Team New Mexico

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Travelblog day.

A rare picture of my primary work team, taken by the sous-waitress at the Pink Adobe in Santa Fe.

Usually one of us — read: Kim, because she’s the photographer (the one with her hair pulled back) — is behind the camera, so we don’t get all four of us at once.

These are the women I spend a good chunk of my life with. We spend a week at a time together, doing stressful, detailed work, once or twice a month. And we haven’t killed each other. Val, who is sitting next to me, used to live in Seattle and now lives in Ft. Collins. Laurie, our project manager, boss, and fearless leader, behind Val, lives in New Hampshire. And Kim used to live in New York City but now lives in Orlando. (Yeah, she migrated south prematurely.)

Dinner at the Pink Adobe is always nostalgic for me, but last night wasn’t thrilling. They didn’t get us on the actual patio as they’d promised when I called. Seems the hostess missed the “patio” part of the sentence. Food was VERY slow — over an hour and it wasn’t that busy. Then, Kim, who eats only chicken (and tuna from a can — don’t ask) couldn’t find any chicken on the menu (I know: odd), so she asked if they could make her some kind of grilled chicken. She also ordered a side salad. They did bring her grilled chicken — a dried out husk on a plate with nothing else, worthy of a Ruby Tuesdays and a minimal salad. The manager stopped by to ask how the food was and we said what had happened. And he so didn’t care. Alas. Pink Adobe is not the place it used to be. I suppose after nearly 40 years of eating there I can let it go. Doubt I’ll go again with so many amazing restaurants in Santa Fe.

Still pretty sad.

The Longest Day

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Yesterday was a kind of harmonic convergence of events. Summer solstice, Father’s Day and our grandson’s first birthday.

Here’s Tobiah, with his paternal grandfather, Miguel.

Normally Tobiah is quite a bit more jovial than this, but my step-daughter, Lauren, reported that he’d been cranky that day. Not everyone loves a party.

I got to stop by for a few minutes, on the drive to Santa Fe, to drop off some presents from David and me. I asked Lauren if the year had gone fast for her, too. She said it had flown by. She even looked a little dizzy, thinking about it.

A year ago, David and I were in Victoria, when Lauren’s boyfriend, Damion called us in the early morning to say Tobiah had been born. We lay there watching the morning light over the Japanese gardens at Laurel Point Inn and the Inner Harbor beyond. We’d visited acupuncture schools the day before and David had clicked with the one in Victoria. Our world had shifted, in several profound ways. Now David thought about teaching Tobiah to fish in the lovely, gentle seascape of Vancouver Island.

I admire what Lauren has accomplished. She has a challenging career and a new baby. She and Damion are learning to build their lives together. Juggling all the families can’t be easy. But Lauren cheerfully makes room for everyone who wants to be part of Tobiah’s life. It takes an openness of heart for that, along with a stern resolve.

So Happy Father’s Day to the fathers: Damion, Miguel, David. Happy First Day of Summer to us all — may we have some now, for all of us who’ve had such a cold and rainy June. Hopefully the light of the longest day shone with radiance for you.

And Happy First Birthday, little Mowgli-baby!

Authenticity

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The other day I heard an interview with Woody Allen on Terry Gross’ Fresh Air (wink to you, Laurie). She asked him if he cared what people thought about his choice to leave Mia Farrow and marry their adult adopted daughter Soon-Yi.

“I don’t want to say I don’t care,” he answered, “because that sounds bad. But I also have to say that it’s impossible to live an authentic life if you make decisions based on what other people think.”

This is, of course, not a new idea. He’s reiterating a concept that many philosophers have explored, such as Osho, David’s current favorite. We all grow up with ideas we learn first from our parents, then from our schools, churches, friends and lovers. Becoming an independent adult is partially the process of learning to separate who you are from what everyone wants you to be. It’s not easy to decide you disagree with what everyone around you thinks. It’s comforting to be one with the group, where everyone approves of what you say. It’s tempting to say only those things that will garner approval. And yet, you trade personal authenticity for that approval. If you do only those things that others will agree with and approve of, you end up living the life other people think you should have. In essence you lose your life to other people’s ideas.

It’s like Aesop’s Fable “The Man, the Boy and the Donkey,” which bears repeating here. (There’s a great site http://aesopfables.com/ that has over 655 fables online with a searchable index. The site also notes that “Mr. Carlson at http://aesop.creighton.edu/ has over 3,000 books of Fables. They are all fully cataloged with much information about each and the catalog is online however he does not have any fables online.”)

A Man and his son were once going with their Donkey to market. As they were walking along by its side a countryman passed them and said: “You fools, what is a Donkey for but to ride upon?”

So the Man put the Boy on the Donkey and they went on their way. But soon they passed a group of men, one of whom said: “See that lazy youngster, he lets his father walk while he rides.”

So the Man ordered his Boy to get off, and got on himself. But they hadn’t gone far when they passed two women, one of whom said to the other: “Shame on that lazy lout to let his poor little son trudge along.”

Well, the Man didn’t know what to do, but at last he took his Boy up before him on the Donkey. By this time they had come to the town, and the passers-by began to jeer and point at them. The Man stopped and asked what they were scoffing at. The men said:”Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for overloading that poor donkey with you and your hulking son?”

The Man and Boy got off and tried to think what to do. They thought and they thought, till at last they cut down a pole, tied the donkey’s feet to it, and raised the pole and the donkey to their shoulders. They went along amid the laughter of all who met them till they came to Market Bridge, when the Donkey, getting one of his feet loose, kicked out and caused the Boy to drop his end of the pole. In the struggle the Donkey fell over the bridge, and his fore-feet being tied together he was drowned.

“That will teach you,” said an old man who had followed them: “Please all, and you will please none.”

I think we’ve all been there. We all want to please everyone. We want to be approved of and loved. But the price for that is your authentic self.

Yesterday someone posted a comment on my blog post: “The I’s definitely have it in this blog followed closely by the Me’s.” Because someone didn’t like what I said, they went for an anonymous personal attack. They’re implying that my ideas are a result of egotism, elitism or self-absorption. This is a classic way to attack a person who expresses ideas one doesn’t like. Instead of arguing the ideas, the person who disagrees expresses personal disapproval. I’m meant to feel bad about myself, that I’m thinking about myself instead of agreeing with the group.

Anyone who clicks on “View My Stats” can see the anonymous poster’s IP address is in David’s hometown. There’s quite a few hits from that part of the world on this particular post, which is not surprising since I talked about the differences in the high school educations David and I received and whether that means anything.

I’m not sure that it does mean anything. There’s a big part of me that believes it shouldn’t matter in our lives, what kind of education we get or what kind of background we come out of. I believe anyone can make themselves into whoever they want to be. Of course, that comes back to authenticity.

But if a big city high school education is better than one at a rural school, doesn’t that bear examining?

Kathyrn Mostow’s song and video are based on the well-loved Margaret Mead quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Thoughtful, because you have to think past what everyone has already agreed to. Committed, because it takes courage to speak those thoughts and suggest that maybe the staus quo isn’t quite as perfect as everyone wants to believe it is.

I have great admiration for Penelope Trunk’s courage. The other day she posted on her blog, which has over 36,000 subscribers, that she had two abortions. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, anyone with any sense of the world has to acknowledge the courage it took for her to lay the issue open with her personal experience. Many people will not approve of her. But there are things more important than seeking approval.

Talking honestly and openly about the world and what needs changing, might be a good place to start.

The Company We Keep

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David tells people I went to a “big high school.”

This is a matter of perspective, of course. His high school class had just under 100 people and mine had just over 400. Multiply that by four grades and you get an idea of our schools. His school was in a small town in Wyoming and served students bused in from neighboring towns and communities; some of his classmates traveled more than an hour to school. Mine was one of three in the school district, in a metropolitan area with a slew of school districts. All of my classmates lived within a few miles of the school.

I went to college with kids who came from graduating classes of over 1,000, so I know my school was not big, in the grand scheme.

To David’s family and hometown acquaintances, though, I grew up in the big city and went to a large school, with all of the attendant vice, crime and trouble that implies to certain small town folk. Yet, when we compare stories, it was David’s classmates that got into all the trouble. Granted, I was a goody two-shoes and hit high school in the early 80s compared to David’s mid-70s. Still, I think the small town life drove them to more shenanigans than I ever heard about in my cohort.

My mom bought our house for the school district. It was supposed to be one of the best in the country and all three of my schools, elementary, middle and high, were brand new. David’s education was what the town offered. The school was hardly any kind of magnet.

We went to David’s 30th class reunion not long ago and he vows never to go to another. Many of his friends had become their parents, living the same lives, moving from one blue collar job to another. He was depressed for days afterward. I was the big-city girlfriend — only a couple of people wanted to talk to me.

I’ve been reconnecting with my classmates on Facebook. And they’re all doing such interesting things. Here’s the latest, a lovely music video by Kathryn Mostow. She’s really good.

It makes me wonder — was the school really that much better? Was it the city and all the stimulation that it has to offer? Perhaps we were in a rarified environment, so that our school drew kids from the kinds of parents able to buy houses in those neighborhoods where David’s school pulled in everyone from that section of a sparsely populated and rural state.

I’m not supposed to talk about these things, I know. I’m supposed to value the beauty of the simple life David’s cohorts have chosen. We all choose what is valuable about our own lives. And yet, one friend is paying the equivalent of college tuition to give her son and daughter a private school education, to give them every advantage. Private schools wouldn’t exist if people didn’t believe the quality of education makes a difference.

You don’t have to have it, a great education, to raise yourself up. David has done a great deal with his life and will do more. Of course, he also reads all the time. Studying to improve himself. Like my grandfather, the farm boy who got his education at the public library.

I suppose some people are handed things that others have to fight for.

June Brides

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We have several weddings in the next month. Tis the season.

Not just for us, either. A friend IM’d me today to ask what I thought was an appropriate amount to spend on a wedding gift, given the particular relationship with the bride. And yes, I’m intentionally referring only to the bride, because this seems like a female system of balances to me.

Even if the groom helps with the registry, the suggested gifts tend to be household items. In some cases I’ve seen wedding registries that are clearly more male-influenced (read: lots of camping gear), or that reflect that a more mature couple has already acquired all the kitchen appliances they could ever use (read: extensive presence of techno-toys). However, even in our liberated era, I know the percentages of who is looking up the wedding registry and choosing the gift.

Yeah, this is almost always a girl thing.

Thus, for David’s nephew’s wedding this summer, it was me who called the bride to find out where she is registered. She didn’t know who I was at first. Not surprising since we’ve met only at family events and have never talked on the phone. She right away said she didn’t want us to feel obligated to send a gift. Which was absolutely the right thing to say. Then she said she hadn’t registered anywhere, but maybe should because I wasn’t the first person to ask. But she hadn’t had time to drive to the next town to do it. Obviously I’m not a close relation or friend, but I felt compelled to tell her she should get online and register. David’s sister was looking for the registry, too. I told the bride that the family wanted to give them gifts, to get them started in their new lives. I brushed away her protestations that they have everything they need, since I know perfectly well it’s not so. They’re in their mid-twenties, going to college and have a little girl. I stopped short of telling her this was part of the point of getting married. By the end of the conversation she was convinced and I felt like the militant aunt.

We’ll get them a nice gift. “We” as in David and I will split the cost and I will pick it out. We give nicer (read: more expensive) gifts to the poorer couples. For another young friend’s wedding we went a little higher than usual, because they need it. Not like women in Africa need medical care, but nonetheless.

I counseled my friend on IM to go lower in price, which turned out to meet her own sense of what she should send. It’s funny, how we talk to each other to work it out. To make sure we’re doing the appropriately supportive thing.

Now I have to go look and see if the nephew’s bride followed my advice and registered.

Being Mindful

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I notice the way my mind works has changed over time.

Is that odd? And no, it’s not a dementia thing, as some snarky individuals have suggested. I notice it mostly with writing and I suspect it’s a product of the last two years of concentrated fiction writing. Not just fiction but the fantastic kind. (As in fantasy, though I hope it’s also excellent.)

What I notice is I have homonym issues more lately. I type “no” instead of “know.” I recently did “knight” instead of “night.” Bizarre replacements where I know perfectly well what the word is, but something in my head replaces it as I type. This always happens when I’m creating, typing in a blur of speed to get the scene on the page.

There’s an amazing book that my mother discovered and gave to me. (There, that makes up for saying I only planted St. Joseph to shut you up!) It’s called My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor and is about a brain scientist’s experience with a devastating left hemisphere stroke. The book is easily the best I’ve ever read for a firsthand account of the difference between left and right brain thinking. I’m a brain scientist myself, in my winding educational/career path, and Taylor made me understand all the rules I knew about division of labor in the brain.

What the book affirmed for me, is that creativity comes out of the dreamy right brain. That side is timeless, non-linear, unconcerned with rules and boundaries. The left brain is the one that tracks how long it takes to cook a hamburger and reminds me of my lists of things to do, and what order they should be in.

I was discussing the revision process with two writing friends lately. The essayist proposed that revision is simply like refining a grocery list, such as moving items in similar parts of the store into the same group. The fiction writer agreed somewhat, but emailed me a picture of her dining room table arrayed with notecards for her current novel: her book in spatial form.

I stymied all further discussion by trying to describe how it felt to me these days. Lately my novel feels like a glass globe I hold in my head. I tweak the colors inside, moving the shapes and swirls around.

Very right brain, I suspect.

Thus, the homonym thing. My right brain doesn’t care for the letters, only the sounds and shapes. My essayist’s left brain writing gets engaged more now in revision. Even then I find myself sinking into the globe’s spell. I’m supposed to be reading out loud, to hear the voices. Sometimes pages go by and I realize I’m altering in silence, absorbed in the colors.

Dreaming.

A Place for Our Stuff

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We began packing it all in this weekend.

As instructed. It seems there’s a minor denotative difference between packing up and packing it in, but the sense of retreat seems the same to me. And it does make a difference to begin packing ourselves up. The move seems really real now. After more than a year of planning, of applying to schools, of applying for visas, of buying houses even: filling the cardboard boxes with my stuff really brings it home.

I’ve lived in Laramie now longer than I’ve lived anywhere. Certainly longer than I’d planned to. I’ll just hit 21 years by the time we load the moving van. Long enough for anywhere, really. It’s a bigger stretch for David who’s never lived outside of Wyoming in his whole entire life. For those at home keeping score, that’s 50 years. He’ll be the first among five siblings to move out of state, too.

My moves before seemed so much simpler, first dictated by the waxing and waning of the academic cycle. Then it seemed I packed up and moved from one grad student dig to another. There was a simplicity to my life then, when I could load pretty much all of my possessions into a Honda Accord hatchback.

Moving excites the desire to return to that. As I contemplate moving each item, its relative value gets weighed against the space it takes up, the gasoline cost to transport it, the theoretical space it might occupy in the future. Right now, a lot of it seems not all that valuable.

I’ve been posting to Freecycle a lot. What a wonderful thing it is! Within an hour it’s gone. To someone who will actually use it, too. A blessing, truly.

The houses in Victoria have no storage to speak of. Our new house has a five-foot high storage space on the lowest level. I hesitate to call it a basement. Less than a basement, more than a crawl space. Our realtor enthusiastically pointed it out as a place to keep our Christmas decorations. I didn’t add, “and all the other stuff I’ve been dragging from place to place since college.”

When people ask us why the houses in Victoria don’t have basements, we waffle. David says, “because the island is a huge hunk of granite.” I repeat what our realtor said, “they just don’t.”

Maybe, really, it’s because they don’t have so much stuff.

Men’s Men

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I’m coming out of the closet and declaring to the world: I really don’t like Football Guys.

This is not to say that some of the men in my life haven’t played football, on official school teams, even. But I feel safe to say that they were not Football Guys (Hominus footballis).

This morning there was a pack of them at the Starbucks counter. Wearing their Cowboy football outfits, hulking shoulders straining the shirts, coach-type guys in civilian clothes yukking it up with them. They surveyed the world with macho good spirits, believing they are the gods of their doman. Oblivious to the irony of the caramel macciatos (macciatoes?) cradled in their large hands.

I can’t really explain why they irritate me.

Maybe it goes back to those formative years of high school. The Football Guys were my antipode: the popular brawn to my outcast brain. They lumbered through the halls with witless, charming smiles, sure of their place in the world. A place won through size and aggression.

Both of my men who once played football didn’t stick with it and bailed before the later years of high school, which I think demonstrates their enormous good sense. David quit because of the physical damage. And because basketball was more fun. He still has neck problems from ramming himself into those tackling dummies. Kev will probably argue with me about this post, but he bailed for theater in the end, which was infinitely sexier to me.

I know there are the gals who go for the Football Guys. But I was never one. I wasn’t much of a cheerleader, either, and bailed on that after my twelve-year-old go at it. Chanting and doing the hokey-pokey while the boys played just didn’t seem like that much fun. Especially when the angry male coaches yelled at us for being in the way.

I suppose the Football Guy epitomizes to me everything that is unattractive in the male. Where men vilify the extreme female: the vanity, the irrationality, the emotional manipulation, I dislike the brutality, the extreme competitiveness, the machismo-fueled ego. I know football players can be smart men, but I think that’s not a part of themselves they’ve chosen to develop. Truly, not all football players become Football Guys.

It’s interesting to me that American football hasn’t really caught on with the rest of the world. It remains a sport that is uniquely ours. One wonders why that would be. Why we’re the only culture that thinks it’s neat.

Why are we the ones stuck with the Football Guys?

Letting Go

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No, we haven’t sold our house yet.

Amazing how many people ask us that. On an astonishingly regular basis. I’m getting to the point where I want to say, BELIEVE ME, I will announce it to the world when we get an offer! I really feel for those women whose family and friends ask “Are you pregnant, yet?” We know you love us, support us, want only the best for us. But really, you are not helping.

At some point you’re doing everything you can and you just have to wait.

Here we are: waiting.

Today we stopped by our real estate agent’s office though. Dropped in on her after lunch. She’s so fabulous that she doesn’t care. She’s the best in town. I implicity trust in everything she’s doing.

“We just came to nag,” I tell her. “So you can tell us not to worry.”

And Donna hesitates at this point. I’m sure she’s going to tell us to worry. That she’s lost confidence. Maybe stopping in to see her wasn’t such a good idea.

“I don’t want you to think this is freaky,” she says, and hesitates.

Okay, “freaky” isn’t “you’ll never sell your house in this market.” I’m betting she’s going to suggest we bury the St. Joseph upside down in the back yard and I’m opening my mouth to tell her we already did, if only to shut my mother up.

“But there is no reason your house isn’t selling,” she says. “The gardens are gorgeous right now. When we show the house, it just shines. Everything is perfect. You should have an offer by now.”

She takes a breath.

“What I want you to do is think about letting go.”

She goes on to tell us a few stories: the woman whose house wouldn’t sell in the hottest market ever, until her dog died and she confessed relief, because she’d been sure the dog would never survive the move; another woman whose completely updated house could not be sold and who emailed or called Donna every day telling her how no one would want it and it would never sell.

“I can’t explain it,” she says, “but I’ve seen it happen, over and over.”

Donna, freaky theory or no, is likely right on. When we first put the house on the market, I wrote a blog about how much I hated it. We have loved this house. Loved, loved, loved it. (Note my dutiful use of past tense.) We knew it was our ideal house the first time we saw it. We loved every minute of living here. We wouldn’t sell it, if we weren’t moving away.

But we ARE moving away. Away to Canada, to British Columbia, to Victoria. To a beautiful new house that we’ll love living in. It’s time to let this one go. It belongs to someone else now — we just don’t know who yet.

To prove it, this weekend we’ll start seriously packing. We’ll take our favorite stuff down off the walls and box it up. I’m depersonalizing. Withdrawing myself from the lathe and plaster, from the original wood trim and leaded glass. The reflecting pond we made, with its carefully balanace ecosystem, will delight someone else. I’m trading it all in for our new life. My pound of flesh. It’s a price I’m willing to pay, a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

My life lately is all about cutting, have you noticed? Not my forte at all.

But I’m getting good at it. Let it all go. What remains is the best part.

Where the Deer and the Antelope Waddle

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Lots of whining lately about all the rain.

Understandable. It gets old. Those of us in the sunny West rely upon our average of 330 sunny days each year. The last two weeks of nearly unceasing rain has people making grumbling remarks about Seattle. They also make absurd statements like “Since when did Denver get a monsoon season?” This from people I went to high school with. Who have lived in Denver for 40+ years. They should know better.

Before the drought, our Junes were always cool and rainy. They’ve forgotten.

Memories are short. And subjective experience seems to be the shortest. We’ve been in a drought for ten years now. An entire decade. Did you remember it had been that long. I didn’t — I’d been saying eight years. Now I’m wondering which two years I lost… At any rate, this decade-long drought in the western states has exceeded the infamous Dust Bowl.

Nobody seems to know this.

Of course, we don’t have the icons of that drought. The enormous dust clouds. The ragged people fleeing the farms to wander the cites with their belongings on carts. Technology allows us to irrigate, to control the flows of the rivers, to truck in water. Instead of losing livelihoods, our urban lives are impacted by hot, sunny days, perfect for recreation.

Now people are saying they miss the drought. They’re right — there isn’t much of one at the moment. (That link updates weekly, so if you’re reading this later, the map might be different. But what it shows as of June 9, 2009, is small patches of abnormally dry soil in the West and huge swathes of soil with normal moisture — it’s a miracle, really.)

It was like this, in the before time. I remember the summer I turned 16. I babysat for two kids and we would ride our bikes in the chilly rain to their golf and tennis lessons. When I was young, I used to write in my books the date I finished them. (No, I don’t know why.) I finished Little House in the Big Woods on June 8, 1974 and I noted that it was snowing. With an exclamation point. Cold and rainy, yes — even then snow in Denver on June 8 was remarkable.

Of course we’re all tired of the rain. We want to sit on our patios. We want to play in the mountains and soak up the western sunshine. We’ve had enough of cold and want summer already.

But in all the wanting for the warmth, let’s take a moment to give thanks for the rain.