In the spirit of “revisit childhood” and also “pretend we live here”, I took the girl to the park today. That’s it. It’s a big park, though.
It was cool and sunny, and she played like a little kid for hours, stuffing my purse with pretty autumn leaves and climbing all the playground equipment that has been banned in the US, making friends with a little girl from Scotland. There are still a million ducks in the ponds, and they swarmed anyone who stood too close to the water, hoping for treats. We walked through the woods along the river, and Zenny found a circle of fairy houses hidden in a grotto.
It was pretty perfect.
Duck yoga
When the shadows started getting long, we went home and had tea to warm up. The characters on our Korean rom-com finally kissed, and Zenny was skipping and happy when we went down to the as-seen-on-food-network Italian restaurant for (really nice and affordable) homemade pasta.
The best kind of easy, simple day. I had a moment of delight when we saw a squirrel, and a moment of joy when a thousand pigeons flew in a huge circle overhead and then dove down to fly past so close that their wings blew my hair. I feel really happy.
It was colder on Sunday. We bundled up and walked down to a coffee shop for chai and a bagel before heading to the museum to meet Laurie, my childhood best friend. My mom worked as a cook at her parents’ restaurant and traded childcare while attending university, so we spent most weekends and school breaks together. I had a feral summer living with my grandparents when I was 9 (my mom sent me home from Arizona while she took summer courses) and Laurie’s mom made sure I stayed fed. We were as close as two kids could be - especially in the 80s when that meant roaming wild and getting in fights with the neighborhood boys until the street lights came on. We are a generation of alley cats.
I ran up and gave her a long hug when I saw her, and we started talking nonstop for the next few hours, barely looking at the museum displays. Zenny and Lydia stared at each other and didn’t say anything, which is pretty much how Laurie and I met the first time, too. They’ll get used to each other if we stay for longer.
Laurie’s husband drove us over to my old house. We maybe worried the current homeowners a bit, yelling and pointing at things and posing for pictures in front of the driveway, but nobody came out to investigate. Everything was so small. Looking across at the huge field I used to trudge across in the snow to get to school every morning, I saw that it was so close we could jog it in about 30 seconds. The far-away fence that never seemed to get any closer as we hiked toward it was actually only about 50 feet from the road. Having legs the size of baguettes while wading through 3-foot snow is a whole other world.
We stopped by Laurie’s house, where her parents live in the basement apartment, and her mom came out to give me a long hard hug, squished to her bosom like I was a kid again. I teared up a little bit, I was so happy to see her. Laurie’s dad came out and looked confused, saying he remembered my mother (and her Black Forest cake) but didn’t really remember me. “He was after being drunk whenevers we were there,” Laurie teased. Can’t blame him for that, we were very loud and acted out violent make-believe with her Lady Lovely Locks and Rainbow Brite dolls.
Laurie supports us moving back, but knows a body need to see what they’re getting into, so she bought us supper at Mary Browns (Newfie KFC with vinegar taters) and explained the underfunded Provincial medical system, yearlong waits for surgeries, and scarcity of decent fresh produce - being that nothing grows locally except potatoes and turnips, and Newfoundland is the last destination for food trucks from Mexico. I noticed my accent starting to creep back in while we were talking, which I took as a good sign.
No matter which way this next year goes, it can’t be another 35 years before we see each other again.
The Rooms (museum):
View from upstairs
We didn’t see any bald eagles in the nesting grounds by Quidi Vidi, so I am counting this as a sighting.
There are very few 19th/early 20th century landscape paintings of Newfoundland - it would be cool to bring back tonalism and academic realism for a new generation of painters.
My old street (our house on the right, next to the white one)
It wasn’t like getting transported back in time, it was more like watching an old movie you loved as a kid and realizing you can see all the strings on the special effects. It’s not a bad thing, just weird.
Zenny is still enjoying it here, even after a taste of the cold gloominess and fried foods that would be more typical of daily life than being on vacation mode. It helps that we’re staying in a row house that feels like a home, as well. As a trial run, it’s going okay so far.
One thing a day. Unfortunately for Zenny, that one thing was a 6 mile hike up Signal Hill and down to Quidi Vidi. I packed her with eggs Benedict first.
The 30 min walk up the hill trail turned into a 60 minute walk with all the stops to pet cats, sit on rocks, and try out every bench. I gave up taking scenic photos and just took pictures of her sitting on things.
Don’t worry, she took a picture of me, too.
We climbed up the tower, bought a shirt in the gift shop, walked down to Quidi Vidi - she scooted down the wooden stairs like they were each individual benches - then I took pity on her and called an Uber for the ride back. We had a lunch of crumpets and tea and aero bars in front of K-dramas for a bit before I dragged her back outside to shop downtown and find dinner. A protest for Gaza marched down Water Street with drums and shouting, and a woman pressed a flyer into my hand, saying her niece is on the aid flotilla. We waved to them all and laughed at the Ferrari stuck impatiently behind them while they blocked traffic.
Dinner was scallops and crab legs at the Fish Exchange, with a slice of cake for the girl. Zenny was cold and happy when we got back to the flat, sprinkled with rain, and I was picking shells out from under my thumbnails because I gave her the tiny crab fork. We watched King the Land until bedtime. Really good day.
Tomorrow: meeting up with my childhood best friend and her tween daughter, so the girls can go do... something, while we catch up on three decades of living. Also I am going to grill her about the job market and costs of utilities.
Arlo Guthrie was playing overhead in the terminal, singing City of New Orleans as we caught our connection to Toronto. Huh, that’s funny, my mom and I listened to that song all the time when I was a kid, I thought.
Two flights and 10 hours later, we finally rolled up to our flat and the next door neighbor was hammering his roof, listening to Led Zeppelin. I started laughing.
Me: help help, universe, I need a sign!
Universe:
We showered, changed into clothes that didn’t stink, ran around opening all the cupboards and finding all the extra blankets, then I peeled the girl off the bed where she was trying to pass out and we hit the streets to find some food. (Three flights, ZERO MEALS. We ate protein bars and beef sticks for 16 hours.) I didn’t recognize anything, the stores are all different, but it smelled just the same as I left it - wet leaves, something baking somewhere, salt in the air. Our phones didn’t work, so we wandered around until something smelled good and ducked inside: India-Newfie fusion that kind of blew our socks off. Zenny went from a limp rag doll to prancing back up the hill to our apartment. We crashed out on the couch watching King the Land (Korean rom-com) and drinking chamomile. There should be sleep tonight.
It’s good to be back. Even if we did have to spend the flight from Toronto to St John’s sitting in front of the two worst people in the world having a meet-cute and developing the start of a finance-asshole romance which will have them both divorced and splitting all the assets they spent two hours bragging about. The guy’s red flags were in a race against hers, they were so excited to interrupt each other to talk about themselves. It was kind of sweet, in a way that made me wish there was an airlock to cycle them out of. I hope in the movie of their love story, their spouses connect with each other over discovering the affair and live happily with all their combined kids on a Christmas tree farm while those two suck down martinis in a casino and turn into tanning-bed mummies, complaining that child support payments should come with receipts for expenditures.
Anyway, I’m home!
She has had it with airports
Her bones grew back as soon as she got some sugar into her
Whoa, pork belly and masala fish & chips
Ourdear little walk-up flat, with practically room to swing a cat
In general, I don't like to write unless I can joke about things, and that just hasn't been happening. On Sunday I went for a walk to try to shake things off, and got hit with a wave of grief and mortal terror like I've never felt before. It was awful, I thought I might be having a heart attack or something. Went home, had a massive crashout on my studio couch, and then felt empty, like my body had vomited up poison. It just left that thin whining fear/worry that I've been feeling for ages, which was a lot more noticeable once the racket of grief went quiet. Then I remembered something: Tylenol does not cause autism (for fuck's sake), but it does cause temporary suppression of empathy and reduced emotional pain. I took one before work, one in the afternoon, and HOLY SHIT, it actually helped. It turned the volume down, and I felt kind of indifferent. DIY antidepressant. Follow me for more ways to hack your emotions in ways that will make your doctor frown.
Once I had my shit back together I had to do my therapy homework. My new therapist is sweet and young and wants to do lots of exercises using feeling wheels and word association, and I am down for it even though I think it's a little silly. Silly is fine. Silly is a relief. My assignment was to come up with 5 affirmations to counteract the bad feelings from the Wheel of Feelings. This was harder than it sounded. Cheerful lies don't work on me. "Everything will be okay!" Nooooo, not necessarily, people die and starve and end up homeless. "You're beautiful and strong!" Why do I have to be beautiful and strong? That is not my job. "It's never too late!" Sometimes it is. You miss an opportunity and it never happens again. "Anything is possible!" No it isn't. Be real.
Here is what I ended up with:
1. I am still here.
2. Don't get scared, get angry. (Terry Pratchett. It was a tossup between that or "It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it".)
3. Outlive your enemies. (I just have two three enemies right now, but I'm open-minded.)
4. Fuck you, make me. (Yes, I watched John Oliver.)
5. The Dunning Kruger Effect. (Incompetent people greatly overestimate their competence, and competent people greatly underestimate their competence - so if you're feeling like a useless loser that's probably a sign that you're actually doing okay. Delusional overconfidence is essential when learning a new skill, otherwise we'd all give up before getting any good. When you learn enough to realize how much you don't know and feel like an imposter, that's actually when you're getting a handle on the skill and have things to teach others.)
I cringed after reading them to her, and she started laughing and called me cute. Oh no, this again. I don't know what my face is doing when I talk to people, but when I am an old lady I will have a secret weapon - nobody suspects the cute old lady. I should add that to my affirmations. If I change my last name to something like "Bibblesworth" or "Puddifut" or "Nibblewit" I'll be able to get away with murder.
We fly out Thursday. My atelier class starts as soon as we get back. I have a painting in a gallery show next month. I am reading Victorian Psycho, by Virginia Feito, and Bury Your Gays, by Chuck Tingle. Just finished the second Mickey7 novel, Antimatter Blues, by Edward Ashton. (I like the Mickey7 books, but the movie, Mickey 17, was better. That hardly ever happens, but the movie was weird and unhinged in a way the books aren't. They're still good, though.) Staying busy, is what I'm saying.
Invasive Species II
I'm nervous about the trip. If it feels like home, that's the start of a lot of trouble. If it does not feel like home, that's the start of a lot of trouble. Either way, it's good information to have so I can get on with things.
My grandfather died on Saturday. He made it to 93, once his kids intervened and cared for him full time. Drunk Wife had been spending all his retirement money on booze and Uber Eats for herself while he had been subsisting on snack food, until he had an accident that alerted the family to his health conditions. He played guitar and made jokes until the end, even when his memory started to go. Dementia can change a person’s personality, but he stayed himself.
I am having complicated feelings about his death. This is going to be all over the place, because my thoughts are gathering and scattering like mice, or murmurations of birds. Grief is weird.
I didn’t have a father, and grandpa made it clear he was not my parent, but he was the closest thing to a dad I had. My youngest aunt, Robin, was 12 when I was born, and Beth was a teenager. My mom cooked her way through university while taking care of me. Living in the family home, I was almost one of the kids, but not quite.
Grandpa made bread every Sunday, and gave me a little ball of dough to copy him. He rolled and pinched a row of perfect loaves and put them into big aluminum pans while I squashed and mangled my little ball of dough into a greasy lump and dropped it in a tiny pan to rise next to them. He always laughed about how my mini loaf would rise and bake to look exactly like all the carefully prepared loaves, and he let me eat the entire little loaf with lots of butter. Fresh warm bread is still my favorite food.
He sat me on his knee while we watched Indiana State and Arizona State football games. I didn’t know what was happening, but I liked picking a color to root for and clapped when the medics had to come check on a concussed player.
He played banjo and guitar, singing Peter, Paul, and Mary songs, Fox Went out on a Chilly Night, and some silly folk song about a clumsy guy blowing himself up in a cotton mill. He loved Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, and Willie Nelson. He brought me to the university, where he was a professor of education, and I watched him develop film in the dark room. He loved photography and ceramics, and he loved my grandmother. He wrote a song for her and played it on his guitar until he died, even after his memory left him.
I didn’t cry when my grandmother died. I was 13. I had grief and foggy thoughts, and it hurt to see my mother cry, but I just couldn’t. It worried me a bit. I thought it was because of what happened when my mom and grandpa got in a fight in front of me one morning at breakfast when I was about 5. Instead of stopping him when he punched her to the ground and dragged her across the kitchen floor by the hair, grandma took me by the shoulders and led me to the living room, sat me on the couch, sat down next to me, and waited with her hands folded in her lap. No words, no hugs, no expression on her face, she just turned away and let me cry, and I was so upset and confused. Grownups are supposed to fix things. I could understand an outburst or a temper tantrum from one grownup, but I couldn’t understand the other grownup letting them beat up their kid. She should have stopped him.
I finally cried for her now, though. Their story is really over. They met in the art department at university in Arizona, fell immediately in love. Mark was born when they were 24, as they worked through grad school.
Chrissie came a year later, then my mother, Mary. When she was about 7 months pregnant with my mom, grandma got very sick, very suddenly. Grandpa was out of town, so she packed up the babies and tried to make it to Kingman, where his mother lived, but she only got as far as Wickenburg before she gave birth prematurely. Two things saved my mother’s life: the doctors were so busy and the birth was so quick that they didn’t cut the cord right away, so she got all that cord blood into her tiny body; and the hospital in Wickenburg had just gotten something brand new to 1959, which the Kingman hospital did not - preemie incubators. She was 3lbs, and they didn’t expect her to live. They guarded their expectations and let the toddlers pick her name (“Mary”, because they liked it, and “Carol”, their neighbor), but great-grandma got involved and kept picking up that tiny baby, turning her over so her little head wouldn’t flatten on one side.
my grandfather's grandmother
my mom
There aren’t a lot of really early baby photos. Grandpa’s best friend, a photography buddy from the Navy, had all the negatives, and his daughter threw them out. (That daughter is Drunk Wife, who grandpa married after his friend died in a car crash. Grief is weird.) I once saw a beautiful photo of grandpa holding my mom in one hand when she was born, but it’s gone now. They put all their belongings in a storage unit to move to Vancouver for grandma’s cancer treatments, and when she died he was lost. He forgot to make the payments, and everything went to auction.
He told stories. When he was 15 or 16, he and his friends drove around rural Arizona. One night they came by to get him and he didn’t go, and all of his friends were killed when they ran into a stalled vehicle on a dark road. He was the oldest child, his mother was 15 when he was born. His dad, Casey, was a teenager too, and joined the military to support the family. Casey fought at Iwo Jima, and never recovered from seeing a tiny bloody shoe the size of his daughter’s in a cave they found. They blamed his heart problems on the war, but he had broken his leg as a kid and a blood clot broke free and lodged in his heart; half his heart died in his chest, and it came apart when they tried to resuscitate him. Casey died before he was 40. It was a really bad way to go, and the family never got over it. Grandpa joined the Navy to support the family until his mom remarried.
After my mother was born, they moved to Guam, where he and my grandmother were teachers.
He built a catamaran in the living room of their house, then threw a party with beer while all his friends took the wall off the house and pulled the boat out. They had the wall nailed back on before the police showed up. They lived on the boat, and sailed to Japan, Yap, and Hawaii, where they studied ceramics with Claude Horan. They survived several typhoons, underground in abandoned bomb shelters. My mother remembers all the palm trees stripped of leaves, just bare sticks in the air, standing alongside toilets perched on plumbing, the houses gone. My grandma, at full term, went into labor with Beth during Typhoon Karen, but the minute the nurses asked who she would send the baby to on the mainland - as there was no running water - her labor stopped. She held that baby in for another month, and gave birth the day the water came back on. Grandpa came to pick up the baby on a motorcycle with 6 year old Mark on the seat in front of him, and Mark held that baby tightly as they drove back home. Grandma went on birth control after that, but Robin came along anyway a couple years later.
With 5 kids, the oldest heading into middle and high school, they moved from Guam to Indiana, and grandpa worked on his PhD in Bloomington. A colleague roped him into teaching for part of the year at Memorial University in Newfoundland, which turned into full time work when he finished his dissertation. Grandma got a job as a medical librarian at St. Clare's Mercy Hospital, and they moved with the two youngest to Canada. They gave my mother $100 when she turned 18 and said good luck. The oldest two got married and stayed in Indiana, but my mother got pregnant, dumped my dad when he said she either had to marry him or get an abortion, spent the money he threw at her on plane tickets, and went to Newfoundland. Her parents weren't happy with her. Her kidneys failed, and she spent 3 months on bedrest in the hospital, but they didn't visit or bring her books to read. She stared at a crucifix on the wall for months and gave birth on a snowy morning in November.
They were good people, but bad at having 5 kids. They should have had the first two and been done, spending their lives traveling and reading and making art and playing guitar. They weren't racist, religious, sexist, or puritanical. The outbursts of violence were unusual and coincided with times of great stress, otherwise they were benignly neglectful and busy with their own lives - and each other, because they had that kind of love.
Grandma had a congenital kidney problem, which Zenny inherited. Zenny had the good luck to be born in a time of early diagnostics and robot-assisted micro surgery to repair her kidney valves, but grandma suffered all her life with kidney infections and pain, until a young radiology tech accidentally blasted her with hundreds of times too much radiation during a test in the late 1980's. She developed leukemia and died in a span of about 5 years. I remember right after it happened - the first sign that something was wrong was when she fainted in the shower, and EMTs came to carry her out of the house. Grandpa was a wreck. They traveled as much as they could before she got too sick, visiting us on the Navajo reservation when we moved, spending time in Indiana with their other grandkids, driving to North Dakota to see grandma's family.
She was in North Dakota when she collapsed and lost her vision, and they had to rush back to Canada. At the end, they let her go back to the apartment they were renting in Victoria, and she had a few last good days with grandpa before one morning she went for a swim, laid down to rest, and never woke up. Grandpa laid there with her for hours before calling anyone.
We just get this one life. I don't think it turned out the way they hoped, but they had adventure and love. I guess I was waiting for them to be back together before breaking down about it. Chrissie called us all in a video conference early Saturday morning and told us, crying, and showed us his body. He went quickly and painlessly, just checked out and left, and you can't ask for much better than that. Chrissie deserves a goddamn medal of valor for not dropping the phone and throttling Drunk Wife when she piped up in the background about how long it'll take to get his insurance money.
So I am baking a lot of bread and crying. I don't know what to do, and I'm not trying to figure it out. My brain is foggy, my chest hurts, I'm sad and angry and feeling mortal, and that's all as it should be. It's okay.
Bluer By Its Very Weight (Ted Braffet, 1966)
We walked the beach my son and I barefoot in the coral sand.
Tiny creatures scurried to attend affairs along the ocean’s edge.
The seabreeze mingled with a musty smell,
Of green and growing things,
Of bright and looking things,
Of dead and rotting things.
Above the high water mark and where the green began,
The trees and brush and spider webs
Choked off the trade wind flow.
The dusty suffocating heat in there
Could melt the zoris off your feet
And so we splashed along the edge,
My son and I
Ankle deep
Or just a little deeper,
for my son.
Overhead the noonday glare reduced our eyes to squinting slits
And cast shadows pooled in black which huddled underneath our feet
My own was scarcely bigger than my son’s.
Great anvil clouds sliced clean white rows
Across a sudden blue reflecting sky.
The color scarcely faded where it met the sea
And drew its geometric line
That centered
Both my son
And I
Swirling crystal clear around our feet the sea turned pallid green
Then lemon lime out by the reef.
While on beyond the surges white line
The sudden blue reflecting sky
Opaqued the surface of the sea.
The blue went seven miles down, enriched and thickened
By its steep descent, made bluer by its very weight
Locked prisoner in the Ocean’s
Deepest trench.
We walked the beach
My son and I
Holding his small bronzed hand
We walked the beach
My son and I
Barefoot in the coral sand.
I was doing pretty good until the plane landed in Honolulu, and then anxiety swallowed me back up when I stepped out of baggage claim and saw the man with my car. It's not depression - it's stress and sadness, and I need to fix this.
Couldn't sleep until I snuck out of bed and curled up on the couch with the cats, then knocked off until 6am. Once the kids were away to school, I grabbed my wallet, went downstairs to my computer, and booked tickets to Newfoundland for fall break in a few weeks. I'm taking Zenny to show her my old house, get a taste of the freezing October winds*, check out the local schools, visit the museum and the Peter Pan statue in the park, and see if it feels like someplace we could live. Might rent a car for a day to drive around the bay and check out the small towns. For years I have been half-joking that one day I'll get fed up and fuck off to live in Dildo. My time has finally arrived.
So, Plan A is to go back to Canada after Leif graduates in May, get a little place with my savings, and find some kind of part-time job that will allow me to also be a painter.
Plan B is to find a full-time library job in Washington, but it would have to be a pretty good one in order to afford living there on one income, which would mean admin/management. Less fun and less time to paint, but we could live in a little house in the woods.
I don't have a Plan C yet. "Do what the audience is screaming at you to do." I don't know what that is, so if there's an obvious thing I'm missing, drop it in the comments.
* It snowed on Halloween one year. I was feeling very scary in my witch costume until my mother tried to make me put a coat on over it. She said it was either that or I could put the costume on over the coat. I chose the fat witch option, because serious witches do not wear baby blue puffer jackets.
Hours slept: 6. It would have been more, but the dude sharing one wall with me started quietly tapping the first part of “shave and a haircut” along the wall at 1:30am, and the dude on the other side tried opening the door between our rooms.
Fell out of bed at 6:30am (hotel beds are too high), ate my last Washington apple with a cup of dishwater hotel tea, slopped my damp swimsuit into my suitcase, and caught the shuttle back to the airport. Sitting on the plane, I felt my defenses going back up. I got what I was looking for with this trip, though. Going to eat this problem one bite at a time.
Edit: made it home. Landing felt like going underwater, my chest tightened up so fast I could practically feel my body pumping out the cortisol. It was nice feeling like myself for a few days, anyway.
Driving through Portland isn’t so bad, and street parking was free for the holiday. Liz met me at Paxton Gate, and we walked around shopping, ate pastries in the park with her kids, got some weird ice cream, and I gave her a mini painting of a giant robot in a classical landscape. Which I forgot to take a picture of.
I stopped at the Grotto, which looked peaceful online but was absolutely swarming with tourists. Walked around for about 10 minutes and bailed.
The car is returned, I shuttled back to the hotel, and now I’m bellied up to a flight of beer and a steak. Once I’m good and tipsy I’m going to go make a nuisance of myself at Barnes and Noble and find my way back to the hot tub before bed.
Staying out of my head this evening and just enjoying my last night.
I don’t know what witchcraft was in those “serenity” essential oils, but I feel dead calm. It’s really weird. Must have been filled with beta blockers.
Update: guess who had two drinks and bought a leather jacket? 😬
