Not Yet

I went to a craft show in Jackson a few weeks ago, and at the entrance were several animal rescue charities.  One of them had brought in dogs and cats to be adopted.  I put my hand up as a makeshift blinder and rushed by.  Once my friend and I were past them, I assumed I was going to be safe.

Not so.

We walked around looking at the booths.  We stopped to talk to one of my favorite potters and to buy one of his awesome dragons.  We dodged various unreasonably large baby carriages.  And then we turned one of the final corners.

The entire booth was covered in colorful paintings of pit bulls.  Roux's sweet pitty smile was on every canvas.  I felt like someone had slugged me in the stomach.  I couldn't breathe.

The booth belonged to a pit bull rescue from the north of the state.  They were selling shirts and paintings to raise funds for their organization.  I had to walk by it, and I'm embarrassed to say that it took me quite a few minutes to get myself collected again. I finally composed myself enough to come back, and I got some information from their group.  When I got home, I put it on my coffee table and left it alone.

Several days later, I checked out their website.  All those beautiful faces, all those brave hearts in need of a home... I fell in love with all of them, but one stood out.  She was an American Bulldog, and I sent a question to the organization about her.  Unfortunately, while she is good with other dogs, she views cats more as snacks than friends, so she is not a good match.

It's still so hard missing Roux.  Yesterday, I was in Big Lots, and they had the silly little dog Halloween costumes out.  It made me instantly think of how wonderfully patient Roux always was with being dressed up in silly outfits.  She wore reindeer antlers, New Year's hats, angel wings, and absolutely rocked a winter sweater.

I look at Chewie in his chair, and he seems lonely.  Yelldo does not play; he's too old.  I think about how much Chewie would love to have someone to romp with, but then my eyes track across the room to my cats, Pearl and Dillon.  They're peaceful and sociable.  What would happen if I brought a new dog I couldn't be absolutely sure of into their lives?

So it's not time yet.  Not yet.  When it's time for someone else to join my furry family, everything will fall into place.   We'll all be ready then.

New Year's Eve and Cookies

It's New Year's Eve, and I'm celebrating with my usual flair.  I have lit the candles that will take me into the new year, and everything I could be in charge of as far as cleaning (which isn't much, actually) is done.  The house hasn't been scrubbed and polished to the nth-degree as I usually do on New Year's Eve, but I did sweep today (bad luck to do it tomorrow), and I washed all the pans and bowls I used during today's manic baking spree.  They're quietly drying in the new little stainless steel drainer in my sink.

Usually at this time of the year, I'm full of introspection, full of thoughts of the past and worries about the future, but not this year.  I'm watching Criminal Minds in my comfy pajamas, and there is an absolute minimum of navel gazing.

And that, of course, is because I made oatmeal raisin cookies today.

This seems like a total non-sequitur, I know, but bear with me.  I'm going somewhere with this.  I promise.

I remember when I had my myomectomy while I was still in Indiana. There was a period after that when all things in my life sort of fell into focus.  I stopped caring about a bunch of things (and one notable person) who I'd allowed to cause me absolute woe.  I started doing things I had always wanted to do instead of smiling wistfully and saying, "Someday."  To use a phrase that is endlessly new-agey and trite, I found myself.  Rather, I found a new version of myself.  I really liked that person.  (Of course, one of the things that happened during that time was going to a meeting of the kendo club, and so the evil T came into my life and things sort of took a hard left for the worse....)

I feel that clarity of purpose again now.  I've been sick for...  God. I don't even know.  Between the migraines and the Topamax and this other, I've been sick for years and years.  I'd say that in just the past calendar year, I've had less than two weeks a month where I felt like doing anything other than surviving.  Now, though, even with the limitations currently on me with recovery, I am finding that other person I lost again.

There were so many things I'd lost along with that other me.  Many of them wouldn't mean a thing to anyone but me, but I guess that's what life is made of, the things we endow with importance for ourselves.  From the time I was in high school, I used to make a batch of sourdough bread every week.  I started it with the idea of giving a loaf (or so) to my grandparents.  That ritual got even more important to me when my Granny got sick.  She couldn't eat a lot of things, but she could eat my sourdough.  I had starter that I kept religiously fed for years.  It died when I went to Japan, clearly, but when I came back, I tried repeatedly to get my routine back again.  As my health declined, so did my resolution.  I just mixed up batch two of the bread today.  Every step of the process made me feel good.

It wasn't just the bread.  The cast iron skillets that are the legacy of both my grandmothers came to me shiny and well-conditioned.  Yesterday, I decided to make cornbread from my Granny's recipe for the first time in what I guess is probably three years, and when I took it out, even though I'd taken pains to store it properly, it was in need of care.

That was one of the moments (and I've had several lately) when how much I'd let go and how much of myself I'd lost really hit home.  My life before the surgery had become about the quickest possible solution, the easy path to finish the necessary before I fell down.  Now it doesn't have to be.  Oh, there's nothing particularly complicated about the foods I'm making.  My grandmother's cornbread is fabulous, but cornbread isn't a recipe requiring Cordon Bleu training.  The aforementioned oatmeal cookies I put together today weren't complex, either. The thing is, I CAN make them now. I don't have to run for the couch and collapse.  Pain and weakness aren't pinning me down. I have the energy and the will again to do something that I enjoy because it connects me to my past and allows me to share with my family.  Somehow, oddly, ironically, by losing something, I have managed to become more whole.

It's not just the cooking.  My house has been full of projects that I was "going to get around to" but never have.  I have been systematically fixing, changing, and moving.  I've been making things I pinned on Pinterest for someday happen now.  It's not perfect, but I'm making progress.  I have two great piles left to tackle, but as I look around my living room now, this house reflects me again.  (And maybe those two great piles are representative of me, too, heh....)  It feels like home.

So I'm back to the salad days.  Maybe it's the baking days for me.  Whichever.  I can't say that there aren't moments of difficulty and sadness, and I'm not such a sunshine-dazzled fool that I believe everything is always going to be fabulous, but right now, I have to say, things are pretty good.  That's a nice place to be as I get ready to leave 2013 and head into 2014.

And now, I'm going to have a cookie.  Happy New Year to you wherever you are.

A Letter from Myself

(this arrived in the mail today.  we wrote letters to ourselves on the last day of the TGC Brazil trip as a final reflection.  although I knew it was coming, opening it still came as a poignant moment.)

__________

23 June 2012

Dear You,

Please remember what you've learned and seen here.  Even on the days when things get terrible, appreciate all you have.

Don't forget the students you've met.  Don't forget David Campista and their great generosity.  Take it with you and remember that beauty.

Remember the monkey.  Wild things can be gentle, too, when approached with the appropriate attitude.  This is good classroom advice.

Remember the joy of being alone.  Remember the joy of being with others.

It's okay to order the caipirinha.

It's okay to go back to the hotel if your head hurts, too.

Take a minute and look back over the pictures.  Watch the light go through the crystal ball.  And, finally, if you are not as happy right now as you were at every moment in Brazil....get your ass back there.

ME

Fede Gimmel

This is a fede gimmel or gimmal ring.  These rings are made of two, or as in the case of this one, three rings that swivel open.  The hands open, and there is a heart inside.  You can see an example of an opened one below.  It's a different ring, but I think you can get the idea.  These were used as men's wedding rings or women's engagement/betrothal rings during the Victorian period.  (By the way...I like the word "betrothed."  If I ever get to that point, I'd like to be "betrothed" instead of "engaged." Betrothed.  Yeah.)

I love this.  To me, it's a fascinating variation on the Claddagh.  The same symbolism of eternal unity and companionship is there.  The heart is hidden, a private thing, on this ring, but it's lovely.  The detailed hands, one masculine with its shirt sleeve, and one feminine with its ruffle, are charming.  I have seen lots of different types of old jewelry, but so much of it is intended for women.  The fact that this has so much detail and could be worn by men, too, delights me.

If I were getting married, that distant misty if, then I think this would be a cool band for that imaginary husband of mine to have.  I would hope he'd be interested in it.  I don't know.  Maybe it's too fancy for a modern guy.  I just adore the history, the symbolism, and the function of it.  I'd like to think Imaginary Husband would look down at his ring, think of us together, and smile.  Isn't that the purpose of those things, after all?

Oh, and if you want the ultra-awesome one from the top picture, I found it here.

Photographs

Yesterday, I was fooling around with my computer and my iPad when I ran across old folders of photos.  Since I was in the process of transferring a few from the netbook to the iPad, I wound up scrolling through images I haven't seen in a long, long time.

I looked at places, faces, and events from my past.  I also looked at the dates.  Can it really have been as long ago for some of those things as that number says?  It doesn't seem possible, to be honest.  Yet, I know it must be so because as I looked at some of them, little details that had become blurred came back into sharp focus.

After all of that, at some point in the day, I checked in on FaceBook.  I'm not on there even half as much as I used to be.  I get notifications to my phone, and I find that I'm just not as interested in what happens there unless somebody close to me is having a problem.  I check in once or twice a day now to catch up instead of leaving it running as I used to.  I don't know what that says about my interest in my fellow man, but there you have it.

As I was on FB yesterday, I saw a photo of someone I haven't seen in a long time.  Almost the only contact I have with him these days is through the random FB mention.  He doesn't post much.  I suppose he's too busy with his job and his obligations.  He never has been one for FB, less now than ever.

I looked at the image and thought about how much he's changed, how much he's still the same.   Memories of how we met and the time we spent together made me smile.  His wry sense of humor and quick wit came back to me.  I wished once more that we weren't so far apart, that I could see him again somehow.

One of the crappiest parts of getting older, it seems to me, is that paths tend to split and people who are dear to us tend to wind up going in directions we can't follow.  Even though we intend to "stay in touch" and hold on, life intrudes, and the best of intentions all too often fails.

I think I read an article somewhere talking about how FB completely destroyed the natural life cycle of human relationships.  It said that in previous generations, it was completely normal for people to pass in and out of one's life and be "lost," that every friendship had a life cycle.  If I remember correctly, it sort of accused FB of hindering the rightful deaths of these connections.  At the time I read it, I hated it.  Who has the right to say how long or to what degree a person is important to you?  Should there be an expiration date on how much you care for someone?

Even though I haven't seen him in the real world for a long time, it still brings me joy to know he's out there doing well (better than well, actually).  For some reason, it's a hopeful thing.  We will probably continue to e-talk and make plans to see each other that fall through.  I will continue to be proud to know him from this distance that separates us.  Maybe we will never see each other again except for the images on an online social networking site.  I can't say.

All I know is that seeing that picture made me miss him all over again.

Notes to Myself

In preparing a lesson plan, I opened an old Norton Anthology to skim it for a particular work.  As I thumbed through the pages, it became less of a search and more of a discovery.  I had an accidental encounter with myself, long, long ago.

All along the margins, carefully written with the needle-pointed black pens I preferred all through college, were annotations, questions, lecture notes, commentaries.  Wallace Steven's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" contained terse notes on interpretations, plays on words.  Plath's acerbic "Daddy" is written almost completely up with marginalia about symbolism, biography, metaphors.

Inside the text itself are other little pieces of me at that time, a draft of a note I wrote to a professor I was going to interview and write about for a paper that became one of my all-time best was hiding in the works of Gwendolyn Brooks, an information slip about a get-together to go see Romeo and Juliet marked a segment from D.H. Lawrence.  As I rifled through the pages, the fragments of my undergraduate slipped around me, pulling me back to that time briefly even though there was not one single picture to be seen.  I remembered the hot, tatty lecture rooms of Lee Hall with their battered furniture, peeling walls, and tatty tile.  I remembered the roar of too-loud window units straining to cool us or the tick-ping-ping of a steam radiator fighting an early December chill.

I remember, too, all the other things that were going on in my life, a grandmother in the last stages of a battle with cancer, the unresolved and endless ridiculousness of my relationship (or whatever) with D., persistent questions about what was coming next in my life.  This bulky volume with its onionskin pages brings it all back, every golden gingko leaf on Engineering Row, every late-night conversation.

Sometimes the past comes rushing back in to swirl around me again, like a tide that shifted without warning. Just that quickly, the fragments I surround myself with coalesce, solidify, and that strange duality of the person I was then and the one I am now have to make peace with each other, find a way to share the space.

History Speaking - Old Capitol Museum

Today, I went to Jackson seeking things to take to Brazil.  I knew that I wanted to take things that were as representative of Mississippi as I could, things made here, crafted by people from here if possible.  The big problem is finding things like this, especially affordable things in the quantity I needed.  I picked up my best friend, and we made a day of it.

Rotunda, Old Capitol Museum, Jackson, MS

We started at the Old Capitol Museum in downtown.  I had remembered a large gift shop there from when I had gone a long time ago, and I decided it would be a good place to start.  The Old Capitol was damaged heavily when Katrina came through, and it underwent major renovations after that.  It was very different.  The restored building has multimedia exhibitions and is very nice.  It is a very pleasant place now.

One of the exhibitions is a screen that scrolls down from the ceiling in the former House chamber on the hour and half-hour.  A film is projected onto it with actors recreating the debate that took place when Mississippi chose to secede from the Union.  It is rather intense to stand and watch as the actors attempt to persuade you to vote for or against secession.   As I stood on the third-floor balcony looking down at that film playing to the huge chamber, empty except for my friend and me, it struck me suddenly that I was standing in the place where that decision had happened, that it wasn't an abstract nebulous concept, some random string of dead letters on a page, but real people who had argued with each other and had come to the decision that the best thing for the state was to leave the Union.

Somehow, even though I have lived here and grown up as any Mississippi native or transplant does surrounded by the Past (with the capital P on purpose), it seldom feels real.  Maybe it is exactly because we are so inundated with it that it lacks sharpness.  You don't have to go far to see it.  It might be a redneck with a rebel flag sticker or a devout bunch of costumed Civil War reenactors on a major holiday, but keeping the past alive is a full-time hobby or job for people here.  There are even holidays that nobody else takes, for example, my trash didn't get picked up because it was Confederate Memorial Day. (Who takes THAT?  Apparently my trash guys.)   I think all this familiarity breeds contempt, though, or at least builds up a giant callus. We drive past major moments in history everywhere, and I think that sometimes we need to shake off that ennui and remember that real people struggled, chose, lived, and died during them.  I don't mean that every moment needs to be dedicated to glorifying or resurrecting that past, but when we become so numb to it that it becomes just another part of the background, I think something important has been lost.

Doorknob Detail
Governor's Office Door

The museum had a very fine edge to tread, and it did it well.  While we have some things and some people of which we may be very rightly proud in our state, Mississippi's past, let's face it, is not exactly 100% glorious.  I won't absolve my state of any past transgressions nor will I try to gloss them over, but I will say that we are not alone in that in this nation.  We are not alone in that in this world.  Every place has some part of its past that it must overcome. Every place, just like every person, has some scar to carry with it, some wound to heal.

 That's the other reason museums and the going to them are important.  For better or worse, even if it's something quite terrible, I think it's always better to know who you really are and what you really come from.  Know your good and your bad, your strengths and your weaknesses.  Such self-knowledge gives a firm foundation to build a future on.  The museum is a living example of that, and not just in its exhibitions. In its various stages and phases of renovation, it has physically removed the bad, that which has decayed through time so much as to be no longer functional, and it has replaced those things with that which supports, that which meets the needs of the current day. One whole room chronicles the various changes the Old Capitol has had to make to survive including removing original brick in some cases because it was crumbling or damaged and of course restorations after not one but two hurricanes sheared away its roof.  I guess we can use the Old Capitol as a bit of an object lesson, not just for what is housed inside it but also for the structure itself then.  If we as a state and we as individuals within it can manage to do as well as this one museum,  perhaps we can all use the past, whatever mixture of good and bad it may be, to reinvent ourselves gracefully to meet the challenges ahead.

Unexpectedly

We outgrow love like other things
   And put it in the drawer,
Till it an antique fashion shows
   Like costumes grandsires wore.
~ Emily Dickinson
______________________

My power went out today, and as I was pulling books off the shelf for something to read while I waited for the linemen to come out and figure what squirrel-accident had caused it, I laid hands on a very old Dover Thrift Edition called Great Love Poems. Since it is almost the Day That Shall Not Be Named, I sort of smiled to myself and took it down along with Pride and Prejudice, the volume I actually intended to peruse.

I noticed that I had dog-eared pages in the poetry collection, and I became curious. I long ago stopped doing that because of the damage it does. Now I use post it flags or something removable instead. I looked at the pages I’d turned down, though, to see what had moved me at the time. Predictably, all of the poems were full of yearning and unrequited love. I had no idea how old the book was until, rather unexpectedly, a photo fell from where it had been tucked in at one of the turned-down pages near the back.

And there he was. Strawberry blond hair pulled back into a ponytail that would curl just at the ends, but as was so often the case, some of it was starting to escape. Sitting cross-legged on the edge of that low stage, he had his Martin guitar in his lap, those beautiful hands were engaged in tuning it. The ever-present brown leather sandals and beat up, worn-in jeans finished the picture. The whole of him was there, unexpectedly and rather unceremoniously dumped into my lap once again.

I picked it up gently, as if it were some ancient thing that might come to pieces in my fingertips, and I looked at him. I can’t remember now even how that particular picture got taken. I know I must have been on one of the couches at the front that were our usual seat just from the angle, but I really have no memory of shooting that photo. Even less do I remember tucking it into that book next to the overly sentimental poem that has sheltered it all these years. Yet I must have done so, and I probably did both with strong feeling in my heart for him at the time. Everything I did related to him had such strong feeling attached to it….

I continued to page through the book, and then I slipped his photo back where it had come from. It seemed the right thing to do, almost like laying an artifact back in a protective case or putting something back inside a time capsule. This object has no relation to the me I am now, but it did relate to the person that was me once. I cannot deny that there once was a girl who loved that boy, and she sat on a blue couch, watched him play a guitar, and she took a picture of him. When he finished playing, he probably bounced over, sat next to her, and they had a really good time. Or not. Maybe that was one of the nights he sat with somebody else or ignored her because he was in a bad mood….

And then, as always, once I closed the book, I began to ponder. I look back at the depth of emotion I had for him, the strength of feeling that made me turn down those page corners, and I wonder sometimes if I am capable of feeling that for anybody else again. I wonder if I should, if it is a good thing or a bad thing to have that depth of feeling for a single person, a flaw that should be remedied altogether or simply something good that was applied to the wrong situation. Was it in me or in him that the fault lay? Was I deficient or was he? This is the last of the questions I need an answer to, the one that through the years has made me doubt, and ultimately, the one I know I will probably never get resolved. I guess I’m glad I’ve come so far from the girl who put that picture in that book, probably with tears and sighs, but I wonder if I will ever be able to lay aside the fear and the doubt as well.