The Romney In My Mind

I was making the bed this morning, my mind a battlefield of conflicting illusions, when a thought dropped in: you don't have to listen to any of this, it's just the mind.

For a moment the whole landscape shifted like a computer desktop, to my left. All the dark fears, the scrabbling strategies, the circular obsessions, all of it dropped away the minute I saw it for what it was. This is the part of my mind I can't rely on to tell the truth, this is the destructive, shape shifting, obfuscating, fear based monster, the Romney in my mind.

Here's how I'd behave if I listened to the Romney in my mind:

I'd increase my defenses. I'd suspect everything 'other'. I'd close down, shut myself in, stop listening to the world out there.

I'd sever relationships because I felt threatened. I'd boast and swagger and lie about my achievements because I felt small.

I'd stop caring about anyone else but myself. I'd be focused on my survival, the survival my fear tells me is alternately marginal or needs to be in the face of everyone else.

I'd start fights because I felt the swing again, the flop between 'I'm so great, don't mess with me’ and the ‘I'm so tiny and irrelevant I need stacks of cash and power to protest my enormity’.

I'd let people fend for themselves, after all, hadn't I had to scrabble and fight?

I'd be unable to see a reality out there because my Romney was in the way. I'd be inside counting all my money, grateful that some of us had spine, happy to share My Romney with others through a process of persuasive democratization.

I'd stomp out into pristine nature and challenge it, shaking my enormous fist at the girly trees and glorious vistas. Why are you out here? I'd shout. Why are you not fuel for my commute, cash in my pocket? It would take a very brief moment, this face off, before I moved right in to rape and pillage.

I'd say ‘I’ a lot and reward those who agreed with me and punish those who didn't. I'd have no idea what a womb was, a place for something other than myself? It's an empty space and therefore, fair game. I'd conquer it because that's what you do with spaces where Romney is not.

I'd use people without thinking. I'd have no idea why else they'd be there cluttering up my Romney reality.

Soon there would be only Romney in my mind, nothing else, no more tension left, and then, when I am ruler of the world, I’ll see little point in examining anything I do because me and God, we don't need nobody, nobody but me.

Up In The Air

And what it does to you. Altitude. The first leg I am between two grumpy men, a sort of filling in a belligerent sandwich. He on the right of me, who I do not know, is sighing and hissing: ‘Jesus Christ” long and drawn out like: Jeeeezus Chrrrrrist. While he on the left of me, who I do know, innocently drones on the phone, and is the cause of the meltdown on my right. Meanwhile the aircraft idles hotly on the Denver runway waiting, waiting for the air above San Francisco to make space for us to dare to take off because we know that we can land.

I feel protective of my fiercely communicative husband and sympathetic towards the fuming stranger. He’s trying to write emails and every time he comes up with the first few words Michel makes another call. I want to tell him “ssssh” and I want to reprimand the other for cursing so uncharitably. It’s not a good start to this endless journey half way round the globe.

Finally we’re up there. He who was recently blaspheming has settled down with one elbow well into my space while my husband has grown still and sleepy on my left. I am no longer such an agonized filling. But the space is minute and the man on my right is unforgiving, broad shouldered and frantically scrolling through downloaded emails, twitching at his blackberry. I have drawn my shoulders in so that the sides of me would converge if I sketched me head to toe. I can barely breathe.

We land without crashing and I am prostrate with gratitude, saved again by United, who otherwise exudes an air of ‘frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn’. There is an urgent sweeping march across the glass bridge in San Francisco, a ghastly tumult at the departure gate for HK, a towering babel of tongue speaking and we are on the next leg, the endless one, higher this time and now I am another kind of filler in a similar sandwich.

On the left of me is a man as wide as he is tall, and he is tall. He wears a floral blue Hawaiian shirt and is kind. This man is two men’s worth but he draws his elbows in and contains his spill. He smiles and apologizes when I must climb over him to the damp, long distance toilets where every disease lies ready and waiting to catch at my meek and briefly bare nethers.

On the right of me is that same man, the one constant, my husband of 35 years. Now he knows, through training, that he must give me an inch of the armrest even though we are feet apart in height, though not girth.

I am up against the bulkhead. Overhead the crew struggle with the basics of communication, their radio frequency reliably frazzled, urgent but indistinct causing me to hope, as I always do, that the technological virtuosity absent here is not also absent in the serious matter of keeping us aloft in space.

My ipad hangs by a cord beside my teetering glass of wine and glass of water, double death by liquid. Inside England unfolds, slow and mannerly even as it enters the deadly slow shock of WWII. I have done it properly this time, downloaded a great big series that is stately and careful, that paces me into a leisurely peace powerful enough to help me feel less pinched, adrift and upright. I am rocking along in my 5x10 world, protected from Hawaii on my left and husband on my right by the darkness. In my little lit rectangle things come and things go, but oh so lyrically. I am brought to tears, not silent but gushing and clamorous but it is dark and high and noisy enough for my unraveling to pass unnoticed.

In this dim, catapulting capsule I am surprisingly unprotected, advancing, ready or not. What I feel, behaving like some hot spark sobered by the cold ash it will become. I am once, no several thousand times, removed, but what moves me when I have my feet on the ground floors me up here. It is as if the high, cold air collides in glorious physics with the ordinary of my life. I am not moving mundanely from departure to arrival. I am some miraculous catherine wheel hurtling through deep space away, away from everything I know and yet closer than ever to my life.

This 30,000 feet effects me like this every time, and every time I am laid bare by it, crying more easily, laughing at anything. This time is awkward for my body but unsurpassed for my spirit. It is impossible, this flying through the air, and we could just as soon plummet and die. At any moment.

So when I think about things here, like love, it’s untrammelled by gravity, huge and magnificent, something I fall into while flying.

The Option To Leave

For those of us who do not take the obvious escape, bowing out of life, committing suicide, ending it all, there is this remaining problem of how to continue in the face of the lesser daily suicides we commit and the extraordinary bravery an ordinary day, asks of us. The challenge of how to take the next step with something other than quiet desperation.

There is always the option to kill ourselves. That thought kept whispering itself to me this morning because it posed this enormous dilemma of how to live if you refused that option. And that made me think of what we insert instead of a straight forward death. Because here I am this morning choosing not to kill myself, choosing to live but what does that mean?

Does this mean I’ll rock victoriously through my day rampantly alive having just averted death again. Not likely. What will come for me then is all the minor maimings, the personal tortures, the ways I have learnt to torment myself and the life that I have been given. Because I have chosen not to die does not mean that I have chosen to live, I mean really live. I may have chosen to continue as the walking wounded. Though there has been no death there is still a war going on it seems.

And I am such a good soldier, heading off obediently into the trenches, fighting on both sides. And it can be subtle, not blatant. I may appear to support life as opposed to death, peace as opposed to war but what opposes my really being alive is this fierce and constant inner battle. I am too little of this, too much of that, too old, too stupid. I am not kind, beautiful, clever enough. I present myself with a conglomerate of embarrassing, damning shortfalls and flaws, things that essentially ask to be wiped out, annihilated, because they simply don’t make the grade.

So there is the simple, violent action of taking one’s life, in one fell swoop and then there is the decision to stay and live and simply hit the trenches daily, hourly, moment by moment and shell yourself to a slow and less obvious death but a death all the same. And the pain of it, this self inflicted violence, because I am speaking of the battle that rages within ourselves long before we consider what injustices rain down on us from the ‘world out there’.

I’m talking about our private world, our private decision not to kill ourselves, our private bravery in deciding to continue and our private war against ourselves despite our decision TO LIVE. All the anomalies here, the paradoxes, the mist that rises immediately over our decision to live, blurring the life we have stood for when we chose not to die. This should be life affirming, shouldn’t it, this decision? I, Gail, who am capable of leaving, have decided to stay. What should follow should be a kind of celebration, shouldn’t it? But it isn’t. Because of the mist, or rather murk that rises, the impetus to live gets overwhelmed and confused by persistent, surprisingly vicious little acts of violence so we are alive but we are often privately staggering and blind, going forward through sheer force of will, pitting itself against this desire to destroy that is not felled by the decision to live.

So in this round about, dim and confused way I was thinking about the choice to stay this morning and the incredible bravery it takes to stay because to stay often feels like staying to fight, I mean live, another day. And it shouldn’t be like that, you would think, given that we’ve just made this powerful decision to be on the side of life. You’d think that would catapult you into such a bold, affirming experience of what it is to be alive.

So now that I am here, having chosen not to end it all, how am I to do something more than merely survive the battlefield that presents itself instead of the bouquet of flowers I was expecting. Sometimes we expect the flowers so much we don’t even notice there are explosives hidden in them, we are so unprepared for battle still bathing, as we are, in the aftermath of having saved our own lives.

So it’s necessary to notice that violence, if not death, persists even as you choose life. If you don’t pay attention you can’t protect yourself and the veils will come down and you will have no choice but to take the route of quiet desperation.

But while I have said ‘death’ and ‘kill’ and ‘suicide’ several times in this post and ‘war’ and ‘battle’ and ‘desperation’, what I’m actually writing about is the desire to see all of this so that I can somehow avoid, no. not avoid, alchemize this war inside into something like peace. I’d use that same extraordinary power I called upon to not kill myself to identify and avert, or somehow include the desperation, in something that is a celebration of life.

Having begun so many paragraphs with ‘so’, and confused myself utterly in my attempts to see, I come back to this. I am alive because I choose not to die. I owe it to myself, no to life itself, to recognize the field of battle this leaves me on so that I can choose not to participate in the warfare, so that I can own my power to transform the urge to destroy into a will to live that is more than just the decision to not die. I will use my ability to see and identify the bullets, and blades and stones and I will transform them into that bouquet of flowers I originally expected to receive and I will live in a way that takes all this cruelty and turns it into the love that lies at the origin of all things. And I will do it first with the war inside myself then maybe make a tiny dent in the suffering all around me.

Not Quite Dying

A fly executes lazy laps an inch from my forehead, flaunting it’s fly self. I cover my lips with a fold of white sheet so that it will land on an eyelid, my nose, but not my lips that I shall have to kiss whether I love me or not.

It's a milky hot Sunday afternoon and I am not dying. But I am lying in bed staving off death or any of its lesser handmaidens that may want to whip me into an impromptu dress rehearsal.

Its odd lying here in this room that I am normally dreaming in or bustling about ignoring its built for lounging décor, doing my best to ornament the place with towering piles of unpacked laundry before it makes its mysterious journey to the impossible closet across the room.

The wooden fan above circles lazily but doesn’t land, dreaming of more Casablancan places, slim long cigarette holders, long tailored skirts, seamed stockings, cloche hats and the tang of gin.

Yes, I am lying in bed now like a middle eastern woman modestly prepared for company and I have only these next few closing hours of Sunday day and the sleepless slice of dark before the next day to battle my viral demons.

I smile under my sheet moustache and think about the years I spent just like this, six full years maybe and another four spent half sitting and half lying down. I remember the places lying there took me. The fields of battle. The blood on the sheets, the ripped out hair, the odd eye snatched out.

I will not, I repeat, will not lie here one sodding minute longer do you hear – to the merciless, silent air. Will not, and the air did not even tremble. The colour white enveloped my brain, I lay on it, it lay on me, I was the wound around me sweat laden sheet, I was the white steel pressed ceiling, I lay flat, I didn’t move.

Sitting was an activity for athletes. I was like a stop light on a busy road. People sped up to me, stopped abruptly revving their engines and exchanging pleasantries, gave me their reasons why they were not me, so this wouldn’t happen to them. We nodded, my head against the pillow, I smiled my wise smile, the light changed and they sped off. I stayed still, caught in a deadly damp web of pain and weakness. That was the era of fight, of fury, gnashing of teeth, my hair wet with tears. My husband held me. I pushed him away.

“I will not. I will not…”

He’d grab for me again, I was hot and slippery, he’d hold me down and whisper in my ear.

“stop fighting it. Stop,,, We love you, we all do. Just as you are.”

And I would sit up redfaced and indignant wound up in bedclothes.

“How can they?”

I’d throw my hands up limply and we’d watch them slap down on the whiteland, now mine, the bleached out color of my banishment.

There were days and years and moods of morning and of mourning, of fighting beyond any weapons, a refusal to die, a refusal to live like this, a refusal to open my eyes to another day in this white wasteland while my family grew up past me.

Christmas, New Year’s parties came and went, the sound of music and laughter on the porch outside my door. My eyes wet and my body raging. I loved to dance. I could not now walk without help. Where is a life before it is over and after it no longer works? What is this nowhere land that people rush through smiling and waving their tickets out at me. I try to snatch at them but they’re too fast for me. I am lying swathed in pale sheets even though it is day and they are flashes of sound and color.

It is over. It is over. The realization that no fighting can win. Overhand, underhand, guerilla, no fighting can win because the enemy leaves no trace of itself, only the signs of its destruction. There is never a face to face.

And the years when all the fight was gone. The very investigation of the depths of hopelessness, the realization of no escape. This is it.

The lack of energy to fight or die. Just merely being and tears sluice down through my hair. This is too difficult. What framework of reference can lend meaning to this cul de sac of a life. Even dying seems proactive. I am a ghost in my own life. My children are growing, they are eating food that I have not prepared, people come and go, they tap down the long passage way to my casement room made almost all of small panes of glass to bring the outside in. I arrange myself against the pillows and smile because they don’t deserve my rage and my despair. They desperately want me to make this pretty and they want to know, their eyes examine me, they need to know that we are different, that they could never ever find themselves where I am. And I smile benignly because when the net dropped it caught only me.

And then the glorious reorganization of concepts, perception and reality. The turning upside down of faithful old precepts. “I am sick and I cannot get better therefor my life is over”.

“My body is sick but I, I am whole, I am alive.

The suffusion finally of gratitude for a life in any shape and form but particularly this one with all its limitations. Slowly I begin to see through my incarceration to something that is mine, that has no edges, is edgeless. The air smells different, like flowers, there are sounds like music and colors, the color green swirls through the bleached out air of my sick room, like a kaleidoscope green and purple, orange and blue. My casement kaleidoscope room.

I give up. I give up. I fall at the feet of these colors, this air, the way life sounds, the throb of it in my chest. I am done. I accept. I surrender. This is it. There is nothing else needed. I am at first and last showered in everything.

Now, nearly 20 years later I know that I’ll get up and go to work tomorrow. I know this will end. I know about resting and the delicate balancing act of staying healthy. With my mouth under the sheet I look at all of this, stupefied with wonder.

And Verily...

I say unto you --I had to do this as an exercise, and it was grave fun. What have you to say, my flock?

“You have heard it said that it is a good and worthy thing to volunteer for a not for profit organization but I say to you if it is only to enhance your resume and not out of genuine concern for those you are “helping” then they will likely not benefit from your empty actions and you will end up with a great job and an empty heart.

You have heard it said that a man shall buy his wife diamonds which are a girl’s best friend and take her to candlelit dinners and gaze into her eyes but I say to you if you have not heard her through her tears and loved her when she’s ugly and disheveled you have not truly loved at all and when all is said and done you will have diamonds and candles and no warmth of human flesh and no body beside you when you sleep.

You have heard it said that parents should love their children and guide them in the pursuit of perfection but I say to you if you have not shown your children how to love imperfection then they will be without love for the world as it is and themselves as they are and they will grow up in despair and die in grief.

You have heard it said that good taste is admirable but I say to you if you lack the courage to admit less elevated tastes you shall find yourself surrounded by people just like yourself and the conversations will echo with emptiness and be competitions and everyone will wear layers of armor lest they be discovered for who they truly are.  

You have heard it said that it oils the wheels of society to do and say what is expected and not rock the boat but I say to you if all that you say and all that you do is mere lip service to an order you believe supports you than you will wake up one day to find the ground gone beneath your feet and your mouth in the shape of a scream. "

A Gruesome Editing Metaphor

Kill the babies

My father said.

By that he meant,

Not the fresh, blush,

Flesh of newborns.

But the torrent

Of exuberant words,

When one

Would

Do.

Why overflow

He said.

When flow,

Alone,

Is good.

Tell that

To a rose in bloom,

Dad,

I said.

Tell that to a sunset. 

One

Almost freezing,

That’s one degree centigrade.

Just the one.

In the dry creek bed,

Something round,

Shock-orange.

Not the sun,

Fallen.

A perfect pumpkin,

Halloween residue.

Above, in the

Charcoal sketch

Cottonwood,

An owl --

To whit to whoooo.

And higher, even higher,

Cutting the late afternoon

Winter blue,

Streaked with white,

Egyptian geese,

Garrulous honkers,

Spill.

North, south, east, west.

A compass of

Aerial confusion.

And a dove,

One lone dove,

Calls.

A Torrid Enough Story

I was enjoying a leisurely bath, reclining in the warm wet staring out at the oblivious green of the ash tree. This time last year a surprise storm froze out the gentle letting go of fall and rolled in a premature shock of winter. In one icy day everything fell, no yellow no gold, no falling one by one just one day untouched by autumn and the next all green was gone.

Fall. We all fervently hope it won’t do that again. We want time to relish the ache of goodbye, the leaving, the longing, the days of teetering on the edge of loss, but not falling. We are like lovers on the dock before the ship sails. We are full of impossible love, so enormous we regularly get lost in it.

How many people, right this moment, are falling, falling, falling?

I added more hot water. Then I thought of all the people experiencing the opposite: pain, suffering, disconnection, alienation. The lonely, the tragic.

And what of the wily? And the corrupt? The plots afoot, those fighting for justice, those fighting against it? This world wraps itself around everything equally, the whole rollicking, unsentimental mess, a kind of craziness. 

We, all of us, involuntarily participating in what has to be the biggest story ever written. Each a full-blown character in it, swimming in the most powerful elements of intrigue, love, hate, fear, anger, every subplot so intense, so rollicking, so shamelessly unrestrained.

There are so many themes, huge themes, all here, all happening now behind those eyes, in that room, across the street, across the border, on our doorstep and way across to the other side of the world. So many arcs this story has, its sky lit up like the Fourth of July.

Who can resist such a story? No missing elements, no holds barred. If you just listen, if you just see, you will be blown away. And the story is so fierce and dynamic, so radical and ruthless that you couldn’t slam the book shut if you tried, couldn’t get up and walk out of the cinema.

It should be compulsive reading, we should be unable to tear ourselves away. We should be consumed. And, whether or not we know it, we are.

Any writer who has ever struggled to bring together the elements of a story, struggled to inspire a trajectory, tried to hold the reader in thrall can appreciate this. This is the epic story of stories, and we’re in it.

Do any of us have any idea what’s going to happen next?

 We should be sitting on the edge of our seats...

Apparently Elsewhere

I leave home because I am lost and I expect to find myself somewhere else as I am not here. And I look and I look, everywhere, and I still can’t find myself. Even on the other side of the planet, I cannot find myself.

I must be looking in all the wrong places. That or I don’t exist at all, and yes, philosophically there is that question, but I am looking for something more substantial not this something that suggests a self but won’t confirm it.

So I’m trying to explore the way this works. I look for myself, and can’t find anything more than this suggestion so I conclude that I must be somewhere, just not here. So I head off. I will find myself, we’ll get back together, we will function better. I leave full of hope, no backward glances, all onward and upward. This movement away makes me feel better, like I’m doing something, at least not just standing here confounded.

Where might I be? I wonder. I imagine somewhere exotic, the kind of place that winks slyly at you from the slick silk pages of Travel and Leisure.

To get there I must pass through those places I think I love, airports. Why do I think I love them? They’re full of people like me, we’re all bustling about busily, looking for ourselves. On the flights where I am lucky enough to be upgraded I sit in wannabe fancy lounges full of busy, important, well to do people looking for themselves. Everyone there is full of a summoned sense of self-importance as though that would work as a substitute for the self they’re looking for and cannot find.

When I arrive in the exotic place I see all the trappings of exotic places, palm trees, millions of people not like me, foreign, different people. I see glorious sunsets, I have fabulous drinks watching them. I sleep in comfortable hotels with some or other beguiling characteristic that led me there.

I lie on the bed and see if I am there. I soak in tubs using little bottles of fragrant free stuff. I walk around and look at places I have never seen and could not possibly even imagine. I look into the faces of people I pass on the streets but they don’t see me. They’re focused on something far away. Maybe they’ve spotted themselves in the rose mist of the horizon behind me.

I try resting, gazing up at the details of the ceiling, the sky. I try rushing around frantically, carrying maps and iphone apps, getting the lay of the place. I try socializing, clinking ice around in tall glasses, asking questions, trying to listen.  I try working, observing, writing, writing, writing, thinking, writing some more. Still can’t find myself. I look hungrily out the windows of cross-country trains at the endless landscapes I’ve read so much about. I scour the horizon for signs. Where am I?

The days pass, I‘m back in the airport full of busy people going ‘somewhere’. I’m going back home where I know I am not. I try seeming full of something else that isn’t me. I try substitutes, like practiced humour and intelligence. I try kindness and humility. I know there’s ground beneath my feet but I can’t necessarily feel it.

At home I settle back into the familiar routine, I give up trying to find myself and dress up as someone who has found herself, well enough so that I don’t make myself or others feel too uncomfortable.

After awhile the hope rekindles and resumes its hungry simmer. I need to leave, I need to go off, I need to find myself.

I do this for countless years, maybe lifetimes, and then I stop, face to face with the utter hopelessness of it all. It is no use. I have looked everywhere. I am never going to find myself. Anywhere. I’m peering down into the abyss, I’m falling into it. I’m soaked in stupefying despair and disillusionment. It’s no use, no use at all.

Every cell in my body is dumbstruck with despair.  I sit down heavily, numb, catatonic almost. Completely and finally lost. Nowhere to go.

Slowly, one by one my cells shudder and regroup. It takes hours, it takes days, it takes weeks and months. Days and endless days of no escape. One random day I look up. Everything is still exactly where it was. But something

Infinitely subtle has snuck in while I wasn’t looking. Something glorious and patient, patiently peeling back all the filmy layers of my resistance. She gets closer and I lift my hand to touch my face to check it’s still here, because it is also there, its moving towards me and nothing will stop it. I am standing dead still and this, coming towards me, is me

A White Page Is Not...

A white page is not silky

but it lies flat.

It stares up at me expectantly.

Is it a pale body waiting for a tattoo?

It has no eyes but is wide-eyed.

No morals,

but it is immoral.

It wants touching, will be touched,

by anyone,

This white page.

A white page thinks itself

a fancy philosophical premise,

a tabula rasa.

A white page has nothing going for it

but is brazen about that.

Unashamed.

A white page shakes its fist at me,

has a foul mouth.

Reaches out it’s hand and clings to me,

simpering, pleading.

Won’t let me go.

A white page needs help

but repels it.

Gazes at me lovingly

then looks away.

A white page is a tease,

sizzles under my fingers,

pretends to have time for me

protests love even.

Lies there a sullen, unshadow,

a piece of light that won’t share.

A White page is not good for anything.

It needs stalking, scaling.

It needs to be overcome.

Or it needs to

Go Away.

Smoke With Fire

Labor day. I cannot remember what it means here in this country, but today it seems ominous.

The day began with an irascible, howling wind and a fire up Fourmile Canyon. The sky over the mountains released a plume of shocked white smoke expanding to dirt grey, transparent and eerie and then thick and suffocating. The sky version of a swamp.

The climate inside me was no less ominous, no less opaque. I awoke feeling like the solitary member of an endangered species unfamiliar with notions of comfort or safety.

Now, hours later, the sky is still cloaked in smoke, and I? I feel no less vulnerable. At risk, uneasy, feeling like the sky, dank and full of ash. Apocalyptic my daughter phoned to say. That’s what its like in downtown, like the end of the world. We’re perched up and away, ten miles out of the canyon. We can stand back a bit and see the edges of the apocalypse swallowing the sky. The blue, wan and losing the battle.

But today can’t be all about the sky can it? The drama in the canyon, the suffocating heat of the flames, the adrenaline of life fleeing from it, the smell of life dying in it.

The air yesterday was strange too, hot and urgent, blowing at you like someone you didn’t like standing too close, touching you. We should have known, because of yesterday, that something was coming. We should have readied our forces, rallied them for today and the end of the world.

It’s no use saying it’s just inside my head because it isn’t. What’s inside here is amplified out there. No escape seems possible. It is inside and outside, it is everywhere. And what is this peculiar light that makes the hair stand up on end, conjuring obscure swirling memories of lifetimes of loss? What is it that takes this day of rest and turns it sinister, something so exquisitely uncomfortable I need to curl up my edges and turn away from it?

I look up to search the grey for blue but there is none. The sky is an eye washed with tears. There are forlorn scraps of sunlight on the asphalt outside and the tips of the Russian sage but I cannot find where the sunbeams come from.

But this is just a day, isn’t it? The light comes and it goes. And the weather inside will recede without pausing to explain itself and I will come out of the smoke in the sky and the dead things, I will rise up out of the end of the world and I will be that mysterious sunbeam, we will all be.

Sunbeam, such a dear sweet old-fashioned word. 

Backwards And Forwards

This is a walk down memory lane. Yes, just as unapologetically sentimental as that. When we first arrived in the States we bought a business here, on the Main Street in Longmont.

We didn’t want to live in Longmont we wanted to live in the foothills, in Boulder. About ten miles closer in to the foothills of the Rockies, Boulder has been a cool town for several decades.

Longmont was drearily conservative. It had some lovely rustic old brick buildings but that was all. It was no match for its neighbor’s brazen eccentricities, the exuberant silver creek that gushed down the canyon, the eternal party on Pearl St Mall and the gorgeous deep-treed sprawl of the university campus.

So every morning, early, we’d wake up in our hopeful new country and dutifully head out of cool Boulder on the no-nonsense Diagonal, away from the mountains, to work in the business that might earn us citizenship in the USA.

The business itself was as dismal, more dismal, than the town. It was an office supply company full of hanging files, printer cartridges and staplers. It had been trading on the Main St for over fifty years and was the only business for sale the Christmas we arrived in1997. There was a tight time frame. We had an uncomfortably small window within which to purchase a going concern that employed at least five US citizens.

No-one sells a business over the festive season. We drove out to see the place one icy, white day. We turned left off diagonal onto Main St that dead of winter day, the landscape was frozen, absolutely still. What stays with me most was the smell that hung over the dead town. It was the smell of pale boiled turkey breathing over the town from the local turkey processing plant.

I turned to my husband. I was going to say: Don’t do this, not for anything. But I stopped myself. Could I, a patently un-business person, be qualified enough to issue such a warning?

Daily Office Supply might have been quite something back before World War II but then, in the winter of1997, it was an wan monolith, all two cavernous levels of it. No amount of staples could fill the place out, make it feel less desolate. I had been a journalist in my other life. This was like entering the bleakest circle of hell. I did not understand office supplies. Neither did I ever want to. Still, I’d have to answer that call from the officious admin assistant at the tech company up the road. She was probably low down on the ladder there and this filled her with rancor. It made her feel small. When she phoned in for supplies she talked down to the gray people at the gray office supply store on the gray main street in the grayest town in America.

We labored at our palely loitering business but, in the end, a successive  series of unfortunate events killed it quite dead. The dot com crisis hit and all our hi-tech customers fell away, Office Max opened just up the road and,  finally, two planes shocked the world by flying into the World Trade Center.

At the time of our demise we were blessed with a most loyal band of employees. They stayed with us, sitting around the office furniture that would never be sold, until the very last hour, the very last sign of life.

Today, more than a decade later, I travel back down the no nonsense straight of the Diagonal, my daughter next to me in the passenger seat. She is having knee surgery at the hospital there. She’s 27 now and it’s the first time she’ll be experiencing deliberately giving herself over to people who hold her life in their hopefully capable hands.

She’s nervous so she falls into an uncontrollable fit of giggles while the anesthesiologist applies nerve blocks to various parts of her anatomy. She says it’s like someone hitting all the ‘funny bones’ in her body at the same time. She looks silly and sweet in the blue paper hat with the elasticized rim. Some of her dark hair refuses to be tamed by it. She’ll be ‘under’ for two hours.

I slip out to get coffee wondering at how detached I am. I put all our bags in the boot and sit down in the driver’s seat and close my eyes -- trying to practice “how am I really feeling?”. A wave of something sodden rises in me and I’m briefly overcome while my mind argues that I am being overdramatic.

I drive off, up and down the streets of Longmont on a distracting nostalgia trip. It looks so different, not bleak at all. It has changed and I have changed. I notice how big and leafy the trees are, how they soar skywards and curve to meet each other across the peaceful, broad streets. I see the homes set back deep and shady. I see people sitting reading languorously on their front porches.

I drive down the Main St and notice a place to have real coffee. In Old Town Longmont there are thankfully no chains. I’m squeamish about driving past our old building but I do anyway. There it is, cavernous as ever, now a music store. The small logo of an electric guitar floats in the open space above the red awning we thought would make all the difference. I look at my watch and realize I’ve almost been a bad mother, almost missed my daughter coming round from her surgery. I take a few hasty pictures, cursing myself for being infinitely distractible and rush back to the hospital in time to rescue my maternal reputation.

‘Turn over room four’ someone says over the speaker system. I put that together with the incomprehensible thing the nurse smiled and told me as I walked back in the door: No turnover yet. Ah, uhhm, yes, I smiled back.

I think this means my daughter is now in room four, having been ‘turned over’. I send a prayer into the ether: thank you LIFE for turning her over. I know it is just a knee but …