Does This Make Me Look

As this last week came to a close and we move closer to my dad’s move, all that jiggle in my soul is, well, jiggling. Riding all kinds of emotions at once: Relief that he’ll be less isolated and in a supportive place, a poignancy that this move is predicated on my dad’s ebbing capabilities, and a kind of helpless nervous energy that has me constantly wondering what to do with my hands. He&I have also peeled back some new layers in our communication this last week. He’s become more comfortable with me being there and less apt to feel he has to talk to me if I’m sitting on the couch or at the dining room table with him. He can nod off in peace without thinking he’s being a bad host. There have also some been some surprising emotional reveals, which, considering he’s not been big on examining or excavating feelings being a product of his generation, have alerted me to new ways of listening to him. Example: (Him after I came back from a long walk) Are you mad at me? (Me, shocked because in no universe was I upset with him) No, not at all! Why do you think that? (Him) Because you had to leave the house to get away from me. (Me) Oh, daddy, no. I love walking! It keeps me sane. So that’s why I just took that long walk. (Him) Are you sure? (Me) Yes. I promise. I love you and definitely have zero reason to be angry with you. (Him) Let’s not talk about this anymore.

And so we didn’t talk about that anymore. I did think about it though and realized even more how the filter between his front-facing self and his feelings has become much more porous.

Around mid-week, he became spicy about the move, saying, “My life was pretty calm and now, since you’ve arrived, it’s all changing.” A bit of revisionist history—although he’s not wrong that in the three+ years I’ve been here, change has happened albeit he’s also been pretty well moving&grooving at his place as it had always been. In the last few months though, yes, more temblors in the firmament where he stands. I’ve also found, polished, and gotten stronger around wielding my emotional shield when I need to because more and more he’ll flash at me moments where I recognize the kind of prickly he would aim at my mom. Times he may feel I’m hovering or directing his movements, being rigid, or what-have-you. He’ll reel off a few “You never want to take a chance” when the subject of ordering in versus cooking what’s in the fridge comes up. Or “You make too much of what I say” when he complains about not being able to get out of a low chair and I jump to put another, easier one in its place. So I’m learning to figure out when to let him be. But also I’m hyperaware how those comments push on a very purple-bruisy emotional bit in my psyche. From the beginning of being his daughter, I’ve responded to the dynamic of how my parents were. Naturally I wasn’t aware of doing it, but as a girl observing, I decided to align with him. To become the cool girl. Chill like him, not emotional like her. I wouldn’t exhibit too much in the way of worry, I wouldn’t insert myself in his (or anyone’s decisions), I’d find a home in books, music, and dry humor…and sometimes dry martinis. I’d avoid becoming too deeply affected by other people and guard against letting go.

Can’t say that’s altogether been successful. Just now I’m starting to do the work of understanding how to care, to step in and not think I’m being intrusive. Somewhere along the way I’d decided making my needs and thoughts known in a relationship was unnecessary as people had free will and would either love me or not. Who was I to ask? (And again, a post for another day.) My dad loves me. He’s also being driven a bit crazy by me currently. And you know what? That’s just fine because it’s my heart driving my actions. Not encroaching but embracing. No smothering but supporting.

So as much as I’ve loved hanging out at his place with him, I’m also underfoot. I creep around trying not to wake him up as he naps. I watch him heading for the kitchen and hold tight before stepping in. He may just be pouring another cup of coffee but he may also be trying to set something on fire on the stove. Yet I know he needs to be involved in his own agency. Not infantilized. Where’s the line? Damn if I know. Also, being slightly sleep-deprived given the nocturnal prowlings of a local cat who is apparently feeling springtime in a non-spayed or neutered way (PEOPLE, please put your felines out of their misery by doing the right thing!) and the meeses who continue to rummage around in the kitchen, things feel pretty surreal right now. Strange enough that I’m ending this with a mouse/dad metaphor: Dennis brought over these traps that actually look like tiny spacecrafts where the critter goes in, gets the treat (in this case avocado cuz they love avocado), then can’t get out. His plan is/was to then drive him to the place he’s working surrounded by much wild land and let them out. The first night, one of the spacecrafts was turned over, the avo gone, along with the mouse. Fine. Wily bastard. I thought, if I could just convince them that the place they would be going offers more than the space they currently occupy, that they’d climb on board and maybe they, like my dad, might be interested in making the move.

I moved into my dad’s last week. Here’s what I learned (& how): The sleeper sofa is not quite long enough to contain the full-length of me; there are still mice who live in the kitchen as I discovered on the first night when, on my way to get some water in the dark because I didn’t want to wake my dad since he’d left his door ajar, I heard a scrabble of little feet as I approached and the next morning discovered the meeses enjoy avocados, as evidenced by the half-gnawed avo that had been left in the cabinet to ripen and was now shredded; that when fire alarm batteries begin to die they apparently wait until the early-morning hours to begin chirping, as happened on my third night there requiring me to find the stepladder, turn on the hall light, and climb up to remove the thing located over his bedroom door, which he’d closed. He slept through the whole thing. But ultimately, I learned tow very immediate things: that my dad and I and the space of his place are not quite conducive for us to be roommates. That’s one side. The other is that it is great to hang out with him, even as I was centering all the other things like medication and meals. We ate together, and I cooked up stuff like a rusty J.Childs no rabbit, but definitely, some animals I hadn’t handled in a while (I’m looking at you chicken and steak). I also came to really understand his bachelorhood, a state of being he’s lived in since I was 12, so doing the math, 49 years. Alongside this independence lives the very real fact that I’m his daughter, and while he wasn’t necessarily trying to be a host, there were moments he was aware of me being there. After the third night, tho, I saw what a day into night looks like: coffee, paper, napping, martini in the early afternoon(!), second one in the late afternoon (!), then TV rotations on the news, then, and I think this is because I was there and made it happen, dinner, maybe more TV, bed. I love the man beyond so the privilege of being with him was incredibly real along with the observation of who he is right now. Glimmers of his humor are absolute, evidence of his cognition losses also absolute. The loop-di-loops of conversation.

Here’s something astounding though: Dennis and I had been staying on the topic of his choices around his living right now: Moving to a one-bedroom apartment at an independent living place down the road where he was on a waitlist or him staying put and me moving in. He always wanted the third choice: everything exactly as it is. That third choice was really never on the table and for the first many of our discussions, he’d get really angry about that seeing as how he never remembered how many times he’d fallen and/or exhibited risky behaviors in the last few weeks. But yet, we stuck to it: You have these two choices. Right, let me not lose the thread here: The astounding thing is that a one-bedroom apartment became available last Sunday. And so on Monday we went and had lunch there and saw the place. He was quiet but not altogether sullen, just observant. We looped around him asking if the place was for us? We framed it back into his world. And the conversation continued. A very wise woman who I’d spoken to last weekend had given me some amazing tips on how to help him be a part of his own life given his cognition and one suggestion was a whiteboard so all this last week, the whiteboard became the talking points around his choices. On Tuesday, he said Yes, it makes sense to move to that one-bedroom. A couple of salient points about that: As much as we love each other, he does not want me living there. Some reasons: He wants his own place. He doesn’t want to be responsible for taking me away from my own home. We Spencers have that thing about I don’t want to do anything to cause any discomfort for anyone else because then I’ll feel guilty about it and I can’t handle that. (Wow, there’s so much more to that and perchance I’ll revisit it in a future post.)

He and I went down and signed the lease on Thursday. We have a lot of work to do (natch) and what’s written on the whiteboard now are the next steps, which overall confirm that he won’t need to do anything more than pick out his favorite furniture and then we’ll move him in two weeks. He is tremendous in ways that I watch as he ebbs&flows toward this choice he’s made. He’s not altogether ecstatic, and perhaps I’m really seeing more stoicism than anything, the very same I’ve seen about his not driving anymore. He’s stopped talking about the third choice, also because the move became more framed around him not needing to worry about any upkeep of his place anymore (see mice and fire alarms, not to mention roof leakage and furnace failures that happened this last winter. Oh, and weeds, that don’t ever seem to be pulled enough on a regular basis).

The emotion of this move has not really settled in me yet. Putting my energy into the things that need to happen between now and then is where I seem to be focusing, yet there is a jiggle where once I unloose that pebble in my soul, what will trickle then flood will be waves of feelings. And I’ve no doubt that as I start to pack up his space after he’s settled in his new one that this writing space and all my morning pages and perhaps some actual short stories will be filled with the sounds of my emotions. And here we go.

I’m currently sitting at the desk in my dad’s living room doing my workday. I snuck in at 7.30 this morning and watched the neighborhood come awake, then heard him come awake. Here’s the series of events so far this morning: He turned on the coffee machine, which was primed and ready from when I set it up last night. Then he puttered around the kitchen and I was so happy to know he was getting breakfast (one of the recent concerns is that he’s not really eating). Continuing to work, I glanced into the kitchen and was startled to see him standing next to the stove having placed a porcelain bowl over an open flame, which caused me to attempt calmness as I got up, walked quickly toward him while asking “What’cha doin’?” and removing said bowl from the flame with a hot-pad. This flip of emotion from “ahh” to “EEK” reminded me of the time in 1986, NYC, middle of the night, looking out the rear window of my Lower East Side apartment where the back of four buildings faced each other around a courtyard, and where what seemed to be a late-night cooking party was happening across the way judging from the sound of pots and pans rattling. This made me happy: friends/family noshing together even at 2 a.m. feeling the love while sharing food. Then someone yelled “Fire” and I realized it wasn’t their hearts lit up but their building.

This emotional whiplash has become really familiar over the last little while. Or rather this ability to hold a couple of extreme emotions at the same time. Love and fear. Wonder and worry.

Dad took a tumble (actually two) within the last five days. Here’s what I learned. The Lively device he carries in his pocket works. We found that out not because he pushed the button for help, but because when he went down, he landed on his side where the device was tucked into his pocket, and somehow the thing activated from his 112-lb bodyweight. Thank-GD for his very soft shag carpeting so that he wasn’t broken. As far as I can piece together (based on experience with when the thing has been pushed before by mistake), I think it went a little like this: A voice came out of the little speaker on the thing: “Dean Spencer? Is this an emergency? You’re on a recorded line.” At that point, I imagine my dad either didn’t realize where the voice was coming from or didn’t hear it, so the Lively folks called him. He did not pick up. Because he was on the floor and not anywhere close to the phone. So they called me. Dennis and I headed over. Here’s what was happening inside me as we drove to his place: A cacophony of noise in my head and heart about what we were going to walk in on. A high-pitched frequency that attempted to tune me into some sort of channel that with preparation for what we might find. But I couldn’t land on anything so just worried the hem of my shirt until we pulled into his driveway.

We walked in and found him on the floor in his bedroom, embarrassed but lucid and all in one piece. Still not altogether clear on the chain of events but it seems he was about to lie down and fell. He blamed alcohol. In fact he told us to take all the alcohol out of the house. (Sidenote: The next day, when told about his request, he looked horrified. Asked us not to take the alcohol out of the house.) The buzz in my head flattened a bit into a hum as we checked him for breaks and bruises, then tucked him into bed. Some relief washed into my system, but an edge of awareness pricked me that falling is now happening. As I understand it from people who’ve experienced their parents aging, things like this begin to happen quickly and often. Because he hasn’t been going to the wonderful Silver Sneakers class that for so long kept him balanced and moving…because he just doesn’t get up in the morning in time anymore and/or says “not today” when the topic comes up, his limbs are not getting the kind of movement they used to get.

So, tumbling. When we were here for dinner the next night, he said his leg had fallen asleep, then promptly got up from his chair and fell down. Dennis picked him up, commenting that he falls like a stuntman. As if he’s trained in it. No stiffness, just rolling. So that’s, er, good?! What was going on inside me then? “Shit. Yes, it’s happening.”

I ordered a comforter for the sofa-sleeper that we had delivered and which now sits in his art room. I brought over sheets and clothes. I sit at this desk and work, enjoying the view from this corner of the world. A lot of folks walking all manner of dogs: yippy ones, huge ones, long-haired, short-haired, etc (those are the dogs, the people mostly similar yet here’s a riddle: Why do men here not own long pants? How did cargo shorts with socks become a thing? We’ll save that for another day). There’s an orange tabby running back and forth from the porch across the street to some very important destination a few doors away. A black cat in my dad’s yard stalking some geckos. A Scrub-Jay hopping around in the tree outside the window, I suspect the one and the same we dubbed Sir Scrubs and I gave ink to back in April 2020. There are also trucks. So many trucks. White ones. What’s that about? Why so many white cars? In here it’s very quiet. Like a time casule in a way and I feel like an astronaut testing a new atmosphere. The sounds: My dad’s breathing. In and out deeply, napping in his favorite chair. My fingers click-clacking on this keyboard. The man across the way scraping his grill and the low-rider with the windows open booming bass as it passes by.

I tell myself, Remember This and toggle between a sense of comfort in being here and Wow, that this is what’s now.

When I moved from Cali to NYC in 1984, it was a decision that felt altogether perfect for the direction I wanted to go in my life. The pace of the place shook me just right, the career path I wanted to roll on as a music journlist would happen there easier than So.Cal. All of it made sense so I made the choice and did it. At the time, while I was dimly aware of the move’s domino effect, I didn’t think of it as anything to stop me. Well, hell, sure, people will miss me but this is what I wanted and needed to do.

Inside of that move there were naturally a multitude of choices ranging from Good One (taking the SPIN job even though I wasn’t quite at the skill level yet to take it on, then working my arse off to get there) to Meh, Maybe Not (the blue pill? the red pill? Why not both?). Not to mention the downright strange, bordering on batsh*t ones where I’d say to myself: “This will make a good story someday” as I did things like walk across an active train trestle in South Carolina in the middle of the night with a guy I’d just met at a party and smoked a joint with. And honestly, that’s the sum total of the story: no train ran me over, I didn’t have to jump off the trestle, I didn’t fall off the trestle, the guy walked me to the sliding doors of my hotel. The end. I did store a sense of what crazy adrenaline feels like, which has come in handy for certain fictional moments that don’t turn out as well.

But mostly the choices I’ve made have been around how things will land in my own life.

When making the decision three years ago to move back to So.Cal to be near my dad, the choice felt one-hundred-percent the right one and my absolute gratitude that Dennis was onboard and felt similarly cannot be overstated. The idea being to see him happy and safe. Those two intentions blinking neon over every moment. Currently I’m spying that neon-blink from different angles. What’s fascinating (OK, terrifying and confusing too) is that I see the time is now that choosing to honor his autonomy in making his own choices—the ones that make him happy—is putting him in direct opposition to safety. Naturally he doesn’t view it that way. For him, everything is fine and should stay exactly as it is. From where I stand, sit, jump, run around, wave my arms, the things that are falling through the cracks on the most basic level are putting him in danger. (Shout out to every parent and all caregivers the world over who from age 0 to infinity move inside the happy-safe dance, needing to know when to do-si-do and when to step off the parquet floor when it comes to choices made for those who need it.)

And leaving the choice to him currently is no choice at all. Literally. He doesn’t want anything to change. Over the last many many months as this situation has been developing, I’ve whittled it down to two choices (with a sounding board that looks a lot like Dennis) and it’s to move in with him and do the daily caretaking or set him up in an independent living apartment down the road with meals, housekeeping, and other folks for social stuff. (There are obviously other choices inside of this, but suffice to say, starting from multitudes and whittling down through social services and otherwise, these two are where we’ve landed currently.) No surprise that when we talk about those options with him he A) doesn’t like either and B) can’t really see what the problem is that would lead to either happening and, finally C) can’t actually really remember that we’ve presented options in the first place. So… if the neon blink is around Happy and I climb up and balance on one of those “p”s, the view includes me. Where am I inside of that moment? To be honest, it’s difficult to think about being there away from Dennis and the cats and my own autonomy inside of our apartment. I also absolutely feel how amazing and grateful I am to spend time with my dad, even as I mourn the part of him that will never be there again. The conversations we won’t have around books or his collages. It’s also difficult to think of him being disrupted in his day-to-day and living somewhere new because that’s just hard no matter how old you are. The happy-medium currently is being with him most evenings and some mornings to make sure he eats and takes his pills. And if I can’t be that person, then Dennis or my dad’s friend J has been because it does take a village and currently I’m lucky to have that (not to mention a few people reading this have and continue to be there, which makes me cry a little with gratitude). Yet, still, choices want to be made and this one wraps its arms around another human who for sure has opinions. Who is stubborn and full of love and good intentions but also a little blind to what is happening in real time. And I’m his reflection, inheriting all those traits and now charged with inhabiting what it means to choose.

of time…. I don’t have it today for writing. If I consider writing a luxury, which I do a little but also know myself well enough to understand it’s also a necessity. I could get all caught up in the swirly of being lucky to have writing time at all but to go down that road fully is a fool’s errand. What I know is this: Spooling out my thoughts in any form of storytelling or observation is as important to me as breathing. The amount of time I have to do that is currently finite but rethinking what it means to spend time unpacking words is also ever-morphing. Rather than hold on too tightly to how many hours (minutes? seconds?) I might need to create something/anything challenges me to work with what I have and not get mad because I currently do not have what has previously been available. (And no time to edit/revise as indicated by that way-too-wordy sentence above.)

A current comment around this conundrum (if I want to call it that) when I talk about my sadness of feeling the thread of my fictional worlds slipping away is “It’ll be there on the other side when you do have the time.” That may be true, yes. Although currently I don’t feel it quite that way so rather than agitate on the lack of it (time, world & character building), I’m thinking to focus on using what I’ve got. And when there isn’t any “got” time, think, daydream, stare out the window and just have it. I’m not saying I won’t probably get pouty about it. But I’ll no doubt find something in it.

So today, no luxury of poring over the words I love to write in this space on a Saturday. Yet, look, I wrote some words and said some things and feel so much better for it. Thanks for being here!

I can never ever ever get my phone to work. And I’m always always always on a train or in a car and sometimes on a bus. I rarely recognize anyone even though I know them well enough, in the moment anyway. Then I wake up.

Lately, I’ve been concentrating on remembering, then writing down to the best of my abilities, my dreams. A few similar threads are popping up. And because I’ve been working for a few sessions now with a Jungian therapist, the insights are for sure revelatory but also bananas in a kind of science fiction meets dramady kind of way. Like if Lucille Ball and a Sutherland (Keifer/Donald=whichever) mashed around in some time-warped grape pit, these might be the results. None of them have freaked me out too much but a couple have merited some extra thought. And here’s what I’ve learned while exploring this topic of dreams: You can go back and revisit, even ask, whatever person is popping in and communicating with you what it is they want. This, to me, seemed wacky until my lovely therapist suggested it. Just ask. See what happens. Not suggesting the dream will reoccur, but instead take a. waking, quiet moment and ask.

So I tried that with this one dream in particular. Here it is: I’m driving with a pre-teen girl who is quite a handful. She’s angry and mouthy and not particularly patient. We’re trying to get something done and have just left my house to do this thing (I don’t know what specifically but it’s important). Suddenly I remember I’m supposed to be at my waitressing job and I’m either 15 minutes or an hour and fifteen minutes late. I FREAK the F out. I HATE being late. I take out my phone but naturally I can’t work it. It’s massive and the buttons are stuck (apparently it’s the iPhone incarnation from 1972). I haven’t used it in a long time (maybe forever). As I struggle to figure out how to dial, I’m still driving (I think I am anyway, we are moving forward) and suddenly the girl gets really pissed at me and yells “You’re an asshole.” I feel that might be true but I also feel it’s a bit harsh that she’s yelled at me for having to go to my job. One where, by the way, I serve people. I ask if she really needs the stuff from my house and it seems she does. I consider giving her the keys to the car and letting her drop me off at work and take the car back to do what she needs to do. Somehow I know this is a bad idea given she’s underage and it’s not her car. Yet I’m also pretty sure I’m going to make this bad decision anyway. Then I wake up.

The dream hovered around and I thought it was curious. I wasn’t particularly jacked up about it, more baffled about who was that girl? Didn’t recognize her at all—physically anyway. And waitressing, for bejeezuz sake I’m glad I’m not doing that anymore. But something was going on there. So, as suggested by the ThisJungianPerson in my life who suggested I ask the girl what she wants, I did that. During a morning writing session, I asked. I waited. A little tickle around the job I felt stressed about being late for being one where I serve others, endlessly. So, yes, there was that. A thing that doesn’t even merit going into any more detail about because it’s obvious. As is the inability to work a phone, i.e., communicate easily and properly. Yes, that is a thing for me. Then the angry girl. The one who is quite sure I’m going to abandon her and not see through whatever it was we had started. The young part of me that didn’t finish being sassy and spicy before taking on the responsibility of SERVING people. (Wow, when you get going on this stuff it’s pretty rad.) And so she shouted at me about it. And here I was eager to get out of the damn car and give her the keys to go it alone (again, perhaps). So maybe what if I try staying in the car. Screw the service job (for now), remain behind the wheel and go back to finish what we started. Although I have only scant ideas about what that is, it’s a start.

The phone? Well, I’ve thrown that out the window. (It probably hit someone and broke them somehow.) I haven’t had another dream featuring this girl but I don’t think that’s the point really. I think instead I’m sticking with the search&find on my way back to sassy, spicy, ears&eyes wide open land. Winken, Blinken, and Nod.

The other night Dennis broke into song while feeding the cats. Two rooms away, I was struck by it. It sounded to my ears unabashedly joyful and my emotions clacked around inside me like Yahtzee dice with the first thought tumbling out as “when’s the last time I felt pure joy?” followed by “what’s happened to that emotion?” and so on and so forth. Where I landed was on sadness. I do have an occasional wash of “Wow, Yes. This moment is good.” and it’s often while on some long walk and the sky is blue and a bird sings and such like that. So I know there are pockets inside me where that stuff rubs around and hasn’t turned completely to dust, but yet ….

In the NYTimes I saw this great piece on the wonders of watching adults be goofy (or rather how back in the day: Advertising late 80s/early 90s, the regular folx dancing with abandon movement seemed to be afoot). One namecheck is the Bjork video “It’s Oh So Quiet” shot in 1995 when I was a video promotion person at Elektra records. Directed by Spike Jonze, it’s got some unadulterated joyful bits with literal dancing in the streets. I remember seeing it for the first time in a planning meeting for how we would be marketing this bit of magic and while I know for a fact I was charmed and smiled the first time I saw it, I also know there was deadset gravity in that room what with all the brow-knitted muckity-mucks coming up with ideas on how best to get this lark out there in order that the public would buy the album and radio stations would play the single. My job: Get MTV and VH1 to spin the shit out of it. Gawd I hated that job of always selling. Knocked a stake through my soul on the regular. Yet there I was doing it for three years solid. Dorothy peeking behind the curtain of music where the joy didn’t live. I manufactured some of the joy stuff back then with substances but I’m not sure that actually counts.

So where’d it go, the let-loose-ness? The dance like no one’s peeping, sing like no one’s perking. Well, sure, I understand how endorphins work (OK, not really). How I’m pretty sure they dim a bit with age. I found this article about that, which to be honest I haven’t read all the way through but am fairly certain it’s saying things like endorphins change as we get older. But I also found this, which suggests a kind of boomerang activity where raw happiness returns substantially from your fifties on. U-shaped, they say. An upside-down smile turned right side up over time, I say. Taken on the face of it, sure, phases of life, carrying great responsibility in those mid-years of career, family, and so on. All that makes sense although what I’m getting at is more about what happens when joy becomes more nuanced, less raw. That, I think, is just natural aging stuff. What happens as we all add layers of experience and responsibility into our lives. Also though, what happens with personal history. The other day, listening to a TJL episode, there was mention that when a trauma happens in life, the person you were in that moment becomes ambered, frozen in that time. Whatever age, you keep on going, become who you are, still recognizable ongoing (usually, hopefully) but the emotional flash-freezing means you’ve left that bit locked up. Hearing this detail stopped me. Yes. I for instance can pinpoint a moment where I passed from the room of carefree into a space with less windows, a little less helium. A time at twelve coming home from school and my mom was in our shared room and I could hear her crying. Because of course she was. She and my dad had just gotten divorced. She was lonely. Real human emotion there. I though was caught out in a place I didn’t recognize and two things (or at least the two I can remember) happened: my joy at having just come from whatever it was I’d been doing that had made me happy felt inappropriate in the face of this sadness and I need to take care of her so therefore no time for silliness. It was a kind of slot dropping in the door of the speakeasy I wanted to enter where everyone was dancing and I could hear them but I wouldn’t be let inside in that moment. That’s not in any way to say I didn’t get silly and joyful because I definitely did, but it was a more guarded pfizzle of emotion, let out in spurts like a slow leak maybe.

Currently watching Daisy Jones and the Six. One of my all-time favorite books now set to moving pictures and my current takeaway is on two levels. First, what the hell with the amazing seventies fashion! Mixed emotions here: I actually was wearing those things because I was in high school in the seventies and I could wear (or at least did wear) tank tops, halters and things you could see through. Plus a lot of short-shorts because I lived in California. If I’m sad about anything to do with the series, it’s that I won’t be wearing those things again although I did find a halter top bought when I was in my forties and wore pretty successfully that I apparently refuse to give away. Second about Daisy&Co., the music. The high from it. The joy I do remember feeling when I was sunk into sound. Where it took me. The rock’n’roll kind. Again, though, it was guarded. I could completely give myself to a song, album, soundtrack while laying on my bedroom floor with headphones on. I could definitely lose myself in an audience watching a band but that was a more measured abandon. I was always/usually on the lookout to make sure nothing bad would happen. The click of caretaking. I look at my high school smile above and see caution behind it. I still have that.

I’m also currently aware that the style of joy I’m sporting is more layered. Fine. I’m okay with that. There’s a halter top under there somewhere.

There’s a phrase in the writing world: Kill Your Darlings. In essence, it means to have the courage to get rid of unnecessary scenes, characters, or words in a story even if those bits have become dear to you. Maybe there’s been a lot of work in the crafting, maybe some turn of phrase or description feels so clever it couldn’t possibly be dumped, etc. etc. Naturally this is where my ego gets all tangled up in blues. Currently, I’m revisiting the first book I wrote that I sent out to agents, got a few interested responses but ultimately no bites. Yet now I’m told that there is an interest in stories written about that historical time known as the nineties and so I’ve been encouraged to resurrect this manuscript and resubmit it. So this last week I spent some time re-reading and looking for darlings to kill.

One that I surgically removed (alright, maybe just ripped out at the roots) is one I had a lot of fun writing back in the day of writing. And because my ego is not too far from the surface of my skin, I’m just dropping it right here. It’s just a scene, taken out of some context, but still a snapshot of a character in a novel written by me. A young music journalist in the nineties struggling…of course. So thank you for indulging me, if in fact you choose to.

Slap. Slap. Slap. 

It took every fiber of my being to keep the smile frozen on my face while I watched Pip Helix, bassist for Crown of Thorns, slap his hand against his thigh to the beat of Cameo’s “Word Up!” His head was moving from side to side in a kind of Stevie Wonder–roll, while he stared at me and sang, “We don’t have the time for psychological romance. No romance, no romance, no romance for me, mamma.” And then he flapped his hand against an imaginary bass and contorted his body on the barstool, while nodding at me and miming a crazy rock face. He seemed to be enjoying himself. I was in a great amount of pain.

I tried to look away, but he kept hitting me on the knee during the downbeat, so I just stared at him trying to keep a neutral expression not unlike someone pretending to understand what a baby’s trying to convey. Mostly I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me.

But I kept smiling until my cheeks hurt, while scribbling, “Help me” in my reporter’s notebook. I thought about flashing it toward the bartender so she could call someone. Pip no doubt thought I was taking notes on his air-bass moves. Finally, the song ended with him giving one final bass slap against his stomach, then shouting “UP” loudly enough that anyone walking by on 23^rd street would have heard him. 

“Right on,” I said lamely, my teeth clenching as I signaled for more drinks. 

“That song fuckin’ rocks,” Pip said. He reached for the glass of water near his elbow—the one I’d been sure would be shattered during his air-bass flailing—and guzzled. I was glad he was hydrating since before Cameo had come into our lives he’d been describing how his recent stay in the hospital for exhaustion had been the best thing to ever happen to him.

“I’m a new man,” he’d said enthusiastically. “I found out that alcohol is a serious dehydrator, dude, and that your body is made up of sixty percent water, but as you get older you lose it. Like you could seriously dry up and blow away like one of those Western movie weedy things. I mean, I. Never. Drank. Water. Ever.” He enunciated these words like they were little bombs and his eyes got wider as he dropped each one. “Like all I ever put in my mouth was alcohol. I mean, I guess ice cubes melt and become water and stuff. But still. I was dryin’ up. But now I’m fillin’ up.” 

I waited for him to finish gulping his water and asked, “So, what kind of music did you listen to growing up?” 

Pip looked at me, as a light shut off behind his brown eyes, and a mini dreadlock with a turquoise bead shook down the middle of his face. I’d remembered his hair as standard-issue medium-length rock hair, but now he seemed to be cultivating a whole kind of Rasta situation and because he was a standard-issue medium-intelligent white guy, it was a bad look on a lot of levels.

Pip shook the appropriation interruption out of his eyes, chuckled and said, “Dude, you didn’t come here to talk about my childhood.” He sounded kind of defensive. And, while yes, in fact I had come to talk about his childhood at least a little, I did remember that the press had had a field day digging into the Crown of Thorns’ personal lives back in the day—who they were fighting with, fucking with, and whatnot. So I shouldn’t have been all that surprised that a question referencing anything other than his new musical creation might cause him some amount of snarl. I decided to go down a safer road.

“Well, you know, I’d love to hear about your early influences, and how they might have impacted your new music.” 

“Let me tell you about this album,” he started, ignoring the “early influences” bit. It’s a dozen songs of kick-ass grooves. I mean, here’s what makes it so fuk’n different: every song is just bass. How many albums can you say that about?” 

He stared at me. This was apparently a real question. I started to think. I was about to say maybe Primus? But Pip jumped in with, “Exactly, none.” 

“So then that’s cool for you,” I said. I looked down at my notebook and wrote “Only bass. What?” Then I looked back up, “Do you just mix down the drums and guitar?” 

“No, dude,” Pip said, shaking his head and giving me a suspicious look. “Did you hear any drums or guitar on there? No, you didn’t because there aren’t any other instruments at all. Just me and my bass. I didn’t want to have to work with anyone but myself, and even that was hard at times.”

“Right, of course.” I hadn’t listened to the entire tape. I was doing this interview because I had to, so my regular borderline obsessive preparedness had been ignored. I’d read the press material, then listened to the first five minutes of each song figuring the bass beats were only funky lead-ins. I’d had no idea that the entire forty-five minutes was just him and his bass. This guy really had been traumatized. Why else would someone take an instrument meant to be the underpinning of a band and sail off solo unless he’d been so pummeled by his old bandmates that he’d decided any other human in the room would be a hardship? I wrote “listen to music” and “band abuse” in my notebook. 

“Huh, you could be onto something here. How’d you come up with the idea?” I asked. His brow furrowed. Silence. Deep thought. After a few too many minutes passed and nothing seemed to be coming, I added, “I mean, is there a band whose bass player you wished had been more, er, bass-centric?” I wanted to stop saying the word “bass.”

“Man, you really want to talk about the past,” Pip snapped. Then, finally, he took a deep breath and said slowly like someone explaining to a child how to use a toothbrush, “I first got the idea during the last Crowns tour when I was up in front of all our fans. It was a massive stadium and I realized that the person standing smack in the middle of the stage was the one who people listened and paid attention to. And I was sick of not being seen. I mean, I get the whole bass player as backbone of the band shit that people talk about, but I never felt like that. A person can live without a backbone, but they always need a face and that’s what the lead dude is. You know what I’m saying? I want to be the face.”

“I totally know what you’re talking about,” I said, which was scary because I actually did. So I repeated it. “Everyone needs a face.” Then I wrote it down and added some underlines. 

Another week and I look around. Not a hella-lot changed from last to this. On the one hand: Great! On the other: Harrumph! Not harrumph in a necessarily bad way but maybe more in a settled kind of flat-line way. No ups, downs, or sideways on the dad front, which is in fact awesome! (Although I did miss marching and stretching around a stationary chair this week with him as he was not fully feeling up to it. Shout-out to the Silver Sneakers crew and fingers crossed for next week.).Work is fab, teaching is a’rollin’ along. Time ticks. Each hour holding stuff, and all the stuff melting together to make a day.

Maybe that’s the thing. The sense that things are getting done. I’m coloring within the lines and the picture’s just fine. I’m not bored but I am aware that just out of the sightlines there are a couple of things waiting to get my attention. (I’m looking at you unfinished second draft. And, yes, I see you YMCA fob wanting to swipe me into the pool. OK, mountain top views tapping your toes waiting for me to gawk at you on an epic walk.) Talking to a friend about how those things will be at the other end of this particular busy cycle. Intellectually I can believe that. Emotionally not so much. When I give in to that latter mood, I become convinced that tho things on the sideline will move on. My novel will pack up all its ideas and find someone else to bring it to life. The Y fob will just disintigrate while the mountain views will take their beauty elsewhere. Absurd, I know, yet still, no one ever said that the emotional landscape was altogether sane.

Even mining my brain for former music moments, some salacious something to drop into this space, brought me only a hazy sense of distraction wherein I stared out the window while having vague thoughts about what to have for dinner. Maybe the part of me that creates word-like story things has finally taken that long-planned trip to Madrid. Or Barcelona. Or Amsterdam. Although it didn’t put in the proper paperwork to take the time off. Jeez, workers these days.

Anyhoo, I did actually print out my novel’s second draft up to what I’ve polished so far. All 135 pages. Taking the story up and into the second act, which constitutes around halfway through. I took the digital file into the Office Depot, then paid to have it printed out and spiral bound. When I came back to get it and the woman behind the counter asked her workmate “Where did you put this lady’s book?” I got a little thrill. She called it a book. OK, maybe that was the highlight of my week. And by book, I know she pretty much meant that it’s a thing with a spiral binding that they would of course call a book as opposed to something stapled that they’d refer to as a pamphlet. I, on the other hand, felt a jolt roll through me and an inner yes, yes, you see me! I’m a writer of a book! juddered through. Did it inspire me to rush home and work on editing the rest? Not so much. Mostly because I’ve been so long away from the story that I printed it out to read from the beginning. To remind myself that there’s a there there. To be carried back into the lives of the characters and their dramas. And maybe I’ll read it and think, Gah, nothing to see here. Or it will relight that little wick that went sideways like when you get a dud candle and the wick just wimps out and gets drowned in wax. But in this case I want to dig that wick out and set it aflame. I did step out of the Office Depot and read the first page, which I thought was drek, but then I read the second page, which I liked and decided that’s where the whole michegoss should start. I also discovered that in order for me to read this without tinkering, I will have to go to an empty room without any writing instruments, lock myself in, and read without stopping. Otherwise I’ll start making changes immediately, thereby negating the whole point of Just. Read. It. See. If. It. Holds. Up.

So that’s it, really. A week. Current situation. Hum along if you know the tune.

The week before last, Dennis went back to NYC to ready our Washington Heights apartment for selling. It was bittersweet, much more for him than for me given he’d completely remade/remodeled the thing from studs on out almost twenty years ago. For me, the moment carried a parcel of emotional weight in a lighter form. More of a size that fits in a side pocket of my heart (albeit a deep Levi’s 501–style rather than the shallow sort) as opposed to the all-consuming backpack of emotion Dennis was very clearly carrying. Some of this was because of distance. I was here in Cali while he was in the apartment, nose pressed against the details of disappearing some of the specific details he’d crafted in order to turn the place into a blank canvas (read sellable) space. But also, this apartment was his baby and one that I’d stepped into a full decade after he’d lived a lot of life inside it.

Apartment 3D. I showed up there for the first time when, early-ish into our relationship, D offered to cook dinner. I don’t remember if I brought anything. Maybe a bottle of something. I do remember walking through the door and being completely smitten by the amount of detail and craftsmanship that he’d put into every nook, every cranny, every crevice and corner. I was already smitten with feelings for the person who lived there but this entry into where he lived took it to another level. It’s often said that your surroundings reflect your soul or maybe just what you’re most interested in. Sure one person’s extremely tall stack of books may be a totem of pride for whoever built it while for someone else that stack may represent a dangerous teetering pile of Why?! But beyond the specifics, I do think that how someone arranges, or even avoids arranging, their surroundings reflects something of the person’s inner workings. That my ex-husband’s studio apartment was basically devoid of floorspace because it was covered with stuff spoke (in retrospect) to the goodly dose of chaos in his life. There were a lot of interesting things mixed up in those piles but it took a huge amount of digging to find them.

Stepping into apartment 3D was mind-boggling on a purely how-did-he-do-this? level. Some people may (&do) ask me, How does it even work to write a story out of whole-cloth, thin air? I can’t explain it and if I tried it would without doubt bore a person to glassy-eyed death. Walking around 3D though, I wasn’t bored hearing about beveling and planing and the hand-grooving of cherry-wood cabinets. I mean, I didn’t understand any of it, but whatever. The amount of passion in D’s voice explained it completely. Then I walked into the bathroom. And that was it. For those who don’t know me well, I’m a water person. Vessels filled with (sometimes too) hot water are my magic place. Throw in some eucalyptus or lavender and bubbles and I’ll likely stay there forever. When I stepped through the door into the 3D bathroom I remember distinctly thinking, Well, that’s it. I’ll have to move in. Most especially into this particular room.

I did move in and wrapped the beauty of the place around me. 3D. Haven Avenue. On a couple of levels, the nouns making up this address held true. Not just three dimensions dealt with but a good amount of them. The haven of it. Away from hectic New York City, yes, but also a shelter that served as a portal into a real true relationship. I learned and found how to listen, trust, feel flaws, not be embarrassed by them, talk about things that heretofore I would have been afraid to discuss (&would have been convinced would have turned one or the other of us out of the apartment), and ultimately began to relax in the presence of another person, which meant I was relaxing into myself. Learned to actually understand love. I wrote a book there. I started another. Began a meditation practice. Started listening better, or at least deeper. Began to look into the headlights of some true troubles I’d lived with financially and emotionally and not be paralyzed. To step around to the driver’s side and take the wheel, then use the lights rather than be frozen in them.

That in 2020, almost ten years to the day after I moved in, we packed up much of the place, found a wonderful tenant, and drove cross-country to spend time with my dad in California was an introduction to What-If. Who knows. Let’s just see. (For more on that, there’s this.)

I understand intellectually about change. I have a tattoo on my right inner wrist that translates (roughly) to that very word. I try hard to be OK with change. Sometimes I’m really just pretending. I’ve certainly done a lot of it: the change part and the pretending bit. And right here, right now, I’m acutely aware of not knowing what’s next both physically and psychically. Sure, I know that in a couple of hours we’re picking up my dad to go see his art in the Redlands art show (for all you locals, his collage will be featured in the show until March 15. Here are details.). I know that in some amount of weeks I’m going on a weekend away. I know some things in the immediate and really have no idea as well. I’m not sure why I’m more struck now by that sense of no-idea in a more intense way than I was back in the day when I walked out of my job at SPIN and just trusted something else would come my way. Sure, I was scared sh*&tless about where my next money source was coming from, but it did come. And in some ways, I remember thinking of it as an adventure. There are traces of that adventure-sensation still but also a deep awareness that there’s a lot to pass through to get to the next. Some of that is based on real estate stuff: selling in NYC is a gnarly trouble-beast 98% of the time. But also the awareness of what’s next with my dad: not having a clue what that will look or feel like.

There are times lately when I’ll walk through a room, see the sun slanting in a certain way; a bird will chirp; a butterfly will lift off a plant outside the window; the cats will be cute, leap off the ground with all four feet while chasing something/each other; D and I will be sitting somewhere just being, and I’ll think, Remember this. Right now: Moments of remember-this are a trail stretching from a 3D haven where someday (soon?) another set of remember-this-ness will take shape with another cast of characters while I’ll be stepping into all the things that come next.