five from ottawa

My shoulder is at about 85%. This week is one where I have to use it extensively—I have to finish packing, and more than just a box or two at a time. The shoulder will also have to support me while I lie on my side to paint the baseboards in the entry and in the entire upstairs (three bedrooms and a bath). The sight of those baseboards over the past two months has been an indictment every time I looked at them. My ice packs are back in my freezer, just in case I beat myself up a little too much. Myron reminds me that there is no rush here, but I am sick of this purgatory, of not knowing when we will move or where or how much it will cost us. The morning chill and yellow leaves in the yard remind me of what’s coming. No one in their right mind wants to move into Winnipeg after the snow has started.

#

Myron does not have a Don Draper drawer. I have put off packing his office until the end because I wanted to preserve his privacy, even though there is almost nothing there to hide. A few years ago, a friend of mine lost her husband very young, and it was impossible for me to keep from imagining myself in her position, especially with the treacherous road Myron took to bike to work. I pictured myself opening a sticky, stubborn drawer of his massive desk and hearing it bark in protest that its master was gone. Now I open the drawers and wonder if any stray papers are things that I was never supposed to see. The Lifetime Drama subroutine in my brain says Gentle Man! So indulgent, so in love! Nothing to hide, not ever! Then it plays soap-operatic flights of music as Lifetime Drama subroutines do, and I think This is why the secret is always SO gutwrenching. Then I remember who I married and who I am, and I put the things in boxes and wrap them up with tape.

#

The rain started late Friday night. Saturday morning I woke up early to a pearly gray dawn. Three hours later, it looked the same, as if time had stopped. Five hours later, six, and still the opalescent light. Everyone hid in their homes, and the park was silent. Everything was silent, really, except the rain against the shingles and eaves. I realized that I have been waiting for a rain like this, an all-day soul-soaking rain, for months now. Something in me is breathing more easily, and something else feels washed away.

#

Wrapped around the capable, functional, washed-clean core of me is a double helix of panic and inevitability. Whichever crisis rises, it is immediately put down by remembering that everything is an eventuality. The house will be sold, the move will take place, it will all happen no matter how badly I might mess anything up. (Did I ever tell you about the time we filled out a form in pencil and the government employee called us you stupid kids?) It would be really great if the inevitability would hang around so that the panic would stop foaming up. I need an older gentleman, someone in his seventies who smells like coffee and mothballs, to chuck me on the shoulder and ask me what I’ve got to worry about, maybe call me toots or missy.

#

Maybe I should be doing more Breathing In of the Air and Appreciation of the World Around Me. Doing more mindful eating instead of eating quick half-meals, taking more photographs. Maybe I should even be trying harder to sweep aside the clouds in my crystal ball and getting a better vision of what’s to come. Not doing this feels like yet another failure, though, and right now I am trying not to be hard on myself about failures. I am trying to be an accepter and say yes, that happened and trying not to dwell. I dwell, though. I am down in it. I feel completely alone. And then in his drawer, where I try to be careful with things without being nosy, I see a photo of myself, and I wonder how I could have ever felt alone, ever, ever.

#augustbreak: forgotten

I forget things. Yesterday, I carried around this note in my back pocket, ready to pass it to Myron just before we said goodbye. I’ve still got it. Something tells me that it’ll lose a little something in mail delivery, but it won’t change the substance within.

well, well, well, my Michelle

This woman knows me better than just about anyone except Myron.

sorry about the picture-of-the-picture—scanning isn’t working today. I think this was 1992.She lives too far away from me, in the house where her grandparents lived when we were kids. I do not see her nearly enough, but the minute we are in touch with each other, miles and time melt away. She knows what I am made of, and when you are with someone who knows your building blocks, you breathe in a deep, effortless way that you cannot at any other time. I have never had to say to her Please be happy for me. It’s her default. Even when I dated someone she still calls Sonic the Hedgehog, she was happy for me.

She has often apologized to others for what I’m made of; she knows it isn’t actually as nice as it should be. “You don’t have to apologize for me,” I would say. She did it just the same. It’s because of the way she loves, which is one of those all-or-nothing loves. I never seem to issue those of my own volition; people have to drag them out of me with heavy machinery. Michelle did it with the phone.

In my childhood bedroom (another Scintilla post I have not written; blame a migraine and everyone else’s great posts which I can’t stop reading), my mother installed a powder-blue slimline phone. She mounted it on the wall and it had a shortish cord, so I had to stand up near my bedroom door to talk. This is not an ideal situation for a thirteen-year-old girl. But my mother did not think like a thirteen-year-old girl, and I was expected to be grateful for any bit of telephone I had. 

Michelle called. Did I have the homework? Did I see what X was wearing? Did I have a crush on anyone? What was I going to wear tomorrow? Did I like Bon Jovi?

Girl loved her Bon Jovi. 

I answered her questions, said Igottagobyeseeyoutomorrow, and hung up.

Years later, she laughed. “I tried! I couldn’t keep you on the phone!” I didn’t know how to have a conversation. But I put in the time in person. We did things with Girl Scouts, with choir, on our own. We laughed once for two class periods straight, uncontrollably, in tears and gasping for breath. Somehow none of our teachers sent us out of their classrooms. We double-dated; I’m still not sure which one of us was actually stuck with the guy who looked like Cousin Itt. We grieved and got drunk and stayed up too late bothering her Nana until three in the morning, sometimes all at the same time. We watched Dirty Dancing (a hundred times) and The First Nudie Musical (once was enough). We made peanut-butter rice krispie treats and pastitsio and we wore matching French maid costumes, and fought with each other while wearing them. We used our criminal minds to get away with murder all through school. We walked around the high-school track late at night singing The Mamas and the Papas and watched meteor showers from her front yard. We edited a yearbook that brought tears of pride to our adviser’s eyes.

Fourth grade, with much smaller hair. Evidently it was a Blouse Year.She shared her family with utter selflessness. During the summers I spent weeks at a time at her house, coming home for clean clothes and to prove to my mother that I was still alive. I did chores and ate meals at her table and babysat with her. We played B94 and sprayed Sun-In in our hair and sprawled on beach blankets in the sun. I basked in the love of her parents and the energy of her siblings. But it was always Michelle who gave the most, who loved hardest, who side-eyed me when I handed out bullshit, who made me feel like I was just fine as myself (even if she had to apologize to others in the process). When my brother died, it was Michelle who picked me up at the airport when I flew home, who held me and demanded nothing. When my mother was dying, she did the same. And when I got married, she drove all day to come here and stand at my side, bearing my mom’s charm bracelet. She’s family, in a way that no one else I’m actually related to can be.

At the end of Stand by Me, the adult Gordie writes: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” And no, I never did. I have had fun with other people, and shared secrets, and loved with what my heart had to give, but the love you give when you’re a child is different than any other love, wider and stronger and less judgmental. It depends on nothing and generates its own power like a star. You can apologize for it and let it collect dust and even put it away, but its power can do anything. Thirty years is nothing to a star.

(And she will know why I chose Guns & Roses for this video.)

---

The Scintilla Project, Day 8: Who was your childhood best friend? Describe them—what brought you together, what made you love them. Are you still friends today?

#augustbreak: shhhh...

Myron’s leaving today for a conference and to do some research at an incredible collection. When he goes away, I hide a card and some snacks in his bag. This time, I went for these ginger snaps, which… well, when he finds them he’s going to make a very inappropriate noise. I’ve even gotten my mother-in-law hooked on them. Something about the thinness and size of them reminds me of dog treats every time, but I would probably do tricks for them, too.

Sunday, 8:53pm

Shhh, now. Hide upstairs with me. The power’s been out for a good long while, maybe ninety minutes. Oh, those black fluffy clouds rolled in while I was finishing up the golden beets and feta, and just as we settled down at the table the lights went out and stayed out. Fortunately, there’s enough charge left on this laptop for me to scrawl you a note, to tell you about everything around me right now.

After dinner, after a bowl of yellow cherries and little glasses of unoaked Ontario chardonnay, after I loaded the dishwasher and left the skillet to soak in hot water, I tiptoed upstairs and let Myron and his dad have some time together. My father-in-law is a senior, and his hearing is going. He can decipher Ukrainian better than English, so the conversation isn’t one I can understand. The register of Myron’s voice drops when he speaks Ukrainian, becomes richer and darker like flourless chocolate cake. Sometimes I ask him to show me how to pronounce a particular Ukrainian word, but my attempts are so bad that it pains his ears, and I stop before I get it right. And it doesn’t really matter; this is something no one else can join. It’s a club for two.

What else he inherited from Papá: A passion for gizmos and reading history for pleasure. A facility for languages (Papá taught himself Spanish in his eighties). A taste for buckwheat cabbage rolls and sauerkraut. A mind for intricacies and a lack of patience for bullshit. A respect for clever humor. The collector gene, made manifest in the shelves of books both here at our house and back home in the house where Myron grew up. And oh they can be stubborn, joyfully, delightfully stubborn. These two know how to get their way. They’re buddies, two peas, a chip and an old block.

I can’t eavesdrop when I don’t understand the language. I’m the third wheel right now, upstairs with the laptop, without the air conditioning on this sticky summer night. The rain blew away the power (and the Bluesfest concert stage) but not the humidity. The last threads of light are leaving the sky as I type. Downstairs, illuminated by one of my homemade candles, they’re hatching plans for the rest of the visit and occasionally laughing, wise and worldly laughs. Papá has already chopped down two trees and hung a little house for a weather station and read The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. I hear their voices echo. I hear Papá’s slower cadence and Myron’s responses, and all I can make out from this far away, with only my English to help me, is the raised tone at the end of a question. Everything else is a mystery to me.