apples and pears

Did you ever see something that you knew totally made sense to someone else, but looked like total gibberish to you? You feel like you can kind of make sense out of the edges, but the total message misses you by miles. That’s what this picture makes me think of, how it makes me feel. I guess the responsible way to phrase that would be that I respond with a sense of anxiety and inadequacy when I view this photo. I suppose it’s kind of pointless to give this picture credit for influencing my emotions…can you tell I’ve been working with a shrink?

I guess because I have been in therapy for a while now, I am thinking of things like my reactions, my plans, my desires and my requirements, my prayers, my ambitions and expectations, and a lot about my failings. I have done a lot of letting go, a lot of forgiving, a lot of crying, and a lot of hoping. At then end of the day, I am grateful for every step that has brought me to this point, even the steps taken that lead directly to stumbles and falls from grace, the steps that ended in crying heaps on my kitchen floor, or finding my adult self crying in the shower, begging for some new measure of understanding about what this life means in this present moment.

I wrote an entry in my journal on New Year’s Day 2009. I wrote about shooting stars, wishes, prayers, the weight of how we feel when we really want something with our whole selves, or at least how I feel. I could picture my young self, so fresh, so sure of herself on the outside and so terrified of never measuring up to some line she wasn’t even sure really existed. I remembered laying my long chunky body down on the sidewalk outside our red brick house on College Street, half on the pavement, feeling the heat of the day seeping into my legs and the fabric of my shorts, with the other half on the shaded patch of grass, peeping between pecan branches and making shapes out of white puffy clouds.

I can see it now through the eyes of a thirty year old woman, not a nine year old girl. I know words like cumulus, dopler effect, radiant heat, transcendentalism, and I can play the word association game like nobody’s business. When I was nine, I don’t think I knew a whole lot about much. I never would have imagined words like dichotomy, paradigm shift, orthopraxis, or quarter-life crisis.

At that point, I still was sure I would be a doctor, and that by the time I was 12, I wouldn’t be such a fatty. Those were things I was sure of. I was also sure that my room would never be clean enough. I was sure that if I studied and made 100’s, the kids in class would tease me about being too smart, even more than they already did. I mean, I didn’t really even understand why a kid accusing me of reading the dictionary in my spare time was a bad thing. Because of that, I was also sure that by not studying, and being lazy, and still making 96’s and 98’s, and sometimes a lower 90 or high 80 would infuriate my parents at home. Even at the tender age of nine, I realized the need to pick my battles. I also understood that sometimes, you have to sacrifice a battle to win the war. But I wouldn’t learn that phrase until late high school. Once I did learn it, so many things made sense.

I think about that little girl in her front yard. I can see her. I can hear her breathing. I can remember how she felt..so calm and so frantic, at the same time. She already seems to know that life is most firmly and fully lived right on the edge of things. She doesn’t know it, but hormones are beginning to charge into her blood stream by the bucket full. In just a few short months, she’ll start her first period. She will be amazed at the power of her own body, but she won’t have words to put with that feeling for at least ten more years, and even then, she’ll only think them very quietly, because she won’t understand that it’s ok to be a girl and like that about yourself until she’s at least 25. Then, when she turns 28, she will realize that she’s becoming the woman she always wanted to be, saying the words she’s learned and now knows what they mean, and why they mean what they do. I wonder if whispering any of these things in her ear would make her feel any better, or if she would even remotely understand what I was trying to tell her. I’d like to think I was a pretty smart little kid, but I don’t think I was quite that smart.

I don’t know if telling her anything would be a good idea. I mean, if you could soothe some of the anxiety of growing up, even if it was just to tell yourself that things will get better, would you do it? If you knew it wouldn’t tear the space time continuum, or create a black hole, or alter the course of human history, would you tell yourself that it was all going to work out? Would you trust the fates enough to tell yourself that as a nine year old? Would you be worried that you might be speaking too soon, that the bottom would surely drop out in the present, and that you’d be telling a lie to your nine year old self about things being alright, eventually? In the final analysis, it’s probably a good thing we don’t have that choice. We are most likely best served to believe that the past is always prologue.

But I wonder about that little girl, with hopeless hair, blue grey eyes, and the vague sense that she is on some kind of track toward something. She knows exactly what she needs to get by—she knows she is loved and Loved by something bigger than she can really imagine. She knows she likes to pray, and she wants to know God. She believes in miracles and knows that at some point, because she lives in a universe that is still so very black and white, fairy tales really are real. She even still half-heartedly believes in Santa Claus, because she likes the idea of believing in a nice idea, even though she won’t know that’s what that feeling is for another 15 years.

I think about her, and I look at her in my memory. I want to tell her that we eventually get a handle on all that hair, but that we have some unfortunate mishaps and fall into some tragic fads along the way. It won’t be cheap, but it will be interesting and colorful on the way.

I want to tell her that when she is an adult, those eyes that seem to never be the same color two days in a row will be her best friend. She will learn to use them to look past the surface. She will learn that people trust her eyes, and she will use that influence for good, because she will learn that betrayal is the cardinal sin, and even though she won’t read Dante’s Inferno until she’s 28, she will understand the feeling much earlier. She will be grateful when people compliment her eyes. That will be something that makes her feel set apart and special and she will have to try not to be vain about them. She will also have to learn to deal with the fact that she has a horrible poker face. This will mean that she’s going to have to learn to tell the truth, but to be careful with her words. She will know the flavor of “first, do no harm” long before she learns about the Hippocratic Oath.

She never quite loses the knowledge of the love she has or the Love she receives. There are a few moments that are awfully low, and for that I do wish I could give her a happy thought to store away for tearful mornings, letters she will wish she had locked in a drawer but sent because it was the right thing to do at the time, and letters that arrived at just the right moment. She won’t learn the true meaning of the phrase “situational ethics” until she is almost 30, but all of those letters and their aftermath and afterglow, they all prepared her to savor the meaning and the occasional mercy of the same.

I want to tell her to be careful with her love, but at the same time, I want her to love with her whole heart, every single time. I want to reassure her that seven years from where she sprawls out on that patch of concrete and grass, she will fall in love for the very first time. And it will feel better than anything else in her whole entire life will feel. And it will hurt worse than anything else in her whole entire life will, in ways she can’t imagine. She will learn to be thankful for that first love, because that’s the feeling she will always try to match, because it was so amazing and vivid. She will be grateful for that first heartache, because she will know that she will always come out stronger on the flip side, because nothing is as hard as the first time. She will learn that regret is a necessary component for nostalgia, and nostalgia is what reminds you of why you are happy to not live in the past.

She will learn things about God that she can’t imagine now. God will be huge and infinite, and sometimes even at nine, she can see the edge of what that means just at the moment she stops saying her prayers and slips off to sleep. But she will also learn about God as a God of small things, too, impossibly small in the face of infinite depth and breadth. She will learn about all sorts of paradoxes. She will find herself in the Bible, see stories from angles that would seem so foreign and alien to her nine year old mind. She will be enthralled by Elijah. She will befriend Peter. She will come to know Jesus as her brother, her friend, and her savior in a thousand new ways.

She will wish there were times when she could walk away from the knowledge that God’s will is where she wants to be, because sometimes that means being uncomfortable and angsty. But she will know a deep and profound center of things, she will learn to live away from the mountain-top experiences, and find deep peace in the middle places. I wish I could tell her that the peaks and valleys are going to be intense, but that the middle places are where she will catch her breath and see some amazing things. I want to tell her that she will dream dreams one day that will remind her of God’s promises.

I want to tell her to that the story of Gideon will be something she needs to find and own. I want to tell her that Bob Marley is going to be important. I want to tell her that one day, she will learn about synchronicity and non-violence, liberation theology, and experience the steadfast love of Jesus in the most ordinary and mundane ways.

I want to tell her not to worry about her nervous stomach, or her big feet, or the fact that she hasn’t learned to use her humor to full effect. I want to assure her that she will get a first kiss, she will learn how to dance. I want to tell her that it’s ok to want things to be fair, to be better than they are. I want to tell her that while her idealism will be tempered, she will always, even in the darkest of places, not ever really be able to suppress the hope and conviction that things are going to get better.

I want to tell her these things. Not give her specifics, no cheat sheets about the math portion of her college boards, or boys she should never kiss, or girls she should never be friends with, or the colors of her dreams or the flavors of her birthday cakes, just give her a little bit of hope. Give her a little bit of sunshine to keep in her pocket. I wouldn’t dream of telling her of the heartaches, or the train wrecks, or the small and large deaths she will witness and feel. I won’t tell her about the horrible haircuts, the blown test grades, the hangovers, the way that some mean kids grown up to be mean adults. That would take out some of the flavor of the gumbo life will offer her.

I imagine that when I am sixty, twice as full of years and experience as I am today, I will imagine my 30 year old self as I am now. I’m on my regular side of the bed, farthest away from the door. I have on a pair of boxer shorts I stole from my grandfather when I was in high school or junior high and a pink shirt I spilled bleach on while I was cleaning my bathroom the week after I bought it. The cat is grooming himself at my feet, and I’m in the first house I ever owned. Everything I own is in this house, its all in one place, for the first time since I was 18.

I am afraid most of the time that I will end up single, childless, and alone with several more cats, and that people will think I wasted my life. At this point, I kind of have a hard time disagreeing with them. I can’t come to terms with the fact that all or some of those things may end up being true at some point. I don’t think they will end up being true, and that’s mostly because I can’t manage to beat the hope out of the nine year old sprawled on the pavement in front of the house that my brain immediately flashes whenever I think of “my house”, even though I haven’t lived there in over ten years.

I hope when I’m sixty, I’ll want to come back and tell myself mostly the kind of thing I’d like to tell my nine year old self.

Don’t worry so much. You’re going to be fine. You are going to see some amazing things, and some things you’d rather not see. You’re going to laugh and cry a lot. You will doubt yourself some of the time. You will sometimes believe in things that aren’t all the way true, but you’ll eventually figure things out, and fix what you can.

You will need to read the letters in your bottom drawer periodically, to remind you of things you have forgotten, and places you still have left to go. You will still revel in the simple things, like hot cement and cool grass and big white clouds. You will fall in love, as many times as you need to, and one day, it’ll be for all the marbles. You will have amazing friends who will hold your hope on dark days, and you will do the same for them.

People will die, in big and small ways. You will keep picking up rocks, be enchanted by mysteries and mystics, and want to be at the beach every Summer Solstice. You will sing the song you were meant to sing, say the words that are written in your heart, and have more than you can ask or imagine. You will be loved and Loved.

I know I wouldn’t understand my sixty year old self anymore than my nine year old self would understand me, right now. But I’m sure, if we squinted just right, at the edges, where things either come together or blur, we would know what we meant.

mil besos,

rmg

ok, seriously...

so i ended my fast way before i wanted to do so. let's just say that events conspired against me, and although i am pretty tough, a five-day-long headache was really about all i could reasonably stand. i'll try it again, and this time will not be silent...not matter how gross it gets.



i just got back from having lunch with my friend doris, who is 83. for the first time, doris looked and acted really old today. she had trouble keeping up with the conversation, repeated a couple of things. she's never done that, before. and she wanted to talk about her funeral. needless to say, i came back to the office kind of sad. it's not that i mind talking to doris about her funeral...she's 83, and it's my job to plan funerals with people, or at least part of my job.

the thing is that, no matter how much i try and give up my ego in the middle of all of this, i mind thinking about how i'm going to feel without my twice-a-month visit to her. it's how i'm going to feel when i don't hear her tell me, "stay off the street, kid!" everytime i leave her house. it's how i'm going to feel when i know there will be no more random coffee mug gifts, given by her with such glee at the little dining table under the skylight. knowing that things could be getting close makes me nervous, makes it difficult for me to stay fully present with her, because what i want to do is start to get clinical, get focused on the details, put my heart away, and really get out my brain. but that would be the wrong thing.

that being said, this is incredibly hard. doris has been one of my buddies since the very beginning. even though i know that all things pass away, just as all things are being made new, my heart still kind of hurts a little bit.

mil besos,
rmg

you may be right, i may be crazy...

so today is my prep day before launching into a full on detox cleanse. i'm currently having a mug of hot chocolate and trying to decide what i want for lunch. this time tomorrow, i will be drinking super-special lemonade and water, a cup of mint tea each afternoon, a salt-water flush when i come home from work, and if i'm feeling extra adventurous, a nice hot cup of laxitive tea. stop freaking out. i will be getting all the calories i reasonably need, as well as plenty of vitamins and nutrients from the actual lemon juice and all the goodness God puts into grade b maple syrup and cayenne pepper. don't believe me? do some reading yourself, my dearies. it's good stuff.

you may be asking yourself at this point, a) why in the hell is she telling us all of this, and b) why in the hell would anyone do this to themselves? it sure can't be good.

the answer is that a) this is my blog. i've never really been one to keep things i think are weird, or fun, or interesting under wraps. also, i think doing something out of the ordinary, even if it is dietarily out of the ordinary, is worth sharing with people. it could also encourage people to do some of their own adventuring, and that's kind of cool. b) i don't so much look at it as doing it to myself, as i am doing it for myself. that sounds kind of dirty, but whatever...

the detox i'm doing is called "the master cleanse", and you can download the pdf on line, if you choose. it's very well documented and researched, and i beta tested it on myself before easter, to make sure it would work for me. i've made some modifications to fit my life, and i'm ready to do it for the real. during the beta test, there were some amazing moments of clarity, unlike any i have felt before, and i want to spend some more time in that head/heart space. i feel like it's pretty necessary for me at this point in the ball game. while things are going pretty well, at the moment, there are some thoughts i'd like to spend some concentrated time on, and since i'm not going to be able to vacation any time soon, this seems like the next best option.

also, and as much as i hate to admit it, but know i need to say it out loud, and please to God don't say anything about this part if you leave a comment because i just CAN'T bear to hear it...i am so sick of being the chubby girl with the great personality and giant brain who isn't getting asked out on dates. detox seems like a good way, the right way to start a real live major life-change. and if life really does begin at 30, i don't want to waste another minute.

mil besos,
rmg

clock watching

in three hours, i will be almost on my way home. by that time, i will have been at work for 13-almost 14 hours. the next two weeks are going to be insane...just really, really, really full. and there is really nothing i can do about it. you know, sometimes life is like the rinse cycle, and you just have to hold your breath until all the water stops rushing in, and you finally hit the spin cycle.

i think fixing up the back yard two weekends ago must have really shaken something loose. and it's been good to sit with all of that, and think about what it all means. i'm still trying to figure out some of it, but i think i'm coming to a point where i'm almost ready to talk about it out loud with you, internets.

and starting on thursday night, i'll be doing the Master Cleanse for the really real, and i'll be blogging about it over the course of my cleanse. i did a trail run last month, and feel like i'm really ready and maybe even called to do this for the really real. so, beware. the Master Cleanse is pretty intense, and i'll be giving you a very real, pretty uncensored look at what it means to me and my body. i won't be sending out daily reminders about the post on yahoo, so if you want to be reminded to read daily, update your rss feeds, or make a note.

i'm hoping the cleanse/fast will knock loose whatever the gardening missed. God is good, all the time.

mil besos,
rmg

how do she garden grow?

so this weekend, i spent several hours working on the back patio, which has been the most neglected part of my house since i bought it. this is what happened...

the more i do with the space i live in, the more it feels like some place i'd like to call home.

mil besos,

rmg

opposite day

when i worked at summer camp, our cook, Pappa Bear, decided i needed a nickname. unimpressed with the list of names i have been given by my friends and family (and it's a long, occasionally funny list), Pappa Bear insisted on coming up with his own, something uniquely descriptive, something all my own, something that everyone would know belonged only to me.



you know you have a special nickname at camp when Pappa Bear puts a name tag on your cup. i shouldn't have been suprised at breakfast during that second week when "Rachel" was replaced by "SNAFU" in all capital letters.



SNAFU is one of those charming phrases we've inheirited from the Marine Corps. since my poppy was a marine, i'd heard that phrase all my life. i was in college before i think i really knew what all the letters meant. i mean, i'd gotten the flavor of it even as a small child. SNAFU was something i lived. having that lovely phrase as my nickname only added another layer of irony to the cake.

SNAFU means that i have no idea what it's really like to be bored. i mean, i understand boredom on an emotional level...like last night, i couldn't find anything to do, my brain was so full that i was afraid blood was going to start running from my ears, but i couldn't bring myself to actually take a shower, dress, and go someplace. so, i sat on my bed and reworked part of a rug i've been making for the last five years. and i also watched "Celebrity Apprentice". this is shaming to me, because i really really really like this show. and i hate everything about this show. it's just so...messy and catty and horrible and so different from my little life that i literally will only pee during commercials, and i won't take phone calls. it's worse than watching "Days of Our Lives", which also embarassess me to admit to watching. i don't even want to think about how grammatically incorrect that last sentence was...

in dealing with things that aren't boring, i have to say that i really do have the market cornered. at least in my corner of the universe, i do. i'm sure i have nothing on the social workers who hang out downtown, or the er docs who pull lord-knows-what out of people's hoo-hoo's all day long, or mommies who get handfuls of frogs and rolly-polly's in their hands while cleaning out little pockets. but the freakshows i get to watch (and i say that with a lot of love in my ity-bity-tiny-coal-black-hard-heart) are pretty incredible. it's not what i imagined my life would look like at 30, but it is MY life, and even on days when it's hard, it's beautiful and i wouldn't trade it with anyone, for anything.

there are so many things going on in my head these days. it's hard to pin down which ones i want to talk about, which ones i want to ponder, which ones need to be wrapped in newsprint and packed away for a while, and which ones are just too far out of reach/sight to be reasonable. it's not that my brain is any more or less full than normal, i think it's just that i'm taking better stock of what's going on, what stuff means, why things move in cycles and waves, and how i'm doing at managing all of those things.

i've been with therapy mary for a year, now. i feel clearer than i've felt in a long time. it's not that a lot has changed since last year, because it hasn't, at least not on a macro level. but at the bottom of things, the volume seems to be turned down a little bit. instead of feeling like a substitute teacher walking into an algebra class full of hateful children who are all bent on breaking me, when i sit down to think about things, or when they creep into my head, i feel much more like a sweet, but semi-stern librarian, asking rowdy children to quiet down, so she can answer their questions about the card catalogue one at a time. maybe that's an odd analogy, but it works for me.

life is good.

mil besos,
rmg

all things considered

there's usually a lot going on in my head that i never say anything to anyone about. that's pretty true at the moment, as well. granted, if you added up the sum total of what each person in my life knows about me/what's going on, you'd have a pretty spot on idea of the whole picture.

what's going on in my head today is somewhere between white noise and primal scream. and i just can't make friends with it.


meh. the trash heap has spoken. expect a decent post later in the week.

mil besos,
rmg

rambling...

there's no picture for this post. i know, that's a departure from recent habit. i'm sure you will be just fine.

somehow, writing things here feels more purgative than writing in my journal. like it's not real unless i write it down for other people to see. i don't write the hard things as much as i should. i make it a habit to keep the deepest things away from other people, sometimes even from myself. but i'll tell you this...

i walk by it every day, at least twice a day, but more like six or seven times. i can't even bring myself to look at it, head on. the damn thing is so familar, even if i just catch it out of the corner of my eye, i can see every feature clearly. it mocks me with silence and emptiness. i know a thing is only a thing. and i know that this thing belongs to me, again for several very good reasons, not the least of which is that it is, in fact, mine. those facts notwithstanding, i am on the verge of outright hatred for this object. it mocks me with clean lines, hand rubbed spindles, sense-memories of long-forgotten meals.

i look at it and i force myself not to tear up. all the other stuff just like it, i have managed to wedge into a closet upstairs, in a room other than my own. i can avoid that stuff for months on end. i only kind of barely remember the stuff is there. but this thing won't fit into the space i've carved out for the rest of the artifacts. i can steel myself to have to grab something from that closet, or open it to put something into it. i can't seem to steel myself to walk through my kitchen every day, though. it's such a regular activity...you'd never imagine what a test of the will it can be to use the back door, and not run out the front door, just to avoid seeing my high chair.

that's right. MY high chair. i used it. there are photos of me sound asleep slumped over it's tray. my brother used it. my nephew even sat in it, once or twice. but every time i see that thing, all i can see are the faces of the children i see only in my sleep.

mil besos,
rmg

hands

i have never liked my hands. i have been trying to make peace with that since i was a little girl.

i know that's an especially silly thing for a woman to say, so typical of early 21st century female insecurities. there's a book called "i feel bad about my neck", so i guess it's chic and accepatable for me to feel bad about my hands.

my mother, my grandmothers, my aunt, my fairy god-mothers, my friends...all of them have beautiful hands. even the men in my life have lovely hands. for the longest time, everytime i looked at my hands, i was disappointed in them, disappointed in myself. my hands were a reflection of what i felt about my whole self...so close to being good, but not actually good, at all. i looked at them and all i could see were the improvements that needed to be made, the things that had slipped through them, the things they had broken that could not be mended, or lost and couldn't be found.

i used to get in so much trouble when i was little for being messy, for losing things, for not keeping track of things, for going too fast and messing things up, for not putting things away. i track it all back to my hands. i have made every effort to put away that messy child, to get all the barbie wash-off nail polish washed off her ragged cuticles. she still peeks out from time to time, and rolls her eyes when i make my bed in the mornings. she also has a real problem with the weekly dusting, almost ritualized in it's pattern every saturday. i suppose there was a time when she was sure that all that activity, all the mess would cover up how she really felt about herself, and her hands. now, i try to clean up all the mess, keep it neat and tidy, so maybe no one will notice that my hands are too big, too hot, too efficient.

i am not one of those people who can just have fun...it makes me feel guilty, and nervous that the bottom is about to fall out. i know, i know, i'm supposed to trust God, my fellow humans, etc. who doesn't have fun, right? here's the thing...i can only let myself have fun and enjoy something if i feel like i'm contributing to society, being taught a lesson, or teaching a lesson. i know, it's sick. this is why (ok, it's one of the reasons why) i see a therapist regularly. anyway, i usually extend the "it's not just a fun ride" principle into my work life, as well. and that is how i ended up with my hands (the hands i cannot make myself learn to like or love) full of mysterious red dirt inside a very small church in an even smaller town in a remote part of new mexico.

i am fascinated by miracles...not just the healings, although they are paramount. i love the stories that go with the miracles. stories about mundane things, ordinary people, every day heartbreak seem to collide with grace, mercy, angels, and (like aeschylus said to agammemnon) the awful grace of God. i had been fascinated by miracle shrines like lourdes, fatima, and chimayo for years before i ever thought about visiting one of the sites. but i found myself organzing a trip for some of the kids i used to work with around chimayo and the santa fe ski area. see...fun and work.

so i took the children skiing. and i took them to the loretto chapel in santa fe. we prayed. we shopped. we ate alot. the kids liked the skiing. they moaned and groaned the day i told them we weren't going up the mountain, we were going around it.

we talked about miracles that day, for a long time. i told them the story of chimayo, which you can read here: http://chimayo.org/history.html they seemed sort of underwhelmed, but were willing to go along with me, because i knew where all the snacks were. we talked about whether we believed in miracles, what constituted a miracle, why miracles do or don't happen depending on the situation, etc. they were smart kids. once we got to the church, the kids were getting quiet, doing their own thinking, preparing themselves to be still and do some thinking. i was very proud of them.

and so, we ended up inside this lovely little church, wandering through, saying our prayers, thinking thoughts to ourself, not really whispering or anything. and all of a sudden, we were in front of this little hole in the ground, full of the most beautiful red dirt i had ever seen. i remember feeling this overwhelming compulsion to put my hands in the dirt and rub it across my palms, through my fingers, up to my wrists, like i was washing my hands. so that's what i did. other pilgrims had brought little baggies or boxes to take home dirt from this little hole. the dirt is supposedly the vehicle of miraculous healings that have taken place at chimayo...healings, pregnancies, relief from pain, etc. the walls of the little room with the little hole are decorated with old crutches, wheels from wheelchairs, pictures of babies. and so there i stood, all of 25 years old, still with so much to learn and see and do, with two handfuls of red dirt, staring blankly at a pair of hands that really no longer looked like mine, no longer looked detestable to me.

i brushed the excess dirt off my hands, put them to my face, and breathed in the earthy aroma of that glorious red dirt. i exited the little room with the little hole, i looked at my palms, and they were glittering...quartz in the dirt...diamond dust...miracles happen every day.

nothing has been the same since. i look at my hands, at what they are doing, and i try to make it good, make it an offering. we have so much to do, and such a little time to do it, and i don't want to be careless with a single minute, don't want to pass up a minute of joy or learning, don't want to miss a sunrise or a sunset because i'm off doing something piddly and small. i don't want to miss doing something incredible because i'm worried about how my hands will look, or what kind of mess might get made.

i look at my hands now, knowing full well there is not a shred of dirt left on them from that early spring day. i think about how the red dirt filled in the lines and rings on my palm and finger tips, and how that moment, staring at my hands, felt like a thousand years, how i could feel the life in the dirt flowing into my hands, getting me ready for something new. if i close my eyes and think of early spring in the mountains, that is what i remember. i know i picked up something important that day. i am still trying to find out how to put it to use.

thanks be to God.

mil besos,

rmg

don't...

don't panic. i am just taking a little break to stir up some new stories for you guys. if anyone is still even reading this...

mil besos,
rmg

blessed among women

Ode to Veiled Women

Oh! My Sisters…so many of you faceless, wordless, nameless, blessed, and veiled.
As you see the world around you through the blue haze of the veil,
do you ever wonder what you are missing?
Do you ever stop to think that the world is missing you?

You, my sister, who sees only that which is in front of her, never to the sides, and never behind…
do you stop to mourn what you are missing,
do you know that you’re only getting one third of the picture?

Does it make you angry that God made you a girl?
Does it make you angry that even though God made you a girl,
Man made you a veiled woman?

Do you wonder what the wind would feel like on your whole face,
raising your dampened hair and wilted spirit?
When was the last time you raised your whole face,
your whole head, your whole self,
naked and unashamed into the bright Sun of the afternoon,
glowing like the mother of all creation?
Are you even allowed to think of that?

Oh! My Sisters…so many of you faceless, wordless, nameless, blessed, and veiled.
Your eyes were opened a long time ago.
You know that you are missing nothing.
Child of the West: this world misses nothing you cast forth.

You, my sister, who sees everything in a three-hundred-sixty degree scope of present, past, and future…
You only mourn what you can’t imagine.
You never stop to think about what could be hiding under the rocks, waiting for you to slow down.

It never occurred to you to blame God for making you a girl.
It never occurred to you to blame God for making you a girl, because your fathers and your brothers agreed you could be anything you wanted to be.

Do you wonder what mountains there are left to climb?
Have you had enough of shaving your legs, painting your eyes black,
cutting your hair just so, smoking because you can?
Do you see yourself mother-naked in the mirror, or do you only see
What you have hidden in all of this creation?
Do you allow yourself to think of that?

I think about you, Fatima:
Daughter of the Prophet.
Mother of God.
Small child of Piedras, with her brown face upturned in my hands.
You have so many faces.
So many faces.
And they are all beautiful, behind all of the veils that we wear, for all of the reasons we wear them.

Yes, the faces are beautiful.
Even mine.

mil besos,

rmg

and now, for something completely different...

The rest of this piece said something about “at the front of your jeans”. I’m not sure I want to know what that means. Regardless, it’s an interesting question. “How big is the gap?” Which gap—gender, wage, generation, intelligence, socio-economic? There are gaps everywhere: small and large, profound and mundane, the truest definitions of the agony and the ecstasy.

There are gaps we don’t even see but that make themselves known in our daily lives. When I talk to an older person—either of my grandmothers, my grandfather, the old couples at my church, etc. , the gap I notice the most is between what I say and what they hear. I find myself having to modulate the pitch for my voice, the correct volume of speech, weeding out colloquialisms that they will not understand, being plain in my expressions. I wonder what the gap looks like from their end… how frustrating it must be to talk to me if I am over-excited, or get confused about which ear their hearing aid is in, or use the slang I pick up from my crazy friends. That must be hard for them.

I think about the gap between what happens and what might have happened, sometimes. The further you get away from a pivot point, the harder it becomes to really imagine how things might have been if that one pivotal point had occurred at a different place or in a different way. For the first few months after my dad died, I would imagine how things would have been if he had lived…trips home, holidays, conversations. But the further I get away from being 18, sense of relief or comfort I get from pretending or imagining that things were different becomes smaller and smaller. There is no point in trying to script out a conversation between my father and I as adults, about anything. It’s to the point now that it’s not even fun to think about, because it’s so far-fetched. Giving that up, walking past that gap, and not filling it with conversations that won’t happen, has been good, I think…profoundly hard, but good.

I think there is a gap between parents and children that is particularly important. There comes a time in early adulthood when I think you realize that there is a difference, no matter how small, between who you are as your parents’ child, and who you are in the world. My friends and I talk about this a lot. Sometimes, there’s this huge sense of betrayal in the children. Who am I to be anything other than what my parents have been telling me I am? Who am I to tell my parents “No”? Even my toddler-aged nephew knows not to tell his mother and father “no”. I imagine it’s hard for a parent to come to the realization that you will never fully know your child, not any more than you child will every fully know you. And I think that’s true, regardless of how close the parent/child relationship is. Coming to grips with that is vital. Ignoring that gap in knowledge, intimacy, authenticity just creates an atmosphere of thievery…parents robbing children of the right to grow up, children robbing their parents of the right to see the fruits of their labor.

I just got back from a weekend with two of my dearest friends. We try to spend at least one weekend together every year. Time has been our gap…the time between DC, Austin, St. Louis, New Orleans, New Braunfels, Durham, San Antonio. We have filled up the time between when we all lived together and last weekend with all sorts of experiences, other people, other houses, other friends. But, as in all transcendental friendships, the gap narrows to nothing when we are back in the presence of each other, the entity we call “us”. We lapse easily back into our rhythms of speech, our friendship roles, the way we all sit squished together on the couch to watch a movie, when we would probably be just as comfortable in other chairs or on the floor. You can believe that the gap is almost gone…just a hint of air in the middle of things.

Caroline’s poor husband always takes the invasion of his space with such grace. I promised I would try to find him a boyfriend to play with. Then, I realized that a boyfriend wouldn’t be enough to bring with me, next time. Adding partners into the equation of friendship is pretty easy to do, assuming you like the partner. Melissa and I love Caro’s husband, Alex. He’s a prince among men. He makes Caro sparkle. He has also made Caro a mother. And that, friends and neighbors, is something holy. There is nothing better than your friend telling you, after years of worry and not knowing and doubting and praying, that she is having a baby. I cried with happiness. But a little part of me was sad, too. A little tiny, awful, horrible, nasty, mean, selfish part of me cried because this changes everything, and not like getting married changed everything.

Partners can be left at home for long weekends. Partners can leave the house for a run, or errands, or to go beer-drinking with their own good friends. Partners can go to bed and read while you stay up and talk into the wee hours. Babies can do none of those things. Babies go with you everywhere. Babies are with you all the time. Babies are magnificent. Babies are breathtakingly gorgeous. Babies make me insanely jealous. There…I said it.

That being said, I can’t wait until the day that child makes her entrance into the world. I would be happy to never spend another weekend with my girls if it meant that the new little girl could have five more minutes learning about the exceptional creature that is her mother, and the repository of patience that belongs behind her father’s eyes.

The gap is necessary…the gap is the lost tooth of our 20’s, to be filled in with the tiny pearls of child-rearing wisdom. The gap is knowing that my couch-surfing days, cris-crossing the country on frequent flyer miles, going on adventures during school holidays and long weekends is rapidly coming to a close. Life moves on. 11pm becomes staying up late. Work can consume. Gym dues beckon you to stay one more hour.

The gap is that space between being asleep and awake, where you can see the face of the ones you love, and hear their voices, and know that eventually, all the gaps close. And you always end up right where you were meant to be.

mil besos,

rmg

word about the scenery...

the christmas blog is coming, for sure. remember, i officially have 12 days to get it done, and i'm pacing well. in between trying to remember what all has happened over the last 12 months (and good Lord, has it been full!) i've been to the rio grande valley, done all my shopping and wrapping in less than 8 hours, planned a visit to the zoo, eaten some sub-par chinese food, bought milk at the grocery store, planned a small (but VERY fun) pajama party for NYE, cleaned the house, done laundry, and sort of showed up to work. one day, i will learn to rest on my time off. this is not that day, my peeps...this is not that day.

i have a picture of michelangelo's lybian sybil on the top of this blog. it's not just some arbitrary piece of classic art, although it is a classic. no, the lybian sybil is my absolute favorite painting of all time. suprising, huh? bet you thought it would be van gogh's "iris" or "starry night", or the chagall piece with the bride and the goat...maybe even da vinci's "madonna of the rocks"...or something by kandinsky, like the color study with the squares and the circles, which i do love, because somehow all my water colors end up looking like a cheap knock-off of that one painting. but no...it's the lady in the toga, high up on the ceiling of the sistine chapel that is my favorite of favorites. she is a master painting...but that's not why i love her.

i love that painting. i love that painting because i want to be that lady, minus the over-developed calves and weird hair-do. she looks so strong and confindent. ultimately capable, utterly composed, still and yet in motion, the epitome of multi-tasking, the definition of grace under pressure. i keep her on the screen saver of my computer, so that when i begin my work day, i am thinking about projecting that kind of calm and action. the lybian sybil and the baby jesus keep me focused and grounded during the day...they remind me of who i want to be, and what i need to do to get there.

mil besos,
rmg

oh geeze...

oh internets...it's been a bumpy couple of weeks inside my head.

long story short-- i am fine. the universe gave me a huge pass, all things considered, and for that, i am one very grateful, adamantly NOT dating a total butthole (two words: press shots...), cookie-avoiding, Christmas-shopping-procrastinating, ironed and starched, thirty year old on her way to a greater understanding of a lot of things.

i can't believe it's the third week in advent. holy smokes...

mil besos,
rmg

cold weather...free association...stream of thought...speed of light

it's just cold enough...you can smell the winter on the wind, if it blows just right. makes me think about going hunting with my poppy. i know hunting with me wasn't nearly as much fun as with my brother or my dad or his friends, but i was always excited to go with him. looking was so much fun when i knew what i was looking for...turkey, deer, whatever. i wish i knew what i was looking for or looking at right now. the sides of the picture are clear, but the foreground and the middle is blurry and so out of focus, i can hardly stand to look right at it.



we used to ride out to deer camp in the old blue bronco. that car was magic and smelled like adventure. all i can smell right now is adrinaline, and i have to will myself not to get into the car and just start driving, with the top down and the heater blasting, trying to find the right perspective from which to view what's going on in a real way. it's totally different, and totally the same. i'd read tea leaves, but i'm too tired to go make the tea. water seems like it takes hours to boil, and i swear i have a million thoughts a minute, so maybe it's not hours, after all. maybe the blur isn't really all that bad, and i'm just being a drama queen about it.

i vacillate between total certainty that i am right and the knowledge that i am absolutely wrong. if i thought it would do any good, i would bang my head against the brick wall downstairs, just to knock something or anything loose. and then i remind myself that i am a grownup. this is what i bargained for. yes, this is what i bargained for, running myself ragged, dragging myself along on the ground, knees bloodied and eyes red, all these years...

things, whether they change now, or change later, or are even in the process of changing, are going to have to change, at some point. all this independence i've been socking away, being so proud of, all the time by myself with nothing to be louder than my thoughts and the purring of the cat, all the things i demanded i could and would do by myself...all of it...i am willing and ready to open it up and share it, and along some lines, even radically change it. and that is scary. the scariest part is that it doesn't bother me in the least. i'm even ready for it, at least in theory. giving up all nighters to ironing, or cooking bizarre dinners, doing laundry whenever i choose to do it, grocery shopping twice a month, spending hours on the phone, going when and where i please when and where i please, watching the same movie three times in a row, or leaving a whole album on repeat for a solid week...the little things that remind me that i live alone and am single...i am slowly packing them up into boxes, and putting them into a closet. slowly.

lord, have mercy.

mil besos,
rmg

what dreams may come

"the only difference between empty hands and open hands is attitude"

--paraphrased from G-d Calling

do you ever have those dreams where someone asks you the hardest, most bizarre question you've ever been asked, and the minute you try to blurt out the answer, it gets caught in your throat, and even though you are screaming at the top of your lungs, you just kind of make this really pathetic "mmmmmphhhhhblarglemmmmmph" sound? just me... whatever, you people are full of it...you've totally had that dream, and you know it. and if not, i hope you have it tonight, so you can sympathize.

i haven't had that dream in months. no, lately, that's what waking life has felt like. and not in a bad way...really, not at all. actually, things are going quite well. i feel like i am using my real voice, saying true things, making good on my answers. my yes means yes, and my no means no. this is a good place to be. and looking back on it, i have been here a lot longer than i thought. i spent hours the other night going over old journals, seeing the progress, the regressions, the slow climb out of austin, and everything after. i am profoundly grateful...for all of it. it's like the song "no ceiling" is playing on a continuous loop in my head. eddie vedder said it best, "this love has no ceiling". and despite my penchant for waiting on shoes to drop, i am findng myself relaxing back into this...and i am utterly unafraid.

that's the thougth i keep coming back around to...this profound gratitude. i feel like an exclamation point, all the way down to my toes, which today are firmly housed in my favorite steve madden high heels. i know that's what you're supposed to do before thanksgiving...make your list, focus your intentions, put gas in the car, etc. but i found myself feeling all these feelings weeks ago, totally unbidden. like i woke up one day, and this veil had been lifted from my eyes...nothing had changed, but everything was different. no new people...no new routine...nothing out of the ordinary had spurred this. it simply was, or is, i suppose. and again, i am just profoundly grateful for everything, everyone, all of it, even if tomorrow, everything is different. these moments, this time and space, have been immense and amazing, like my own little central park in the middle of the madness of the manhattan that is my brain.

mil besos,

rmg

nostaligia: she's a beast.

i remember standing there, in the coldest rain i can remember, singing with pete seeger at the top of my lungs. my roommate mike had come home three days before, and with not too much arm-twisting, convinced me to take a bus ride to someplace in georgia i'd never even heard of. considering that i worked for a bunch of hippie liberals, getting friday and monday off was a snap. explaining to my family that i was leaving dc for the weekend, in the company of total strangers, except for mike, who was a stranger to them, was kind of hard sell. telling your conservative momma and grandparents that you are going to attend a protest at a high profile military installation is a ticklish kind of thing to do. i suppose they just shook their heads, said a prayer, and figured it was something i needed to get out of my system.

what i didn't know about geopolitics, even after graduating from college with a minor in political science, could have filled the grand canyon. i spent my time in college reading about the rise of empire, the devine right of kings, and aristotelian political theory. i spent very little time in the modern era...and the time i did spend there, i spent reading about the palestinian/israeli conflict. i was guilty, according ts eliot, of neglecting and belittling the desert that lay in my own back yard. and i was coming into my adulthood at a time when that desert was filled with voices crying in the wilderness, begging for someone to listen. i was 21 when the big protests at the imf and world bank happened, happily ensconced in my little life in san marcos, trying to finish my degree, and swealtering through another texas summer. i remember seeing the protests on tv, and changing the channel to "behind the music"...sometimes you just can't stand to see the reality that is staring you back in the face.

by the time i got to dc, in the summer of 2000, 12 days after i graduated from college, the tenor of the conversation, the realization that things were happening that i had no idea about, knocked me for a loop. as a person, i was just really coming into my own...moving away from home was just the tip of the ice berg. i think most people come to a point in their young adult lives when they realize that they are no longer simply their parents' child, they have become something beyond that. i was, and still am, profoundly proud to be my parents' child. but my identity isn't nearly as wrapped up in that persona as it was when i was 21. things have happened, i have seen things, done things, been a part of things that have happened far from the reach of their hands, physical and metaphorical. those things have shaped me as much as the time i spent in their house. and i am equally grateful for both. that being said, i think most people go through a time in their lives when they stand everything they thought they knew and believed on its head...and you see what sticks.

what stuck for me was remembering that i grew up in a house that believed in God. i grew up in a house that believed in the goodness of people, that believe how you treated people mattered, that even nasty people deserved to be treated well. i never believed that the world was a fair place, but i learned that i could deal fairly with people, and that made all the difference. i learned that standing up for the right, true, and good things is hard, but necessary, and that the licks you take for doing that are always worth it, no matter the cost. i learned that the measure of a person isn't about what's in your bank account, but what's in your heart and what comes out of your mouth. and so, as i felt myself thinking all these big thoughts, wrestling with issues i'd never contemplated, i had a good foundation to build upon.

and so i went to georgia...to find out what i did not know. i wasn't silly enough to believe that the story i heard in georgia was the gospel truth about what was happening in latin america. history is rarely unbiased, regardless of whether it is written by the victors or the victims. but i knew i wanted to know a different part of the story. to be honest, i felt like a charlatan, a voyeur, an interloper. here i was, a middle class kid with a middle class education, who didn't even know if she was a republican or a democrat, who didn't know anything about the sandinistas, or the contras, or nicaragua, or archbishop romero, and i was smack in the middle of a discussion of all those things. i remember being silent for so much of the time i was there...just taking it all in, reading pamphlet after pamphlet, trying to make sense of what i was reading. and i felt like so...unfaithful. both my grandfathers and one of my grandmothers had been in the military. my uncle was in the navy. my greatgrandfather fought in wwi, and i had been taught my whole life to be patriotic, to support the troops, to be reverent almost. and here i was, standing in the middle of a cold fall rain, in protest at a military base. to say that i was conflicted would be an understatement of gigantic proportions. and i still feel conflicted.

what i do know is this...i have a profound and deep sense of respect and admiration and gratitude for the men and women in the armed forces. they keep us safe. they are volunteers. they leave me breathless with their selflessness in the face of incredibly difficult circumstances. they don't get to vote about where they go or what they do. they are so incredibly brave. and they deserve to have policies that reflect that bravery and honor. and i believe to this day that the policy i was protesting deserved that protest, on their behalf, because they could not do it themselves.

i'm not going to write a diatribe about how awful the school of the americas is. i'm not going to go off on some rant about how crappy governmental subterfuge is, or why i think the geneva accords are subverted in the name of national security or global stabilization. those things are a matter of public record, and the proof of the pudding is written in miles of newsprint. and i'm sure the school of the americas has graduated some upstanding and decent people, and that the instructors there are not all cyborgs with lumps of coal where their hearts should be. what i am going to say is that america deserves better. our men and women in the field, sleeping cold and hungry in the name of freedom and peace, deserve better. i pray that we are coming to a time when we can say that, demand that, and achieve that.

as i stood in the rain, chain smoking camel cigarettes and listening to speaker after speaker talking about mid-night raids in el salvador, nuns and priests murdered for standing up to political juntas, men and women who had been kidnapped and tortured for disagreeing with their own governments, i found myself marveling at the wonder of my own government. we have come so far...we still have so far to go.

so, as i sit on my little balcony, on a mild november night, i remember. and i hope.

mil besos,
rmg

a real barn-burner...

What you are, the world is.

And without your transformation,

there can be no transformation of the world.

--j. krishnamurti

you know, turning 30 was pretty major, grey hair aside. the weight of the experience isn't lost on me. i hate to say it, but part of me really, really, really embraces this new era in my life. and i say that without a trace of irony. and another part of me just hopes i am up to the challenge.

i guess i imagined that turning 30 would provide me with some automatic wisdom that i wouldn't have to try so hard to attain, or that things that bothered me would suddenly seem so trivial that i would never think about them, ever again. that's not the case at all. things have been so bizarre in my head lately, i'm feeling kinship with my 15 year old self again, and that is more disconcerting than i'm willing to admit at the moment.

i realize i'm sounding cryptic. and i don't intend to sound that way. i'm just finding myself incredibly frustrated lately. the real kicker is that i'm actually NOT the problem. and i am dealing with my absolute powerlessness in the face of a lot of things, at the moment. YAY. i love those lessons.

shit. someone pass me the asprin. and that bottle of vodka from the freezer.

mil besos,

rmg

godless heathen...table for one?

this is me. this is me trying to explain that i'm just one girl, with one vote. this is me trying to break out of molds, have discourse, and be an active participant in conversations with people i love. this is me being catergorized, polled, ingested, and spit out into raw data, polished numbers, and focus groups. this is me being told what i think, what i don't think, what i like, what i don't like by millions of people every day. this is me.

i have to be honest with you. i am, for all intents and purposes, a liberal. it took me years to own that. i still say it with fear and trembling, because i know the judgement that title brings with it. i know what people say about liberals. and i'll tell you, for me, almost none of it is true. but people, even people close to me, insist on sending me emails, news articles, clips, etc. that tell me what and how i am, as a liberal. i hate that. i really, really hate it. i hate it so much that i've spent the last thirty minutes trying not to cry over an article that ended up in my inbox less than two hours ago. i feel a constant need to explain and explain and explain that while i do support liberal causes, and tend to vote in a liberal fashion, i am my own person. and i feel like i have been mostly very circumspect and quiet about my feelings in this last election, to the point that i am in all out avoidance of all things political with about half the people i know. this isn't because i don't want to have the conversations. it's because every time the conversation is broached, i end up feeling like i'm not only defending my political convictions, i'm defending my right to have any feelings and convictions at all, because, as a liberal, i'm not supposed to have any thoughts or feelings of my own outside the party line, right?

wrong.

let me be clear about this...i am tired...sick, tired, and really overwhelmed with being told "what i am" because of the way i choose to vote. that is not the measure of me as a person. that is not what i think G-d sees when G-d looks at me. i know it's certainly not what i see. not by a long shot.

i am not a godless heathen. i actually really love Jesus...to the point that i work for Him, as my primary job. i don't think that all republicans hate poor people, or believe that GWB is the root of all evil, or in every conspiracy theory that comes down the pipe. i don't think that you have to live in new york or los angeles or washington, dc to have a decent idea. i don't buy into the liberal elite idea that if you didn't go to college, you aren't worth talking to. i don't want to keep the poor uneducated, and stupid, and strung out on welfare.

i don't want a huge government. i do want more personal responsibility. i do think that truth and values are important--i think that truth and values are so important that i wish we had a constitutional ammendment allowing for a vote of no confidence, because we deserve the right to call "no joy" in the middle of the game, just as much as any european country does. i think that it's ridiculous to talk about a culture of life and still support the death penalty, meanwhile ignoring the health crisis that looms for american children, who bear no responsibility for the financial or political choices of their parents. i support faith-based initiatives to act on behalf of communities, rather than creating governmental agencies to do the same jobs. i think that a fair day's work deserves a fair day's wage, and that the market determines what is fair. i think that we have to be innovative, creative, and reconciling in our attempts to make new discoveries and continue to explore technologies we already have in hand. i think that most people agree on most things, they just can't shut up long enough to come to that point.

in this last week of campaigning, before this historic election, please remember to vote! please remember to say thank you to our men and women in uniform who make it possible for us to live in a country where we have the right to vote. and be nice to the g-dless heathens...we sometimes are halfway decent people, who aren't bent on total world domination.

mil besos,

rmg

contemplative wednesday

In our life there is a single color as on an artist palette, which provides the meaning of life and art...
It is the color of love.

—marc chagall

one of my little old guys died last week, on thursday. he had moved to sonoma to live with his niece last february. he had big blue eyes, always wore a turquoise ring, smoked like a fiend, and had a little pug dog named "doc". he woke up on wednesday to see if his social security check had cleared. he told his niece to tell me thank you for the card i'd sent him the week before (the picture and quote are at the top of this post), and to tell me he was sorry he'd missed my birthday. and then, he died. i cried like a little kid when my boss told me that story. i still kind of want to cry, thinking about it. alan was a wonderful person, a dear man, someone with a lot of love in his heart, and so many stories to tell. i am so glad i got to know him.

i'm listening to a lot of music lately, even for me, and i listen all the time, to a pretty big variety of stuff. here's what's on the mix today... it is definately as random as it looks. but it's good, oddly enough, kind of shockingly good. and my mind is going in about 80 different directions today...so, this is kind of a sound salve, i guess.

Syrup & Honey 3:20 Duffy Rockferry

Drown 8:20 Smashing Pumpkins

Nebraska 4:34 Bruce Springsteen

Call It A Day 3:37 The Raconteurs

Ashokan Farewell 5:11 Nashville Chamber Orchestra

Evangeline 3:13 The Band with Emmylou Harris

Lady Margret 3:02 Cassie Franklin

Storms Are On The Ocean 3:24 June Carter Cash

The Dreaming Tree 8:48 Dave Matthews Band

Everyday 2:25 Don McLean

Red Dirt Girl 4:18 Emmylou Harris

I'm Yours 4:03 Jason Mraz

Myriad Harbour 4:00 The New Pornographers

Atlantic City 4:03 Bruce Springsteen

Travelling 3:34 Joni Mitchell

Mack The Knife 3:24 Louis Armstrong

Autumn 2:50 Paolo Nutini

Florida 5:01 Patty Griffin

Desire 3:41 Ryan Adams

Fly Me To The Moon 4:01 Tony Bennett

With Or Without You 4:56 U2

mil besos,

rmg

big three oh...wow.

turning 30 kind of went like this...without the me turning into tiger woods part. seriously, i am not making this up. this has got to be, without a doubt, one of the top five largest let downs of my entire life. thank the sweet baby Jesus i get a do-over this weekend. i am going back to bed, now.

mil besos,
rmg

about that...yeah.

**this photo was taken in some random bar in san franciso, easter sunday 2008. this is patio grafitti, not bathroom grafitti, for all you sticklers**

The line between want and need is not a line most of us are fond of walking. Or living, for that matter. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, what each of us really needs to make it in the world is a fairly short list. I-pods and cell phones and disposable incomes have become things that we need, just plain need to get through our day to day. I’m consistently amazed at the amount of “first world” conversations I have with people I know and love…conversations about needing to cut fat out of our diets, or to spend more time on the treadmill, or losing five dollars on a stupid sports bet, or spending fifteen hundred dollars on a lost weekend in Las Vegas. They are conversations that the great majority of people in the world wouldn’t even begin to understand. Isn’t it ironic that the things we convince ourselves we want the most are the things that allude us?

Sometimes the things we want are the very things we most don’t need. Case in point: if I had driven off to Louisiana in the middle of a summer night when I was 19 to get married, my life would likely be a ruin of epic proportions, right along with his. And that’s not because I don’t want to get married. I do. And it’s not that I didn’t want to get married to him, because at the time, I did want to. It’s hard for me to comprehend what that might have meant. The ripples that stone would have scattered over the pool I could see at my feet, down the river that I was just beginning to glimpse, and all the way down to the ocean that was beyond my reckoning, they might have been more than anyone could have imagined. And they might have been more than anyone could have bourne. The long and short of the story is that I didn’t do what I wanted to do, right at that minute, and like Mr. Frost says, that has made a great deal of difference.

My friend Patrick says that the hallmark of adulthood is to delay gratification. I’m not totally sure I agree with him on that point. But I do agree that delaying gratification is sometimes a good thing. Surely, it was a good idea not to run to Louisiana in the middle of the night in the middle of finals week. But, I also have to ask myself the questions about the other gratifications I deny myself, sometimes to my detriment. I mean, you can be cautious to the point of serious phobias.

After my dad died, for about the first six months or so, I would catch myself being happy, and kind of feel guilty about it. I mean, my dad died. My dad. Died. And he died five days before I graduated high school. He spent my whole entire freaking senior year in high school dying. Dying. And every day I went to school and tried just to get to the end of the day. I remember being terrified of hearing my name on the loud speaker, of him dying while I was at school. Up until that point in my life, I hadn’t really minded every knowing every thing about my little boring life. After he got sick, and people started flooding us with attention, and pressing us for details, I realized how much I craved privacy. I didn’t want my weakest moments, our weakest moments, exploited like some live-version of an after-school special. It felt like rape, to be perfectly frank. All these people, my age and older, all my father’s collegues, people from our church, marching into our lives, demanding the intimacy that only terminal illness in a small town can bring. This was our family. This was our experience. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t a scholarship, or a wedding, or a birth. This was a death. And it was a longtime coming.

I got to a point in that year of spending a lot of time in my room, or in my car. God knows how many miles I drove in loops around Brady…from my house to the park, up memory lane, west to the San Angelo highway, a quick right at the John Deer dealership, down the road past Nicky’s house, past the house on White Street that Mamaw and Papaw Sellman lived in when Momma was born, across the low water bridge, around the square, up to Sonic for a coke, and out the lake road, all the way to the lake, which used to feel like such a long way to drive, crying and praying and chain smoking the whole way, sort of caring and not caring if anyone saw me. What were they going to do? Go home and tell my parents that I was out driving the speed limit, crying and smoking? Right…even I was allowed an indiscretion in seeking my solitude, I suppose.

I’m sure my family wondered what I was doing, although I did have a lot of extra-curricular activities that made for good alibis. As for the staying in my room…as long as I made at least one appearance every hour or so, I pretty much was left alone. I can’t tell you what I thought about in my room. I know I thought about my family, about my dad being sick, tried to come to terms with what it was going to mean not to have him in all the places I expected him to be. Even with all that headwork done ahead of time, I was still so surprised when he died. Shocked, even. I mean, really, he had been dying for a long time. We all knew it was time. I said all of that. I meant all of that. But still, in the back of that little girl mind, I still expected a miracle.

I can clearly remember a handful of days out of that whole year. Very few of them are memorable in a good way. All of which is to say, once that fog of pain and anger finally started to lift, I felt like some part of me had been taken away, some part that I would never get back. Some of that I think was a faith that was not my own. Some of that was coming into my own, becoming the adult he’d always dreamt I would be. Some of that was realizing that I had to tuck my chin into my chest, steer a shoulder into the wind, and just keep walking. When you have been in that set of footprints, coming to the realization that you can feel something new and good can kind of mess your head up.

Going to college three months after my dad died was one of the greatest decisions of my life. I had to summon up a lot of courage to do it. That sounds strange, because I was only going to be two hours from home. I was living with my best friend, in an on-campus dorm. I had already been to orientation, bought my books, signed up for my classes, everything was ready. I was afraid to go to college without my dad. All four years in high school, we had whittled and worked our way down to an acceptable number of colleges to apply to. We never made a big deal about it. This was between the two of us…like our bets on the NCAA tournament every March, or the NBA finals in June. After my Waterloo in chemistry, Daddy and I set our sights on Law, instead of Medicine. And we started looking at more in-state schools, too. We would sometimes talk about going to law school together, since by the time I got ready to go, he would be about ready to retire.

After he died, I didn’t know what I wanted to be anymore. I changed majors five times in the three years I was in college. I finally settled on a BA in History, with a minor in Political Science. A homage to Daddy, for sure, but I also got out of having to take college algebra or statistics. Mom never said anything, but I think she knew that I was really at loose ends, but wanted me to have the space to come to some kind of resolution on my own. And the truth is, I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it. How to do explain to anyone that you don’t want to do what you thought you wanted to do, because the one person who was going to stand beside you in the show wasn’t there anymore? So, I went to college. Even though what I really wanted to do was crawl in a hole, and die right along with him. Seriously. But I knew that he would have hated that. And the last thing I wanted to do was to let him down. Law school, I could leave behind. But I had to get out and make a life, and this was at least a step in a new direction. And part of me really wanted to go.

I don’t write or talk much about my father. It’s not because I don’t love him, or miss him. I just don’t want people to feel sorry for me. And it’s a private kind of pain for me. I don’t really even talk about it to my family. I don’t want to talk about a lot of it. There were things I saw and heard that I would pay obscene amounts of money to unsee and unhear, things no one should ever have to see or hear, no matter how old they are, no matter how brave or smart they are. Some things like that cannot be explained. They can never be forgotten, no matter how hard you try. I will always have seen what I saw. I will always have heard what I heard. I will always have the memories of doing things for my father that no child should ever have to do for a parent. I do a good job of putting those things in a room in my head that is reserved just for the kind of things you’d rather not remember. That room may be a little fuller than I would like for it to be, but such is life. I try to keep that room tidy and sterile. Things in that room threaten to come crawling out like a line of cockroaches marching across a white rug at those moments when you most need to keep your composure, you have to do your best to nudge and smile, and get the fuck out of Dodge before you lose your nuts, and maybe your lunch.

Time doesn’t make it feel better…it makes it feel less frequent. But the pain still comes on like a charley horse in your heart…untreatable until it’s full-length on you. And you just do what you have to do to get through it. And no body is allowed to judge what measures you take. Maybe not even God.

Happiness can be like that, too. I love to see people in the throes of happiness. They are oblivious to the fact that anyone in the world is sad at that moment. I’ve always kind of admired the guys who propose to their girlfriends in restaurants, or at ballgames, or on billboards. There’s something admirable about that kind of devil-may-care happiness. I remember seeing my brother’s face after my nephew was born. He was literally the happiest person in the world. This child was his Willy Wonka golden ticket. This was his best thing, ever. He was punch-drunk in love with his child, his wife, his family, and with the whole world. The whole thing was sweet enough to give you a cavity. He didn't sleep. He didn't eat. He was utterly absorbed into the being of happy. Utterly consumed.

My friend Celeste asked me to be in her wedding when we were 23. Even at that relatively tender age, I was an old pro at being a wedding attendant. So I do what you always do when one of your best friends asks to you be in her wedding…I said yes, and asked when she needed my dress size, and where I needed to look for shoes. I have to say, Celeste is one of the easiest brides I’ve ever attended. She was just so excited about getting married and seeing all her friends, she forgot to be totally awful. Normally, even if I know the person or people, I treat all engaged couples with a shot or two of suspicion.

And jealousy. There….I said it.

Not so with this couple. Tim and Celeste were for real. They were butt-crazy in love with each other. It made me giddy to be with them. Being with them was like getting a B-12 shot. They were so sweet, and I wanted to be grossed out and think they were being goofy and stupid. I just couldn’t. Seven years on, they are still butt-crazy in love. I still want to be grossed out. They are so happy, and so grown-up, but still so goofy and sweet about it. I look at them, and I want what they have.

About two minutes before we walked down the aisle, with the bride behind us, and about 30 seconds after one of the worst bouron hang-overs in history slammed it’s way into my central nervous system, Celeste looks up at me, with big happy puppy dog tears in her eyes, and says, “Rachel, I just hope one day you can feel like this, too.” And then, I started crying. And I cried all the way through the service, off and on all the way through the reception, and then all 126 miles back to my house in Austin. Cried all the way. Cried like my guts were going to bust loose and spatter on the windshield. But I wasn’t sad. I was happy. So, so, so happy. Happy for Celeste, happy at the bittersweetness of weddings of childhood friends, happy at the prospect of being happy like Celeste, just happy. She put my eyes out with her happiness, and she still does, sometimes. It was so nice to cry my eyes out over something good, and sweet, and true, and beautiful.

mil besos,

rmg

something to say

for my thoughts on 9-11, i'd ask you to look up a post i wrote in April, titled "visual learner". you can find it in the navigation bar to your right...

and may the souls of the departed rest in the mercy of God, who is bigger than we can ask or imagine.

mil besos--rmg

all things considered...

so, i'm back in my office after ten days of vacation. it's culture shock, to say the least. the time off was wonderful, and spending time with my alabama family was very refreshing. and maybe all those miles between here and there gave me some perspective i've been needing. i will say this...that was the one trip/event of the entire summer that almost went entirely to plan, my driving reroute re: gustav notwithstanding.

i kept having this strange feeling on vacation...something more than the post-nasal drip induced by different tree pollen...i came to this, somewhere on my trip home, just outside of vicksburg...

so many of my friends and cousins my age have children. i've been watching them, the grown-ups and the parents, with increased curiosity. How quickly we seemed to move from doll-babies to real babies, faster than we moved from playing house to moving into houses. the line from playing the bride to pushing the baby carriage seems to be shorter than we thought. when we get together now, 11pm is a late night. we know there are things that must be done tomorrow, and we must have a clear head to do them. we don't throw up fuzzy pink drinks at 3am, or do shots in the basement. we have margaritas at dinner, and stop drinking after one or two. a glass of wine almost never turns into the whole bottle, anymore...almost never. we have departed, forever and always, that vast and tameless section of our lives. it is bittersweet in the tasting, to know that. to know that our carefree days are behind us, for the most part. to know that small hands hold our hearts forever, and that we have ceased to be creatures of our very own, those are large lessons. in the final analysis, i know all those changes and chances are worth the losses you take on the freedom front. and it's not really sad that the wild days are over, or at least come less frequently. this is life. and life moves. vacation is not forever...and neither are the salad days.

i have started marking my maturity based on things i purchase from the home depot--the caulking gun was definately a big step, i think.

we do not like ike.

mil besos,
rmg