Gertie and Hope

Two things happened today I would not have anticipated when I woke up.

I found myself toting a ball python named Gertie around in my car in a tupperware container. (She woke UP while I was moving her -- that was a bit unnerving -- but she didn't push the lid off her little box, and it was all GOOD). And, was glad to help Mary and Sarah move into their house, their first "real" place chosen together. They're happy and warm together, and it makes me feel content for them. (And, apparently I'm still enough of a dyke to get into the zen of helping people move :-)).

And my wonderful sister S came over for sushi, sistertalk, a viewing of the final eppy of Arrested Development, and a leeeetle too much wine/beer. And one of HER pieces of news was of my ghost niece Hope, who was born a week or two ago, biochild of S's eggs and generosity of spirit.

Pretty miraculous, this birth, and miraculous the way S and I can hang out, and how much wisdom about living in the space of porousness I gain from her. Am grateful to have her in my life.

The other tedious stuff like the crashed computer? It just recedes. I'm outside the scripts, writing stories, and grateful to have people like Stef alongside me, finishing the sentences.

A midnight smoker

After a flirtation that had been going on for months, coy, yearning, increasingly seductive, I had a full blown affair last week. Cigarettes. DuMaurier Special Mild Regular, to be precise.

I'm really not sure what this was about, still. I quit smoking before I turned 30. Kept the flirtation confined to Truly Rare Social Occasions for a decade -- a smoke or two when I was hanging out with Gillian on Festive Occasions, a fitting accessory for a party that had me clad in a corset and unleashed inhibitions. Filching one from a stranger on the very rare occasion where, drink or coffee in hand, it seemed the right punctuation. Part of the debauched Prides over a few years where the drinking started at brunch after our 5K run and didn't end until a rain-soaked, weaving bike ride home at 3:30 a.m. Maybe five a year, and those carefully counted out, felt toxic in my blood the next morning.

The allure of running away with it was always there -- the first always made me crave a second, which I usually had, and then stopped. I'd regret it in the morning, cough my way through a run, feel my lungs like reproachful bellows. But always, I saw myself as a non-smoker, saw the rare cigarettes as acts I committed in particular contexts, out of my "real" self.

Through my divorce, I held to the usual pattern -- had one free for all night that involved about five cigarettes and a lot of damp emotional squalor when I was with L&G at the first event that A was at separately, but otherwise, no craving at all. But then. I moved here. The gritty market, the place where the edges are more open and gaping than anywhere else, random life. And the streets -- the dingy, dirty little streets -- just ached for late night walking, butt in hand.

I noted the pull -- every. single. day. I wanted to smoke. It wasn't seeing other people smoking, it was more about a sensation of wanting the single thing I'd always truly loved about smoking -- walking, alone, in the dark, cool air outside, cigarette sparked in unison to thinking. My late adolescent yearnings in poetry and autumn and movement as I walked the streets of my muted suburb, the grimier, frowsier streets of my first solo apartment in Windsor, the tussle of love tangled, becoming self, blown and breathed through the walking and smoking. Brooding looking at the river before I flicked cigarette into the water. Smokes secretly shared with my dad over dinner, long after he'd quit.

Somehow, that 20 year old Cateself kept pounding at the door of the 41 year old LoftCate and smoking seemed to be the main medium. I held it at bay until one night I smoked some pot with D, and my defenses to the whole idea were down, and I dragged her with me to buy a pack, asked her to sit with me while I smoked one, then two, in my courtyard. It was still a little too cold out to sit outside -- but that's the perfect moment.

The next morning, I handed off the pack ($8!!! btw!) to a ravaged guy in front of the liquor store ("part of your cunning plan to secretly kill the homeless?" Ted asked me). Put aside the thoughts of smoking. Went to Portland, to Vancouver... then asked Katie for one of hers. Just one. Came home. Pride. Filched a couple more, standing on the street in femme garb, in a beer garden. Found myself a couple of weeks later buying a pack after a wine-sodden night with S. Smoked two, put the pack in the freezer. Unfroze it and gave it away. And then another pack, same process, only this time, the freezer became more of a "keep them here until I want another one" zone.

And last week... full blown immersion. Walking in the dark, pondering, wondering. Sneaking down to the lake after dinner with SB to look at the dark water and think and smoke. In my flat, at the kitchen counter, wine in hand, cautious strangled hope in my throat, while talking to F on the phone. Some kind of inverted desire to breathe in a new way.

Every day for four days, I smoked a little. Not a *full* pack over the week, but close. And already could feel my lungs tighter when I was running, could see myself strategizing -- "hey, Matt will be at that party, HE has smokes, maybe I can cadge one from him." Could look forward to another one.

Well. This clearly just would not do. I needed to rewrite that script and pronto. I am not going to fall into that abyss out of some crazy image I have of myself as some brooding post-adolescent romantic. It hasn't escaped me that in most of the truly alluring photos of my young dad, he's got a smoke in hand -- but living fully, by definition, means breathing full oxygen, not sucking the air out of your own skin, wrinkling up like the post-40 coworkers who scared me into quitting in the first place more than a decade ago.

So. I packed it in. Threw out the rest of the freezer pack. Find myself weirdly, unexpectedly, breaking up with cigarettes again, pushing aside the "one more time won't matter" voices, reminding myself I've written them completely out of my story for so long that they can't nudge their way back in.

But. The allure of just one. So fucking tantalizing.

Tony Head Shot

If my dad were alive, today would be his 65th birthday. It's so hard to imagine this man an Official Senior Citizen.

Something tells me that this would not be an identity he'd be embracing too whole-heartedly. The man living into his mod story in this picture, the one who wanted to imagine himself in full body, full thrust experiences, the one who took the little girls out to the walk on the train tracks in their easter dresses and constantly wove the story of easter-eggs-so-well -hidden-we-didn't-find- them-until-the-next year, the one who brought poetry to the kids who hated school... this man is not the one who'd be buying a tilly hat and fussing about discounts.

I often wonder what Dad would have made of my life, in the end, how I'm living the life full that I know he wanted. I think about the deep immersion into experience that textured him -- like the time he was lost in the caves in Belgium with M on his shoulders and the lights started going off... his fear translated into a deeply thrilled retelling that I overheard more than once over dinner parties. Sometimes deep misfires -- like his need to put himself against the wall in the gas chamber at the concentration camp in France we visited, him trying to imagine with his body and full senses what it would have been like to be herded into that room.

In many ways, Tony wasn't remotely governed by convention -- he veered wherever he felt he could live fully, pushed the bounds of "taste" and hesitance, ordered the 10 scoops of ice cream in the amusement park in Copenhagen just because they offered it (and found himself juggling balls of it in his hand), had the passionate affair that resulted in his leaving my mom, who didn't really know how to play or live in vivid relief without him. Looked deeply at poets and people living in their art, wanted to live inside Leonard Cohen's music or characters on stage.

But there was also deep convention, the tight immersion in his family, especially near the end, the immersion that irritated me when I had no time alone with him. When he got sick, the living fully was infused with a kind of sentimental portent, a fear wrapped in a deep yearning for love and more. He'd kiss my arm fiercely if I gave blood, clutch my little sisters and P to him, try to find his way through my prickles and fears and glum uncertainties of my early 20s and connect with me as an adult.

The Raymond Carver poem about endings resonates here:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

I hope he felt that. I think he did, though I know I didn't let him feel that enough.

I know I want to live fully too, I want to feel myself beloved here on my earth. I'm quailing a bit this morning about what living fully means for me. My long conversation with F last night reinforced that connection, the sense of rare intense closeness that embodies living fully, to me... the transcendent moments. But, no room in this space for embracing it completely... so what IS living fully? Letting that go and living strong and autonomously? Quietly cupping my hand around that possible heat and trying to keep it aglow? Letting bursts of it be part of my life, followed by the empty spaces? Which of these let me live fully vivid, experiencing it all -- and to feel beloved on the earth?

My dad had that, jumped into heat and vividness... and also carved a life where he felt beloved. There were a lot of ashy moments along the way, though. The time in his tiny crappy bachelor apartment with the pull out couch after my mother drew her lines and made him leave, even though P was still in Europe (the time that my uncle claimed all he did was lie around and smoke pot -- but how much to trust that crazy uncle who outed me at my grandfather's funeral?). Losing us out of his immediate life, my conflicting way of never letting him feel truly loved. All of his fear as his illness got bigger, his bargaining, his hallucination and nightmares, no real peace with me.

The ashy moments are part of the texture of the vivid, I think. We live safe or we live leaping. My dad lived leaping.

Keeping plants alive

I had dinner with my friend Stephanie last night, which was wonderfully connecting, as always. I'm so grateful she's come into my life -- she's so wise and graceful and warm and funny. I am blessed with the relationships of my world.

She met me here before we went out for pasta and cheap wine on a patio, and we were talking about plants. I realized I've had this little shadow project since A and I split up to start being the kind of person who can keep plants alive. The verdict is still out on this.

The pothos is the one leaf-turned- toward- the- light in my space. It started out life as a gift from Beth when A and I moved into our first apartment together. It endured a lot of benign neglect for 13 years, occasionally tossed a cup of water, very rarely food, insufficient light. It crouched glumly in the corner of our dining room, not thriving but not giving up either.

A handed it over to me a few months after I actually moved out. My friend had given it to us, it should be mine. I moved it, but left it in the car overnight because I needed help hauling it and its pot in. Early October freeze, bad idea.

I moved it inside and -- as is my wont -- messed with it too much. Repotted it, fed it, watered it. "All fresh and new," I thought. "It'll be so happy now."

Of course, that was way too much stress and trauma. It started to wither, then did the plant equivalent of panting on the ground, tongue lolling. I panicked a bit -- it seemed to represent... something -- about who I'd been, who I could be -- I didn't want it to just disappear altogether. So I took some cuttings, rooted them (while squabbling with T about what the right actions would be), and eventually stuck the new pieces into the soil as the old plant was still dying off.

Today it's richly thriving, basking in the light of my new space. And I'm learning the same lesson over and over with my other plants. Moving causes trauma. Plants do NOT recover from trauma by fussing too much with them. When a plant starts to show distress, yanking it out of the pot and overloading it with activity makes it wither even more.

Plant life, human life, apparently all the same. Learning to not poke the sleeping bear, letting people have their own processing time, trusting that there will be a resurgence of life... hard for me. Learning how to do that.

Coffee chaff

I took my dog-eared pages of my almost-done proposal to Moonbean this morning to read and edit and scribble on the little patio outside with my usual fair-trade americano. While I was reading, a shaking of little ... flakes.. of some kind, brittle little organic leaf-like fragments... kept sweeping over me. In my hair, into my coffee, over my papers, my shoulders. Allan roasts his own beans, and this is apparently the chaff from the beans, flying out through the vents, covering all of the coffee drinkers, readers, chatters, smokers, neighbourhood gazers. Birds build their nests from it, Allan claims.

Being covered in periodic shakings of coffee chaff is just one of the odd, serendipitous, surprising moments of what it means to live in the market. Counter-culture in so many ways. There's the overt, active pushing at some edges -- the aggressive anti-car activism, claiming of the streets for street theatre, people, human scale movement, direct confrontation of the pot laws. Crack heads in the same park as the squealing little kids in the wading pools, all part of the same system. And there's more organic flowing texture into other cultural edges -- the woman who came into Moonbean today dressed in full Heidi garb, a blue and white checked gingham dirndl, big blond braids with giant blue delphiniums perched on the top of each braid; the out of shape middle aged man riding a bike down the street whistling "if you could read my mind" in perfect pitch, the topsy turvy melange of caribbean, asian, european and african food and garb, the countless pierc-ed would be artists, dancers, writers.

There's so much here about benign coexistence that I'm not sure how to make meaning of. It's more than cross-cultural appreciation. There's a chippiness to the more political elements of it, a hefty dose of the mushy minded left conspiracy theory/anti car crowd combined with some pretty sharp-edged anarchism -- but there's also, somewhere in there, a real accommodation of a system that is fundamentally about people and their differences and a sort of dynamic self-reliance.

Not sure yet how to understand my place here, what drew me here. But locating myself in it is a constant question mark about how we can coexist without othering.

Cumulating Cumulos

The clouds are heavy and stacked outside my window today, unfortunate for the bbq I'm going to this afternoon, celebrating the end of the fundraising intense tri-athlon my friend Danny dreamed up and made happen. Stephen Lewis is supposed to be at this event, presumably because Danny's been so instrumental in raising money for the SL foundation over the past several year.

Good place for me to keep shedding my vague unsettlement of the past days, a pivot point for a couple of things. The sense of feeling like I need to be more purposeful in my life, with schoolwork and what to do with it, and with my meandering sense of direction on other things. And Stephen Lewis as a key embodiment of that -- not only as an inspirational sort of figure, but because he was the spark for a paper I wrote on the social construction of emotions a few years ago, the first paper that really sent me down the path I'm on.

I remember the interview that triggered that paper on emotion as speech act, the first place I really recognized that emotion is performative, is in service of something, a request, a turn in the conversation, rather than this sort of unbidden, purely "visceral," "irrational" thing. I also remember that as a bifurcation point recognizing that how I see human interaction is so vastly different than how most people do, a perspective that means I sometimes bob along just under the surface of knowing how to talk about it, interpret it, use it in a useful way, because I feel sort of alone in the conversation.

When Suzie heard that same interview, her response was to want to take Stephen Lewis home and give him a good dinner to comfort him. My response was a sort of dawning awe that his emotive response to the AIDS crisis in Africa was possibly the only thing that would evoke the kind of reaction that people would have to pay attention to, and suddenly I understood emotion as a whole grammar in and of itself. And I also felt small and inconsequential in terms of what I've accomplished in my life, motivated to do something more important.

I haven't done anything important. Maybe my research will help further some kind of understanding about connection and responsibility, and if I can turn it into something applied, it might be useful. I hope this bbq will be a good cementing of my commitment to supporting Danny more concretely with his orphanage project in Uganda.

I had a really resonant conversation with my sister Friday night. We were talking about my niece, and she said she and my mom had a conversation about how Lulu is clearly smart, but, my mother said, "smart like me and you, not smart like C." And then she went on about how hard it is to raise a child you think is a lot smarter than you are, how you don't know if you're doing the right thing. I just looked at M, shocked, and she said, "you didn't know we talk about this all the time, about how we're smart but you're in a whole other dimension?"

That was a gaping little moment for me. The exposure of my mother's frustration her whole life, the ridiculousness of overplaying any brains I have, but more than anything, recognition that sure, I might have some capacity, but for so long I've been feeling like that is mostly muffled, unfulfilled, just muddling along, not doing anything substantive with it. I'm 41. I can't muddle anymore.

One of the truly sorrowful things I feel about the loss of the "could be" story with F is how tantalizing it was to envision a space to live into that "better self" -- the sharpening of my mind and resolve, the space to chisel the edges of ideas, all wrapped up in mutual opening up and curiosity. I hate that the timing was off, that it dissolved into more muddying, wet sludge instead of the crystaline, icy light-filled possibilities we found in the interstices. And I have to shake that off and find these other paths for substantive, edged thinking.

And on the way, maybe a little playfulness.

The Legacy of Mel

Someone posted a story about a former child star charged with drunken driving and marijuana possession and a car crash on my online forum, which included the line, "in which he suffered a broken rib and a shoulder injury, but did not go off on any anti-Semitic rants." I've decided that this is the perfect catch-all "you know, it could be worse" subclause. "She dropped her groceries all over the ground and swore loudly, but did not go off on any anti-semitic rants." "She defiantly lit up a cigarette right in front of the bar, but did not go off on any anti-semitic rants." "She sputtered furiously as she watched her ex openly smooch her new love on the street, but did not go off on any anti-semitic rants."

It's all perspective.

Goldfish have no memory

I've just spent an hour scrubbing my apartment of the rice and floor-mashed bananas and cheese bits and heaps of laundry and dislocated keys and all of the other residue of the lovely, too-short, sweatily chaotic visit of my sister and her family. My nieces are absolute delights, M and her husband calm amused parents, Loopy eating up all of my unwanted ice cream, all of us constantly shoveling food into the gaping piehole of my sweet grubby two year old niece. The four of them slept puppy-like in my silly blow up bed, Mica protected by a little boxy frame, M clinging to the side of the bed.

It was good to have them here in my place, and they left a mess and in the most indie girl fashion, I've spent an important decompressing hour with loud music and lusty wailing about loss and hope with cleaning tools in my hands. Ani DiFranco really knows how to capture that "little plastic castle/is a surprise every time" sensation about how we navigate life, loves, dreams, work that we strive for. The gleeful, eager greeting of the incandescence of new connection, the crumpling of the bruising moments, the surprise anew when what follows is difficult even when we know what to expect.

M and I had a good conversation about the role of a partner in one's life, about how it's more than just about domesticity, but also about the continuity of conversations like the one about the dilemma about voice/disclosure in my blog. I think I was partnered for so long I still need to keep learning about how to be content when these stories are more distributed, more dispersed, through my willow-branch-strong network. Like my learning, like my life in so many ways, I'm in community, not in a dyad or always in face to face connection. I keep learning about that from my so graceful long-time single friends, like M-who-was-in-Rwanda, like S, like J.

The real trick for me, I think, is to be present to where I am, content with what is. Listen to the silly reassuring earnest reggae, the prana of the yoga mat and the grounding of my feet, no restless mind about what *could* happen, no endless checking of email.

The probable-ending of my more-hope-than-real-relationship can certainly be traced out in Lucinda Williams and Ani and Tori and Liz and all of the other open yearning sometimes-angry grrls. But I'm 41, not 24, and the path forward doesn't have to be full of drama. Pluck Growing-up-Skipper (whom I dressed and redressed for Lulu about 50 times, after teaching her to say "Skipper, I'm sorry I pulled your head off") off the lamp. Put away the piles of towels and sheets and napkins. Turn off the lights that Lulu turned on with the dimmer remote. Scrub the counters. Go for a run. Finish editing the proposal chapter I wrote yesterday. Nap before D's party tonight. Take the skyline, my neighbourhood, the restorative energy of the now into my cells. Scan Nerve and summon up openness to diversion.

And besides -- what the HELL does "peel out the watchword" mean anyway? Definitely too old to be a real indie-grrl :-).

Love and other Near Death Experiences

Mil Millington writes the best titles, even when his books are really plotless, chortly adjacencies of witty turns of phrase. The title of his latest is really resonating for me this week.

I woke up this morning feeling a little azure, a little bereft, a pattern I've acquired in the last few years. I often wake up a thin malaise. Sort of like an inverse shivasana, an accumulation of simmering worries or sorrows. It dissipates over the morning and as I pick up steam, it vanishes and I get to be my usual optimistic and robust self. But first-thing-in-the-morning-Cate has a hard time not giving expression to the bruises or the soggy, quiet fears. I need to develop some better practices about calmer bedtime (no computer, no dvds on my chest) and not reaching for the email stream before I'm even out of bed.

These habits are a lot like the "Secret Single Behaviours" Sex and the City did a silly episode about. Unlike the SATC world, though, I suspect most people's "SSBs" aren't as much about examining pores in the mirror or eating crackers with jelly over the kitchen sink, and much more about what we do when we're alone and feeling the lack of refraction for the utterances that need voice. One of my clients, who's lived alone in the last few years since her kids both moved on, asked me seriously over dinner one night a few months ago, "when are you lonely?" Bedtime was her time, the echoing time between the day survived and the release of sleep.

My vaguely malaise-y morning was interrupted today with an email and subsequent phone call with a good friend going through her own near-death love experience. Discovery of betrayal, a hidden relationship, wrenching loss of trust, anger and self-lament. A story we all know, the set and the words hurled at each other the only specifics. (And even those words, so well-rehearsed -- "I thought you loved me, I trusted you;" "I was protecting myself, you were part of this." Scripts we all know). In my phone call, there were tears, reassurances, the girlfriend script enacted. Regrounding.

As I hung up, I was reflecting on a couple of things. This was a deep relationship for my friend. It's rare, really rare, to feel the kind of connection to someone that makes the air around you sing just because you're together, where just sitting and reading together can feel *active,* where you're not *working* to find things to look at together or talk about, but just flow. That's rare, and when we have it with our friends it makes us whole, and when we have it with people we also want to be naked with, it's an unbelievable, undeniable spark of good fortune. Dangerous to believe in, maybe, because we all know where it can go off the rails, and as we get older, we all carry so many other interlayered stories whose characters and voices appear suddenly in the now, twisting at it, reshaping against hope. But it hooks you in, that connection, that simultaneous threading of those moments in the dark when the music and flesh and shadows make you one, just right, the intense fragility of intimacy, and those moments that result in the tear-stained phone calls, the seeing yourself as foolish for the decisions you made that let you burrow further into intimacy.

When we connect in that depth of dimensions, that's also when de-connection becomes the frayed cord plugged into the socket -- and we all do that differently. Some of us cry and lament and yearn, others -- like her guy -- pull back, get cold, retreat.

My friend I was on the phone with is one of the open-hearted of the world, one of the warmest people I know, who gives and deserves so much love. This is a hard moment for her -- but she'll continue to offer her full self into her loves. I know that about her, and that's one of the reasons I love her so much. She believes that she'll find that connection that will bring her lightness. I believe that too, for her... and for me.

I don't know what's going to happen with my friend and her guy. In many ways, I hope this will give her the chance to let go of a story that she's tried to feed for a long time, a chance to let in another opportunity for that kind of connection, one where the map is more aligned. I don't know what's going to happen with F and me, either, not really. I wish our maps could be more aligned, but I certainly also understand that the leap from "I feel this connection" to "I'm going to dislocate my life abruptly" is pretty profound, and frankly, I probably wouldn't be able to do that quickly either. I get it. And... despite my friend's tears, the apparent folly of it all, I believe in that green light, and would like to be able to see if we could continue to feed the connection. But if we can't, if we can't find a way to do it that feels okay for both of us...I'll keep wriggling to find that current, that connection that infuses, that the edges of hope/fear that I feel every morning before my day takes me over yearn for.

Time after time

I ended the day in a cosy bar downstairs, crammed with people who are all living out their own stories in fluid, squiggly ways, listening to my neighbour Kat sing. Jazz, standards, her own songs, full-voiced, ochre spirit.

Kat "retired" one of her songs tonight, the Cindy Lauper song Time after Time, which she used to sing with her friend who died about a month ago. caught up in circles/confusion is nothing new/flashback warm nights/almost left behind/suitcase of memories.... Gorgeous rich focused moment, a crowd who loves her, soaring catching voice. A moment of perfect balance.

I dont really know Kat, but we touch edges now and again. I let her park her vespa in my parking spot, and we have little conversation fragments now and again -- my doorway, my countertops, me showing off my gold sandals to her and her young gay boyfriend Matt, my rescuing her from trying to cart her end of year project to school on her teetering bicycle.

I let myself live in my neighbourhood today, live into people who matter to me. M back from Rwanda, wrung out but so steady and sweet. Kat, a tentative friendship over coffee and muffins and talk of what happens to your energy when you die. Bethy and Huckleberry. A rueful phone call with my best friend D. Email chats with S & D, who matter despite their recent arrival into my life. A run along the water and an accidental encounter with an old pal. Dinner with J&S and Carly and so much love and warmth. Then the bar and the music and such... crowded warmth.

I was here today, present to loss and looking at everything square on and owning my parts and looking forward and sanguine shrugs. Tomorrow, I need to really get some work done. Today, I was living into being happy with the Cate that I am. A thread of disappointment, acknowledgement of my part in that, a belief that my richest stories are still before me.

The lure of narrative, the dull weight of the now

So F and I have realized that the vivid narratives of an imagined future we were weaving together had overtaken the possibilities of the now. I feel very foolish in many ways -- just two weeks ago, when I was in New Mexico, I said blithely to L "I'm happier than I've been in a long time, buzzing with all of this excitement and possibility." And then the plane hit the mountainside of F's existing commitments, his recognition that he can't let go of his current entanglements to really reach for the heady whispered stories we uttered in the dark and through our feverishly tapping fingertips. SCRITCH. Paper ripped from the typewriter and crumpled into the corner.

It feels so... jagged -- there were so many points of intersection, so many places to nudge each other's words and ideas and flesh into places we were both a bit afraid to go to, a rhythm of nosing each other just a little further into delight, held gaze, deep recognition, an edge of difference that illuminated. A truly rare dance. Wrong timing, maybe. I don't know what would have unfolded, been written, if we'd both come to this untangled. But this... this was an overwhelmingly raw opening up, an abrading shutting down.

From the perspective of narrative psych, you can call this kind of deep connection a lot of things. Love. Shared imagination. Excitement at new possibilities that seem to fit. Uncommon chemistry. Predestination. Whatever terms, mutually crafting the story should make it real...and it's flattening when the shared story that seemed to capture us both equally fragments and the so solid possibilities just dissipate into the ether.

I always feel like the powerful story should be enough for faith, for optimism that it could happen, should bulldoze over other obstacles. But, stories collide, that's the point of multivocality. They're never straightforward.

Being with him was... tauntingly connecting, such a fit in so many ways. It's flaying to lose that verdant shaping something that I've yearned for for a long time -- this particular kind of connection that includes a dream of a life on the ocean, shared ideas, provocative physicality, seeing the world. It's about F specifically, and a more general, long-set yearning. A narrative I'll never be able to let go of, not really -- that desire for the side-by-side gaze.

I'll be fine, I'll focus on school, scan the space around me for new stories to write, drink beer and flirt and live in my network of tight connections. But. It was a big story, one I've wanted for a long time, one I thought I'd finally found a co-author for... and it's wrenching to let it go.

Vertigo

This week has been a real test of living in the deeply uncomfortable space between places. What my dissertation chair Barnett called "the vertigo of lost certainties and the exuberance of new possibilities."

With F, trying to find a way to live gracefully in the cleavage between the now-space and the potential future, when there seem to be so many painful steps between here and that vivid tomorrow. How do we stay grounded, stay connected, hold faithfully to an image of what could be, work through a wrenching letting go of what's real today? Trust that the filters will all dissipate? I feel like my grace has fled the building, leaving me dancing to the music of a lumbering, one-beat-behind too loud bar band.

I'm struggling, too, with focusing on this research proposal I'm trying to write, finding the right words and flow that seem so present when I'm running, but the ideas become darting, indistinguishable minnows on the page. Dripping algae, when it should be silvery life.

And finally, this jarring experience last week in the form of a letter from the daughter of my lost friend and prof who died in May. She found this blog, where I wrote with the only kind of meaning-making I know how to do, trying to interpret and give shape to my own sense of loss, my failures and moments of gracelessness, trying to describe my experience and make sense of it. I did not expect it to be public -- naively -- and it's very distressing to realize that I've caused pain to people I feel nothing but kindness toward.

There is, of course, a discussion to be had about memoirs and blogs in general, and "who owns memory," and whether my experience and interpretation of that experience is more or less legitimate than the experience of someone closer. My book club had that exact conversation last month about Ann Patchett's memoir about her friend, Truth and Beauty, and I remember a rich conversation about that a few years ago when Toronto Life published a piece by Sylvia Fraser after Peter Gzowski died called "Peter Light and Dark." I thought it was a riveting and unflinching piece; many many other people thought it was a violation of his life.

Perhaps they were right -- but I'm so caught up in trying to capture and make meaning of all of the fissures and shadows and curves of our lives that I tend to see that kind of full portrait as an honouring of the person, not a slap in the face. I like to imagine that I'd feel the same way if someone wrote about me the same way, that I can see how my intensity and fierceness is not always leavened by the light and warmth and striving, that I can be a big pain in the ass to be intimate with. Maybe I'm kidding myself, and if I heard it in someone else's words, I'd flinch too. I'd certainly want to hear the part about the warmth and brains as balance, not just the fierceness. And maybe that was part of the problem with what I wrote about John, I failed to honour him enough.

Regardless of where my posts originated in terms of my beliefs about how we tell our stories, of course I'm distressed to cause someone pain. So I took down those posts and wrote K a note of apology.



All of the ravels of this week... they twine together, underlining for me that my stories are always so damned multivariegated, so complex. It's how I live... and sometimes it does make me yearn sometimes for certainty, simpler narratives.

Just before I moved to this loft, when I still lived on the street lined with narrow houses full of families, I was coming home one day and came across a little street poem. One, two, three telephone poles with little red construction paper hearts taped to them, with one word on each: Sorry. I couldn't see where the hearts led to, if they went up a path or not, and they ended just before my house. A few days later, one of them had blown onto our porch, and wedged itself into the ice and snow on the step.

I can imagine so many things about that story... from the mundane First Big Fight between a newish couple, to a generalized apology from the universe for pain and graceless moments. But the simplicity of the speech act -- the careful cutting out of the hearts, the tracing of the one word, the taping to the selected poles -- runs as a thread through my yearning. Cutting to the centre: we don't mean to cause pain. Sometimes we do. Forgiving moves us forward, both as the guilty and the hurt.

License plate bingo

is no fun by yourself. This is my conclusion after spending an hour and forty five minutes waiting in line at the Lewiston border between NY and Ontario yesterday.

It's ironic, this cross-border dating thing I seem to have going on right now. I grew up in a border town. Both my grandfathers worked in the US their entire lives, zipping back and forth across the bridge or tunnel every day. I have a strangely paradoxical internalization about that frontier. On one hand, we treated it like a bit of a game when I was growing up, hiding the clothes my grandmother bought us at Fairlane mall under our existing clothes, my mom sneaking into the duty free to buy smokes and booze even when we were just driving through the hour and a half to Sarnia to take the faster route to the cottage. On the other, I was raised with a sense of Scary Other about Detroit, cautionary tale of the "race riots" with their fires and smoke visible from our side of the river, of people hauled out of their cars at lights when they'd neglected to lock their doors, robbed or throats slit. Poverty and desperation folded into a kind of frightened racism that later integrated itself into a pretty strong aversion to the entire country, what I saw as a culture of self-absorbed smugness, consumerism and inability to understand its impact on the rest of the world.

The place still astonishes me. Driving across NY I-90 today, I listened to a real country station -- not the Dixie Chicks new country "empowering" stuff, but the kind filled with little announcements of gratitude to specific soldiers for doing their patriotic duty and songs about what you lose when you choose to spend your money on a cheap motel and a cheap woman and cheap alcohol instead of... I dunno, church? your wife? I also flipped the dial and heard an ad for the "Ave Maria group of funds," "ethical" investment choices for Catholics who don't want their money going to companies that support choice or non-married benefits. And you can't get a decent cup of coffee to save your life anywhere between Rochester and Lewiston.

At the same time, none of my American friends fits anything resembling the US stereotypes we all have. They're all passionate about participatory democracy, revile the administration, mistrust the way God is invoked in the public discourse (even when they actually go to church themselves), bend over backwards to understand diversity and inclusiveness.

It's all a big paradox... and constantly forces me to rethink my assumptions. I'd always seen this country as "over there," within view but arm's length from me -- and now seem to be spending more and more time becoming who I am in this context. Forced to face my own fears and fairy tales about the "affable menace" which is so much more multi-variegated than I'd ever allowed for.

(On, and for the record? Scored New York, Ontario, Connecticutt, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Maryland, Wisconsin, Florida, Massachusetts, Quebec, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Maine, New Brunswick, New Hampshire and Utah! while I was waiting in line at the border).

Swanning about

I've been swanning about again, heading home today from Albuquerque. It's been a full more-than-a-week. Am glad I did this New Mexico trip, though I'm ready to be home, need to be thinking and working and focused. I always get good movement on ideas and connections when I'm away, but need the home time to make something of it.

Spent the last five days in Albuquerque at a small conference, the division of the National Communications Association that concerns itself with social construction. It was a good reshaping place for me -- I always orbit the edges of this "real" academic world, the tenure track teaching/writing/publishing crowd. It pulls me into defining my work less from a studenty vague "some day I'll write some things" perspective and sharpens me into realizing I can do this now. Spending time in the Comms. discipline also reminds me of the deep multi-disciplinarity of my work, and underlines why straddling and lateral connections infuse my work -- am grateful I'm not a purist about eating food paid for by pharma companies, for example, unlike the guy who did his dissertation on the shifting discourse from impotence to erectile dysfunction. I liked him and his wife, both profs who do interesting work about commitment and performance and sexuality, but also realized how narrowly framed their worlds are in some ways.

The best part of this time here was L, my school friend who's becoming closer and closer. Funny that we sort of rubbed each other the wrong way when we first met, and now have such symbiosis. We're close on ideas, and I'm really happy to be her student reader, and I like her sharpness, her energy so much. She awes me, what she gets done in her life (three sons, one with severe cerebral palsy, an important job in a university, her research -- and she knows how to dance and let go). We had some giggly giggly can't-stop-laughing moments among our talk talk talk, and I love that we have that.

We spent the first couple of days at the beginning of the week in Santa Fe, with another school friend, and it just felt so RICH. We ate well, and hung out at K's, this crowded-in-so-many-senses sprawling ranch house (five teenagers, two tiny dogs, four adults, unbelievable flurry of art and antiques). Went to an exquisite spa in the mountains on Monday -- sat naked in the hot tub under the sky, dipped into a cold plunge pool, had hot stone massages. Talked and talked with these two smart, wise, funny, warm women. What a full life I'm leading.

And the opening note to my whole trip, last Saturday, Holly's wedding, the woman I met on a plane last summer, who spent the year in Afghanistan. Very pretty wedding. Some of the conventions give me the shivers (father presenting her to be married, introduced as Mr. and Mrs. with her husband's first and last name), but everyone there loves her very much, and it was lovely to be part of that crowd, and I'm just tickled about the ephemeral but durable part of the connection.

So many little plugs going into their sockets in my life, connections linking things together, electricity humming down the lines. Will get home late tonight, catch up with Darrell, who's been in Europe, see S for her birthday, do some work. Work on Monday, then drive off to ROC for a flying visit when F gets back from kayaking with his daughter in Maine. Work my ass off this week and deserve my planned weekend with F in TO. Somewhere in there I need to find me some client work, but it's all humming.