking Ridge, NJ for four days and three nights each week for the next six months with the possibility of an extension but no, ma'am, there will be no relocation can I be any more clear up front on this? Elizabeth will have to get to work this summer which means either a car or uber. We consider the cost to either or both of us of uber and the reliability of uber and realize reliability can be gotten around by ordering the car super early and just showing up to work super early. We think about what might happen if she needs a car for any other reason given how remote we are and there are neighbors and we weigh this. The truth is, we are treating her like an adult being left alone in a remote area and she may or may not have another adult coming home at night either one or two or three of the nights in question. Like I said, we have neighbors and we are still testing the waters. I am one hundred miles away across the George Washington Bridge and thirty miles south on the Jersey Turnpike. These are not the same one hundred miles I traveled when I went back and forth to Portnoy when there were certain pockets of time I could almost unquestionably count on a two hour drive and maybe significantly less. These are the holy lands of New York City and the approach to the bridge on which you might park for an hour or multiple hours wondering why you can't get any closer and then find out several weeks later that Chris Christie was effing around again and shut down access entirely on the Fort Lee side as a punitive measure (ok, he only did that once BUT WHAT ELSE?!). 

So I might as well be in Charlotte, NC without benefit of access to Cielo, Mr. Cielo, Kate, and Wubby. I'm not even close to my family although on the map forty-two miles (significantly closer than Charlotte to the Cielos) doesn't look terrible, forty-two miles in that part of New Jersey is in fact, god awful. I am marooned. It's OK. As long as we understand what we are dealing with we can plan accordingly. Eventually we accepted that a vehicle would be acquired before I left home. 

Me:    Elizabeth. Do you have any input on this?

Elizabeth:    Yes. I'd like a sedan.

Me:    (chokes back snort) A sedan? Any particular flavor? And just out of curiosity, why a sedan?

Elizabeth:    I don't know and I don't know.

Me:    I was kind of thinking something with all wheel drive because of the snow and these roads. We can teach you to drive in snow and you'll do fine with front wheel drive but there are enough really bad drivers around here that it's good to have all wheel drive so that you can get away from them. The problem with all wheel drive is that they are often very big and very expensive.

Elizabeth:    what about what you have?

Me:    It would have to be pretty old to fit our price range and then we're into the high maintenance zone and that worries me because neither of us can take care of a car and Timmy has closed up shop. 

Elizabeth:    OK, so I guess anything except a Prius. I can't stand them. That's really all I don't want, is that OK?

Me:    Yeah, you know, I can't stand them either so we won't go there. I'm going to start looking for something with less than 150,000 miles and no older than twelve. It's a fine line around here. We don't have a lot of time which means we're going to have to select something from the pool of what's available now and I don't want to have to go to a dealer because they will be out of our price range. Dealers have a bottom tier that they don't normally advertise. They have the cars they take on trade in which have been driven 'into the ground'. We want one of those if we go that route. 

Elizabeth:    OK.

I started shopping. Unfortunately the pool was small. It isn't always small. Sometimes it's overflowing but right now it is full of very old cars which are just above the bottom feeder tier which is what we'd put her in if we were home all the time. We can't do that. She also knows she has to pay for one third of the cost of the car so each time I bring one up on the screen she looks at it, does the math and divides by twelve to work out her car payments to me. This thing has to be paid off before she goes to college. Technically she has fifteen months but she'd rather have it done in a year. 

After a few days we sit together and pull up the dealer sites. There isn't much. I said there wouldn't be. Chances are good that the vehicles in our price range are shipped off to other locations where there will be a market for them. I find one 2003 Honda CRV for $3000 over blue book and send them an email. I won't pay that much. I get an email back about an Accord which may be in my price range. On the Toyota site I have found a 2010 Prius which is out of our price range but marked down far enough below dealer blue book to cover the dealer conveyance fee and then some. I hear the siren song of not having to set foot in the DMV. Elizabeth and I look at the car and shake our heads. We look at the sticker price, the mileage, or lack of and we look at the maintenance records. We take a call from the Honda dealer about the overpriced 2003 Accord which is only overpriced because it is not a private party sale. The next morning we consider how we might get this car home and I realize I haven't actually looked at the specs online so I pull up the dealership in the town we've been talking about but there is no Accord in this price range. I send a text to my local dealer and ask if it is at this dealer. The answer is no. I realize this is a private party sale brokered by a dealer. I drop the phone on the table and look at my daughter. Back to the pool. We aren't even going to touch that. 

Elizabeth:    Can we look at the Prius?

Me:    Really?

Elizabeth:    Well. Yes. I'd just like to look at it.

Me:    OK. We can look at it. Did you work out what your payments would be?

Elizabeth:    Yes.

Me:    OK, now add $1,000 to the listed price because that's what's going to happen if we buy it. 

Elizabeth:    What?!

Me:    Dealer conveyance fee: $500, CT State tax 6.35%, Registration, roughly $120 (I was dead on). To be fair, E, you would have had to pay the last two no matter what, but the tax would have been less if the purchase price was less. 

Elizabeth:    OK, I did the math.

Me:    You're still OK? (I did the math. She was still OK)

Elizabeth:    Yes. I'm just looking.

I called the dealer in the morning. That was yesterday. We talked for a while. I had a lot of questions because there were some things I didn't really understand and some things I'd read about that didn't make a lot of sense. I do know that when that hybrid battery shits the bed the cost to replace it is going to hurt. I know that regular maintenance is more important in this car than some other cars. He told me a lot of things but there was nothing he could really tell me that would give me a nice warm fuzzy about that one major cost which was going to come at one point or another. He really wanted to but the truth is the truth. I guess the only good thing about this is that regular maintenance ought to give you a heads up on the damn thing, not to mention the battery charge indicator in the dash. It's sort of like your computer. You can tell when it stops holding a charge for very long. Get your ass in there and get it replaced or get rid of it for parts if it's not worth keeping anymore. Essentially, that battery is a second engine or needs to be thought of like that. Not the same cost as replacing or rebuilding the primary but similar. The car certainly won't run without it. 

The last thing I asked the dealer before I hung up, after I'd told him when we'd be there was whether or not they let sixteen year olds test drive cars. The answer I expected was a resounding no. Hell, I wouldn't let a sixteen year old behind the wheel of a car which wasn't purchased for the same reason a sixteen year old can't rent a car and for the most part no one under twenty-five can rent a car. That wasn't the answer. The answer was, does she have a driver's license? 

Yes.

This has always been a very tight lot. I purchased my last two vehicles from this lot and it was tight getting in and out then. It's under construction at the moment and tight as hell. I cringed and got in the back seat. Elizabeth has a tendency to start the car and then wonder where things are. This time she looked at everything including mirrors, wipers, lights, steering adjustment, seat adjustment, where the auxiliary cord goes (seriously?!). Then she looked at something to her right with the letters D, R, and B. 

She looked at the dealer. Drive and Reverse? Yep. Where is Park? You're in it. It's on the dash. What is B? Battery. We'll talk later. Push to start. Wait. I'm not ready. Hang on. More messing about. Mirrors, one more time. OK. Go.

Me. In the back. Silent as shit and she glides out of the space, hangs a tight left and I say, this thing has a great turning radius and Elizabeth says, thank you! Not you! The car!

The test drive course hasn't changed and is actually longer than her driver's test but in the same area. She drives as if she is taking her test except she goes five miles above the limit and tests the brakes to be sure they'll stop good and hard if she wants them to not hit that guy who decided to not run over a squirrel (it happens). I remind her about the hungry, hungry speed trap as we pass the school and she says, right, we saw him on the way here and the dealer laughs and says, they never pull us over and Elizabeth says, I'm not taking any chances, do you have any idea what my mom's insurance looks like already?

He directs her to a church parking lot instead of back the way we came because he wants her to practice backing into parking spaces and I am dumbfounded. This has never happened before but he wants to make sure she can and that she understands. A Prius beeps when it's in reverse. I don't know who is being warned. 

We are standing outside waiting while he parks the car in some mysterious space tucked out of sight and she looks at me and says, I can make these payments. I ask her why she wants this car and she tells me about the gas mileage and I say, really?

Elizabeth:    Mom. It's a 2010. It should take me right through college and well into my first job.

Me:    It's going to need a new battery sometime in the middle of all that.

Elizabeth:    I know. We talked about that.

Me:    You have to drive this thing as if it cost four times what it actually does. This is not a disposable vehicle.

Elizabeth:    I know. 

Me:    Elizabeth. I am actually putting comprehensive loss and collision on this which is driving my insurance through the ceiling. If you so much as hit a sapling with it I'm going to take that coverage off and then if you wreck it and it's your fault you'll have nothing and if you wreck it before you've paid for it you'll still owe me money.

Elizabeth:    I know.

Me:    I hope your frontal cortex has that worked out.

Elizabeth:    I swear to god if I hear one more word about the frontal cortex...

Me:    I know. Your school is as concerned as I am about the frontal cortex. We're all just trying to survive this. 

Me:    Alright. So really. Why do you really want this? Is it just because it's the first car you've test driven ever? 

Elizabeth:    No.

Me:    You aren't going to tell me, are you?

Elizabeth:    You might laugh.

Me:    I'll do my best.

Elizabeth:    OK.

Elizabeth:    Mom. This car is edgy.

Me:    Excuse me? It's what?

Elizabeth:    Are you laughing?

Me:    No, ma'am, I am not.

Elizabeth:    It is edgy. NO ONE in high school drives a Prius much less a gun metal grey Prius. NO ONE has the balls to drive a gun metal grey Prius. 

Me:    So you're being ironic.

Elizabeth:    I am being more than ironic.

Me:    Please don't put a coexist bumper sticker on this thing.

Elizabeth:    I would rather die. Mike will give me a Warren Zevon sticker. 

Elizabeth:    Do you like it?

Me:    Actually, yes.

Elizabeth:    Why? You freaking hate these things.

Me:    For you I like it.

Elizabeth:    Why?

Me:    And I'm OK if you laugh.

Elizabeth:    Mom.

Me:    Because you can't go very fast without intentionally putting it into some sort of power mode. This pleases me. Because you are in an edgy gun metal grey Prius people will expect you to do the speed limit and they will be resigned to it when they are behind you instead of livid so you will cause less road rage. This pleases me. Therefore, my insurance ONLY DOUBLED THIS YEAR instead of, you know, tripling or something because you do incredibly bad things like your brother or marginally bad things like your sister. 

Elizabeth:    I hear that.

In the end I wrote a check and promised to show up with a certified check for the rest this evening. Two people will follow me to the market where Elizabeth works and we will drop off her car. I will find her in the bakery (she fills cannolis for cash these days), hand over the keys and tell her where to find her car. Two men will drive south to Westport and I will drive north to home. Elizabeth will come home at the end of her shift in an edgy gun metal grey Prius from the dark side. 

Very early (like oh dark thirty) on the morning of June 12 I will drive south to Basking Ridge and walk through the doors of another ginormous company in need of a technical project manager with octopus arms and a firehose. Elizabeth will be left to her own devices to get through the rest of the school year with a level of supervision which has yet to be determined. Then she will take off to Ireland with her dad for two weeks, meet the rest of her family (I swear there are hundreds of them) and come home to face her summer which will hopefully involve a second job as a camp counselor at the local YMCA where she was a day camper from the summer after kindergarten all the way through sixth grade and where her sister worked her summers throughout college. 

On Thursday, August 31 she will begin her final year in the school system which is the reason we came here in the first place. In all the years, since 2005 I have missed only one first day of school which was in 2013 when I was still in Cape Breton with Portnoy. She was heart broken and so was I. In order to avoid missing the final first day I'm going to have to drive through one hundred miles of hell and arrive late or work from home but I don't intend to miss it. 

Instead of standing by the rock waiting for the bus I expect we'll put her by the edgy gun metal grey Prius and maybe put the Prius by the rock and that will complete the cycle :) 

 

What may or may not be incubating in that duffle

I freely admit to being terrified. I kind of wonder how my mother felt when she dumped out the contents of the green canvas duffle after two damp weeks at Girl Scout camp. I can still remember what that smelled like; nice in a musty, woodsy, but I don't want to keep wearing it sort of way. Except I would have. At ten, eleven, twelve, and possibly even thirteen (questionable) she still had to peel clothing off my back and throw me in the general direction of water. One summer my uncle handed me a wash cloth (I'd heard of them but not once held one up close) and a bar of soap and told me to go scrub my neck. That nice tan I had going on turned out to be summer dirt. I hadn't been home enough that summer for my mother to have seen me (or my brother) in direct sunlight for much more than thirty seconds. 1977. Right. I was thirteen and Star Wars was awesome! Quality time with Mom; too dark in the theater to see the dirt. That woman had her priorities straight. 

Elizabeth has done her best to keep the still clean clothing in one large bag and the pretty much not so clean with the ohgoodgodthisisrancid clothing in the other large bag but there's also a bit of a free for all going on in there. The good news is they gave away all of the white B3 work shirts which, despite how clean she may have looked in the video on Tuesday morning, looked like holy hell by the end of the day. Over to the right is the blue duffle with the flowers. It's eclipsed by all that plastic which makes it hard to believe all that plastic started out in the duffle in the first place. I trip over the mountain several times a day as a reminder that I'm going to have to deal with it one way or another before the next unsuspecting non-family member crosses the threshold. 

If I take it out with the trash she'll be naked until fall. Every piece of summer clothing this girl owns, and then some, is in one of these plastic bags. We don't have a lot around here and it's not so much for lack of spending as lack of spending. That made sense to someone. This started shortly after the divorce but went into full swing the year her dance tuition quadrupled and we stopped spending money on anything and by anything what I mean are those little things that aren't so little as you think because they add up. We still bought clothes and shoes and household items but we did oddly. I remember offending the living shit out of Portnoy when I bought two pairs of work shoes of reasonably decent quality (remember, I was his first and most likely only exposure to Corporate America and also the benefactor of my only real experience with direct reverse snobbery). I looked at him and said, I don't think you understand. It's going to be another two to three years before I buy another and by then both pair will have been walked into the ground. Which, by the way, is not such a good thing but I do it anyway for reasons other than money (shoe shopping is right up there with bra and bathing suit shopping).

So about buying things. You can suffer death by a thousand cuts and wonder why your budget is blown. You can watch your checking account empty down to about nothing and have no freaking idea why. I spent the majority of my money on food and gas. Those were the things that mattered to me. I stopped buying clothes, Elizabeth stopped buying clothes. She bought pointe shoes and ribbon and elastic and I told her boyfriend the other day that a pair of shoes ran $80 to $93 depending on the shoe and she quipped, add in the elastic and ribbon and you're up over $100 and if you need new toe pads and any other sort of thing you can hit $125 in a heart beat. 

My point is that we knew exactly where the money was going and I know those plastic bags hold every stitch of summer clothing that kid owns plus every last bit of underwear, all of her socks, all of my wool socks, three new t-shirts from Walmart (I notice they're still in their original bag; she was afraid they were cut a little too big and she was probably right so fine, I'll wear them), and her very best dress and sweater which she apparently stood in front of for a good fifteen minutes trying to work out if it was worth spending that much babysitting money on for, well, just a dress. When she tried it on back home I agreed it was worth that and probably a little bit more and that yes, it had called her name the minute she walked in the store. I have a dress in the very same color that I nearly cried about before I bought it this summer. She stood beside me and whispered, do it!

When she unloaded this explosion of unruly stuff I stood over it wondering how this kid had managed to accumulate so much and asked about the luggage contents brought by other girls. She laughed. They changed twice a day just like she did except, she informed me, Mom, if I'm only wearing these clothes for half the day I don't really see any point in not wearing them again the next day. It just seemed sort of ridiculous. I did wear all my underwear though. THAT had to be changed. Socks though, you were right about the socks.

And Mom, they started giving stuff away at the end of the week.

Wait, you guys were specifically told NOT to do that under any circumstances.

Yeah, I know, they did it anyway.

What did they give away?

Socks. Wool socks. Socks like my socks. OK, your socks but you know what I mean.

Elizabeth. Do you have any idea how much those cost?

Yep.

And they gave them away?

Yep. Hundreds of dollars of socks. Also, underwear.

WTF.

Yep. WTF.

Raised in barns?

Rich barns. One girl gave away half her clothes.

Elizabeth. Do you know what would have happened if you'd given away half your clothes?

Yep. I would have been missing half my clothes.

Thank god. Some sense.

Shadow hit the nail on the head when she said Elizabeth would come away with more than she'd leave behind. There was never any doubt about that but she came away with some things I wasn't counting on and they're not bad, I was just startled. 

Let's face it. My daughter is entitled. I don't mean that in a negative way and the one or two times I put that in front of her she burst into tears the way I did when I was told back in 2007 that I was privileged. My daughter tries very hard not to be entitled. She doesn't want to be that person and she's not; at least not for the most part. Quite honestly, you can't grow up in this environment without believing there are things which you should have and if it looks like you're not going to have them then something is FUCKING WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE. Let's face it, that's going to happen. The balance is the intelligence to recognize the truth no matter how much it hurts. You are not going to Tufts. Your parents can't (and will not take out the loans) pay for that and if you even think of taking out that sort of student loan you'd better check in to the earning potential on the other side of whatever degree you choose. And you're probably not going to land enough of a scholarship to get you over the hump. That's just an example and it's OK. This is not unexpected.

Back on coming away with more than she left behind. She worked hard and it was good. She knows how to dig, she tells me. She can dig for days. She can sift but sifting gets hard after a while but that's OK. She can use a pick axe on the rocks in the ground to loosen them up before digging again and she can make cement. She is pleased with herself. She understands painting very well to prevent rust and why it's so important to prevent rust. She has been paying attention and she knows just exactly how much a cinder block weighs having spent a good amount of time passing them down the line. Her work gloves show significant labor. She also knows what work avoidance looks like and she hasn't any use for it. She is embarrassed by it. She is possibly the smallest member of this very large team and she often feels alone although she knows perfectly well she isn't because she is surrounded by other students working just as hard as she is. One girl is crying but she can't say why. She keeps painting. 

At home she can't say what she learned when I ask her directly but she can paint around the edges. She tells me she was cold at night until she got up and turned off the fan closest to her cot. I feel bad about not packing something else but I'm not sure what that might have been. She says she stopped using the deet the second day because she forgot to put it on and then discovered the bugs didn't touch her but they were eating up the kids around her. Most of them had been sprayed or used the fluid she had but none of them had their clothing saturated or were taking B12. We don't know what did it but she never used the deet again and came home without a mark on her. Permethrin. Apparently it kills those bastards on contact. I have no idea why it seemed to be acting more like a force field because it's not like they don't want to eat her alive here in the swamp.  

She wanted more time with the kids. She didn't get it and it made her sad. She felt isolated but when they went into town she stayed in one local shop sitting on a stool watching a man paint small leather binders. He spoke no English and she had an entire four Spanish phrases (and six years of French which did absolutely no good). Later she had a few more words. She watched him finish and sell the binders as people came in and out of the shop. Sometimes he personalized the bindings if people wrote a name on a piece of paper. In the end when she had to go, she wrote my name on a piece of paper and pressed two flowers in the book, snapping it shut and burying it in the bottom of her bag. Later I explained about bringing plants across borders but I'm happy to have them. 

She swam in the crater of a long dormant volcano and saw an island with monkeys (the monkeys were not in the crater). She drank coconut water through a straw and then threw the coconut to the ground to crack it open and eat the inside. This confused me. Coconut water comes from greenish coconuts and coconut milk comes from ripe coconuts which is the sort of coconut you want to eat but she seemed happy enough to drink and eat what she was given. 

She went back to the site and dug up more dirt and moved more gravel and passed on more blocks and painted more rails. 

In the end they came home and it took the same twelvish hours and her bag was searched and she wondered why and I said, that's just the way it is, welcome to the family. Our bags are always searched. Never become a mule. It will end badly. 

I retrieved my girl and her explosive bag at 2:20 AM on Sunday morning. When I drove through the very dark towns to collect my girl I did my very best to keep the gas pedal off the floor. She was perfectly filthy and tired as hell but we stayed up until 4 anyway because we were wired from waiting. And also because I drank roughly 32 ounces of very strong coffee at 1 AM. I may have drifted off just before sunrise. 

She is happy to have gone. I have no doubt about that. She got more than she bargained for but I don't think she can articulate it yet and I'm quite certain she wasn't expecting anything of the sort. I still need to take the photographs off her camera. The battery died on day three and she lost the spare. I'm not sure if it died from heat exhaustion or something else but I'm hoping she's got enough in there to jog her memory a bit. She has always needed processing time and as she gets older the need for that time becomes greater. 

One thousand, one hundred, twenty-nine miles

The photobomb at Glen Echo. See? He *is* adorable. Friday night, maybe 10:40, April 10, 2015. Yes, I am sitting on Cielo.

No photobomb in Floyd, VA. I suppose if we'd waited a few minutes we might have had company but there was a dance in progress so we were on our own. Don't know what time, probably the same time as the night before. Saturday night, April 11, 2015.

Big Celtic Fun setting up at Floyd's new home. Not the same as Dogtown but Dogtown is a bar and contra dancers don't drink. The space is small but the light is beautiful.

Long Lines at Floyd. There were two sets earlier in the evening but by the time I sat down, the new dancers were gone leaving the core which generally stays until the end and then goes to someone's house and stays up until who knows, maybe dawn? playing whatever instruments they have with the band. We were invited, we declined. Something about getting up at the crack of... to climb something. The quilts remind me of Flurry. They almost make up for the loss of the velvet drapes at Dogtown that splashed light by the bucket across the beautiful old wood floor. There is wood under this floor I'm told. It didn't feel the least bit bad.

I've done this backwards. This is actually on the way down I think where you can actually see one of the peaks. It's different on the way up and I don't think I started photographing much until I got through the worst of it except a couple of really notable rock formations which I have failed to take off my phone so far.

This is purely magic. Every time I'm up here I start looking for this maybe a quarter mile into the climb and then I get to thinking I imagined it because something this perfect can't possibly exist outside my imagination - like I HAD to have made this shit up. Get your ticket out, that's the entrance to faery land. For real. Everything changes past that gate, including the nature of the voices in your head. Just make sure you don't eat or drink anything you didn't bring with you until you cross the bridge on the way back out (there is a bridge right down the hill from the Johnson Family farm if you go that way).

The Reason Why.

The summit at Peaks of Otter on the Blue Ridge Parkway in VA. Can't give you a mile marker but it's 84 miles North of the Route 8 entrance just east of Floyd.

Approximately 11:55, Sunday, April 12, 2015. Attempting to contemplate being 51, not really giving a shit, mostly thinking about the view and the fact that my knees were pretty much OK, there still wasn't cell service that could be counted on (good and not so good) and that in a month this view will be completely gone and if you want to see anything you'll have to hang off that rock and part the branches which is something I'll never do on a solo hike.

The Last Bridge -the way out

I really have to learn to start shooting in landscape. This was really just meant to be a short clip I could send to NM as soon as I had a reasonable LTE signal *which* turned out to be a not so good idea because I sent two videos in their original format via iMessage which ate up a chunk of my data plan while I was posting hi res photos to social media. Uhhhhh. Yeah. Well. Mom's got to be the one to blow the shared data plan at least ONCE, right? RIGHT?!

 

So the thing is, I've tried to write this post four times and been entirely unsuccessful. I've either ended up with 4,000 words and been only halfway there or ended up on entirely other subjects and not managed to get there at all so just like two years ago, here are the highlights so that at least SOMETHING is published. This will do.

One thousand, one hundred, twenty-nine miles with one of my best friends ever in the whole wide world and one of the worst migraines in recent history. Starting Friday morning I would have canceled this trip had it been just about anything else but I did not and that was the right decision. Everything went into triage mode so that ONLY what really mattered happened which means that every last thing that really mattered actually happened. This also means I found out what really mattered.

Cielo, I hope you got what you needed because you sure as hell did a damn fine job taking care of me. And why you have my migraine now is beyond me but I sure am sorry for that.

If I had missed sitting in the sun on top of that rock, would I had known what I'd missed? I don't know. Probably. If I had missed walking through the Faery Gate, would the voices in my head have shifted? I'm a believer. If I had not had the journey exactly the way I had it on Friday and Saturday, would Sunday's experience have been the same? Of course not.

I was sitting on that rock attempting to contemplate being 51 and discovered I didn't give a shit...

I was sitting on that rock nearly zoning out entirely and noticing just the small things...

I was sitting on that rock realizing it was OK that I missed my boyfriend and not nearly so scary as it had been on the way up the mountain and not nearly so scary as it's been in the last six weeks.

I was sitting on the rock and my head didn't hurt and my knees didn't hurt and my heart didn't hurt and my lungs didn't hurt from trying to breathe where there just didn't seem to be any air (that's a self made condition).

I was sitting on that rock wondering if I was right about having approximately 500 miles in front of me (I was) and thinking I'd take the long way down past the farm anyway.

I got off the rock and walked down off the mountain.

That might be my post.

Then again, there's a pretty damn epic story that needs telling too :-)

Yes. Yes I did.  

//*And when I pulled into the driveway on Sunday, April 12, 2015 at 9:31 there was that car with MA plates... as unexpected as Schrodinger's Cat. It just doesn't get any better than that.*//

 

Trains

I stand on the platform, just so, to get in the right car at the right time and have half a chance at a window seat facing the highway and being in a car with doors that will open on my platform, which is small.

Thirty seconds before my train comes I step forward so that I am twelve inches from the edge of the platform and I look down and think about that man last year who jumped down to the tracks and saved another man's life and I wonder what I would do if I fell in just now. But I don't and I won't. That would be what six inches or four or two or my toes on the edge might mean, like those boys at the other end with their over sized Coronas and Newport Lights and Machismo that races through the very young and very old alike.

I stand here because I want to feel the train.

The train comes rumbling through the station and every metaphor that's ever been used rushes through my mind and it's still not enough to describe what I feel in my bones and muscle and connective tissue and the way my spine vibrates right into the cement so that I am a conduit that all the world runs through and up out the top of my head and into the sky.

The woman across the way lights a cigarette and proceeds to cough cough cough and I recognize that disease with the acronym you see on TeeVee now like it's curable and I know damn well it's not and she inhales and coughs out and inhales and coughs out and I know she's dying and she knows she's dying and I'm just damn glad that's not me and I wonder how many days months years she has left before the oxygen tanks. Or worse.

Sometimes I am in too much of a hurry and I don't back up and am run over by the rush of mad New York workers who want only to return to the false sanctity of their Connecticut homes; this is me, newly raw, bowled over by men and women who look just like I looked four months ago.

I get on the train and find a seat. I want to read my book but I am watching the highway not move and I am not on it and this is so new that it still makes me very, very happy. I press my face against the dirty glass and realize I am forgetting to be grown up and clean and professional and then I think, oh screw it, I'm wearing running shoes with my skirt and nobody does that anymore. And I have a red back pack that I wear over both shoulders so that my back doesn't go out of alignment and I look like the biggest dork in the world but I do not really care at all. As it turns out.

I race the shuttle. I race it from the train to the office and from the office to the train. Most of the time I win. Does anyone besides me find this disturbing? The walk/run is .9 miles and there are a lot of lights and some serious traffic and I walk jog along with my 15 pound pack and work up a sweat that I'll more or less be OK with as long as nobody's getting too close.

I am absorbed in the rhythm of the train and I stand between two cars where you're not supposed to stand and watch what can only be described as bucolic country side skating by. I have one foot in each car. I love this. No one has made me stop yet but I do get some funny looks.

I live on the Danbury Line. Stamford, Noroton Heights, Darien, Rowayton, South Norwalk, Merritt 7, Wilton, Cannondale... I get off... Branchville, Redding, Bethel, Danbury and back again.

Stamford passengers have your tickets ready.