when change becomes change

Fourth night of Hanukkah.

It's late when I get home from work. The apartment smells like latkes - grease and potatoes and onions. Talking plastic telephones and magnetic drawing boards and scattered Polly Pocket pieces on the floor. Dishes piled in the sink, across the counter. Leftover latke batter covered in black film in a bowl. Scott stretched beneath a down comforter so thick I don't know if he is there. When I lift the corner to check, he jumps, a startled jack-in-the-box.

"Sorry, I'm sorry." I say stepping back. "I didn't know if you were buried under there, or if you fell asleep cuddling one of the girls."

He rubs his face in his hands. Lays his head back down.

I'm picking up wrapping paper and packaging from the floor. Wiping the table. I'm not annoyed in the way I once would have been that he ate dinner with us before watching the girls and didn't even do his own dish. I just want him to go home, now, so I can clean-up this mess, take a bath and write.

He's tired. I get it, after all he's worked for three whole days in two months. Must be exhuasting.

New baby sitting rule: find another babysitter.

He sits up, rubbing his eyes, his face. Sage comforter still covering everything to his goatee. Asks me if I'm mad at him? Tells me about the job offer he got tonight - an IT position working with kids at a Catholic high school.

"Congratulations. I'm happy for you. Did you accept?" Stop circling and collecting, turn to face him, hands full of balled-up Hanukkah wrap.

He's been wanting to get into education, talking about getting a teaching certificate for years. Flip-flopping between that and law school. Still, it's funny, the universe showing off its wicked sense of humor. Scott spent his sophomore year setting a detention/suspension record at his Catholic school. He was a soccer player, recruited to it's state champion team, a notch above expulsion. They just kept letting him clean blackboards after school.

"I didn't do anything really bad," he says of that year, and well, all of his adolescence. "I just didn't do what they wanted. I did what I wanted. They said I had to wear a tie, so I wore it backwards. They didn't say how I had to wear it. That kind of stuff."

Hmmm.

"Remember that psychic I interviewed last Spring?" I ask, lowering myself into the glider so my hands are underneath me. "Remember what she told me?" I remember. Actually, I never forgot. I've been watching for this.

"Rob?" He's smiling now. Comforter around him on the couch and me across the room sitting cross-legged on the glider.

~~~~

It's May. I'm sitting with a clairvoyant who works high profile crime cases, a woman named tops in the Best of Portland poll last year. I'm gathering info to do a short profile for the paper. There's a low wood table between us, and Southwest prints on the wall behind her. Her kids' pictures on the shelves. Comfortable. My recorder's on the table, running.

She says she won't read me if I'm uncomfortable with it, and I consent despite squirming uneasiness. Free reading, right? I don't want to be read, though it's not the idea of someone else seeing into me, it's the horror of having to look myself. Besides, I have clear view down this path path. No narration for me, thanks. Not ready to put words to it. Especially if there coming from someone else's mouth. All I need is a head's-up if sees me falling from the sky in a freak skydiving accident tomorrow. If the parachute isn't going to open, this is information I want.

She reveals little about me, probably reading that I don't want to know. Asks who Robert is in my life. No Roberts, Robs or Bobs, I can think of.

"My stroller is named B.O.B. Bob Stroller."

She's puzzled, sees the name Robert all around me. Mostly she talks about Scott, reads him. Dead on. He's painfully sensitive, acutely intuitive but he keeps it all sealed off because it's too much for him. Absolutely.

"He hasn't figured out who he is yet," Shifts in her chair to stand. "You already know who you are. You know yourself."

I want to ask if he's going to figure it out. Ever. Is there a time frame? I just listen.

"Something good is coming up for him in the fall. A career opportunity. Maybe in education? He should teach, he's a natural teacher. If he went to law school, he'd be doing it for someone else, not for himself. He'll be happier as a teacher. I'd say, keep your eyes open for something happening in the late fall. October or November."

I think: 'We won't be together in November.' See, I can read me all by myself.

Scott laughs when I tell him, thinks it's all a bunch of crap.

~~~~~

"Okay, I still don't know who Robert is. I'll give you that," I can feel the chair pressing a courderoy tattoo into my hands. "Remember what she said about you? About a good career opportunity coming your way in the fall? Education, she said."

"It's not fall anymore," he gloats, smiles.

"It is fall. It's fall for 12 more hours, you can't get much later in the fall than that," I'm laughing. "And, geez, give the poor woman a break. Even if she was off by a month, she pegged it without even meeting you. Not even a picture of you."

Quiet surrounds the laughs. Laughing together. Then silence. Awkwardness.

He stands to leave, lingering. Building up to more words, but I just keep sitting weighed to the chair by confusion. It's the softness in his eyes, an open that lets me see right into his core. It's the tears, rolling over dark circles, a drop at first, then steady running.

It's what I've always seen. Frailty protected. What everyone, everyone else misses knocking into his walls. I see it though, right through the tiniest crack, and I know who's holed-up in that fortress.

Confusion. Confusion.

Maybe it's just the fear of what is real, but I can't stand. If I stand, I will hug him, hold him, hold on to him. With every step I take to disentangle this thing, the gravity of us grips tighter.

I can't stand. I sit in the chair, looking at the futon behind him. If I stand now, I will flatten it into a bed and lay him down on it. Maybe, it's fear. Maybe it's just been too long - July - since I've had sex. Maybe, it's just .... Whatever. I want to be with him right now, an urgency as strong as any I have ever had to leave. As true as anything I've ever felt.

I sit still. The couch behind him.

"This is so hard. And, despite everything I like myself better now than I ever have,"
he says. "I feel horrible and I feel so good. I've changed. I wish you could allow yourself to see that."

Despite everything? No, because of everything. It's because of everything, can't you see that?

There are changes I don't see, I trust what he's saying. Believe he feels something so profound that it's baffling others don't see it too. I believe the truth of his feelings.

And, yet.

He's tells me he loves me. Tells me again how he's changed, just one more chance to prove it.

My favorite professor used to say my characters pissed her off. "They have these have these great cathartic moments, these epiphanies, then they wallow around for pages refusing to change."

"All literature is about the moment of change," she liked to say. "Every story is the story of a change."

The thing is, outward change doesn't come in the moment of realization, it drifts out in the ether - morning fog lacing though the hills, dissipating slowly into blue. There is the realization, the getting there, and finally a moment, long after the spark of revelation, when change becomes change.

The plates in me slid for years, three-years, before anyone recognized.

"I believe in what you feel," I tell him, standing. "The thing is, nothing can be different unless I can see it, too. And, it's not just you. It was us. The two of us not being kind to each other. I hate how I treated you. I hate who I was, that I could hurt you so much. That I still do."

When he leaves, I lower the futon, add sheets, down comforter, and pillows, and climb in alone. Comfortable with confusion. Secure in the truth of uncertainty, and the rising clarity of my voice. Three octaves higher.

Everything is concrete for him.

Intuitive for me.

He needs more than the honesty of my confusion. Yes or no? When? How long? There are no answers, just the time stretching out between here and the place where change becomes change.

For now, honest confusion is the only real thing I can offer.

re-defining resolution

The trick-thing about about making resolutions is they're just too narrowly defined. All about "I'm going to do this. I'm not going to do that." No point in the follow-through impaired starting each new year with a blue print for failure. How masochistic is that?

Year after year, I have steadfastly refused.

The 20s were a winking satisfaction with hedonism, happily skipping down the path to self enihilation and stopping to smell the ashes. College housemates drew-up maps for self-growth and started jogging, I loaded a tube and wondered why anyone would want to make changes that require running. Mystified. The early-30s were defeat, so why bother making promises I would keep for a week? The mid-30s were hopeless desire - the path overgrown, obscured under thickets of witch's broom that left long stinging cuts up my arms, across my back, as I belly-crawled through it. Now, late-30s, slathering salve on the wounds, I'm re-defining resolution.

Success isn't about following the formula, it's about reformulating to make things work.

So, this year, my first resolution:

"I can ..."

Simple, versatile, fluid.

perfect.

...about the purse

My stripey little bag had another solo adventure this week. It's time my intrepid belongings start a blog of their own and stop hogging space here.

Last I remember is holding it between my teeth, one hand locking the car and the opposite arm craddling a bag of clothes and toys collected from the back seat.

Hours later I'm checking all the obvious places: freezer, linen closet, tv armoire. It's not on the hook in my closet or beside the chair at my computer. I'm a tornado of cleaning and orgainizing, spinning as if creating post-separation order will put it back on the hook. I look and I look and it's not there. Not in the freezer. Not under the couch.

Amelia watches in wonder as I sweep and sort and dig through dirty laundry. Now more entertained by the search than her third night of Hanukkah art supplies.

"OooHHHH," the long, pained sigh as I stand staring at her. Stumped.

"Mommy, you are fucked about the purse!"

Bite lips togther. Do not laugh. Do not react. Do not call any atention to her perfect word choice.

"I'm frustrated about my purse," I say, hoping she let's it go at that.

Apparently my purse isn't the only thing I need to keep closer tabs on.

"Just frustrated? That's not as bad as fucked, right?"

ripples

Everything I know about Mary Gordon fits into a single paragraph. Maiden name? Left a small village near Ukraine, somewhere outside St. Petersburg when the Jews were swept from Russia. Settled a couple hours from Pittsburgh. Mt. Pleasant, Penn. How do Russian Jews end up in Appalachia? Her older sister was planning a wedding and when the fiance backed out, Mary wrote an appeal so stunning he did marry her sister. (I hear it was a crappy marriage) When he showed his best friend the letter, my great-grandfather became crazed to meet the writer. Meshuganah Mary, Crazy Mary. Don't know what my great-grandmother said, or if there was really a letter. If that record of family history ever existed, she probably burned in the bon fire of her journals and poems. Her husband was 10-years-younger, a closely kept secret. She had three girls and a boy and taught her self English reading the dictionary; but wrote and wrote wrote in Russian. Every word of it up in flames.

~ ~ ~ ~

Eight months pregnant with Amelia even water gives me heartburn. Her head is shoved way up into my left side, knocking against the little ribs, squishing my stomach to nothing. At 37 weeks, it takes several rounds of moxibustion - heating the pressure points on my pinky toes - to flip her, At 42 weeks it takes acupuncture and two Castor Oil-Root Beer floats to drive her out. The pre-natal prologue to every school morning. She comes in whole, exactly who s he is. For weeks while I wait, I chew Tums and Papaya Eczyms as the rest of the world sleeps. Wait for the 4 a.m. East Coast news feed

"From Moscow, CTV Bureau Chief Ellen Pinchuk." Stop surfing, caught on the name, Ellen Pinchuk. Ellen Pinchuk? My cousin Ellen? Has to be. Don't know her well. She's a third cousin from L.A. who I met every few years when her family visited Youngstown. Our grandmothers were sisters, Mary Gordon's two oldest girls.

I watch a web broadcast of Ellen in Baghdad, an American Jewish Woman covering the war. I see her sign off from Siberia, Moscow, Afghanistan, Jerusalem - and then this. There's my cousin sitting with Vladimir Putin in the Presidential Palace - one of them anyway - for an exclusive before the G8. What you don't see is her chatting with him in Russian about just stuff.

Not a fan of the man. But, if we are truly affecting seven generations in both directions while we are here, I'm thinking the great granddaughter of a peasant who was booted from the country sitting down with the President in his palace a century later???

Got to be sending some crazy ripples up and down our lines.

10 miles up

Saturday morning. Snuggled in flannel sheets, so cozy lying beneath the windows calling old friends. Michelle and I go back forever; all the way back to the tops of the apple trees that covered our neighborhood, all the way back to as far as I go with anyone. Eight, nine-years-old maybe.

She’s pouring hot chocolates all around, already back from sledding the snowy Vermont hills out her door, I’m still in bed noticing how warm it is even without the heater running

It’s a funny, funny ball, this Earth we’re spinning around on. The bigger the circles the tighter the weave; colors on colors through colors wrapping one around another into one around another into one. This place where every time, every place, every thing is every other. Heading west on the St. Johns Bridge to Forest Park is crossing the Ohio River into West Virginia straight on through Wheeling on to Pittsburgh.

We’re different creatures, my old friend and I. She always with a plan, a goal, as I stumble through ordered chaos, tossing years of work onto the pyre and mastering 11th hour successes. Her words say one thing – sledding was fun, the girls are doing well, work is good and on and on but her voice tells the truth. Too even, metered laughs.

“I know you can’t really talk right now, but how are things really?” I ask, after we’ve exhausted the ups and downs of my life, the family updates – her dad’s retiring, sister is pregnant.

“Not good.” All the evenness drains from her voice. “Not good.”

Funny, funny how this Earth spun us right back together just as our divergent paths became the same worn trail. Was it ‘93 last time we met? Chicago and ice-skating downtown and drinking vodka until dawn to the Blues.

Years pass. Moves. Weddings. Children. Things go as they go as they go. We talk less and less. The yearly holiday card, baby gifts, a call for this occasion or that. The circle pulls apart, then snap! right back together it comes.

Old and new – the people we need arrive in our lives just when we need them and they us. The universe is kind that way. Funny how it happens. Her husband has business in Portland. We’ve never met, but it’s natural that he hangs with Scott and me when he’s here, two times a year or three. They connect and suddenly our husbands talk more than we do, every few weeks.

So clueless, our men.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It’s August, a few days after I told Scott I’m leaving, Michelle calls, Scott asked Brian to ask her to call me because they have problems too; and what is it that they’re thinking, these men?

What exactly do they think happens when two women, lifelong friends, start talking?

“Oh, sweetie. I know you’re miserable and he’s not treating you kindly, but just stick with it, girl. Stay with him. Give him another chance” Is that how they think it will go?

I pull fat tomatoes from the garden, lining them around the edge of the table as we talk. Bare feet in the grass, in the dirt. The parallels are unreal.

“There was just a point,” I tell her. “I was waiting for a better job, waiting for more money. I thought if I got the reporting job I was up for, I’d make my move. Then I didn’t get it and suddenly everything in me shifted. I stopped seeing obstacles and found the solutions. It didn’t matter that I was making no money and working nights …”

She opens. This is the most real conversation we’ve had in two decades. Maybe the most open we’ve ever been. She talks and talks and tells the stories she’s kept to herself for years. No one knows the ugly details, her pain, the truth of her life.

“I think Scott wanted me to call you to convince you to stay, but I think you’ve talked me into leaving,” she says. “I just have to figure out the money. I don’t need to live in my 4,000 square foot mini-mansion, but I want to know I can afford the little house on the corner.”

“You’ll do it when you are ready. And when you are ready the money won’t matter anymore.”

Funny how the answers come in flashes. Every now and then we hover 10 miles above our lives looking down at the tangle and we see everything, know where we fit in the flow, and then its gone in a blink. Among the dust particles in a shaft of light I see just myself and understand how the momentum of these shaky steps reaches across the continent to my friend and pulls her forward.

“Why am I doing this?” has a whole new answer that has nothing to do with me. I look the other direction to the friend who walked before me and know my courage is born of hers.

Around the edges of this new circle, still forming circle, so much synchronicity I know it’s been there always. Suddenly all these new people arriving exactly when I most needed them, to show me what it is to be taken to your knees (in ways beyond anything I can fathom) and still look up to give thanks.

Sweet, sweet synchronicity.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Michelle tells me she knows she will leave, doesn’t know when, still needs to figure out the finances.

I hear myself speaking the words I’ve heard again and again. “Baby steps, girl. Step by step. You’ll do it when you are ready, you’ll just switch over to autopilot and go.”

She’ll leave her giant house with her financial well-being and flourishing career intact. Not one step of her journey will be easier because of it. Less complicated maybe. She’ll still be the single mother of three daughters, the youngest an infant, stumbling to find footing on a new path.

Funny how in moments of grace I remember I have everything I need. Remember gratitude.

My apartment has only one bedroom, but I have three beds and two girls to sleep in them.

Sometimes I have to ride the bus, but I always have enough change for the fare and two strong legs to carry me to and from the stops. There is a book in my lap, and I can read. I can read!

By the numbers, I live in poverty; but my house is stuffed with toys and books,
and furniture and there is always good food in the fridge.
My toilet flushes.
I’m writing on a computer.
My kids have clothes enough to fill the closets and drawers in two homes.
No matter where they sleep they lay down blanketed in love.

Sometimes there is much I think I want, but in moments of grace I know.
I have everything I need.

And I am grateful.

For all of you, who show me again and again what it means to give thanks, I am grateful.

That my actions and words may give a friend strength and spread some of this light her way, I am grateful.

I lay in my flannel sheets, head sunken into feather pillow, talking to my old friend at the other edge of the continent.

I have everything I need.

disconnect

The Zone took my phone right out of my pocket yesterday morning on the 75. Now this computer is the only way I can communicate with the outside world.

I’m on the bus, Josie smelling like a pancake breakfast beside me. She’s bouncing from her seat to my lap singing the “Open them Shut Them/Itsy Bitsy Spider” dance medly. Curls her fingers into two little fists and uncurls them in my face. Tickles my lips with the tips “But do not let them in!”

I’m going through the hand motions and laughing with her; and in my head I’m working my way through everything I intend to tell Scott. Fuming. Calculating all the ways I’ve been wronged, because that’s what we do, right? We add it all up, keep score in a game that nobody can win.

That I shouldn’t be on the bus because the car sharing deal is the car goes with the kids. Package deal. But here I am bright and early after working late last night. Point for me. That he is inconsiderate and selfish for asking me to take two buses to Amelia’s school so I can walk her into class and then take two more buses home with Josie when he’s responsible for school today. Point for me. That he is an asshole for not even saying “thank you” after I do this one hour and 45 minute, four bus, round trip commute to help him out. So he can drop Amelia at the curb and pull away to be on time for an interview. Pointless points and this is all just stuff. The same old stuff. Stuff, stuff, stuff – still piled everywhere, no changes here.

Why did I expect to change our relationship by leaving it anyway?

My mind is with the stuff and not the phone I’ve shoved into my pocket. I’m practically talking out loud to myself between verses with Josie. It’s been months since I’ve worn these jeans. Long enough that I forget how everything always falls out of the shallow pockets. And, I’m a pocket kind of girl. You can pull more crap from my pockets than a 10-year-old boy’s. Wrappers and old receipts, little toy pieces and coins collected from the floor, business cards and pen caps – I carry it all around. Just can seem to throw away old stuff.

But what have I thrown away?

I can’t keep up with the shifts. Leave for work Friday bouncing out the door; I’ve slept eight hours, made my bed, read, meditated, eaten two meals, cleaned the apartment and written before I go. Haven’t had a day like this in months. Something shifted while I was in Phoenix. I started eating again and sleeping full nights. Suddenly I can’t get enough food or shut eye. I’m gaining weight and there’s a sense of calm in me – a new ability to sit with things.

Friday night I take the late bus and while I stand at Burnside and Fifteenth watching the cops hassle a few kids and waiting for the next bus, self-pity floods that calm and me disappears into the fog. I’m 37, riding the bus home from my crappy job to my empty apartment at midnight.

Why Am I doing this?

I can have it all back whenever. Anytime. There are pictures of me, pictures of us, all over Scott’s place and it’s hard to remember why I’m doing this. He’s still wearing the ring. Even in leaving, I can’t completely leave. I have to leave it open-ended. Can’t bring myself to say the D word and finalize it. So I confuse things. Confuse him. The night before Thanksgiving I make Tofurkey and smash and greens. He brings gravy and apple pie and wine and we have a family dinner with the kids because I can’t take the thought of him alone. I still want the pretty picture. I want my vision and my freedom both.

He comes back early the next morning to take us to the airport. I know I should ask someone else, but he wants to and I let him. It’s awkward, all of us standing at the ticket counter, checking luggage, but him not going.

“I love you, Holly,” he tells me at the security stop, end of the line for him. “I wish I was going.” He’s hugging and I’m not hugging back.

“I know,” I say. I can’t say I wish he was going, too. I don’t.

“That’s it?” he says, his face cracking. “You know?”

“I don’t know what else to say.”

He’s crying into the glass wall of a news stand, head against the window, back to the airport, when I look back.

And, I hate myself.

~ ~ ~

There’s a memorial service for my brother-in-law the Friday after Thanksgiving, a day after Jeff would have turned 50. Almost two years after his death. The last five years were cross-country trips to specialists and three organ transplants and two amputations before diabetes completely overwhelmed his ravaged body. My brother puts the urn - a short, wide oval of amber colored wood - between a picture of them on a glacier, a snapshot of their dog Louie, a portrait of Jeff smiling and healthy.

“Jeff told me he wanted his ashes spread at Neiman-Marcus, and he was only half kidding. I think He’d be happy that this is the most expensive square foot of real estate in the city,” he laughs, tears down his face, splashing his shirt.

I’m surprised at the power of my grief. Stronger than it was at the funeral. Bigger than it was in that glass walled ICU when then erratic beeps ran into one alarming drone that I can still hear and the mountains on his monitors crumbled into a smooth streak. Where has it been all this time, this grief?

Amelia and Josie play with their cousins under the palm trees among the headstones outside, chasing each other in circles in the sun.

Have I ever grieved anything? I am mourning Jeff and I am just mourning. Mourning everything I have ever lost.

~ ~ ~ ~

Why Am I doing this?

It's easy to ask at Midnight. I get off the bus, round the corner of my complex, past the fountain I circled with Josie waiting for the manager to show me the apartment.

I ask over and over, calling it out the ceiling through tears that splatter the carpet. Lay on the floor holding my knees and crying loud enough for the neighbors to hear but I don’t care. All the peace of the morning is gone. I want to call Scott. I want to talk to my children, pull the covers to their chins and kiss sleeping cheeks. I want to lay on the rug and let myself fall apart. Cry until I can’t.

There's an old friend outside the door. I feel it lingering and twist the deadbolt. I can't pull the bed out for fear of what will crawl in next to me. Maybe I won't get out for months. There's a kind of peace in the center of depression - a quietness that settles during months in bed.

Only the edges feel like swallowing broken glass. It's calm at the eye.

I don’t know why I’m doing this and still that quiet voice inside persists. Insists. “Keep going. Keep going.” So soft it’s barely audible over the tears, so loud there is no other sound.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~


We're off the bus at Sandy and 42nd, Josie greeting the cold with a little shake that rises from her purple rainboots to her red knit tomato top cap. I can almost still read the number "75" when I reach into my pocket and find nothing. Air.

The taillights shrink, disappear up 42nd.

I know what the zone is telling me this time.

Separate. Pull the rest apart. Ditch the phone that's still connected to a shared plan, let it disappear across TIllamook. Across Brazee. Across Freemont. Prescott. Let it go. Walk right down the street to Cricket and start fresh.

Stop sharing the car.

Stop sharing.

Let. It. Go.

Midnight Express

I HEART Tri-met!

On the bus you experience so much of the city the average car commuter misses. And, you can read.

I ride the 11:32 p.m. bus home from work. I aways hustle to catch the 11:32 because the next bus doesn't come untill 12:02 a.m and I've arbitrarily decided that after midnight it's no longer safe to walk the four well-lit blocks from the bus stop to my apartment.

I board the bus and scan for possible serial killers while walking to the last open seat. From the back I can keep track of the others. The bus is unusually empty, a few street punks, a couple college students and in the very back row four African American kids - maybe late teens or early 20s - who are loud and drunk, but harmless.

Two men, two-women. One man - the quiter guy - is toting a five foot stack of green 10-gallon buckets and drumsticks home from a night of busking. His buddy is loaded and slurring and, well, obnoxious.

I open "Riding With Rilke" and the noise of the bus falls away. Actually the noise of the buss passes out across three seats, but I don't know this yet. I'm with Ted Bishop on his Ducati outside of Green River, Utah and "just south of here in a harsh red mountain range, the Hole-In-The-Wall Gang relaxed between robberies."

Bishop is talking about Jesse James and Butch Cassidy when I notice the bus isn't moving and look up from the page.

There's a thick blue leg, dark blue strip, beside me and a large hand wrapped around a handgun next to the leg.

A GUN.

Two guns.

Three Guns.

All drawn. All in the hands of cops. All less than two-feet from my head.

I'm thinking, if they decide to use these things, I'm in a very unfortunate seat.

They've come for the passed-out kid becuase he meets the description of some one reportedly seen waving a gun: A black man in back jeans and a black jacket.

Of course, it's crucial to have ready weapons when approaching an unconscious suspect.

All four are off the bus; and then all of us are off the bus - the yeasty warm smell of baking bread clinging to the fog.

The kid is not armed - just riding while black, which, I think, is a felony in Portland Police statuetes.

They keep us there untill the the 12:02 arrives.

Two possible serial killers on that one.

Can't get this kind of ride in a car.

I HEART Tri-Met!