You might want stand back from your screen as I have been laid low by bronchitis, and I’d hate for you to catch it. I’m convinced I picked this one up on the bus when I was off to get the new glasses, but it could have come from anywhere and it is taking a long time leaving.
It arrived on little cat feet a few days before Z and I were in loco parentis for my cousin’s seventeen-year-old daughter and her friend, who took their first solo trip to us. Possibly it started as a run-of-the-mill bus cold but trying to keep up with teenagers transformed it. All I know is I’ve grown bored with it, bored with the cough syrup (the flavor of which has not been improved upon since I was a kid despite all other sorts of advances in medical science), and bored with the addlepated thought-processes that plague me when I’m on antibiotics and codeine.
The worst part though is that this illness of mine made me feel really old.
I am accustomed to having young people treat me as if I’m youthful and cooler than their parents. I attribute this quality to having had the “cool mom” (who did NOT make casseroles or force a bedtime and to whom my friends wanted to tell their problems) and so I learned by observation. Over the years, I have enjoyed this distinction, but I may have finally pressed against the outer limits of those descriptors.
I was always about twenty paces behind these two energetic Hoosier-lings, and I was always out of breath. Multiple times Mere stopped, peered back at me and said with great concern, “Are you doing okay?” in the same tone I used to use when talking to my poor grandmother who had pulmonary fibrosis.
It didn’t take long before I was just waving them off for an hour or two of shopping and sight-seeing on their own while I drank Fiji water and ate cookies at Barnes and Noble and waited for them to text me that they’d exhausted the stock at Forever 21 and had not been accosted by big city ruffians.
Add to this that I had to ask them pointed questions about how they used Snapchat in their daily lives and what various make-up products were for at Sephora (Seattle requires very little make-up of me and I’ve lost some skills), and it’s clear to see my fate was sealed. My coolness has always been debatable, but “youthful” is no longer an adjective that belongs to me either. Alas.
All this to say, this will not be an energetic blog full of twists and turns and themes. I’m just going to offer a hodgepodge of thoughts and happenings and you can skip over the bits that bore you. It’s possible I won’t even come to a point when I get to the end, but I’m running out of days to post an April blog and I need to try out the latest addition to our family.
Here she is:
That’s Erma Bompeck, a $3.99 kitchen timer from World Cost Plus. After hearing about how Lauren Graham employed a timer to help her get her memoir written, I decided the Pomodoro time-management method for Getting Crap Done might be a boon to me. That said, I couldn’t get jazzed by the now-famous tomato-shaped timer made popular with that method. I do not like fruits masquerading as vegetables, and when I tried using the Pomodoro app on my phone, every time it buzzed and I had to re-set it, I’d find reasons to check my mail, update my Facebook status, or play a game of Royal Envoy.
The Chicken of Productivity sat on the end table, roosting for five days with no name. Z tried valiantly to assign her Roscoe P. Chicken but his ignorance of poultry biology (she is clearly NOT a rooster) was alarming and I felt a little annoyed that he, who names everything in our house from our various blankets to my engagement ring (Fluffito and Ring-ring, respectively) should feel it his right to name MY chicken. Plus, I wasn’t having her twirl around on her base with the name of a bumbling, racist sheriff from Dukes of Hazzard. No. These are trying racial and political times, and I will not be celebrating such tomfoolery with my Chicken of Productivity.
I felt I needed the support of a female, time-keeping muse. I considered Eudora Welty or Virginia Woolf, but in the end I remembered my college mentor, Gibb, who suggested that I should be the next Erma Bombeck (Erma’s job was not open nor was she ill at the time, so I’m not sure why he thought I could just walk in with my pristine, no-experience post-college resumé and take hers). I liked the Erma Bombeck shout-out to Gibb who believed in my quirky writing, and I liked the simplicity of channeling Erma, a funny woman who wrote some articles of consequence and some of no consequence. Erma got a clean slate every day with her syndicated newspaper column, and I doubt if anyone really remembered or faulted her for the stinkers. Since I’m trying to remind myself to err on the side of imperfection-but-done instead of near-perfection-but-never-completed, the name seemed inspired.
There’s something about Erma Bompeck’s face that harkens back to my Fisher-Price barnyard, and I’m hoping that by having her stare at me for the 25-minute increments during which I write, that I’ll begin to think of it as “fun” instead of “existential-crisis-in-the-making.” So here are my first 25 minutes of focused writing under Erma’s gaze. (The only downside is that because of that overactive amygdala of mine, I’ll jump out of my pants when the buzzer goes off.)
Here are the thoughts I’m trying to harness right now:
- There was a robbery downtown an hour ago that left two police officers shot (wounded and recovering thank goodness) and so the helicopters are buzzing the apartment and jangling my nerves.
- I just read yet another article about empaths and while I’m not 100% sure I am an empath, I do know that amygdala of mine makes me “sensitve.” I am beginning to wonder if the city is just too much for me. For instance, that helicopter sound has my ears vibrating and my gut churning because those poor worried cop families and what if the helicopter crashes into the downtown and what made armed robbery seem like a good idea a block from the federal building and why are 236 new people moving to Seattle every day and at what point is the city just going to belch some of us out?
- My new glasses are making me hold my head just so so I can see the screen, and I wonder is it better to see things clearly but be a slave to your corrective lenses so you get a crick in your neck or is it better to squint and increase the likelihood of crow’s feet?
- My new glasses look much better than I was anticipating and it seems a shame they are computer lenses so I can’t walk upright in them and wear them out in public. Should I have ordered them with all-purpose lenses, thus allowing me the chance to impress people with my hip, green tortoiseshell-ness? Would I have kept up better with teenagers if I could have worn these glasses?
- Will Z notice if I eat a chocolate egg out of his Easter basket since I have depleted my own?
- The Messy Drawer needs cleaning and how long exactly should I keep the iPod charger for my giant, antiquated 2006 iPod that will no longer charge? Also, if I decide to throw it out, must I find a place that recycles electronic stuff? Where is such a place? If I just “accidentally” drop it into the trash, will I be fined by the city? Are quandaries like this why the Messy Drawer is messy?
- Also, if I throw the half-burned candle with the dodgy wick out that is taking up prime real estate in the Messy Drawer will this unleash some natural disaster that will require said candle and thus I will all be at fault for the disaster?
- Will Z notice that the bright blue one-egg pan I gave him for Christmas got burned up yesterday and lost it’s sheen when I failed to realize the pasta I was cooking was on a different burner and so all I was cooking was the blue right off his new pan?
- Are Lucky Charms really that much less healthy than microwaveable maple and brown sugar Quaker Oats? There are oats. There is sugar. Wouldn’t it all come out about the same but I’d get to embrace my Irish heritage and feel youthful with the former?
It takes a while to swim to the surface of that kind of brain soup. Also, Erma has dinged her first ding, so now you know how slowly I write. Next.
Last year, I may have told you that I discovered Vivian Swift, my favorite illustrated memoirist, was going to be in Seattle, and for reasons I can’t explain, I took it upon myself to invite her to stay in the writing studio here at Chez Girl Scout. It was a little insane. I knew her only from her books and she didn’t know me at all. In my message to her, I assured her that I was neither a weirdo nor an asshole, told her where Z taught, gave her the link to my blog and our address so she could do a little research on us to determine if we were either of those things, and then I paced around the house fretting because a woman on Long Island that I’d never met was probably at that moment laughing with her husband about the complete loon on the other side of the country who was delusional enough to think she’d want to stay with strangers who could, for all she knew, have a dungeon or web cams adhered to objet d’art around the studio.
When I extended the invitation, it was a strange internal knowing I had: that I needed to make this offer and that it would be good for my soul. Somehow, I also knew—even though it was beyond logic—that she would ultimately say yes. And sure enough, two hours later, she emailed and said she was having a year of saying “yes” and so, yes.
Those 48 hours with her in residence were a delight last May. I loved talking to her about writing and art. Z and I went to hear her read. We drank tea that morphed into several Alice B. Toklas cocktails on the patio of the Sorrento Hotel on an evening when the weather was perfect except for about 27 drops of rain that fell mysteriously from a cloudless sky. When she left, I felt lighter. I felt better about my writing and my life. I saw the city in a new way. We didn’t magically become besties and we aren’t texting each other multiple times a week now to complain about husbands or talk about new ways we might style our hair, but it was a really satisfying moment in a spring that had been largely scary, upsetting and otherwise tedious, and it gave me faith that it is still possible to spend time with someone previously unknown to you who feels familiar and real.
Maybe this is something all extroverts know instinctively, but it was a surprise to me.
While I wasn’t entirely duplicating that experience this month with an old college friend, there were some similarities. True, A and I had known each other since he was a friend’s roommate our sophomore year. We had spent a semester together in a truly horrible sociology class (boring, poorly managed, and erratic and we were ill-behaved because something in the professor triggered a Lord of the Flies response in us). But after that year, we didn’t see each other so much, and then graduation happened and if someone had asked me where A had ended up, I would have said, “I don’t know. Probably back in Virginia. Or did he live in North Carolina? I can’t remember. One of those places.” While I still—all of these years out—believe I am still a student at AU and thus fully expect the president of the university to demand we all return for a mandatory chapel convocation at which point I suppose I might have bumped into A in the lobby of Reardon Auditorium, it seemed more likely that our next contact would be one of us reading about the other’s death in the alumni magazine.
Now, with social networking, it is difficult to imagine a time when I didn’t know what ¾ of my high school graduating class had at Pizza King last Friday night (Note: Royal Feast and breadsticks. Always breadsticks) even though I’m on the other side of the country, but in the late 1980s, we were apparently just so sloppy-rich with friends that it was easy enough to assume there would be more and more and more to fill up spaces left by the ones we accidentally lost track of that summer day when we marched out of the auditorium with our diplomas in our hands.
Ah, youth.
So when A and I had a brief conversation on Facebook and he mentioned that he and his husband were going to be in British Columbia, I had a very similar Vivian Swift knowing. I knew I would invite them to come visit and I knew they would come, but more than that, I knew it was something I needed even though I had no idea why I needed it.
Z was particularly perplexed after I had asked if he’d mind if we had houseguests. “Who is this now? Why don’t I know those names?” He seemed a little dubious when my description didn’t offer rich detail and I said something vague like “we had a class together once in 1986” as if I had invited a faceless student from that two-week intensive composition course I taught at the technical college in 1997 or the sharp-tongued, deeply tanned woman I sold shoes with one summer in 1986 to come stay with us.
But Z is nothing if not supportive of my dreams, and he could see the glow in my eye. So, he shrugged and said sure, and thus it transpired that A & T would drive down for dinner, spend the night Chez Girl Scout, and then head back to their holiday rental across the border.
In the days leading up to their arrival I was giddy with anticipation though there was no rational reason for giddiness. Instead, I should have been nervous. A and I had known each other for such a brief time, without much opportunity for anything akin to a deep conversation because we were always in a group of people, yukking it up. Who was he really? And what was left of the 1987 Beth that he would recognize? One of my sharpest memories of him involved him sitting under an Amy Grant poster in a dorm room wearing a new kelly green shirt that he hadn’t yet laundered and that had turned his skin an eerie shade of green. That didn’t seem like enough to base an evening’s worth of conversational topics on.
For all I knew, I’d just invited someone I wouldn’t like at all into our house and we’d have to spend 36 hours making small talk and gritting our teeth and pretending that we like death metal or fusion cuisine. Or maybe they’d get one look of the likes of us and realize we were not their kind of people. (Z has taken to wearing Crocs everywhere he goes these days because of a self-diagnosed foot condition that he swears is only comfortable when he is wearing the equivalent of small, rubbery laundry baskets on his feet.) And yet, I had none of these worries because I just knew it would be excellent.
The minute I saw A on my stoop, it was as if no time had passed at all. I immediately turned into an ill-behaved golden retriever, wagging my tail and nearly leaping on the pair of them. They stood in the Girl Scout Writing Studio & Guest Quarters for a full ten minutes, no doubt tired from their drive, while I fired questions at them about their trip, their life together, what A had been doing the last 28 years, what T does for a living, where he’s from, when they got together, etc. It wasn’t until Z used his wife-calming voice and said, “Honey, maybe they’d like to settle in before you start the inquisition?” before I took a breath.
It was a short visit, but—for me (and for Z who told me multiple times how much he liked the pair of them)—it was exactly what I needed after this wet winter that has never wanted to end, my bronchitis-addled body, my fuzzy brain. We didn’t even spend much time reminiscing since we had so few shared memories, which was probably a great relief to Z and T. Instead, we talked about art and architecture and books and TV shows and our weddings and our hometowns and politics and travel and dogs and twenty other things. It was exactly how I knew it would be even though there was no way to know it.
I love these little mysteries, the synchronicities, the warmth from unexpected places. Now that I am old no longer young, I find that instead of concerts or amusement parks or the acquisition of some material item, these are the moments that make life rattle and hum for me. I was even comfortable with the tiny ache I felt that we live on opposite sides of the country and so won’t be making this a regular occurrence. Though hopefully it won’t be another 28 years.
I’d be really impressed with myself if I wrote these paragraphs out in two 25-minute increments and Erma had solved all of my writing woes. Last month I bought a new broom I was really excited about for a few days and then one day I realized the floor was no cleaner because I hadn’t actually used it. Sometimes I get myself new tools with the mistaken notion that they’re actually going to do the work for me.
I’m probably going to need a larger-sized and fiercer animal timer to keep me focused. Something with claws and fangs that sits on its haunches waiting on me to walk away from the keyboard so it can pounce. And it won’t be named anything like Roscoe either.
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