This, Too, Shall Pass

This lovely summer Saturday morning, I stood in my yard watching small planes come and go from our tiny local airport and thought about how everything fades.

In the summer of 1981, I watched my father and another man carry two people out of a burning twin-engine Cessna.  That sounds cool and heroic and like something to be proud of, and it was.  It was also like this:

We're driving down the road on a hot summer evening, 16-ounce glass bottles of Coca-Cola and Dad's Root Beer clanking in the orange and white cooler on the floor by my feet, heading to the drive-in to see The Fox and the Hound.  My mother sees the plane, flying low, and makes a comment about it and then a moment later a ball of fire rises into the air up ahead.

One moment, the music is playing and the night breeze is soft in my hair and the next my mother is reaching hysterically for my father's arm, saying something about the plane that doesn't make sense to me, and he's hitting the gas.  I can still see her forearm, pale freckles against a sea-green sleeve, reaching across to him.  I can see the way the fire rolled upward, like the mushroom clouds we'd seen in films at school.

My father got out of the car and my mother said, "Don't go in there!"  In a voice that was oddly calm, my father said, "I'm not going in there.  No one could be alive in there."  And then someone started to scream, and he was gone.

My mother hovered around the edges; I stayed in the car with my little sister, seven years old and repeating over and over again, "Let it be a dream. Please let it be a dream," as she cried.  But it wasn't a dream, and the smell that filled the air--a smell I won't describe for you--made it obvious that not everyone had escaped.

The pilot and his son died.  A young woman was thrown clear and my father and a passing truck driver carried a 16-year-old girl and her mother out of the burning wreckage.  They recovered; there were ceremonies and medals.  And for at least a decade, I watched small planes suspiciously, wary of any tilt that seemed too extreme, waiting for them to fall from the sky.

And then, this morning, I smiled at a small plane in the sky and realized that I didn't know when I'd stopped holding my breath.  I didn't know when I'd started seeing those little planes the way everyone else did, or whether the fear had faded away over time or abruptly been gone one morning.  Perhaps it was this morning.    But suddenly, I knew that sooner or later, everything fades.

I'm About to Be Famous

Except for the part where I'm not, at all.  A little over a year ago, I wrote about how I kept getting recruited off the sidelines to be an extra in various films my daughter had dragged me to.

One of those movies--the one that inspired that post, actually--was a little bigger scale than the others, in that it starred Dennis Quaid, Zac Efron and Heather Graham and was directed by some guy apparently famous for shooting a plastic bag blowing in the wind or something like that.

I did not meet any of them or even see Quaid or Graham, but I did stand across the street from Zac Efron for a couple of hours while he filmed a scene over and over again. Between takes, he rode a borrowed bicycle around in the street, which was kind of cute.  Up close-ish, he still looks like a skinny teenager and I kind of suspect that photoshop or something similar is behind all those ab shots the magazines were showing us a couple of years ago.

It's called At Any Price. Here's the trailer.

If you go see this movie, you may or may not catch a glimpse of me standing on the street in front of a restaurant with Luke from the Post Office while Zac Efron jumps into a car and screeches off down the street about 15 times.  Oh, wait...probably that will only happen once in the movie.  If you do spot me, I'll look like hell, standing out in the cold wind in a sweater that makes me look huge and flat shoes that don't match my clothes--the nice heels that go with that outfit are in my car a mile or so away.

The Things that Keep Me Up at Night

Probably you know that I've been having some semi-serious medical problems.  And that I have had almost no income during the past 3+ months while I've been dealing with that.  And that I've naturally been having problems with the insurance company. And that my car went from crappy to altogether dead and I've had no transportation for over a month.

But really, I can deal with all that.  This is what's been keeping me up at night:

Sure, when you have no way to get to the store, you think about running out of things like food and medications.  But really?  In an absolute emergency, you can live for days without food.  Toilet paper?  Not so much.

Fortunately, there's a gas station with a convenience store not far from my house and we've been able to pick up a lot of basics there--paper products, canned food, milk, etc.  The thing is, it's not a high-volume store and they don't restock all that often, so the other day, during our ten-inch snowfall, I bought their last roll of toilet paper.

And then I felt greedy.

See, we still had a couple of rolls at home.  AND I have a local friend who could take me to the store in a real pinch.  We don't have cabs or buses here, but if I were really desperate I could pay $20 for a car service to take me to the store and pick me up.  So my worry wasn't that I'd bought the last roll of toilet paper and what would we do next...no, it was WHAT IF SOMEONE ELSE NEEDED THAT?

I really, really wish I were exaggerating for humor's sake, but I actually did find myself lying in bed that night thinking about the depth of the snow and worrying that someone else in the neighborhood might trek out to the gas station in desperation and find that they had no toilet paper.

Letters to Barb

As I write this, my dear friend Barb Cooper is in yoga teacher training for ten days.  I’m very excited about this for a number of reasons and it’s exactly where she should be right now.

But.

Oh, don’t worry.  I have absolutely no reservations about what she’s doing.  My “but” is purely selfish.

See, other than a brief bad period a couple of years ago which I mention here only because I’m compulsively honest, Barb has been at the other end of my keyboard for more than a decade. 

She was there when my 17-year-old started school and when I made the difficult decision to rescue her from the school system four years ago.  She was there when I started out on my own for the first time after ten years with my husband, and when my mother had a triple bypass and when I got my first full-time job in a dozen years and when I lost it. 

And now, while I’ve never been a needy or constant-contact kind of person and I know she’s still there in spirit, STUFF IS HAPPENING.

Would I have written that ill-advised email to a man from my past yesterday afternoon if Barb had been around to screen it?

And the night before last, I was up half the night because my teenage daughter shared a letter she’d written about her middle school experience—an experience from beyond the depths of hell that Barb lived with me from the other side of the country.

And today…well, today it occurred to me for the first time that the “less/fewer” rule DOESN’T SEEM TO APPLY TO “MORE”.  That was very disconcerting for me, especially since (if true) it suggests that “more” and “less” can’t be precise opposites.  I need to dig into this further.  And really…who else isn’t going to think that needing to know is a sign of some kind of neurosis?  You’re thinking it now, aren’t you?

However it may seem, the point of this story isn’t actually to complain about Barb’s absence.  The truth is, I’ve been pretty busy the past few days with a new client (after three months of medically-induced downtime!) and finishing up a project that got put on hold when I got sick.  The point of this story is that so often I see people online talking about how you don’t really have a relationship with someone until you’ve met in person and that sort of thing.

I know where those statements come from; in emails and forums relating to my relationship blog, I’m forever seeing people who are “in love” with people they’ve never met—usually people they’ve been corresponding with for one to three weeks.  And it’s true that it’s easier to mislead people or only show them a particular side of you online.

But it’s also worth noting how much a person on the other side of the country can become a part of your everyday life.  I just took a quick look at my gmail account—which I’ve only had for about half the time I’ve known Barb—and it’s showing about 7,000 THREADS between us.  Some of those only contain a few emails, but others contain dozens.  All told, I suspect that we’re over the 100,000 mark at this point.

Somehow, I find it hard to believe that I’d magically know her better (or vice versa) if we’d sat down for coffee or shuttled our kids to the same dance class.

Life in Bedford Falls

I've long said that I live in Bedford Falls.  It's the Christmas parade where you see someone you know every ten feet, the waitress at the diner who was your daughter's pre-school classroom aid fifteen years ago and remembers her name, the five-minute chats with the clerk at the gas station (and the way no one behind you gets annoyed--they may even join in), the way the children's librarian smiles when you come in with the grandkids and remembers when their mom graduated to young adult novels and a thousand other personal interactions.  It's the look of the place, too--the bright red wheel barrow in front of the hardware store downtown and the tiny post office and the storefronts run by people who live and work and shop and play in town.

But recently, when I started having some serious medical problems, I learned that my Bedford Falls was quite a bit wider than I'd realized.  (If you're thinking, "started?!  What do you mean started?", that's a fair question, but trust me on this--it's a lot more serious right now.)  Not being able to work for several weeks just at the time when I most need income has been rough. But it's also been a lesson in the beauty of humanity.

First, my high school best friend canceled a trip out of state so he could, basically, be close enough to drive me to the hospital if need be. So, instead of taking a vacation before he started a new job this week, he spent the week between Christmas and New Year's picking up my prescriptions and driving me to the grocery store and even bringing me toilet paper.

Then, some friends from the suburbs started talking behind my back, coordinating how they could help me out. And yes, that made me a little edgy, but also reminded me how fortunate I am to have such amazing people in my life.  One of them sent me a check that he insisted was a gift--when I objected, he said that if I insisted, I could send it back "when I got tired of it." And then these wonderful foods started appearing on my doorstep in decorative baskets, courtesy of a friend on the other end of the country.

I was already a little overwhelmed when an undauntable young friend on the other coast decided that it was time I "let the universe take care of me for a while" and started a fundraiser for me (and look at the nice things she said about me!)  And when she did, several of my past co-workers immediately chipped in to help.

My older daughter, already overwhelmed with three children, a full-time job and a husband going through medical issues himself, offered to come (225 miles) and pick up her sister if I had to go into the hospital.  I've received messages of support, prayers and offers of help from friends all over the country, some of whom I haven't seen in years. And today, a couple of college friends I've seen once in the past decade messaged to ask whether they could come and take me to lunch on Saturday.

I'm just saying "yes".  I've always been a big believer in mutual support and community only as long as I'm on the giving end; it's a bit uncomfortable when the tables are turned.  Perhaps everyone feels that way.  My wise teenager (who decorated the inside and outside of the house for Christmas by herself while I slept one day, after I mentioned that it made me kind of sad that I hadn't been able to do it) told me it doesn't work that way, that I'm on board with the idea or I'm not.  And I guess it's time to try out that view, since I really can't do a damned thing for myself at the moment regardless of my philosophy.  It's come as something of a surprise, though, how nice it is to have all this care and concern washing over me.

Not a Blast...

but more of a gentle twinkle from the past.  I wrote this for a friend's newsletter when Tori was in 1st grade, and recently he sent it back to me.  When I saw it for the first time in years I realized that I loved it--not my telling of it, but the memory of the experience--just as much as I did in the moment.

"I know a story about the Big Dipper," my daughter says, looking up. We're walking to the playground in the quiet spring night air.

 

"Tell me," I say.

 

"See that smallest star, at the end of the handle?" She points.  "That's the youngest brother. There was once a little girl who had no brothers. She made beautiful suits of clothes for seven brothers, and they made her their sister. But one day a calf came to the door and said that the buffalo herd wanted her. The brothers said they couldn't have her, so the the buffalo attacked. The girl and her brothers climbed up a tree to escape, and the tree kept growing higher and higher until they reached the sky. And they began to glow."

 

She points again.

 

"And that's them?"  

She nods.  "That's them. They turned into stars."  

"Is that true, do you think?" I ask as we reach the playground.  

"Its a legend Mom," she says, and climbs onto the swing. Her toes barely reach the ground as she pushes off.

 

"You pick if you believe it."

 

She stretches her feet toward the sky so hard that her long hair brushes the gravel in the dark, and I absolutely believe that a child can climb high enough to join the stars.

Too Discreet to Function

Last month, I spent a few days at the Ritz-Carlton Resort on Amelia Island.  It was a lovely place with excellent service, nice restaurants, onsite shops and a wide array of services I would never have thought to take advantage of.  And this was the view from my room:

The truth is, though, the whole atmosphere was a little more tactful than this carpenter's daughter is accustomed to.  For example, it took me quite a while to locate the ATM, which had its own spacious room behind a heavy wooden door with only the smallest and most discrete of signs identifying it.

I didn't get into real trouble, though, until I unexpectedly needed to make a purchase that apparently upper class women do not discuss in public.  There were several shops in the building, including one that advertised "sundries", so I didn't anticipate a problem.  But a quick turn through all of them turned up nothing.  After a review of the map of the resort confirmed that I hadn't missed any shops and that I was a good half hour from town, I went to the front desk and asked whether there was a drug store on the premises.

"No, I'm sorry," the young woman behind the counter said.  "But the sundry shop does carry items like..."

She trailed off.  She looked away.  

I was raised in a barn (well, a small industrial town in Illinois) and I was in a hurry.  I filled in "feminine hygiene products?"

"Yes," she confirmed with obvious relief.  "That's what I was going to say, but I was looking for something more...delicate."

Then, she continued, "But they keep them behind the counter."

I thanked her and hurried back to the sundry shop.  I've never bought drugs, but I think this might be what it's like...if your dealer is a nervous novice.  I approached the cashier and said, "The lady at the front desk said you had feminine hygiene products back there?"

She quickly looked around to make sure no one had heard.  Then she gestured me behind the cash register and opened a cabinet at floor level and completely concealed by the counter.  I made my selection and started back around the register to pay, but she whisked the package out of my hand and into a bag before I made it around the corner.  

This bag:

(The tissue paper is a nice touch, don't you think?)

Underneath the fancy wrappings, of course, these were the same products that I casually toss into my grocery cart every month.  Until last month, I thought everyone else did, too.

I'm not sure how the refined professionals at the Ritz-Carlton would feel about my telling this story in public, complete with the vulgar use of "feminine hygiene products" on at least two occasions.  I'm thinking of it as a public service, though.  Ladies, if you're wandering the hallways of a swanky resort in minor crisis, just ask at the sundry shop. But for God's sake, keep your voice down!