Losing True

It's possible this project will result in a man

So my 15 year old walks to the car from his scout meeting (and no, I am not going to apologize for the fact that my son is in scouting nor go into detail about why his troop is actually a good one and the boys his age make it all look, well, cool; nor is there any homophobic pro-Christian racist militaristic crap that smells bad enough for my Unitarian-raised liberal-minded fairly sensitive to the suffering in the world and trying to make a difference but for god's sake I'm human and therefore sometimes lazy and even selfish nose to smell).

So my 15 year old walks to the car from his scout meeting, looking perplexed by something. (I also have to say he is growing so fast that he seemed perceptibly taller after two hours out of my sight. He had to duck his head down to look through the passenger window at me as he approached.) He swung himself into the seat and said,

"I won an award."

We looked at each other in surprise. 

"For what?" I asked, but nicely.

He explained that he had won the Red Pencil, which is an award even I, with my lackadaisical approach to parenting a scout, recognized. It's given when a boy demonstrates leadership without being asked. 

I told him I was proud, but secretly thought to myself there must have been some mistake. The boy I collected from his weekend camp out the other day leaned sleepily against the trailer as all the other boys, including my younger son, busily unloaded grubby, heavy bins of equipment, ignoring my son's lack of physical assistance. When asked to detail his role in the job, he looked at me wearily, the way a general looks at a private who just asked the world's most ridiculous question. "Giving direction is part of pitching in, Mom."

Tonight I drove him home from the meeting and as we pulled into the garage (and by the way I keep forgetting to mention I am one of the few people in New Jersey who uses her garage to store her car. Hey folks! Did you know that's what they use garages for up in New England?) he looked down at his notebook and my glance followed his to the check I had carefully written out (after finally remembering) and had carefully asked my son to deliver to the Grand Master Elk of Mojo at the meeting in order to pay for that earlier mentioned camp out. 

"Uh oh," he said meekly. So much for the Red Pencil.

As it happens, Grand Master Elk lives a few doors down. My son threw himself in his glory across the couch next to his little brother, ready to bask in the reflected light of his brother's lack of a Red Pencil. But I went into my office and pulled out a blank envelope. Then I gave my son a choice: 

1. He could address an envelope (which I held in my hand) apologizing for forgetting to deliver the check at the meeting and signed by him, and I would walk the envelope down the few doors to G.M.E.'s mailbox, or

2. He could walk the check the few doors himself, knock on the door, and give the check to G.M.E.

He thought for only a few seconds and then stood up, his hand outstretched for the check. "You won this round," he laughed. And he put on his shoes and walked out into the night.

If any of you have raised or are raising at this moment (let us join hands and pray) a teenager, you know how stunning this turn of events was. That A) he was willing to get up from the couch for something that did not place chocolate or dyed chewy sugar, a video game, or cash into his hand and B) he was willing to walk to the house where he knew he would be greeted by an adult who might answer the door in a manner varying from "Sup" not to mention C) he had to put his shoes on and did so willingly gave me hope. 

Could it be...possible? But no. Not yet, anyway. Because while he was gone I walked down the hall to throw his notebook onto his bed and had to wade (you think I'm kidding) through a sludge of crumpled jeans and t-shirts and balled up socks to get across his room.

Still. Just maybe.

I'm so glad I had siblings.

Yo, y'all

Now, where was I? Oh, right! I was healing from a bit of breakdown brought on by a traumatic breakup, working on being in recovery on the side, frosted just a bit by being a single mom. It's coming back to me now. And the last thing I remember thinking was that blogging was a bit self-indulgent.

Which it totally is.

So I come back here a bit reluctant, as well as feeling a bit exposed because sometimes the people who read this get a wee bit put out, for instance when I am explicit or ungrateful or when I tell the story my own fucking way because, hey, am I writing this or are YOU?, but I need this outlet. I have a big change on the horizon: I am going back to graduate school for master's degree #2. (I'm thinking of collecting an even half dozen, I guess.) 

I have between now and the fall to find how the gear system of this Mack truck I'm driving works and shove this rig forward. And I can do it. 

Damn the torpedoes (or whatever it is the bad guys shoot at Mack trucks). I'm out of this window and into the next. I hate change, but it really puts out.  

The angle of the dangle

"Why did you stop blogging?" a friend asked me the other day. And one of my oldest friends (making me laugh even as he cursed me) is frustrated  by my silence. 

Ah well. Such is life—or blogging, more apt. In life we can explain the need for silence with a little shrug. Consider this a little shrug.

And, as Ricky Gervais points out in his (fabulously hilarious) special Out of England who fucking cares about every little whine and gripe and what-I'm-making-for-dinner and how-I-slept/didn't-sleep in my life? I like his blog, though. He's so amazingly normal, which probably reveals how abnormal I am. 

On the other hand, I miss all of you. I miss the stance I take to address you. I have to kind of lean back, maybe against some tree or a wall or the fender of a Jaguar, I don't know. I square my shoulders but slouch, too. "Hey babes," I say to the invisible, silent not-you you listening: "how's it hanging?" 

Silent month

Clearly blogging and I are taking a little break from each other.

But not every break signals bad things, and separation can cause noise where  you might expect silence.

A year ago, it was as if I fell through the ice of a frozen pond. I was growing more and more certain that I was in horrible danger—those were the moments I could get my head above the numbing water. The rest of the time I was under the ice, able to see everyone walking around above me, but unable to break through to get help. The panic would rise, and I would numb it back down again. 

It is so strange to be going through this season of holidays and deepening weather and the excitement of my children, when a year ago I was pretty sure I wouldn't see this December, or if I did, I'd be watching it from a jail cell. I feel incredibly strong, but at the same time, I am craving silence in the worst way. The slightest shadow spooks me; the next minute I feel omnipotent. It’s like waking up from a bad dream many times a day. It's taking almost all of my energy. I still maintain that alcoholics going into recovery should be granted a cure by the sea. For, oh, two years. 

When my youngest son had his first set of tubes in his ears, I carried him out through the doors of the hospital and into the parking lot and he startled, whimpered, then burrowed down into my arms and looked around fearfully. “What is the noise?” he asked, trying to push his head under my arm to cover his ears. It was just the spring birds, but he had never heard them so clearly. He remembered for years how deafening they sounded that day, how their beautiful sound was distorted by volume into ugliness.

I am struggling to get the words to describe how it is to go through December without it causing me pain. I had forgotten, have forgotten, that I used to love the way this month pulls in winter with a hokey overdone flourish, like someone dragging a ice-cold fragrant Christmas tree into a room. I wish I could observe it all from a great distance this year. I wish I could watch it pass by me, safely out of my orbit, beautiful to look at, but silent.

Beowulf 2008

My son had a friend over, and with my youngest, they sat at the kitchen table eating subs for dinner. I cleaned up the kitchen, half-listening to them talking. Someone said, “But the coolest guy of all was Beowulf.”

Ok: I was an English major. And not an English major because I couldn’t figure out what else to do, an English major of the I-actually-like-studying-literature brand. So I asked, like an idiot, “You like Beowulf?”

Guest immediately answered, “He’s beast.” (I know enough to know that means he’s cool, thank you very much.)

“Are you…reading Beowulf in school?”

Guest hesitated, as if I had asked him whether swans mate for life—the question had a component that interested him, but wasn't worth answering.

 My youngest warmed my heart by asking, “Was that a poem or prose, Mom?”

I started to spout on and on about oldest surviving yadda Anglo Saxon poem yadda yadda, but then I ran downstairs to get my old Norton’s anthology and ran my fingers over those so-familiar onion-skin pages. With a flourish, I opened the book on the table for them. My oldest read a few lines; they laughed at the language, and then I flipped forward to the scene when Grendel’s mother shows up, figuring they’d like the violence.

“Right!” Guest shouted out, suddenly alert. “Angelina Jolie!”

“All right, who’s tougher,” I asked, my mind back in Teen Boyland, “Braveheart or Beowulf?” My sons hesitated, but Guest, with pained patience, explained:

 “Beowulf is worth 10 Bravehearts. Beowulf is way more buff.”

Cool on the other side of the fence

I'm always suspicious of silence here, as it's typically not a good sign. Yet I feel fine—or at worst, a little drifty, as if I'm floating between two lives. Who knows which way the current will take me? Certainly not I. I've been idly looking for a full-time job (translation: I email people advertising on craigslist every now and then, and when they email me back, I immediately forget about them).

In my own defense, much of my energy is being taken up by the demands of my older son's entry into high school, which is fully related to him being 14. He has convinced himself that the people in our town are shallow, nouveau riche conspicuous consumers of right-wing left-minded ideological no-good. I, for one, see no reason to disagree with him, and for years I've been hoping he would come to this conclusion. What I didn't count on was that reaching that conclusion would cause him to decide that immediate relocation is the only remedy and that Charlotte, North Carolina is the place to relocate. Is this because he loves the weather there? The culture? No. This is because a friend of his is having an easier time adjusting to high school (translation: a different time) and claims that at his high school, popularity is not based on athletic prowess, as my son feels it is here, but on an amorphous quality my son refers to as "personality." 

Uh huh. 

Hello darkness

I am depressed again. I have tried to put a spin on that sentence that would cheer it up, give it some kind of jaunty ironic twist, make it less depressed sounding, but nothing's coming to me. This time I guess I could say I have the tools to get better faster, that I understand what's wrong and what it means. I promised myself when I started feeling better this summer: You'll do X or you'll do Y if you start to feel that way again. Yet I didn't count on—apparently didn't remember—how numbing the effect is. You see the tools from across the room and realize that there is no way you have the energy to get up and get them. And it's hard to trust those tools, because here I am back down.

One thing that helps is that this summer I went as far down as anyone can go without ending up the hospital. I know that. I suppose another person might have landed in the hospital, might not have been able to fight hard enough to avoid it.

Friends of mine helped me celebrate my birthday in September, and as we sat at a picnic table outside I found myself suddenly talking about quitting alcohol. They say in AA that when you get up to tell your story, you never know what's going to come out. I just started to talk and I noticed everyone around the table getting quiet, just listening, so I kept talking. It didn't seem hard to say.

Afterward one of my friends came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder. "Do you realize how strong you are?" she asked me. It surprised me. Is that what I am? 

I'm holding on to that now, that even though the wrecking ball has swung back into the picture, I can dodge it, or catch it somehow and push it clear of my life. Man, I hate the weight of that thing. It's heavier than the world. And turning to see it pulling back as it picks up momentum to swing toward me, having to position my feet to brace myself for it, that is where the exhaustion is. 

Get out of the way, I want to yell to everyone around me. This thing has my name on it.

The fox

As I’ve been feeling better and the dust settles and (your favorite cliche here) so on, unconnected imagery that popped up all summer is morphing into symbol, then meaning. 

In mid-July, I discovered a new dirt road had been cut so that construction vehicles could make their way from a main road in town through a big and beautiful townhouse development.  The houses are pleasant to look at, and they wind gracefully along a pond, and it’s all very scenic. So one night I drove past the No Trespassing signs to see what was what, and I parked in front of a just-framed building. It was almost dusk, and it had been a gorgeous summer day. No one was around, and I wanted to walk through the new house to see how it was laid out. There was no sound but my flip-flops on the dusty floors. I went upstairs and looked out across the pond through the window holes. I thought how nice it would be to live there, and how much I enjoyed building my house, the one I had to leave when X-man got fired. Then I walked down the framed stairs and stood in the open front doorway. I startled a fox that must have been right at the front steps. It ran off a bit, and then stopped and looked at me. It stood there for quite a while, then trotted off.

A fox has so much literary muscle behind it as an image, and then, they’re beautiful and strange: not dog, not cat, but something in between.

A few days later as I was driving in my neighborhood (which is a mile or so from the new development) a fox was running through a yard and stopped to watch me drive by. (I of course romanticized that it was the same fox.) The next night, as I walked a block from my house, I had that weird sensation of being watched, and I turned around and saw a fox sitting on the edge of a yard. Just sitting, with its white-tipped tail curled demurely around its front feet, and looking at me. (I am not making this up.) Since then, I see the fox ambling around the neighborhood all the time. (Again, I’ve decided it knows me, and now when it sees me, it can go about its business of hunting or partying or whatever foxes do; it knows I won’t interfere.)

Last night as I was about to let the dog out, I held his collar and paused to check the yard first; he was going wild about something and, well, the skunking he had in the spring is still fresh in my memory. That’s when I saw the fox in my yard. It was right in the garden on the corner of my property, having turned at the sound of the door opening to look in our direction. I pushed the dog back into the house and stepped outside. The fox kept looking at me. It was big, but it was so dark out I couldn’t see its color and so I’m not sure if it was possibly a coyote. It was much taller than I would have thought, and its stare was pure curiosity with no fear. It sniffed the rocks at the edge of my garden and then trotted across the street.

I’m tempted to feed it, to tame it. I fantasize that if I opened the door of my car as I drove by, it would jump in.

I imagine it’s trying to tell me something, that it’s asking: well? Are you coming?

Tenacious

It's no secret to anyone who's spent any time in my house that my children are obsessed with the movie "Tenacious D and The Pick of Destiny." It's equally no secret that I have a crush on Jack Black. This is why, in spite of the very few teeny tiny moments of slight inappropriateness that inch in there at certain points, I let my children watch the movie again and again. I just love to see that impish smile at the edges of Jack Black's mouth. Then, without moving anything on his face, he can somehow convey a playfulness that absolutely charms me.

I realize he's married, and the father of young children, and because I happen to respect the institution I'm not going to make my move. And maybe I'm lucky he is married, because if he was in my life I'd never get anything done.