EDGY, WHOLESOME
I decided to start two new projects. Why? Because I’m me. This one is called LA Bloggers Live! and if you live in the Los Angeles area, you can come and listen to your favorite bloggers reading their own words. I know, right? Awesome. And if you are a blogger in the Los Angeles area or visiting the LA area, you are invited to come and read, also!
Update regarding the 2nd project soon.
(ALSO: Craft trading is happening RIGHT NOW!)
Yes, this is Leahpeah’s blog. No, she is not in. Instead, a treat for those people that like great writing and absolutely inspiring photographs by Brandon. Each fabulous image is linked to the original size.
It’s not until after my trip is over I remember I’ve been past all these places before, when I was very young, and the names of these towns and bodies of water were too difficult to pronounce at the time, and you were too embarrassed to say them out loud, anyway, phonetically clicking through each letter in your head, which would at least have helped you arrange them in your mind’s storage, the boxes stickered with embossed red labels. Wash-tuc-na. Al-mi-ra. Te-ko-a.
I am driving these roads trying to see if the story unfolding resembles any place like where I imagine the characters inside my head reside, cutting their way through hopeful fields beneath threatening skies, the wheat reaching to their outstretched fingertips. You picture a small town production where the director tacks feathers to the arms of the actors and says, “Imagine you are a fish, and in a fit of drunken humor, God has just granted you wings. Now fly.” The first person in my story always stays very low to the cardboard waves, and flies in timid, confined circles, all around the round. And what is that? Are his eyes welling with tears? Does a tiny, repressed part of his childhood recall what it was like to look straight up into the air and believe, truly believe he could defy gravity’s will and soar? The brief, exhilarating moment as the tips of the toes begin to bear the weight come off the backs of the heels? Even in descent, the first character holds onto the fantasy, imagining a falcon in stoop.
The second is found a week later, 1,000 miles away, unconscious and in a ditch, surrounded by emergency personnel wondering aloud whence the goddamned feathers.
If this is 1989, then gas in Fruitland is 89 cents, and I am flying through this, my dwindling supply of antidepressant, still per gallon cheaper than water, still no elixir like 60 miles per hour with the windows down, and this is 10 years before I turn into a drunk, so there’s no cost to the state, neither. This is where I start talking to myself, out in the open, and the passing drivers smile, because they assume I’m singing, and that we have this in common. Connectedness is king out here and God bless them, but we don’t. A capella, honeyed agony, practicing the words for the heartbreaking what’s gonna come.
The prescription’s a bit more expensive these days, and every time I splurge, I know it’s just another drop of blood in the bucket, but I can’t allow myself to go crazy waiting for the order to get filled on my flying car. And I’m out here on the Palouse, praying for overcast heavens to apply a coffee filter diffusion to the harsh contrast of these high plains, bathed in tones of red and yellow and 1964.
Today, I am the second character in my story.
In the morning I am on Highway 2 to Spokane, and I have forgotten that there is an air force base out this way, so it strikes me as odd that the few abandoned barns out here have the considerable protection of a fleet of ghostly air tankers and bombers, swooping in and out of the clouds. I imagine instead some eccentric millionaire, isolating himself out here on the Palouse and reenacting WWII battles his old man told him about.
It’s the isolation and perception of moving impossibly slow along this highway that gives it the dreamlike quality. I dreamt recently that a boy had hired hitmen to kill me off, only he couldn’t afford real professionals, only local riff-raff still working on single 0 status, and it’s a long, drawn out affair, with plenty of missed shots and temporary hiding places betrayed by pointing monkeys and unstoppable sneezes and all the usual suspects, and I decide right then and there that the nightmare death is so much worse than anything reality can offer because in your mind, the both of them are equally real, but at least in reality you can run at a normal pace.
Dying frustrated is far worse than dying alone.
The day hit me like a freight train, what with a speech that failed to move anyone in the audience save me to tears, and not the good tears, but the tears of the prom queen runner-up busting out of the auditorium through the panic-bar doors before she can watch her prom king beau skip-to-the-loo. ‘At least,’ I think, ‘it’s spring-time,’ and flowers are made for good cheer, but this is the Palouse in March, and there are still patches of snow unmoved by the sun’s persuasions, and not even the peaches or plums have begun to show their lipstick.
All along the most primitive routes are funny signs like, ‘SUMMER ROAD ONLY NO WARNING SIGNALS’ and train tracks with, sure enough, no warning signals. I have a couple of pictures of trains that I was racing, and when I finally passed them, I’d come up to train tracks in the middle of the road and not even have the sense to slow down, because, well, there weren’t any warning signals. I think the engineer gave me the finger.
I pump my fist to get him to ‘toot the horn,’ but I think that only works on 18-wheelers.
Of the 500 miles I cover, I make but one promise, and that is to avoid Waverly, because the very name reminds me of a word I once invented to describe my ability to talk out of both sides of my mouth at the same time, ‘ambideclatory,’ like when I told her I knew what singer she was talking about, and when the stars lit up in her eyes, ‘Really?,’ not only did I lie again, but I lied in the worst way: matter-of-factly. If you had only just wavered, maybe ended with a flourish and a smile, she could have called you on it and you would have had an easy out, the just-kidding egress, ‘No, really, who is he?’
But no matter how much I tried, and how many turns I took, Waverly just kept getting closer and closer, and it was maddening. I imagine this is what it feels like to be a farmer’s kid, the only son, and you know, you just know you’re going to inherit that farm, get some local girl pregnant and no matter how fast you drive, you always wake up in Waverly. It’s that kind of beautiful out here. Once I finally rolled up to the town, I parked and turned around to go back, but in the end I realized that I would only wind up back here, so I turned around again and drove straight through it. The town was full of magpies and flags and once I got through, it released its hold on me and let me go about my way. It was just a sad, lonely old picture of a town.
Still it’s like when someone takes a lovely and yet somehow unflattering shot of your profile, leading you to think, ‘Good color, good light, good composition, good depth of field. Why does my nose look so goddamned big? Ugh.’
I’m racing now across the Palouse River, trying to run down the last bit of light before I have to resort to the Ludovico Technique on my camera’s diaphragm. There’s an old house makes you imagine that one day, long ago, someone put the final nail into that sonofabitch, stood back and proclaimed, HOME SWEET HOME. But that right there reminds me of something I once said in a hotel room, where you made a rule on our vacation that we couldn’t wear clothes. On Thursday, I stood next to you brushing my teeth and said, ‘I wish I were taller,’ and you bit me below my right shoulder and threw a towel over my head. On Friday, I lay on the bed and said, ‘I wish I had better skin,’ and you plucked a hair from my chest, and pushed me onto the floor. On Saturday, I sat in the chair next to the balcony and said, ‘I wish we did this more.’ You finished latching up the suitcase and I watched you fret over a zero-balance receipt.
I hate it when they ask you, ‘Have any regrets?’ and your impulse is to say NONE, NOT NARY A ONE, as though there are only 2 or 3 regrets possible, and not ten thousand. So having a few dozen, in the grand scheme of things, means you’re still pulling As on the report card, but people want their love to seem A+. So, ‘A few,’ I say, but I’m still thinking good enough for a scholarship. I’m definitely on track for grad school at a public university, anyway, and I even took a few of the AP courses out of my league. Then I get to Othello, which has a wildlife refuge specializing in sandhill cranes, and sure enough, my trip coincided with when they practice their flying formations, and they were all over and everywhere, all at once. This is where the Palouse ends, and the waterfowl picks up on this side of the Cascades. It’s just a beak and webbed toes what separates me from the loons, I think. A hundred photos, a thousand words worth per each, all perfectly aligned with the story I want to tell, all how I pictured it in my mind, all reminding me that I have, in fact, been this way before.
Now I just have to fill in the words.
Full photo set here. All of Brandon’s one night stands.
Imagine an easy chair. It’s brown, striped, not too big, not too small, and sitting in our upstairs bedroom. Never, and I really for serious mean ever, have Joe or I sat in that chair. We have never used it for its purpose, of housing our bottoms, because it has been, since day 1 in our home, covered with assorted clothing. Periodically, Joe will go through and hang up all the shirts, pants and bras that have been tossed from my body onto that chair and for a brief moment, possibly two, we get to view its soft and cushie seat. But then *snap* it’s gone. Because it’s nighttime and I just got undressed.
Two days ago, as Joe strode in the bedroom and glanced at where the chair should be, he stopped short and stared at the impossibly high mound of clothing, a good four feet above chair level. “What?” I asked. He said, “I’m going to get the camera. This is something that everyone should see. I’m going to post it to my blog.” And then *poof* the pile magically disappeared and we all lived happily ever after. And the pile was never seen or heard from again because I learned my lesson and always hung up my clothes. The end.
Actually, I asked him not to and very thoroughly explained why him doing so would damage me physiologically for years and he couldn’t live with the guilt. He promptly apologized and suggested we make flash cards of all our innermost feelings and meet up in an hour to powwow. Our marriage was strengthened and now we always hold hands.
Actually, I quivered my lips and let a large, single tear gently fall from my right eye while pouting, ‘You just don’t love me.’ Joe then fell on his knees, crying and asking me for forgiveness. I let him squirm for a bit and then laid my hands on his head and blessed him. We never spoke of it again.
Actually, I threatened him with the loss of a limb, a small limb, if he ever made such a rash suggestion again. He knew I meant business, so he ran out and got me a Chai latte and gave me a foot rub for the next two hours.
Actually, I batted my eyelashes and moved my shoulders suggestively and asked if there was anything I could do to change his mind. I can’t tell you the end of this one, but suffice it to say, we both have large hickeys in the shape of Texas, his on his neck and mine on my thigh.
Actually, I told him I would sort all the socks if he would promise not to. And then he hung up all my clothes. Dude, I had the worse deal, let me tell you. Two huge baskets full of dirty, holey, sometimes crunchy boy tube socks. I had to go through and touch them all, about half of which I picked up with two fingers, pinky extended, tossing them directly into the trash bin. The entire time I had the EWWW mouth on my face.
And that’s the truth.
I send Joe a text message that says ‘You look so cute. Profesh Joe rocks!’ I watch from the corner of my eye to see him get it. I keep waiting and then I realize he isn’t going to get it. Of course not. He’s in a meeting. And he’s professional.
There’s a girl in the corner, purposefully facing away from everyone with her book open, legs crossed and sneaking furtive glances over her right shoulder to see who might be watching her. Teen Girl Squad strides in. They are eternally bored in their sheep fur lined boots and shoulderless sweaters and tight jeans with careful and expensive rips in them. They move as if one large life form, a mass of hormones and sadly perfect hair and lipgloss.
I notice the man sitting to the left of the door watching me again. I continue to ignore him. I watch the older couple, he with his Louie L’Amour novel and she with her newspaper, one leg up in his lap. He pats her ankle every so often and it’s comforting to witness.
The man watching me looks as if he might speak. I take a sip from my drink, set the cup on the table and take out my crochet needle and some yarn. I feel the blue and very thick yarn in my fingers, rolling it from side to side, wondering what it wants to be. A hat, I decide. They are all hats right now. Joe is nodding to the man across the table from him outside. Joe looks cute. He looks concerned and he probably really is. Programming questions make him happily involved.
The man watching me is sniffling but otherwise not bad looking. Early forties I think, but any person, male or female who is sniffling repeatedly every five seconds, has a rapidly lowering attractiveness factor and may want to rethink not bringing a hankie. Or sitting in public for long spans of time. Or looking as if they want to hit on someone. I’m annoyed and wishing I’d worn a ring on my finger today.
The youngish-mom in the seat next to me gathers her kids and assorted kid-paraphernalia. There are two children, both under five years old, and they have been climbing over her like Mount Everest wiping snot on her shoulder and saliva in her hair while she good-naturedly wrestles them back to her lap. She attempts two false starts in exiting which fail because of one action figure left behind under a chair and a red shoe wedged in a seat cushion. Her third attempt is successful and the lobby seems much less friendly with them gone.
Romeo makes a quick beeline for the recently vacated oversized chair, leans back and sets his drink on the table in between us. I see him looking at me every few seconds but ignore him. He doesn’t appear to be the sleazy type of guy – that guy is kinda fun to squelch – and I don’t want to hurt his feelings. Every time I look out the window at Joe, whose head is now directly to the right of the man next to me, the man tries to catch my eye. Finally, out of some odd magnetism that must have been pulling from his eyes to mine, I glance at him, smile, and go back to my crochet. He makes a small sound in his throat, then a tiny muffled laugh. I decide the best thing to do is to be friendly so I look up, smile again and say, ‘Sorry if I seem to be staring. My husband is right there outside (and I point) and I keep checking on him to see if his meeting is over.’ He looks where I pointed and says, ‘I see. And here I thought it was my new haircut and my son’s Axe.’ And before thinking I say, ‘Axe is truly one of the stinkiest deodorants I’ve ever smelled. Why do they wear it?’ He laughs a real laugh and says, ‘The cat died last week and I swear it was the Axe.’ I’m confused by that but since he’s checking his watch and getting up to leave, I let it go and am glad to not prolong the conversation.
Left in the lobby is an Asian couple wearing color-coordinated zip-up leisure suits with stripes down the sides. Their very tall and very glamorous daughter is wearing extreme amounts of silver and looking very overdressed for a late morning coffee. There is also a weekend-dad with the name ‘Crusty’ on the side of his coffee with his daughter who has on extremely short shorts and can pull it off because she’s young with firm legs. I like the father immensely because I assume the Crusty is an indicator of his sense of humor, a sign that he tries too hard, which every parent does from time to time. My son would find both their daughters attractive.
My coffee says ‘Nia’ on the side. My voice broke when I said my name and it hurt too much to try and correct her. Besides, Nia is kind of a great name.
A guy sneezing at one-minute intervals sits in the empty chair next to me. I say bless you the first few times and then give up. I think about joking with him that I extend to him a standing Bless You! and to consider it his every time he needs it, but I don’t. I also think about moving but the only empty chair is directly across from him and I figure I’m getting fewer germs from spray on the side of him than a full frontal attack. I think everyone in the city must be sick right now.
There is a thin, small man just outside the door that nods to everyone walking out. He’s talking to himself but trying to include everyone around him. It’s a nice gesture but it appears to creep people out. I decide to talk to him when I leave.
It looks like the meeting is going well. Joe trimmed his facial hair so he has a slight goatee with a tiny Miami Vice shadow working the sides. He calls it the Lazy Man Shave, but it suits him.
A tall woman with long blonde hair has an uncooperative two-year-old who refuses to get up. She scoots her whining child, using her booted leg, at the rate of six inches every minute until she gets to the front and orders. Then she picks up her child in one scoop and whispers, hard, in her ear. The mom’s head is shaking in tandem with her mouth opening and closing. And for the millionth time this morning I miss the kids and wish they were here. Tony would have got an Izze, probably grapefruit, Tyler would have picked a water, or better, brought his own water from the back of the car and waited patiently for us to play out our wasteful consumeristic weekend tradition. Alex usually gets a caramel frappe and Devon a Chai latte, like me, but he gets his extra hot and with extra Chai pumps like his dad. And Joe would have looked over the pastries and then decided he didn’t really want anything after all and then shared my Chai. If he was in here. But he’s out there.
A man has a leak in his drink and little drops of caramel colored coffee hit the floor creating a snowflake pattern next to his shoe. The couple next to him call his attention to it and he laughs saying, ‘I’m glad you can see that too. I wondered if I was imagining it or just having trouble swallowing.’ They all laugh and out of that comes a conversation of ‘What do you do’s and ‘Where you went to college’s. You can make a conversation with anyone if you try.
I’ve taken out my laptop to jot a few notes. My drink is lukewarm at best and the man next to me asks me if I’m a writer. Why is it so hard to say yes? I get nervous and tell him sometimes I am.
And sometimes, I am.
Joe‘s been helping me get my site updated. (He says it validates!) I’m back on the work-path. I’ve got more energy and feeling pretty good. Today I even cleaned the bathroom. And vacuumed. And I liked it.
Tonight we worked on the published photos page. What do you think? Like it?
So if you were hoping to hire me for shooting photos (I swear I won’t lose your disk – I figured out an alternate plan so that will never, ever happen again pinky swear) or to write and/or edit, please look also at my writing credits.
I think about him every once in awhile. Like picking a scab, tearing off the top layer just to make sure it’s still there and it still bleeds. It doesn’t hurt anymore. Not really. But seeing the red blood reminds me of when it did.
We drank beers together for three weeks. My punk, unkempt hair pushed out of my face with my right hand and my left hand’s fingers curled around a clove cigarette. Or a menthol, depending on who had what. Sitting at the table outside near the heater, his long, dirty blonde and wavy hair and intense blue eyes but mostly his Italian accent floating through the air, I thought I must be in heaven. That finally, I was safe. ‘Darling,’ he said ‘you are lovely.’ and I knew that soon I would tell him the secret in my heart wrapped under soft layers of rose-colored ribbons.
The next night when I showed up a few minutes late, my nose anticipating the musky scent of sweat, mud and grass on his shirt that I loved, I searched for his soccer socks, fresh from practice. I ordered a beer, sat outside and smoked alone while staring at the wrought iron fence. My chest turned slowly darker with every inhale and my tears dried on the exhale. The soft cushion surrounding my heart hardened into a brittle shell and then broke into a thousand pieces.
I look at the bleeding exposed spot of what was a few years ago, but feels like a hundred, and then my husband walks in, sits down next to me and holds my hand. His scent of aftershave and coconut shampoo combine in the air next to me and it makes me laugh. It’s the most delicious scent I’ve ever smelled. The feeling I thought was intense love for the foreign man was barely more than nothing. It was the shadow of nothing. And even though it felt like a skyscraper, it was a mud hut, but it took time to find that out.
My husband leans his arm into mine while we sit side by side on the couch. I’ve been crying, crying for no reason that anyone knows of, and he hands me the handkerchief he keeps in his pocket for just such an occasion. He turns and looks at me, in me. ‘You are lovely.‘ he says straight to my soul. And I know that right where I am is heaven. I know I’m safe and it doesn’t matter if I’m sick or not. If I’m rich or not. He loves me. It’s not a secret that I love him and daily he unwraps the ribbons laced softly around my heart.
“Mom, if we keep driving around like this forever and we get lost and can’t get home, I wouldn’t eat you even if I was starving. I don’t want to get Mad Mom disease.”
“I think you should stop looking at me. But if you must keep looking at me, do it from over there. On the other side of the door.”
“Oh, thanks for answering the phone! I was worried you’d never pick it up again after our conversation the other night about brain harvesting and emus. Have you slept yet?”
To my husband (a year and a half after we were married): “Are you sure you don’t want to look at other marriage options?”
“Can you tell me what colors you mix together to make orange? You can pick from red, yellow and blue.”
“You know when someone tells you ‘You’re so crazy!’ but they’re kidding? This is not one of those times! I need my shirt back. And the fire extinguisher.”
“I did tell you, but you were mumbling something about erasers so you might not have heard me.”
“That is so….pretty the way you organized the thumbtacks into 20 different containers by color shade and size.”
“But did you ever ask yourself why most people /don’t/ carry a raw potato in their purse with them everyday?”
“Do you always keep your phonebook in the fridge?”
“Rubber bands are not really evil. The devil is evil. Rubber bands are useful tools for people to keep papers bound together. Do you see the difference?”
“Is it ok if the green beans are touching your fruit salad or would like you like me to built a mini-fort with the mashed potatoes to protect them?”
“No, I don’t go up and talk to whoever is there even if I think they look interesting. Normal people don’t do that. They just go there to do their laundry.”
“Please stop singing. And if you don’t wash the paint off your hands before we leave I’m going to make you wear my ski gloves to dinner.”
“When I look at you, I feel a little bit better about myself. And I feel so much smarter.”
This is Devon, my first born. He was such a knobby-kneed, curly tow-headed baby. He was the light of my life and had my full attention for only about 18 months until his sister turned up, whining for bottles and diapers, which he willingly and happily fetched for her (me).
Devon has a brain in his head that can sometimes be a bit intimidating. He is just sharp, in the boy genius kind of way. Conversations with him and what he thinks are always informative, entertaining and sometimes I even learn a little something. Although I fear he is becoming a Republican, which I’m proud of at the same time because he has a mind all his own and isn’t afraid to use it and own it.
He was always in the advanced classes all going through school and figured out even before middle school that he could exert very little effort and glide by quite easily. The highlights of his schooling so far, to me, are those moments where I saw him really getting excited about something he was learning, because it happened so rarely. But when it did, that spark in his eye was so, so great. He starts to talk with his hands and then his arms and then his whole body, sitting on the couch, threatens to almost shoot up through the ceiling as he explains how some new computer program interacts with something else, which I have no idea what it all means, but frankly, I don’t care. I’m just watching him and loving it.
I home schooled Devon for the first three years of school while we lived over in Germany. His little sister joined us for most of our classes and got the benefit of watching him make an erupting volcano and combining chemicals to create the foulest smells ever to touch anyone’s nose. Ever. We went for walks around the neighborhood and learned German and got to know the Landlady and often went to pet her farm animals while practicing single digit timetables.
And then somewhere around his 5th grade year, my mind started unraveling at an alarming rate and Devon shouldered more responsibility than some adults. By 6th grade he juggled school and housework and babysitting and entertaining his baby brothers while his sister cooked them meals and did laundry. And then some months later I went away for a year or so and when I came back, he was older.
By the time I made it back to San Diego, his dad had moved the family north and it took me about 2 years to find a local job and move closer to him and the other kids. All through that trying time of driving back and forth and frustration, Devon would tell me, ‘It’s small steps, Mom. Each time it gets a little better.’ And he would give me a hug. And later, when I was alone, I would weep because my son had cause for so much wisdom.
Living close these past two years has been wonderful in so many ways but one of the most valued by me is watching him become a man. He’s a good man. Young, yes, but old in so many ways. This past year he’s poked his toe into the social aspects of high school. He’s learned a little about having a crush on a girl and making a best friend with a guy. Both of which he had never felt safe enough to do before. He has excelled in leadership and became the co-editor of the school paper, which he takes very seriously. He’s also got a great sense of humor and cracks my shit up. We’ve always been the best of friends but it’s been only the past few years that I learned how to be a real mom. And he’s let me be his mom, although he in no way had to and it must have been a very scary concept to trust me.
I worry about all the mistakes I’ve made while he’s been a part of my life. I worry about all the things I’ve put him through. I worry about the issues he’ll have to deal with someday.
And then I look at his face and in his eyes and remember that God and the Universe have everything under control and no amount of my worrying will do anything to change anything. My job is to love him. And I can do that.
Because there is no way to freeze time at 17.5 years old, Devon turns eighteen today. My baby is eighteen. When I was eighteen I had him wrapped round my leg and his sister about to be born. I had lived through years of drug and alcohol abuse and felt about 100 years old. Thank God that all he has to do is attend his last year of high school and prepare to go to college in the fall. Thank God he’s never smoked or done drugs and that his alcohol consumption is at a very age-appropriate level. All of that is hard enough. And he has to register with selective service and possibly get drafted at some point, which scares the crap out me so I don’t think about it very often.
I’m so proud of you, Devon. And I love you with all my heart. Thanks for everything you bring to my life.
Yours always and forever,
Mom
Greg texts me:
Happy New Year, Leahpeah! Any New Year’s Resolutions?
I text back:
Yes! No new resolutions!
I don’t mean to be glib. Far from it. I really, really mean it. I can’t count the amount of years I’ve set myself up for failure by promising to Quit Smoking by February 20th!* or Exercise 1.5hrs/day until I lose 20 lbs! or Keep my desk orgnizd! or Say 1 nice thing to everyone I meet! I mean, c’mon. That last one would get on everyone’s last nerve after two hours and that is before leaving the house.
One of my journals from around age 14 has a list of about 20 resolutions, which includes ‘not eating anything with fat ESPECIALLY chocolate’ and has twelve lines written under the word chocolate. The list also has ‘learn to like my family’ which everyone knows is a foolhardy wish at 14. There is some chemical imbalance at that age that makes your hair weird, your taste in clothes questionable and your affinity to family near non-existent.
Somewhere in my late-twenties I realized that the error was occurring in the making of the resolutions at the beginning of the new year. I am always on the path of finding better ways to be and live. I spend countless hours in my head figuring out how to do things in a more fulfilling and time efficient way, much to the detriment of many other things in my life including laundry and orgnizng my desk. So, I realized, that for me to put all this pressure on January 1 of any given year was stupid. My perfectionist personality is doing it 24/7 365 days a year already in every category including welding. The only way to top my natural state of crazy is to create even larger and more elaborate resolutions like Only walk in odd numbered steps or create one crocheted hat per 3 hour installment of free time, including those hours in front of TV in the evening but not including meditation time since my brain will be preoccupied with manifestation, internal healing and levitation, wherein ‘free time’ can include time on the toilet and time sleeping.
I don’t need any help being more crazy. I do it fine all on my own. And piling on New Year’s resolutions every first of the year only adds to the issue when not far behind comes the let down of falling short of my newly set outrageous goals.
I do well to just keep the main goals I’ve had for the past 5 years or so:
1. Do the best I can, all the time that I can.
2. Take good care of myself and others.
So, Hello New Year’s Resolutions! You suck and I will not be making any of you. At least until tonight around 3am when I’ll be hard at work figuring out a better way to de-lint the dryer.
* I did finally quit smoking a few years ago, but it was nowhere near a February.
Mehdi had been driving passengers at all hours for three days. Being woken up by the phone at 3:15am after a scant one hour and ten minutes of sleep was torturous. To say his eyes were bleary would be an understatement of such great proportions it was laughable. He face was a caricature of himself, the dark, red lines outlining the deep bags under his eyes, cutting deep shadows across his cheekbones and making his dark eyelashes stand out like frames on paintings. But it would all be worth it when he got the paycheck. The holidays were just around the corner and every penny counted. His two young girls deserved the world and he would get it for them.
The woman had called the night before giving detailed instructions and the address of her destination. Had he been more awake a few hours ago, he would have remembered to bring the map and the directions he had downloaded from the internet. But he wasn’t and he didn’t. But he was sure that he would be able to find where she was going. It was a small town they were going to, after all.
The drive of 45 minutes was one of the longest drives of his life. He willed his eyes to stay open, almost missed the exit, took a few wrong roads but aptly avoided collision a number of times. The woman at one point asked him to please call into the office and have someone there tell him the directions because she was not sure she could find the way in the dark in the middle of the night. He scoffed, telling her no, sadly, they are all sleeping and there is no one there to speak to. This is not true, of course, but he does not want the shame of admitting he was too tired to remember to bring the directions.
Mehdi thinks to himself that the woman in the backseat is too much of a chatterbox. Why does she insist on speaking to him non-stop about unimportant topics such as annual precipitation and the Seattle Seahawks and Huskies? He has no care for those kinds of things. Getting people from point A to point B is his concern and right now, he is not so sure he can find point B. Perhaps, he thinks in his unawake and groggy mind, perhaps she knows where she is going and can tell me the way? Perhaps she is always awake at 3:45 am and this is why she is so chatty? Perhaps I can put her mouth to good use and have her tell me which way to go? In these small hilly areas, the addresses are so hard to find. But after a time he realizes that clearly, she is not going to be much help. The sounds of her voice are annoying like a buzzing bee but, he admits grudgingly to himself, they are all that is keeping him awake.
Miraculously, after some time and a few wrong turns and with going 10 miles out of the way, (because surely there is a faster road if he only would have known it) they have found it. He looks up and realizes that he has no idea where he is. He has no idea how to find his way back down and through the hills. It might take him hours.
Mehdi asks the woman if she could go in the house and ask her relations the way back down the hills. They could surely tell him. She tells him that sadly, they are all sleeping so there is no one to speak to.
Have I mentioned my love for figs? I probably should have because my adoration for them might make you a little uncomfortable but since you already love me, it will be too late to stop reading. Face it, you’re stuck.
I SO look forward to fall because figs are really a seasonal fruit, which is different than a-kind-of-seasonal fruit which you can get all year round because everyone everywhere wants to have them in their kitchen even if it’s December and the hankering is for strawberries. It will only cost you $16.99 for a handful, but you can get them. Not so for figs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them in the produce section except for fall. But that is probably just fine, because when I do get them, they are sweet and wonderfully full of flavor instead of pretty looking but tasting like cardboard.
My passion for figs started quite early. My grandparents would sit around our long dinner table (They were at my house, you see, because it was fall. In the summer we went to their house.) and talk grown-up talk and at age six or seven, there just wasn’t anything much better than getting to sit with them and crack nuts, eat cheeses and partake of the delicious flesh of figs. I would over hear about how so-and-so was doing, people I couldn’t remember hearing about before, but as long as you were quiet and polite, they didn’t even notice. And they’d crack open an almond or pecan and leave the shelly mess in front of you to pick the meat out. Sometimes it was challenging. But sometimes it was easy and I’d use that little silver pick to get the flesh out. And the large crates of citrus from their groves in Arizona would be piled over in the corner, the oranges and grapefruit smells permeating the entire house and almost disguising the regular smell of House. It was perfect.
Sometimes, My aunt, the funny one that teased a little (but only in a good way) would come over, too, and it would be those times that I would freeze, hand mid-way to my mouth with a nice, plump piece of nut meat, and stare at the person my mother had become. Laughing and radiant. She was even more beautiful than usual. It was amazing to look at her with her head slightly back, laughing so hard that sometimes you could see tears at the corner of her eyes.
One time, my grandpa showed me how the figs were different tasting when they were only days apart in age. He sliced a whole series open with his pocketknife and showed me the colors in the itty, bitty seeds and had me taste little slices of them. His favorites were the ones right in the middle. I liked the least ripe ones that were firmer. And we both agreed that the very, very ripe ones were just too sweet for eating and should be used in baking. If he were here to ask me now, I’d tell him that I agree, the mid-point ripened figs are the best tasting. And also, my palette has matured and I now enjoy dates as well. He would be so proud.
I wish I had photos of the figs in my refrigerator for you, but the pictures wouldn’t be the same without his strong and weathered hands holding them, anyway. Or without my mother’s laugh.
I can never get enough of public radio. I know where all the stations are in my area. I know when my favorite shows are on. I sometimes sit in the car for an extra 5-10 minutes after reaching my destination just to finish listening.
The end result of this is that I’m kind of sort of informed about a wide variety of subjects. A connoisseur of tiny tid-bits, if you will. I can carry one side of a conversation with someone that knows more than I do pretty well. It’s when I try to tell someone that has less knowledge than I do, about any certain subject that has caught my fancy, that we find ourselves in trouble, people, since I really don’t know what I’m talking about. I have, some people might say, just enough knowledge to be dangerous (and/or annoying).
What I notice, however, is that my feelings on the subject are not proportional to the amount of knowledge I have. For example, if I know 20% of all there is to know about immigration, shouldn’t I be 20% on the scale in how strong I feel about it? This is theorizing that there is a way to quantify the amount of knowledge on any subject that is to be had. But instead I find that I get passionate about some things right from the start and I want to ‘share’ my feelings and point of view with others. My small and puffy mind wonders if this is a problem for other people as well. Do the people in the public eye know more than I know? Do they spend the time to really know their subjects well, front and back, before formulating an opinion and going out on the path to support Pro-Choice or Pro-Life? There are times when I’m completely hot under the collar and spewing strong opinion and passion everywhere only to find out a few days later that I’m actually full of crap.
Since I am by nature an impatient person as well as slightly lazy, or at least drawn to comfort and ease as opposed to being driven, for the most part, to spend my days researching politics and current events, and because I have this public format that I am free to use any way I wish, I might as well spill my over-saturated, passionate feelings about subjects I don’t actually have all the facts for here. I need a name for these new recurring posts.
In this series, I will not even try to pretend that I know everything about the subject at hand. I will merely state my current opinion and hope that you, dear reader, will agree or not agree in my comments so that I can actually get a well-rounded and more full knowledge base on said subject. Look for the first installment this week.
I hope you are all having a wonderful Tuesday.