proteanme

About 3 weeks ago my grandmother died. I’m coming home for a very short trip to see my family and attend the funeral and burial.

My grandmother, who we called Mammaw, turned 100 this past December. There was a big family party. My sister and I sent flowers. Mammaw lived for a couple months after that and then passed away on the eve of my mom’s 79th birthday.

Mammaw helped raise me and my sister, along with a whole group of people, most of whom are dead now. Growing up I would say that Mammaw had backbone. That’s the best way I can explain it. She gave us structure and order and consistency. That’s the big umbrella under which everything else with her existed — all the summer trips, all the holidays, all the dinners and the desserts — everything she did for us and she did a lot.

“C’mere kiddo.”  I just remembered how Mammaw used to say that to me or my sister or one of my cousins.  Even when we were grown. She’d say it and pat the arm of her chair or the spot beside her on the couch.

With her gone I feel a little more untethered, a little more ungrounded, and less like myself. Which may explain why last night as I was trying to fall asleep, I thought about dying. Usually, when I think about dying I think about who gets left behind and how really fucking hard that can be. But last night I just got so scared of dying myself, that I shot up out of bed. I slept horribly after that and all day at work I couldn’t quite shake the sadness or fear. Riding the tram up to OHSU this morning I thought this is the weirdest fucking thing, riding this tram up a hill to go to a job.

I know that alot of my fear of dying comes from not knowing what’s going to happen and not trusting that it will turn out to be anything good. For the last ten years or so I’ve been working on trying not to take that line of thinking so seriously.

On the way home I made myself look at the river and the grass and the trees, especially all the ones that are blossoming right now. I remember going for a hike once with Ty when I was feeling really sad and he kept saying things like look there’s the sky and look there the trees or there’s a bird or there’s a flower.

When I’m feeling optimistic or a little enlightened I like to think that nature is telling us something about living and dying. We talk to mystics and repent and pray and do tarot and augury and gather data and do science experiments and conduct research, but maybe it’s really as obvious as the cycle of life and death, as hard as that is to say without wincing because of how the term got commodified by Disney and Elton John. But it is always happening in the natural world around us. Maybe we are all just like leaves. Leaves that can kill and torture each other, but still leaves. Or maybe we are more like volcanoes. Or big gay rainbows. I don’t know. It’s a pretty simple view, but I’ve been wondering for a while now if we just make things too complicated with our big and under-used human brains.

We have a guest at our house this week, a Buddhist nun, which is different story, but I’m bringing it up here because when I got home from work I was surprised to discover our guest had set out a treat for me — a small tart with a note telling me to “enjoy,”  accentuated by a little hand drawn smiley face. It was such a really nice surprise that I forgot my angst long enough to think of something else besides dying and being sad and wishing I didn’t waste so much time.

I thought about the last time I went home and how it was warm and sunny and Becky and Jeremy were getting married and I met PJ and Nash and ran into Ty in Indy and how I got to spend time with so many people who are so dear to me. And I thought about about how the time before that, I’d come home for Ned and Kristy’s wedding and how I loved being with everyone there and seeing fall again in Indiana and how sweet it was that Rachel and Pat let me tag along with them flying home and getting around Indy and down to Bloomington and back to the airport.

I’ve not posted for a while because I’ve not known what to say about anything. There has been so much destruction and upheaval and so much suffering these last several months. And there seems to be a mean spirited climate taking over US culture, at least when it comes to looking out for each other. And I want to say something meaningful about all of it, about how life is precious and how there is so much pain in the world and how if you can do something for someone that will make things better, then do it.

I’m sitting at a coffee shop in Hood River working on some freelance web projects. RU has gone off to see the monks at the hermitage in White Salmon.

It is remarkably sunny here and the temperature is getting up in the 50’s. It makes me think that when I’m  desperately missing the sun I should drive over here or better yet, a little further east, to The Dalles and get a dose of blue sky.  Today, maybe it’s less pertinent because I know it’s sunny in Portland too. But man, when the sun comes out in winter, I’m so gratefully psyched, even though it reminds me of how much I miss bright sunny days. I miss them in a desperate kind of way, sometimes so much so that I have to keep a lid on it. Or I’m afraid I might go a little crazy. Whatever you’ve heard about how much it rains in Portland, it’s true. And it gives it a damp and mossy kind of gothic feeling. I love how the sun pushes against the dark and chilling part of primeval. Even a cold sunny day can do it.

I’ve been wanting to post about a bunch of things that I’ve been thinking about, like gun control and queer culture and writing code and why some people call themselves DJs but can’t mix to save their lives and how L.A. seems so beautiful and hopeful and horrible and tragic at the same time. I’ve been thinking about empathy and and how hard it is to to show sincerity about real things and why I’ve been humming church hymns to myself. I guess it’s enough to note it for now and maybe I’ll come back to some of it.

Right now I need to decide if I should go for a walk or work or write.

After 6 months of riding the tram, twice a day, nearly 5 days a week, I’ve been noticing  it really doesn’t bother me any more — being up that high and enclosed in that space.  In fact, sometimes I enjoy the ride. I first noticed a shift back in November, when I stayed later at work than I normally do on a couple different occasions. It was dark when I rode down and it was so cool to look out and see the city all lit up.

While, I often still sit in on one of the little jump seats on the way up, I’m ok if I don’t. And if it’s a beautiful sunrise, I’d rather stand and look out.

On the way down I try to maneuver close to the back windows where I can stand at look at the skyline or the traffic or houses below us. Sometimes I like to look back at the hospital as we speed away from it, tracing the cable lines from there to where I stand hovering high over the ground.

This morning the wind whooshed up against the cabin and rocked it side to side. A guy stood beside me texting and two women stood in front of me holding on to to one of the few poles. And it was pretty amazing to me how much all of it was all ok.

I guess there is something about practice. Because I was so dang scared of heights. I’d get a feeling deep in my abdomen that felt just like “step back.” If I had testicles they would have ascended. For the first month, I hated riding the tram. Hated it. I’d stare at my shoes, stare at the floor, fold little scraps of paper I carried in my pocket, until they looked some king of modern origami. I hated when the tram slowed down right before it docked on the upper platform and it would seem to just hang there forever. But I just kept getting on and riding it. Sometimes, the change feels pretty amazing. I can’t believe willingness and exposure work.

When the year ends, I’m not much for projecting out into the future. No grand pronouncements or prognostications here. It’s never been my thing. I do like to reflect back though, to take account of the things I’m grateful for and note any trends.

For me, 2010 seemed mostly to be about relationships – making new ones, catching up with old ones, deepening existing ones and very sadly, ending others.  I don’t like to talk much about those things here, good stuff or not so good. It feels too private for public airing. Still, when I think about where I spent a lot of  my time and energy this last year, I think  of people, which seemed kind of impossible this time last year as I was still in the thick of the numbing grief of losing my dad. And especially in light of that, I want to say “thank you” people of 2010. I think of all of you more than I tell you and I will try to be better at that.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff that happened in 2010 that I’m grateful for, like finding a new job, putting up a hammock on our deck this summer and having a birthday party that people came to, learning to ride the tram, learning to cut my hair, and graduating from the IPRC’s writing certificate program, going on vacation to San Francisco, Palm Springs, Indiana and New York, putting together my chap book, The Animal Keeper, doing my first reading, and helping my friend A.M. teach a writing class, taking 6 hours to drive back from the Oregon country Fair, spending a couple weekends on the Oregon coast and traveling around almost a whole week in the Oregon outback. And not just because I want to contradict myself and talk about people, but more because I want to be true to my heart, I’ll add a short list of names here: RU, Lowen, Katherine, Maggie, Martha and Mom.

I don’t know how to talk about my dad without it sounding terribly sad, even though I’m not feeling terribly sad anymore. I still cry sometimes, like last week when I watched these movies where one of the main characters was dealing the death of a parent, but in general, I don’t feel weighed down or numbed out by grief any more. Yay. It’s like writing those lists – I didn’t mean for it to be read as sad as it came off. Sometimes I think I normalized a lot of stuff that was kind of tragic about my dad and tragic about being my dad’s kid. But that’s what kids do to cope and you don’t just turn off those coping skills when you get to be an adult, even when you’ve been an adult for a while. I want to post these couple poems I wrote about Dad’s death, in part because I never thought I’d be able to write about it without getting sentimental and over wrought. But I did and I’d love to have read and for anyone who reads them to know I’m ok. American culture is funny about grief. We’re expected to keep it to ourselves. We’ve not developed a great skillset to talk about it. Or to talk about anything that profoundly changes your life, at least not if it’s about profound loss.

I’m not sure that it’s related, but thinking about that made me think of my grandmother, who is 99 and in a nursing home. The few times I’ve seen her there she either seems checked out or so sad. I saw her when I was home in October and she cried most of the time we were there. Not sobbed, but visibly teared up. We grow old and things go backwards kind of – our bodies don’t do the things we want them to do, our minds don’t always work right, and we usually need some extra help and then we die. And that whole process is another huge part of life we try and push away. We get born and most of the time it’s a celebration for the first couple years, but we get ready to leave the world and who even comes around to see us?!

Rain and trees. Trees and rain. Oh, Portland, please don’t start your rainy season yet.

It’s strange how easy it is to get back in the swing of things here. Get on my bike, ride to work, go to the store, buy some food, do the laundry, wash the dishes, pay the bills. Just kinda pick up where I left off, more or less. Even though that’s not what I want to do. I can’t quite articulate exactly what I want to do or what’s missing. I know it’s not as easy as moving to New York, which would not be easy at all. Anyway, I can’t quite sum up the thing that feels off inside. It’s like a crack in a fault line, maybe. Although that sounds too dramatic. Maybe it’s just that it takes a long time to figure oneself out and that’s what happening to me. I’m figuring myself out. I think I’ve said all this before. Alot. Before my dad died.

Just because it takes a lot to surprise me and I don’t believe in astrology doesn’t mean that’s that I’m a cynical. For a while now I’ve been letting people call me cynical and I’ve really got to stop doing that because what they really mean is I’m skeptical.  And doubt, which I have a fair amount of,  isn’t the same thing as scorn, and me being doubtful doesn’t make me contemptuous or bitter.

If I wanted to add to my credo I’d say that the planets don’t figure into my experience of how the world works. I try to figure the world out by looking at what people do and people do wonderful and horrible things in equal measure.

Also, I’ve had it with snarkiness. I think when people say snarky things they think they’re being witty and clever. But really they’re just being mean.

I wanted to add something to my credo post, which is I believe you should try not to do things that cause you to feel pain and humiliation and if you do you should try and forgive yourself as best your can and then try hard not to those things again. Just practicing this could probably take up a lifetime, although if you want to do other things, like go to school  or climb a mountain or read the classics, it shouldn’t be thought of as mutually exclusive endeavor.

A real summer adventure. Left the house at 9am and didn’t come back until 9pm. Spent a couple hours at the Oregon Country Fair. It’s one of the queerest non-queer events I’ve been to. I suspect I’d say the same thing if I went  to Burning Man. But I digress. RU and I took the longest way home, riding all these back roads, passing farmlands and vineyards and clumps of trees and cows and sheep eating up the grass in their pastures. We took a ferry across the Willamette, stopped at a roadside fruit stand and got organic blueberries, and had dinner at a taco truck in Woodburn where they make their tortillas by hand. I’m happy to be sun burnt and tired.

More blue skies and hot temperatures and I refuse to complain about it. Or listen to complaints about it. Not that they’re not valid, I just don’t have receptive ears. I want to have an all on love affair with summer without having to fend off the naysayers.

Thanks to my friend, Shoshanna, I put in some serious-for-me biking miles last night, which included riding out to St. Johns, crossing over the deck of the bridge and riding back on Hwy 30. And Shoshanna was wearing a dress and flats with a strap! All in all, including my work commutes,  I think I might have ridden about 30 miles or so yesterday, making the pizza at end of the ride well worth it. It’s a pretty stunning view from the deck of the bridge, especially on a night like last night, when it was so clear and there wasn’t much traffic. The best part, though, may have been coming down the hill off the bridge and stopping for hydration in this pull out tucked into the edge of Forest Park. We were immersed into forest’s aroma. It was like diving into the deep end of summer.

I went to bed feeling tired in a good way and slept with the fan facing me.

I count myself lucky on all fronts.