Alecto's Ophelia

Poems, Prayers, and Promises

 

It's got camping, she writes, it's got muppets. Why yes, it does. Two things I love very much, camping and muppets. Did I tell her how I feel about muppets? Does it matter? She probably would have worked that out anyway. More importantly, did I tell her how I felt about John Denver and the Muppets? Huh. This also doesn't matter. It's one of those connectivity things.

When I was small, not so small I could walk under a bar table without hitting my head, and not so small I didn't know how to hold a menu, or how to handle my tableware correctly but small enough to be reminded about the napkin in my lap, I was at a restaurant somewhere in Missouri with my maternal grandparents and I remember four things.

1. My sensitivity to my surroundings had value. That I sat up straight, held as decent a conversation as could be expected of a small person, and kept my napkin in my lap once directed had significant value which wasn't so much about being good as it was about being what was wanted and needed because the currency of being good only bought invisibility. In this context it bought approval which was astonishing as I wasn't asking for approval; I was attempting to put people at ease by behaving as a Roman while in Rome. This sort of thing keeps one from being dead. Later I learned that this sort of thing also opens doors and the rooms and hallways behind open doors are full of all sorts of possibility. This was a pivotal moment in my life.
2. My grandparents told a story about a couple with whom they'd recently had dinner. The couple admired the menu as an oddity and decided to take it home. They hid the menu under the table and when it was time to order they returned one menu instead of two and pretended there never were two. Years later I understood my grandparents weren't just making conversation. They weren't just asking our opinion when they leaned in and asked, in a very adult way, 'why, Alecto, why on earth would anyone want to steal a menu anyway?' 'I don't understand it either'. Well then, they asked me, you do understand there isn't any difference between stealing a menu and stealing anything else? You can't justify theft by telling yourself it doesn't really hurt anyone.
   
   So why is this story on this list in this post. I had to work on this because I didn't get it either. It didn't make sense. But the memory trigger on this one is strong enough to hold it here with the three other bullets since 1975 and that's a long time.  
   
   Did they think we needed to be taught not to steal?  Seriously? With our parents? Theft was a felony offense in our house and the penalty was severe. I took six or seven straps with a leather belt for the crime of eating a supermarket donut before one of my parents figured out the donuts had been stacked one way and not the other and there were only ever six donuts in the box, not the seven that would have been possible if you'd stacked the another way. The problem was the box got upended and then repacked and then the confusion and chaos and Alecto blame occurred. Totally Dickensian if you think about it. We didn't need a lesson about theft. It's not as if a 'teachable moment' just jumped out of thin air. The story felt premeditated and aren't lessons on ethics and morality generally premeditated? If you teach with a stick you aren't teaching ethics and morality; you're teaching fear. You haven't taught the why not other than the fear of authority, whoever or whatever that authority might be and in the case of The Church.... wait for it... there's this business of mass in Latin. You aren't teaching a damn thing but burn in hell if you can't even understand the damn sermon, now are you? What the hell is that even about?
   
   A lesson on ethics and morality. I don't think it had a damn thing to do with theft. I think that was just what was in the queue at the moment. In 1975 it wasn't my first lesson in ethics and morality but it was close. It was the first lesson that was entirely out of context, in other words, there was nothing situational going on. The neighbor kid had not just lit a nearby field on fire thereby getting my brother and I grounded as accessories to the crime with a long lecture on how the legal system works. I got the non-situational lessons later but you really need to teach that sort of thing early or you end up counting on the community to raise your kid and I guess you end up with as good as you've got around you at the moment.
   
   It was about the right thing to do. Cause and effect. All things matter and there is no way to justify something to yourself. Interesting thing is my father rode this one good and hard but not until later. I don't know what prompted him later but that's not in this list. 
3. I had my first Shirley Temple. Why is this important? Because it's the first memory I have of someone giving me something that I would put into the classification of 'extra' and children do not get 'extra'. Today when I see children make assumptions about that sort of thing I struggle because I know perfectly well they have been raised in a way which tells them in no uncertain terms that they matter as much as their parents and yet... and yet... Don't misunderstand, there were times when my grandparents behaved inexplicably cruel in the other direction, this just wasn't one of them. 
4. And here it is. There was a band at this restaurant and oddly not overwhelming because my oddly sort of kind of deaf grandfather wasn't suffering. By oddly sort of deaf I mean he had a hearing aid and if you spoke clearly there wasn't so much of a problem which is indicative of losing range, not so much volume. Speak in pear shaped vowels I heard later on and instantly understood the imperative. So they passed around bits of paper for requests and I asked for a pen which my grandfather produced from somewhere and I wrote down the following:  Chevy Van
   
   Chevy Van is a one hit wonder released in 1975 by Sammy Johns and I must have been hearing it at the drop zone more or less constantly at that point. I'd been hearing it long enough to hum the chorus under my breath and maybe come up with half the lyrics and the thing is I couldn't have told you who Sammy Johns was but I would have told you for sure it was John Denver. 
   
   My grandfather looked at the words and he did ask me who was the artist and I did tell him point blank and he did respond, 'and who would that be?' I did not have an answer. In an effort to let me down easily he told me there were an awful lot of requests and they might not get to mine by the end of the evening. By the end of the evening it occurred to me that the band wasn't playing anything that even remotely sounded like Chevy Van and probably would think that piece of paper had been torn off of a larger note. 
   
   The next day we went to a record store and we looked for this song by this artist which is when I found out about Sammy Johns but I also found out about John Denver and I said, this, and this, and this, I love these things and the man in the record store laughed and said John Denver was going to be around a lot longer than this Sammy Johns and I said, that's OK, I still love that song.

To this day I have to stop and remind myself that it doesn't belong to John Denver and there's a reason for that. Sammy Johns scratched the surface. If anyone ever stopped to listen to those lyrics they'd have realized he never got past the first refrain but that's OK, he was heading in the right direction and the damn thing sounded great. John Denver took a shovel to the same surface, broke it wide open and then depending on his state of mind, either kept digging or went at it with a trowel and brush.

Shortly after I was married, Joe and I went out to RISD to visit one of my childhood friends, a girl I'd been particularly close with just before I fell off the cliff and tumbled onto the rocky shores of Middle Earth; that place we find ourselves between childhood and emancipation if the safety nets of normalcy have been severed. I used to dream about her. We wandered around Providence and stopped at a park bench, probably to get high. There was a stage being set up with lights about fifty yards away and we wandered over. It appeared John Denver was setting up a free concert in the park which made no sense whatsoever in 1984 but we sat down on the grass anyway and in the back of my mind I was thinking, why are these two people tolerating me? Nobody I know likes this man and I know this because one time on the rocky shores of Middle Earth I made the near fatal error of bringing him up and about got myself cast out. I have no idea what happens when you get yourself cast out of Middle Earth but it can't possibly be good.

We stayed until the band packed up and drove away. The park was packed.

For Christmas that year Joe bought me a copy of John Denver and the Muppets. It was a Christmas album and it was beautiful and I played that thing to death every year even past the years when I refused to play Christmas music anymore. It was the last thing to go (it even made it one more year than the Charlie Brown CD which is actually pretty damn good).

Muppets. Do I love muppets? Why yes, I do. Sesame Street came of age in my time. I was five and a half when it hit the airwaves but I didn't have access to a television so it fell into the category of things I got to see at other people's houses and unlike Dark Shadows which is something that gave me nightmares when I managed to sneak into a friend's house and watch it with her after school when I was six or seven, my mother didn't disapprove at all. Sesame Street might have been the only thing she didn't hold up to the light with suspicion. I loved Grover passionately. I thought Big Bird was an idiot, Oscar misunderstood, and I got it about Bert and Ernie pretty early. Kermit was entertaining and I have almost no memory of Miss Piggy until later. The Count grew on me and later I understood that I used him to define both Tourettes and OCD, superficially but at least in a broad stroke outline.  When Mr. Hooper died I cried for days and when I heard that Luis and Maria got married (which was just before Mike started watching) I couldn't quite figure out if this was for real or not. 

Which of these things doesn't go with the other? It was a significant improvement over Captain Kangaroo and those damnable pingpong balls. 

The Muppet Show aired from 1976 - 1981 and therein lies the collision. The concoction of the Muppet Show followed up by however many films were released brought individual characters to life giving them depth, complexity, strengths, and weaknesses. We got Animal out of that (at least that's when I think he appeared, I could be wrong). We got the Swedish Chef and the cranky old men in the balcony and the love affair from hell. We got an entire cast that showed up for a new demographic, the demographic that had to leave them behind. Most of us were delighted even if we wouldn't admit it. Anyone born before 1960 without a well defined sense of whimsy, or children within a specific age range, probably missed this.

I can't remember if the Muppet Show had guests the same way Sesame Street has them but I expect the existence of new and different muppets created the possibility for Jim Carrey, Stephen Colbert, Eminem, Jesse Jackson reciting 'I am - Somebody' to a butt load of children at 123 Sesame Street,  Yo-yo Ma, Bill Nye, New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Kofi Annan, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and the one that did me in, R.E.M. singing Furry, Happy, Monsters with, you got it, about a dozen furry, happy monsters bouncing around. Sesame Street always had guests, it was an issue of who, what, and how many. Things got bigger, broader, and if we can really call a children's show edgy, well, they got edgier.

You do know that Sesame Street was edgy, right? Seriously. I do not have to tell you that in November of 1969 to release the characters and concepts released at that time to that particular audience (or any, really) was asking for trouble. All the edginess is gone now. Granted, in retrospect we look at some of that and call it racist and so we clean it up but the intention was not racism and it did get cleaned up as we cleaned ourselves up. But that wasn't the source of the edginess. Our willingness to advocate for change is why Sesame Street was allowed to exist. Now we are super safe and we are very, very correct. We are so correct that if we sneeze in the wrong direction the people who want guns put away will probably find one and shoot us. Oops. Did I do that?

It's OK, the pendulum always swings. My point is really about John Denver and the intersection with the Muppets. 

Camping. Camping is important because it reduces things down to the marrow and makes it easier to see. We like to camp in specific places because we like to see those specific places but what's it really about? For me the hike has become about hiking my own hike. The very thought of hiking with someone right now is extremely distasteful. I really don't care to deal with another person's needs or feelings or baggage which is really about not wanting to deal with needing to be something for someone else. I'm good with compromise, I'm good at compromise but I think I went too far over the edge last time around and right now I'm still finding out what my own hike feels like and I have to tell you, it feels nice. Sometimes I look around at something beautiful and realize I have no one to share that with but that passes very quickly. 

Camping is another thing entirely. I could go either way on this. Everything is reduced and less is more. Less is WAY more. The best I ever had it was the trip over the mountains on the Blue Ridge Parkway through VA when I literally had nothing but the tent, the campfire coffee pot and a cooler full of sandwiches augmented by cliff bars - this topped off with two igloo coolers in the back of the car to refill water requirements. Then I had one lantern, sleeping bag, crashpad, deet, small daypack, toothbrush, and, that's probably it. I had a bag with clothes in the back because I was going to land in TN eventually but as it turned out I didn't have the map I needed to get to TN without the navigator but that turned out OK, I got on the road to Damascus eventually. I had a spiral notebook and a pen. I wrote for a bit in the evening and I did have a camera. 

Camping can technically happen in a hotel room. I would have told you this was ridiculous until a couple of years ago when I realized the same thing that happened in the minuscule two room cabin with single bulb and tiny ac unit (which is why we had it) and the miraculous water spigot off the side was also happening inside a Holliday Inn. Or something. I don't remember where we were, not that it matters, we've been a bunch of places and the B&B in Saratoga Springs takes the cake in terms of, this is so much nicer than anything I've ever lived in I'm not sure how I'm going to go home now. 

We sit in bed and drink wine out of the cheapest plastic cups or good glasses depending and knit or rip it out and start again and we talk and I don't really know what we talk about but we do and then it is late and someone needs to sleep and usually I think it is probably me but I don't really know. Sometimes there is really bad television and sometimes there is not but it's hardly relevant. Sometimes we are in that room for a very long time because one of us might be sick and once, at least once, very, very sick and so we stayed in that room for however long it took for it to be better and once we lived on Dominos pizza for a couple of days because that is what there was given the circumstances and twice we had terribly good meals within spitting distance of the terribly lovely B&B and the juxtaposition of each place we crashed and what we ate was hardly ever relevant. Everything just got stripped down to Poems, Prayers, and Promises. 

We didn't do that this year. I can't afford the time and she went to Cielo which is a very good thing for her to have done because it's been too long, I think. Last year we had two dance weekends. We had one in January which I have a feeling didn't happen at all this year and we had Flurry in February which meant we probably had a good five days together because of the travel from NC to CT and then Saratoga Springs. And despite the absolute lunacy in my life this year (this week was the LONGEST FREAKING DAY EVER) I am painfully aware of what I don't have right now. It's OK, it's not going anywhere, but I am aware. I don't miss the dancing. I don't miss it at all. I got a message this morning. You missed a great dance and my first response was, that's ok, really, that's ok and later I thought, no, no I did it. I did not miss a great dance, I did not miss it at all. A great dance happened, of course it did. Those dances are always great but I did not miss it one bit. To miss something you would have to want to be there in the first place. 

I do miss camping with Cielo. I miss it in two cabins in Frisco, a motel outside the Dayton City (city?) limits and one just inside, I miss it twice at the Hotel Floyd, or whatever it's called, and I miss it in the middle of the city at whichever mid to high end usually reserved for business travelers hotel we stayed in outside of Glen Echo. I miss it at the B&B in Saratoga Springs. There was the house outside of Blowing Rock but that might have been pushing it. I miss it in my living room and at my kitchen table but that's not quite the same as sequestered away from every thing and every one up under the night sky listening to the wolves howl with the smell of woodsmoke sticking with you all the way home and the start of the first mostly successful top down sweater half in the bag. 

And that's what she sent me. That video up there with that guy and the muppets going on about poems, prayers, and promises. I don't suppose there's any point asking how she knows about any of it. 

 

Our best possible selves

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

 

I wrote this post three times over the course of the weekend. I can't make it work. It wasn't just about Tuesday, December 5 and the calendar either. So what the hell, I'll just post the picture and you can make up whatever you want. Not all days look like this day. 

What I do know is this: How your life is in one place, it is in all places. 

Seven days in black and white

The internet meme popped up when it popped up and it started with very firm instructions and the verbiage was concise. The last sentence contained the off putting 'tag someone' requirement that instantly puts that sort of thing in the no go category at best and most often shuts down the viewing process for me entirely because it wreaks of something I'd rather not see. If pressed I'm not sure I could identify exactly why anymore because the widespread use of the directive 'copy and paste if you love me' sort of thing, if you care at all, if you're my real friend (I'll find out now even though I'm pretty sure I really know), to raise awareness of xxx, to share the suicide hotline (has anyone checked to make sure that actually IS the suicide hotline? It might be, but did you check?), to pray for the cancer survivors...

(STOP FUCKING PRAYING THIS INSTANT AND START DOING SOMETHING even if it means arming one of your parishioners and putting them in front of the closed church doors during services. Some of you are having apoplectic fits just now but this is in response to the current memes focused on triple digit number of people killed by a white man with a gun so we must pray but 20 dead by a person of color and we must DO SOMETHING RIGHT THIS SECOND... I'm just saying, there is another way to look at this instead of the knee-jerk reaction which assumes no one is doing anything other than praying even if you do not agree with the action in question and please do not assume that the woman or man standing guard outside that door does not know how to handle a firearm. Not a right or wrong. An observation about my political party and for the record, I no longer believe Americans should have free access to firearms for oh so many reasons - I didn't type NO access - I typed free access)

...It is a very rare occurrence for me to play one of these games and when I do, the phrasing is changed entirely, the ask is very different and the last sentence is either gone entirely or changed. For example, A friend of mine posted the eighth photograph on her phone and pasted the text of the game which asked her friends to leave the eighth photograph on their phones in the comment section and if they did she would give them each a number at which point they should copy and paste the text to their own wall, post their own photo and keep the game going. She had so many lovely photographs in her comments and my eighth photograph happened to be a screen shot of my camera roll which showed a block of screen shots broken up by a jar, yes a glass JAR of multi-colored OTC painkillers and one or two other things but it's that glass jar and the expense receipts that stuck out. Most of the photographs on my phone are expense receipts because every time I have one I photograph and email it to myself and immediately attach it to the appropriate expense report which is how I manage three of them each week. The jar exists because while I have a prophylactic medication to keep chronic migraines at bay I am no longer willing to take the not OTC medications to handle the popups of which there are many since my body can't decide if it wants to be peri-menopausal or fully menopausal. I though this was very funny and posted the screenshot. When I got a number I thought it was even funnier because it was a screenshot of my iPhone settings. I think I was trying to help someone navigate to Siri & Search to turn on notifications for transportation apps like airlines and hotels so she'd get the delayed flight popups and my photos are littered with this sort of thing because I am an abuser of storage space. 

I decided to play the game for two reasons. The first was because I thought the fact of the photo was very funny. The second was because I wondered if I phrased it right if people might show me their lives. So I phrased it thusly:

"Please make my freaking day. Place the 3rd photo in your camera roll in my comments. I’ll give you a number and then you can play too (if you want to). Yes. This is the 3rd photo in my camera roll. It beats the 8th. I think."

I expected maybe three or four or ten at best depending on who, in my not so willing to do this sort of thing friend feed was feeling willing to share at the moment. I got twenty-five and the thing about those twenty-five is what came with them, the explanations that made them intimate, vulnerable, and not so much a snapshot into the lives or phones of some close friends, long lost friends, not so close friends and in one or two cases, just acquaintance's lives was the fact that they were gifts. 'Here is my husband doing this oh so silly thing because he wants his ten seconds of fame'... 'here is the video of...' 'here is my daughter doing...' 'here is this and this is how I felt'... I was blown away. I gave them all numbers because I said I would. Each reveal in the photograph was met with an equal response. Some of them had no idea why I'd given a number. I think they were responding to what was happening in the comment string. I had to come back and explain and then be clear that the game was an absolute choice. I have no idea if anyone other than Cielo and Lucia played because most of these people don't show up in my feed. 

So that's the story of me and one meme. Just that one time.

Except for this black and white thing. I hated it. I hated the phrasing. I hated the photographs. Oh, they were beautiful for the most part but they didn't tell me a damn thing. This is a modification of the original. My friend Dave doesn't much care for the tagging of people as a way of passing the game either.

"Day 4: My life in black and white. Seven black and white photos. No people, no explanation. Nominate a friend each day. No nominations. Volunteers welcome."

The original instructions were phrased a little differently and in the beginning the usual directive to copy and paste the instructions were present but four things were very clear:

1. My life in black and white emphasis on my life
2. One photograph for seven days emphasis on one photograph each day for seven days
3. No people, no explanations emphasis on you can't have any people in your photos and you can't have any explanations in the caption, the photo has to say everything or nothing
4. Tag someone, pass this shit along.

For a lot of days, I'm not really sure how many, beautiful or trying very hard to be beautiful black and white photographs streamed through my feed and I tried to make sense of it all. In some cases given what I knew about some of my friends there was just no way in hell these photographs were current. Nope. I'm sorry, you are not in Athens right now and that photograph was most likely not taken in black and white originally. You sir, are not in NYC, you are at your home office in your tighty-whities just outside of Hartford writing code. You WISH you were in NYC right now. I will allow that this photograph may very well have been taken in black and white because you are an artsy sort of guy. There is only one woman who posted seven days of mostly outside beautiful photographs who probably did post her actual life day by day for seven days. At the end of her posts I wanted to ask her why she hadn't posted anything about the rest of her life, you know, like her kitchen with the light streaming through the window and hitting the kitchen table just so the way I imagine it must or the vulnerability of an unmade bed. I wished for anything like this that showed me who people really were and I saw absolutely none of it. I saw a black and white photo competition.

So that's why I decided to do it. 

Initially I was going to leave the caption off entirely but then I realized I'd have to say something so I titled the first photograph 'One' This initiated an obnoxious response from my son. "Lemming" "It would be you" I responded. He wrote back something about being the lemming of lemmings and I let him off the hook. Later I changed the title to Saturday so it would make more sense. No one was ever going to understand What the hell I was doing if I didn't at least name the days because I wasn't going to be doing it right. They weren't necessarily going to be beautiful photographs for two reasons. First, I was going to have to take several of them on the run and in the dark and the iPhone does not much care for in the dark. Second, there are some things I am just not good at but one particular shot I wanted I wasn't willing to give up just because I still haven't figured out how to get it. Admittedly the first and last shots are beautiful. I got lucky with the last because the light was just right. I really wanted it to be the hidden cemetery in the woods about a half mile down the road which dates back to the civil war. This would also have been a not so good shot because I have trouble with the iPhone in that sort of light. If the leaves were all gone it would have been easier. Maybe I will post an eighth just because if I can get it. 

In the end there were seven black and white photographs which show my life very clearly. It shows what Saturdays look like, and then Sundays and then the stark juxtaposition of Monday morning and the still surreal shift into the never never land of Tuesday morning. Wednesday morning could have been any one of four mornings and Friday was only Friday because I had the day off with Elizabeth but the photograph would have been a dramatic shift back anyway. The Thursday shot could have been a before or during, but I thought the absolute after, even though the light and shadow makes it difficult was far more relevant. It was that sort of week. Later when the battery died on top of the tire flat to the rim in the parking garage at Basking Ridge I had to laugh at the universe giving me the gift of that occurring in my own driveway. 

The women shed tears over the Monday photo. I wanted to reach out and smack the shit out of them. Don't do that, dammit! It's 2017 and this is what we do! The comment, you must really love your job... Christ on a bike, what the fuck? Would you have said that to a man? Highly unlikely. On the other hand, to be fair, some of these women are close to me. Some of them understand the struggle to find balance and being women we are allowed to shed tears. Men, not so much. Men struggle to find balance as well but I don't think they have the space much to talk about it openly and I know damn well no other man is going to openly weep in empathy. So there's that. But the 'you must really love your job part'.... hmmmm... no, I don't think so. You, sweetheart, have lost touch with reality. If I were a man you wouldn't say that for two reasons: 1. That mortgage has to be paid and men do what men must to pay the mortgage (that I am a one adult household just doesn't process in what I know perfectly well is a VERY intelligent head) 2. If a man works a travel job that requires an exit from the household before light on a Monday morning, this is not so unusual. He must do something either a) very interesting, or b) very important. I think of my friend Jason who has been a contractor for a very long time. He exits the house at 3:30 on Mondays because his trip to BR requires a flight but some clients have required Sunday night travel with a Friday evening return. Jason has a weekly rotation which means he is home two weeks out of four. Some clients don't ever permit this. I do not believe anyone has ever questioned Jason's choices. I was nearly hanged until dead for those exact same choices in the nineties and so this was almost my primary motivation. 

I wanted to create a photo album that could be flipped through but Typepad cannot do that. Typepad can create photo albums but oddly enough it can't seem to import them in the correct order and I'm not sure you can fix that or properly embed them in a post yet. It is entirely possible I could put them in movie maker and embed that but for now I'll just pop in the photos and let you scroll through the week. You're only getting the days of the week but really, this should not be all that difficult to figure out. Why is the office empty on Wednesday? This shouldn't be all that hard to figure out. You don't have the benefit of the time stamp so I'll give you that as well. 

A week in my life in black and white. No people, no explanation. Some assumptions will have to be made. I wish that wasn't so because there is a story behind several of these photographs; one is rather lovely and unexpected but you'll just have to make it up in your head. Am I lonely? Is this solitary? If you don't see people you might automatically think that but you can't go there if the rules are to leave them out. I suppose when presented with a series of photographs like this, we superimpose what we believe we know about the person behind the camera. The fact of this startles me because I don't know what I may have failed to reveal. 

Saturday late afternoon

 

Sunday evening

 

Monday 5:30 AM

 

Tuesday 6:30 AM

 

Wednesday 6:50 AM

 

Thursday 8:00 PM

 

Friday afternoon

The truth of it in vignettes  - this will be longer than you think

Saturday late afternoon

I haven't had enough time outside lately because there has just been so much to do. Not for work, but for life. My daughter is getting married in June and things are starting to ramp up and Elizabeth has this life that comes in and out of the house in a way which draws me in as opposed to Lucia who locked herself in her room with her friends. Elizabeth and T will eventually retire to elsewhere but because she misses me the two of them spend a fair amount of time sprawled on the red couch in the living room creeping closer with four feet coming toward my lap and when they bring the middle friend in with his whirling dervish energy there is no escape because the Dervish and I are in love and will sit on the floor and discuss HO model trains and his lovely relationship with his grandfather and how badly he wants to ask out the boy in his AP Chemistry class for hours while Elizabeth and T creep across the floor in circles around us interjecting periodically about the boy in AP Chemistry and what the hell is the Dervish waiting for anyway? So late Saturday afternoon I intentionally went into the backyard instead of getting in the car and heading out to the grocery store and looked at the light. Originally I meant to photograph something in the grocery store but the chicken coop broke my heart. It was shut down for one reason but kept down because leaving Elizabeth as the primary caretaker for the birds just wasn't fair so we didn't bring them back. This is my life. This backyard with this empty coop which has gone through periods of emptiness before. It is the closed up coop in the beautiful, nearly wild meadow of a backyard which is my life and I was struck by the stark fact of this and also my absolute acceptance of the stark fact. It is ok that my heart hurts. It is good even. It is good to be conscious. And so that beautiful photograph of not a reminder of what my life was but the actuality of what it is today. I was happy out there and I need to remember to be back there more often. Not just outside, but back there.

Sunday evening

This was easy. This could be any evening except the location is either the red couch or the hotel bed at the Hanover Marriott. I say 'the bed' at the Hanover Marriott because they are all the same, or they have finally become all the same because I am no longer aware of the differences in rooms. Not much, anyway. At the very end of the day, every day, when all things are finally done, I pick up the current sweater which is being knit and fall into it. At the beginning of June I started the first of either three of four sweaters I meant to have completed by Christmas and started. I discovered knitting mens sweaters is not quite the same as women's sweaters and made two egregious errors. The first was just a disaster in more ways than I can discuss and eventually I will rip it out to save the wool. The second is going to be OK eventually because I am fairly certain I can make the collar right. I sure as shit hope so. The third, jesus, the third. How could I have gotten that so wrong? My gauge is almost always dead on but somehow it is the size for a fourteen year old boy. FML. I am on sweater number four and it is entirely possible I'll finish this by Christmas and the size will be correct and I will only have made a complete mess of the pattern on the chest. I still don't know how the hell I managed to screw up one side of the henley front pattern when the other side is absolutely perfect. I am fairly certain it has something to do with the way I increased the stitches into the pattern from the opposite direction. The instructions confused the shit out of me. So either way it would have looked fine but it looks like two separate patterns on either side. I will make Mike wear it anyway. I will tell him it is supposed to look like that but he will not believe me because in some places it is perfect. I will tell him I also meant it to be that way. I will look him dead in the eyes and not blink when I say this. That's my story.

Monday morning

Oh. This. So much this. It's taken me so long to get really good at this exit. It took so long to get past the sleep anxiety and so long to let go of the 5:15 wake up and roll back to 5:00 because getting on the Merrit Parkway at 5:45 instead of 6:00 actually DOES make a huge difference. Figuring how to be staged well enough to shower and be out of the house with all my shit and coffee in twenty-seven minutes (because the car has to be in motion at 5:30) and then down the stairs, across the lawn and onto the driveway without falling on my ass or spilling the coffee (which gets out anyway) into the bag of knitting was a bloody miracle. The excitement of going back to Basking Ridge after a three day hiatus combined with the anxiety of leaving but knowing I'll be back on Tuesday night... and the whole thing is just one giant circle which is not a hamster wheel but it is something I've stepped onto voluntarily and it moves fast and I'm still trying to control the pace which is why I start at 7 AM voluntarily. I'll get to that. However, I load my luggage and computer into the car, shut the door, climb in, turn it all on, set the Garmin not because I don't know where I'm going but because the ETA is 'time to beat' and it's GAME ON.

Tuesday morning

I am leaving my hotel room and I will be back on Wednesday night and I look at the intimacy of the unmade bed and I want to show you this but I can't really explain why other than it feels like I make this giant leap out of Weston on Monday morning, bounce off the bed in Hanover on Tuesday morning, back to my own and then back and it just goes like that and again, it's about the ritual and the getting past the sleep anxiety which was always about, have I got everything worked out? Will I get enough sleep? Will I be good enough? Will my daughter be OK? Will I get this shot right? I will not get it right but whatever, I'm posting it anyway.

Wednesday morning

I am not the first person in the office. Lots of people arrive before 7 and it is primarily to avoid traffic. On Mondays and Wednesdays it is about avoiding traffic for me but on Tuesdays and Thursdays it is about getting actual work done before I have to start sitting through meetings or dealing with triage. Usually it's the crap left from the day before when I get to 5 or 5:30 and my head has gone to white noise and the only thing I'm good for is triage because it's going to take a massive shot of adrenaline to get my brain cells engaged. I love the concept of the open workspace but the truth of it is we don't interact more with the exception of the library table which is where the consultants sit. We interact because we can see each other. The problem with the open workspace is the fucking noise. At some point I think the community will define itself to the point where social mores will develop beyond the scope of 'do not talk to people staring straight into a screen who are also wearing a headset because this means they are probably on the phone (this is also a great way to hide out). Eventually people will learn that when they are MOTHER FUCKING LOUD they are disruptive and will take the party elsewhere. The library table is dead center in the middle of the workspace so we don't really stand a chance. To my right is the party space. I don't know who they are but there are two or three women who like to stand up, talk and laugh loudly and gather additional people to do the same. I can work through it because I can pretty much work through anything but when I'm on a call I have to keep my headset on mute and when I'm leading a call I have periodically had to pick up my phone and computer and walk as far away as possible because the noise is so loud through my headset that no one on the call can hear each other. My boss is on the other side of the room. He is getting ready to come over and shoot them. A reason for gun control. Possibly. Or at least he would need to be interviewed thoroughly. I do believe he would honestly blurt out: I need a 45 because the time has come to blow the heads off the two or three women on the other side of the room. OK, maybe not, but still.

Thursday night

This was so beautiful. I left the building a little before five. Like a few minutes. I had managed to successfully lock my boss in a room for eight straight hours. I've been told this has never been done. It is entirely possible I have saved him from himself. We have pounded out the ROM (I love that), Rough Order of Magnitude with enough detail behind each piece to be able to construct the high level project plan with a timeline I can force him to meet for not just one project but a second which is nested within the first. The first project is being managed with the Agile method which means you don't really have an end date for the ROM. (I find this maddening). The second is pure waterfall and the PM is terrifying. Also unreasonable. Although if you can't come up with an argument for why you can't do your part of the development in two weeks, god help you. With the argument must come the project plan and the timeline. To this you may need to be locked in a room for eight hours. He doesn't have the bandwidth. He is pulled in too many directions. I won't tell you what I had to do to make him sit. Sit he did. I still have to finalize the damn thing and get it to him today or tomorrow. So that. I got in my car and pulled forward and knew instantly that I was on the rim. I also knew I had to get the car into open space so I limped it into a good size alcove, got out and started looking for the implements of destruction. 

No implements of destruction. Oh FUCK. Possible he was still in the building. No answer. Try his internet line. No answer. Try a text. Nothing. Crap. Go back to the car and start digging again and who the hell am I going to call? A man pulls up. Do you need help? For one tenth of a second the voice in my head said: we do not need the help of a man (what's your boss? a unicorn? maybe). Then the voice in my head said: are you out of your mind, woman? Then I said, yes please! He drove a hybrid which did not have a spare tire which means he did not have implements of destruction. He used his cell phone flashlight to dig deeper into the recesses of my vehicle and found mine. We had a hard time getting the cover off my spare and I said I wasn't opposed to brute force. We didn't break it but it was damn funny. I actually knew where the key was to get the damn wheels off the car but we'll get to that. 

The jack. I haven't changed a tire in, oh, I don't know, twenty-five years? I think David changed the tire on the Forerunner in 2004 and we had trouble finding the spare tire because it was under the car. But I don't recall the instruments of destruction being an issue. We looked at the jack. The jack looked dubious. He got under my car and looked around. I got down on my knees and he said, you're going to get your coat dirty and tear your hose. I just looked at him. I asked if he was having trouble working out where to put the jack and he said yes, it didn't look right. I decided not to interfere and he finally made a choice. When he started trying to get the car up he asked if the brake was on and I looked at him blankly. Do you want me to do it now? No! ok. He looked at me and said, don't hear this like it's sexist, ok, because it's not. ok. I don't know how a woman is supposed to make this work, it's all I've got to leverage the damn thing. The jack was wobbly. It looked wrong. He got back under to look at it and I stopped breathing. I heard him say, it looks fine, perfectly stable and as his head cleared the jack collapsed on itself. It wasn't the wobbling car which had stopped wobbling, it was the weight of the car. 

I picked up my phone and called Mike again and he answered. Where are you? I'm at the 16/17 exit, where are you? I'm at the 16/17 exit, is that you?!

Mike looked at the jack and got his out. He also has a Toyota and we were dubious. As we were jacking the car back up, with the parking brake, and Mike swearing about the lack of leverage, another man came by and said, dial 4400 if that doesn't work and building management will get AAA out here in about ten minutes. I thought this was a fine idea. Mike muttered, in about three seconds that is exactly what's going to happen. The man stayed and watched. He was older and frail but not going anywhere. The tire was up and they worked on getting it off and the car didn't move, since the brake was on. Another man stopped by and tried to figure out how to help. He stayed too. They worked on getting the tire off. The cover was being difficult. One of the project managers stopped by and asked if we needed help. She said she didn't have a spare tire anymore either because she had some sort of tire that wouldn't go flat all the way. She asked if she could help though and stayed. They got the tire off and rolled over the spare and started the business of getting that on. It was being difficult. Two more people walked up and asked if they could help and one of them said, that's sort of a ridiculous question because you almost have it but I have a better jack if you need it so I'll just wait until you're through. Everyone wants to go home on a Thursday night but everyone stayed very calm oddly enough, not even looking at their phones. Just waiting. In the end my tire was on and the first man started to pick up the dead tire and I said, let me have that. Mike said, you'd better just let her. We didn't let her touch the tire changing business and she's probably not happy about that. I took the tire and rolled it to the back of the car and everyone followed me. You're going to get your white coat dirty. Mike and the first man together: she won't care. I picked up the tire and held it away from my coat. Tires are heavy. I'd forgotten. I threw it into the back and then looked for the red cover. The first man asked if I wanted to put it back on and I said, no, no point really. 

I looked around. There were at least ten people standing there waiting to be helpful. One guy said he was from building management and I wondered if he'd just wandered by or if someone had called him just in case. He said, well, we could have just called AAA but you just don't see people doing this anymore and you were almost done so I left you alone. Mike grinned. The guy grinned and I said, so I work for him in DSM and anything you need you're the top of the line. Mike turned white. The guy said, I work in TV and Mike said, thank god but really, she would have made one of our guys give you something. 

I got in the car and drove home and the traffic was still there but that was OK. When I got home at about 8 I decided the tire in the back should be the photograph instead of the luggage in front of the glass front door with the light pouring out and the dog losing her shit because I was home (which she'll do even if I've only been gone for twenty minutes). 

Friday afternoon

Heartbreaking. I took Friday off because Elizabeth was registered for a six hour campus tour at her first choice. We have already done the two hour tour but she really wanted the six hour and I made her pick the November 10 tour over the October something tour because I was over booked. I wish I had not. She called me on the way home on Thursday and told me she had never received a confirmation email and finally sent an email and on Thursday afternoon she finally got a response. She was not registered. She hadn't wanted to tell me until she knew for sure because she didn't want me to be upset (I would just have called the contact I have at admissions). Her level of upset was exactly where you'd expect it to be. It took twenty minutes to explain that I was upset because she was upset, that I wasn't even remotely upset with her, not even remotely disappointed in her although I did wish she was not so unhappy with herself. It's a life lesson, sweetie. We all have these life lesson opportunities. When I got home she hadn't told her father yet. He took a vacation day and I don't really know what that means. He is also a contractor but he may get actual vacation days. I just have to make sure I bill my full 40 hours or I don't get paid for them.

(we are capped at 40 but we work what is required - don't get excited - you do the math - x dollars times number of weeks = salary and subtract out anything you have to cover on your own which can be some if you are W2 through an agency or everything if you are 1099 and if you are still making significantly more than you would be making as a FTE then shut up and do the work)

This is not a problem. It is a rare week that I don't hit 40 by Thursday evening and I hit my 40 at 2 PM this Thursday. She wouldn't call him. She sent a text. He was livid. He suggested we just show up. I vetoed that idea. He wouldn't let it go. She cried. I suggested she type this:

Please stop. You're making me feel worse than I already do.

I remembered that six years earlier I had typed nearly the same to my mother which became the final email in a rapid fire email exchange and that was just about the last I heard from her. Not all dogs bite. Go ahead. Tell him how it's making you feel.

Whatever he said in response, it was the right thing. I asked her, since she had possession of her mother for a full 24 hours what she would like to do on Friday. She said she'd like to go to MOMA. Of course she wanted to go to MOMA. We will sleep as late as you'd like and catch the first available train. 

So in the morning we got in my car and the battery was dead. Of course it was. We got in her car and drove to the Westport station and barely got on the 11:06 so we could stop at Butter for lunch before MOMA. A word about Butter, they'll charge you $8 for tap water so just don't. I don't care how good that burger looks. While waiting for our burgers I gave her two tylenol and a benadryl because her head hurt and her sinuses were backed up. This was a crapshoot because I'd never given her benadryl and some people do ok with it and some do not. She did not. By the time the dessert menus hit the table she said, I have to get out of here, I need air. Elizabeth does NOT pass up dessert. By the time we hit the sidewalk she said, I need to go home. No MOMA? No. Holy shit, Elizabeth. You'd sell your soul to get to MOMA and do so at least four times a year. Mom. I have to go home. I turned back toward the station. Mom. I can't walk. I put her in a cab.

By the time we got to the station she was ambulatory but barely. We had fifteen minutes and she wanted to go downstairs to Magnolia. I was dubious. The tourists have broken the Thanksgiving to January fifth amnesty, broken the treaty entirely and breached the city walls. Grand Central is filthy with them. We crept down the stairs and looked around the corner. Between the back wall and Shake Shack there were probably 250, maybe 300 people. Magnolia is against the wall by the stairs in the middle of all that. The only way we would ever get through that ocean of midwestern horror with their oversized closets on wheels would be to move like the true New Yorker that Elizabeth's dad is, like an arrow or a missile or Armageddon on a stick. Elizabeth's dad uses his elbows out. You never really see him coming. I go in sideways using my shoulders and a good hard push. I do not apologize I just keep moving. I would have been willing to do it except it was probably a 45 minute line and Elizabeth probably would have gone down in the crowd. I said, no, back to the train now. She wept and then passed out on the train. As we approached Westport I looked up cupcakes in Westport and found something hidden and wonderful that ought to put Magnolia off the map. Except it won't, but that's ok. 

Later T showed up in the driveway with the car his dad bought him because he will have his license in January. She is embarrassed by this but T loves cars so she is going to forgive him for his father's excesses and somehow T thinks he's going to come up with 30k to pay his dad back. T's dad is also going to have to foot the maintenance on the 2014 BMW X3 after the maintenance warrantee runs out because T will be in college by then and the maintenance on these things once they are of a certain age is astonishing (types the woman who traded hers in for $1000 toward a RAV4). T's parents drove the car away indicating that they would return at 10:45 so that he could drive it home and Elizabeth could get back to her dad's by 11 since neither of them are permitted to break the curfew which is in effect until they are 18. (positively draconian but ok)

At 10:48 the doorbell rang. Holy shit. I hadn't been watching the time because I assumed T and Elizabeth would be watching the time but they were not. I let T'd dad in the front door and ran down the hall. The commotion behind the closed door made it very clear I'd be sorry if I opened the door.  Elizabeth, FASTER! MOM! Go away! NO! I went down the hall and sat at the top of the stairs and laughed into my hands. I wanted to blurt:

Listen, Joe, this is hilarious. They can't get their clothes on fast enough. Want to come down the hall and heckle them?

Except I never would and that's why I sat down with my face in my hands and laughed. I sat up red faced, tears and said, listen, do you know your son gets migraines?

Well, he has sinus problems.

Yes, that will kick them off but what happened tonight was a full blown migraine. Boys and men get cluster headaches, not migraines but every once in a while they do cross that line and this is about the time it starts if it's going to start. If he tells you his head suddenly hurts all over and the light feels like a knife in his eyes, that's a migraine, not a sinus headache. The dull throbbing in the back of his head that comes on suddenly and is accompanied by knives in the temples, that's bad, man. 

Well, he has sinus problems. Did he eat?

Yeah, almost an entire pizza.

Sometimes he doesn't eat if his sinuses are bothering him. Other times he inhales everything in sight.

Yeah, I've seen that. But about his head. I gave him one tylenol, one advil, and one naproxen. I know Dawn isn't going to like that and you don't have to tell her but that worked. Also I taught Elizabeth how to put his head in traction and that helps a lot but he needs to go to sleep in a dark room right away. So I think they both fell asleep back there. (lies, lies, lies, but only about the sleep part).

Later she sent me a text and apologized and said they made some poor choices and I said, yeah, bad timing, don't sweat it. I've made lots of poor choices and I only regret some of them. 

Post Script

I spent more time telling you about the pictures than leading up to it. A photograph is a blink in a day or life and this business about it saying a thousand words, I'm not so sure about that. Sometimes, yes and sometimes not so much. How can you possibly know what that closed up chicken coop means if you don't really know me? The knitting? No way anybody is going to pick up the back story on that one. You get Sunday on the couch with brown wool on a circular needle. It will get you one quarter of the way there. How can you know about Monday mornings, what they look like, what they feel like, what it took to get there? Well, sort of because I write it but what if I don't? The parts in the middle, maybe. But the tire? How you can you possibly know what led up to that photograph? 

And what about Elizabeth on Friday? Nope not one bit of it. Nobody knows anything about that photograph except for the fact that we paid $8 for tap water because that's where the comment string went. Nobody knows that was the pivot to an extraordinary day; extraordinary in its depth of emotion, the up and down of everyday life and the being truly conscious of the texture, sound, and movement of what is my often unbearably beautiful life. 

The Anarchist Cookbook

The Anarchist Cookbook - This is a PDF link, one of several available, ostensibly the original 1971 edition. Based on the TOC, I believe it has been scrubbed. Go for it anyway.

The original cover looked something like this, or maybe exactly like this. I'll never know because they're all gone now. Although, I can't say I had the original copies in my hands because I did not. The original edition was published in 1971 and I'm not sure what year it was banned and I'm not sure what year the scrubbing started but scrub they did. I have this obsessive desire to purchase editions from 2012 forward (I think there's one every year or close enough) just to see what they've done. I don't really know who 'they' is, just to be clear although a couple hundred keystrokes would probably get me there. The covers are all black now, on everything, regardless of the edition you think you're purchasing. The 1971 edition is black. I read a lengthy review on Amazon about the 1971 edition having been thoroughly scrubbed. They are all approximately 160 pages. This makes me sad. What exactly is missing? What on earth did whichever powers that decide these things think was so damaging? What did they think couldn't be gotten literally anywhere?

Listen. This.

How to make napalm in your kitchen:

1. Break up some styrofoam paper plates (binding agent).
2. Cover with diesel fuel (active ingredient).
3. Wait until plates have dissolved. Mostly.
4. Pour off excess fuel.
5. Stir slurry until smooth. 

Note:    Napalm is sticky, you idiot. Don't get it on yourself. It is also highly flammable (see active ingredient). Think really hard about how you're going to deploy said sticky stuff before you start spreading it around randomly. Rubber gloves, anyone? Do your homework. Do you suppose this shit might eat through rubber gloves? I don't know. I do know it will STICK TO THE RUBBER GLOVES THUS LIGHTING YOUR SORRY ASS ON FIRE SHOULD YOU COME ANYWHERE NEAR FLAME. I'm just saying, having the recipe for something doesn't necessarily make it useful.

Now, a molotov cocktail, on the other hand, completely self contained and anyone with an IQ within spitting distance of 100 ought to be able to make that work without blinding themselves or their closest friends and neighbors. 

Back to the book. It was probably 1992 so that would have made the book obscure given the time period. We weren't blowing things up in the US in 1992. Much. Islamic Extremists were prepping for the 1993 first attempt on the trade towers but we weren't listening.  Clinton was in office and the bubble was just beginning to build, with great enthusiasm. The groundswell of Latin American and Asian immigration was just beginning; a flow of incoming cultural shift that washed across the country in marked pockets but not necessarily limited in geographical influence. The taste and texture that is us was changing and in our arrogance we barely noticed. 

In the Republican city that is Phoenix I parked my rental car and wandered some streets aimlessly on weekends when I wasn't permitted to fly home. This didn't happen often but every once in a while I got a no go on the Friday 1 PM flight east with the Sunday 6 PM return west. In retrospect this was horrible, an abuse of corporate power where flights were often booked and then abandoned, unused paper tickets collected but not refunded or rebooked, software trainers held hostage at the Scottsdale location to save the expense of a $400 ticket while incurring an additional two days of hotel and meal costs. In the end the net savings was probably $140 at the expense of two small children and one despondent mother. The unused middle tickets of my back to backs (buy a round trip spanning two weeks and another in the middle for the weekend and somehow this is cheaper although illegal) collected dust on Phil's desk.

In the Republican city that is Phoenix I parked my rental car and wandered aimlessly on weekends when my brother was not in Eloy. Many parts of the Republican city that is Phoenix are oddly deserted on Saturdays and most assuredly shut down on Sundays except for the odd door with the open sign in the middle of a block in the middle of an entire lifeless section. These are the places just outside the city center where I parked my rental car and walked, block after block looking at the store fronts until I inevitably found a portal with a damn good reason to be open on a Saturday after 2 PM or better yet, a Sunday.

It was a called a Spy Shop. Today there are quite a few Spy Shops in Phoenix but this was different. The Spy Shops I see online have a lot of what my Spy Shop had but they missing some things. I do find it interesting that Phoenix has Spy Shops that are actually called Spy Shops. Maybe other places have things called Spy Shops and they just don't exist this far east. I would expect to see them in Spokane maybe just because it's so close to the Idaho border but maybe I'm making some unfounded assumptions or maybe my assumptions about Idaho are geographically incorrect.

The Spy Shop jumped out at me because it was open on a Sunday and also because it was called The Spy Shop. I almost didn't go in. Later when I saw the film Pulp Fiction I was reminded of how I felt outside that shop when Butch Coolidge took shelter in the gun store. I had that same not so good feeling but I went in anyway. I didn't need refuge but really, who the hell passes up this sort of thing? Also, along those lines, who the hell splits up and searches a haunted house in multiple directions? Same sort of crazy, am I right? It wasn't a well lit store front like what I think I'd find today. It reminded me of those strip mall store fronts where you go to get an advance on your paycheck. 

It was musty.

Of course it was.

And it has EVERYTHING. It had weapons, all sorts of weapons. Guns were the least of it. Cross bows, knives, some things I had trouble identifying. It had the entire section on listening devices. It had covert everything. You want to pull a James Bond? This is the place for you. I wanted to buy the pen with the camera in it but I didn't have that much money. It had repelling gear. Really. Repelling gear. Night goggles. It had all sorts of clothing for men and women (not a sexist shop in the least). You want camo, you get camo. You want night gear? We have an entire selection of tight and baggy black clothing and the hoods and masks to go with them. Boots! Oh the selection! Climbing shoes. Climbing shoes in BLACK! They did not have parachutes. I asked about that. You get your parachutes from the manufacturer, ma'am. Can I get a canopy in black? We're not sure about that, ma'am. Huh. Have you got a list of manufacturers? We do not, ma'am. Interesting. 

Then, oddly, they had an entire sub-section on things in which you hide your keys and valuables in the house. This was an odd juxtaposition. Housewives come in and buy a fake cabbage to hide shit in the refrigerator, I think. And they aren't bothered in the least by all the gear. This is what I'm thinking. This looks like a baby monitor. It IS a baby monitor. Convenient. 

They were very good about me wandering around touching things and asking very few questions. I started feeling safer and they weren't looking at me like I needed to be thrown out. They only asked once if there was anything I was looking for in particular and I was dead honest. No. I've just never seen anything like this and I want to look, is that OK? Yes, ma'am, it's absolutely OK.

I'd passed the book section on the way in and hadn't even looked because I was making a beeline for the handcuffs. I stopped on my way out to look at the books. I didn't expect to be all that interested. I expected far right wing manifestos and I'd read some of those and didn't need to read another; I got the point - no judgement, just, OK. I pushed the door open and saw the pale tan cover on the oversized trade paperback.

The Anarchist Cookbook.

What the hell?

I closed the door and picked up a copy. I read that book, or flipped through the drawings for forty-five minutes. After the first five minutes I moved to a corner and sat down, glancing up at the counter to see if they minded. They did not. The book is hand illustrated and having learned much later that it did not have an editor, was in fact not edited by anyone I understand how it came to be in its original condition. I also was not aware of the author's age or circumstances which is probably good because maybe I wouldn't have taken him seriously and quite honestly he deserves to be taken seriously whether he thinks so or not. I do understand his frustration in not being able to remove the books from the shelves and his horror at having written the thing in the first place. I don't expect, given what he has communicated that he'll ever understand why the book, or why I think the book is as important as it is. He will suffer it's existence for the rest of his life and for that I am sorry.

There were eight copies on the table. I didn't have a lot of money and this was well before electronic banking or even the idea of multiple bank accounts (at least for me). I did keep a check register with a balanced account so I did know exactly what was in there and exactly what it was going to do to me if I bought all eight books. 

I bought all eight books. 

The men at the counter looked at me and then rang up and bagged the books. When I took out my checkbook I realized I might have a problem. I must have been nineteen shades of red when I stammered out something about an out of state check and I could go find an ATM or come back on Monday with cash and I was so embarrassed for not having thought it through. The one man looked at me for a moment, looked at my license and said, ma'am, you don't look like a woman who writes bad checks but can I ask what you're doing in Phoenix? I explained, probably in too much detail. They were upset about my kids and the weekend. They wanted to know that my kids wouldn't have access to the books and I said, not at this age, no but that I didn't believe in withholding books from my kids anymore than my parents had withheld from me. I told them about the one time my mother asked me to not read The Painted Bird until I was eighteen and then I had to explain THAT. I said I wasn't about creating an anarchist and I didn't really need to know how to build a bomb or how to handle a firearm or make LSD in the kitchen sink or even how to grow pot. I said that I thought what the man had written was important because it had been written and it had been published. I talked a little while about the how and why books are censored and that I didn't believe that having information or even access to things caused people to do things they shouldn't do. I said I thought this was a manifesto of a different sort that needed to be listened to. 

One of the men said, people don't really see it that way. Most of them buy that book as a joke. I said I didn't think it was funny at all. I said it was poorly written, poorly constructed, poorly edited, and that the illustrations needed an actual editor but that was the part that made it honest. I asked if they thought people actually read the book and they said they didn't know. Only one of the two had read the book and he said it contained some very useful information. I agreed. 

When I did go home I was scared. This was way before the NSA as we know it today, but the NSA did exist. I didn't know what it was called but I did know to be afraid of it. It is not the FBI and it is not the CIA and Homeland Security IS a new thing. Sometimes when you hear, well, you used to hear people talking about 'The Man' the talk is about Authority but Authority which is invisible and can do things which may or may not fall outside of our constitutional rights is the thing we are most afraid of. I was afraid to fly home with those 8 books. 

I was well past the time of checking luggage having had it fly to some other state or get lost entirely one too many times and I could get a week's worth of clothing into a carry on and if my weekend home got cancelled I could get a same day cleaning done on a Friday (there goes another $30 in savings, Phil) and wash the rest of my stuff in the hotel sink. I could not fit 8 large trade paperbacks in as well. The bag was unmarked. I put half my clothes in the bag, the books in the carry on and prayed. Later prayer turned to flop sweat when I passed through security which, I might remind you was nothing like it is today. Flop sweat did get attention. I was pulled to the side and my bag lifted and put on the ground. I was tyachacardic. The woman asked if I was OK. I said I thought might have a fever. She said she needed to make sure I'd be OK to get on the flight and they brought me some water and after that some juice and had me sit in a chair by my bag. 

About a year before I took that job a woman who'd been in the industry about twenty years said something in a conversation at a bar, not directly to me, but about travel. She said she never traveled in jeans anymore because as a woman she found she was treated much better when she traveled dressed for business no matter what day of the week she was flying. She said even with a computer bag, jeans automatically downgraded her. I always wore a suit when I traveled. I always wore my most conservative suit and full makeup and perfect corporate hair. I did this right into the turn of the century because you know what? It's the truth. 

You know what else? A WASP business woman in a good suit with a carry on and a computer bag is far less likely to be searched than just about any other demographic out there. Had they found my books we would probably have all had a good laugh and I would have gotten on the plane as long as I had remembered to BE the WASP business woman in the good suit instead of the on the fringe anarchist who grew up on a drop zone, started life in what might as well have been a racial demilitarized zone (ok, maybe calling it a DMZ is pushing it, remove the D) in the late sixties, and moved from one cultural epicenter to another until finally landing on the Gold Coast. The problem was, once in possession of those eight books I was no longer in that suit. I got on the plane anyway.

Over the next two years I gave every one of those books away, which was my intent. I don't know if I meant to keep one and accidentally gave the last away or not. I do recall suddenly not having one and being unhappy about it but I let it go, after all, I didn't really need it. I'd long since read the book and everything I might need to know I already did know. The chances of me leading a revolution which would require bomb making skills or even a gross of Molotov Cocktails is absolutely zero. Should the shit really hit the fan around here I'm the last person you want making bombs anyway. I'd blow myself up in the process. Gasoline in glass bottles, I can probably manage that assuming glass bottles can be had (wait. recycling, it's a conspiracy!).

Why was I looking for The Anarchist Cookbook in 2017? I'm honestly not sure how it started. Maybe it was a conversation with T, who is in many ways very much like me, tells my daughter. Maybe we were talking about things you can build and things you can make and things which are easily found on the internet. I know we've talked about pre internet life which is before either of them were born. He would have found out about things anyway the same way Mike found out about things. Maybe T is more like her brother than she realizes. Maybe Mike is more like me than any of us have considered. We want to know things and sometimes we want to know things because we believe it is our right to have this information. We tuck it away because it exists and needs knowing. Mike builds things, I do not. I do not build circuit boards, I do not make batteries (although I did at one time), I do not make small engines out of unexpected things, and it would never occur to me to work out how to engineer a clean room. T thinks of these things but he thinks more about cars and finance and someday he will probably be in risk analysis. And Mike is an industrial designer and I put chaos in a box and these days that's called a technical project manager although in the past it was called a system architect because I built things instead of driving the people who are building the things. But we all ask the same questions. 

My girls do not ask these questions. They want to know about other things just as passionately and if we made a venn diagram there would be a big circle in the middle.

So I'm not sure how I got to The Anarchist Cookbook in 2017 but I did and I was going to buy it for T when I found a trustworthy source for an actual first edition and my daughter said, stop! Stop right there! I am going to buy him that book for Christmas. 

His mother's head is literally going to explode and blood and brain and skull shards are going to be all over the wall. She is just NOT going to understand. 

p.s. you CANNOT take the pot recipes seriously because he's missing a crucial step, and I do mean crucial. Therefore it is safe to assume he may be missing crucial steps in a few other recipes, or instructions, or what have you. Just sayin.

The 8th Floor

This is $404 per night room and they aren't kidding. It's not like when you look at the back of the door and the hotel disclosure tells  you, along with the emergency exit information, that the maximum rate that can be charged for this 'motel' room (yes, I read this in a flea bag once) is $500. I mean this room in this photograph is currently going for $404 per night and it is NOT in Manhattan. Not even close. It is in Hanover, NJ which is sort of Parsippany. Sort of. My rate, as a gold member would be a whopping $396. Nice savings. My rate with the corporate code I'm currently using is $224. Well hot damn! That's a near 45% discounted rate. My Unicorn contact at the Hanover Marriott has informed me that the 2018 negotiated rates are not going to be quite so kind to my company (with the code I'm currently using, Jason gave me six and this is BY FAR the very best) but it will be that way across the board, for all hotels for everyone, he tells me. Fear not, he says, when you compare rates again they will most likely let you come back. He is aware that I fear a return to the Indigo. The are such lovely people, I've told him, they try harder than any hotel staff I've ever spent extended time with and they were always so happy to see me but the property itself is a disaster and I can never sleep, not even on the top floor. Rice paper walls where the slightest noise in either adjacent room is amplified and I was never a light sleeper. I was terrified of the elevator. I am oddly fascinated with it though. If I could sleep I might keep going back just to watch the archeological dig of the peeling layers of wood floor laminate and San Francisco wall paper slowly reveal the truth of the hotel's identity. It is not an Indigo, not any Indigo is really an Indigo, they are all something ICG picked up and rebranded at some point but I think they were all different things other lives, independently operated old hotels, Howard Johnson's Motor Lodges, the original Holiday Inns which could not be converted, and others. When the laminates pull back, at whatever rate the prevailing humidity determines, releasing the memory of smoke filled rooms and leaking pipes, the bones of truth lie bare. I believe my Indigo is very, very old. It's the elevator that gives it away but the paper thin walls wreak of a mid-century takeover and remodel to double capacity which more or less ruined it. So that. 

I found out about the Marriott almost immediately because my boss asked, where are you staying? And I told him and he said, oh, you know Jason is up at the Marriott in Hanover and I said, their rates were just awful and he said, see Jason and so I did. Well shit, I hadn't considered using corporate codes from the last job or the job before or even the job Jason was on three jobs before which I have never been on. I tried to book a room with one code and came up with 257 but had a three week wait to get into the standard room which, by the way, looks pretty much exactly like that photograph. I waited three weeks and finally got into the Marriott the last week of June and had my first solid or nearly solid night of sleep. I wept. No, said Jason, you're doing it all wrong, it's this code. Ah, great, 224 and my boss, who is not really my boss but she signs my expense reports said, ok, that's a little better. Since I'm really her first contractor and she got used to the Indigo rate of 180, 257 was a bit tough to swallow, especially back when it was three nights a week and by the way, don't forget to add on the state and local taxes. I don't have airfare but this is still new to her. 

Given the initial wait, I booked out to the end of October. There were some nights I flat out couldn't get in but I didn't worry about  it. The first blocked night I put myself in the Whippany Courtyard about six miles East (? I'm directionally challenged) on Route 10. Oddly enough the Whippany Courtyard which is not a full service hotel by any stretch of the imagination is significantly more expensive than the Marriott. It is, however still a Marriott property and points are points. It's all about the points now. When I have enough points I am taking Elizabeth to Key West which is where Elizabeth has wanted to go for years (a lot of years, maybe six?) for some obscure reason. By the time I actually have enough points to stay at a Key West property (I have accumulated enough for about a night and a quarter), Key West will have restored itself. 

One night at the Whippany Courtyard had me convinced that I should pay the extra $20 per night and stay at the Basking Ridge Courtyard with Jason on the off nights when Hanover wasn't letting us in. They meant well but it was a bitch getting in and god awful getting out. The Jersey barrier forced a right turn which didn't allow any turn for two miles which only allowed a right turn with no good place to make a u turn which forced a giant loop which added, in the end nearly 8 additional miles back to the office. Too much money for a bad commute and an over priced motel. Basking Ridge was OK. They charged for parking. I was astonished at this. Why? You're in the middle of nowhere. A stones throw from the Indigo. Why are you charging for parking? Well, OK. Not hard to get to and oddly enough your 'bistro' will actually bring the food in a bag up to the room. Well that's cool. Not that I minded fetching it at Whippany but it's interesting that you do this. The first night was perfectly fine. The second time was OK except they fouled up the concept of mobile checkin where no credit card presentation is requested, no identification is presented (I'm ok either way with that), you simply validate the last four digits of the credit card used to pay for your room. The guy checking me in stumbled through this, screwed it up and swiped my card. I got really nervous. Listen, I told him, it is entirely possible that my card is going to be billed twice now and I'm going to have to unravel the whole thing so could you do me a favor? Flag my account. Tell them I was a fully checked in mobile customer and that you swiped my card. Just do that for me and I'll follow up, OK? OK. Good enough.

Yes. Double billed. But. He flagged me and it was unraveled immediately. Fair enough. 

Third stay was an unmitigated disaster. She picked up my room card from the box of mobile checkins and asked for credit card and ID. Crap. You don't need my card. I have to swipe your card. Why? Incidentals. You have incidentals here. You have food and that gets billed to the card on file. If you swipe my card I'm going to be double billed just like last time. You won't be double billed. I gave her the date of my last stay and results. She snarled, swiped my card, handed me my key in packet and said, room 219 and I thought... how am I on the second floor? Not to be a snob about this but I haven't been on a low floor since I hit gold why am I on a low floor now? I said, OK, thank you and went to the bistro to order dinner before I moved my car and went to my room because last time I didn't have a working phone. When the man asked me for my room number I looked down and said...um 413 because that is what the cardboard key holder read. The post it stuck to the key holder which should not still have been stuck to the key holder held all of the information she was supposed to validate. I gave him the room number, moved my car and went to the fourth floor.

At the door to 413 I held my breath and inserted the key. In I went. I unpacked and prepared for the morning and five minutes later opened my computer and attempted to connect to the internet. It wanted my room number and last name. Nope. Not a match. I should just have tried 219 but that would have caused bigger problems. I picked up my phone. It rang and rang and rang. I dialed 0 for the operator which should have given me the back desk. It rang and rang and rang. I picked up my computer and purse, leaving my work computer behind and headed directly to the bistro to intercept my food. I was just in time. He re-rang up the receipt to remove the delivery charge and I signed to room 413 with my name clearly on the check.

I got in line in front of the other girl. To my left was a longer line in front of my girl which is where I would have preferred to go. I explained to the girl when it was my turn that the interwebs did not know me. I showed her. She did not understand. She looked up room 413 and asked, did you get into that room? Yes, I am fully moved into that room and have billed food to that room. They let you bill food to that room?! Yes. They did. I have it right here. That's not possible. Sigh. Here is my food and here is my receipt with my name and room 413, I'm not sure I understand the problem. Neither am I.

To my immediate left was a VERY frustrated man. 

I'm telling you, someone is in my room.

That's not possible.

There is stuff all over that room.

What kind of stuff?

An open suitcase on the bed. A woman's red briefcase on the floor. Bathroom stuff all over the bathroom. A DRESS HANGING OVER THE BACK OF THE CHAIR! SOMEONE HAS MOVED IN!

Are you sure you were in the right room?

I opened room 413 with my 413 key and walked in. I looked in an open suitcase and saw ladies underwear, can you explain this?

DID YOU TOUCH MY STUFF?!!! ARE YOU TELLING ME YOU PUT YOUR HANDS IN MY SUITCASE?!!!

No. No. I didn't touch your stuff. It was open on the bed and your underwear was on top and I didn't touch anything!

The woman on the left (who checked me in) turned to the woman on the right who was clear this could not have happened and 

HOW THE HELL DID THIS HAPPEN?!!!

I don't know.

FIX IT!!!

What do I do?!

I looked at the woman in front of me and said, you cancel his reservation and rebook him in another room on the fourth floor because I am not repacking my stuff and leaving and I already have food billed to that room. After that you find me, cancel whatever room I have and put me in 413 but make sure the food comes with me.

I have no idea what she did but in the end I went back to my room, ate my dinner and chatted with Elizabeth on FaceTime until it was time to settle in for the evening. I made a mental note to lock the door from the inside at the beginning, not the end of the night going forward.

In the morning I picked up the guest folio that had been slipped under my door probably just after midnight and prepared to photograph and email it to my work address because my expense reports (all bloody three of them) have to be submitted on Friday morning, one after the other. When I laid it out flat on the desk it read:

$8 parking

OK. I can't even. I called the front desk. I was still in a mild sleep haze but I wanted to get them before the herd started checking out manually. It was 6:15. 

Hi. This is room 413 (in case you aren't reading your phone). My guest folio is inaccurate and unfortunately I need it to be accurate this morning. I have only been billed for parking, not the hotel stay, and not the bistro meal. I need to have this corrected and sent back up. Can you fix this for me? 

(I have odd ideas when I'm not in a full service fully staffed hotel)

No, I can't. We're not staffed for that.

OK, so I can't leave here without an accurate folio. Seriously, I can't. So my room rate is this, and I'm holding the receipt for dinner so if you don't put that on the folio I'm ok and I'm sure you'll eventually work out how to bill me. Can you just put the folio together even if it's not pretty and print it out?

I'll do my best.

OK, I'll be down in 30 minutes.

At 6:45 there she was by herself looking like she belonged in Hanover. Perfectly groomed and beautiful, a wild juxtaposition to the two women from the night before who had clearly been rolled through the lobby half a dozen times by a herd of wild frat brothers on holiday through Jersey. 

Hi. I'm room 413. I just need my updated folio.

Blank stare. 

I handed her the folio for $8. 

Blank stare.

This is in the top five most surreal hotel moments in my entire traveling career and that includes the 2 AM murphy bed debacle at the Cincinnati Marriott when they gave me the club suite which doesn't really have a bedroom and failed to explain. 

Blank stare.

I'm not leaving without an updated folio and I can stand here all morning taking my conference calls from your lobby with my computer on your counter until my wifi runs out at 1 PM with my extended checkout rights. 

She turned around, gathered some papers, turned back and started typing. A few minutes later she handed me a folio with the correct room rate and parking. No food. Fine. I'll take it.

OK. So. If you could find my reservation for Wednesday, please.

Type type type. OK, I have it.

Hit cancel.

Click.

Done? Reservation all gone?

Yes.

Thank you very much!

Later when I told Jason there was a man in my room and I was never going back because they'd just handled it badly he asked where I was going to go. Bridgewater, I think. If that doesn't work out I'll just drive home and back but I am NOT going back there. Sorry, just no. I got into Bridgewater which was the same distance away as Hanover but South. We'd been talking about checking it out but when you're attached to a property you don't really want to leave; it becomes your second home. My boss was astonished. He said, you'll wish you'd just driven home. It will all be fine until you get to the 287 exit and then you're just going to park for 40 minutes. 

He was right. I parked for 40 minutes but the getting back wasn't so bad. Bridgewater wasn't so bad either but it wasn't Hanover. It wasn't staffed to handle all that many guests, it's more of a conference hotel I think and if there isn't a conference happening then it isn't a full hotel. They also charge for parking but it's in the middle of the city so I get that. There is one man at the door and one woman at checkin. They understand perfectly how to handle business travelers but there is only so much they can do. They're perfectly lovely and a reasonable backup if I absolutely have to but the discount is not 45% and I know why, the volume isn't there to support it. It is almost better to go home. So now I am limited to Whippany as a backup and the Indigo as a failsafe. Jason, who has 800,000 points to my 109,000 finds this hilarious but Jason can't exactly fly home to Rhode Island if he doesn't have a room. 

What was missing from Bridgewater aside from a lack of traffic (Hanover has traffic but not a 40 minute exit backup) and free parking (which is completely forgivable in the city) and full service room service (which so does NOT matter)? 

Hanover is home. When I walk in the side door, I never come in the front door anymore because I know exactly where to park for the quickest getaway in the morning, and approach the mobile checkin sideways I am met with at least one very wide smile and often a row of smiles. Welcome back, Ms. Alecto! We've missed you (the week and a half I was locked out). Or, Welcome back because it's Monday night or how was your Tuesday night drive? Because it's Wednesday night. The business manager who deals with business travelers and is the reason I have a room every single night I need one all the way out to the end of Q1, 2018 waves if he's on the phone or comes over to chat if he's not with someone else. I've introduced him to Jason who has now unblocked himself all the way to the end of Q1. 

The reason I eat every meal in my room (Jason is horrified) is because I have a standing appointment with Elizabeth at 7 PM which will not be disrupted for anything unless there's a screaming emergency on one end or another. From 7 to 7:30 we are together. It is also true that I don't have a lot of bandwidth when I leave the office but eventually I would get sick of cobb salads and chicken quesadillas and cheeseburgers (stay the hell away from the mushroom veggie burger thing, that didn't quite cut it) but mostly cobb salads. The timing is such that I check in at about 6:15, order food at about 6:20, unpack, which is really all about staging for the next morning - clothing ready to go, pillow on the bed (yup, it gets compressed and slammed into the suitcase), personal computer connected to the interwebs and ready for FaceTime, suitcase ready to be repacked, toiletries out with bag hanging on the door for each item to be dropped back in and then slammed into the suitcase, medication in a glass by the bed, medication container back in the suitcase, cliff bar in the brief case pocket, plain yogurt for breakfast out of the knitting bag (this works, ok) and into the room refrigerator (so far I have never forgotten breakfast), coffee maker out of the cabinet and set up for morning, coffee cup out of its plastic wrapper and placed next to the bathroom sink, shoes next to the briefcase and the only thing left to do is change out of my work clothes and into whatever I'm lounging/sleeping in but I don't do that until after dinner has been delivered because I do not want to scandalize the man. Last thing to do is login to Netflix which takes some time because my email address is my full name with an underscore between the names and that navigating back and forth with the arrow keys is maddening but I am truly grateful for the service. 

Now it is 6:40 or 6:50 if I am late and the food may or may not be there yet and if it is not I sit down and start knitting and if it comes while I am still moving about I stop and open the door and here is when something very lovely has started to happen. There are, as far as I know only two wait people who bring up meals in the evening. They are a man and a woman of color and I note that they are of color because there was something interesting going on with the man and I am generally taken aback when service people seem to be a specific minority across the board - so the combination of the minority and the man shook me initially. The woman is cheerful. She is of indeterminate age. She is probably my age but I'm not certain. When I figured out that I could change the tip on one receipt and submit the other without (because the client is not going to cover this and the amount of the receipt has to equal the submission) the relationship changed. I would have done this with cash but I don't really carry cash. It is bad form to not add an additional tip to a room service delivery. Seriously. They don't see that service charge and 20%, even if that is what's included is not enough to carry food up through the service elevator and through the halls. Sorry, nope. You don't have to add a lot, you really do have to add enough to acknowledge. So I figured out how to do it and the relationship changed. With the woman there was just an easiness about her, not that there was anything hard, the transactions just relaxed and she accepted my smile which was and is easier for me.

The man is an enigma. I am going to find out his name. In the beginning he would not make eye contact. There was nothing hard about him, it felt like overly deferential covering, I don't fucking want to be doing this. I don't really know for sure and I don't really have any business making assumptions but something was going on. His discomfort preceded him into the room and followed him out and I felt guilty every single time. When I figured out how to add the tip he made eye contact. I don't know if it was about the money or the acknowledgement or if it was timing or a combination but he made eye contact. And then one day he smiled and I about fell over. And then the damnedest thing happened. We didn't see each other for a bit because I was gone once and the woman got my order during the next and then he got my order and asked where I'd been. I explained. He smiled and said he was so glad to see me. I said I was very glad to see him too and that I would be gone for another week and a half because I had this one more lock out but then I'd be back hopefully for the next two years straight. The smile was brilliant.

My first night back on Monday the woman came to the door. I like the woman. I am happy to see the woman but I was worried about the man. What if he thinks I didn't come back? I don't even know his name. I don't know her name. I was running behind on Monday and I was already in the middle of a full screen session with Elizabeth.

She set my salad on the desk to the left of Elizabeth and took off the cover to shows me the way she always does with the flair she seems to have perfected and I smiled and said, yes that is my Monday night salad and took the binder with the check from her and said,

Say hello to Elizabeth, we're having our nightly chat.

This is your daughter?!

Yes, this is Elizabeth. I miss her every Monday and Wednesday night so we have thirty minutes of FaceTime starting at 7.

Hello, Elizabeth.

Hi!

You miss your mother but this must help.

It helps a lot.

Well this is very nice. I've never seen anyone do this at a hotel. You can have dinner together.

(getting Elizabeth to eat what I've left her is a never ending struggle)

I signed the check, added $3 and handed it back. She wished us both a good night and left the room, closing the door softly behind her. More softly, it felt like, than ever before. 

On Wednesday he was back with my dinner. I startled myself when I opened the door.

There you are! I'm so happy to see you!

I am happy to see you too. I have been thinking about you.

I was here on Monday but that very nice woman brought me dinner so I didn't see you.

Well here I am now and you are back so this is very good. You won't have to leave again soon.

No, I won't have to leave again soon. I will be here every Monday and Wednesday so if you don't see me you'll know someone else has my order and it's OK.

Yes, I will know that and I won't worry about you.

Now what does that mean? What does I won't worry about you mean? What does I have been thinking about you mean? Never mind, I know what that means. People who care about each other think about each other. I don't understand the worry part but I don't suppose I have to understand. Maybe he worries I won't come back. 

I know, and I have talked to Jason about it, that I am very attached to this property and it is really about the people. I check in and get into the elevator and go to whatever floor and room I have been directed. It is our home away from home, Jason says, and we don't want it to change. We know they'll be remodeling next year and we are both afraid of what will happen to our rooms because we are very used to the walls and the carpets and the furniture and the beds and oddly enough that green thing at the foot of the bed. It's not even very useful. It's scratchy. Jason says, as long as my friend the bartender is there when I go straight to the bar for a beer after I get my key and he's happy to see me again, I can live with the redecorating. And I say, as long as that lovely man who brings me cobb salad keeps bringing me cobb salad I suppose I can live without the scratchy green thing at the foot of the bed. I throw that damn thing on the chair, Jason tells me. I hate it. You're going to miss it, I tell him. 

The other night I was about to turn out the light and I looked around at the room and thought, holy shit, Jason and I have matching rooms. This is actually really freaking funny. Like two kids in a giant house, our rooms decorated identically by some insane mother who thought we might also be dressed alike at some point. 

When I first checked in I was sent to the third or fourth floor and I stayed there for quite a while and wondered about the guests who continued on up to five and six and every once in a while someone went to seven and then the mysterious eighth floor. I wondered what was up there. I didn't think too much about it but one day I was sent to the fifth floor and thought, finally! I have made it another level, like a game and what will I find when I get to my room? Nothing. Just another room up another level except with each level there is the expectation of more quiet. I don't know that each floor gives you more quiet but I do know there is a significant difference between two and four and there is definitely something different about four and five. But the rooms are the same. One day I was sent to seven. Holy crap. Right back down to five which is where I stayed. Back to seven. OK, I get it. The stuff in the bathroom is a little different. The bottles are bigger too. I wouldn't necessarily notice because I don't use them. I only use the soap which is my favorite hotel soap ever because of its size and shape and I have been collecting the spare bars to take to hotels which are not the Hanover Marriott. 

On Monday I was sent to the eighth floor. I about fell over. This is like space invaders level 10. You hit the top level and nothing happens, you've just hit it. So now what happens? Do I have to go all the way back to floor 2 and start over? On Wednesday I went back to the eighth floor. The bottles are definitely bigger and there is a shower cap but not the ubiquitous sewing kit. Maybe they have done away with this. So what is the difference? I see there is one giant suite across the hall and a junior suite down the hall but I don't know what it takes to get an upgrade around here. 

I'm not really attached to an upgrade, by the way and I'm not sure what I'd do if I had it. Having been slammed into suites in the past and walked past kitchens I had no use for and sometimes very large dining room tables and looked at multiple bathrooms, it just left me wishing I could have reserved those upgrades for family travel. But lately every mobile checkin on my phone has read: eligible for upgrade. No idea what that meant.

I had no idea what that meant until I went cruising back to the Marriott site looking at current room rates and then I saw it. The difference between the two room rates that kept me out during the first three weeks. There is a standard room which is a double or a king which is called a Guest Room and there is an M Club Deluxe. The M Club Deluxe looks EXACTLY like a guest room except it comes with the following: M Club Lounge, M Club Lounge Access, High Floor. The M Club Lounge sort of requires access so I'm not sure why they've called out. The M Club Lounge will feed you snacks around the clock and a full breakfast most mornings. The only thing you get charged for is alcohol. So there it is. At some point I got upgraded to the M Club Deluxe and totally missed it. It's not all that relevant because I'm the last person likely to set foot in the M Club Lounge or any other sort of public space like that but that's what happened. I got upgraded, silently, I just missed the boat. I'm not even sure where the M Club Lounge is, I'll have to ask Jason. My guess is Jason's not an M Club Lounge sort of guy either. He's too attached to the bartender at the Auld Shebeen pub. 

Getting to the 8th floor was never about the 8th floor although being at 5 or above is a good thing because silence is a good thing. Getting to the 8th floor is about a bartender who calls out when you walk through the door which makes the ache of being away from your wife three nights out of the week a little bit bearable. Getting to the 8th floor is about a man who brings you dinner and worries about you when you've been away and a woman who knows you well enough to understand why your dinner comes when it does every single time. Getting to the 8th floor is about having been there long enough to have the business guy plug your rooms in six months out even though you're booking Mondays and Wednesdays which leave an unbooked early week gap which will be harder for the hotel to book. Getting to the 8th floor is about knowing that the temperature needs to be set at exactly 74 for an hour to bring the room up above standard icebox and then at 72 for another hour and then down to 70 for the remainder of the evening and then at 69 to sleep.

Getting to the 8th floor is about turning out the light, falling back and letting go without reservation, which is something I have trouble doing at home some nights. 

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.*//