Inside Out/Outside In...AND some writing news

OUTSIDE IN

On Tuesday night I saw "A Breath for George," shown outside on a tiny screen against the wall of the Guthrie Theater. It could have been shown on a grain of rice and would have still packed a punch. We said in the sanitized chairs provided, masked and socially distanced, some of us in lawn chairs carried from home-- a crowd, undistracted by birds, or motorcycles, or the voices of children somewhere in the park behind us. Only the helicopter flying too low pulled our eyes from the screen. I don't know if these showings will be only in the Twin Cities or if they will come somewhere near you, but the website of the theater that produced the movie is a must see. It is full of resources you might not have seen other places.

http://newdawntheatre.org/index.html

There's a mural of George Floyd on the front of the Guthrie, composed of little post-it note like squares. 

INSIDE OUT

It's amazing how much the sky can change in an hour. Nature shows us change every season, every hour, every second. We can change too.

This is the view I see from my bedroom floor--the place where I do my yoga practice.

WRITING NEWS

An essay of mine (along with 29 others) is on the shortlist for the Masters Review Anthology. I should know by the end of the month if I get chosen as one of the ten winners.

Thank you for all the amazing birthday wishes!!!

Reflection of Minneapolis's stone arch bridge in the Mississippi River

A birthday is a new beginning of sorts. I'm 67 now, not 66. Let's start over.

Forty seemed so old when I was 19 and having surgery on my spine. Forty seemed like a tremendous goal.

We have the chance to begin again every day. Every moment, really. Every time we think a thought or open our mouths, we can go from here to there and have a fresh start. Life is stuffed with changes and transitions and bridges to somewhere new.

When I was in my 20s or even in my 30s I imagined my elder years would be staid and even. It's been anything but that. Here's my list of transitions of the last dozen years (in no particular order.) Things are always changing for all of us.

Maybe now the question is, what changes do I want to make in the coming year?

Children at home to empty nest

Married to divorced

Brunette to blond

Blond to silver

City dweller to suburb dweller

Suburb dweller to city dweller

Crazy and depressed everyday to crazy and depressed now and then.

On medication to off

Meat eater to vegetarian

Vegetarian to meat eater

Anxious person to somewhat less anxious person.

Dog and cat owner to houseplant fancier

Freeway driver to ardent pedestrian

Caregiver of the dying to bereaved

Homeowner to condo dweller

Ground-floor inhabitant to fifth floor inhabitant

Distracted to devourer of books.

Insomniac to dream journaler (some nights, anyway)

Mothered to motherless

Californian to Minnesotan

Beach walker to riverbank walker

Wheat eater to gluten intolerant

Hardwood floor fanatic to I love my bedroom carpeting

Grandmother of children to grandmother of high schoolers.

Owner of too many books to owner of fewer (but still too many) books

Big drinker to little drinker.

66-year old to 67-year-old

Bicycles and Sheep

Last night I met a woman. She asked where I was from and I told her California. “I’m loving my time here in Vermont,” I said.

“You should buy my house,” she said. “You’d love it.” She told me it sat on 40 acres. A studio to rent out that would cover the mortgage. A pond. She tore a strip of paper from her notebook and wrote down the address. “You could have sheep,” she said.

I had fantasies of becoming a weaver once.

She told me the house was on Zillow so I looked at the pictures online. It’s off the market, Zillow says. I think she told me this, but said it was going to go back on. The rooms in the house are painted the colors of the rooms in my house. There’s a bright red table.

I thought I might dream of sheep last night, or speaking French, or standing at the edge of the pond, marveling at how I’d made this new life on the Canadian border surrounded by sheep and sugar bush.

But I dreamed of a bicycle trip and training to ride in it. The training had been going on for months, but I was still learning to repair my bicycle, being drilled on how to take this and that apart and replace it. Parts were laid out on a grimy towel, and the instructor held a shiny metal thing-a-ma-jig in his hand. “This is the piece you want,” he said.” You’d have to pay me big bucks to go on a bike trip. I’d rather just step out in front of the roaring truck than have it hit me from behind. There have been two men in my life in the last decade who were rather taken with me, and these men were serious about biking. That wasn’t the only reason it wouldn’t have worked out, but if I’d made a list of pros and cons, biking would have been written in all caps on the con side. This bike trip in the dream was going to last months. Hundreds of miles. It was a bike trip in which we followed a soccer team, peddling from city to city. Soccer. Sure. I like soccer if I’m in a bar with a soccer fan, or if it’s the Women’s World Cup maybe, or I’m watching some little girl I love.

“I hope this isn’t one of those conversations that changes my destiny,” I told the woman with the house.

“It could be she,” said. There was something about her. Something about the whole idea, something about the dream of the bike race that made me think about how capable we are of changing everything.

Setting Moon/ Rising Sun

Life in Pillville feels mostly unbloggable these days. I tell myself it can't be worse than holding your dying lover. It can't be worse than being dumped for a woman twenty years younger. It can't be worse than wailing in the doctor's office that anti-depressants are needed right now. It can't be worse than standing on a bridge and looking at your shoes and imagining them wet, the wet crawling upwards.

All those things happened. And I think that might actually be why things feel so bleak. I've got some kind of cumulative thing going on here.

But really, I'm all right. Every morning I wake delighted with the day. Good morning, world, I say aloud. And I am truly so happy to be alive to see the full moon set and the sun rise.

And I ask myself what kind of person I want to be. Kind, I say. Patient, I say. Full of love, I say. And each moment feels like erosion. Like sandpaper to the soul. Start over, I say. And I do. I do. I really do keep starting over.

But there's nothing like a situation that feels stuck to prompt one to get other stuff done. That tree that's needed trimming? The cruddy under-the-sink spot in the laundry room where the catbox used to be? Done and done. New hairstyle? Why not. If you can't change your life. Change your hair.

And I'm working toward some other changes too.

Death, Pain, Anger, and Santa on a Tractor

My mom is home.

I've explained and re-explained the difference between pro-biotics and antibiotics. We've gone over the changes in her pain meds. I made soup for dinner, made sure to offer her a bowl of ice cream, and I just rolled some Max-Freeze onto her back. She's not quite herself, eyes like giant hollows, walking in super slow-mo. Each hospitalization, while life-saving, delivers its own special beating and sends her home weaker.

My father died suddenly of a massive heart attack one night after dinner. I was away at college and witnessed nothing of the the actual event of his death, yet that quick drop to the floor is how I've always imagined my mother would leave this life. It's now seeming quite likely that I was wrong.

A sudden death seems a mercy to me. To be alive one moment, aware of a brief pain perhaps, and then gone. No needles. No indignities. No litany of agonies. No small chiseling away of the mind and those elements of personhood that once were so integral and now are gone without a trace.

I really don't think very far ahead these days, and I don't worry. I do the things I can do. I have confidence that I will do the things, solve the problems, and ask the questions and find the answers, and change what needs changing, and just keep going. And even after I do all of that, she'll die.

Hahahah, life, you trickster! is an attitude that I can usually muster these days. My tire pressure light comes on as I start my drive to the hospital in the pouring rain. Okay. Hahaha. We take a detour to the tire store. Oh, now there's a Christmas parade and I'm behind Santa on a tractor. Okay. Hahahaha. Oh, the home physical therapy didn't get set up like it was supposed to? Well, less funny, but we'll survive. A pain medication situation that doesn't seem to be working? Well, I could get a little angry, but anger won't stop the pain, so never mind...but still, I'd like to engage in the luxury of rage. For most of my adult life, it's been evident that the lessons learned through difficult situations don't always come up again and give one a chance to flaunt that back store of knowledge. There's always new stuff. Like never ever get discharged from the hospital on a Saturday--and especially don't get discharged on a Saturday if they're going to fuck with your pain meds.

But I'm ready. Sleeping on the couch, maybe, with the MaxFreeze at the ready. Tramadol dosages researched, ready to say go ahead, just take it 2 hours early. And aware, at least right now while I'm still wide awake, that anger at anything won't do anything good.

Everything I re-learned about parenting, I learned from a dog

My son and his family have left Margaritaville and gone on to SeaWorld and Legoland. I am dog-sitting. "Sandy" is a rescue from the pound--an adorable rat terrier who smiles and could win any speed eating contest paws down. She's crate trained and when we all call it a night, my daughter-in-law calls,"C'mon Sandy, let's go night-night." The agreeable little beast runs into the crate and plops into her bed. For my daughter-in-law, that is.

Last night it wasn't really that hard to get the dog into the crate--though she didn't go in when I called to her. We danced around a bit, and when, after a minute or two,  I asked her in my serious dog-sitter voice to "sit," she did sort of a civil disobedience flop, and I scooped her up and put her in her pen, repeating sweetly, "Go night-night, Sandy." I switched off the lights without any further cajoling and went upstairs.

The howling commenced just as I settled under the covers. The calls were lonely and sad at first. I waited a bit, but it became evident the dog was winding up, not down. "Sandy," I said sternly from the top of the stairs, "No!" Full-out howls escalated into little siren-like wails. You would have thought that every dog on the planet had died, and she was the one left to mourn the passing of a species. I tried the stern "No" a couple more times. Then I brought the poor creature and her bed into my room. She walked around for what seemed like hours. Her tiny rat-terrier toenails tapping against the wood floors like a troop of angry fairies.

I remember when my children were babies. It was ridiculously hard work. The love alone, and the way it rearranges every priority you thought you had is so disorienting you spend those first months trying to get your bearings, stunned that motherhood tenderizes your heart in ways that are both terrifying and transcendent. And you undergo this personal re-modeling job while sleep-deprived night after night for months on end.

When Sandy woke me this morning and I walked her down to the patio to pee, she smiled at me. When I opened my car door, she was ready to hop in. We drove back to my old place--a house she's never been to. This cheery rat terrier who joined my son's household with an extreme fear of men, and for the second time in a week, is at a new house with new sounds and new smells, well into day two without the people who rescued her. She's had to learn it's not okay to bark at the cat--a questionably-groomed 18-year-old who lives on one end of my couch and sips special milk from a bowl on the end-table. That the helicopter flying over isn't here to kill her. That the grevelia leaves won't crush her if one falls on her. And yet, here she is at my feet, pawing my leg to get onto my lap. It's amazing how love lets us adapt. One day you can be in the bedlam of a shelter, and the next you are napping on the floor in a nice house with children who want to hold you like a baby. And then after more bliss than you could imagine, you find yourself in a new place with a stranger who drives you to yet another strange place.

Both man and beast are hard-wired for survival. I think we're hard-wired for love, too. It's adapting to those damn changes that's the hard part.

A Boatload of Things I Don't Know About My New Life

Just a little while ago a man in a black wetsuit, complete with hood, pulled up to my dock in a small motor boat, afixed a mask to his face, and dove into the water. There was a piece of equipment yammering in the background. The marine equivalent of the "mow, blow, and go" gardener? Removing barnacles? I have no fucking idea. It went on for a while. If this were a Harrison Ford movie, I'd be kidnapped and held for ransom by now. Men resembling slick black seals would have tunneled  under my house and stolen....my bean bag chairs? My airbed? What the hell. Probably some kind of  marina beige-world HOA sponsored barnacle removal, I guess. But mine was the only dock he visited.

Yesterday while my son and his family and I waited to board our boat for the Wildlife Viewing Cruise to Anacapa Island, we witnessed the orientation for a kayaking session. I was secretly relieved that there were two women my age in the group. I'm going to be in their shoes soon....admitting that I know nothing at all, really, about kayaking.

Last week I had to leave a check for 35.00 dollars and a form I didn't understand under the doormat so the backwash testing folks could come do their........testing.....um, yeah....testing my backwash. Whatever.

I'm going to buy a bunch of kayaks.
I'm going to buy a boat.
I'm going to change my life.
Let's hope I float.

Waiting for a Sign

"What are you going to do now that you've got your Master's Degree?" people have asked.
 "I'm going to write," I say. And I am. I have a memoir to shop, a novel and 2 short story collections to finish.
But also, I feel like I'm waiting for a sign. My post-divorce life has been so completely filled and shaped by being in school that I feel a little bit lost.

The Water is Wide

As my writer's residency in France draws to a close, I'm thinking about the flow of this river called divorce. Where's the damn boat so I can just row across and get to the other side? Everything in my life is changing, flowing, transforming except where I am with Mr. Ex.

The division of our joint assets is a stagnant mess with something that looks like progress poking up out of the depths every now and then, but it turns out to be an illusion.

This bridge across the Garonne is the last thing I look at every evening as I sit outside on our quiet patio in Auvillar. At night it's all lit up and I've ventured across the road to it a time or two. Standing on the narrow footpath along its railing is an eerie experience.

Bridges make great metaphors. From here to there. From this to that. Wife to writer.

I'd just like to make my break from Mr. Ex before it's time to tip the boatman for the last ride to the other side.

Nothing Compares to You

I'm a mess, I admit it.  

The road trip is over.  I'm about to board a plane and fly back to L.A. where I will be "home" for 36 hours before I board a plane to Greece. I've left my daughter M. in St. Paul for what we are calling her first "grown-up summer." She's almost 2o and she will live in my condo, drive the car her dad has handed down to her and work a  9-5 internship tutoring inner city kids. For the next few days she will be hosting her brother, his wife and their 3 kids and putting her first household in order.

Meanwhile, I feel like I've come almost full circle. I became a blogger after my trip to Greece last fall--when I left the country to be as far away as I could manage when Mr. Ex got re-married. I'm returning for a writing workshop + hiking with the author Meredith Hall  http://meredithhall.org/  and I have fallen completely in love with the man I've been dating since December.

Here's how I know:

M. found little to appreciate on my ipod during our long drive from California to St. Paul EXCEPT for Sinead O'Connor's hit Nothing Compares to You. We played it a couple of times every few hundred miles. Mr. Ex liked this song and when the two of us were driving in the car together when it came on the radio in the 80s or 90s or whenever that was, he'd sing along and put his hand on my knee.

On this trip, I remembered that and there was an interesting pang, but I didn't really care.  All I could think of was the man I'm going home to.

I am very, very lucky. 

And a mess.

ROAD TRIP

I'm traveling again.  Driving from California to the Midwest, and it feels good.  I made this drive with Mr. Ex many times in the years before we had our daughters and those memories feel almost sweet. It's a strange feeling. But that young guy in the flannel shirt & jeans & work boots I'm remembering isn't the guy I was married to for the last ten or twelve years and I wonder if I've changed into a completely different person, too.

Rock Springs, Wyoming has changed a lot. From a historic western town to an i-could-be-anywhere big-box, chain-store, strip-mall characterless place. Now they're trying to bring the historic downtown back and my daughter, M. & I are doing our part to help. Last night we had dinner at a brew pub that's staked a claim in an old building and is serving up delectable local beer. A perfect mix of the old and the new. 

Our trunk is full of that liquid gold now.

I don't know that I'm ready to call those old memories  of me & Mr. Ex golden, but there's something about there that's worth thinking about.

Sunday Sunset

I saw a jumbo jet glinting in the sunlight tonight while I was walking my dogs and wished I was on it.  Sorry, dogs.  It seems ridiculous to me that more than 15 months after my marriage ended, I  still  have not adjusted.  I have a lovely townhouse.  I live with 2 dogs and 2 cats. When I turn out my reading light at night, the dogs come over to the side of the bed for a final pat on the head. The timid cat who spends her time licking the hair off her legs while living in my downstairs bathroom cabinet comes out of hiding and settles down on the foot of my bed.  The other cat moves closer and purrs. So what is my problem?  The problem is that it's Sunday night--the one night of the week when I used to eat dinner with my husband (I know--how pitiful is that?!) and as I was walking those sweet dogs and looking up at the jetliner, I actually thought, I should be walking to dinner with Mr. Ex right now.  Is there no hope?

My son once told me that being adopted is like being in the witness protection program. Divorce is like that too. Your past is wiped out. You're supposed to forget it and move on.  Be someone else.  Erase your history.  Good thing I'm not in the witness protection program because I'd be fucking failing and would have a bullet in my brain by now.

So here's the score: 30 yr. marriage--over.  4 month relationship--over.  Coffee date--lukewarm.  Dinner date--no indigestion; just bland.  Full moon Athens/internet/telephone romance and possible friendship--over because I felt like burning a bridge out of spite. Internet and telephone correspondence: over due to the fact that I'm not OVER the divorce.  Internet correspondence--over because I'm not OVER  the divorce.  Okay, I admit it, I'm not over the divorce.  So sue me.

Two Left Feet Dancing to the Beat

When I was married, we hosted a big Thanksgiving party every year. China, crystal, champagne, the delicious things that my friends made and brought to the table. Our feast occurred for two decades and I never imagined that changing.

When I was a little kid we had a tradition, too. The day was spent at my grandparent's or at my Aunt Mary's and I never really expected that ritual to change either.

But I never made it to the adult's table before my grandparents and my aunt died, and the house in which I thought I'd be serving up turkey and dressing for at least another decade isn't mine anymore. I think I'm figuring this part of life out-- things change.  

This year as I make my Thanksgiving plans, I'm discovering, that already, they're going to be different from the "new tradition" that began last year. I like rhythm and ritual, but I'm starting to see that this new unpredictability is my rhythm.  I'm a little awkward, but I think I'm feeling it. I'm dancing to the beat.

Some Gravity Is More Equal

While I could riff on the wild turkeys I saw in the woods, or the amazing political photojournalist who's been eating dinner with us, or another Match.com date (yeah, I know) who has probably run screaming into the blogosphere, what I really want is for anyone who has stumbled here to go to the link below. I am interested in the unpredictable life right now. Here is the literal embodiment of the metaphor at sea.

http://www.svkwai.com/current_news.html