head in the clouds, feet on the ground.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Today, a list. Inspired by the blog of Alex V. Cook.

1. 2008 is supposed to be my year of transformation.
2. Our home is being transformed. Acoustic ceiling tiles are being buried under sheetrock and drywall. Wood paneling is being mudded to give it a drywall finish. Floors are being refinished. Plants are going into the ground outside. Porch floors are being sanded and painted. Sunny yellow walls and grass green walls are being painted pale gray-blues, crisp, clean golden wheats and soft whites.
3. We will be living in a mighty grown up house soon. But not for long.
4. I went saltwater fishing in Cocodrie, Louisiana for mother’s day weekend. This is what my mother-in-law wanted. For me and c. to come down to her fishing camp and fish and spend the night.
5. I’d never really fished. I thought I would be miserable.
6. But I loved the drive down to Cocodrie.
7. I loved being surrounded by shrimp boats preparing for the opening of shrimp season.
8. I loved the one-hour boat ride that brought us closer and closer to the Gulf of Mexico.
9. I loved that I wanted nothing more than to jump into the water and swim. Though I couldn’t because it would have scared the fish away.
10. My life is transforming. I’ll be a student again.
11. I’ll also be a teacher soon, to college freshman and sophomores from small Texas towns. I’ll probably love this.
12. I like young minds.
13. Most importantly, I’ll be a writer.
14. We are leaving Baton Rouge and heading to Austin, TX. I am blissful and sad all at once.
15. Dismantling closets and cupboards is more involved than one would think.
16. Every single object holds a distinct memory or carries with it an emotion.
17. Even old cassette tapes. I had a hard time parting with my husband’s collection of $3-gas-station-cassette tapes. I didn’t even buy them.
18. But yielding my hesitation, he kept them. He put them in a case in my car and said I could listen to them on the drive to Texas and decide which ones to keep and which to toss.
19. I liked this idea. One of my favorite Aretha Franklin songs is on a gas station cassette tape.
20. I am lucky that my 2004 Jetta came equipped with a cassette player.
21. I had packed two boxes of all of my landscape architecture materials – notes I’d taken, papers I’d written, thick articles packed with dense language. Things I’d read and highlighted and contemplated. I had also packed every single journal I filled while in school. Not to mention a whole box dedicated to thesis materials.
22. The next morning, I wondered: Why do I want to keep all that landscape architecture stuff? Does it make me feel smarter? Does it prove to me that I survived the 3 ½ years of mental torture?
23. I unpacked the boxes and threw as much away as I could. I kept all of the journals. The travel journals are especially nice.
But I got the articles/notes down to one binder (from about fifteen). It made me want to cry. It made my stomach ache the way a broken heart aches.
24. I had to remind myself: You are no longer that person. You don’t have to carry your entire past with you; you can keep small reminders without bringing along every last overstuffed suitcase.
25. I also threw away almost every design project I’d done – planting designs for residential and commercial sites, a free bike rental strategy for the city of New Orleans that included an economic development component, and on and on.
26. Later, I finally sorted through the two boxes of materials I’d brought home with me when I quit my job last year. I threw away everything except one tiny pile. I couldn’t figure out how I’d let the two boxes consume space in my office for an entire year.
27. I managed to exhale for a very long time. I am not an urban planner or a rural planner or a community planner anymore. I am not a landscape architect.
28. I am a woman who studied these things and worked in this realm over seven years.
29. Seven years spans infancy, toddler-hood and early childhood. It’s okay to mourn this passing. And it’s okay to remember fondly that I did a really good job when I filled this role.
30. My 23-year-old friend asked me if I feel domestic doing all of this packing and paint-color-picking. I think she thinks that being married and owning a house equals being domestic. Maybe it does.
31. I said I feel like I'm preparing for the most important business venture of my life to this point.
32. I had a boyfriend who said I was domestic. It felt really insulting at the time. I was 20 or 21. I wanted to tell him that being clean and also considerate of others and enjoying the act of cooking a good meal now and then was not domestic so much as it was a sign of a civilized, compassionate and creative human being. But I thought of this too late.
33. Occasionally, after having spent a whole day cleaning the house and celebrating it by cooking a good meal (because it's nice to cook in a clean kitchen), I will joke that I am a domestic goddess.
34. But mostly, I don't feel domestic. I feel like my head is in the clouds and my feet are on the ground, toes occasionally skimming the water. Is there a label for that kind of person?
35. I never again have to conduct a round table discussion or a 300-person community meeting with disenfranchised and frustrated citizens. Dairy and sugar cane farmers. School teachers. Senior citizens. Generations-long families of bricklayers.
36. But when I did, I listened hard, and I sincerely cared about everyone. This can ware a person down, or make a person cynical. Both.
37. Because community members are generally misinformed and often too myopic to grasp the big picture, and equally, the financing aspect of community development projects usually ends up pissing on the very people it ought to assist. Or at least it pisses on the majority of them.
38. I left before cynicism set in.
39. I am an optimist by nature and desire.
40. Transforming into some person new or better or who better fits your inner-essence means releasing who you have been.
41. I wrote a poem the day after mother’s day.
42. I wrote it in twenty minutes though I had not known it was sitting inside of me.
43. I only knew that laying eyes on two dresses nearly socked me in the gut on the night of mother’s day. I got sucker punched.
44. I used to want to start a girl band called Sucker Punched. But I’m not musically talented.
45. It would have been a punk band. I would have played base. Is that domestic?
46. I think the label I want is: Nourishing.
47. I didn’t catch a fish in Cocodrie (so maybe I could have swam), but I almost caught one. A speckled trout. I didn’t know how to reel it in properly. I held the pole over the water for too long when I should have swung it in over the boat right away. Apparently trout have tender mouths and can escape the hook easily. Mine fought its way back into the water.
48. He was a tired fish. He was hyperventilating and not swimming when he got away from me. I secretly hope he lived to swim another day. Days. Months. And on.
48. He was THIS BIG. (Envision two arms being held wide apart.)
49. My fish grows with every telling.


Here is my poem. Remember that I am not a poet and please be forgiving.

Late at night. It was
packing clothes from my closet
into a cardboard moving box
that brought out the ache.

Two dresses.
Black chiffon party dress, its price tag
still dangling on a safety-pinned string.

The other, brown and beige silk
worn three times, maybe four.
This dress that made me look skinny and professional
when I felt like neither.

Muddy colors and flattering cuts.

She had died, our mother.
And we shopped.
Loaded our arms with more
clothes than they could carry.
Tried on and on and on.
Dresses, pants, blouses.

All the garments our mother
could have sewn for us.

On this grit-your-teeth-smile-and-be-happy day.
This get-out-of-the-house-necessary-elation
day-after-a-funeral.
Ding of a cash register may as well be a casino slot machine.
Charging credit cards.
Bags we carried home.
Heavy bags of purchased therapy.

The manufactured memory of
four sisters shopping together
so we could feel happy and full,
instead of empty and robbed.

Yesterday made two mother’s days.
I thought I did not miss her this time.

Pulled these hangers from my closet.
Dresses delicately draped. Drooping.
Remembered shopping with my sisters.
The bliss. Then, the murk of black brown beige.
Like a fist in the stomach. A tender bruise.

Fabric you ball up. Stuff into a garbage bag
and drop at Goodwill
so you can discard that desperate day after her funeral.

SONGS: Won't Be Long, Aretha Franklin and So What, Miles Davis

documenting change: fourteen.

health. wealth. wisdom.

When I was in tenth grade, my dad and I – alone for two weeks while my mom was off in Ohio for the birth of my nephew – we thought we’d won the lottery. The big one.

I’d woken up to get ready for school, and I found a cryptic note taped to my bedroom door. “Sleeping after selling horses,” it said.

My dad worked the late shift at various grain elevators along the Mississippi River, so he’d come home around 4 or 5 a.m. and go to sleep just before I was waking.

On this particular morning, having gone to bed believing that at long last he was a wealthy man – he couldn’t quite rest easy. The second he heard me get up, he shuffled out of his bedroom nearly shaking.

“Did you see my note?”

“What did you mean?”

“It’s an Indian proverb. I wrote the English translation.” My dad was whispering, and his eyes looked crazy and alert and as if they were bouncing joyfully.

“What does it mean?”

“Herpreet. What I’m going to tell you, you can’t tell anyone.”

“Okay.” I gave a solemn promise.

“Come here.” He led me out of our hallway and into the kitchen. He pulled out a lottery ticket – his hands shaking. And then, still whispering, he slowly pronounced the words, “We won the lottery.”

I think I froze in place. I’m not the kind of person who screams like a hyena when I’m shocked and happy. I get quiet and contemplative and numb. Later I might break out into laughter. Nervous giggling laughter. “We won the lottery? Are you sure?”

“See it.” Newspaper open in front of him, he extended to me the ticket held in his shaking hand. He began reading the numbers aloud, as if confirming for himself. “Don’t tell anyone,” he reminded me.

“I won’t,” I promised, my own body suddenly shaking in disbelief.

I spent that day at school in the strangest waking-dream-state. I felt as if I’d been dosed with enough Novocain to numb a full-grown horse.

“Okay.” He said. We embraced tightly. We laughed. We stared at each other – our excited brown eyes probably mirroring one another’s in expression. “I’m going to go try to sleep now.”

“Wait. What did that note mean?”

“Oh.” He said the proverb in Punjabi. Then, “sleeping after selling horses. Means someone is resting good after working hard.”

When I got home from school that day, my dad was awake, probably getting ready to leave for work. Embarrassed and disappointed, he had to tell me, “I made a mistake. We didn’t win the lottery.” Psssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss. Like a pin stuck a balloon. I deflated. I’d been fantasizing all day about how now I was going to be able to afford to go study English at U of Wisconsin in Madison or UMASS/Amherst.

That weekend, we got on the phone and told my mom and sister in Ohio the whole fiasco. I think at first, he may have asked that we keep the whole thing to ourselves. Eventually, my other two sisters heard the story too. For years and years we have laughed about how, for a day, we’d won the lottery. Bellyaching laughs.

Once you think you’ve actually hit the jackpot, you can never forget what it feels like to be instantaneously rich – even if only for a day.

So on Monday, when I got online to look at the posted triathlon results, I was not at all disappointed to see that in fact, I had not placed 3rd in my age group. Back in January when I’d registered, I’d signed up in the “fat tire” division of the race – for those who would ride on mountain bikes or hybrids. While I was training, I got hold of a road bike and never thought to change my registration for the triathlon.

I should have been counted among women 30-34 in the road bike division. I placed 15th out of 25 in my age group and division, and 104 overall. I am really damn happy with these results. And all day Sunday, I got to believe I’d won the lottery. Sort of.

But it’s as if I really did win the lottery.

On Tuesday, I decided that it would be the right thing to notify the race coordinator and the woman who really placed 3rd. I sent them an email explaining my error in registration. I elaborated that, having panicked in Lake Charles at T-Gator, completing this second triathlon without mishaps had been important to me. I shared that (newly realized) I raced in memory of my mother who passed. So believing I’d placed for a day was a welcome feeling. Finally, I told her:

I wanted J. to know she placed 3rd, b/c she may have had her own reasons for why this would have completely made her day.

Later, I came clean to my classmates:

Hey guys,

K., I wanted to say thanks for hand delivering the rocketchix metal to Serrano's. It truly made my day to believe I'd actually placed! Especially after how disappointed I felt after T-Gator. Part of training for a triathlon was in memory of my mom who passed away a year and a half a go. She was a completely feisty and adventurous woman, so she regretted that she'd never learned to swim and ride a bike. During rocketchix, I focused during the swim and the bike by talking to her the entire time. In my head - not out loud. :) And it helped - I didn't even notice the wind during the ride.

I explained my registration issue and said that I’d let the coordinator and the actual winner know. I added:

But. I'm totally keeping the metal on the pink ribbon! ;) Well. Unless she asks for it...

So, I want to digress for a moment. Sometimes you encounter a person to whom you are immediately drawn. There was one girl in my class to whom I was drawn. She had also had a tough time at T-Gator in Lake Charles. She crashed as she was heading out on her bike ride, and when I say she crashed, I mean her entire calf is still healing. She also scratched up her arm and her face. But, bleeding heavily and aching - she completed the race. She is nineteen and a freshman at LSU.

I noticed right away that she is completely stunning and has a dry and quick wit. I also noticed that she seemed fairly unaware of her own beauty, and possibly unaware of the degree of her humor. I noticed that she is mature for her age – she, at nineteen, asked me questions about what I do that I don’t know if I would have been astute enough to consider at her age. Her humor also revealed her intelligence. Finally, compared to the other freshman girl in our class – a nice eighteen year old, but a young eighteen, it was blatantly evident exactly how mature and intelligent H. is.

Beyond this all, or because of it, or just because, I knew I liked the girl. I liked the way she spoke of her hometown. Once, on a bike ride, we passed cows on River Road, and H. began telling me about the place in Tennessee where she grew up. She said she lived in a place where she could look across the street and see baby cows all spring. She said she missed it.

In general, she spoke as if she is present and observant in the moment and her surroundings, but also reflective of the newness she is absorbing. She mentioned once how small a town she came from, how sheltered her life had been. Yet she made the statement matter-of-factly instead of in disappointment or disillusion.

I guess it’s fair to say that, though she is in a totally different time in her life from where I am, I admire her. It was clear to me that we would not actually strike up any kind of friendship outside of class. In class, whereas, some of the people who were closer in age to one another were striking up actual friendships, my interactions with H. and others were appropriately limited to polite small talk.

Return to last Tuesday. A few hours after I sent the email to my triathlon classmates, I received this unexpected response from H:

We were all very excited for you regardless of any mixups in registration. Hey, you still beat 2 (or 3 - I can't remember) of your high school classmates! :)

On a more serious note, I'm really glad you sent this; you cannot imagine how wonderful the timing. Tomorrow will be the one year mark since I lost my brother. He had just turned 20 when he passed away during a glacier climbing accident in New Zealand. Extremely athletic and active, he was in the process of training for triathlons but never got the opportunity to compete in one. This entire experience has been very helpful as every time I complete one, no matter how I do, I feel like I've done something to make him proud.

Long story short, I'm sorry to hear about the loss of your mom, but I think I understand when you talk about talking to her while you rode. I hope this experience has been a good one for you; if I don't see you at T-Gator, enjoy Austin and good luck writing!

And it hit me in so many places. Heart. Head. Stomach. I sat with this email for several hours. I wanted this young girl to know exactly how remarkable she is. Later, I responded.

How strange the ways in which we all connect to one another. My husband was in a hiking accident in Montana when he was eighteen. He fell off of a mountain and broke his back and wouldn't have made it except that, completely disoriented, he managed to find his way to a hiking path. A couple of dogs sensed something was wrong and ran off from their owners - leading them to C. A husband and wife found him, and the husband happened to be a neuro-surgeon. He was incredibly lucky.

I'm sorry about your brother. I had already quietly observed that you are so very mature and intelligent at your age (compared to what I was like), and also that you are a stunning beauty [If you weren't sure of this, you should be.] Freshman year is a feat in and of itself, so I'm amazed at how remarkable you are to be in the honors college, to have made time for triathlons, to be living away from home for the first time, and to be grieving. Be proud of handling it all with grace. Your brother is most certainly proud.

I'm sorry you have to deal with finals during this one year mark. At the one year anniversary of my mom's death, I was afraid I would be in shambles. But my sister took it upon herself, first thing in the morning, to email my dad and my other sisters. She said in her email that she wanted to celebrate who our mom had been on that day by sharing her favorite memories of her. She asked that we respond by sharing our own favorite memories. Instead of being a mess, I ended up smiling to myself all day as I thought of the stories we'd all emailed to one another.

I hope you find a way to celebrate the person your brother had been tomorrow. Good luck with finals.

I don’t know if there’s any more I need to say about this all. I’d realized through various comments she made during our class that H. was close to her mother. I myself had never shared until that email that my mom had passed away. I keep thinking of this girl having lost her 20-year-old brother at the end of her senior year of high school and then heading off to college three months later. I keep thinking of her parents at home, having two kids gone from them – one so devastatingly gone, and one embarking on adulthood for the first time. I keep thinking about what it must be like to spend your entire freshman year grieving and also doing what you’re supposed to do.

H. did not need to respond to my email. But she did, and quite honestly. I’d already been thinking to myself that I wished I had a way to share with that girl how smart and mature and beautiful she is, because a person should know this about herself. Especially when she is just nineteen. I thought: Here is your chance to respond with equal honestly.

It was good to know she felt helped by my first email. I felt helped by the note she sent to me. In this exchange, it showed itself to me – the most exciting and meaningful reason to embark on actions outside of your comfort zone. There exists the mere possibility of discovering the connective tissue between yourself and people who are, on the surface, entirely different human beings. To discover it is like winning the lottery; it is like becoming a more grown and richer person – but to discover that invisible connection means first being open to the possibility.

SONGS: Redemption Song, Bob Marley and I Found a Reason, Velvet Underground

documenting change: thirteen and 2/3.

the sound of laughter.

After my first triathlon on April 6th, the rest of my class was training for a full length event on April 19th, but I was not. I got lazy. I attended classes, but I skipped workouts here and there. On April 19th, my classmates did their second event, and our class ended. Then I got REALLY lazy. I managed to stop swimming all together.

A week before my second triathlon, a wave of reality hit. I realized I better get back to work. On Monday I went to swim and I could barely swim 100 meters. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? Panic. I began to swim every day, trying to build back up to the 350 meters I would need to do for my triathlon. On the Friday before, I managed to do 300 meters, resting for about a minute between each 100.

It was not looking so good.

On the day of the event, I rushed to the site, got registered, set up my transition area, and ten minutes before the race began, I decided to have a look at the pool to help relax me. I walked into the Natatorium. My eyes grew at the sight before me. An Olympic sized pool?! This was not relaxing at all. This was terrifying. And unexpected. And it made my breath short.

Here is what I did. First, I put myself in the last group of swimmers – the ones who would swim the 350 meters in 15 minutes or more. (I had timed myself at 14 minutes). Since we all wore ankle bracelets with chips in them that began timing when we entered the water, we were really competing against ourselves. This gave me an extra twenty minutes to calm down.

One: I stretched. Calves. Hamstrings. Arms. Neck. Quadriceps. Over and over, I stretched.

Two (simultaneous to stretching): I observed. I watched swimmers who entered the water first get tired, flip over to do back stroke. Some alternated between freestyle and sidestroke. I saw some struggling to swim with their heads above water. I realized that I am not the only person who struggles with swimming. Even if these other women are faster, they’re not necessarily better, and swimming isn’t necessarily easy.

Three: I strategized. If I get tired and can’t make it from one end of the pool to the other, nothing is stopping me from hanging onto the ropes if I need to. If I need to rest at the end of the pool lane, there is no person who will tell me not to rest. If, while I’m swimming, I need to flip over and do backstroke, there’s no reason not to.

Four: I breathed. Breath from your diaphragm. Nice. Slow. Full. Breaths. No more being short of breath. Nice. Slow. Full. Breaths.

Five: I comforted someone else. As I quietly breathed and stretched and watched and thought, there were four girls behind me who were talking and talking and talking about how scared they were. About how crazy they were to think they could do this. I turned to them. I said aloud: “If you need to rest midway, hang onto the lane ropes. Nothing is stopping you from doing so. If you need to take a minute at the end of the lane to catch your breath, take it. No one’s gonna tell you not to. Just do whatever you need to do to finish. Because you can finish." Then, firmly, I added, "You can do it.” Hearing the words come from my mouth made me remarkably calm.

Six: I had a revelation at the perfect moment. Just as I was about to enter the pool, I thought, You love to swim. You LOVE the water. Why are you scared of a thing that brings you such joy? Get in there and have fun for god’s sake. If you’re gonna do something you love, have FUN while you’re doing it! Simple and startling revelation. My god, I am right! And getting into the water, I felt really, really happy.

Seven: I remembered something as easily as I'd put it in the bottom of my psyche. My mom could never swim. She was scared of the water, and I have never been.

Eight: I had an idea. Mom, I’m going to take you on the funnest swim you’ve ever been on. Get on my back and let’s GO.

GO. The woman called. And I WENT. Steady. Steady. Steady. Until I bumped someone’s foot. Oh my god. I need to pass her. I shoved my head back under the water and passed her. Oh my god. I just passed someone. Mom, are you having fun? Let’s go. And I swam. And swam. And swam. Freestyle all the way. I passed someone else. And another woman. And another. My husband counted six. A record ten minutes and 58 seconds later, I was done.

Here is the thing. I hadn’t thought once of my mother at the last event. And even at this one, I wasn’t thinking of her. I thought I was doing this entirely for me. But something about deciding that I would swim for her made it easy for me. And, yes. I felt her presence as real as I felt the water.

We swam like whales, me carrying her on my back, her laughing. When I got to the end of my 350, I could have done another 350. Bliss. This is what swimming is supposed to feel like, and I got to let my mother experience it with me. It was the most fun I’ve had in a pool in a long time.

I ran out of the Natatorium and rushed to my bike. When I got out of the transition area and mounted my bike, the conversation continued. Come on, mom. I’m taking you on a bike ride. Let’s GO.

My mom, born in India in 1938, wanted to learn to ride a bike as a girl. And she’d begun. When her father told her it wasn’t a thing that girls should do, she stopped as quickly as she’d begun.

Riding on River Road, I envisioned her – aviator sunglasses, circa 1980, a red, white and blue scarf wrapped around her head and tied under her chin, red lipstick, pale blue jeans, a white cotton sweater with short sleeves and tiny flowers embroidered on the front. There she was riding on my handle bars and laughing. The faster I rode, the harder she laughed.

I noticed the wind only once, and when I noticed it, I heard my own voice inside: Mom, you ready to ride really fast? And we pushed through.

When I got back to the transition area, I dismounted, put my bike up and ran, ran, ran. I didn’t need to stop once to walk.

There was a photographer on site, and when I saw the event photos, I noticed that I have the stupidest grin across my face in each and every snapshot. Mom and I must’ve been having a really good time.

While the class I trained with had not been training for this particular event, three of the girls in it decided to register to compete. So when I first arrived, I was thrilled to see them all. My instructor and one guy from the class came to cheer everyone on.

After the race, we decided to go eat together. One of the guys, k. stayed to hear them announce the results because he had to work in the afternoon and wouldn’t have time to sit down to eat.

At the restaurant, I was on a surprising high, knowing that my mom had been with me at every turn. But of course, I chose not to share this with everyone. I think I made a remark to one girl that I focused by talking to my mom who’d passed away. But it was more than just talking to my mom. I felt her presence in a way that was as absolutely real as feeling the wind brush across your cheek or feeling the sun warm the back of your neck. And I hadn’t asked for it the way I’ve asked for dreams. I didn’t even consider it as a possibility.

While we were eating, k. showed up, a smile across his face and a metal hung around a pink ribbon in his hands. “Herpreet! You placed 3rd in your age group.” I was stunned and happy and disbelieving.

My mom and I went for a swim and a bike ride. And it was the most fun we’ve had together in years. I discovered the best reason of all for continuing to do triathlons. In memory of my mom. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough each time to do with her two things she never could do, two things I love to do, and two things I am getting better at every day.

I spent my entire Sunday feeling more proud of myself than I’ve felt in a long time. And blessed to know that my mom will show up when I need her to, but also, now and then, just to have some fun – she was that way. Feisty. Spontaneous. Adventurous.

Mother's day is this weekend. And my mom's birthday is this month. On the 27th. She would've been 70. So she gave me a gift showing up, and it allowed me to give her a gift. This swim and this bike ride. And when I ran, I think she just let me go. I think she just stood back and watched.

I wish everyone could have heard her the way I could hear her laughing on our bike ride.

And I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow, because, now I’ve got to do work that pays. And because. This is a lot for me to digest still. All of this. I am still digesting.

SONG: I Found a Reason, Velvet Underground.

documenting change: thirteen and 1/3

water babies.

As long as I can remember, I have loved the water. Being near water. Being in water. When c. and I have contemplated where in the world we would be willing to live, I have always said that I absolutely cannot be landlocked. My older sisters tell me that when I was very young – two, three, four – they hated taking me to a pool in summers because I was fearless. Taking me to a pool meant they couldn’t casually relax with their friends for fear that I’d be off jumping in the water and drowning.

I love the water. I know. I said this. But being submerged in water – an ocean, a lake, a pool – it makes me feel remarkably joyful. I am amazed by water and its ability to bear and support millions of life forms.

When I was eight or nine, I watched a documentary about women who delivered their children submerged in water. I was fascinated, and I told my mom that I wished I’d been a water baby. She said, “Well, maybe one day you can have water babies.” (So you can understand why I was completely shocked to have a panic attack in the water at my first triathlon.)

I hadn’t been able to say why it was important to me to train for and complete a triathlon. I’m not the most athletic person in the world. Correction. I am not an athletic person. But I am certainly drawn to particular athletic activities. Swimming. Biking. Hiking.

I’ve always wished to be really good at these things, in spite of the fact that I am not. I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was nine. When I was around four or five, my uncle tried to teach me how to ride a bike. Hell. Everybody tried to teach me how to ride a bike. Running beside me, then behind me, then letting go. And I would crash. I could never find my confidence or my center of gravity on two wheels, so I was stuck with the training wheels. And at a certain point, it just gets embarrassing to ride with training wheels.

It was when I lived in Delaware and befriended the boy next door that I learned to maneuver on two wheels. This kid was always on his bike, and he was the only person who I had to play with. So I don’t know if I asked him to teach me to ride, or if I just played around on his bike enough that I caught the hang of it, but I learned. I finally learned to ride a bike. Yet, as an adult, I’ve never felt totally secure on a bike.

Part of training for a triathlon involved my desire to get better at two activities that I like, but that I’m not particularly good at. I had also shed twenty pounds between July ’07 and January ’08, and I wanted to find a way to keep the weight off without being stuck in a gym. I thought that training for a triathlon would help me get into exercising in the great outdoors, and that completing a triathlon would be a way for me to celebrate my weight loss and my health in general. But I never felt convinced that these were the deepest reasons for my desire to compete in a triathlon.

Sometimes, you understand your reasons for doing the things you do only after you have done the deeds. Sometimes, you make tiny connections with perfect strangers that help you know there are even greater reasons why you were supposed to do what you have done.

On Sunday, I completed my second triathlon. No panic attacks. No falling off my bike. No dropping my water bottle. It was a completely blissful event. And I found my reason, after the fact, for why competing in a triathlon was so very important to me. I found the reason why I will make every effort to continue training for triathlons. Don’t you know? It all comes back to my mother.

But just as I was digesting this reason, a second and more surprising reason revealed itself. It is the connections that you make with your fellow competitors, perfect strangers to whom you are perfectly connected. If you are very lucky – as I have become, you discover more than the surface connections between you, but instead the actual connective tissue that binds you as human beings in the world.



The story of my second triathlon, how I discovered my mother’s place in this adventure, and the sheer luck of connecting to a perfect stranger – I’ll share these with you in my next post.

SONG: Summertime, Miles Davis (but I really wanted Right Now, Charles Mingus - not available on Playlist)
Changed to: I Found a Reason, Velvet Underground

a.m. ramble.

I heard myself declare, “i ROOMBA IS GONNA SAVE MY SANITY!” My husband ordered a discounted i Roomba online, and it arrived yesterday. We set it to work and watched our dogs follow it around in a bewildered state. Is this an animal? Should we attack?

I watched the Roomba eat up dust and dog hair in a way that sweeping with a broom never accomplishes. And I sighed. Dog hair and dust on the floor. They are the bane of my existence. At least one bane.

The other day, my brother in law asked me, after reading my blog posts about Austin, “So how much is the Austin Chamber of Commerce paying you?” And I laughed. “A girl’s got to make money.” But upon my excitement about the i Roomba (because I thought – I’ve GOT to tell people about this), our conversation crept back to me. I realized that there is no need for ads on my blog when, in fact, I am writing ad copy for free all the time.

Isn’t that part of what a blog is? – An advertisement for books, movies, songs, events, i Roombas, even an advertisement for ourselves? Look at ME. You want to LIKE me. You want to READ me.

All of this ruminating on the nature of my own consumerism falls on the heels of two other events that are making me wonder, Am I a mega-consumer, or am I a walking character? One event has to do with songs on this blog. The other, with seeing This American Life last night.

A friend of mine recently commented that she can’t concentrate on the words in my blog posts when songs are playing. I was still processing her comment, wondering if the songs are superfluous, when a kind of exclamation popped out of my head. Life should have a soundtrack! It deserves that. I began lamenting that when I change the songs on my blog, Playlist does not automatically document what the history of my playlist has been. I went through old posts and tried to remember what song had accompanied each post. If I could remember, I noted it at the end of the post. I decided, if I’m going to have a soundtrack, I’d better keep track of what it is.

Why do I want a soundtrack? Why do I wish that songs could burst from air at any given moment – When I’m getting an oil change. Even now, sitting in bed, barely awake. There is a part of me that believes life is a story. Not just my life. Every person’s life. And I guess I’m accustomed to multi-media tellings of stories.

Last night, c. and I went to see the season two premier of This American Life in the movie theater. I love This American Life, the radio show. I’ve never watched the television show.

In the theater, when Ira Glass got to the Q&A part, an audience member asked, “Do you find yourself having This American Life moments all the time? Like when something happens, do you hear yourself narrating about it?” Ira Glass answered, “No. Wouldn’t that make me crazy?” And the audience, including me, laughed.

But then, I thought, I do that. I do it all the time. I remembered my mad desire to have a soundtrack for life. I remembered how I am constantly and desperately trying to tie together little fragmented events, in hopes that I can make some grand, or at least comically poignant, meaning out of them. Here is a recent example:

I got a coffee from the Starbucks drive through. I was at a red light and began reading the print on the recycled napkin. It said something like, “More trees. Less paper. Less paper. More trees.” In the next moment, I found myself counting the napkins I’d been given. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. ELEVEN! Eleven napkins. More trees. Less paper. Less paper. More trees. Perhaps when Starbucks closed its doors to train its employees for quality control, they should have also schooled them on earth-friendly-consumer-etiquette.

The same day – I’d found a hand written sticky note on my car that said: “Call 555-5555 [I don’t recall the actual number.]. It’s important. –F.B.” So I called, after a few minutes pondering, Do I know an F.B.? I don’t think so. But what if it someone’s in trouble? I dialed. Only to be greeted by a computerized voice: “DO YOU WANT TO MAKE A MILLION DOLLARS?” Click. I felt violated by this ploy. I wondered, What made this person choose my VW Jetta wagon to post this note on, instead of the Honda Civic next to me? What about my wagon proclaimed that I might actually dial the number, and that I might actually be persuaded by the computer message? Does my car say that I am naïve? And desperate for a quick buck?

These two events followed an NPR story that was still percolating in my mind. It was a story I’d heard about a couple in Pheonix who, rather than receiving the rebate check so many of us are looking forward to, received what the IRS deemed would be more useful to them, an air conditioning unit. It seems that the IRS has identified people who may be inclined to use the rebates to pay off debt. They’ve also studied these people to determine what they may need and have sent them products in lieu of a rebate check to ensure that the rebate checks will actually be put back into the economy. [By the way, I’m beginning to think I’ve completely invented this story. I think I ACTUALLY heard it on NPR a month or two ago around 4 in the afternoon while driving home from work, but I can’t seem to find it on NPR’s website. Anyone else out there hear this story? Is it a figment of my imagination? A short story in the making?]

I share these three fragments with you to make the point that, I found myself having my own This American Life moment. I told my husband c. that I’d call it, “God bless fucking America,” or maybe, “This is fucking America.” And yes, there needed to be music playing during these moments. I don’t know. The Boss? John Cougar Mellencamp, “Jack and Diane?”

And here was one of my heroes, Ira Glass, saying, not only does he not analyze every event in his life for how it might be a This American Life moment, but in fact, if he did, it would make him crazy.

Am I crazy? Narcissistic? A writer? Are being unstable and narcissistic and analytical of events and surroundings collectively exhaustive? To be a writer, do I have to be at least one of these? Personally, I’m thinking that to be a writer, I need to be all three. But I don’t know what the theoretical term is for this phenomenon.

After the movie, c. and I were walking to the car. (Not before stopping outside the theater to watch people leaving the movie. I told c., “I bet we know a ton of people who were sitting in the audience.” We watched people trickle out and counted the familiars. Six. I thought there would be twenty or thirty. But c. assures me that to randomly know six people in a movie audience, without pre-planning to go to the movie together, is actually quite a lot.) “I want to develop the humor in my writing,” I told him. READ: I want to be funny. How can I be funnier? I told him I need to read John Irving and David Sedaris more intentionally. And steal their techniques to make the most devastating events laugh-out-loud funny. For that matter, I’d like to steal Ira Glass’s ability to edit interviews and his own narration, and now images, in such a way as to make tragicomedy. C. understood what I meant.

We went to dinner at a Lebanese place. The waiter asked if we wanted dessert. We said, “No.” I looked over at the table next to me and saw a couple sharing baklava. The next thing I knew, I was telling c. about how my mother made the very best baklava. How her Greek friend, crazy Tula, had taught her, and eventually, she got so good at it that people were constantly asking her to make it. I told him, “It was never dry.” Here at the table, I found myself tearing up over baklava. Or rather, over my mother.

And maybe also because one of the segments in This American Life had also made me want to cry, but I’d held back. It was called, “Talk to an Iraqi.”

So now, I’m left wondering these things:

Am I a walking billboard, and is my blog a string of words that equate to pure product placement [Roomba, Austin, This American Life, Starbucks (where I only go in desperate times; I don’t really like their coffee), Volkswagon]??

Or am I a character, and are all the people around me characters? What is that monologue we memorize in high school English? “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Am I a modern-day Shakespeare?

Can I make the sad things I tend to write about funny in their melancholy? In my conversation with c. last night, I rehashed a years-old story that exists in bits and pieces, though I’ve had the title forever now: “Miss Pensacola, 1979.” It would be the perfect piece to attempt after hard-core studying some David Sedaris. What can I steal from you, David Sedaris?

The morning rambles on. I'm going to turn on my i Roomba now and play with the new plants I bought yesterday afternoon while I deliberate on what the perfect song for this entry is - the perfect soundtrack.

I leave you with a link. This is the Storycorps episode NPR aired this morning. It also made me tear-up. Granted I'd just woken up, and my mind was still coming into focus. Enjoy.

[I just remembered. One of the things that Ira Glass spoke about last night was the strange sensation of being in the subway and also seeing a poster with his face splattered all over that subway station. Is he a walking billboard, literally?]

SONG: Word, Elvis Presley

too many to-do lists.

So much to do, such a small amount of time. The reality of moving has set in.

Selling one’s house is a major chore. We’re trying to get everything done in six weeks. Among “everything” is replacing our front door, replacing four columns on the front porch, possibly dry walling our ceilings, scraping/sanding/painting our front porch, making a door for the door-less potting shed, re-laying gravel in our little parking area, and the list goes on and on.

It's work just trying to become unattached to this little house we adore. And this little neighborhood we've come to love. Neighbors we know and like. (Of course there are those whom we are happy to get away from!)

A signal that there will be light at the end of the tunnel is that the houses on our street do not tend to stay on the market for very long – two weeks, maybe a month. Let’s hope we’re not the exception. Because the sooner our house sells, the sooner c. can quit his job and the two of us can head into the western sunset…Where we still need to find a place to live and where c. still needs to find a job. [EDIT: Where my fiction-writing career will begin and where c. will begin working at an architecture firm that truly suits him.]

All of this, in the midst of being very exciting, is slightly. No, incredibly. Overwhelming. Forgive me if my story-telling skills are not at their best in the next few months.

SONG: Changes, David Bowie