Taped

I have seen my family the past four days in a row. If you know me at all, you know that this is like, a world record or something. On my mom's side of the family my brother and I are the only people left and on my dad's side, in Oregon it's just he and us, plus the stepmom. Most holidays either my brother or I or both of us have to work so usually there is three, maybe four of us at best, celebrating a given holiday together. Well, needless to say, this Thanksgiving was different.


My dad's mom, my grandma Lou, lost her husband and my dad's stepdad this year at the age of ninety nine. This is her first holiday season without him and so she came out for two weeks for Thanksgiving. As a surprise, my dad's two brothers and their wives came out to from Colorado and California to surprise her. They have all been here, along with one sun-kissed, Justin Beiber-looking sixteen year old cousin from California as well and Los Angeles to be exact. We had Thanksgiving dinner with them at my dad's house and then Friday night all met at Meriweathers (my favorite restaurant, score!) for dinner and then on Saturday night went downtown for dinner and then took my aunt to get a now nationally famous, maple bar with bacon on top at Voodoo Doughnuts (she saw a show on the food network). Yesterday afternoon I met everyone for a big exciting Max and Portland streetcar ride around town so my grandmother could see more of the city and needless to say, she loved it. 


Family, its a funny thing. I've never known much of it and have always a sort of awkward relationship with most of them as I'm sure many people can relate to. Other than my parents and grandparents, three out of the four of them who are now deceased, the rest of my relatives I see every five to ten years and don't really know at all. They don't seem to understand or want to believe that I am gay and there is always awkward conversations about why I don't have a boyfriend. Politically and religiously we are on far extreme ends of the spectrum so any current events and politics are usually also not good topics to cover. One of the things I have always wanted most in the world is to create a family of my own. To have a spouse and children with them and to, although my upbringing was pretty darn good, create what I had and then some, giving my children every ounce of love I can squeeze out of me and helping create people who grow up to help make the world a better place. Perhaps much of the depression I'm facing at thirty has to do with the fact that I worry that I'm getting older and there isn't even a glimmer of hope at this point that I will ever have those things. In any event,  something happened yesterday that reminded me to be thankful for this odd bunch of family that I do have even if it's not the family tree I would have imagined myself to be clinging to at thirty. 


After a few hours riding around town the sun had gone down and it was starting to rain and we were on our last leg of our big exciting public transportation tour of Portland, headed back to Lloyd center to get in our cars and go our separate ways, and a man got on the Max and sat down near my family. My dad was seated next to me and my grandma and stepmom next to him and across from him my aunt and uncle. He was probably in his late fifties, early sixties and was I think, homeless. I could see he was thin and dressed in many layers but only when he sat down was I able to see the boniness of his knees jut out through his jeans and his thighs seem to be non-existent, burring themselves in the small scoop of the seat. He had grey hair and was balding in the back, his long hair slicked back away from his face. His checks were sunken in and he had deep wrinkles in his face and rough skin on his hands. His nails were trimmed short but there was dirt under them. I was glad at least to see he had a newer, comfortable and warm looking pair of shoes on and a giant down jacket. The most interesting thing about this man, at least from outside appearances, is what he carried, a suitcase. Most homeless people you see around Portland have sleeping bags or blankets or garbage bags or backpacks or rolling suitcases but this many had something that almost looked like a stage prop. It was smallish, about a foot and a half by two feet and boxy, completely square in shape. Each half, the upper and the lower were exactly equal in depth and it had a hard plastic handle on the top. It was a dirty, dingy brown in color and dented, the sides curved gently in. All of the corners and edges were covered with layers and layers of frayed duck tape indicating that this suitcase has probably been around as long as it's owner has and that he had taken great care to patch up it's sores and cracks quite diligently over time. In any event, the suitcase looked like something I've seen a hobo carry in a movie or a clown would pull flowers out of at the circus; I'd never seen a homeless person with a suitcase like this until yesterday. I don't know what this man's story has been, what unexpected heartbreaks and decisions brought him to be homeless and riding the train with my family yesterday, but his suitcase indicated to me that they had been on the streets together for many years, he and this small square bag. 

The part of this experience that really stuck with me, and the part that I really wanted to tell about this man, was how he looked at my family. Seated next to him was my blind uncle who wears glasses as thick as two coke bottles and squints incessantly and my overweight, disabled aunt who spent three months in the hospital this year after a bad car accident and now walks with a cane. This is at least how I'm sure they are often described, how the outside world sees them but they, just like all of us, are much more than they would seem to be from outside appearances and hold beautiful things inside of them. They are an odd couple indeed, both living outside the standard societal norms of what good people, valuable, worthwhile people look like. But they love each other dearly and have for over thirty years and I'm sure see and appreciate in each other all of the things the rest of the world may and probably does find flawed about them. As they sat on the train and rocked back and forth with each stopping of the car, they held hands and at one point my aunt rested her head on my uncle's shoulder and you could see her whole body exhale in the comfort of him. I watched the man with the suitcase sneak glances at them. I wonder if he had love like that in his past that he was recalling. I wonder if he was thinking that looked nice and he wished he had the same or if he was thinking about a woman he used to know in such a way. Mostly though, more than looking at them, he looked across the aisle at my dad. I'm not sure if my dad noticed, I think not, but I did. He watched my dad, who ran most of the conversation during the train ride, quite a lot. He and my dad are probably similar in age, both gray in the same places. My dad however, has less wrinkles because he's been well fed over the years and his cheeks and the corners of his eyes are plump. My dad was sporting some sort of fancy gortex winter coat from REI that probably set him back a few hundred and equally expensive clothes and shoes. He had around him a cadre of family that looked at him and listened to and responded to him. His mother and wife on one side, his child on the other, and his brother across from him. And although when I look around at these people I know the issues and struggles we all sometimes have in relating to one another and trying to figure out what being a family really means and should look like and find myself wondering what the hell any of us have in common besides blood anyways... I suppose to many people looking down onto this scene of six seemingly happy people, my dad would look like a king on a throne. I wondered, as the man with the suitcase watched my dad and studied his outfit and how he spoke and how we responded to him, if this envy or admiration for my dad's obvious wealth in life, not only materially, but more familialy (if that's a word), is what he felt. He seemed to have a curious, longing sort of look on his face. Not one of anger of of jealousy even necessarily, but one of wonder and almost... one of awe. 


This fall has brought quite a bit of heartbreak and disappointment to my life and I have felt at times like I am floating around the world in a bubble. Like the world and it's people, like color and sound and vibrancy are out there... and I am in here, wherever that is, invisible. I feel onside of myself, alone, quiet, watching and listening, but not participating. Like I'm waiting for the right moment to rejoin the world somehow if I can only figure out how to manage this. I go to church some weeks and I sit in the back and look at all the people around me and as the minister speaks my mind floats off into other places and I watch the congregants around me focusing intently on the music or the sermon and I wonder if they feel connected to the earth and each other in that moment, if they feel grounded in community, in love... or if they feel sort of like they have ear muffs and swimming goggles on and walls of plexi-glass around them separating their muffled and lonely reality from the rest of the world like I do. As I watched the man with the suitcase the other day study my dad and my family, I wondered if he felt the same way in that moment because I'm pretty sure I saw in his eyes, the reflection of myself. I saw those feelings of separateness and of longing for something more, for a deeper more meaningful human connection, for a yearning to be visible, to be seen... for what I think so many of us sometimes in moments of struggle believe everyone else but us has.


I wonder metaphorically speaking, we are all a little bit like this homeless man with a suitcase at many moments in our lives. On the outskirts of the world in our head and in our hearts. If we have so much going on internally that we find it hard to take off our swimming goggles and earmuffs and break through the choked bubble we live in to join the rest of the world and really live. For the man with the suitcase, I would assume many of his struggles are physical in nature; finding a warm place to sleep at night and a hot meal, on top of all the more mental struggles that people like myself face. I am blessed more than most people in the world simply to have a roof over my head, and yes, even a family of sorts and heck, I have a job and food in my cupboards and there are ten percent or more Oregonians who can't even say that right now. And while I have these things, I still have longings and dreams and desires for my life and have often as of late like I am watching the rest of the world live from the sidelines while I sit here in my quiet, invisible bubble racking my brain to figure out how in the hell I'm going to just survive until the next day, let alone thrive. 


To use an oft quoted saying, nobody ever said life was a walk in the park. And isn't that the damned truth. Some days, weeks, years, probably even decades for some of us, it can feel like one God forsaken struggle after the next. Why some of us are blessed with a family to go on Sunday streetcar rides with and some of us are not, I will probably never know. In my own assertion, there isn't explanation for a lot of the things that happen to us although we are absolutely the captains of our own ships and to much extent, are able to steer the course of our own lives. The trick to life is not what happens, but how we respond. This is the part we can control. I suspect most of us are just here trying trying to tape together the cracks and fissures that appear from time to time in our lives in an effort to hold ourselves together, just as the man on the train has appeared to have done so dutifully with his suitcase. By the end of our days most of us will have so many layers of tape holding us together that the person we once were or people we have been throughout or days is barely visible, each new layer of tape a fresh start, a new attempt at piecing back together our lives and closing up a wound after life throws us a curveball. We will likely be dented and bruised and battered looking... but we will have stories and memories and a lifetime of some extent in our hands. I wonder the stories and the memories that the man on the train's suitcase could tell, I wonder what memories are underneath each layer of his tape. May we all go forward with gratitude, recognizing all of the many blessings that we do have, the things that we have folded nicely and put in our life's suitcase and stop focusing as much on the things we feel like are missing, the things we used to carry along with us and miss dearly or the things we have always longed for, but haven't as of yet had. May we see in ourselves and in other people, beauty in all those neatly folded and rumpled things inside of ourselves, in all of our the many frayed layers of our existence and in the dents and bruises underneath it all and be thankful for them having made us who we are. May we try to be conscious and aware of those who eye the beauty of our lives from the sidelines and appreciate them for pointing out the blessings we may have been previously unable or unwilling to see ourselves and may we go forth with thanks, always trying to share with others in our abundance. 


Namaste.

They are saying it supposed to snow today. Light this evening and then more through the night and day tomorrow. School children and people that don't have any responsibility to the outside world or need to commute long distances are excited at the possibility and being surrounded by the quiet and peaceful glory of all that soft downy white. There's a certain sense of calm that comes with snowfall and around here it can be a welcome reprieve. Normally I would take extreme joy in being surrounded by soft blankets of rolling icy white dunes but this week I'm quietly begging God to hold off for a few more days so that I, and my employees, can get to work and feed a lot of very wealthy folks Thanksgiving dinner.

Yesterday I went to work at three thirty in the afternoon and finally left at four thirty this morning; I had to fight to keep my eyes open driving home. With the exception of three phone calls from work throughout this morning, I slept from five thirty until noon. Normally subsisting on a breakfast of a piece of fruit, cup of coffee and a few slices of toast, today I decided it high time to have a heartier sort of meal to nurse my achy back and the bloody feeling soul I'm sporting these days. I fed my bruised and broken heart a giant mound of pancakes, four of them to be exact, grilled slightly crisp with butter and drenched in a downpour of real maple syrup. I drank two mug-fulls of lemony french pressed Ethiopian coffee, some of my favorite, and watched the oil swirl in the top of the cup. I sat in silence and listened to my little red dog breath quietly, inhaling the world in and out slowly, and wondered what he worries about, what it is like to live a life in his body, in his world.

I have cried more in my life this November than ever before. I have probably shed more tears in the past four weeks than in all my other years combined in actuality. When my mom died I didn't cry much. I would have occasional breakdowns, only when I talked about her with anyone so I've mostly just tried to never do so, the showing of emotion always feeling horribly embarrassing and shameful on my part. I tend to be one that hides her true feelings from others most of the time and drowns her sorrows in something like a giant plate of pancakes with real maple syrup. But this November it seems that all in the world that can go wrong has and feels like whenever I manage to scrounge up a small spoonful of faith that it will get better after some upset, something else troubling occurs. The saying 'when it rains it pours' feels an understatement these days. I guess every cloud has a silver lining and one small lining amid this month's heartbreak has been the blessing of the reemergence of an old and endlessly true friend in my life. Yesterday she came over and she brought me pizza for lunch and we watched my favorite movie, Sleepless in Seattle. And at least three times during the movie, feeling swept away with my life's own recent love story gone horribly wrong, I sat silently and cried, tears billowing in the corners of my eyes. She sat gently beside me and rubbed my back and let me feel and be without question. The end of my nose is terribly sore this morning, flaky and red from having run so much from all the crying I've been doing. I look sickly, my face badly broken out and I've had three cold sores last week and my back has been killing me. I think my heartache and stress about all that's gone wrong this month and in the past thirty years really is starting to catch up to me as of late and show symptoms externally. A friend told me to breath in and out, to take it day by day and to have faith that over time, things will get better and I will be stronger. This is exactly what I would say to someone and I know that it was said with the utmost authenticity and love... but I'm having trouble having faith in anything these days, much less myself and my own ability to rebound and grow stronger.

I could write a novel here about all the failures and stresses that have made this November pulsate with sadness and heartbreak but I'll refrain. I'll simply say that it's bitterly cold outside and its supposed to snow. Its two nineteen in the afternoon and I'm still in my pajamas and I look an absolute disaster. I'm snuggled up under a blanket of down in bed with one of the few loves of my life curled up against my leg. He hasn't had a bath in weeks and sheds badly and normally I wouldn't let him sleep up here with me but today it's cold outside in the world and inside of me and I need the gentle comfort and warmth of his silent love perhaps more than ever before. I'm feeling more hopeless than I can ever in all my days recall feeling and find myself trying to just survive from one day to the next and not think about beyond then because then the tears and the stress and the feelings of unworthiness ensue. I wonder, isn't if funny how in the matter of a month, in love gained and then painfully lost, the world can seem to swell with joy and then so quickly after, seem to ring so loudly with sorrow? From my October 28th entry when all in the world felt happy and hopeful, how in the hell did I so quickly, arrive here? I suppose today rather than drown in my own feelings of inadequacy and disappointment and sorrow about what has transpired in my life between now and then, I will get up and I will take a shower and I will bundle up and walk the dog and I will drive to work and eat an apple in the car and I will serve the world and all the while I will be waiting anxiously to see if that soft, quiet blanket of snow returns early this year to quiet the world and blanket all of our hearts with familiar memories of home and if in its return, it will gently cleanse my soul and melt away some of this sorrow and heartache with it when it goes...

Namaste.

Where the Books Are

Books: the tradition of my people. Currently on my nightstand are the following:

Standing in the Light by Sharman Apt. Russell
This I Believe, a compilation of essays on people's personal philosophies
Three books by Anne Lamott; Bird by Bird, Traveling Mercies, and Grace (eventually)
Never Far From Home, stories from the radio pulpit, by Carl Scovel
The Barn at the End of the World by Mary Rose O' Reilley
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde
The Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larson
and last but certainly not least, Singing the Living Tradition, the UU hymnal which I always keep close by.
Oh, and also close by are four to five issues of New York magazine, one US Weekly (yes, I am currently bowing my head in shame), one Poetry Northwest, and an old New Yorker.

Two of these books I go back to time and time again, three of them I have recently finished reading, and the rest are all in the process of being read or haven't been started yet (since six of them were just purchased yesterday). In the top drawer of my nightstand are about fifteen to twenty more books, most of whom have been shoved in the drawer because I am out of room on my bookshelf in the living room and have nowhere else to store them. Books and I have a long and sordid history. I usually am either completely obsessed with them and devour them in multiple numbers at a time like some literary drug addict, every chapter and book completed the next hit, or I find myself in a complete state of boredom; nothing seemingly able to catch my attention for long. Its gotten harder as I get older to spend as much time with my nose in the pages as I used to because I always seem to fall asleep two pages into the damned thing no matter what it is I'm reading. In college I had two dreams for my life after graduation: one, to get a dog (preferably a golden retriever) and two, be able to read for pleasure again. I was so excited to find my way back to non-text books again that I'm pretty sure instead of going out to celebrate my graduation with friends and/or family, the night of, I could be found in bed, stacks of books of every genre piled up around me, a deep grin on my face, and a light shining down upon me from above; after five years I had returned to my own person heaven.

I was thinking the other day about tradition and about the things we carry on with us from generation to generation. Unfortunately, much of my family's traditions died right along with my mom several years ago and there's not much of anything in my life these days that I would consider a tradition, except perhaps reading. My favorite memories from my childhood are of bedtime. Not only did they included the coveted backrub, they included the reading of a story or chapter in a book. My favorites were Mother Goose and Grimm at an early age and later Ms. Rumphius and Anne of Green Gables. Of course when I was quite young my parents would read to me but as I got older the tables turned and I would read to them. I still love reading out loud and am always, desperately and usually in vein, looking for a reason to do so. I used to silently pray in class that the teacher would call on me to read aloud, making secret promises to the Universe do all my chores for one day without complaint or to finish my homework early if only I would be called upon to orate to the class. At home when I read aloud at bedtime my dad would fall asleep every damn night and I used to get so frustrated with him that I would shake him and yell at him for falling asleep and he would drowsily apologize and perk up only to get heavy eyelids again a few minutes later. Only now can I understand how it was so hard for him to keep his eyes open as I, at ripe old age of thirty suffer from the same affliction of being unable to keep my eyes open after work on many days. In any event, this patter of him falling asleep and me trying to keep him awake long enough to listen to me went on until I was a teenager and I can't really recall if I did much reading during my adolescent years or not; most of them I have tried to completely block from my memory for multiple reasons including but not limited to my brief addiction Hagen Das bars and susequent weight gain in the eighth grade, bad (no seriously, really bad) hair that decided it wanted to be curly all of a sudden during puberty, and well, all the other usual trauma and drama associated with being ages twelve through eighteen.

Growing up my house was a quiet one. I can't remember how old I was before we got a television and when we did, it was a small black and white one. Of course by the time my brother and I were both teenagers we each had a television in our bedroom, I think this was a tactic our parents, who probably beyond frustrated with our smart mouths and surly attitudes, used to rid us momentarily from their lives. But the years before that television was never a focus in my house and it's watching limited to something silly like an hour a week. I think Saturday mornings may have been the only time it was ever on. And in it's absence, we learned to love books and to grow big imaginations and keep ourselves entertained with hundreds of other creative and active endeavors. And at night, if I couldn't sleep I always knew where to find my parents; in the living room in their assigned seats (more on that in a minute) reading together in silence. Today, this to me feels like home. When I think about them sitting there by lamplight, the sun having gone down a few hours earlier, sitting in the chairs my mother had re-stuffed and re-upholstered herself with a striped maroon fabric, quietly being in the world together, I can feel everything in that moment as it was. It was safe and warm and well, it was as much home as I've ever known, as much home as I could drink up in one giant sip. You could always tell my dad's chair because the seat was permanently lower than my mom's and I remember my brother and I used to tease him endlessly about this (funny the things you think are funny at eight). Sometimes after dinner but before bedtime my parents would sit in their chairs and draw us pictures of clowns and my brother and I would lay at their feet in silence, intently focused on coloring in our clowns just right. And my parents would sit and read the newspaper or the New Yorker or whatever book they were working through, occasionally lifting their heads to say something to each other and then quickly going back to their reading. I crave this quiet comfort, this safety, this long lost feeling of home today unlike I crave much else in the world. I miss being able to hear my parents quiet conversation from their reading chairs from my bedroom as I lay newly tucked in at night. I miss, oh god, I'm gonna say it... I miss... simpler times.

I feel quite anxious on some days that I'm thirty and don't have children or a family of my own yet; I always thought and assumed I'd have a couple of kids by this age like my parents did. I stress out that I don't want to be having children at 35 and be too old and un-nimble when my kids want me to play with them. I don't want them to be embarrassed about having the mom with all the gray hair (although, my mom wasn't old when she had me and still had lots of gray hair which I was endlessly embarrassed about so maybe this shouldn't be a concern really). But when I think about parenthood really, I think in the end its not about gray hair or what I'm sure will be my tacky clothes that embarass them or our house or anything else that my children will think of fondly in their adult years about their childhood, its the traditions we will share together. I think about the traditions that I want to pass on to them, whomever they might be, and top amongst the is the love of books, or reading I suppose I should say. I don't really care what they enjoy to read, so long as they enjoy reading. I think having a child that didn't like to read would be worse to me than just about anything... and I'm sure now that I've said that aloud, I will probably have one that doesn't. Damn. Anyway, I can't wait for bedtime stories, and to spend Sunday's laying on the floor in front of the fireplace with them in the winter reading and to see which books are their favorite. I crave endlessly the comfort of that quiet and safe place where all is as it should be and I can't wait to provide the safety to my children of  knowing where to find me after bedtime if they can't sleep; sitting contently with the newspaper or a magazine or good book (and hopefully, a spouse!) in my assigned seat. Yes, there in the company of my books and my family I will have in at least one way, come full circle and found my way back home.

Namaste.