Patches of Sunlight

I grow up in bursts.( I might not have any hard evidence to substantiate that claim, but it really feels true so I’m just gonna go with it and see how it feels by the end of this post.) I don’t mean that my body grows in bursts (insert fat joke here); rather my sense of self as a grown up and my capacity for life’s toll.

If ever there was a time of burst, now is that time.

I can chart them, the ups and downs that make up the heartbeat of my life. Justice’s birth. Whooping cough. This move, that move and then the other move. Dating. Housesitting. My life pulses with times of growth and stretching. They are usually not the most comfortable of times, days and hours stretched to breaking, my mind racing with all that had to be accomplished, so full I felt top-heavy.

If ever there was a time of top-heavy, brain-hurty, heartbeat up and down, now is that time.

There is simply too much life in this little old life of mine. Only this time, it’s all good stuff.

A wedding, family in town, Jonthan’s new job, Jonathan’s other new job, Mother’s Day, house closing, cleaning, packing, moving, buying appliances, extra trainings at work, a new term with its Saturday workday and 12-hour Monday, a day trip to St. Louis, more cleaning, packing, moving. And of course all the regular of meal planning, food prep and prep cleanup with a fairly particular diet and an increasingly particular stomach. Trying to keep track of it all makes my head blow up like a balloon. Always I feel the bursting point and always it stretches ever so much more.

It will all end soon. Life will ebb back down to the daily grind and I’ll keep on trucking, but May will loom large in my rearview, one of those months that casts shadows on the landscape of my past. I grew up some more in the month of May, 2013. I didn’t always handle that well, but it’s good to remember those months that stretch you until you feel sure your entire body is going to thrum like a rubber band. Then it’s past and you look around and realize you’re still absolutely fine.

I keep saying it hasn’t landed yet. We signed a bunch of papers and it didn’t land. Someone pushed a key across the table at us and it still didn’t land. There’s part of me that honestly wonders if it ever will.

I imagine waking up in a new place, stumbling across the carpet, wondering who put all our stuff in boxes. I imagine walking out to kitchen, trying to remember where I put all our plates and knives and spices. There will be our furniture and our cats, but it will still be someone else’s home. We’ll just be living there for some peculiar reason and paying all the bills.

Then Jonathan and I sat on the floor in the basement, me leaning against him, him leaning against the wall. Our wall. In our basement.

In our house.

And it landed just a bit.

Then a swarm of people descended and cleaned every last trace of the prior inhabitants, cleansing their scent from the house so our unique scent, the welcoming aroma that says “Home” to me could fill the place. It smelled like clean and a fresh start.

My books are lining the shelves in the closet, waiting for their usual home to arrive this Saturday. There’s a couch in the living room. Four out of six appliances are parked in their spots, three of them even hooked up. And bit by bit it becomes real.

We can’t do anything halfway. Our home changed shape with Brother Jonathan’s wedding so we just kept on changing it into another house. It will be ours, a place to raise our children, to teach them to rappel off the deck safely and how to race the garage door. It will be ours to open up in hospitality. That house will actually and really be ours.

You know what?

It already is ours.

I think that just landed.

I love movie trailers. The way all of the rules of cinematography, music, scene cuts and slogans come together in such a condensed format fascinates me. There are the movie trailers which capture the emotional essence of the movie without giving any plot points away (Man on Fire) and then those that seem to do a far superior job at portraying the emotional essence than the movie itself (A Man Apart). When I find a trailer I like I’m often tempted to watch it over and over again, a much shorter prospect than watching its movie over and over again and I still get to enjoy the story. I don’t remember the first time I saw the trailer for Silver Linings Playbook, but as soon as it faded to black I knew I wanted to see this movie. Then I did (totally worth it. A beautiful story about two broken, socially awkward people which doesn’t pretend to fix everything in the end) and I knew that I had to read Hemingway.

He’s been on my list. Years ago I read The Old Man and the Sea, hated it, didn’t understand it and hated it some more. To my mind that doesn’t really count so I made A Farewell to Arms book #9 . I got to the end and was only stopped by pitching it out a window by the fact that it was an ebook on my work phone.

Ernest Hemingway is the most matter-of-fact author I’ve ever read. His narrator states events without making any comment about them. I suppose the book is a love story seeing as the central theme is a relationship between Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley, but they simply appear to happen and then keep happening because neither of them is making any decisions about it. Even when Henry is separated from the retreating army, traveling cross-country with a dwindling group of ambulance drivers, trying to get back to his Catherine, he speaks of it as if it’s simply the next thing to do.

This is not my favorite writing style to read. I found the clipped, terse sentences, the blunt descriptions and the complete lack of a narrator’s inner life frustrating. And yet, I cannot deny that Hemingway’s style was most effective. There is a bleakness that saturates every event, every night, every morning. Even at the most tender moments between Henry and Catherine, the war sits outside the door. They know it, they feel it with every breath and in their attempt to ignore it we are left with the impression of two people only half there. The parts of them that cares about anything beyond themselves, that plans for tomorrow has been neatly shut up and hidden away.

At the almost end they’re happy, away from the war and its gray, bleak sorrow. Then some more stuff happens. Then the book runs into a brick wall and simply stops. And I was mad.

I don’t see myself ever becoming much of a Hemingway fan. I can appreciate his skill, his artistry, but his world is so dark. The clouds hang low all over without so much as a hint of a sun behind them.  I am glad, though, I read one of his books when it counted and could make an educated decision about it. And I’m really glad I didn’t pitch my phone out a window.

I’ve always felt that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (book #8) simply happened to the world. It wasn’t written in the conventional sense of the author having a plan or a purpose or any such normalness. If Douglas Adams had told us that he had found the manuscript congealing under a rock his garden I would have nodded sagely for that would have explained it all quite nicely. No doubt it was quite the attractive rock.

Turns out, from reading the introduction to the Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide, this was pretty close to how it happened.

I took the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy with me to California with the intent of reading the entire thing front to back. Growing up, my mom insisted that book 4, but more so 5 was the work of a sad, cynical man who wanted everyone to die. She claimed that book 5, Mostly Harmless, should never have been and then went on to ensure as much as possible that it did not exist in her world. And may I say that the fact of my mother having such a strong opinion about the writings of Douglas Adams is one of the reasons she was the coolest mom ever.

All of this to say I’d only read Mostly Harmless once and had understood not a single word of it. There was alternate time and a weird bird Guide and Arthur was happy- it was all very disconcerting. Obviously the only thing to do in the face of such ignorance was to read the bloody thing and be done with it. I’ve been over and over book 1 of The Hitchhiker’s Guide, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, even heard it read by the author, so I skipped straight to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

It was delightful. All bright colors and vivid imagery that swooped and twirled where you least expected it to. If it had simply happened as the author mostly claimed then it must have happened at a good time of the day when everyone in the vicinity was feeling quite chipper. Then came Life, the Universe and Everything which, when read so closely on the heels of its brother, was quite clearly written. The prose didn’t swoop; it walked along the ground only to pounce at you from behind bushes wearing dark glasses. So Long and Thanks for All the Fish does quite the same only with far more flying. And then… it was time.

Mostly Harmless felt like it had been written when Douglas Adams was suffering a particularly savage head cold, in the middle of winter, when he’d been awake for 36 hours straight and was in the middle of a depressed bender. In the rain. The prose creeps in the wake of the plot, a fierce, grumbling servant who clearly wants his master dead and humiliated and then dead again. I think the saddest part was getting to the end and realizing that I’d hated the book. I don’t dislike books Douglas Adams has written. I even enjoyed his book about endangered animals and I don’t give a fetid dingo’s kidney for endangered animals- Douglas Adams was just that clever. He’s witty and plays with words much like P.G. Wodehouse and I love him. Only now I hate him just a bit for having broken this piece of my world.

So I have decided to take my mother’s view of the matter. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a fantastic trilogy that brings delight to readers everywhere.

All four books of it.

It was like watching a punch happen in slow motion- it was coming from a million miles away and you knew it would hurt when it hit, you knew that it wouldn’t end well and yet you’re still glued to the floor, unable to move or even look away.

I knew the ending of Of Mice and Men (book #7) when I picked it up. I knew the ending when I decided it would be my pick for the April chapter of the book club. And I picked it anyway. And I read it anyway. And I hated when the ending came anyway.

The heartbreak of the ending washed over me like old news that still stings when it hits. It was the theme of loneliness, though, that really stuck and made me pay attention. George would be better off without Lenny. He might be able to settle down, to own something for his own. Everyone around them agrees it would be the smart thing to do. And at the same time there’s this low level of jealousy because, for all the grief he causes, Lenny is still someone to talk to.

There’s not a character in the book who has what he wants and that wanting drives most of them apart. Curly’s wife isn’t living the life she’d imagined so she flirts. Curly doesn’t know what to do about this so he’s aggressive, belligerent, a short man with a big head. The other migrant workers are all making do, the little company they might have, such as Candy’s old dog, can be taken away at a moment’s notice. Nobody in this world is thriving.

Enter two men with a dream. John Steinbeck showed his hand back on the title page so we know they aren’t going to get their dream.  But simply the having of such a dream sets them apart from the rest of the farmhands. The other farmhands are subsistence farmers of their futures- they have enough to get by, enough community, enough hopes, enough plans for the future, but no more than what will see them through this week. It was the dream that set George and Lenny apart, that bonded them closer than any of the others. Such a beautiful dream that was simply not meant to be.

I’m glad to have read Of Mice and Men. I don’t plan to be reading it again anytime soon.

But little Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

-Robert Burns

“To a Mouse”

As a blossoming writer I read a lot of blogs. I read blogs about chasing your dream like a sane person, blogs about writing, about having a voice in this crazy world. At times they all say essentially the same thing. “Stop waiting for people to pick you, to define who you are and what you can contribute. Pick yourself. Then do your thing.” This has always made sense to me in my creative world. No one ever told me I was or could be a writer. I just felt a story inside, wrote it, decided it was crap and that I could do better. So this advice has always rolled off my shields of “I already knew that.” I hadn’t counted on the wide range of experiences this idea applies to.

Last week I was at a conference with people who have been in their careers for, at times, longer than I’ve been alive. They know the higher education world inside and out. Someone said from the podium that a person without some sort of higher education was relegating themselves to a minimum wage economic standard. Someone else encouraged us to think back to our own college years. And I chuckled to myself as I felt the outsider.

Only I’m not. I’ve found myself carrying on intelligent conversations with people who work for schools with 22,000 students in all 50 states, plus D.C. And we were connecting like equals. I knew what he was talking about, could follow the important pitfalls between regulations for private non-profit and private for profit schools. I listened to a Congressman expound on the faulty metrics legislators use to make regulatory decisions and I followed every word. I nodded at the right times and even caught all the jokes.

It made me realize that I need to start picking myself for my job. I already got picked by my boss and the president of the college when I got the job. Really, it’s hard to get picked more than getting hired when you aren’t technically qualified for the position. Only now I keep waiting around for someone to keep telling me that I can do this job. Every step of the way I startle myself with how capable I feel, how much value I feel like I add to my college.

It’s time to stop. Stop being startled. Stop waiting for other people to affirm me and assure me I can do my job. It’s time to just go ahead and do it already. It’s not rocket science. It’s just a lot of saying “Yeah, I can do that.” And then doing it.

Rinse.

Repeat.

(I went to California last week for a conference. There was a lot that happened in the week, but I think this is my favorite thought that came out of the experience.)

There are times when I’m sitting in a large metal monstrosity that is preparing to catapult itself 30,000 feet into the air that I honestly wonder who thought that this would be a good idea. The engines spin up, their noise and violent shaking filling the passenger area where we all sit and pretend not to be terrified of what technology hath wrought. The plane creeps forward, slowly picking up speed until you are barreling down the airstrip at speeds great enough to defy  all the God-given rights of physics and gravity. The plane hops, once, and you are air born, hanging precariously above the ground that so desperately wants you back. If everything goes according to plan, you end up so high above the clouds that entire planes can join you above the clouds and still look like miniature versions of a piece of a model airplane that a child might accidentally swallow. And up there you stay, free to move around if the captain has turned off the seatbelt sign, until you arrive over your destination and begin the controlled plummet we call “landing”. It’s madness and here we all are, just supporting the delusion.

Other than that, flying’s a lot of fun.

It’s been months now, chasing, always chasing that pillar of fire. We were sure it had landed, had hung our dreams on an address and settled in to wait. Around each bend of the winding road we heard a quiet voice ask, “Do you trust me now?” And we said yes, of course.

Then came a Friday when Jonathan came home from his last day at work. With no warning he’d been let go and we were left reeling. And the voice whispered, “How about now?” I grasped for a certain yes, but always ended up feeling like we’d been chasing the wrong pillar. We’d been wrong somehow, heard wrong or simply wanted too much. The quiet voice got quieter and we floundered.

The possibilities multiplied, fracturing and spreading across the landscape until it became impossible to see the horizon. We sat to listen for the voice, but had misplaced our silence. We strained, using all our muscles to see the pillar, to hear the words and still the voice repeated, quiet as a sigh, “Now?”

We prayed. We talked for hours. We dug down to the base of the want and found something that startled us. It seemed worth sacrificing for, only we didn’t even know if that would be an option. The horizon was black with possibilities that had dried up and withered away; we were nearly out of time.

And, just like I’d thought back at the beginning, just like we’d hoped, in the eleventh hour, on the final day we had to still make a choice, the voice came booming back. The pillar caught fire once more and hung in the air, scattering all the blackened possibilities and debris of fret. And we saw. And we heard the voice, loud now as thunder, ask us yet again, “Do you trust me now?”

Anyway, long story short, Jonathan got a job at a company he’s wanted to work at and we are closing on our house in ten days!

I just finished watching The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I’d read the book some months ago and it was breathtaking, simply breathtaking. All I can say about the movie is that it saddens me that it took me so long to track it down and make it happen.

There was this line. I’m not going to get it completely right, but it was this heartbreaking lament. “How can you not see it? Everybody is in so much pain.” Oh my, how that resonated. Life often feels like a swirling maelstrom of pain; yours to be sure, but all too often it’s merely the cloud of tiny hurts that etch the ones we love to the bone. What I loved, though, what moved me down in my soul, was the wildness and inclusiveness of friendship.

Sam and Patrick are step-siblings with a tight bond of mutual love and friendship and respect. They were crazy about each other in a way that reminded me of my siblings and I, reminds me in a way of my Jonathan and I. And yet there was space in their relationship to welcome in a lonely freshman. His presence didn’t diminish the joy they had in each other; now their joy was tripled with another person joining them on the Island of Misfit Toys.

I want my relationships to look like that. I’m not sure how that works within a marriage, because there is a very real sense that this relationship is exclusive and you weren’t invited, but otherwise. I want to have friendships like that and I want to offer friendships like that. I want to offer friendship to the lonely, have established friendships that we can welcome more and more people into. I want to live that love that is so strong it creates a gravity field, just pulling people in.

Charlie makes me sad that I’m so bad at presents. When I receive a gift that connects to a piece of who I am, I feel incredibly known. I feel understood in an intimate way. It’s a feeling I want to give to others, but I’m terribly bad at giving presents. I just blank or I get too esoteric and the meaning is lost in the pure confusion of “what?” and “why?” But Charlie, he understood people. He saw through who they said they were and gave them gifts for that person hiding inside the façade. It’s beautiful.

That’s my word for the movie. Beautiful. It was lovingly filmed, acted with great conviction and sensitivity, and the soundtrack somehow wrapped up each scene, pulling together the disparate parts and making a piece of art, all without drawing attention to itself.  It was a story about seeing other people, truly noticing them in a way that affirms who they’ve always wanted to be. I will finish this blog post and then wander around the house, looking for someone to hug, someone to love. All the best stories have that effect on me. And this, for sure, is one of the best.

There are some books that are like warm blankets and cups of tea. They just welcome you in like old friends, your mind fitting into the comfortable twists and turns of the plot, the hills and valleys of language like children playing house with a nest of blankets. There are other books that make me wish I could have selective brain surgery just so I could experience them again for the first time.

Book #6 (of 23 for those keeping track) was Anansi’s Boys by Neil Gaiman. Oh, what a beautiful book.

It’s quirky and offbeat with a very deep heart that reaches through the pages and into my soul. Only, not in a creepy way. That characters are so real I expect to meet them on the street if I were to ever be passing through London and the story a mix of ancient folklore and the troubling, naggy pain of losing a parent suddenly. I had a much better relationship with my mom than Fat Charlie had with his dad, but she wasn’t an ancient African trickster god so I guess it all works out.

I found myself waiting for moments, anticipating the rise and fall of action, the moments of decision. And the bit with the lime. Oh my, I love the bit with the lime.

There are times when you need to be challenged by a book. You need to confront new truths and hear a new voice speaking into your world. And then there are times you just need an old friend. When I grow up and become an author, I hope to write an old friend like Anansi’s Boys.