One More Excerpt from My Work in Progress

Day 18

Robert and I drove along the Gulf Coast through Grand Bay, Alabama Port, and Bayou Le Batre (proclaiming itself “The Seafood Capital of Alabama,” with signs for shrimp, grouper, flounder, and cigar minnows), and out over a tall hump of a bridge to Dauphin Island.  In Alabama Port, we passed the Clyde Sprinkle Volunteer Fire Station.  Later in the day, I looked Clyde Sprinkle up.  He died at the age of 94, in 2005.  He owned and operated Sprinkle’s Grocery Store and Sprinkle’s Can Company and he was a co-founder of the fire station in Alabama Port.  A note on rootsweb.com indicates that as late as 2000, he was “a joy to listen to and had such spirit.”

The predicted rain never arrived, despite thick cloud cover and oppressive humidity.  A stiff breeze was blowing as we pulled onto the Mobile Bay Ferry—our craft was the Marissa Mae Nicole—for the trip to Fort Morgan.  We were sent on our way by a blue heron patrolling the dock, and by flocks of pelicans.  The pelicans are something of a mystery.  No one knows where they go in the winter: Mississippi?  Florida?  Mexico?  Scientists are tagging them to see.

It took forty-five minutes to get to Fort Morgan, chugging over choppy seas.  We passed more pelicans and several oil rigs.  We hung out with a worker on the boat who grew up north of Minneapolis.  There was no reason to ask him why he lives here now, but Robert did anyway.  When the man said, “Winters,” Robert—a native of Joliet, Illinois—laughed in knowing solidarity.

Once we docked, I let Robert off to ride and drove along the shore, past houses in pastel shades of yellow, green, blue, red, and gray.  Almost all of them were built on tall posts on the beach, in what seems like random relation to each other.  They are rustic rather than grand: faded and weathered.   The overall effect is informal and charming. 

At Gulf Shores, I drove north, over a toll bridge crossing the Wharf Parkway and Brown Lane.  The toll collector, anticipating tomorrow, wished me a happy Mother’s Day, as though my maternal status was tattooed on my forehead.  I drove to Foley, which was having an arts festival.  I parked the car and strolled through the park where the festival was being held.  At one booth, I stopped to admire a piece of stained glass.  “I love this,” I said, “but I’m traveling and I’m afraid it might break.”

A woman standing next to me overheard. 

“Where are you from?” she asked.  She was young and heavy, with pale, pocked skinned.

“California.”

“Oh!  California,” she murmured, as though I’d said I might be having an allergic reaction to shellfish.  And then, “I’ve heard about California.”

“Heard what?”

“Just how it’s different.”

We smiled at each other.  It made me feel as though I wasn’t the only one wondering.  We both were, across the divide. Both hearing stories, trying to imagine ourselves living unimaginable lives.

We came to rest in Pensacola.  On our way to dinner at the Oyster Barn, the sky finally opened, shedding rain.  Just as we pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant—a little shack overlooking the bayou and a lovely bridge—the rain let up, and we went in.  Robert had his raw oyster fix.  I watched some young men fishing on a dock.  The rain started again, but they kept at it.

At a table next to ours, a young father and his seven-year-old son ate oysters and hush puppies.  They knew the owner and all the waitresses, who ruffled the kid’s hair and teased him.  The father let the kid be teased, let him answer questions as though he was a regular person, not as if his own self-image was wrapped up in whether his kid proved sufficiently smart or funny or cute.

The owner of the restaurant approached them and introduced them to an elderly man who had been sitting at the counter.  “I’ll pay you if you take him off my hands,” he said, comically at his wits’ end.  “He eats here every night.” 

The elderly man didn’t know the younger man or his son, but they all began to talk.  The old man sat down.  “Do you like your teacher?” he asked the boy, who said he did.  The owner went back to the kitchen.

They talked for another ten minutes, until the elderly man left the restaurant.  The father did not seem irritated to have a stranger at his table.  The little boy was polite: talkative but not insistent on being the center of attention.  And the elderly man, who ate alone at an oyster bar every night, was gracefully included in someone else’s family for a few minutes.

It was really quite extraordinary.  It felt like something I had never seen before, this human dance in which all the participants knew exactly where to put their feet.

Until five years ago, I lived only a few miles away from my mother.  She dropped in unannounced several times a week, mainly to see the kids, one or the other of whom was usually still around then.  We often went out to eat together, and she was always at our Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.  At Thanksgiving, she brought Marie Callendar peach pies, because she didn’t like apple or pumpkin or pecan.  At Christmas, she proclaimed routinely that “it’s not my holiday” and didn’t bring presents.  Perversely, though, she bought almost every ornament that hangs on my tree to this day.

She was part of our everyday lives.    

Occasionally, we traveled with her.  We took two cruises together—one to Alaska and another to Hawaii.  Once, when my then-husband was away, she and the kids and I drove to Disneyland for a few days.

On the drive home, merging from 580 onto 680, I was nearly cut off by a woman who tried to squeeze past me on the ramp.  “You bitch,” I said more to myself than to anybody else, positioning the car to prevent her from passing me.

My mother was furious with me.  “Gina!” she cried, tipping her head toward the back seats, where my kids, aged 11 and 8, were sitting.  “I don’t like that kind of talk!”

Not a minute later, we were safely on 680 heading north, and she rolled down her window as the offending driver passed us on the right.  “Asshole!” she yelled, both middle fingers extended prominently.  She was 77 years old.

The four of us laughed so hard.  And the kids and I still do, when one of us brings it up.   It reminds us that my mother had spirit, that she was never afraid of confrontation, that she was funny as hell and knew it, but could laugh at herself a little, too.

On the drive back to the hotel, the rain came down so hard that the windshield wipers couldn’t keep up.  The thunder felt as though it was inside my body.  I couldn’t stop thinking about the old man driving home.  I hope he has the kind of house that looks cozy from the outside.  I hope he has an overstuffed chair to sit in, and a quilt to put over his legs that someone made just for him.

Another Post From My Work-In-Progress

Day 23

 Highway this morning edged in tall, thin pines and orange, purple, and yellow wildflowers growing in the grass along the shoulder.  And then, all of a sudden, the pines opened onto an enormous meadow: green, un-mowed and a little shaggy, vast.  It was a kind of gift, a glimpse into what is hidden and enchanted.

 I’ve noticed that birds that look like egrets hang out near the cows munching in the fields.  So I googled it and found that they are cattle egrets—a kind of heron—and they hang out with cows because cows’ shambling gaits cause insects to rise from the grass.  Cattle egrets need insects to survive.  This is called commensal feeding, because the egrets profit from the relationship, but the cows don’t.  The Internet is a wonderful thing.

 Lake City is another in a string of small Florida towns: a mix of the pastoral and the ugly ordinariness of mobile-home sales, fast-food and barbeque joints, churches, real-estate and insurance offices.  And flower shops.  Small, southern towns have a lot of florists.   Do people really have enough money to buy fresh flowers on a regular-enough basis to keep these shops in business?  The one in Lake City has a sign out front: Life Is the Flower; Love Is the Pot. 

A large percentage of roadside business in the south is devoted to selling, repairing, and repossessing mobile-homes.  I don’t remember this from the last time I was here.  I suspect this hints at something fundamental that is changing in this country.  It is yet another facet of life that is so different from mine that I can’t claim really to understand it.   How do you live in a double-wide?  In one of those parks?  I simply do not know. 

 And that reminds me how hard it is to know how anybody really lives.  I remember Oprah hosting an early show about stay-at-home moms.  And in her genuine, nonjudgmental way, she asked them, What do you do all day?  Really, what do you do?  She didn’t know. 

 I don’t know how to live in a small town (as opposed to a suburb).  I don’t know how to live a life that involves going to an actual job every day.  I don’t know how people live where it snows.  (I did it in college, but somehow, that doesn’t count.  Someone else drove me around and cooked my food.) 

 In a weird way, thinking about how other people live is like thinking about death.  You just can’t quite put yourself there. 

 My mother grew up in an orphanage, without parents.  I simply cannot imagine how she survived.  But she always had remarkably little curiosity about how other people lived.  I would muse about life on farms, something that, as a young adult, I convinced myself I would love.  (I realize now it was because I had heavily romanticized attitudes about livestock and homemade pie.) And my mother would say impatiently, You would hate it.  It’s just like your life here, except you would have to work harder. 

 She was right, of course.  Sort of.  The rain would have really mattered.  The air would have smelled like hay.

Once, on a car trip from San Francisco to Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, my mother told me about a long-ago train trip she’d taken.  We were at that moment driving through an Iowa cornfield, and that is what reminded her.  She said she sat next to a boy a little bit older than she—maybe 20 or 21—and he told her that farmers said, “The corn is knee-high by the Fourth of July.”  She never forgot that, she said.  (Well, she’s forgotten it now.)  She said it wistfully, and I, who was 20 or 21 at the time, knew without being told that she had liked the boy and had always wondered what had happened to him and how things might have been different.

Now, when I see a cornfield, that is always what I think about.  Her memory has become mine, like a handed-down pair of shoes. 

The things I like about traveling are: staying in clean hotels, eating food that I didn’t have to cook, seeing things I never really believed I would see (Westminster Abbey, Mount Rushmore, the Eiffel Tower, the Mitchell, South Dakota Corn Palace), and thinking about how people live.  And always, I come home with the realization that I can’t put myself into other people’s daily routines.  I can imagine them, but I can’t know in the way that I want to.

 When I was 17, I went to New York by myself.  My cousins took me to a stage performance by Theodore Bikel, which I barely remember, because I sat in the theater feeling overwhelmed with the feeling that I was Somewhere Else. 

 I’ve visited many people’s homes in many unfamiliar places.  But I think that was the closest I ever came to being in other people’s lives.  Maybe it was because I was young and without defenses.  Maybe it was because I hadn’t lived enough to intellectualize my wonder and was experiencing it on an emotional, visceral level.  I don’t really know.  What I do remember is coming back to my cousin’s Upper West Side apartment, closing the door to the guest bedroom I’d been given, and feeling that the air itself was made of different atoms and that by breathing it, I was not quite filling my lungs, was gasping like a fish just caught and flung into a boat

What I've Been Doing for the Last Few Months

I haven't written here since March.  This is because Robert and I were away for several weeks and I've been writing about our trip, hoping to end up with a book.

For many years, Robert wanted to ride his bicycle across the country, and we decided that this year--the year he turns 60--would be a good time to do it.  I was, by turns, excited about the trip (which I would make by car, acting as the slag wagon) and anxious about leaving my 92-year-old mother--newly diagnosed with dementia--behind.

What ended up happening was that 1) Robert succeeded in riding his bike through (most of) the country, and 2) I booked motels and helped plan routes and drove back roads looking for him when his tires blew and worried about my mother.

The book that is currently taking shape is part-memoir and part-travelogue.  It is also pretty personal, which is hard for me.  I've never written anything like this before.  Its working title is: Complicated Journeys: A Cross-Country Road Trip and Thirty-Three Memories of My Mother.

I thought I'd post a few excerpts:

Day 5

Quartzsite is just over the California/Arizona border, about twenty miles east of Blythe.  There is no denying the assumption that the people who live in Quartzsite think Blythe has too much going on and are opting for a less stimulating way of life.  The gentlemen who checked me in to the Super 8 Motel are non-natives: one is from Hong Kong, the other from Vancouver.  In Hong Kong, they tell me, they hated the crowds; in Vancouver, one of them was robbed.  With high gas prices, they are struggling to keep their motel afloat.  Many of the bicyclists who usually stay there have taken to camping as they inch across the country.  The man from Hong Kong looked aggrieved as he told me that he tried to phone the tour group that manages such trips, but no one would take his call.

Robert arrived around noon, ready to give up for the day after only three hours.  A slow, insidious incline and punishing heat took their toll.  He sat in the bathtub for half an hour, listening to the semis out on the Interstate.

 

I took a lot of car trips with my parents when I was a kid.  We drove to Carmel a couple of times a year, to Los Angeles occasionally, to Santa Barbara and the Grand Canyon and Tahoe and the Feather River.  My father loved to drive.  My mother loved the break in routine.  They both loved to listen to classical music on the radio, eat fast food (which they never did at home), and stay in motels.  My father was a doctor, but my parents traveled like people who had to watch their money.  It didn’t occur to them to do it any other way.

My mother complains a lot about her marriage, which ended in 1977 when my father died of a brain tumor at the age of 53.  She says mean things about him which may or may not be true.  When she says them to me, I tell her to stop.  It doesn’t seem fair to me that he isn’t around to defend himself.  He was a difficult, angry guy, but I loved him a lot.  I know my mother doesn’t remember about the car trips or hanging out in the kitchen drinking martinis once a week or how he called her “Dear.”  When I have tried to remind her, she has taken it as license to regale me with grievances, so I no longer bother.

Robert and I drove through town in the early afternoon.  It was 111 degrees.  We bought candied grapefruit at Daniel’s Jerky Store and took a brief walk through the Hi-Jolly Cemetery, where a plaque commemorates Hi-Jolly, born Hadji Ali in Syria in the 1830s, charged in 1856 with managing a herd of camels imported to assist in the building of a trans-Arizona roadway.  The federal government abandoned the project after some years, but for many years after, wild camels roamed the area. That is something I would have liked to see.

At lunch, reading the local newspaper, we saw an ad for a used-book store at the end of town, past the Family Dollar store.  I was sure it wouldn’t be open on a Sunday, but I was wrong.  Reader’s Oasis Book Store was open and patrons were poring through books on a “Free” table set up in the parking lot.  I joined them and immediately found a book called The English Scene, published in 1940 by The American Book Company, previously the property of School District #40, Yamhill, Oregon.  The book is a textbook, presenting “a general view of England and the English as seen through their own literature.”  Sometimes, something just screams your name.

I was marveling at this when the proprietor of the store emerged.  He was as tan as old leather, slender, with a graying ponytail extending down his back.  He was also completely naked, except for a black sock that he was not wearing on his foot. “Hey, can I smoke in there?” a traditionally clothed, middle-aged man clambering out of his car asked, and Naked Book Store Guy said, “Sure, ‘cause this isn’t really a building.  There’s no roof on it.”  He turned away from us to escort the smoker into the-building-that-wasn’t-a-building.  The cheeks of his ass drooped like coin purses full of pennies.

I wanted to look through more books, but the smoke put Robert and me off.  I went into the store briefly and handed Naked Book Store Guy a few dollars.  “It was on the “Free” table, but I had to give you something, because this is just fantastic,” I said.  He thanked me, but I don’t think he really knew what I meant.

We went to dinner at the Quartzsite Yacht Club, which is the only yacht club in the world built nowhere in the vicinity of a body of water.  It’s a bar with decent pub food and a dance floor and pool tables.  We asked the bartender about Naked Book Store Guy.  It turns out he is rather renowned.  His name is Paul Winer and, according to the bartender, he used to teach at “a big college in Connecticut.”  “Why did he move here?” Robert asked, and the bartender said, “To get as far away from Connecticut as possible.”  She said he is one of the loveliest people imaginable, and that he doesn’t mind wearing shorts in local restaurants.

Paul Winer has made me love this town.  It was 111 degrees here today, and I didn’t even care.  Paul Winer gives me hope for the human race.  Not because he’s a nudist, but because he’s himself, and people you’d think might object are perfectly fine about it.

March 1-9 by the Numbers

9: Number of days I ran 3 miles;

9: Number of days I made the 200-mile round trip to visit my mother, who is 92 and fractured her pelvis last week;

6: Number of times my mother said she didn’t want to live anymore;

5: Number of times she said a nurse had stolen her purse;

1: Number of times she said I ruined her life by taking her car;

7: Number of times my ex-husband went to visit my mother;

1: Number of afternoons spent getting acquainted with my daughter’s new cat;

148: Number of pages in rejected manuscript I am revising;

30: Number of proofreader-spotted mistakes I have to fix by March 19 in another manuscript I thought was finished;

0: Number of times I went down to the beach and watched the sunset;

0: Number of nights I cooked a real dinner;

30+: Number of conversations with doctors, nurse practitioners, social workers, case managers, and physical therapists;

2: Number of nights I woke up at 3 am and cried myself back to sleep.

What Worry Is

I came across this on the Internet a few days ago: “Worry is like a prayer for something you really don’t want.”

I am a compulsive worrier.  I hate it.  I wish I were different in this one way.

I’m not exactly sure who said “Worry is like a prayer for something you really don’t want.”  A quick Google search leads me to “Christian author” Sophy Burnham, but I’m not 100% sure of this, so I apologize if I’ve made an incorrect attribution.  At any rate, the words resonated with me.

I’ve worried about different things over the years: friendships, relationships, children, health, children’s health, money, loneliness.  I think somewhere along the way, I learned (or was taught) that worry was like a bargain I was making with God: if I just made myself miserable worrying, God would see that I was not being arrogant or careless about my good fortune and would make sure nothing really bad ever happened to me, as a reward.

Intellectually, I know this is stupid.  But the worry grooves have already been carved deep into my brain.  I can’t stop.

Monday, on my 3-mile run, I decided to use the worry thing as an affirmation.  I timed it out to coincide with the rhythm of my steps: Worry is like/a prayer for something/you really don’t want. 

I would zone out for a few blocks and then check in with myself, to see if I was still affirming.  Sometimes I was.  Sometimes I’d mucked up the words.  One time I caught myself saying: War is like/a prayer for something/you really don’t want.  Another time it was: Prayer is like/a worry.  I self-corrected.

As I was heading for the hill on Townsend, two little girls were pushing their scooters up to the top.  They looked to be about seven.  Clearly, they were celebrating Presidents’ Day.  They careened down the hill ahead of me, shrieking with happiness.  They did not wear helmets.  One of them was in a dress and barelegged.  They zoomed straight down the middle of the street, oblivious to the curve at the bottom, the possibility that a fast-moving car might suddenly appear, heading right for them.

When I got to the bottom of the hill and began my slow chug up Cliff, I checked in with myself.  My affirmation had become: Where are the/goddamn idiot/parents?

I self-corrected.

Then I thought, Assuming those little girls aren’t hit by a bus, they are going to end up being joyful and fearless, which is a pretty good way to go through life.  Maybe if I had been allowed to speed down a hill like that, I would be a different person.

Then I realized that I WAS allowed to speed down a hill like that.  (On a bike.  We didn’t have scooters.)  And no one watched me or told me about cars around the corner or made me wear a helmet.

So I don’t know what the answer is.  I’m back to thinking it’s just how I’m wired.

Worry is really tough to turn around.  But I am going to keep trying. 

Rethinking An Empty Nest

Since I wrote my last post about being an empty-nester, I’ve been feeling a little blue, even though I received some wonderfully generous comments from other parents who get what I’m saying.  (Your support is very, very welcome.  Thank you, all.)

But then God or the Universe or whatever decided that I had had enough wallowing.  And brought me to a blog written by a young father of two (http://growingsideways.net/2012/02/07/an-entire-week-boiled-down-to-two-disgusting-minutes/).  Whereupon I remembered a night about twenty-one years ago.  A night that will never be forgotten by three of the four people who lived it. 

The night in question involved communal, familial vomiting.  It involved the Baby Who Started It All and then mercifully and uncharacteristically slept for ten hours.  It involved a five-year-old boy who moaned every twenty minutes, “Mommy, I don’t like this!” and then threw up again, sometimes in the toilet, sometimes not.  It involved a (then-) husband who raced home from his late-night job to be ill loudly and repeatedly.  It involved me standing in the kitchen guzzling orange juice, knowing full well that I was going to barf it up in the sink before I could get to the bathroom.

At around 3 am, I turned my head to look at my husband.  He, I, and the boy were lying on the guest bed to avoid waking up the baby.  My eyelashes hurt.

“I would trade a year of my life for a ginger ale,” I said.

Whereupon then-husband staggered to his feet, got in the car, and drove to Safeway (where they remembered him from the week before, when he’d shown up in the middle of the night to buy tomato juice for the dog who’d just been skunked).  And returned with a big bottle of Canada Dry.

We may be divorced, but I will never forget his gallantry that night.  (Or what he sounded like throwing up.  It was kind of terrifying.   Women don’t sound like that.)

Remembering all this, I can laugh (a little).  I think most families live through at least one night like this.  It becomes lore.  It bonds you.

But it’s really hideous, and I don’t ever want to do it again.

So thanks, Kevin Hartnett, for reminding me that a nest populated by two middle-aged birds who are meticulous about getting their flu shots has an upside. 

An Empty Nest Is for the Birds

My children are 26 and 22, but when I dream of them, they are usually about 10 and 6. 

I don’t know why this is.

I’ve read New-Age spiritualists who say that everyone on the other side is about 30, and that we will recognize our friends and family even if we never knew them at this age.  Not sure how these theorists have come to these revelations, but I sort of believe it.  Or maybe I just want to.  Thirty is a good age to be for eternity.

When I’m awake, I picture my children as they are today: young adults, my son tall and bearded, my daughter with cool boots and a chic haircut.  But asleep, I see them as they used to be.  Is it because at ages 10 and 6, they had settled comfortably into life, with friends and interests they have to this day?  Is it because I enjoyed this period of motherhood so much, happy not to be merely a live-in nursemaid but not yet having to contend with the anxiety brought on by teenager-hood?  Is it because this is when they still enjoyed hanging around with me?   Is it because they—we—were still untouched by divorce?

I don’t write very often about how I miss my kids.  (This is because I don’t like to write about things that might embarrass or upset them, but what the hell: they probably don’t even read this.)  For one thing, they are wonderful about keeping in touch with me.  I saw my daughter yesterday; I visited my son in L.A. two weeks ago.  I talk to them on the phone often.  I am lucky, lucky, lucky, and I know it and acknowledge it every day of my life.

But that doesn’t keep me from occasional melancholy and a deep longing for something that is gone, finished.

Society as a whole laughs at parents who feel sad that their kids have left home.  Either that, or we are admonished, told that we should be happy our kids are doing well and becoming productive citizens and what, we should want them to live in our basements when they’re forty? 

I resent all this.  I am thrilled that my children are on their own, living their lives, becoming yet more themselves.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.  But don’t tell me to be embarrassed about feeling sad. 

Motherhood changed me so profoundly.  In one instant, I became a completely different person.  And the thing about an empty nest is that you change again, but it’s not instantaneous and it’s not complete.  You’re still and always a mother, but now you have to be a regular person again, too.

In my dreams, my kids are usually trying to help me find something.

When I’m asleep, I don’t know what it is.  But when I wake up, I think I do.