Retrospective

It has been five years since I last saw Kathleen. Five years! Five years since we started this blog. Five years since we, having left our protective cocoon, discovered and found new protective cocoons – each different from North Carolina, each different from each other. To celebrate this development, I have been going through the first year's entries, when each of us spent lots of time marveling at the quirks of Brooklyn and Denver.

Because I am me, and because I can see my words and remember what I felt like no other can, I look at the things I wrote four and five years ago (especially this one) and I just want to give myself a great big hug.

I so resisted falling in love with Denver. Why? I had always felt like an outsider in my home state, though I tried so hard the last few years to assimilate, to want what I thought I was supposed to want. The truth is, I tried so hard to want what my mother wanted for me, ignoring the fact that they were not one and the same. She wanted for me what she had for herself, which was wonderful for her but ill-suited for me. When I left, I missed my family terribly, and I worried about my mother. She loved her grandchildren so much – what right did I have to take them away? Anxiety dogged me for so much of that first year, even though as I look back, I made some of the best friends I've ever had. (One is featured prominently here, another here.) Truth is, my relationship with Denver changed the minute I saw this house. It was as if, in a swirling instant, so much about my life made sense, much as it did when I met the Denver friend to whom I refer in the same post. I had never been sure of my destiny until that moment – hell, I hadn't even believed in destiny. Suddenly, my whole belief system and outlook on life changed. My roots grew deep, in an instant.
When my mother became sick, and then died, I found my refuge in the relationships I developed in Denver. I never would have thought that, after only a couple of years, these friends would be the ones to nurture me and support me. But I found myself feeling like a wrung-out visitor in my longtime home, and when I was there, I longed to run toward support and comfort.

Recently, the kids and I were in Denver. It felt as if we had never left. Where immediately I felt like a visitor in North Carolina, I felt like I had come home. And I didn't want to leave. Little more to say than that.

What news can I bring you from outside the deep? I feel as if I got everything I once thought I wanted – the manicured house, the subdivision – long after I had ceased to want it, and found that I was right: This is not for me. I have no regrets, only a burning desire to get back what I had. (I am grateful, at least, that I knew while I had it that it was exactly what I wanted.) My God, how I wish this could be me right now. Maybe it will be two years on, if I make it here two years. (Robin to God: Please, no. No, no, no. Get me out of here.)
I have found little that entrances me, little that has moved me to wonder and joy (the excitement and adventuresomeness of a new and very different home is what drove many of those early writings, even though you never could have gotten me to admit it). Mostly, I find I want to sit inside and look deep, deep within, looking for answers, looking for a way home -- looking, in desperation, to make myself an island. I wish I had better news.

If there is one thing that has saved my life here, it's the library. That's my second home. I read compulsively. I look for answers to all my questions. I resolve that this will be my ashram period, that I will find joy in the internal. It's happening. I hope I will be able to look back on this period and find that I am a better person, more in tune with myself and more grounded, feeling more rooted to the world and all its creatures. I read about voice exercises. I will return to Denver a better singer – this I know, because I already am. I can jump off performing cliffs now and sing in front of thousands, because I really don't care what they think about me. Having released this attachment from what anyone thinks of me, ever, anywhere – sometimes even assuming that I will be disliked -- is liberating in a kind of oddball way. And yet, because it reminds me so much of my childhood home, I kind of feel like I'm in high school again, and who wants to repeat that?

A few nights ago, for the first time since my childhood, I dreamt about The House. Happy times with family and friends, spent here. This house means something to me. Is it my past? Is it my future? Will I ever know? Does it matter? After this dream, I took a leap and told a Denver realtor friend about it, asked him to keep an eye on it for me, tell me what he can find out about it. "If you can help me get this house," I told him, "you have no idea how grateful I will be. This is my lifetime house." May it be so.

A final Aarone update

Closure, not that it feels any better.

Crying out in our weakness

Hello again!

Maybe it’s that I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, or that I’ve broken too many bones to enjoy weeks on end of rain, with nary a clearing, or the fact that I’ve probably been listening to Sufjan Stevens’ “Illinoise” album far too much; but today, for some reason, sitting here in greater Chicago, I’m thinking of tragedy.

Every place has little tragedies all the time – ah, life and the world, what cruel tricksters you can be! But what I’m talking about is the kind of flashy, epic horror that seeps into the consciousness and bubbles from the collective soul of a city, or a nation, and how we deal with that.

A mile up in the sky, they are still talking about Columbine. Like group therapy, people talk, and the news talks, and everyone talks about how two boys, alienated and angsty, suppressed and suppressed until, finally, there was a terrible eruption that killed kids; and killed everyone’s souls, just a little. To this day, say the word “bully” in a Denver school, and about 30 teachers and counselors will try to stage an intervention. It’s a red, angry scar; and the Front Range cries out in its weakness, to paraphrase Rumi, hoping that putting its greatest pain in the open will make its kids destined never to repeat it.

It’s in stark contrast to how Chicago’s northwestern suburbs (where I live) handle their own epic tragedy: John Wayne Gacy, Jr. I don’t know if it’s because more time has passed (he was executed five years before Columbine happened) or because the details of his crimes are so particularly chilling. But somehow, this didn’t even dawn on me until a few weeks ago, when one of my husband’s co-workers pointed out the restaurant where Gacy worked as a chef, only a couple of blocks from the office. Who knows whether he met any of his victims there? Whether their families still dine there? Whether they’ve been my husband’s customers? Who knows? People don’t talk about it. It’s as if, by burying it, it will go away forever; and maybe everyone will wake up one day and find that it never happened, that it was a nasty dream or a late-night movie and that there is, in fact, no scar at all.

I wonder how it is in Milwaukee, home of Jeffrey Dahmer, only an hour and a half from here?

I think there is a Midwestern tendency toward stoicism that leads people here to try to cover that scar through whatever might hide it. There is a value placed upon keeping one’s head up and lip stiff, of riding out the storm. It’s admirable, I suppose, and yet … I can’t help but worry that people will suppress and suppress until, one day, we will be helpless in front of the next terrible eruption, whatever it may be.

Happy New Year

Today I was taking the 2 train to work in the early afternoon, a not very crowded train at this time, when a Hasidic man in the usual frock coat, and with a red beard, appeared, passing out a pamphlet titled "L'Chaim" ("The Weekly Publication for Every Jewish Person -- Dedicated to the Memory of Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka Schneerson"). Being even more inclusive than the subtitle promised, he gave a copy to everyone in the car, including me, which is why I am able to post it now.

But it was what happened next that tested my resolve as a New Yorker to never stare.

"Are you Jewish?" he asked the young man sitting one indentation away from me on the same side of the car. Apparently getting a silent assent (I wasn't staring) he put down a plastic bag of something on in the indented space-seat between me and the young man. Still standing, he swiftly drew out of the bag the little ribbon thing, wrapped it around the surprised young man's arm, said some things in Hebrew (as I suppose), pulled out the little boxy thing, placed it on the man's head, and said some more things in Hebrew (as I suppose). Then he disentangled the apparatus of worship, packed it up again, and announced to the car generally:

"The Messiah is coming....very soon! Let us all do good things in the meantime."

All this, between Chambers and 14th Street!

"Happy New Year!" he said. And was gone.

Governor's Island!

We finally went, after wanting to for years.

It is enchanting, strangely peaceful, a ghost town in the middle of the sea, gently decaying, leafy, mysterious. I want to return.

Olive With Her Friend Ziggy

Ziggy is a wire-haired fox terrier male, rather in need of trimming. He is gone to Brazil for the summer with his person, so this accidental meeting in the park was their goodbye for a while. Under the fuzzy fur, he is shaped quite like Olive. We always joke that they would have had beautiful children together. But whose hair would they have inherited?

News from the deep

There’s a reason why fish-out-of-water TV shows get stale after a season or two. We, as a species, are marvelously adaptable. We might be pulled, flailing, out of the water and set under a foreign and relentless sun; but, eventually, we spot the water and fling ourselves back in. It is our way. We find new hiding places, new schools of fish to keep us safe. We get comfortable. From a thematic perspective, there’s just not much to say about comfort. And so some of us, who write so prolifically about being fish out of water, feel little compulsion to tell the world: “Come on in. The water’s fine.”

All this is a roundabout way of saying that which I would not have thought possible in 2005: I went native. It’s all Denver’s fault. It was too friendly – I made my first friend the day I moved in. She was the first, but she certainly wasn’t the last. I have had more “made family,” as one member calls it, than I have had in the whole of my life. I learned about myself, and about that of which I am capable. I found my strength. I found love. I found my song. And I became addicted to seeing a new postcard scene around each corner.

Damn you, Denver. You were so inviting, so warm. So many fishies beckoned me to come in, and in time, I did. I found my voice. I laughed. I found a vast and supportive network that buoyed and comforted me through the birth of a child, the death of a parent, and three job losses. And, not to put too fine a point on it, I had one hell of a good time.

This thematically uninteresting story is coming to an end.

My husband, who has been out of work for many months, was offered a job by a business acquaintance. The job is in the suburbs of Chicago, and he is there now. In a month and a half, the children and I will follow. A hungry fish has to take the bait, even if it knows what lies ahead.

And my emotions roil. After having this amount of support, I can’t imagine who I’ll be without it. I can’t imagine singing again, or having a voice. I can’t imagine leading a group of any kind; indeed, at this point, I can’t imagine leaving the house or meeting anyone or doing much of anything. I can’t imagine wanting to. I don’t want to love another city or any more people for a while. And that thought, that I might not want to feel anything for a while, makes me sad in itself.

But I try to remind myself that we, as a species, are marvelously adaptable. It’s OK to feel sad, and it’s OK to feel numb and celebrate a victory in surviving each day. And it will be OK to be ready to feel something more than numb -- to, just maybe, find something to love about Chicagoland. Just when the sun seems at its harshest, I’ll feel water around me again. I hope.