Moonpie's Great Ruckus of a Night

My insane wonderful online friend Melissa (well, we've actually met in real-life, so she's really just my friend Melissa) just got back home after a week at Cape Cod. She posted something in the middle of the night last night that I just had to guest blog -- she gave me the shake laughs.

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Please make a note of the time of day of this post. This is NOT A GOOD THING. I'm down here and possibly headed for the couch (debating now, as I'll definitely startle/wake the Mr if I head back upstairs). We (meaning he, due to a Very Bad, Very Excruciating Headache) got very little sleep last night. Had stuff going on all morning and he went into his office w/J before 7am! to just do some shit post vacation and pre-back to work. He napped this afternoon and I went to bed at about 10 (to the sounds of him downstairs, googling and printing and listening to and then singing, over and over, the French Nat'l Anthem)...he came up soon after.

So the night's disruptions began w/the focking cat in the hallway, scratching shit. The Mr whisper/mumbling about it, and me getting out of bed and saying, "kittykitty" or what the fuck ever, and going back to bed and finding that the whisper/mumbling Mr was not at ALL awake after all, and I got the Big Death Yell as he freaked out upon me coming back to bed. Back to sleep and then the phone rang. Wrong number. Back to sleep and then the fucking, fucking, dirty, viscious, verminous sons of whore raccoons came and knocked over our garbage (the garbage that I put out this afternoon and forgot to put into the garage, as we do in the summer). Well, fuck that----I went downstairs and hit the outside back light and opened the garage door and waited for them to startle so that I could see what the fuck it WAS (not going out there to get sprayed by a skunk---will risk my neck on those murderous raccoons, though). Little fucker stared right at me. I was SCARED---this was 1:30 am and I know that they ATTACK! and maim people or something. So I hissed and made noises and when they got far enough away, I ran over and grabbed the trash can and popped it into the garage----hit the "close" button and ran back into the house.

Back to bed (not asleep now, now listening to the Mr (don't want to overstate this---he wasn't being that pissy) go on about what a horrible, horrible night's sleep it was. Then round 2 w/the cat----the boy yelled MOM! or something that sounded like it...and cat (as she always does, it's her favorite place) was sprawled out over his pillow after having nibbled on his ear, lol. Grabbed the cat, back to bed w/cat (she never stays w/us, but I try). Almost asleep and then the cat decides that she's not just going to scratch at doors in the hallway, but she's going to leap up and scratch shit at the same time. Don't know what the fuck that was all about, but it was a Great Ruckus, and I just said, Fuck, I'm going downstairs----she'll follow me. The Mr asked me to close the door----I said, Scout will just scratch on it later...he didn't care. So here I sit, contemplating going up to bed (which will mean opening our bedroom door and freaking the Mr right the fuck out and waking him up again) or sleeping on the couch (which will be totally fine, if the CAT. leaves boy and Mr and upstairs doors alone and just goes to sleep.

All while reading this thread, I've been mouse-clicking w/one hand and playing w/the cat (waving that cat dancer toy) w/the other, hoping to tire the little motherfucker out so that she'll sleep on the couch w/me.

And in keeping w/topic, I do have some concern and am going out of my way for the Mr here, as he is running 14 miles tomorrow am and then going to pick up my Nana so that she can watch the soccer match w/us. He has had two really bad nights' sleep in a row.

There goes the CAT up the stairs. Fuck.

Roaming goats

I'm peering through my glasses darkly this morning, a little fogged by the residue of half a bottle of the goofily named Goats do Roam red and a scotch I pegged unwisely to the end of the meal last night. My friend Stephanie and I went to a Fringe play (decent play, Teaching As You Like it, memorable for at least one funny-in-context line about "Shakespeare, me and the Dutch" being the only people to not treat adults like children) and then ate salmon in the treetop-like patio of Kensington Kitchen. The kitchen was slow, and we drank almost an entire bottle of wine before the food arrived. We have such good rich conversations that make us both guffaw, simultaneously intimate and arch. Living in hyphens.

I was thinking about how many of the people in my life right now have fluttered in this year, really, and how I'm hooking my meaning and self into them as much as to the people who've been around longer. And how others have floated out almost completely, like the wholesome little couple and their kids I ran into at Moonbean today. L&A were part of the Great Lesbian Switcheroo of 99 and we uneasily run into each other every couple of years, maybe on Pride, shiftily exhuberant. People sliding out, new ones ripening in, stories of futures written that I would have never imagined a year ago.

I managed to steer my torpid little body down to Nathan Phillips Square for the art show. I didn't see anything this year that made me gasp the way I felt about the Bathers or the Jane station piece I bought in January after seeing it there first last year -- but I bought a fun little print of a french bicycle and a man wrestling an alligator from this woman, and a collagey thing with a bunch of machines and some text on it from this artist. Do It All it says. Over my desk it goes.

Off for a hot run to force myself into a less sluggish physical space, and another Fringe play, with D. A little playtime before the intensity of DC, school, an six months' worth of conversations in five days.

The Bathers

A year ago today, I moved into the apartment in J&S' house. My chosen family in the typically queer sense, held in the warm borders of their little trio-with-large- Saturnic-rings.

It was a good space for re-finding feet, letting myself feel through the waves of letting go, moving forward, that I staggered through over the next few months. It started out with a carapace of mimed strength, scaffolding my trembling self through the unfamiliar motions of figuring out solo future. Painting my bedroom crimson, vowing to not turn it into a monastic cell, my trip to the Nathan Phillips Square art show to insert some narratives of my own into my space. Dripping tears on the subway over my art on the way home, so sad that A couldn't meet me even in the closing ritual I wanted of buying each other a piece of art. Buying some for myself.

I hung that image of The Bathers on the wall at the end of my bed, and gazed at it many times over the next few months. It's the sense of memory. Smiling, relaxed, women by the seaside, recreated from snapshots, colour added by the articulator, seen through a yanked-through-time lens, fogged over. The bottle that floats half up through the image feels like the last picture on a roll, the stuck moment in an old-fashioned slide show when you split the pic in half and see it from the middle.

How we make stories, bricolage of what's there, our own memories, our own hopes. Certainty and wonder always contrapuntal. We are so knowing, then the story shifts slightly and all is questioned. Emulsions of perspective, slivering of meaning. I realized last week that I thought for years my Grandmother's middle name was Evelyn, but read something a couple of years ago that made me think I was wrong. I never asked her. Her obit didn't include it. I'll never be certain, just as I can never remember if my dad's death day is March 21 or March 22 without checking the perpetual calendar for 1992 for which day was Sunday.

Much of the last year has been about living into my Cateself, my me so joyful in this flat, enlivened by the work I'm doing, the way I am me with people whose hands I didn't know I'd wander with, watching myself unfold with F in a wholly open, grounded way. It's also been about framing the story of the self-with-A, the decade and a half that made so much of me, facing the parts I played in that theatre of acceptance and rejection, recognizing them in me now as backward-through time, fogged through a split lens, tangible to look at, no longer possible to remember what the inside really feels like.

Melange

It's been a weird little blend of days. Since I got back from Windsor, I've been trying to hunker down and get some real reading/writing done, and I'm making progress, but my committee meeting next week is looming at me. I have a magnet of a cartoon on my fridge that says "Clive was about to come face to face with the ball he had dropped long ago." I haven't exactly dropped the ball -- am doing a lot of reading and thinking about this project -- but not much of it has coalesced or made it to paper. Still a lot of uncertainty, the kind that Frank and Barnett help me walk through, but Lita tends to squish a bit. So I need to get on top of that.

In the middle of this stewing of ideas, my little online world had some upheaval. A grating cohabitation of worldviews finally came to a head (I think it can best be described as a some flailing badly-hidden judgement from a bunch of small minded christians and the final burst of impatience from a bunch of hooerish pagans -- the usual clash of civilizations). After a Battle Royale, a bunch of us just left and set up a new place. I like to think of it as a Quiet Revolution, abruptly creating a new world where we are no longer bound by the strictures of the Church and they sell unconsecrated hosts in the local depanneur. More drama than I wanted to deal with, but it feels much better to have an online hangout where the complexities of my life aren't met with tight-lipped head-shaking.

I'm trying to create some mindful, quieter space in all of this. I had a good longish run on Monday, hot and elemental, and a stroll-y walk to and home from the dentist yesterday. The view across Riverdale park from Broadview really is one of the best moments in the city. It was good to immerse myself in it, glide through the balmy air and the baseball playing and the people sitting on their porches in Cabbagetown and the honking shouting Italians and the yacking cellphoners on the streetcar. Ran this morning and detoured to my old street so I could see what A has done to the house -- I knew she was doing some work, and it looks good. It's yellow, now, with some really nice landscaping.

Many things in my life are crystalizing -- getting crisper on my conceptual framework for school, a couple of work possibilities, the shape that's starting to emerge for who I can be with F. The lake is in the way, and a few other distractions, but it feels like a life, a space, I can, want to, live into. Quite giddy-making, really.

And this morning, I toasted my bagel in my Grandma's toaster. This toaster doesn't pop, it glides the bread up. I like that sensation.

Tessellations

I'm quilted with images from the weekend. My last glimpse of my grandmother, cold and small and dignified. My ex's hand in mine, tight, so familiar and so foreign, in front of my grandmother's coffin. Taking my cousin's hand and leading her inside to see Grandma, her a little sister for a moment, her gorgeous children in her husband's hands. Stef strolling the graveyard in her cherry red hair with a sharpie, correcting the spelling of our name on the signs. Back at Grandma's, Em finding a fossilized egg, Tony 1982, solemnly holding it up. Issy and Seb dancing for the video camera on my phone. Em playfully dancing for the same camera. Jane's firefighter friend inspecting the plug on Grandma's toaster, the one I've always loved, before I took it as my memento. Jeff and Beth dancing in the hall, practicing for their wedding, earnestly playful.

My last Windsor image -- pulling off the expressway for a moment in Ste. Anne's cemetery, to see dad, leaving him a pink gerbera daisy I tugged out of the flower arrangement on his mom's coffin. His stone looks a bit lonely -- the ones around are obviously more frequently visited -- and it feels so ironic, given that he was always the centre force of whatever was going on. I find him there, though, always, just a brief connection, telling him where I've been and where I hope to go. Usually I bring him small rocks from where I've traveled, but I forgot to find something in Oregon. The single daisy -- his favourite flower -- sparked some vividness into the grey stone.

My drive home was far more floaty than my drive out, less time in the speedy zone with propulsive music, more intuitive but relaxed traffic flow. I hit a storm near London that plunged me into the familiar world of my childhood storm watching, the weird grey charged sky counterpointed the suddenly vivid greens of the trees, lightning flicking down all around me. I miss those overheated moments of heightened ions, where colours are stark, the air alive, my breath shorter and giddy. Storms always evoke the family nexus of the cottage, so distant now, my mother's entire family dissipated, my hours of staring at the lake stored in the place of fragmented dreams and dimly remembered novels.

This has been such a year of reminding me of the allotment of decades, the stacking up of history that is simultaneously part of the learned present and snapped suspended into an image that I need to peer at to remind myself of any resonance, struggle to remember. My split, the scattering of some friends of my life with A, the deaths of friends' parents, John, Grandma. No reconnection with my mother's sister. So many shifts, and here I am, made of all of this mosaic of life stories, looking where I want to go. With F, with my work, with my bio and chosen family. Living into as much vividness as I can.

The Pollard Triplets

Yesterday was a very. full. day. I kissed F goodbye at 7:00 a.m., knowing I wouldn't see him again for weeks, ran back in with a latte for him, clutching my own americano, then hurled myself onto the highway. I was still on Spadina at 7:30, impatiently cursing the four enormous Chinese tour busses moving like whales to my tiny aggressive fighting fish, but then attacked the road. Being late for the funeral would have been Not. On, so I focused all of the energy in my body into driving fiercely and fully, fast but very focused and attentive. Pulled into the parking lot at Sacred Heart Church in Lasalle just before 10:30. This was a Feat.

First people I saw were my stepmom and youngest sister, then my dear cousin Matt, then, in the foyer to the church, A. She was weepy, and we held each other. She held onto me as I said goodbye to Grandma, crying and saying, "she always accepted us, she was always nice to me." This was true. She was a very accepting woman in some profound ways -- picky about things that related to *her*, but not about how other people lived their lives. Bloody independent. Fiercely determined. (These things I apparently come by honestly).

Being with A was so resonant in this family space. She stayed for the mass, and I could feel the shift from loving connection to a more guarded place as the hour beside each other wore on. But that was okay. We quietly provided entertainment for my cousin's two year old in front of us (A's sunglasses, my business cards), Laura matter of factly referring to A as "Auntie A" to Serene. Still family, of course, in this swirl of a clan that included all manner of exes as well as currents. Stef and I joked that the obit should have just said "survived by a giant unruly brood," and this captures it -- roles not so important.

I do love my clan. From the three aunts who fostered me into being in so many different ways to my cousins who are so in my heart to the impromptu queer caucus Jen, Stef and I found ourselves in. Jen has come into being the person she has been navigating since she was about 3, and this is so good to see. Em and I planning a road trip together because we don't spend any alone time. Petra whispering to me at the sign of peace "don't forget us, there's no one to hold us together." We hang together softly and tentatively, poky bits here and there, shaping each other more gently than my mother's family did.

It's all about belonging, seeing ourselves in our quiet roots, telling the stories. We went back to Grandma's afterwards and went through photo albums, drank some beer, ate leftovers. Looked for the easter eggs that were still in the rafters -- Em found one that said Tony 1982. The annual hunt my dad made. Heard the stories of my dad cramming all the kids into his van without telling anyone else and taking them for ice cream. My dad taking the giggle of girls for a walk on the train tracks in their easter dresses, bringing them back a bit shredded and grubby and overheated with adventure. My dad so missed in the leavening of the clan.

Looking at the pictures, we cooed about resemblances -- "look, this picture of Tony at 8 -- I never noticed before how much Raymond looks like him." "Is this Matt, Chris or Ray?" Mocking our foibles -- "which wedding was THIS, Aunt Susan?" Trying to trace the stories that wind us together. "What baby are you holding here, Mary Ann?"

Some of the stories are so peripheral they evaporate even as we look at the pictures. "I think that's one of the Pollard triplets," said Mary Ann about the mystery baby. I have no idea who the Pollards are, really, remember hearing the name, maybe neighbours, like the 1930s mom bathing her tiny baby (Dick, 5 weeks, it says on the back) in a bowl on a table, gone forever now, an erased extra in our central narrative, someone who shaped my grandmother at some point in her life. Recognizing that we're all like that, vivid in our present moments, eliding into an cypher in an album in an old lady's house as decades slide by.

It all makes me determined to continue to grab onto the present with fierce joy. I want to find a way to help make sure there that without the centre to our clan, we still stay connected. That I keep building the sense of family with A. That as I figure out what kind of a "we" there could be with F, it stays vivid and rooted and about delighting each other.

I left my grandmother's with her toaster as a memento (I love that she used it everyday), and an old pie plate and muffin tin for Melissa. I think she'll like those. My bag is full of photos to scan and build into our mythology about dad, our senses of self among the brood. Stef was worried it would feel like pillaging, but it didn't -- we were building stories together, respectfully talking about what kinds of mementos people would like to take. Using my new treo to take little videos of Issy dancing, Seb kung fu fighting, Em dancing when I bid her to. A swirl of an unruly brood, carrying ourselves forward, connected.

Loosely coupled

When we think about relationships, organizations, cities, as systems, one of the questions that comes up is how tightly "coupled" different parts of the system are -- are two parts of a process so closely wound together that they are completely interdependent, that they need each other to function in order to function? Or is there "looser" coupling, slack in the connections that may create less rigidity and predictability, but more opportunity for creative responses?

My grandmother's death is making me realize how loosely coupled this part of my family system is. There is no reason for us to all hang together, really, no overarching narrative of what it means to be part of this "clan," no central point of connection. We've all had a sense of warm enough "obligation" about Grandma in the past decade, have our own more tightly coupled points of connection (me and my one set of cousins, my mom and Jane) and somehow those points allow information to travel through the system in a reasonably effective way, and we stay a system, of a sort. We enjoy each other at the one or two family gatherings that happen a year -- weddings, milestone birthday parties, the occasional casually put together Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner of who happens to be around -- but the connection points are loose.

One glaring example of this is that Grandma's obit missed a few people. Including Grandpa, some grandchildren, the family members who don't have obvious role nouns attached to them (like the dead sons' wives and Ray and Nicole, whom I think of as my cousins, but who are technically second cousins to me, and not grandchildren to my grandmother). It was, I'm sure, hastily cobbled together by my aunt, who seems to have the reluctant role of making the family happen. I'm sure some people were hurt by the omissions -- and this also points out the gap in any kind of "authority" in our family. There is no "they" to actually be hurt by, to feel shunned by -- just the pointed evidence of the way we hang together, haphazardly, twisted together with old rope in no real patterns.

Melissa and I had a conversation yesterday about how to honour Grandma's memory if she doesn't go to the funeral -- and I strongly urged her not to take Mica on a plane yet. "Maybe a memorial euchre game," she fretted, "among the sisters." That makes sense to me.

Stef and I had a more pointed, self-effacing conversation about our shared experience of feeling quite bad that our first reaction was yes, sadness, but backgrounded to how this affected OUR plans, lives, how our recognition of loss is distant enough to be refracted through the other more vivid ways we connect to our worlds and family. We shared a bit of a sighing reaction to timing -- me re F's visit, hers re trying to recover from illness, find time to go to Windsor with J and his kids later in the summer -- but she also put boldly up front some of the mini-stories that keep the narrative of C----- Family bumping along:

"C and i had better play this one VERY shrewdly, if we're going to keep everyone *else* from using this opportunity to make off with albums full of pics of dad and anything else of his...which really should be ours, not just for our specific lineage but also for our fascination with, and commitment to, studying things like genealogy, where we come from and knowing more about WHO WE ARE..."

"i wonder what happens to the fossilized eggs in her rafters" (A reference to the easter egg hunts that emblematize my dad to us, and the mythic leaving of eggs in the attic from year to year).

"i wonder if grandma WILL be leaving sarah all her lipsticks... (A reference to the infamous time that my cousin, at 6, said "Grandma, when you die, can I have your lipsticks?").

I think that's what the life of this woman, my grandmother was about -- making this sprawling family happen, setting the tone for determination and loose connections, creating a world that circles together, flows in and out of contact points, small stories holding us in familiarity.

I'm looking forward to seeing people tomorrow, seeing my current self in this context, feeling the connections that have shaped who I am and am becoming in this part of my life. And I'm watching myself in that loosely coupled space, gazing at where F and I could go, valuing the other dynamic connections in my life that move closer together and further apart and back again into rhythm. Grateful for the warmth I'm feeling in the end of the coupledness with D, for the continued opening up of my friendship with S, for the warm reconnection with A earlier this week. Grateful for all that is reflecting me back in the ways I want to be seen, giving me space to be.

Leaning into it

My grandmother died this morning, fairly unexpectedly. Margaret C----, born Seguin. Raised 7 children, two of whom went before her. She would have been 95 this September, and, as far as these things go, had a really great run at it. She still lived in her home I remember seeing built when I was a little girl, and in fact, still drove. Very healthy, though of course frail over the past few years. She fell and broke her hip on Monday, had surgery last night, and then died of cardiac arrest this morning.

I'm in the edges of the family on this one, a goer-along, not in the middle of the vortex the way I was with my other grandparents. When my mother's father died in September 2001, the family swirl was a category 5 hurricane, all boats blown off their mooring and the landscape changed forever: anger and drama at the deathbed, angst over the will, my aunt no longer speaking to my mother, locus of family togetherness gone. This is more of a predictable spring rain, the passing of someone who lived a completed arc, no tectonic plates to shift as a result.

Because I'm in the margins here, and was amiable with but not close to this grandmother, I have the luxury of feeling slightly selfish about this. Mildly irritated with the timing, sighing with heaviness at yet another funeral so close after John's, tweaked with loss of my dad, irritated that I can't seem to spend a full week in my place with writing momentum, wishing my time with F wasn't going to be truncated a little. Working hard to find the space to honour my grandmother's life among my edgy little emotional space. Knowing I'll find the right zone, breathing deep.

The space between

In a lot of the work I do about relationships and dialogue, we talk about "the space between" people -- the energy between the "I" and the "Thou" (in the Buberian sense), what it is we create in relationship that is not me and not you.

I've been rolling a lot of ideas about identity around on my tongue for a few weeks now, and had a little flash of insight last night in my little mini-dips into pride.

In the afternoon yesterday, I went to Carly's 2nd bday party, a rich little trip into my running identity, my role as part of J&S's chosen family, my aunt-self to Amelia, echoes of my 8 months in that upstairs apt. I navigated the garden party in my little floral sundress, bonded with J's stepmom Char, felt connected.

Then I had a date with D, our last date-date as we transition our relationship into friends. We had dinner on a heart-of-the-village patio that seems to be the nexus of my Pride Lite. I had dinner in this seething place Friday night with Darrell and David, and then last night, D and I met my sister Stef and her guy Jon (in the pic) there for dinner. On the way in, we ran into our cousin Jen, also out doing the pride thing.

After dinner, D and I were standing on the street, drinking coffee, smoking our single pride Lucky Strikes she'd cadged from someone in her charming way, and I noticed someone dressed in what felt librarian-ish garb -- stoic shoes, long dowdy black skirt, frumpy sweater. "Interesting choice of drag," I thought, especially counterpointed to the crazy carnival drag all around. Moments later, the librarian (who I thought was a guy) squealed, "you were on KINK" and ran over to D. She blushed, he gushed, "I LOVE you, you were so hot, I'm a hermaphrodite from New York City, my mother is a Jehovah's Witness but is totally supportive of me, GUYS, this girl was on KINK." Etc. I stood there, coolly observing in my little black slip, smoking my fancy American butt, watching hir hug D. We all wished each other happy pride, then I turned to D. "I didn't know you were on Kink." We both laughed.

We had a good night, our last one as lovers, honest and connected and loving, both clear that more is not going to work for us, but affectionate in that transition. She is so... brave and smart and dignified. I'm so happy to have her in my life -- she teaches me a lot about relational space.

And that's what I was reflecting on while I was walking home. The space between. My identity triangulated between my family (queer and straight), my most intimate friend (and former lover) of 25 years, my recent lovers, queer and straight, male and female and somewhere between, kinked and not. Me, in that space stretched between all of them, fully, fluidly myself.

My two girls

Am home now, after a good little domestic sojourn with my sister's family and my cousin's happily buzzing home. Lots to do to try to get my admin in order, some client work, some school writing. So just a fly by post with a sweet sweet pic of Maya and Mica yesterday.

Mica

Newbabyniece has been born, joining her fierce grubby sweet-smiled older sister Maya, in the world. Her arrival was a little precipitous -- at home (planned), Sunday (unexpected), with no one there but my sis, her husband and my 2 y.o. niece. The midwives had been signaled but they didn't arrive until a few minutes after Mica did.

Mica's way of slipping herself into the world had already weathered one big sandstorm, back in December when my sister had to have an emergency appendectomy when she was 12 weeks pregnant. The quick, two push Sunday afternoon birth was a remarkably calm and casual way of sliding into our space, really, and greeted by her resourceful parents with a kind of warm matter-of-factness. (Of course, this is my sister who contemplated the appendectomy without anesthetic).

I'm amused by the contrast between my sister's perspective ("it was all natural and I did spend my whole pregnancy working on opening up my hips, it was a lot easier than Maya's birth, with the two hours of pushing"), her very seasoned midwife's perspective ("most births happen with this kind of flow, this one was a little fast, all is well") and the rest of the world (How dramatic! Weren't you on the phone with 911!). I admire my sister's groundedness tremendously, the way the swirl can swirl and she just lets it go. No big drama about the fact that, despite the intense anticipation of the new baby, the one set of grandparents (who were supposed to look after Maya if necessary) accidentally had their phone off the hook all day (Loopy drove over there with Maya after the birth to find out if his parents were dead on the kitchen floor -- they were reading in the backyard, oblivious to the fact that they hadn't heard from their sons on Father's Day) and the other grandmother was in the casino in Windsor with her cellphone off.

And so I enter my Aunt Cate role, reading to Maya, holding the baby in the crook of my arm as we eat thai food, beaming at my sister and her gorgeous, rooted little family. So happy to be part of this seasoned little micro-climate.

Squiggly

Am back at home, busy busy busy, breathing in my own space again and reminding myself what it feels like to live here. The humidity makes me less crisp than I felt in the PNW, and I've had really discombobulated sleep... but lots of things are zinging into place. Had good people connections this week -- two wonderful sleepovers with my gorgeous young friend Amelia -- rich friend time with D and S and the bonus of an incredibly affirming 166 minute conversation with Pamela in chicago, with whom I build so well. I understand me, she her, ourselves together so well in our talk space. Rich time with lovers, as well, including the protracted question mark of F that will be answered, somehow, tomorrow.

Lots of pondering of identity this week, lots of ahas. More about that later. As a portal, a breakfast conversation with Amelia, conducted with the aid of finger puppets.

"You used to have a girlfriend, right?"

"Right. You met her."

"But sometimes you have boyfriends too?"

"Right. Sometimes girlfriends, sometimes boyfriends. You know how Aunt Janny used to be married to a man, but is now with Sheri? Sometimes people like boys and girls."

"But not at the same time?"

"Well, sometimes at the same time. But not usually. But people are all different. You know how we have fairy tales of the prince and princess meeting each other and living happily ever after? Mostly it just doesn't work like that."

[rollicking conversation played out with puppets, veering into gender roles and occupations for princes and princesses, Charles and Diana, divorce and Camilla Parker-Bowles as a green shiny lizard puppet and why Amelia has never heard of C P-B]

"So... it's gay if you're a man and lesbian if you're a woman... how come there are different names?"

"Well, sometimes people say gay for both... but it's a good question and not easy to answer." [Some discussion of the isle of Lesbos, Greece and clinical pathologizing of same sex lust].

"Amelia, do you actually know the word for if you like someone of the opposite sex? Like if girls like boys?"

[she shakes head]

"Most people call it Straight. There are other words, but that's the most common."

"Straight? Why?" [confused face]

"Well, because it's the most common and predictable way to love people... like a road that goes straight ahead?"

"So... if you like boys AND girls, it's Squiggly?"

He thought that I thought...

One of the things I've been reading while I've been here (still in Oregon) is Alison Bechdel's astonishing memoir about growing up, called Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. It's a remarkable book -- she grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania with a closeted gay father who was a high school English teacher and ran a funeral home. (The "Fun Home" of the title). I've been such a fan for so long of DTWOF, and this graphic novel form for her own life just takes her work to a whole new level.

At a pivotal point in the book -- when she's come out to her parents and this has provoked a shift in her father's silence about his own identity -- she describes a letter from him to her at college: "He thought that I thought that he was a queer. Whereas he knew that I knew that he knew that I was too."

I think this is a remarkable way to describe all of the contexts that go into how we make meaning, identity, stories together. We figure out what we think the other person's reality is and we wrap our responses into that.

The book is a tremendous read on its own -- funny and reflective and insightful and tragic and sad -- and beautifully art directed -- and it's also a fractal for the musing I've been doing about identity and storytelling since I've been here. I've been thinking a lot about the point and shape of our narratives, in all sorts of ways.... from a conversation about United 93 where someone said "I know the story, I don't know why I need to see this," to rewatching Eternal Sunshine, which so brilliantly floats us on how our stories, relationships always shape who we are, to thinking about the pen I hold now in front of blank paper, wondering which hooks of my past will become the themes I build my future plots on.

I read an interview with Bechdel where the writer -- inevitably -- compared her childhood experiences to Six Feet Under. She said she'd only seen one or two episodes, and she'd often wondered if Alan Ball had ever overheard her talking in a coffee shop, because the family funeral home/closeted gay funeral director premise seemed too uncanny. Of course, the bare premise is the same -- but the fullness of each version of that premise is completely different. And that, I think, is the mystery and intensity of lived narrative... that we can have such similar bones and yet be so brilliantly different... that the many many many bifurcation points we face in all of our day to day decisions create such difference, different possibilities, different realities.

It's possible to make the point that making a movie like United 93 is a way of not rendering a story "untellable" -- an important factor for any culture... that's true, I think... and I actually thought the true accomplishment of that film was the way it didn't "other" the terrorists (in fact, drew parallels to the other passengers), and the way it played the seizing of the plane by the passengers not as heroic but as a simple act of self-preservation. There were no grandiose statements about saving the lives of anyone on the ground, just a flimsy hope that they might as well try to save their own lives. Those two simple reframes of some of the "assumptions" about the story that tend to mark the way the story gets publicly told -- that the terrorists are "other than" us (scary shoe-bomber chaotic people), that the passengers were "heroes" -- alone make the movie an achievement.

Bechdel's book is that same kind of achievement -- a powerfully insightful tracing of how she came to understand "truth" and reliability, and in a way, to be at peace with the acknowledgement that each of our truths is ours alone, shifting even in the moment as we name it to ourselves. What I build into this is that our moments of shared "agreement" on a truth are the mystery and wonder of how we live together and twine ourselves into each other; the willingness to hold each other's truth as possible even when we don't share it is the art and work of living.

Beachy houses

One more pic of where we were... our house was just behind some of the houses you can see in the pic, atop a little hill. *Apparently* above the expected tsunami line, but there were Tsunami Evacuation signs and warning zones everywhere.

Suspension

Am back in portland. I have one more day here before I go home, and I just want to hang suspended, untethered, for a few more hours. I'm not sure I'm ready to come home just yet, not sure I "got what I wanted" from this time (whatever that was), but I do feel like I nourished myself in some important ways, got some clarity on some things, explored some edges of self and desired self, had a few more questions posed, grappled with some of them, laid a little epistemological foundation for the work I'm doing. I realize how much I love this unstructured time and how generative it is and that I need to make more of that happen in my "real life" -- don't know how exactly, but it's a goal, now.

My time at the beach was good, and I loved the water. Unbelievably unfettered, roiling, endless horizon. I went for a longish run on the tide flats yesterday morning, and a shorter one today. Entering that space, mist and roil and whoosh and hard soft wet dry shifting footing, tugs me down into the earth in a way that nowhere else ever does.

The one edge to the trip was some tension in my coordination with Jane, which erupted a bit in the car on the way home. It was there between us the whole time but I think the little cracking of the surface surprised us both and left me feeling a little bruised. Trying to unpack the meaning of that for me -- it's about matching pace, breathing between the vertebrae, listening deeply, wondering how intimacy will get made for me in new ways. Not sure what to make of it yet.

I didn't manage to capture the full coastal vista we could see from various points along the road on the way back -- we stopped at a state park with an astonishing perspective -- but I did find a twillight moment that represents the place in a tiny way. It's a magnificent place.

Liminal space

We're here, on the coast, in a town called Manzanita, and this ocean is so "in my blood like holy wine," as Joni put it. It's a gorgeous little town (pics when I get back to portland -- I forgot to bring the camera cable) and the beaches are long and deep and inviting. The little house we have is just up above the water a tiny bit (possibly above the tsunami line), with views across the water and hills up to the north. The colours are more vibrant than the gulf island water/sky/mountains that are my first thoughts about the northwest -- pinks and deeper blues and sand along with the endless array of greys. Big waves, constantly moving.

It's the perfect liminal space, this beach, suspended between sea and land. When I was in New Zealand 10 years ago, I was awed by the west coast of the south island, where the land seemed to be in creation right before our eyes -- waterfalls where there were none the day before, seismic tremors that shifted roads and hills, glaciers visibly moving, rushing river where there had been a bridge, rain drumming down with intent. It's less *overt* here, but I feel the same creation energy, mini landscapes sculpted by waves, tiny cultures in the sand, here and gone, endless possibilities.

Don didn't end up coming, so it's just me and Jane, which is a nice face-to-face gaze for us. It's a tonic, this place. Jane and I walked long on the beach until we were alone with the moon after dinner, then stayed up until 3:00 a.m. talking -- family constellations, our work, energy fields we don't fully understand. Then I slept like a well-ferberized baby.

I'm posting from the perfect west coast cafe (good espresso, good scones and muffins, non-quaint stained glass), and we're going driving down the coast a bit today. Then some reading and more good food.

Life is good :-).

Fly-by

I'm off to the beach house today with Jane and Don (Jane is a friend from my school program, who started with me and is progressing about the same dogged but Not Fast pace; Don is her sweet husband). I think I'll be out of online range most of the time I'm away... I'm looking forward to the ocean and the sky and some quiet reading time.

Had a lovely little serendipitious interlude yesterday. I woke up early and hied myself off to a little diner I'd seen earlier in the week. While I was eating at the counter, I struck up a conversation with the guy sitting next to me (why does this never happen at home? It keeps happening here), who turned out to be an interesting, friendly guy. He's a test pilot (something about companies ordering customized helicopters and planes) who lives just outside of Portland, big climber/hiker/cyclist/etc. When we finished our eggs, he offered me a little walking tour of the neighbourhood we were in; we walked on a bridge or two, then talked about hiking in the city, and we ended up deciding to hike on some of the city trails in the hills. All very spontaneous, and we had a wandering afternoon, first tromping on the roads that wind through the hills, where the houses implausibly perch right on the edges. We talked as we tromped --life, travels, relationships, hiking, politics, cities -- and had a warm, connected time. After about three hours of hiking, we descended, shared a milkshake, and parted ways. We exchanged phone numbers, but I don't know if I'll have time to reconnect in the less-than-two-days after I return.

Now, for a quick run along the Willamette, then packing, then off to the coast. I'm sad that this is my last week!

Starlight

Am back in Portland. Feels oddly like coming "home" -- it's all relative, I guess... had a lovely time in Vancouver with my online pals. Was in good rhythm with Katie -- who else would march briskly across a whole city with me, circling Yaletown for an hour before finding it, and never complain about it? We were well matched for walking and talking -- and then dinner with Janice and Bonne was just lovely. What a great little group of smart, accomplished, warm, gorgeous women -- it was a great treat.

As always, it really made me reflect on how odd this little online friendship thing can be. Posting with someone in online boards gives as good a portrait of "who they are" as any corporeal space experience I've had -- interacting on forums mirrors how people interact face to face in some remarkable ways. I've never been truly surprised by anyone I've met in real life after getting to know them online -- really provokes lots of questions about how we enact ourselves, and how some qualities are approximated in different ways in different spaces, but they still add up to the same overall picture. You don't necessarily know the timbre of someone's voice, or their pace of speaking, or the warmth of a smile -- but you know what's going to invoke that smile or make them snort with derision. The number of people I know who've met romantic partners online is testament to the potential intimacy of this way of relating.

And... sometimes I worry about the dispersion of self that is made in such a networked, mediated life. Digital space is as "legitimate" a realm to meet people in as any other space -- and I have such a diversity of people I've connected to because of my online world, such experiences (the Greeley Stampede, for example) I would have never otherwise had. There's also a mutual consent factor to the online world that creates an interesting kind of relational responsibility -- there is a huge difference between middle of the night gut spillage and self-doubt that is expressed online, where anyone who happens to be around, up and willing to participate in the conversation can respond -- and, say, tearfully calling a friend at midnight.

At the same time, I think there is a sometimes seductive detachment to the distance of that space, where the optional aspects of it create fragmentation. The connection *is* pretty much possible completely on your own terms, without having to deal with corporeal irritants or the mutual modulation of energy and space. I think having a lot of connections online (in fora and email) allows both best self (patience, attentiveness, depth of conversation) and a potential disengagement, a kind of a-responsibility, in some ways. Of course, a voice is a voice and you are going to respond to a friend's joyful announcement or depths of sorrow -- but there's also a kind of smooth polishing off of the edges possible that could allow us -- me -- to float above the messy space of intimate coordination. Not sure of the implications of this pondering. Just... pondering.

So... coming back from my little real world encounter with my online world people, I disembarked from the LRT from the airport right into crowds lining the streets of Portland for some festival. Chairs all set up along the road, families doing the so-American tailgate thing with some skill. Little girls marking off Wade Family zones with chalk, kids and parents playing frisbee and football in the road, little barbecues and picnics all set up. Jesus people wandering up and down the street purveying their messages. Apparently there's some Rose festival this week, and this 5K run and Starlight Parade starts it off.

I wandered down to a little tacqueria in the middle of the route and had a chicken burrito and a beer while watching the scene. Portlanders are friendly -- one family invited me to watch with them, having staked out space with an extra chair, just in case. Instead, I perched at the little table along the window in the restaurant and chatted with a nice young couple from Ithaca, NY (who, it turns out, grew up near Detroit) for over an hour, about life and work and the west coast and Detroit and race and Portland and running. We watched the 5K, with the fun costumes and toiling exhuberant people, and the beginning of the parade. I'd had enough festivity, so I went home, struck by how relaxed and happy everyone was. Just the right size of crowd for everyone to have space but a critical mass of energy. Portland really does seem to be this magical Goldilocks zone of "just-right-ness".

Now, some sleep, and some work before I head off to the coast on Monday with Jane and Don. I'm happy to be back here.

In a bubble

That I'm starting my day out with a tight little hangover caused by pharma-company-purchased wine does not conjure up expectations for a highly wholesome day, especially when I meet up with my cyber pals later on.

I've been in this bizarre, rarified bubble of fanciness for about 24 hours now, this Fairmont hotel perched right on top of the terminal building at YVR. Haven't even been outside since I got on the LRT at Yamhill and 9th in Portland yesterday morning at 7:00 a.m., except for the little walks from the rickety dash 8 to the terminal buildings. The place is highly soundproofed, with windows everywhere, rendering the airport a distant mise en scene, a Truman Show of planes and gates and little airport vehicles buzzing silently everywhere and people enactingg departure and reunion. There was a huge window in my room overlooking gates and planes taxiing up and taking off all night long, rain hosing down and reflecting the light in a melancholy way. It feels a bit like watching a baseball game from a box, with eager hostesses proferring shrimp and wine and coffee and fruit and anything your heart desires, while the scene outside is casually available for scrutiny.

From a pragmatic perspective, this hotel makes sense -- a nice place at the airport instead of the soul-deadening boxes most airports have -- and why not a Fairmont, with all its fawning luxury that they never quite get right. The offered coffee never comes when I'm waiting for my room, and the wait stretches to more than an hour and a half, instead of the promised 30 minutes; the wifi works only in the lobby. I observe myself moving from my laid back Portland self into the slightly indignant demanding patron -- when the promise and frame are perfection, it's easy to slip into tsking admonishments at every "flaw." ("I'm shocked that there is no wireless in the room!" uttered with a disapproving moue).

The clients, as always, are lovely, earnest, too-eager and anxious. What happens when good looking geeky science majors meet the corporate world. I worked for my per diem, and it was good to restretch myself into this role. And good to revisit YVR, making more stories on my own to cover up the slight wistfulness of memory of having been here so many times with A. The Bill Reid sculpture, which was our talisman that we had to visit and touch everytime we passed through here, is all shrouded for some kind of cleaning, which feels about right.

I need, now, to stretch my body in the excellent gym and then get myself together to go downtown to hang out for a while then meet my pals. Maybe stare at the little parades of luggage trains whizzing by a while, some pomo version of Pooh Sticks.

Yin

My quiet wafty days here are coming to an end Thursday morning, when I fly to Vancouver for a short but intense little client meeting. It's the oddest kind of the work I do, pure consultation, but on a rapidfire schedule. It's interesting that the pharma companies more than anyone "get" that research with human beings isn't about "discovering" something but about creating conversations that live on in the participants' "real lives." I have to put my "tight schedule" hat back on, and I don't know if I can rouse myself out of the soft space and elastic sense of time I've been living in.

I went to a "Yin" yoga class tonight. It was one of those perfect counterpoints to the running and more aggressive ashtanga I've been doing. Yin was apparently developed to help prepare people for sitting meditation -- to open up the hips and pelvis, stabilize the core, etc. It's exactly what I should be doing, the underneath tautness that I can cover up with all my core strength and bouncy energy. These poses are held for at least 3 or 4 minutes, and it's astonishing to me how intense the simplest "sleeping swan" pose can be for me, with my non-rotatable hips. Working into that depth is a profound journey into the edges that I'm not usually quiet enough to contemplate.

I've found those edges of my sense of self here, in this novel openness of space and time and solo-ness. I have been fully, officially uncoupled from A for more than a year now, and I feel like this is the first time I have really stopped moving long enough to tentatively feel around the edges of where I am to find outlines and boundaries of self. I've been a little lonely, a very different kind of loneliness than the loss of being partnered, and it's a good kind of probing, questioning sense of alone-ness. It's not missing someone else, it's feeling myself fully present to where I am, untethered in space, showing me the edges of where I'm content and clarifying some of what it is I would like to write into my story. It's a good sensation, grounded and rooted and energetic around the outside, deeply challenging in locating and staying in tension with the tight hipjoints and taut shoulders.

I'm a bit sad about the interruption to this face-to-my-own-face time -- I'm looking forward to meeting my online pals and hanging out and having good girltime -- especially Katie!, but I know that when I get back the rest of my time here will just slide away. I have to figure out how to keep some of this space in my life back in Toronto.