Grunge and the Goddess Girl

By Rhea St. JulienImage from the cover of In Utero

At the tender age of 12, I got my period, fell headlong into rock and roll, and unwittingly had my heart broken by the girl of my dreams. Let's start with the body. In a few short months, my skinny frame had grown a layer of downy brown hair over it, my thighs had thickened so fast I had stretch marks, and menarche arrived with such a torrent of muddy red blood that I was sure I had shit my pants. It was just my luck that I was wearing white jean shorts, at the mall, on the way to 5.9.7 from Claire’s. I tripped over my own feet rushing to the bathroom, and got the nib of the pencil I was carrying stuck in the side of my leg, which I can still see in there, 19 years later. It’s a permanent memento of that day, as if I don't already have a reminder every single month.

When I showed my mom my shitty underwear in horror, she threw a pad at me and said, "That's blood. Use this. Shower every day." That was about it. No big "Welcome to Womanhood" speech, no talk of the dreaded word "menses". My mother's unsentimental approach belied how she felt about all things woman-related (including me): they were a hassle. So, I figured it out like I did everything else, with my girlfriends. We tried to fit tampons up there, not knowing to take out the applicator, and having it all kill so bad we gave up and stuck to pads, even though they bulked out our cut-offs.

The one friend that seemed to do just fine with all things lady-bits was Lauren D'Agostino. Her long blonde hair shone as she ran full tilt down the soccer field, leaving all the boys and a few of us girls feverishly fawning in her wake. No matter how close I came, I could never catch her.

We spent hours, the two of us, in her huge attic bedroom, dancing to The Doors and Ugly Kid Joe, trying on outfits for the school dance and talking deeply about our families. The other girls in our clique could not for the life of them understand what Lauren saw in me. I was a perennial misfit, a “freak”, who got straight A’s but also had a permanent seat in the vice principal’s office. I was too everything: too smart, too wild, too loud, too poor, too fast. When Lauren dipped her Venus hand in my direction, inviting me into her inner circle, the collective population of my small town middle school took an inward breath, “HER?!” The girls we shared our lunch table with, who I can just call “The Melissas”, were positive I had stolen my place in Lauren’s BFF photo album from their shinier, worthier visages.

But there I was, despite all odds, feeding horses on her father’s farm and sipping hot chocolate he brought us in steaming paper cups. What no one understood was that since I wasn’t a friend that Lauren needed to keep up appearances with, she could really be herself with me. She was so buttoned-up in the lunchroom, attempting to keep her Queen Bee status, but with me she let herself go, trying out head banging and dressing up with me and another friend like Huey Duey and Louie for Halloween instead of a “sexy witch” like the Melissas.

I knew that I adored her, but I had no idea that I was actually in love with her, until, without a word of explanation, she dropped me. The Melissas were triumphant, noisily whispering throughout the halls about how Lauren and I were no longer, how one of the Melissas (whose name was actually Mary) had dethroned me, and how pathetic I was after all.

Absolutely certain this was all a misunderstanding, I ignored them and called Lauren’s personal telephone line, repeatedly. I imagined it ringing, pink and perfect on her trundle bed, and willed her to answer. But she never did. I wrote long missives about our friendship and how much I missed her, reminding her of all the fun times we’d had together, but there were no return notes from Lauren in my locker. She never spoke to me again. The following year, she headed off to a private Catholic school, so I blissfully did not have to see her beautiful face any longer, and be reminded of my unrequited love.

The truth is that while Lauren may have been more of herself with me, I was less and less of myself with her. I was so desperate to hold on to her that I contorted myself into her mold, pretending I liked 50’s-style boy-girl sock hop parties and banal trips to the mall, like the fated one where I bloodied my underwear for the first time. So, once Lauren broke my little 12 year old heart like a slinky stretched too far, I was free to explore my darker tendencies.

I found myself in Mystery Train Records, eyeing cassettes and CDs through my growing-out bangs, which I had to keep tossing back with a flip of my head in order to see the cover art. Music, particularly the “alternative rock” that was pouring out of Seattle at that time, fed the painful part of me that was sore over losing Lauren, and humiliated over proving the Melissas right. If had to be a loser like they thought I was, I was going to fucking rock out.

That Fall, Nirvana released In Utero, and I got on the Kurt Cobain train right before it was blown to pieces by his shotgun. With Heart Shaped Box on repeat, I yelped along, “Broken hymen of 'Your Highness', I'm left black/Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back”. I couldn’t consciously conceive of the fact that I was wishing I had broken my dear highness’s hymen myself---I sub-knew it. The fact that I didn’t just miss Lauren or want to be her like the Melissas did, but actually wanted to be in her, and rub my hands up her blondy legs was never stated, not even in my reams of diaries. Instead, I howled along to Hole, Pearl Jam, and Stone Temple Pilots in my room 3 streets away from Lauren, hoping she would hear me, pick up the phone, and ask me to crawl back into the folds of velvet-girl goodness that I was nearly received into.

V. Provence

There is a woman who sells American and English pastries at the market in the Place des Prêcheurs. She is beautiful and reminds me of the photographs I have seen of Cherokee women. For a school assignment we have to interview an aixois, someone from Aix, so one day at the market I ask her if she might be willing to talk to me about her life in the south of France. She agrees. Her name is Juliette, and we meet the following week for coffee at her favorite café on the Cours Mirabeau, the main, plane tree-lined street in Aix. She is so impressed with my French that she invites me to come to her house and bake with her later that week. It happens to fall on my birthday. Juliette makes me a cheesecake and tells me about how she spent a year in Wisconsin when she was sixteen.

“There is no better city in the world,” she says, “than New York.”

All alone, together

I got the shocking call last Sunday afternoon.  She told me that he jolted awake suddenly in the pre-dawn hours and just as quickly he was gone.  This prince of a man, this decent, loving husband and father had died.  Out of nowhere.  WHAT?  Weren’t they just . . . ?  Didn’t we just . . . ?  I struggled to process this dreadful information.  I wanted to rail against God.  I wanted to offer some words of comfort until I could get there, something trite, like “This is part of God’s plan, it is beyond our understanding.”  Of course, I didn’t believe that.  My rage would be directed at the ether.  My efforts to soothe would be built on a false premise.  I don’t believe there is anyone up there or out there. It is precisely at times like these that I desperately wish for some kind of faith.  There are people all around me who have a version of God.  This God provides a structure for living and dying, solutions to complex problems, answers (or diversions) where there are none.  I don’t have anything close to this.  I was never very good at science but it is all I have.

I used to hedge a little more when talking about this highly sensitive topic.  This was for two reasons: I was concerned about offending anyone and I had some mildly superstitious notion that I would leave the door open, just in case I should have occasion to call God into service in my own life.  As a younger woman, I talked of feeling “spiritual” and that I could imagine “a force greater than myself” in the universe.  I never really had any idea what I meant when I discussed this.  I thought it made me sound less off-putting to others but mostly, it made me less terrified of having no guiding light.  I would describe how we are “all connected,” relate experiences like seeing something extraordinary in nature and how this could grant access to the sacred world.  The truth is, I have seen the sunset over the Pacific, a baby moose in the Tetons, Halley’s Comet and a human child emerge from my own body.  In each case, I have thought, ‘What an absolutely stunning miracle . . . of science.’

The older I get, I am increasingly convinced of the randomness of life.  I do believe that everything always works out in the end, in the sense that we learn to cope with whatever circumstances bring.  What I mean when I say things like, ‘I am exactly where I was meant to be,’ is that it requires an active acceptance of chaos to get from one day to the next.  This is more of a mantra than some philosophical statement about a grand plan.

I challenge anyone to explain to a woman who has just lost the center of her life and the father of her young children that all will be revealed.  NO.  There will be no reasonable explanation and if the logic of it is outside our comprehension, then it is useless anyway.   What we can know for sure is that she will move forward very slowly, moment-by-moment, until it is less and less surreal.  The heavy boulder of pain will eventually be massaged into tiny pebbles that rattle around in her mind.  New rhythms will develop and her children will grow.  She might create a novel iteration of a family, not because this was all supposed to happen just exactly like it has, but because she will simply handle what she has been dealt.

For a long time, I wondered whether this lack of a divine center meant that I was a lost soul (lost brain?).  But I can tell you with conviction what it is that makes me found.  My family and friends (also considered family) are at the core---I live for them and with them in this life, in the here and now.  I do this not because it is written or commanded or foretold.  I do this because it is right and feels good and creates community.  I don’t need to understand the meaning of life to know that when someone is ripped from it too soon, it creates a searing pain.  I don’t require the threat of hell or a judgmental God to treat people with kindness.  I know that I should “do unto others” because I, myself, have feelings.  I also know that nobody is perfect and that when I fail as a human (often spectacularly), the person from whom I need to beg forgiveness is the person I have slighted.

In the tradition of my Jewish culture (and yes, for many people, Jewish religion), in the New Year we do a self-assessment and make a commitment to do better in the coming season.  One rationale for this is to ensure that we are inscribed in the Book of Life for another year.  The warning here is that God will only allow those to survive who have done good, been of service and been authentically sorry for ways in which they have harmed others.  This begs the question whether the people who have died this year somehow weren’t all they could be?  And you see how it begins to break down.

I do appreciate the concept of personal inventory, making genuine apologies (at least once a year) and being intentional about your humanity in the year to come.  This year I hope to focus on being even more available to this most treasured friend that has experienced devastating loss.  I won’t talk to her about God and providence.  I will talk to her about how powerful his presence was and will continue to be in this life.  I won’t talk to her about fate.  I will tell her that I know he is gone too soon and that nothing about this is just.  I won’t be equipped to provide any enlightenment.  But I will visit the kids, get down on the floor with them like he did, and keep his memory fresh for them.  I will do this because I love her and I loved him and this is what people do.

III. normandie

One summer I live in Normandie for a month. Clémence is my host sister, about to start her last year of lycée, French high school. We have just spent the past month at my home in Ohio, and now it is my turn to come with her to France. Clémence and I are the same age and height, and thrown together like this we are fast friends.

She lives with her parents, Pauline and Roger, in the countryside just outside a small town called Bernay. Their home is an old barn they spent years converting into a house. It is beautiful, all dark beams and old stone walls warmed by a fireplace that burns real wood when it gets cold, which is often, even in August.

I am given a small bedroom of my own. It is up the steep, narrow wooden steps to the attic, where the ceiling is slanted and the floors creaky. I push open the window and the view is of misty, grey-green grassy fields, scattered with cows and lined with hedges. I can see the next-door farmer baling hay from where I stand. It doesn’t look too drastically different from rural Ohio, but I find it all endlessly romantic.

When I come back to the Unites States it’s my senior year of high school. For New Year’s, my friend Liam has a party out at his house. I drink too much vodka and spend half an hour speaking French to Liam’s cat. Everyone is impressed by my accent.

I Say Goodbye, You Say Hello: A Facebook Story

By H. Savala Nolan I’m in the doctor’s waiting room. I’m on the couch during commercials. I’m waiting for my latte. I’m in bed, restless. I’m waiting for my boyfriend to get dressed. I’m in the train station. I’m lined up to board my flight. I idle, therefore, I Facebook.

In moments of quiet—moments I might use for serenity, to smell the scents and see the colors of the world around me—I grab my phone and tap the icon, a plain blue square with a friendly white “f” just slightly off center. Behold: my friends. I’m idle, but they are busy. They are fawning over baby animals, baying for blood because of politics, announcing spiritual truths, loafing in tropical sun, sitting down to the best meal ever, cataloging the day’s humdrum  triumphs and defeats, staring alluringly into the eye of a camera, getting engaged, having children, praying over dying aunts and granddads. Despite myself, and despite how over-stimulated, drained, or jealous  it can leave me, I log on. I can’t seem to help it.

Everyone is ambivalent about Facebook. How can we not be? Status updates—the meat of the log-on—do one of two things: elevate the boring, or degrade the profound. Both are bothersome. It exasperates me that some friends think hundreds of people hang on edge, craving  ruminations on how much they love coffee, every day. (And yet, the prosaic is the real juice of life, how we string our days together—why shouldn’t we honor it?) I’m uncomfortable when my friends announce the death of a relative with a stroke of text—silent, clinical, hovering in ether—transmitted to people who will read, dash off sympathy, and forget. (And yet, we know people all over the world. We can’t make 478 phone calls or address 478 letters. This is how we live now.)

But here is the real trouble with Facebook: I never talk to my best friends anymore. In high school, Louise and I sometimes chatted on the phone for 6 or 7 hours a night. We talked about seniors we pined for (their leather jackets and spiky hair and the pretty girls they dated). We talked about music (Green Day and Nine Inch Nails). We talked about diets (cabbage soup) and drinking (did we dare?) and what color to dye our hair (purple). Adulthood at 30-something renders that omnipresent intimacy impossible; she produces reality television, I practice law, we are busy and live 2,000 miles apart. But even in our roaring twenties, we still spoke almost daily. Now, after the entrenchment of Facebook, it is typical for us to go nearly a month without speaking. Recently, with aching disbelief, I realized that the sole reason I know anything about her life is because of her status updates, which tend to be pithy and unremitting, headlines refreshed every few hours as if she were a newspaper. But could that be true?  To test my theory, I blocked her from my newsfeed. A month passed. Radio silence, except for my birthday, when she called. But before that, I couldn’t tell you if she was alive or dead.

At first, confirming the fallow state of our friendship chagrined me. I felt wronged—by her. What sort of person has time to broadcast her whereabouts, food and beverage intake, disgruntled moments, workouts, and crowd-sourcing inquiries upward of a dozen times a day, but cannot find time to connect with her best friend, one on one? To be sure, this isn’t all Facebook. She and I hammer out resolutions when, periodically, I feel I’m single-handedly doing the work of friendship. Perhaps we are simply growing apart. I, of course, could have called her; but why would I? I had Facebook. And so our affinity for Facebook—the estranged, thoughtless intimacy of it—allowed the primary challenge in our incredibly important friendship to become to the substance.

Then, after a few weeks, something unexpected happened: the irritation waned, and I began to miss her. I began to miss her in a way I never did when following her every move and thought online. In fact, I couldn’t have missed her on Facebook: she was everywhere, always.

Yes, I missed her, with the fresh, affectionate curiosity that used to precede a phone call to say hello. And I realized that, despite the constant “updates,” I missed my other best friends, and some family members, too. I didn’t want the curated comic book of their lives; that’s what Keeping Up with the Kardashians is for. I wanted noise,  texture, and monogamy, not silence, a screen, and a stranger “liking” what I wrote. I wanted interjection. I wanted to hear laughter and sighs, and remember that I know some voices so well I can see the speaker’s facial expressions over the phone. I wanted to see, or at least recall, familiar bodies that take up real space. I wanted the moments of silence that come, they say, about every seven minutes in a conversation. And I wanted to hear my voice, too. I needed the grounding and fruition that comes from contact, not the bargain-basement copy that comes from interface.

So I blocked everyone I’m close to. It was a strangely anxious goodbye, as if I were strapping myself into a space shuttle, only perhaps to return. My  mom, my best friend, my boyfriend. All the inner circle, and the next-to-inner circle. Gone.

But suddenly present. Suddenly, again, real. Suddenly, again, in my awareness because they are not constantly in my face. Just like a fish can’t think about water, maybe we can’t truly contemplate—or properly love—people who are always in front of us in the most superficial ways. Good though it may be to “keep in touch” by knowing my brother-in-law ran four miles today, that news is the emotional equivalent of junk food. I don’t see my loved ones when I log on, and I feel a pang of, well, love. After a few days, I think, Hey, where are Jane and Quinn and Melissa and David? How are they? What are they doing these days? It’s like letting yourself get truly, empty-stomach, slightly-on-edge hungry; then you truly want to eat! If you graze all day, you never feel hunger, and you’re never satisfied by what you eat because your eating isn’t connected to satisfaction.

Now, if I want to know what’s up with my brother, I call. And I was surprised to discover that calling was scary. It turns out that I, a social butterfly, have developed a Facebook-induced shyness. Calling feels so forward, so direct, so daunting. But only for about a minute. Then you come to your senses. You give yourself an inward smack across the cheek, and snap out of it. Afraid to call my brother? Are you kidding? I’ve known him for 32 years, and we get along! What’s there to debate? Call. And I do. And we are, as in the old days, family. It feels great.

And there is a bonus, though it’s not one Facebook’s shareholders would be thrilled to know about: I log-on less. Much less. After all, what is there to see? The photographs of puppies that my Mom’s former best friend is currently into? The engagement news of people I never liked but was too meek to ignore when they requested my friendship? The wit and attitude as my cousin’s pals outdo each other’s comments? How entirely, intensely boring.

Especially when there is a city outside my window, and sunshine, and late-summer fruit, and music, and people. My friends, my family, and myself, to be seen and heard.

Lessons from the Hamptons...

Dearest Clara,

Summer has nearly come and gone---most people believe it ended this week.  But I still stand my ground, and will to the end, that autumn doesn’t really begin until September 21^st! So in my book, there are still summer days to enjoy in this next couple of weeks that bridge us to the cooler seasons.   People are right to some degree though, it is somehow not quite the same once you pass the Labor Day mark.

To celebrate summer’s last real weekend, we finally made a trip up to the Hamptons, on the New York Coast, visiting the friends we’ve been promising to see for two full summers now, and I’m so glad that we finally made it.  I had never been before, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  I was afraid that it would be a very long drive for a beach that would be different than what we’re used to---something crowded and full of everything we’re trying to get away from in the city---but it wasn’t that at all.  In fact, our weekend did nothing but exceed my expectations, and we’re already looking forward to that next summer invitation.  Here are a couple of things that I’ll keep in mind from this trip:

• Keep your eyes open:  Let’s face it, the Hamptons are a bit of a see and be seen kind of place.  I’m terrible at people-spotting---in Washington, senators, politicians, and world leaders pass me by nearly every day without my noticing, and celebrities in the Hamptons were no different.  If you keep your eyes open better than you mother, I bet you get some pretty cool people watching.
• Try everything on for size and find your niche:  I had mistakenly thought that “the Hamptons” were a singular destination, but it’s not so at all.  It’s a collection of small towns, each with their own distinct personality and crowd.  If it’s your first visit, give them all a try with an open mind and then settle in to the one that fits your own style.
• It’s windier on the water:  The beach alongside this coast is wide open, and the wind can pick up very quickly.  Bring layers and an extra hair elastic, and be careful as currents form in the cooler water.  But wind isn’t necessarily a bad thing, retreat to beat the heat here and who knows, you might even take a surfing lesson or two.
• Eat (and drink) local:  This little stretch of island is gifted with so much abundance, especially in the summertime, you can’t help but to want to take it all in.    Fruits . . . vegetables . . . lobster . . . fish . . . take advantage of all that’s here when you make your choices for what to make or what to pick off the menu.  Even the local rosé would give the south of France a little run for their euros.  It makes you feel more summery just having summer’s gifts right there.   Don’t be afraid to stop at the roadside stands. Those extra treats will come in handy when you find yourself interminably stuck in traffic on Route 27.
• Prepare to share:   The Hamptons are a more is merrier kind of place, just the way I like it.  There always seems to be room at a house for another overnight guest, room at the table for another couple to drop by, room for a few more on the beach blanket. If you’re staying at someone’s house, bring hostess gifts for more than you think.  Some parts of summer are best enjoyed with others and in this respect, the Hamptons nail it.

All my love,

Mom

II. paris

Leah and I have a week off from our classes at the American College Program of Provence, and we have met my friend Will in Paris. It is night, the October streets are full of people, and after drinks in the Latin Quarter we are going to see the Eiffel Tower. The métro is still running, shuffling back and forth across the City of Light those accidental Parisian revelers who are not even aware that it is Halloween, something of a peculiarity to non-Americans. I haven't been trick-or-treating since I was a kid, and don't particularly like the drunk college Halloween parties that have recently marked the holiday, but for some reason I miss just having the possibility of disguising myself this year.

The tower is still blocked from us by the tawny apartment buildings, and Leah turns to me as we prepare to cross one last street before our view is clear. She has never seen the Eiffel Tower before, never even been to Paris, and the excitement reflects in her eyes like the twinkling, spinning lights that are illuminating the city. As someone who tends to keep something of a perpetually calm exterior, I like how openly excited she gets about these kinds of things.

We are about to take our first step onto the empty road when a Frenchman on rollerblades zooms in front of me from the right. And then another, and another. Soon there is a whole crowd of them whizzing by under the golden light of the street lamps, some wearing spandex shorts, others in helmets, one is still in a suit and clutching his briefcase from work just a handful of hours before. And then there are costumes, too, lots of them for the holiday. I catch sight of a man dressed like a sandwich, and the slices of cardboard bread are so wonderfully out-of-nowhere and unexpected that I feel a pang for back home. Everyone dresses up there.

The whooshing sound of plastic wheels on cool pavement dies away as the last of the rollerbladers continue into obscurity down the street. We can finally cross, and do. We drink Heinekens by the tower---just as tall as Leah thought it would be, and glittering---and Will talks about American things in his loud, carrying voice. I find myself thinking fondly about that man dressed as a sandwich. Then we go home. Back to the hostel.

Photo by Melissa Delzio on Flickr, Creative Commons License

The Hand-off

It has been nine months and I still think about you first thing each morning.  The shower drain is streaked with the tears of 284 days.  I worry that I am forgetting you, forgetting the little things.  Then, I will reflexively feel around for you on the bed or think I hear you in the other room and I know you are embedded in the fibers.  When no one else is home, I wander over and put my hand in the clay mold that bears your name and your print.  I run over the ridges and indentations and am stung with memories of holding your hand as you slept solidly on my lap.  Every.  Single.  Evening.  For 11 years. The first day I met you we formed a quiet but immediate connection.  You tumbled my way through a flurry of sound and movement all around us.  We sat on the floor together and you nuzzled up close, warm and curious.  I tried to keep an open mind, scanned the place for anyone else to hold my interest.  But you were it.  You had my number and I had yours.

Those first months were all halcyon hazy summer.  You flopped on your belly in the dirt as I dug up weeds and planted patches of color all over the yard.  You refused to sleep alone and forced us to cozy up on the kitchen linoleum at your side or bring you into bed in the wee, small hours.  The canyon trail with the sloping hillside was your favorite sunset destination and after 10 straight hours of managing tragedy and illness, there was no better way to end my day.  You caught a bad cold early on and I sat through that birthday dinner frantically counting the minutes until I could get back home and continue nursing you through.  Nothing else mattered as much.

Nobody had ever seen anything like you.  The way you moved, the way you talked.  You could tear around the yard, scooting and leaping into the pool or settle into a nest of pillows on the couch and in either mode, you were utterly fascinating.  To a person, every one was impressed by the limitlessness with which you adored.  You wanted nothing more than to be with.  Your only enemies were balloons and footballs.  You had the most ridiculous face, defying all explanation … it made no sense.

In the later years, you happily abided five major moves, three of them cross-country.  You integrated a series of new family members and seemed to let go of your former incarnations without incident.  Everywhere we landed was home to you and every new person a comfortable lap.  You just had to get your bearings, get the lay of the land and you were off to races.  You were an inspiration to me in this way.

In the final months, you noticed my lap disappearing.  Our nightly ritual was growing increasingly less convenient but even this you soldiered through.  It required maneuvering and creativity, but you managed to nestle into new positions along the way.  Reluctantly, when there simply wasn’t the room, you opted for the second best lap in the vicinity.  I wish I had known that we were in a countdown during that time.  Or perhaps I am glad I hadn’t.  I was so busy with this other countdown, you see.

That last day was simply too much.  I was supposed to be elated and basking in the celebration of a new life.  In actual fact, I was the shell of a person.  I felt guilty for not wanting go — I truly wanted to cancel the whole thing.  But then, how do you cancel something like that?  How do you explain it to people?  ‘No,’ I thought.  ‘It’s time to start the transition.  You will regret not having marked this occasion.’  And I still think that is right, even though I was scarcely there.  It was all happening to someone else.  I look at the pictures and think, ‘Oh, she was there?  Did I talk to her?’  The only things indelibly imprinted from that day are his whispers in my ear, once to tell me it was time to go and the second time to tell me she was already gone.  I spent the car ride back telling myself it was OK that we weren’t there, that they were all surrounding her.  What a spectacle I must have been arriving at the hospital — stuffed into that silk dress, belly protruding and wild with grief.

She turned eight months today.  We half-joked that we hoped she would be imbued with your spirit, your passing converging with her birth.  I often think you would have loved her and how amazing it would have been to see you two together.  She is so delighted by everything these days, so fully engaged, she would have patted your haunches and squealed like she does with Ruby.  People kept telling me that her arrival would soften the blow of your leaving.  By all rights, the two should probably not even be comparable.  Of course they are and also not even close.  She’s on my lap constantly, much more than even you were.  She glows with your light, absolutely shares your disposition, there is no question.  Still, if you were here, you would shove her over just enough to divide the space and I would totally let you.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

There is a house---a camp, really---on a lake in New Hampshire that is owned by my husband's extended family. It houses many generations of strong women; a matriarchal household in every sense of the word. Bought in 1948 by my husband's great uncle and his wife, many of the women who now run the house during the summer and collectively supervise their kids running through the woods and swimming in the lake grew up traipsing through the same woods and swimming in the same waters. It's a family with deep roots and a well-documented tree, but one that is also made of people who have been brought in and enmeshed through skinny dips and grilled hot dogs. Stand in the kitchen long enough, and you'll hear one of the women say "did you hear about the time when..." before the rest of them break out in peals of laughter that carry down to the lake and across the water. The more time you spend here, the more clearly the ghosts materialize and give a sense of tradition to the rhythm of the day that has survived with the minimal necessary evolutions for over 60 years. Claude and Phyllis (the couple who bought camp) skinny dipping early in the morning and serving hot dogs and milkshakes for lunch; the bouncing Jack Russell terrier begging to be let in by appearing in two second intervals in the open top half of the Dutch door on the porch (after chasing a squirrel into its hole and getting his face stuck in its burrow); my mother-in-law first learning to waterski by sitting on the shoulders of her cousin as the boat pulled them both up. In these stories, the men are key players to be sure, but their narratives remain peripheral. The driving characters of the stories of camp are the women. I am weaving myself into the fabric of this family, first as a girlfriend, then a wife---a friend, a mother, an aunt. The Christmas before I married Jordy, the ladies of camp bought me a beach towel with my name embroidered on it. It was to be left here for the winters, awaiting my return each July. I took the gift as a statement: just as there was a place in the hall linen closet for my new towel, there was a place in this family for me. I've come here this week for a family vacation. My in-laws are here, and my husband has a rare break from work. This is more than a vacation, though. By coming here, I get to reconnect with women (and their kids) who I see maybe twice per year, but to whom I feel viscerally connected. They've held me in hard times, called me sister in happy times, and loved me unconditionally through both. For 64 years, the women of camp have gathered by the water, surrounded by bronzed children of various ages to discuss our lives, to discuss current events, to discuss what to make for dinner, to discuss what we're reading. We call ourselves "the ladies of the beach."

It's funny to have such a strong connection to the history of a family that is not biologically mine (in the abbreviation-language of camp, I am an NBR---a Non-Blood Relative). In many ways, I think that spending time with Jordy's family on land that they have shared for so long binds me to his family in a more raw and fundamental way than any other could. I learned to water ski the same way and in the same water that my husband and his entire family learned; my daughter jumps off the same rocks that my mother-in-law jumped off as a little girl, and we all make a daily pilgrimage to the ice cream shop where 2 generations have worked during the summer. The oldest of the third generation will be old enough to continue the tradition next year, and we are all eagerly awaiting her employment (though our waistlines may disagree). Connecting with Jordy's family this way encourages me to love him (and them) even more deeply, and in a sense for more time. Though my time moving forward is limited, I feel like with each summer here, I get time both in the present, and also in the past. It's a richer, augmented experience when you're layering summer on top of summer on top of summer. I recently picked up The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home by George Howe Colt. It's a story of a summer house, like this one, and the family that inhabits it. I just started the book, but I love the way that the house and the land are intertwined with the family and its history. The author's memories of his grandparents are similar to the memories that Jordy has, and likely similar to the memories that Emi will have as she grows up. It was handed to me as soon as I arrived, looking for something to read. I just finished 1Q84, and needed something to thumb through at the beach in-between discussions of the latest article in People or Frank Rich's column that morning. Reading is an integral weft in the social fabric of the ladies at camp. We love books, we love to read, and we love to talk about what we're reading. Here's a sample of what's made an appearance at the beach this week. If some of the reviews seem short, it's because I made people tell me what they were reading as they were running through the house on their way to the beach, the grocery store, or to watch the Olympics (the only time, save for the U.S. Open, that the television is allowed on).

Lulu, 65 The matriarch of this house, Lulu, has made it her business to extend her family. She is the wife of Claude and Phyllis' younger son, John, and is at the center (though some days she would like to be removed from it) of camp life. A fellow only child, Lulu's philosophy is that there are always enough beds, and we can always make dinner stretch to accommodate a few more. Lulu is an honorary grandmother to most of the kids here, and is an honorary mother to all of us. She is the grandmother who waterskis and swears like a sailor and finishes the crossword in the Sunday Times, and she makes it her business to keep alive the history of camp (and with it, her husband's family). When you come to camp, you inevitably hear the stories of this place, and Lulu is often the one telling them. Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichel "I love it. It's a memoir of her childhood with a very crazy mother and how food became so important in her life. She comes from a really crazy family, and she just by happenstance gets connected to a family that loves food, and she discovers that when the world isn't working well, you can make a good meal and all is suddenly right with the world."

Nancy, 70 Nancy's husband, Ricky, was raised with John, Lulu's husband. Both of their fathers were off fighting in WWII, and their mothers, Dot and Phyllis, moved in together. Both nurses, they were best friends, and each had two boys. They got double coupons and worked opposite shifts so that while one worked, the other watched all of the children. They shared jobs---Dot hated darning, so Phyllis did that, but Dot did all of the maintenance. The husbands were in the same medical corps in Italy. Ricky's family used to rent the camp next door when Claude and Phyllis bought this camp, and Nancy first came up to the lake when she and Ricky became engaged.

Nancy, through sheer luck, stayed up here the summer that I brought newly-born Emi to camp. She would rock Emi as Emi screamed and screamed, and she would sit with me through the seemingly never-ending nursing sessions telling me stories of her own family, in and out of which members of our family would dance. Asked about her favorite things about camp, she says, "The thing that always struck me was the intergenerational thing, the cocktail hour with the great grandparents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and kids, sharing stories and sharing time. All of the ages and stages and kids, and everyone just kind of took care of their own kids and other kids---kind of like how it is now. Oh, and coming down to the beach with all of these very professional, intelligent, highly educated women sharing stories from smutty magazines."

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy "It's a book that I never in a million years thought I would read (even though I'm an English teacher), but my book club decided they would do it. I am fully immersed in it. The first 100 or so pages were difficult just because of the many characters and getting the names straight (and feeling intimidated by the fact that it's War and Peace). But once you get over that, Tolstoy is so fluid and so all-encompassing and he understands human nature and the big picture so well, but he includes detail to make it seem here and now. The writing is a narrative, so you read it for a story, but you also get a sense of the history and the philosophical and ethical issues that people thought about at that time in Russia (and even now): the nobility and the peasants; why people go to war. You're also brought back by the everydayness of the characters that he creates, and they become real. It's a great read. We were supposed to read 200 pages and meet and read another 200 pages, but I've almost finished it because I've become so involved with it."

Emily, 37 Emily and I became fast friends when she started dating Jordy's cousin, Evan (Lulu's son). She is one of the funniest people I know. She was married here at the lake, and I was one of her bridesmaids. She returned the favor for me when I married Jordy. Her daughters, 4 1/2 and 2 years old, sandwich Emi in age, and the three of them are quite a sight to behold when they are galavanting together on the beach. Emily now does the Sunday crossword with Lulu, and she's the only person I know who can beat Jordy at Scrabble.

"I just finished Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn. I loved it up until the very end, but I couldn't put it down---I was sneaking reads during work. It was a page turner, and you didn't know what was happening. It was a good mystery, and how you felt about the characters changed throughout the book at different points. I read The Art of Racing in the Rain at the beginning of the summer. It's written from the point of view of a dog---[she looks at me raising my eyebrows and goes, "I know, but it's really good."] the dog is this smart being, but because of how he was created (with a floppy tongue, no thumbs)---he's stuck with his thoughts and knowledge of things but no way to express himself. I just started reading Sharp Objects."

Alice and Claudia, 10 I've known Alice and Claudia (sisters, daughters of Jordy's cousin) since they were toddlers, speaking in one-word sentences and eager to investigate my shoes every time I came to their house. Watching them grow has been astonishing; if ever there were two more interesting 10 year olds, I don't know them. Alice is wonderfully imaginative and creative. This week, she made a magic wand for her brother out of a twig that she had stripped the bark off of in a striped pattern, and a vine woven around and anchored with pine sap. Claudia is thoughtful and funny and up for anything. She's also incredibly creative, and her wrists are buried in brightly colored friendship bracelets that she's made. The two sisters, along with their brother and cousins, are delighted to invite Emi to play with them, and are old enough to be able to tell her stories when she's older about her first years here.

Alice The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman, Meg Wolitzer "It's about this dude who plays Scrabble, and he has a power in his fingers to read things with his fingertips. They're in a tournament in Florida. I got it for my birthday from Grandma and Grandpa. It was on the Chautauqua reading list."

Claudia The Son of Neptune, Rick Riordan "It's the second in a series the Heros of Olympus, which is the sequel series to the Percy Jackson series. It's about a boy, Percy Jackson, who's memory is taken by Hera/Juno, and he loses 8 months of his life with the wolf Lupa and her pack, learning to fight. Then he leaves the wolves and journeys to the Roman demigod camp and he's originally from the Greek demigod camp. I read the first one in the series and it was about a boy, Jason, who gets the same thing but goes from the Roman camp to the Greek camp, and he has to unite the camps before the prophesy can come true. It's so good, I've read it seven times."

After a bit of questioning, Claudia admits she's read it seven times because she's already read (or can't find) the other books in the top of the boathouse, where the girls sleep. I promise to take her to town tomorrow to get a new book to read at the local bookstore. She'll read it and give it to her sister and cousins---I imagine that it will end up in one of the bookshelves in the house, waiting for Emi to grow into it. As for our trip into town, I can't promise anything, but it will likely include an ice cream cone. I know all too well that in a blink, Claudia will be old enough to drive herself, and in another one old enough for me to take her kids for her while she catches a moment to read on the beach.

YWRB: Dare

By Amy Turn Sharp I always pick dare.

Truth or Dare?

I am game. Game on.

Let's do this thing. I will get naked. I will kiss you madly.

I will run through the streets screaming.

Whatever. Why?

I think it is because it is easier than letting you inside of my mind. Inside of all the scary truths I carry like coins.

I think it's important to find your other side of the coin, the people who always pick truth.

They are not weanies. They are powerful totems.

Find them and hold them like lovers.

Teach each other how to be passionately truthful and daring.

Most of us are lacking in one side of the coin.

Truth or Dare.

Hold hands and walk into the future.

Encourage and take a chance.

It's all we've got baby.

The chance of a life well lived.

I dare you.

Future Shock

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a friend-of-a-friend, in which he essentially said this to me (and I am paraphrasing here): “You know the main reason my wife and I decided not to have children is because I think the world is falling apart at the seams and we, as a species, are doomed.  I didn’t want to saddle another generation with this mess.”   My jaw fell slack and my response was an awkwardly managed and strangely delayed “Oh, MmHmm . . .” Having rather recently procreated, myself, I am, perhaps more sensitive to the insinuation that having children might be a selfish act and one that a reasonable and humane person would sacrifice, based on the state of the planet.  And yet, I was also surprised by my initial instinct which was to reply with, “I totally hear you and I mostly agree!”  Part of the reason for the bungled response was pondering whether the mother of an infant should be concurring that having children is crazy, all things considered.  It should be established that this person works in an industry that bears intimate witness to both the real impact of climate change and the barriers to spurring governments, individuals, and cultures to reverse course.  He also described a feeling more generally that he enjoyed a measure of freedom, loved to travel, etc., but his main thesis really stuck with me.  It got me ruminating about the rationale for having children and where we are as a society—you know, nothing heavy. In some ways, despite clawing my way to motherhood against tough odds and having a singular focus about it for years on end, I can utterly relate to the idea of not wanting children.  Like any haughty adult enjoying the relative ease of life and limitless possibilities that come with a child-free future, I have fantasies of coming home at the end of the day and flitting off to a movie or hopping a plane to Bermuda.  The beginning of the end of my first marriage started with a conversation in which my ex-husband declared he had decided he didn’t want children because, “What if I want to just, like, go to Costa Rica?”  At the time, he had never traveled outside the United States, save a solitary surf trip to Mexico, and he didn’t even have a driver’s license.  But this straw man danced around in my head and the phrase “Costa Rica,” eventually became code to me for “noncommittal.”

The other problem with this, obviously, being: When was I ever a person who was able to come home at the end of the day and flit off anywhere or hop a plane to anywhere?  Let’s face facts: I plan things.  Basic work-life functions and my own overdeveloped sense of responsibility slash free-floating anxiety have basically ruled this kind of behavior out for me a long time ago.  This truly has very little to do with newly caring for a living being.  I have always been more attracted to a cozy evening curled up with magazine, husband, and domestic beast than to painting the town.  I have a knitting phase in my history, I have hosted more than one “game night” at my place . . . you don’t need further elaboration, of this I am sure.

Traveling with children is a bit more intimidating, although I do have the goal of providing as many diverse experiences as possible for my kids.  While I realize that taking a child to a place that is inhospitable, inaccessible, dangerous, etc. is no longer in the cards, (which it never was for me, either, frankly) I don’t think my only option remains a Disney Cruise.  I have lots of examples in my life of people picking up and exploring exotic places with one, two, three (!) kids, even living abroad in somewhat “colorful” circumstances.   And the people I know who have gone down this road range from families with endless resources and major job security to those working with a shoestring and cobbling together freelance gigs to make it work.  So, let’s strike that from the list.

Now on to the issue of the world and how it appears to be unraveling.  There is no denying that we are in crisis with the environment.  But, how do I know that my kid won’t be the person who develops some sensational new technology that quite literally saves the world?  I worry much more about the way our politics, culture, and social norms have degraded.  Here again, I like the idea raising a person who might contribute positively in these areas, even better than we have.  And to experience the children of our friends and family and see what lovely, tiny human beings are all around us, I am increasingly confident that we can tip the scales in the direction of progress.

There is no doubt that some element of child rearing is profoundly narcissistic.  By definition, you are creating and shaping a person and then offering that person to the world in your likeness.  This is true whether or not you have biological children.  Then again, I still submit that if all of us out here---imperfect, but kind and loving (sometimes snarky)---raise children with good hearts and strong minds, there are larger benefits than just how it makes us feel to be loved and see ourselves reflected.

Tokens

This was going to be an essay about seedlings. Those tiny starts of plants that are so aggressively green that they’re nearly glowing. I was going to write about how good it felt to plant a pot full of herb seedlings: tarragon and mint and oregano. I planned to describe how delicious the soil had smelled in our tiny apartment as I pressed tiny plants into the soil and set a newly-minted family of plants on the windowsill to get sunshine and fresh air, how plants make a city apartment feel bright and vibrant, how their own will to thrive in a crowded space can feel like a metaphor for my own. But I realized as I was writing about these things, that the story is as much about friendship. More than the tarragon or the mint, it’s about the friend who called me up to tell me she had extra seedlings. It’s about the plastic wine store bag that she filled with soil using a cardboard berry basket as a shovel.

Growing up, my mother’s friends were always bringing plants to our house. They’d pull into our driveway and throw up the back of their station wagons to unload tangled piles of Evening Primrose or Rose of Sharon that’d gotten too big in their own yards. Theirs were gifts that didn’t cost anything but the generosity of spirit that took them from one yard to another.

My childhood friendships were full of similar tokens. Sporting sweaty ponytails and scraped knees, my friends and I gave gifts with great ceremony: sea stones and turkey feathers, miniature slipper shells, and skate egg cases. More often than not these treasures came home and were tucked into corners of my sock drawer, imparting subtle hints of low-tide to my childhood bedroom. They stayed around long enough to collect dust and lose their stink, but when I went to college the rock treasures were put out in the garden and the broken bits of shell and feather were mostly swept into garbage bags and thrown away. I don’t tell this bit with any sense of melancholy. It’s not the sticking around of these tiny gifts that matters so much as the moment of exchange. The moment when one person hands off something that they think another might just find precious. My new seedlings might not make it through a week out of town, but I’ll remember the phone call and the smell of the dirt as my friend prepared a tiny present.

YWRB: What We Rebel For

By Amanda Page Essays were written. We collected them and took them to the head of the English department. We handed him our short stack and waited. We waited for his reaction, for his feedback. We stood in his office, terrified, exhilarated, proud of ourselves for taking this on, scared of ourselves for the same reason.

Maybe we wanted his approval. Instead, we received, with apprehension, a question: what does rebellion mean to you? He didn’t want to disappoint us, that much was clear. But he wanted us to understand that something was missing.

“Right now,” he said, “all I’m reading is several stories about drinking in bars and meeting boys.”

It was early in the project and we were in our early twenties. Drinking in bars and meeting boys was a significant slice of our collective experience.  He went on to say that we needed to have a point, a reason to rebel. We knew he was right, but we challenged him anyway. My memory wants to share a moment where one of us (Amy) dared him to see past the surface to what we were really saying. I don’t remember exactly, and it both kills me and relieves me. I want to say that he responded by daring us to do the same.

We were orbiting the point, just discovering the lesson.

I don’t remember where we found it or who gave it to us, but we happened upon the Marlon Brando quote from The Wild Ones. A girl asks him, “What are you rebelling against?”

He answers, “What have you got?”

Well, we had plenty.

It’s too easy to look back and assign ourselves things to rebel against. I also think that we weren’t rebelling against things. Our rebellion didn’t look like rebellion, which could be seen as a type of rebellion. But we weren’t protesting, we weren’t overtly political, we didn’t have one particular issue that pushed us or for us to push back.

I like to think that we were rebelling in the service of something. We were rebelling for something, not so much against. The idea was to share some instruction on how to rebel, how to live, how to be a young woman writer. We were writing it in real time.

It’s clear to me now, that our rebellion was an attempt to figure out how to live our lives authentically---how to live an authentic life. Every act of authenticity is an act of rebellion. If we rebelled against anything, it was the script. When you’re about to graduate from college, your options can feel limited. You can be overwhelmed with choices, and paralyzed by the pressure to choose. We fought against that pressure, those expectations, often from well-meaning family and friends and professors and advisors.

The most we could hope for was to make interesting lives for ourselves. And at that point, the interesting stuff was boys and bars.

Of course, there was more. By claiming any kind of power over our own lives, we were rebelling against many things: parental expectations, societal expectations, what we’d been taught and what we’d been told to expect for ourselves.

That’s where essays served us most. We claimed our power by claiming our stories. By owning our experiences, through how we wrote them, we created respect for them. I learned to respect my own stories. I learned the power in having a story, and in telling it. The YWRB project made my stories matter at a time when no one wants you to trust yourself. But I trusted my stories. I trusted Amy’s stories. I believed our stories mattered. Our stories mattered. That’s all anyone can ever hope for. That’s what we were trying to say to other young women: Your story matters.

That’s what I rebelled for.

Alone

“Run the marathon with me,” says my best friend (who also happens to be my business partner), “I don’t want to train for it alone.” At the time, her husband is contemplating taking a job 3,000 miles away, in our hometown. We are both hoping to move back in a few years—this city is the bullseye of our 30’s. Our lives are so intertwined that when she mentions him interviewing for it, the job isn’t even contained within the realm of possible. I take it as seriously as if she had told me he was buying a unicorn. I sign up for the marathon on a whim; running a marathon is on my bucket list, and who wants to do anything alone? We are going to train together, to run together. This marathon is to be another check on our list of things that we’ve done, together. We’ve built our business on the principles of wellness and prioritize making time for our friendship amongst our busy days. Our love of running (and ability to run together--no small feat for two lone-wolf runners) binds us; of course this would be something we would tackle together.

I get the message while I am finishing up some work for the evening: “He got the job.” And then within a matter of days, it’s final: my best friend is moving away. Far, far away. I feel happiness for her (she’ll be so close to her family) and deep, deep grief for the moments that I realize may not come the way we had expected them to (We always bring our girls to see Santa together, I worry about her kids not remembering me). At the core, below it all, I am desperately afraid of being left alone.

We were fast friends, bonded by our California roots and our preppy east coast husbands. Running together early on was a test of the potential in our friendship. Our first run together took us over a sun-dappled gravel path that smelled of decaying wood and fresh undergrowth in New Hampshire. It was the summer I got married, before spending our time together in the summer was happily consumed by organizing activities for our sunscreen-slathered children with impossible blonde highlights. She was training for a marathon. Before we started running, I had visions of being left far behind, huffing and puffing in an embarrassing attempt to catch up. That melted away once we started out. Our steps fell into synch, our paces compatible. This, I thought, could be a great friend. Towards the end, as our conversation waned and our breathing and footsteps were all that broke the silence, we realized that we had both stopped sweating, not for lack of exertion. This found us begging for water at a local bar. It was cool and perfect, and we clinked the plastic cups they had given us in a toast to our inevitable closeness.

She has been my steadfast company in a tumultuous time. Through my husband’s surgical training, where he works countless hours, through the birth of my daughter and the growth of our business, she has been my constant. I am as entwined into her family as I am into my own. I love her kids with the unrelenting ferocity of a blood relative; her little sister makes me feel like less of an only child. In fact, her family is the primary reason that though my husband spends far more hours at work than he does at home, I (and my daughter) have felt neither lonely nor alone. Now, during my runs, I have a desperate and sinking feeling. My brain repeats over and over, “I don’t want to do this alone.” What, exactly, I am afraid of doing alone eludes me. Perhaps this is an indication of the hole that she will leave when she moves.

For the first time, I am running and crying at the same time. With our training for the marathon, I am spending more time on the road. Mostly alone, since our routine has been so upended by this move. Running for me has always been a release, and the metaphor until this point has been of the yogic variety: finding comfort in discomfort, pushing through, knowing when to yield. I ran through teaching special education in the Bronx, through the abject terror of my father’s cancer, through the life-swallowing grief following my grandfather’s death. In these times of hardship, I turned to running to be my constant companion, found solace in its repetitive simplicity. Left, right, repeat. All without tears. To stop the tears, even. With this move comes a new metaphor in my running: I don’t want to do this alone. I’ve always run alone, save for runs with very close friends (I have exactly two people with whom I like to run, not including my dad's running club, many of whom I have known and run with since I started coming home from college). What is it about this time in my life that brings the tears every time I lace up? Running had, for so many years, been my companion; now its companionship reminds me of the one I am losing. This marathon, this move, solidifies for me the simple fact that good company is at the heart of what we all want in life. Yes, misery loves it, but so does joy.

It’s all anyone really wants, isn’t it? A friend to synch steps with; company for life’s path. We look for, and find, companionship in the oddest places. Online, in bars, in friends’ social networks. We find drinking buddies, lovers, friends, husbands, confidants. We curate relationships that we hope will prevent us from being alone---truly alone---on our journey. But, I’m learning (as an unwilling student), interludes of aloneness are inevitable, even with the most loving cultivation of relationships. More than not wanting to face her leaving me, I don’t want to face it alone. A cruel irony. The fact is that it’s only her and me inhabiting our friendship; when she shifts a bit, there is nothing to fill that space, except dull sadness and the fear that she has something to fill the space that I will leave.

A few weeks ago, my left quadriceps started to ache. It was unstretchable, unrestable, unmassageable. Gnawing. I chalked it up to getting older. Then, last week, my right leg began to ache behind my knee, a twinge with each step. As if one leg was incapable of working without the other. Left, right, repeat.

What Are You Reading (Offline, that is)?

This space is usually reserved for books, sometimes magazines, but always the printed word. At risk of romanticizing the tactile pleasure of physically marking where you’ve left off (are you a corner-folder or a book marker?), feeling the right side lighten with every page flip, or getting the perfect crease in the newspaper allowing you to hold it with one hand while balancing a coffee in the other, I will say that print will always be cozier—in my mind, friendlier—than digital words. But some print publications are fleeting and I feel incredibly lucky to live in a time when an article I’ve read, dog-eared, carried with me even, can be shared via the internet.

***

I love books. I’ve loved them unrelentingly since my first wobbly attempts at reading—maybe closer to memorization—when I was still small enough to be afraid of the dark and was, thus, the proud owner of a flashlight, perfect for illuminating pages under my covers. In elementary school, I once got into mild trouble for reading a too-good-to-put-down-for-an-entire-school-day novel on my lap during an unnecessarily long lesson on soil erosion. So you can imagine my surprise when during a particularly tumultuous time in my life, I’ve found myself unable to give a book my full attention or to still my thoughts long enough to form my own sentences.

It was only during this past year that I truly released the notion that we would move west. We renovated our apartment to include an office big enough for daily work sessions with my business partner/best friend and co-worker/sister, settled our daughter in an adorable preschool, found a nanny for our son who puts Mary Poppins to shame, and helped my sister move from an apartment upstairs to one literally right next door. Life being what it is, we had only just settled into this routine that felt worthy of forever when my husband got a job offer in San Francisco—at a company he’d admired for years, doing exactly what he wants to do, with people who could aptly be described as awesome.

In some ways this move is a no-brainer. Even putting aside my husband’s opportunity, there is a lifetime of reasons why our family should settle in San Francisco. One of the first things that people learn upon meeting me is that I’m a Northern Californian. My husband and I got married in Napa. Our dog is named Tahoe. I refer to the Bay Area as “home” (I also happen to refer to New York as home, but that’s fodder for another time). My huge extended family spans the west coast from San Jose to Seattle, with three quarters of them living in the Bay Area; our holiday gatherings have been described as epic. But it was sudden and I’m sad (which is a huge step up from the first few weeks after this news when I would have said heartbroken).

While books, even some of my forever-favorites, haven’t soothed my anxiety or even temporarily diverted my attention from this looming change, essays and articles that seem to have been written with me in mind have found their way into my purse. I pull them out—all crumpled and soft from the friction of my wallet, phone, and stray chapsticks—and read snippets when I’m feeling particularly heartsick. They’re worry stones for my mind.

***

I’ve always been a loyalist—none of that flitting around from thing to thing for me. I excel at commitment. My upcoming move wasn’t even a topic of conversation when I came upon this article, “The Joys of Staying Put,” over a year ago. Apparently, there are people who live in their New York apartments for a lifetime, generations even (see also “100 Years of Staying Put”). These are my people, my tribe. This article may have been the catalyst for my decision to live not just in the same city or same neighborhood, but the same apartment . . . forever.

The funny thing is, our apartment isn’t even that great. I mean it’s reasonably sized by Manhattan standards, it’s a duplex, and it has a backyard. Oh, and our rent is below market in a neighborhood we love. It’s also what a good realtor would call “charming” or “full of character,” meaning it’s old, creaky, and will always have a thin veil of dirt, no matter how hard you scrub. None of that really matters though because we hear the birds chirp every morning and one of the neighbors with an adjacent yard plays classical music on his outdoor speakers most afternoons (though everyone on the backside of our block, at one point or another, thought we lived in listening distance of a great pianist). Only one other person seems to understand: the late and great Nora Ephron. Her brilliant essay, “Moving On,” about falling in love and leaving an apartment, is everything I feel. Like one of her movies, I read this piece and find myself laughing through my tears.

Now I’m in what Thomas Beller calls the “In-Between Days.” We technically still live in New York, but we’ve been traveling to and from San Francisco. Our count of the New York days we have left is close to single digits. Every experience has the potential of being characterized as “the last”—last impromptu backyard grill party, last day of pounding lattes and never watching videos of animals doing funny things in the office, last run up the Great Hill. Then there are the saddest ones of all—last stroll through an empty wing of the Museum of Natural History while our daughter makes up elaborate stories about the exhibits and our son interjects with animal noises, last family walk during off-leash hours where our little ones scramble up the rock they’ve termed “the mountain,” and the kids’ last ride on the double-swing my husband hung in our backyard (the one baby Jack is only just big enough to hold on to himself). There’s a real danger of letting every moment become too precious to be real.

Despite my temptation to squeeze the life out of our last days in the only home I’ve known for my adult life and to document everything we do prior to our move for posterity, I’m trying to remember that I don’t have to. I should be marveling at my luck. Unlike Joyce Maynard, I’ve fallen in love with a place that in all likelihood will remain right where it is for the entirety of my life and my kids’ lives too. In Maynard’s essay, “Paradise Lost,” she describes her grief and finally acceptance when rising waters slowly submerged her home and haven on Lake Atitlán. Her surrender to the reality of life came when she realized "The idea that any of what we have will last forever is a dream." If we hadn't changed our life by deciding to move across the country some other circumstances would have. We'll cry, we'll move, and then we'll visit an ever-changing New York through our ever-changing eyes.

Inside the White Picket Fence

By Marni Zarr I met him in sophomore geometry. My head in the clouds over his best friend, the subject of which made easy fodder for conversation. Our instructor happened to be his basketball coach which miraculously made me privy to over the shoulder glances at his correct answers during tests thus saving me from failing. Happy that I had this advantage I was big on smiles and loved conversing with this insider who knew everything I wanted to know about my not so secret crush on his goofy yet charming friend.  In between the hand holding and break ups between his friend and I, the two of us grew into good pals. Hours spent with him on the phone, nothing said in coded whispers as was required with other friends.  I wasn’t afraid of my parent’s overhearing me as I spoke to him through the avocado kitchen rotary, only that our phone time would be cut off before I was ready to say good-bye. The curly cord a slinky in my hand, I’d wind it’s twisting loops through my toes while talking and daydream about compliments from the older girls in the P.E. locker room. One insisted I should be a foot model. The perfect shape and always polished, the only blemish a growing bunion on the right side, enough to squash that idea. My self doting thoughts were suddenly interrupted by his innocent question, “So what about going to the movies with me this weekend?”

My parents prejudices were a good cover-up for my own fear. I wasn’t totally comfortable with the thought of going on a date, although I considered him a friend, a black guy. Would people think he was my boyfriend? Would they stare and tag me with another accessory like my religion that I wasn’t comfortable carrying around? Did I want to say no but blame my parents prejudices as a shield for my own? How could I decline without hurting his feelings? All of these thoughts swirled in my head like an alphabet soup of questions whirring audibly in a blender, a jumble of words and feelings that in the end was so thick and unrecognizable my thoughts a messy mush. and then, the honest answer rose to the top, “ I can’t, I have to be sixteen to date.” Although valid, we both communicated the understood underlying truth with an awkward moment of silence.

Who knows what would have happened if I had been allowed to experience my first date with him. I could sense his feelings for me were different than mine for him, but his character spoke only of respect. I could have breached my parent’s rules and told them I was going to a movie with a girlfriend and met him there but didn’t. Instead I packed the incident neatly away, we stayed friends, I denied my feelings, and life went on with the blame pinned to my parents, folding my confusion neatly away to be dealt with later.

We remained friends while the dating excuse covered the dark truth until late winter. Still three months shy of my 16th birthday I successfully convinced my parents to lift the dating rule, “just this once.”  The most popular boy in high school, a year ahead of me had asked me out on a Valentine’s date.  Possessing perfect all American good boy looks with mischievous sparkly blue eyes and a California like carelessness to his confident athletic walk, he was the stud of the school. How I was chosen to be his valentine crush was never clear . . . to anyone. He was the boy on a pedestal. The one that everyone remembers.

All nerves electric at the sound of the doorbell, awkward introductions were made and off we went down the front walkway to his pristine truck where he opened the door politely and I raised myself up and sat on the soft burnished brown velour seat. First stop, a weathered liquor store in a strip mall just outside the cozy confines of his country club community. I waited while he confidently strutted in and came out minutes later with a six-pack, gum and a pink plastic comb which became my souvenir of the evening.  I loved how he played with my hair and teased me with it as we listened to “The Cars”  cassette on his fancy stereo and drank the lukewarm bottled beer in the theatre parking lot. Three for him, two for me, time for the movie. We each popped a fresh stick of doublemint gum in our mouths and before getting out to walk around and open my door, hand resting softly on my thigh, he asked me to reach into his glove compartment so he could reapply more of his “Polo” cologne. My senses heightened to the first hints of sexual tension the scent was forever branded on my memory so that years later I could smell our song whenever it played and feel his hand as it went up my shirt.

After the movie, fully clothed but rolling in the cool winter grass of the church on the corner, we kissed and I assumed it was true love forever, hearts floating in my head I went home to dream about our wedding and how envious everyone would be as I walked down the aisle with the dream god of the high school universe.  Two weeks later, as the deities of high school often do, he moved on to new and easier waters. My elevated ego smarted from the fall, but I had the song “Just What I Needed” by The Cars and my light pink comb for comfort. Even if never allowed to pray at the feet of his graven image again I knew I had earned his blessing and to me that was timeless.

A few years ago I ran into a former high school friend at a neighborhood restaurant as I walked out the door. Turning at my name there was instant recognition in the hint of a smile, the way you see through someone’s voice and facial expressions and it transports you back in time. We started talking about our current lives, family, kids, jobs etc., the creamy pre-prepared information filling the space between high school graduation and now. The conversation turned to people we occasionally ran into from school and we shared short clips of what we knew or had heard.  His son was on the high school football team at a small school in California and being coached by another former classmate’s younger brother, small world. The topic of football sparked my curiosity about my long ago crush and the question rolled off my tongue with a wistful lilt. His face fell as he told me what he had heard a while back. This boy who many of us had assumed would go on to have it all, just as he did in school, grew up and had taken his own life. I couldn’t help but wonder if every one of us who had assisted him in rising to that highest spot of teen-age stardom hadn’t somehow contributed to his fall.

YWRB: First Impressions

By Amanda Page My first memory of Amy Turn Sharp is crisp and static, like a simple snapshot. She was a girl in a poetry workshop, sitting in one of the chairs beneath the classroom window, scarf around her neck---although it was Spring---and headphones casually slipped from her ears, dangling from her neck where they got lost in the fabric.  It might have been the first day or late in the quarter. But that's when I took notice. She seemed shy as she responded to a question---maybe about her poem. What stands out to me most about that moment is the reserve and timidity she displayed, because I was reserved and timid. I was shy and I didn't like it, but I didn't know how else to be.

Maybe that's why the image sticks. Or maybe I recognized a kindred spirit, but not consciously. Anyway, that was not the woman I started to know on smoke breaks. The Amy Turn I came to know in fifteen-minute bursts was loud, exuberant, and wildly enthusiastic about writing and life.

We weren't fast friends. The quarter ended and I saw her once over the summer, when I saw her on the street and stopped to say hello. Fall came and classes started and there we were in another workshop together. Most of our friends had graduated that summer. We were those rare, at the time, students who kept at it, floating a little, not quite ready to move beyond the classroom, still trying to figure out what we were doing in college, let alone with our lives.

Maybe I'm projecting a little. That's what I was doing: floating. Flailing. When I met Amy Turn, as she was called then, I made a friend to flail with. Amy Turn. I rarely ever heard her called anything but the two names together. She was never just "Amy." I admired that. I was from a place where two names were common, and I'd tried to get one to catch on for myself. It never happened. I wasn't a Bobbi Jo or Barbara Dee. I was just Amanda. Just the one name. And I couldn't quite get the two-first-name version of myself to exist.

We started writing together. We'd sit at the bar or the coffee shop or sometimes at the kitchen table in her apartment and we'd handwrite essays in yellow legal pads, right there on the spot. We thrived on the spontaneous nature of sitting down and writing something complete. We were rebelling against the image of the isolated writer, working in a dim room all alone. The work had more energy, more life, because it was composed quickly, full of vim and whimsy, in the presence of another writer.

Rebelling against the idea of the diligent, lonely writer was exciting. We reminded ourselves that Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road on one long continuous scroll. He couldn't have written it all in isolation. He needed his friends. He needed to be around the "mad ones." And I found myself a mad one in Amy Turn. I liked that my first impression of her was wrong. It gave me hope that I could rebel against first impressions of me. I was more than just a shy girl with a single first name. I was a writer, and that's what I wanted to be known. Amy Turn made it known.

Amy Turn was known. Everyone in town seemed to know her: restaurant owners and convenient store workers and every single bartender in town. It’s hard to not know the girl dancing on your table at the end of the night. Before I knew it, we were known as the writer girls. People expected us to show up with our legal pads and scratch out whole pieces. People knew about our project. That terrified me. But it also made it real.

If you're going to look for a friend with whom to rebel, you can't go wrong with one who pulls you out of your comfort zone, who introduces you to people as the person you want to be, which is not always the person you see yourself as. I started, then, to see myself as a writer. That vision, that version, of myself has wavered through the years. It's good to have a mad one to contact to remind you that you are not the lonely writer.

And it's good to know that the mad ones don't always reveal themselves in your life with that first impression.

We want to know: Do you have a friend who pulls you out of your comfort zone and makes you rebel against the small version of yourself that you sometimes believe yourself to be? How do they pull you out of your comfort zone? How do they prompt you to rebel against that small version of yourself? Email us at amanda@bold-types.com or leave a comment.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Today we're lucky enough to present the Pretty Mommy edition of our "What Are You Reading?" column. Our pal Michelle LeBlanc is the tastemaker behind the impeccably curated shop, Pretty Mommy---but we don't just love her for her good taste. Michelle isn't afraid to be honest that figuring out how to run a thriving business while raising two small children comes with daily challenges. We love that she's willing to share the parts behind all the pretty.  Here, she tells us what she's reading, and pulls in two of her friends to join in the conversation. Michelle LeBlanc, Pretty Mommy I have to wax a little nostalgic about summer reading . . . growing up in the hot climes of the southwest, I spent many a long morning combing the shelves at the local library, taking home stacks of reads . . . lounging in the cool a/c with classic movie star bios, some trashy romantic lit that I snuck in under my mother's nose, the latest Sweet Valley High installment, and a hippie beauty-at-home recipe book for concocting face masks out of oatmeal & honey, patchouli oils and rose water toners . . . then finally coming out of my cave at dusk to brave the heat and track down some ice cream . . . oh to have those lazy days!

With two littles underfoot, my reading time these days is pretty much limited to short snippets of magazine reading (Bon Appetit for wishful cooking & Entertainment Weekly for indulging my pop culture obsession), but one week every summer we escape with the in-laws to a cabin whereupon I let the relatives keep track of my kids and I dive into  something with just a touch more depth (but only a touch mind you, there's nothing so awful as a downer book in the middle of summer vacation, no?) So to that end, I just ordered Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead . . . Amazon's description calls it "deceptively frothy" . . . sounds right up my alley!

[Editor's note: Hey look! One of our favorite people, Robyn Virball, recommended Seating Arrangements in the May 18 edition of What Are You Reading? The author happens to be Robyn's friend, which makes her a friend of ours.]

Jenna & Cary, Ace & Jig Some current favourites are The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses, both by Jeannette Walls. We scrounged a third-hand (dog-chewed) copy of The Glass Castle off of a friend and since then Cary and I have both read it, and now the same copy is being devoured by the second of our interns! Some serious recycling going on. It's a fast-moving and fascinating read, and her no-nonsense literary style  really appeals to us as busy mamas (she cuts to the chase!). The story is a memoir of the author's life and her unbelievable family and the follow-up Half-Broke Horses  is a true life novel which relives the tale of her heroic grandmother. As you may guess, we are drawn to stories of strong women.

Cary also reports that she is currently reading Vaclav & Lena by Haley Tanner about the immigrant childhood in Brooklyn.

And last but not least . . . we are both so thrilled to have reached the stage where we can enjoy reading chapter books with our eldest. Cary and Alice are reading The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and James and I are reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  It's so fun to revisit these favorites from our childhoods.

Jennifer Murphy, Jennifer Murphy Bears & dull Diamond I'm crazy for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. The dreamlike quality of a life weaving in and out of real and unreal spaces takes me away in the summer . . . seems like the perfect daydream---charged with vivid plots and characters.

YWRB: Genesis, Part 2

by Amy Turn Sharp Last month, Amanda and I went back to Athens, Ohio. A pilgrimage of sorts. We had not been back to the deep woods together for over a decade. We went to the Ohio University Literary Festival. We were going to meet Terrance Hayes (one of my favorite poets). As soon as we walked into the auditorium, we spotted our old professor. Mark Halliday. The poet. Another favorite of mine. He was the same. Interestingly eccentric,. Nervous, yet commanding. Weird socks. Fidgety.

*     *     *

I remember storming into his office one day with Amanda. I dragged her like a rag doll toward his big wooden desk.

I beat on his desk and told him about the Young Woman's Rebellion Bible. I was nearly reenacting scenes from Dead Poets Society with my passion. I almost jumped on his desk.  I told him how I freaked out when I heard Amanda tell me her ideas about this project we could work on together. I told him everything. I moved about the office like a dancer. I was so young. Amanda giggled and nodded her head. There was music from an old radio in the corner. I think it was Joan Armatrading. Or perhaps I made that up years later. It was a calm office made insane by us. We were often bringing high intensity to calm situations. It was our best practice. He smiled and encouraged us, but it looked like he was also afraid. And looking back, perhaps he was afraid it would not happen. It would loose steam and fall flat. It would make other work suffer. Or he was just amazed by us. I think I was amazed by us.

*     *     *

We listened to the magic Terrance Hayes read to us. It was amazing and his words purred at us and we all sat on the edge of our seats, poets scribbled in tiny notebooks. We all wished for language mastery. It was perfect. And when we left, I was kinda sad that I did not run up to Halliday and hug him tightly, tell him we are doing it again. That it just took us a long time. To become us. I had daydreams of us ditching our car and heading to our old tavern. But I knew things had changed. I knew there were new rebellions all over the place. I raised my hand and waved at him like a cool kid, and blew him a kiss. All the way home I thought about the fire in my belly that made me dance when I talked about writing. I knew it was back. I could feel my feet moving in the floorboards of Amanda's SUV.

We're curious: Has there been a time when you've amazed yourself?

Max

(Editor's note: This is part two of Leigh Anna's exploration of losing her dogs. Part One, Samus, can be found here.) 2011 stunk. It has taken me many months to even get to the place where I can write about this without completely losing it. Some of you already know how my little family was rocked this past year when little Samus, my sweet boxer dog, passed away suddenly. Little did we know that just 7 months and two days later, we’d be saying goodbye to our other sweet baby, my dear boy Max. From the beginning, I was absolutely in love with that boy. We drove 4 hours in the pouring rain one night to Memphis to pick him up. He was so fat, with so many wrinkles. I was so excited . . . and a little discouraged when I tried to get him to sit in my lap on the way home and he just moved to the other side of backseat. We had a dog that didn’t like to cuddle, or so it seemed.

Max quickly became a mama’s boy. Contrary to my observation on that ride home, he loved to cuddle . . . and boy was he lazy. Samus wanted to play all the time and all Max wanted to do was lay on the couch. The only issue we ever had with him was potty training. He was HORRIBLE! He would leave a trail through the house . . . he didn’t know how to stand still while peeing! I would get soooo mad! I finally resorted to buying toddler undies for him and that was the only thing that finally worked. He was so cute in those undies.

 In 2007, Chris and I decided to quit our jobs, move to Atlanta, and go back to school. The day we moved, we noticed Max wasn’t feeling too good. Within two days, he stopped eating and we knew something had to be wrong. We took him to the vet, where they started running tests on him. We left the vet without a diagnosis but they were pretty sure he had Lymphoma. The test would take two weeks to find out for sure.

My boy got so sick. He didn’t eat for those two weeks and lost 10 lbs. We came so close to losing him . . . the test finally came back and it was a huge blow. He not only had lymphoma in his chest, but it was stage 4, B cell, the worst kind. They advised us that most dogs with that kind of cancer only last another year at best, with chemo. But we couldn’t lose our baby without trying to help; he was only 5 years old. We started chemotherapy immediately and after 6 months of treatment, he was in full remission. Max was a trooper . . . my miracle dog. We got lucky and the lymphoma never came back.

 When we lost Samus, our world was turned upside down. We all grieved so hard for the loss, Max included. He slept by the front door; he’d wake me up laying on my chest at 3 am just staring at me; he’d drag us up and down the alleys and streets looking for her; he would stop in his tracks when he heard another dog that sounded like her. It made us so sad to see him having such a hard time with losing her.  That’s one reason we decided to get Rilke, 6 weeks after we lost our girl. Max needed a buddy as much as we did. He was so good with her . . . she was such a playful puppy . . . but he never got mad at her. I think seeing the two of them together, I really started to notice how much Max had aged.

This past Thanksgiving came and went quietly. That Saturday, we woke up to a beautiful morning. The temperature was supposed to be in the 60′s and we knew that it wouldn’t last much longer. We decided to take the dogs out to Fire Island, a beautiful state park beach that allows dogs in the winter months. It was Rilke’s first time to the beach and we were all excited as we packed up in the car and headed out. It was absolutely gorgeous outside and we were just so happy to be together. This photo was from that day . . . I had no idea it would be one of the last photos I would take of my sweet boy:

We had hiked about 2 miles from our car, down the beach, when our world came crashing in on us. Max had been so happy, running, sniffing, playing . . . when all of a sudden, he fell over and started having a major grand mal seizure. Right there where the water hits the sand, on the most beautiful beach, my dog was dying and I felt so helpless. People came running from everywhere, and Chris and two other men started giving him CPR. After what seemed like an eternity, he started breathing again. Someone called the rangers for us and they came and picked us up in a SUV to take us back to our car. Max was awake but out of it for sure. We took him to the nearest pet hospital, only to have them tell us things like cancer, brain tumor, epilepsy, infection . . . our wonderful trip to the beach had gone so bad so quickly.

We did a few tests to check his bloodwork and rule out an infection. They said the only way we would know if he had brain cancer would be to do an MRI, which would cost thousands. We hoped for the best, got a prescription for anti-seizure meds and went on our way. We felt so lost, and I was just a ball of nerves. That night we cuddled him and loved on him and he seemed ok, just tired. The next morning, we went for a walk, ate breakfast, and he had his smoothie and two treats. His head seemed to be bothering him, he kept scratching and rubbing it. He laid down in the sun, on the bed, probably his favorite place in the world, and went to sleep. About 30 minutes later, he woke up, had another seizure, and passed quietly in Chris’s arms.

That weekend was horrible. But . . . looking back, both of us had seen it in his eyes. He lost a part of himself, a spark, when Samus passed away and he never got it back. Even though losing Samus was heartbreaking, it made me appreciate Max so much more those last few months. I am thankful that he didn’t seem to suffer much; I am thankful that we were with him, that he spent his last full day on the beach, and that he didn’t die in a hospital. I am also thankful that I did not have to make the decision with either of my dogs. God knew that would be a decision I just could not have made.

 I loved Samus dearly, but Max . . . that boy was MY boy. I loved the way he woo-wooed when he was excited, the way he demanded a treat around lunchtime every day, the way he nibbled on a toy, the way he said “I love my mama,” and the way he made me massage him every night. He was spoiled all right, but he was one of the best relationships that I have ever experienced and if I could do it all over again, I would in a heartbeat. I’ve had dogs my entire life but there was just something special about my relationship with Max. I would have done just about anything for that dog. Looking back at these photos, I feel like I was at my happiest when he was by my side . . . or in my lap.

After losing both of our “kids” that we have had for the past 9.5 years, Chris and I just felt lost. Our whole family dynamic changed. Now Rilke was the only dog, and we had only spent a few months with her. She still doesn’t know the kind of things our other two had learned through the years---it’s like starting completely over. But I am so thankful we got her when we did or else our house would be way too quiet. We have since added little Bronson to our family. It’s not the same around here . . . but I hope one day we’ll have the connection with the new ones like we had with Samus and Max.

Once again, in 2011 I was reminded that I need to appreciate the time I am given. I am so thankful that I got to experience Max’s amazing personality and be loved by him. Time goes by in a flash . . . 9.5 years of my life was gone in 7 months and 2 days. I am trying to remember that and really live my life in a way where I have no regrets and really love on my friends and family as much as I can. In the end, that’s really all that matters. I miss you dearly Max . . . I still think about you every day. I hope you and Samus are running and playing on a beach up in heaven somewhere. One of these days, when I close my eyes for the last time . . . I really hope you two come and tackle me with kisses. Call me crazy, I don’t care.