W-w-w-arm

Today, we tie an all-time February high. Which means, of course, that it will be snowing by Saturday. Welcome to Colorado!

Barney, R.I.P.

"Hey, man, it's f----ng Don Knotts!"
"He's the coolest."
-- Hipsters studying a flea market oil painting in John Waters' movie "Serial Mom"

Barney no longer goes to Raleigh, or anywhere else, to party. Here in Denver, the news of Don Knotts' passing made nary a blip on the collective radar. But as you might expect, this, in North Carolina (where a huge statue of Andy Griffith graces the main city park, thanks to the channel TV Land), was huge. It was, in fact, front-page news today at the old hometown paper -- and written by staff, no less. It gave me occasion to shoot a note to an old co-worker/friend who was obsessed with "The Andy Griffith Show." I also had to inform him that our favorite downtown lunch eatery, Joe's Place Featuring Joe's Mom's Food (yep, that's the name), is closing next week. I was never particularly an Andyphile -- although I was always amused by Mount Airy, where you see "Mayberry Launderette" and "Mayberry Diner," among other things -- but today, on a cool, clear, Coors-commercial day in the Rockies, I feel a little more hollow.

With, without

Three hundred sixty-five days ago, I made my first post here.
I wrote that post from my house, a rambling house with a rambling yard that turned bright green in April, where I fed the robins and nuthatches and little gray squirrels tried to hoover up what was left. I had a garden, and a patio, and a pond, and a swing in the front yard just shy of the split-rail fence. We had a school that was more like a home, with friends and teachers we loved. I had a life as a county leader. We had a wide net of support -- family, longtime friends all around us. And we had money. Not a lot, sometimes not enough, but we could scrape something together.

What a difference a year makes. We have the mountains at our back step, but little else. Today my father turns sixty; and more than a thousand miles away, my family celebrates without me. We have a tiny house that costs entirely too much, with a little yard that never gets very green in this drought-ridden part of the country. We have no birds, but the squirrels are the size of small cats. We have a Dumpster. We have a school full of privileged children who are far too grown up for their own good and parents who are far too concerned with being hip to see the disservices they sometimes do their children. The organization that I led in North Carolina has grown and thrived; and I, like a proud mama, have had to stand back, let other people take over, and marvel at what it's become without me.
And money. The money that had been in our marvelous house evaporated. My checking account is embarrassingly overdrawn. We are behind on rent. I couldn't afford a present for my father's birthday. I'm sure my children will cry mutiny if they have to eat peanut butter sandwiches for dinner ever again. This has been the most miserable winter in memory.

So, if I must sit back and assess whether life is better now than it was a year ago (and frankly, I try not to), the answer is no. No. And no again. But there is one thing that has saved my life this year in this frosty place, and I find more and more that I cling to it as a rock climber to a ledge.
I have been cultivating a talent I always had for singing. I never thought it would get me anywhere, and yet it looks like maybe it will. Maybe I can get it to translate into cash. I've already gotten it to translate into something I confess I haven't felt for several years: joy. So, if you're in Denver and you hear a woman loonily singing trying to forget her troubles, maybe even crying at the same time but trying her damndest to smile, that probably would be me.

Has It Really Been a Year?

Hard to believe. I wrote the first post in Mile High Apple on February 21, 2005, sitting at this same computer, at a desk I no longer own. The view, to my right, was out the window and into the back yard. The pine tree that dropped cones and large branches on the lawn, and that I always feared would one day fall on the roof if the wind was strong enough. The garden I battled with and finally lost to. In North Carolina, I am sure, the daffodils are already out, the grass is turning green and the birds are tuning up. I miss it all very badly sometimes. The sound of the train whistle at night, people's accents, the wisteria. My friends. Having an attic to put things that I did not need right at the moment but that might be useful in the future. The illusion that I knew exactly how my life was going to be. How can I miss it all so much and yet be happy here?

C-c-c-cold

Here's something that will never work in North Carolina: Tonight, if you take a mug of boiling water outside and throw it into the air, it will evaporate. No lie. We probably will break Denver's all-time low of -9. Only in this kind of weather can a 62-degree house feel tropical after being outside.
We walked home from school today (we had to; we're watching the grrls' friend this week, and they won't all fit in the car), and two out of the four were crying by the time we made the six-block trip home. In coats, hats, ski gloves, long johns under two shirts and jeans, and snow boots. I think I got minor frostbite on one section of my body, which still stings and hurts five hours later.

Institutional Knowledge

Here's a disconcerting thing that happened today: I went to SuperTarget, that bulwark of crass commercialism where it's Christmas every Saturday -- at least, it feels like it when it comes to fighting for a parking spot. As I traveled the rows farther and farther from the door, I thought, "Jeez, I'm being pushed all the way to Mervyn's." Here's the thing: Mervyn's, a discount store, hasn't been there for months, and the space above the door that should read "Mervyn's" in huge blue letters instead is covered with a banner that says "AVAILABLE" and lists a phone number. So someone who moved to Denver today would never realize what had been in the empty big-box space next to SuperTarget.

Here's another thing that happened today. As I went through Westword, our freebie indie paper (which is far inferior to The Independent, its Triangle doppelganger), I found the following statement in a letter to the editor. This was a letter lamenting the dearth of good steak restaurants in Denver, which is slap in the middle of cow country. Here is the excerpt, with credit to Jan Nerone of Denver:
...In the quiet moments, I dream of Char-Grill. Ah, the Char-Grill. I once lived right next door to Char-Grill #1. Its beefy aroma would waft up to my loft apartment and lure me outside in my jammies to worship at the altar of the cow. Nothing brings one back to reality quite like an old-school burger and a shake so thick that it scoffs at the puny straw.
Char-Grill!!! I know exactly where Char-Grill #1 is! It's on Hillsborough Street, on the right as you come from the Capitol, just past the turn onto Glenwood Avenue toward our favorite coffee spot, Helios. Suddenly the memories of working on the night desk came back. Late-night Char-Grill runs. The lump in the throat forms.

carpe diem

An tiny elderly lady with walker on Brodway near 100th Street. Affixed to the walker, a tattered, hand-letted sign: "Impeach Bush." That's not the sort of thing you see in Raleigh! I marveled as I passed her. Or even in Cobble Hill.

I also went to Chelsea today. I don't think I was ever in Chelsea before, at least not that far west, to 11th Avenue. The cheesy congested quality of 23rd street at Seventh Avenue gives way to serenity and unpretentious-looking townhouses that probably cost a zillion dollars apiece, then, as you get closer to water, to industrial-looking spaces now being used as ultra-trendy art galleries and fashion boutiques. On the way to the New Museum of Contempary Art, I walked up Eighth Avenue from the 14th Street subway stop, a sunny cold morning, before turning onto 22nd Street, astonished by the old-fashioned-looking little stores, some with ancient Deco-looking neon, that alternated with sex shops, and thought how New York this battle is always taking place between the past and the future. How odd pieces of the old city survive, not just the grand things built for the ages, like the Public Library at Byrant Park or the Metropolitan, but the strange little scraps that nobody thinks about too much. Until one day they are gone.

Old Dog / New Tricks

The dog will be 13 in May. Since moving to Brooklyn, he has learned to jump on the dining table, even though he is only about 16 inches high, by first jumping onto the chairs. On the table, he has been known to find food, particularly bread, until we wised up and stopped leaving it there. Now he just seems to jump up on the table for the hell of it. Because he can.

Yesterday, when I went out to see friends and Jarek was working, he jumped onto the table and then off, on the way down apparently dislodging the lid of the mini galvanized garbage can where we keep his food, a few feet from the table. Discovering a bounty of dry dog food inside -- I had just opened the bag a few days earlier -- he ate his full, perhaps half the 4.5 pound bag, and then staggered off to start digesting. We were afraid this might mean another expensive midnight trip to the dog ER, but he seems OK, if a little lethargic.

And who says dogs aren't smart?