smooth move

it’s my first night in the new place. all of the rooms are heavy with sagging boxes, crumpled bags and dirty furniture. this spot is as sweet as i’ve been remembering it, shiny with patinas of both old and new. i don’t yet know how i’ll turn this place into my place, but i trust that i’ll bear my weight into the creaking wood floor and carve out a little home for myself.

these two days of moving were awesome, and i’m grateful we made it safely. i haven’t done much in the apartment but set-up my bed, scrounge around for the clean sheets, and steal internet from the neighbors. i also took a shower and dried off with some clean clothes because i haven’t yet unpacked towels. but it’s hot as ass and i’m dripping with sweat, so drying off, it turns out, was not so necessary.

it’s been a smooth move, but how about this for a smooth move: a few great guys helped me move into my new place today. one of them left a gigantic turd in my toilet this morning and clogged it, so i just bought a plunger at CVS and walked around my new neighborhood with it in my hand, while i looked for some dinner. smooth that i didn’t ask for a bag to carry it in; what was i thinking!?

tangled up in blue

when i was twelve years old, i had the same nightmare over and over: that my mom was dead and my brothers and i were being raised by our father, who has really fat fingers. in the dream, i would bring my dad a hairbrush and ask him to brush my hair like mom and he would try, but his fingers would get tangled in the rubberband when he would braid it back. eventually, we would give up on the braid, and both begin to cry about mom being gone.

i’m in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—hometown of my dad and all my dad’s side of the family. it’s my first time here in a year and a half; my last visit marking the occasion of my cousin Beth’s funeral. the why and the how of her death is sad and complicated, but the fact of it has left an indelible mark on my life, and on many others’ lives. of course, the fact of her life is still in us too, which is why her death is so significant.

tonight, my grandmother and i drove to Beth’s house to have dinner with her husband Kerry and their two children, Seth and Hannah. i was afraid to talk about Beth, but nervous too, not to talk about her. the subject of death can halt our speech and muck up our good communication. driving over to their place, i was full of knots in my mouth about what i wished to say, but couldn’t say. i didn’t want to go.

but we arrived at their house, and immediately, there was much joy in being together. the children and i played jenga on the floor, ran around outside, played in the woods, took silly pictures of each other, ate chili for dinner and played more jenga: a regular night at Beth’s house, only without Beth. but she is alive in her children, and as my grandmother noted upon our leaving their house, “those kids are so alive.” there is no better way to describe what it was to be with them tonight; i felt so alive.

after dinner, Hannah brought me a hairbrush and asked me to braid her hair down her back. it seemed like her hair hadn’t been brushed since school was out. her hair is long and blonde and has a dry film on it—some familiar mixture of summer sweat and chlorine. while i brushed, she sat in front of me and told me i brushed her hair like her mom used to brush it, and that they celebrate her mom’s birthday every year and would i be able to celebrate her mom’s birthday with her sometime, and could i believe her mom would be 40 if she had been alive for her last birthday.

i was so caught up in the activity of this conversation, and in this child speaking so truthfully about her own dead mother, about things that aren’t easy—that i messed up the braid, and my fingers got caught in the rubber band at the base of her back. i took it out, and brushed it and began again—hoping that her sharing could continue all night, and praying that i could learn from this child how to be brave, how to untangle all the knots in my own mouth, how to speak the truth about life and death, how to love Beth still, how to be alive.

 

let the beauty you love be what you do *

on the rainiest afternoon of this spring, i was having cheap beers with Drew in a dingy lower east side bar, where he pulled out small scraps of paper from his wallet. we unfolded them together and he showed me his new year’s resolutions lists from the last several years. i loved reading them—these marks he’s made for himself, to himself—little drawings, really, that caught who he was the moment he wrote down the words.

a month later, packing up all my things in my apartment in New York, i found my own 2008 new year’s resolutions list. the final resolution is “blog,” to be read as a verb or a noun or both. it’s June, and i’ve only just begun it, but am enjoying the writing so much that i wonder what took me so long to get it started.

this got me thinking about how, three years ago, when i moved to New York from the Craft Center, i had no space to make paper or bind books, so i started to cook, and it satisfied my need to make something with my hands. when i finally got an art studio this year, i hated being in it so much that i taught myself how to play the guitar in my apartment and practiced harder than anything, just to avoid going into my studio. i’ve wanted to start a blog since January, but couldn’t get it going until now, almost definitely because in this month of tons of moving around, i can’t carry much with me but my laptop. and so i try to write. and once in a while, it satisfies the way making a mark on a page does, or making a list or roasting a chicken.

i guess the space around us gives a shape to the kind of art we make. it’s awesome that there are any number of ways we get to be creative, and i am just learning that, for me, what i do is not so important as that i do. it’s a good lesson to learn about myself, so that when i’m in a funky spot, i can remember there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.*

on the other hand, some people stick with one way of expression, regardless of what the space around them predicts. and i do envy them. when my parents were young and living in sin, in New York’s lower east side, they shared a very small studio apartment, dingy and cheap—one of those below-ground places, with only one window at street level. if they needed some space from one another, my dad would take his guitar into the bathroom, that doubled as his office, and sit on the toilet to write songs. my dad has so many songs in him, and i love this story for showing that who we are and the impulse to create is so strong that it seeps out all the time, no matter how the space around us pushes in on us or makes it hard.

so, for now it’s me and this blog. and my callouses are getting soft. but who knows what Boston will bring?

*paraphrased quote from a poem by Rumi: “let the beauty you love, be what you do. there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

slouching towards bethlehem

when i was very young, our family took flashlights down to the beach on a full moon night to watch sea turtles lay their eggs in the sand. that part was magic, but not as memorable as a morning several weeks later, when mom and i went down to the beach to see the hatched baby turtles crawling towards the ocean. they were small and dark and everywhere, slowly inching towards the wash of the tide. but seagulls hovered over the sand and dove down to grab the newborn turtles with their beaks. i could not understand it; these were babies, and they’d only just been born!

i asked mom if we could pick up the babies and take them to the water to protect them from the birds, and she told me no, because the long walk to the ocean was an important exercise in building strength for the turtles, and that if we did that work for them, they wouldn’t be strong enough to swim in the ocean on their own. so, we watched the seagulls eat multiple breakfasts and nature do its complex dance of survival, which almost always includes death. it wasn’t easy to watch, and it wasn’t easy to understand, but each turtle had to go it alone.

i’ve been calling my mom all the time lately. i don’t know why i call—maybe hoping she will fill in the gaps between points A and B. in all the inching from one choice to the next, i’m not certain i’ll know enough about how to do the next thing. but somehow Mom reassures me that i will, a little like baby turtles know something about digging themselves out of sand, about salt, about rising waters and about working hard for their lives.

we have to go it alone, and yet, we are never alone. i’m making my plans to move to Boston, and i don’t know how i’m going to get from point A to point B, or who will be there to help me. i feel like something from high in the air could swoop down and topple me, and so, i call Mom. and she doesn’t pick me up and carry me, but reassures me that i’ll only learn how to take a step, by stepping.

you can sell your paintings on the sidewalk by a cafe where i hope to be working soon

i drove to boston two nights ago to look at apartments yesterday. my morning-into-afternoon filled up quickly with phone calls to brokers, contacts from craigslist, three stops at the same coffee shop to use their wi-fi, rental agents who drive like shit, racist euphemisms about boston neighborhoods, a lot of U-turns, google map printouts, messy handwritten notes on the backs of the google map printouts about square feet and monthly utilities and a flock of wild geese. 

(the wild geese thing was amazing: i stopped at a red light after making a U-turn, waiting to turn left, and out into the busy four-lane stepped a mama goose, with two dozen goslings marching right behind her. we stayed stopped at the stoplight through two green arrows, so all the kids could waddle across.)

so the day was filled with this kind of stuff, plus a brand new friend i met in the morning who invited me over to her house for tea in the afternoon. and i had to explain a dozen times to different folks that i don’t yet have a job, because i don’t.

but i do have a lease on a third-floor apartment in Jamaica Plain! it’s beautiful and old and owned by a curmudgeon who’s lived on the first floor of this house for 56 years. i knew i wanted the apartment the moment i walked into it, even before seeing all the rooms. JP feels like a real neighborhood, with community centers and murals and a crime watch and corner stores and a charter school and tons of churches. grass grows in the sidewalk cracks and the houses are kind of rickety. nothing’s polished, but nothing’s broken, and i loved it. my street is in close proximity to reliable public transportation, a laundromat, a food co-op and lots of bars, restaurants and bodegas.

i’m psyched for you to come visit me, as i’ll have plenty of space!

and here are a couple pictures of the building:

 

dollar by dollar

i arrived in new york this afternoon in my car. the whole trip north went smoothly until i got to the george washington bridge and had to pay eight bucks to cross it. i’d spent all of my dollars paying tolls on the new jersey turnpike, and my wallet was empty of cash. i knew i didn’t have it, but pulled out a bag of change from my backseat, to try find it anyway. the woman in the booth asked me to hand her one dollar at a time, so paying the toll took a while. the people in the cars behind me hated me and my slowness, and they let me know it with their horns and their shouting. welcome home, i guess.

unbelievably, i had eight dollars in silver coins to fork over for the toll. i drove on through, crossed the bridge and parked my car by my old apartment. i walked over to riverside park, which is where i’ve taken hundreds of walks with so many different people. it’s not my favorite park in the city, just the one that has caught so many of my memories out of convenience and proximity. and today, it was just shining with those memories. as i walked the length of the park, i clinked some leftover change in my pocket with my hand and thought about past, present and future and about finding all those dollars in my car.

i called my mom after my walk, who i’ve loved talking with lately. she is bright and funny and alive with wisdom and small stories. we’ve been laughing so much and she is just all aglow with something special these days. anyone could see it in the way she moves and smiles with her whole body. on the phone with her, i ran through all that makes me anxious about the coming weeks and how i didn’t know how to do it. she said to me, as she often says, “bird by bird, babe.” it was a good reminder to take things one day at a time.

many of us don’t know we actually have the very things we think we don’t have. nor do we know we have the gift of time to do the finding. bird by bird or dollar by dollar, we are given a lifetime to discover that what we need is in us already. one dollar at a time, a small fist to open and close and a willingness to reach my arm way out the window is not such a bad way to make my way across any bridge. even though the voices and horns will buck me from behind as i do the counting, i’ll do it anyway.

i’ve got some real estate here in my bag

about three and a half months ago, i found a job for the summer-into-fall, working on a small, organic CSA farm in Harris, Minnesota, just north of the twin cities. the farm sounded ideal—it’s run by two women, one of them a UCC minister and the other a guitar teacher and songwriter. they grow food, raise animals, bake bread, spin wool, teach classes. believing i’d be a good fit at their farm, they offered me a spot on their team. i accepted the job and loved tucking an answer in my pocket to the often-asked question, “what will you do after you graduate?” i’ve been a compulsive consumer of quick answers my whole life, and know how well an answer can cover up any amount of loneliness, worry, dread or anxiety.

i won’t wind through all the nitty gritty of what has happened in my life since i made those plans in early March, but it generally includes giving a messy labor to a thesis project that took most of me to birth, meeting a guy i like a lot, graduating from seminary, and falling into a deeper love with my godson Sam. what has changed and is changing is only still being revealed to me, but the changes are significant. for the first time in a long time, who i’m with seems more important than what i’m doing. i’m getting softer and more generous with myself, more willing to be in all the questions and not have all the answers.

so, no farm in minnesota. not now, anyway. i’m moving to Boston at the end of this month. it’s a vulnerable move because i’m moving there for relationships. i don’t have a job and i don’t have an apartment, and i don’t have much knowledge of the city at all. who knows where my story will take me, what it will ask of me, or how long it will keep getting written? but i’m feeling glad to love people so much. and i’m packing up my old car with all the question marks; i think they’ll keep me good company on my trip north. and maybe answers would make for a safer journey, but they’d stop this long conversation i’m having in my heart. and i’m just not ready for it to be over.

scrabulous

about a month ago, i played some old-school scrabble with Drew at my kitchen table. it was late, and we were on a scrabble date, taking breaks to walk downstairs, change and fold our laundry. i’d been talking big about my scrabble game, and warning him that i’m pretty good at it, but also that i’m a sore loser. he too claimed to be good, and so we set a match for this particular night.

as we were loading our laundry into the machines pre-game, he asked me how i play scrabble. i was quick to tell him i play by the rules, which means if he lays down a word, and i don’t think it’s a word, i can challenge it. if it’s not a word, he takes his tiles back and loses his turn. and vice versa for me. i don’t really think of this as hard core, just the way a person plays the game.

we started our game, armed with a thick official scrabble player’s dictionary (OSPD) on the kitchen table. early into the game, i wanted to play the word ZEN, but didn’t know whether or not the OSPD would recognize it as a valid word, as it had the potential for being a proper noun or adjective. uncharacteristically, i asked Drew if he would challenge the word ZEN. he shrugged his shoulders, smiled and casually suggested i just play it, and that we’d look it up, and if it’s not a valid word, then i could take my tiles and make a new one. so i slowly made the simple word, we looked it up, and it was not legal, so i pulled my tiles back and made another play. no big deal.

a little later Drew was knee-deep in vowels and had all his tiles letterside-up on the table, where i could see them. together, we found a good play for the vowels, and he made it. we moved along like that for the rest of the night, taking breaks to fold laundry, to make more tea and to help each other. a really good date with a really good guy.

it was not playing by the rules; it was not playing as i ever play. but the scrappiest rules can change, relationships can change and thankfully, we can change. i’m scrappy and slow to learn this, but a small, soft side of me says it’s the most important win.