first day: rest of life

In a room with no windows and lots of bottled water, expensive art on the walls, they keep handing me papers and I keep signing my name at the bottom. Print. Signature. Date. Here's your copy. Repeat. I am thankful, truly I am--thankful enough to cry. Health insurance, retirement, pre-tax flexible spending account, massages every other Friday. Would you like insurance for your pet? Just sign here. This is a safety net, not handcuffs. Repeat this to yourself as your own name becomes unrecognizable to your eyes.

When it is time to break for lunch, I pick up my favorite black bag and leave the building without talking to anyone. I walk around the city and peer at the world from under edge of umbrella, wondering at the places I've lived and how they all look similar in the rain. It is cozy, familiar, private under there, and holding on to the handle for dear life, I start to feel like my own person again.

I put in a call to my dad's office to double-check my PPO plan choice and when a secretary asks who's calling I hear a foreign, troubling snippiness in my reply: His daughter in DC. Great. I've been here two days and already I'm losing my moorings. How can you navigate when you can't see the stars for all the city lights? When he calls back, he tells me that my choice are good, my reasoning sound. This is both pleasing and upsetting. Oh good. I can make it on my own in the world. Wait...I have to make it on my own?

When I left home on Sunday, the turgid, plummy bodies of my tomatoes were just turning red. The peppers were so green and small and perfect, the drops of rain sliding down the curve of their crispness, that I almost squealed with delight. Little Rat helped me load my possessions (more books than clothes) and said Don't you know that we're a family and you're not supposed to leave. That's okay. I can forget you if you don't care about us. This is an improvement. When I moved to San Diego, he threatened to run away and join the Navy.

I don't know how to say this because I don't know how to think about it, how to make sense of these pieces. I am smart. I have a brain and, what's more, I have school loans to pay. I like to solve problems, to take the variables and fit them into an equation of my own design and see the solution sweep away some of the chaos and disorder (if only temporarily, temporally). A job, no, a career, with health insurance, a trajectory, a purpose and a login and user ID. I see the point, the need. It's 27 June 2006, not 1906 or even 1946, I'm well aware. I wrote out the date at least 47 time today.

Even so. My ambition curves more toward the things that money can't buy. Even as the panicky, trapped feeling rises in my throat at the thought of committing a whole year there is an ache in my bones to set out roots of a different kind. The Hummingbird Management system might save your documents, but will they really last? When the hiring manager asked me my long-term goals, I didn't tell her about the little boys with freckles and their small, serious shoulders or the rows of strawberries that fall plunk plunk plunk into the tin pail.

sweetheart, you come by it honestly

Wednesday around midnight I got in my car and drove home. I missed my mom and Little Rat, and watching Norman lumber around the field in his mournful, solitary way. Grahamcracker told me once that my grandfather loved the sight of cattle grazing on a hillside, that he could watch them for hours. I think of my grandfather, a difficult man, and all his characteristics that my father didn't inherit, didn't pass down to me. I drive through the city, the suburbs, and down the wavy length of our small, rural county. When I pull onto the gravel road leading up the hill to our house, a silver fox runs through hazy beams of the headlights. Norman is by the gate so I roll down my window, stop, and watch his dark shape move in the black angus night.

sleep

Am tired--monumentally so-- even after spending hours and hours in thick, motionless sleep this weekend. Two friends set off to wander through Guatemalan villages and, fitting of their kind, quirky ways, called from airport to say that they had left the keys to their cool (style and temperature-wise) cavern of an apartment under the recycling bin...just for me.

So while most of city frolicked on Saturday afternoon, stuffed self silly with Alice Munroe stories before falling into sort of sleep associated with college--ravenous, fully-clothed, deep, on top of blankets, etc. When handsome man from upstairs knocked on the bars on front door, looking for a frisbee, couldn't pull self together sufficiently to issue coherent, let alone charming, greeting. Instead, stumbled around room, opening and closing drawers and cupboards and mumbling astonishment at obvious lack of sporting equipment. Handsome man would not be unjustified in suspecting drug use on part of girl in basement. Was fully clothed at least.

breakfast value meal

Crazy A sat at McDonalds yesterday morning for roughly an hour because he was early for an appointment. During these fifty-odd minutes, he "fell in love" with Sha'nel, a 24 year old girl who works the register. Apparently she is a grown woman, though, because her mother, who works the drive through, didn't say anything when she gave her number to an 18 year old boy. Trust me Kate, she's very mature, he said. I asked and she told me she doesn't that many kids.

summers

6: The window frames the sliver of orange candy moon and insects flap their hard shelled bodies against the screen all night. We lay on top of the covers and wait for a breeze that never stirs. The adults play pinochle around the kitchen table and eat coconut cream pie. The underbellies of our pillows are cool and smooth when flipped. Finally we fall asleep.

10: I find an old Reader's Digest under the guestroom bed at Grahamcracker's house and cry my way through the story of a young girl who dies of leukemia. Cataloging the girl's symptoms -- the purple-blue bruises appearing for no reason, the aching joints -- I notice that my own elbows and knees feel as though someone is banging at them with a wooden mallet and convince myself that I'll be dead by August. Is that a bruise on my arm? The secret weight of my imminent death colors the summer a shade more poignant than usual. This might be the last piece of watermelon I eat. Soon I'll be too sick to go to the waterpark. When I'm gone they'll be sorry they sent me to bed. At the end of the summer I'm a good two inches taller and need new pants for the fall.

14: I give in and read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time. For months now my dad has suggested it and I have ignored his suggestion in favor of bb gun wars or eating kakigori in the matchi with Philip. Finally, in a cabin on a mountain by the sea, far away from Philip in Tokyo, I pick up a ragged old copy and fall into immediate, desperate love with Jem, Atticus and Scout. A new thing starts to grow inside me as I read. Probably this thing would have emerged on its own one day; but lying there on the top bunk, it was shaped profoundly by Mrs. Dubose's camellias and the pale, wispy courage of Boo Radley. It is a baby ache at the sudden, small understanding of it all--the bigness and smallness of humans, and the way that goodness, courage and tragedy sometimes can't be separated into their own neat, little boxes.

18: Dot's older brother Leighton was a prisoner of war to the Japanese. After his ship was torpedoed in the South Pacific, he drifted in the warm briny waters but it was really my mother's prayers that kept him afloat, Dots says. She would iron and pray and sing hymns and that is what kept skin on his bones when there were more rocks than rice in his bowl. She digs out a picture of a thin, handsome man in a uniform who could be anyone's great uncle. You know, she says, I swore that if I wasn't married by 25, it would never happen. I met Vern the day after my 25th birthday. She still has some of the letters he wrote and a picture of the two of them kissing on a velvet sofa, the skirt of her polkadot dress spread around her. At the end of the summer she gives me this picture and I pack it in with all the other things to take to college.

20: The months stretch out ahead, hot, muggy and lonely. I take a job chasing tough kids around a sweaty gym. On trips to the monuments, my co-workers sneak off for cigarettes and the kids steal hotdogs from the street vendors. They boy who broke my heart emails out of the blue. The days drain by in an uneven rhythm. Somehow, I move forward.

24: Is it better to know or not to know--to labor away under your own silly predictions, pieced together from bits and observations, small flashes of insight that might really be the glare of a mirror? You could drown in these thoughts, even as you lay in the hot sun at the cool water's edge. Throw the weight of suspense off your back. Keep walking. Wait and see. It's going to be okay.

weekend words

taste
whisper
laugh
plot
chat
pick
laugh
lug
lift
tell
meet
laugh
spill
drink
sing
dance
dance
dance
dance

american dream

Thoreau went to the woods because he wanted to live deliberately. Ellen went to The Woods because her parents bought a house in that particular subdivision.