Black and Sun

We have entered the realm of adulthood; we are no longer renters. Today we own a house.

 And, to seal the deal, we also now have a dog:

No 2.1 kids, but we instead have a triad of cats.

Tonight we spent $3500 on appliances. They’re stainless. Putting our tax refund to work.

We are living the American Dream…

Mid-last fall - about this time last year - Den got word that one of his oldest friends, a friend from elementary school, middle, high school, his first childhood crush in fact, who later resurfaced as an adult friend post-college years, continuing on into the present, had a lump on her leg. She thought she’d hurt herself exercising, but it just wouldn’t go away. So she went to a doctor, whereby she learned that she had a rare and agressive form of sarcoma.

She told us - her extensive network - about this in an email, the tone of which was both gravely serious and optimistically upbeat. What she didn’t say in that email is that a sarcoma diagnosis is nearly always a death sentence, no matter how advanced your crack team of oncologists. Perhaps she didn’t believe it then. Perhaps she truly was optimistic. Perhaps she was shielding those she loved from cold reality. I don’t know; I never got to know her that well.

In May she died, after multiple surgeries and a thwarted attempt at chemo. Not before being reborn as something part legend and part spiritual guide and networker from the ether yonder.

At some point during that frightening winter or spring as she waged a war of optimism and hope on that evil spreading, masticating lump, she began sending weekly Thankful Friday emails to her network. It was something she had apparently started years before, and in the darkest weeks of her illness she resumed the old habit, blasting her hope and thanks out to her massive network of family and friends-new-and-old. And after she died, her network continued. Every Friday flurries of email stream in to [Jens-Network].

Over the last couple months Den’s Thankful Friday missives have taken on a sort of celebrity status, growing by the week in flourish, depth and, ahem, creative license (I note, only because they are often stories I was actually present for, and seem to be much more interesting in the retelling).

Liberated from the yolk of a day job, Den is finding the writer that once was. The writer that was once upon a time when he acted in the Proscenium Circus with young Jen Doran, back when he was discovering first love and setting neighbors yards on fire with coffee cans of gasoline. Below is last week’s Thankful Friday installment for [Jens-Network]:

“Hi! Excuse me! Hi! Sorry to bother you but did you happen to see a small, white poodle with super curly fur while you were out walking tonight?”The cab of the pick-up was dark but we could see that it was a thirty-something male leaning out the window with his friend/girlfriend/wife looking wide-eyed and semi-hopeful in the seat next to him.

“Sorry. No, we haven’t.”

Indeed, we had seen no such dog fitting said description. The woman’s face, blanketed in darkness, now a stark charcoal-rub caricature of one long, heavy, angst-ridden sigh finding release in complete and utter exasperation.  They loved this dog.

“But if we do see her we’ll definitely call you.”

“Thanks.” And this is where the human brain in recall goes all ‘funny’, mine at least, “Her name is ‘Waffles’ (…maybe…) and she got off her leash and jumped the fence about an hour ago. My name is ‘Mike/Bob/Sam/Joe/Frank/Your Name Here’ and my number is 512-4bleep6something-wha?4random#blahblah.”

Perhaps its a mutant strain of genetics called ‘Hope’ that we think we’ll actually remember any helpful information in moments like these… in one ear. Processing. Processing. Please hold. Then out the next. Goodbyyye, useful memory! Off to the dustbin of personal history with you!

But I assure you for the rest of our evening stroll Heather and I were ever so watchful. Oh, absolutely, the next day whenever I found myself out in the neighborhood on a break, I looked in fanatic earnest for that small, white, curly-haired pup, too.So, get this.

On the drive down North Loop Avenue the following afternoon, making my way to the post office, I spotted a dog pulling a short length of chain behind it and fitting the EXACT of those described specifications:

Small. Check!

White. Check!!

Curly Haired. CHECK!!!

Poodle! My stars, CHECK-CHECK-CHECK-CHECK!

There goes “Cheerios” on the loose! Or, Waffles or Cookie or Mike or Joe Bob… what was that phone number again?

<<Screeeeeeeeeech!>>

“WAFFLES! STOP! HERE GIRL! GODDAMNIT, WAFFLES, STOP!” but like any smart dog being barreled into by some lunatic braking two tons of hurtling steel she took off like a lightening bolt underneath a fence and into somebody’s back yard.

Zip-Zing-Poof!“

No, Waffles, come back! Its me, your buddy Den, the guy who just spoke with your ‘mum & dad’. Just last night… stop. They miss you…”

I wasn’t about to give chase, either, as, to my knowledge, many Texans have a fondness for gun ownership. I can only imagine someone seeing an idiot ‘Yankee’ leaping around on their property screaming about breakfast foods making for some fine target practice…

“Sumbish’ came right at me, officer, crazed look in his eyes, hollerin’ nonsense about flapjacks ‘n such. So I flattened ‘im …like a pancake.”

Now, how often does this happen, though?  Actually finding someone’s lost pet (most likely anyway) and having the opportunity to actually do something about it?  Here was my cosmic lottery moment. I was going to shine in the universal spotlight (”I’m ready for my close up, Mr. Demille.”)! Would there be a reward? Yes, of course, there would be: the screams of familial joy and teary cheeked laughter, a lapping little pink tongue swabbing a weeping child’s face, deus ex machina ~ Christmas in September for everyone ~ !!! <<insert SFX angels singing upon high here>>

Alas.

I’m afraid this story does not have the traditional happy ending to it; I did not reunite ‘Waffles’ with her family; she did not come back to me when I called and called.  The court may note, however, that I did brave one very excited phone call to a completely jaded Austin City police department.“

You what now? Lost your waffles? Sir, you do realize this call is being recorded, right?”

The whole affair did bring me to a most unusual observation, though.  From that moment on I found myself noticing every single dog that was not on a leash walking around the streets that day (more than you might think in a city with a strict leash law).  I was strangely intrigued by this phenomenon for reasons to follow.Mostly these dogs all looked perfectly content sniffing every stick and leafy bush while four-legging it along, tongues lolling and tails wagging. But some looked just plain lost, too. Detached and searching for something or someone. Some obviously outright scared: jerky backward glancing heads and nervously tucked-away tails.

So, what was stopping me from pulling over to the curb and picking up one of these friendlier beasts, taking it home, and calling it my own by giving it a name?

Reality for one:

(Ripped from the ‘The Daily Texan’ headlines)

‘HYDE PARK DOG NAPPER APPREHENDED! LOCAL RESIDENTS DEMAND ‘SEND HIM TO THE POUND’! Baffled Culprit Babbles, “But I Just Love Waffles!”‘

Or, more likely…

Heather: “You what? We can’t take in a … a DOG!”

Dennis: “But he looked so lost and fluffy and…”

Heather: “Well, what about the cats? You think they’re going to approve of your drooling new pal?”

Or, hello? Were these dogs even lost to begin with? Big presumption that!

But the more pressing and personal reason I wouldn’t just abduct any old stray is my problem with this one concept: past identities. Better still, unknown but evolved histories. And I don’t mean ‘does it have its rabies shots yet’ either.

(Wait! Look! Up ahead! It’s my point!)

When we become untied from what is our comfortable lot in life we can easily find ourselves wandering. Unleashed, undefined and sniffing for some sort of familiarity. Tail sometimes wagging, sometimes tucked between our legs. Moving to a new state (and a *very* unfamiliar culture to boot), I can attest, is a damningly near perfect example.

Whether it be physically, or philosophically, some of us can wander passively or actively. By either standard we might one day catch ourselves staring long and hard into what we thought was the same old trusty looking-glass but, in a sudden burst of clarity, declare, “Holy bejesus! Who was this “Me” that whole time?” (why I’m still not used to discovering this notion after having moved so many times is still a complete mystery to me I might add).

From the distance that ‘all-things-familiar’ had kept me *from* ‘Me’ I had successfully tricked myself into thinking ‘this is, in fact, the real Dennis’ (no small bit of irony there methinks - hmmm, objects in mirror closer than they appear, eh…?): Career minded, hard worker, solid & productive member of society, blah-bahdy-blah-blah blaaah. You know, those little boxes kind of things packaged together so neatly that aid in defining ‘who we are’. On the surface these can be informative road signs to be sure. But, deeper?

More to the point, we, also, have our given names and complex histories as foundation, but to everyone else we’re certainly only mere strangers. Tabula Rasa: Blank Slates. Strays waiting to be picked up and given a new name. A whole life unexplained to someone - better tell it right in the few short impressionistic strokes you’re allowed, or else! 

…How dare they?

The thought of delivering a personality portrait rich in the poetry of joy, tragedy, wisdom, love, hate, ritual, heroics, discovery, falling down, getting back up, being a good friend/husband/wife/father/ mother/lover, being a terrible friend/husband/wife/father/mother/ lover and so on and so on, to one more person can be just … daunting.

And at my age. Sheesh. This? Again?

“You, my fair weathered new Acquaintance, don’t *deserve* to know me!”  Let the Righteous be heard! Amen.Yes, indeed, ‘jumped the fence about an hour ago’ have I by relocating to another city.

Some of us can experience this wandering by simply getting a new job, or going off to a new school or even by a short stay in a foreign country. And for those of us who have undergone the nonsensical and unspeakably cruel fate of losing someone we loved so dearly we are forced back into finding ourselves all over again. This, without doubt, is the most bewildering Wandering of them all (You have my respect, my admiration and my shoulder whenever you may need it).

I am feeling my own stray-ness now. I am fortunate enough to be wandering by choice (actively) for at the moment I have slipped my neck from out under the collar of familiarity and I am looking about in gleeful wonder with a certain level of amazement… and, yes, with fear, as well. 

This in time, for better or for worse, will fade into a warm, fuzzy pastiche as things begin to glue themselves back into place. My comfort zone’s pillow will get fluffed and, unawares, the collar will find itself fitting snuggly once more around my neck. My head restfully will plunk itself down drugged by modern life’s ‘Soma’. But what great insight one gets to see from this vantage ~ let me just enjoy the view for one more moment.

Then remind me exactly just what right do I have to give a stray a new name and call it my own?“

Here, Waffles, are you lost? Or, just out for a walk…?”  

[Okay Annie, I’ll update my blog.]

Yes, it’s been a while. It’s been winter and I’ve been down,  kinda. I’ve always liked winter, but lately it just seems to go on a little too long. November, December, January – those are the good winter months. Christmas with my family and Den’s was good (no major bickering broke out between my mom and I this year). We got a blizzard for my birthday (my landlord cursed my name – literally – as he shoveled two feet of snow out of the driveway), and I finally felt justified to go out and buy a pair of Sorel boots for clomping around in the snow. February we went skiing with friends in Maine and rented a chalet in New Hampshire where we cooked dinner, drank wine, watched a bad movie and played dominos and some weird bean game. But March…March seems to get me every year. Two, three…or was it <em>four?</em>…more dumpings of snow just sucks when you’re living in the city. The neighbors get surly, leaving lawn furniture and trashcans weighted with bricks in their “claimed” parking spots; cars get encrusted with salt; you run out of wiper fluid half-way to work… Past February I just can’t find it in myself to enjoy winter anymore.

So I’ve been grumpy lately. The world outside my window looks ugly and grey. I resume my mutterings about moving to a new city (which, really, I have no business doing after dragging Den back from warm, sunny Los Angeles), and today even began two new diatribes about how much I hate above-ground power lines and my latest plan to move to Canada since the US is clearly heading in the direction of right-wing facism and consumer glut. But really it’s just the weather, as Den pointed out this morning as I sulked on the couch.

And the remedy is to get out of the house and fill one’s brain with things external to oneself, with the hope that there will be that much less room to fill with sulking and concocting extreme plots to dismantle the stability of one’s life.

A couple weeks ago we went to The Philosophy Café, which is a monthly open-to-the-public gathering at McIntyre & Moore booksellers in Davis Square. This was just the medicine my flailing spirit needed - a good esoteric debate for me to sink my sharp little teeth into. The topic was “Who Counts Morally?” and the mission was to determine whether there is a line between the rights of humans and animals, and if so where and how is it drawn, asking: if humans have rights, why? and what distinguishes them from animals? The discourse fluttered around notions of religion and soul, capacity to reason, ability to relate, ability to create. But these explanations seemed flabby to me, full of holes and question-begging. At every pause in the discussion my hand shot up like the too-eager kid in fourth grade…but for some reason the moderator just kept looking past me.

This was a topic that’s been circling in my head for years. At the end of high school I became a vegetarian, because of something I’d seen on 20/20 about the unsanitary procedures at meat-packing plants, topped off when, just a couple days later, I found a hairball in my hamburger and my mother swore she hadn’t dropped it on the floor. Then in college I read an essay in which the central argument amounted to, “if you can’t kill your own pig – experiencing both the life and the taking-of-life of the animal – then you have no business eating meat. This became the force behind my argument for being vegetarian, which I sustained for eight years, until I started getting monthly headaches that laid me out flat. In New Zealand I began eating meat again and the headaches disappeared. And in New Zealand I could argue that the animals were at least treated humanely — and not shot full of growth hormones and antibiotics — but now back home in the US I can’t, and yet I still eat meat.

So. Where does that leave me? A hypocrite in my own mind.

I will not be placated with the argument that “animals were put on earth to serve humans” or that “humans have souls and animals don’t” - both of which I think are assinine – in fact, this is the very reason that I rejected Christianity at the tender age of eight. (You better believe my cat’s going to heaven! Because if I have a soul my cat damn well does too!) But I never could believe in heaven, and although I will always insist that my little familiars have every bit as much spirituality as I do, I’m not at all sure that I actually believe I have a soul. I’d like to believe I have something more than the body I live in – as does my cat, as did that creature that once was a cow that reluctantly parted with its flesh for me to eat for lunch – but I can’t be sure, so as far as I’m concerned it’s all just wishful thinking, and the best I can do is respect life, for that may be all there is.

And because the food chain is inherent to existence, and nature was not designed with the principle of live and let live, I cannot apply the logic that all living creatures are sacred, thus making it is as wrong and cruel to kill a fish as a cow as a human fetus as an 18-year-old boy as a 31-year-old woman as a 93-year-old coma patient as a mosquito.

So instead I argue – and argued when finally an hour and a half later the moderator gave me a chance to speak – that there is no inherent morality. We have no inherent rights. The notion of rights is inextricably tied to religion. In actuality you can only have “the right to” what cannot be taken away - and life is not one of those things. The notion of rights is a luxury of self-actualization, created by us, through our language and our self-reflection.

What we do have, I argue, is a will, or desire, such as the will to live or the desire not to suffer. But to ensure that this desire is respected, the burden must be on the “doer.” As rational, reasonable, empathetic creatures we have a responsibility to be kind to the best of our ability, and to do unto others as we would have done unto us. And I would argue that this extends to animals, and that we have a responsibility (which we are failing to uphold) to not cause animals to suffer, just as we have a responsibility not to cause our fellow humans to suffer.

Having had so much time to percolate in my head, this little argument of mine had the effect of turning the nicely moderated discussion on its head. The discourse got a little unruly towards the end…which made it a whole lot more interesting.

After the discussion wrapped up, a Globe reporter that was doing a story on the Philosophy Café came over to where Den and I were sitting and took down our names. The story ran today and I even got my own pull-quote

Last weekend was Den’s birthday. We drove up to Vermont to visit his friend Merry in Middlebury, but spent most of the weekend in Burlington. I can’t believe it’s been 7 years since I’ve been back to Burlington! Den humored me as I scampered up and down Church Street in the cold, making detours on Cherry, Bank, College and Main Street, revisiting all my favorite haunts from my college days. Had to get sweet potato fries and an apple crumble with Ben & Jerry’s and cheddar cheese at the Vermont Pub and Brewery. Gone was my favorite Chocolate Oatmeal Stout, but the Vermont Smoked Porter wasn’t a bad substitute. Paid a visit to Speeder & Earl’s for a Clockwork Orange (espresso and hot chocolate with orange peel and almond Torani syrup). Visited Old Gold – the best vintage shop EVER, where I got my Schott leather jacket that my parents spent years trying to get rid of (unsuccessfully). Had Dim Sum at my beloved Five Spice Café, where Den watched with glee as the waitstaff sang Happy Birthday to the wrong table (we set them straight in time to rescue our cake). Then we returned to Five Spice again for dinner because I couldn’t leave Burlington without having their Pad Thai and Jerry’s special red snapper, which is now tilapia because snapper is being over-fished, but which is still every bit as good as I remember.

Stopped in at Ecco because it had been Beth’s favorite dress shop back before we moved to London. She had fallen in love with a white silk dress that she nearly bought with the justification that she could get married in it someday. Now, some 5 boyfriends later, she is getting married and I couldn’t resist peeking in to see whether, against all odds, the dress might still be there. Of course it wasn’t. I also have an Ecco dress with a story, a slinky black evening gown that Jay had bought for me as part of a surprise graduation present to wear to Phantom of the Opera in New York, not quite realizing in his provincial Vermont way that nobody really wears evening gowns to see Broadway shows. Wandered into Pier 1 – one of the very, very few remaining privately owned franchise stores (most are corporate owned now) – where I worked my last few months in Burlington, in addition to waiting tables, trying to save enough money to make my way to London in some semblance of style (all that money was gone within 2 weeks of London). Frank, the owner, greeted us but, not surprisingly, didn’t remember me.

Acquainted Den with Pure Pop, to see whether Burlington would pass muster in his eyes, measured by the quality of its indy record store. It did. Whiled away an hour in Bennington Potters, where Merry became determined to buy a banged up antique couch that wasn’t for sale.

Den bought Merry a book from The Crow, where I learned the fate of Chassman & Bem – a locally owned bookstore that had been a fixture on Church Street – like so many other small quaint and quirky bookstores, they were driven out by the behemoth, packed up and left as soon as they heard Border’s was coming to townz. Goddam Borders! I swear I’ll never buy a book at Borders again.

The Origanum health food store is gone from Main Street, replaced by a new Onion River Co-op. But the new co-op is fabulous so we don’t have any hard feelings there (plus Den found a bottle of blueberry wine, which is huge in satisfying Den’s unquenchable craving for blueberries). Vermont Pasta Company, the first restaurant I ate at in Burlington when my parents drove me up for college, is also gone, replaced by something called SmokeJack’s. And Sweet Tomatoes has strangely become Three Tomatoes.

In addition to the despised Borders, an Old Navy moved in (to where Woolworth’s used to be) along with the usual mall suspects of JCrew, Pottery Barn, etc. And of course there’s a Starbucks now. But Muddy Waters is still thriving on Main Street – all that a perfect coffeehouse should be, with it’s rustic décor, comfy chairs and couches, shelves of books for the borrowing, and even a few beers on tap – and of course we spent more than a couple hours there contentedly lounging with our newspapers and coffee. And Sweetwaters is still there, and Nectar’s – of course – and The Daily Planet, and Ken’s Pizza, and the Church Street Tavern and Leunigs (where I promised Den blueberry pancakes, but they weren’t serving breakfast when we went in, so we had pancakes and omelets and hot chocolate at the iconic Henry’s Diner instead).

We didn’t have time for dinner at Trattoria Delia, which had been my favorite restaurant whenever my parents came to visit, since as a student I couldn’t otherwise afford it. I’ll have to return with my parents sometime, so my mom can have her favorite Pond-Fed Swordfish. There’s a story behind that. My mother, who with every year becomes more of a pain-in-the-ass to take to restaurants, couldn’t find a single thing she wanted to eat on this incredible Italian menu, what with her worries about dioxin and fat and pesticides and hormones and mercury. The mercury was at the top of her most vocal concerns that particular evening, because she really wanted the fish, but… and so, without even so much as cracking a smile, the waitress reassured her that there was no need to worry about mercury in the fish because this particular variety was pond-fed swordfish. At which my mother instantly brightened and said, “wonderful! I’ll have the swordfish,” happily oblivious as my father and I snickered and cajoled. Seldom do we go to a restaurant as a family that the pond-fed swordfish incident isn’t brought up.

The whole time I’ve been in Boston I’ve ached to get back to Burlington, but somehow the opportunity just never presented itself. And I fretted over how they always say “you can never go home again” – I don’t know anyone in Burlington anymore (even Jay has moved away, and I long ago lost contact with him anyway), nor am I even the same person I was when I last lived there. And I guess it’s true that you can’t go home again, in that I could never return to that place in time, that old Heather still in school, still naïve of all the experiences and travels and heartaches that I’ve come to embody these last 7, 10, 12 years. But there’s something so exquisitely comforting about returning to a place that once was home, and that has been long cherished as a memory, to find that you can suddenly reach out and touch it. In all the places I’ve lived, only two cities have ever really felt like home – in that way that you can leave a place and return and feel welcomed back: Burlington and Edinburgh. I haven’t been back to Edinburgh either, and it haunts me with memories so poignant it seems I could just step back into them. I’ll never be able to live in Edinburgh again, and I think that’s what prevents me from visiting – the fear that I might love it too much, because I desperately didn’t want to leave that city when my year came to an end. But I could live in Burlington again. Maybe not now – for career reasons – but someday. This is a city that speaks to my soul in a way that Boston, even Cambridge, just never has.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything… I’ve finally found a job that keeps me busy enough to turn off [most of] the noise in my head. And so, less time to reflect. And less time to whine. But here I am, 7am on Christmas Eve morning, curled up in my chair, laptop on lap, because I can’t sleep-in for some reason, reflecting on reflecting, and my week, and the last couple months, and what’s been going on in my world that I can write about.

I’m a lot happier these days. The new job is fun and I really like the pace of agency life. I like that projects that would’ve taken two weeks and half a dozen iterations of edits in corporate, I can now get done in an hour. I feel so much more productive at the end of each day. And the things I complain about now are really pretty trivial. I like that every day is something different. In November we attended a party for the Red Sox that the client co-sponsored — which was kind of ironic, seeing as I’m the one person in the state of Massachusetts least interested in meeting a Red Sock — but there was a certain amount of novelty value. Got to hang with the drummer from Aerosmith. And Dennis got to interview “Miss Massachusetts” for an NPR story. In January I’ll be going to CES in Vegas — a city I could’ve happily lived my  life without ever visiting — but it sounds like it’ll be a lot of fun. I can’t say that what I do for a living is especially meaningful, and I’m certainly not saving lives or making the world a better place, but I like that I at least don’t have to spend my days in meetings anymore.

I remind myself on a daily basis just how bad it was at my old company so I don’t become too complacent with my new reality. It was bad. So so bad. Worse than I’ll probably ever know, my friend Beth tells me. And the worst of it was that after a while I began to think it was me. And then I began to think it was universal, that all companies are like Dilbert cartoons. And when I could muster up that sputtering spark of hope, I would dream of what it would feel like to be out of there, and to look back on those days and think smugly about just how fucked up that company was. Which I get to do now. Thank god.

My taekwondo is suffereing a bit for it though. I work late a lot and don’t get to classes as frequently as I used to. I try to make it to at least three classes a week, but even that doesn’t always happen anymore. I’m a red belt now, which means I should actually be training harder if I ever want to test for black belt. This is something that’s been bothering me a lot, because black belt was a goal I set for myself when I moved to Boston four years ago. And I have to achieve it. But I’m not really in any hurry and I don’t especially mind if it takes another two years. It used to be, back when I first moved to Boston and was looking for work and didn’t know what the hell I was doing with  my life, that taekwondo was the haven that kept me sane. Used to be I didn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t go to taekwondo every night. So I guess it’s a good thing in its way that I’m down to just three nights a week.

It’s now 7:34 Christmas Eve morning. The house is very quiet. Dennis is still in bed. My pie crust is sitting in a ball on the kitchen counter waiting to be rolled out and baked. In a little while I’ll go out and retrieve my parents from their B&B. Then Dennis promised to take my dad up to the Car Talk studio in Harvard Square, and maybe to Ray’s garage in hopes of meeting one of “the guys.” Then we’ll pick up a bottle of Jamieson’s for Peter and wrap the last of our presents and head up to Portland for Christmas.

There’s not much I want to say about what happened Tuesday. If I think about it too much I’ll just throw up. At least we were spared some of the indignance of electing a president we did not elect. But in it’s place is shame. Shame for all those young voters that didn’t bother to vote. Shame for all those undecided voters that couldn’t find their way through the rhetoric and media hype to make a very important decision. And most of all shame for all those folks that actually voted for Bush. It’s a disgrace. The man lies his way into war, drives us into debt, and ratchets up the world’s hatred for America, and the good-hard-working-god-fearing-salt-of-the-earth folks of this fucked up country reelect the bastard. And once again, I’m ashamed to be an American.

All those who know me know how much I hate my job. I have hated my job for the past…well, since forever, really.

So here is news: I got a new job.

A new job, at a new company, in a new field. A complete career change. I got a writing job at a public relations agency. And a very cool agency at that. I start Monday. And now I’m just counting down the days.

Goodbye beige cube. Goodbye souless marketing mediocrity. Goodbye white, 30-something males in blue button-down shirts. Goodbye bland death-by-boredom corporate hell…

It’s fall already. Where did the summer go? The last two months have flown by – what have I been doing that I couldn’t stop and record a thought or two? The other day I took out my little black notebook to jot down the name of a book, and found pages of notes I’d scribbled reminding myself to remember…

In August we went up to The Island in Maine, my dad, Den and I. The Island is a summer camp that has been in our family since the turn of the century, built by my great-grandfather. It’s one hundred years old this year. It sits on East Grand Lake in Forest City, Maine. Too far north to become a tourist resort, each visit is a walk back in to time, amazing how little has changed over ten, twenty, a hundred years. The boulders, the trees that frame the shoreline, the evening sunsets – always the same. Some things do change a little: the black-eyed-susans outside the kitchen window are gone – a little pine tree sprang up in their spot; the hammock tree came down in a storm. But pretty much everything else is just as we last left it.

Den and I were up for a weekend last year, but before that I hadn’t been up to the island since the summer before I started college. That was the last year my grandparents made it up too. I spent that summer reading and sulking in my teenage way – it didn’t occur to me that I should be savoring the end of something special. For years after I ached to be back at the island with my parents and grandparents. But returning this summer – after thirteen years – my dad and Dennis and I began to lay the ground for a new era. This is why I live in New England – so I would never be far from our island.

Opening camp always begins with a day spent sweeping batshit from the surfaces of everything. Unshuttering the windows. Uncovering the furniture, moving tables and chairs back outside to the porch. Hunting down wicks for the kerosene lamps. Firing up the gas fridge.

Our island has no electricity or plumbing. The kitchen features a green pitcher pump, a gas hotplate, a wood stove (in which my grandmother used to bake her legendary blueberry pies), a “modern” gas refrigerator, a gas light fixture. In the living room is the obligatory trophy deer head mounted above my grampa’s desk. My grandmother always hated that deer head, but for some reason it’s still there. The desk had originally been an organ, brought over by my great-grandparents in their big boat, the Green Dragon. At some point the organ rotted and was converted to a desk. We still have an outhouse, use of which is politely referred to as “going down the lane.”  There is discussion of replacing the outhouse with a biological toilet, but I am steadfastly opposed to this modernization. The outhouse was good enough for Grammy, I say. We take our baths in the cold, cold lake – with ivory soap, because it floats – and then run back to warm ourselves by the fire. As a child I used to huddle shivering and blue in the green rocking chair by the wood stove after a cold morning dip, chattering to my grandmother over a mug of Campbell’s instant chicken noodle cup-a-soup.

My dad slept on the balcony watching the stars. This is where my grandparents used to sleep – my grampa in his iron bed and my grammy swaying in her hammock. Every morning my grandfather would rise early and make my grandmother breakfast in bed. As his eyesight declined it took longer and longer for breakfast to arrive, and my grandmother would be trapped in bed long into the morning. As a child I used to scramble upstairs and swing with her in her hammock while she waited for breakfast.

Den and I slept in the tall, sturdy bed my great-grandfather built. The head- and footboards are made up of crisscrossed poles of cherry logs, papery bark peeling along the edges, but still amazingly intact just as when he and my great-grandmother slept in it a century ago. We went to sleep at night to the sound of the restless black lake flinging itself up against the boulders. Sometimes our lake is remarkably still – the surface smooth as glass and crystal clear. But not this year. All night and all day we heard the lake beating up against the rocks, rhythmic and constant like breath. If you look out the window at the right hour during the night you can see the moon shining through the pines and casting a golden path across the lake.

You awaken in the morning to the call of the loons, the lake still lapping steadily at the shore, the sky pink, warming from the east, air chilled enough to beckon a fire. The loons call their mournful call: “where arrrre yooou?” And another answers back: “heeere I am. Here I am.” Sometimes the loons sound like they’re laughing. “Still laughing at Katy King’s dirty joke,” Sam Brown used to say. Nearly twenty years ago it must have been since Sam visited us at the camp, the same year that my friend Katy King from the mainland stayed with us on the island. The joke wasn’t that dirty – or that funny – it just shocked the adults to hear it come from a ten-year-old’s mouth: what do you call the sweat between Dolly Parton’s boobs? (answer: mountain dew). Raised eyebrows and embarrassed laughs – Katy cracked herself up – and then the loons joined in and Sam said “they’re laughing at Katy’s dirty joke.”  There aren’t as many loons as there used to be. Used to hear them all day long. They say it’s because of the acid rain – it weakens the shells of the eggs.

On the morning of our last day at the island, I woke up with the sunrise and sat in bed writing these notes to myself in my little notebook with a nub of pencil I’d found (from my grandfather’s last crossword puzzles). The sky was pink. The pines along the shoreline were still dark silhouettes. As the sun rose across the sky, it shimmered down on the lake’s ripples like diamonds. The water was so clear you could see the rocks on the bottom standing on the balcony. This place is heaven to me. The souls of my grammy and grampa live here. The soul of my father’s childhood, and of mine. This is the real pace of time, not the hyperspeed clock of city life.

We closed up the camp. Shuttered the windows, covered the furniture. Tucked away the linens. Locked down the food items. Dragged our bags down to the rocks and waited in the sun for my dad to come around with the boat. As my dad came into view, a cheesy image came to mind: when my dad shows up in heaven, he’ll arrive just like this – driving an old outboard motorboat, motor whining, bumping up and down on the choppy water, hair blown back, squinting in the sun, East Grand Lake a glistening expanse of blue and diamonds all around him.

The crickets are back. I hadn’t heard them before tonight. The quintessential summer-night sound. Softer than the shrill cicada whir of hot, sticky southern summer nights, heavy air close around your skin. The cricket-sound is more subdued. This is the languid sitting-outside-under-a-mercury-lamp sound, bare knees tucked up and glowing, grass lit up phosphorescent yellow-green, fingers poking with twigs at the tiny insects hopping from blade to blade. This is the sound you hear in your little-girl years, lying in bed awake as the grown-ups go about with their grown-up lives, their murmur passing through the wall from the den, mixing with the tv drone and summer night sounds. The headlights from passing cars make squares of rolling light on your wall, the breeze blows in through the open window, and the zig-zag rhythm of the crickets lulls you gently into little-girl sleep. All is well in the world.

I find myself awakening on the living room couch tonight to the sound of the crickets. Dennis comes in from his run. The screen door slams shut. Dinner is half-cooked in the kitchen. “C,mon, I’m not that late!” Dennis says with a grin as my eyes blink open. I had fallen asleep with the words of Annie Dillard running through my head, finger still holding the page in my new book, stretched out on the couch, with my cat’s soft little body pressed against my stomach, thinking, what could be more perfect in the world? A summer night, the sound of crickets, a purring cat…

I played hooky from work today. Thought I was getting sick yesterday, told my manager I’d be working from home. But I woke up feeling fine. Better than fine, because I decided to stay home anyway. Commuted 15 seconds from bedroom to living room. Worked from the couch, frumpy and unshowered. Sat outside eating blueberries while Dennis fixed my bike. Went to taekwondo with more energy than I’ve had in two years. I think I might be on to something.

I get up from my doze to finish cooking dinner. Nectarine shrimp from my old brown recipe notebook. Scribbled in rough estimates, given to me by the owner himself of the Five Spice Café in Burlington, Vermont. The last time I ever ate there, the last time I was in Burlington. That would be about six years ago to the month. I think. Dennis’ friend, Merry Moses, is moving to Middlebury in September. We said we’d visit her lots. I can’t wait to eat at Five Spice again.

Heat oil in wok. Add garlic, don’t let it brown. Add olek sambal chili sauce, 1 teaspoon. Add coconut milk, 1/2 cup. Add fish sauce, Squid brand, 1 tablespoon. Bring to a simmer. Add shrimp and sliced onions. Sugar peas, etc. Cook nectarines through.

I cut a tomato from the garden. It is redder than I’ve ever seen a tomato be. It practically glows under the bright kitchen light. I tear up lettuce. Slice a cucumber, an avocado. I bought a sunchoke from Wholefoods today. “Do you know what a sunchoke is?” I ask Dennis, holding up the shriveled brown root. “A what? A sunchoat?” My mother used to buy them for me. I never knew what they were but I liked the crunchiness.

What could be more perfect in the world? I ask myself at the dinner table. Dennis is chattering away, I’m being quiet, words and cricket-sound running through my head. I stumble over the perfect part. It’s like I’m waiting for something. A pinnacle of some sort. Why? What is a pinnacle in life? What is perfect? Nothing more than this. This is life. A summer night. The sound of crickets. The breeze blowing the curtains in the neighbor’s window, in ours. A black cat on the window sill and another under the table. A mess of dishes in the kitchen. Dinner on the table. Warm companionship. “The applechokes are great!” Dennis says.

What could be more perfect?

I’m sitting outside now trying to think of what the word is that describes the cricket-sound. Not a chirp, or a whir or a whine or a buzz… I’m sitting in the dark, the porch light has shut itself off, my computer screen casts a blue glow around me. I don’t have an answer. I can’t think of a word for the sound of crickets…

July 4th weekend. Three barbeques in two days. Burgers, chicken, scallop cerviche. Corn-on-the-cob. Watermelon. More watermelon. Puppies, babies, suburbs, a new house. Missed the fireworks. Roamed the streets of Somerville, looking for a hill with a view. Hit my social threshold, three times over.

Lately conversation seems like work. Dying to talk about something other than houses, jobs, babies, dogs, the South Beach diet, and George Bush. My soul feels unnourished. Nothing feels very real anymore.

Monday, a holiday, woke up to drizzle following a beautiful-weekend-for-barbeques. Woke with an ache in my chest, in that spot at the center where your ribs split off. The diaphragm, I think it’s called. I kept putting my hand there throughout the day, trying to feel the physical spot on my body that the ache was emanating from.

It was residue from my dreams. Tiring, winding dreams full of emotional alleyways. People known and not known floated in and out. The last moment before waking, standing in the kitchen – my mother’s kitchen – red brick linoleum, white countertops, wooden cabinets – someone is making me go through the cupboards and throw stuff out. I don’t know who. A shadow presence. Myself, no doubt. I open a tin of China black tea, hold it up to my nose. The smell of the tea hits me with a wallop. No, not a smell, an emotion. A memory. I clutch the tin of tea to my chest and silently plead to be allowed to keep it. Please don’t make me throw this one away. A primal cry shakes my soul.

I awaken aching. Clutching my tea. My sleeping, waking pragmatic mind tries to wrestle it to the ground. What memory are you clinging to? I ask myself. A resonance of my last weeks in New Zealand surfaces as the answer. Yes, this again. Always this. But what is the memory of? I flip through my scrapbook brain searching for a snapshot, searching for the source of my ache. I find nothing. I find no single accountable memory.

I sit up in bed. It’s 8 a.m. My cat stretches and yawns. “What’s the matter?” Dennis asks.  “I had a weird dream,” I say. My dream hurt me. Punched me in the gut. “Do you want to tell me about it?” “No. I don’t know. I can’t remember it. I want coffee first.”

Before leaving the house, I checked my email. Got an email from an old friend. A friend from my last year of high school, a few college summers. He tells me he’s been thinking about me lately – works with someone who reminds him of me – wants to hear my voice. This email from my friend, his memory of me, this voice from my past, links hands with my tea tin and settles into the ache in my chest. I wonder what I’ll tell him of the life I’ve developed for myself, of the person I’ve become. Will I complain to him about how expensive real estate is in the Northeast? Will I rave to him about the South Beach diet?

Nestled at a table at 1369, feet tucked up, table lamp casting its warm yellow glow, I seek safety in my coffee and magazine. I’m reading a month-old New Yorker. An essay called “Hard Lines.”

“I think I would have been happier in publishing,” I say to Dennis, apros pos of nothing. He looks up from his newspaper: “Well? What’s stopping you?” Oh, how many times have I had this conversation.

Dennis once had a pal in Europe. A ROTC kid. A truly lost soul. He’d walk past a toy store and say, with utmost earnestness, “You know, I always wanted to own a toy store.” Then he’d pass a dog on the street and say, just as earnestly, “I always wanted to be a veterinarian.” What would be known in my family as a complete flake. The notion of which prevents me from chasing after every half-baked dream that floats into my head. Dennis mentions this kid whenever I say things like, “maybe I should go back to school for psychology.” Dennis thinks I should pursue writing. It’s obvious to him. It’s not obvious to me. In my indecision – in my fear of my own capacity for flakiness – I just stay where I am. Corporate marketing wonk. Perhaps this is why nothing feels real anymore.

I go back to my magazine. I go back to my ache. I no longer know what my aspirations are. There’s nothing that I’m dying to do with my life. Not even writing. I just know that I don’t want to do what I’m doing. I don’t want to be a marketing wonk. I don’t want to go to barbeques and have conversations about buying houses in the suburbs and fad diets.

“I feel like I’m living an emotionally half-assed existence,” I say to Dennis. He looks up from his newspaper again. He doesn’t really want to have this conversation. I tell him about my dream and about the email from my friend – this voice from my past, which in a way represents my own voice from a self I no longer am, holding me accountable for who I’ve become. I’m on the brink of tears. The ache, I realize, as I’m talking, comes from feeling like my memories are more real than my actual life. With my fingers I trace the grain of the wooden tabletop. I observe the color of the lamplight on the wood. I lay my hand flat on it’s surface. This table should be more real to me than my memories. But it’s not.

The persistence of memory. I loved that particular Dali painting for a long time before I ever understood it. It was featured in the creative writing chapter of my third grade English textbook. My introduction to expressionist writing. I finally came to understand what it meant at a tiny Dali museum in Paris. The only museum I went to the entire time I was in Europe. I don’t much care for museums. But standing in front of this particular painting in the museum’s small, dimly lit enclave, it suddenly made sense. The melting clocks. The unreliability of time, of reality, melting under the persistent force of memory. That was my interpretation anyway.

I talk myself out. Babble about the poignance of my memories, the absence of poignance in my life, my lack of direction, the dullness of our friends, the dullness of my job. Dennis listens, his infinite patience belied only by the rhythmic twitch in his jaw muscle. I take my cue. I offer him another coffee, and go back to my half-read essay.

The passage I return to begins with a big letter “M.” I read it out loud to Dennis:

Memory is fiction – an anecdotal version of some scene or past event we need to store away for present or future use. John McCrone, a British science correspondent, writing in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement, calls memories “cognitive reconstructions,” and goes on to say that our brains, though not well evolved for retrospection or contemplation, never give up a reshuffling process in their effort to extract what is general and what is particular about each passing moment of life. Garry Wills, in his book “Saint Augustine’s Memory,” writes, “The past…is not an inert structure in which we can deposit a remembered item to remain unchanged until called up again…In fact, what is being recalled is the experience that a person underwent in acquiring anything to be remembered.”

I sometimes feel as though I’m living my life on autopilot. I go through the motions, but the real living is going on in my head. I guess the point is to make your life more real than the activity in your head. I guess that’s easier recognized than achieved.

I listen to the rain outside. Feel the cool damp air brush against my bare arms each time the door opens. Drink down the last of my now-cold coffee. I look around at all the Inman Square bohemians spending this rainy Monday afternoon in the little pink coffeehouse. I take note that this moment is more real than that tea tin in my chest.