Does This Make Me Look

This is not going to be a post about the weather. It’s raining currently (for the past two days and a couple more to come). There’s been hail, or rather something called thundergraupel, which is some bizarre combo of Zeus-y sky rumblings and pelt-y ice offerings. Here’s a clip. But like I said, this writing isn’t about the weather. Not specifically anyway. It’s more about what I’ve noticed comes up when the ground is wet. First, literally: worms seem to surface. I was just out back in our patio area, which is now kind of like a tiny stream, and Desi&Lucille, who are sporting tiny swim caps and exploring, were toying with something-or-other in a way that they only do when a thing is alive. Crouching down, I saw a couple of wiggly worms who(?/that? sentient beings?) had been washed up on the pavement. I returned them to the small patch of what used to be dirt and now is legit mud in the corner where things grow. But like I said, I’m not giving column inches to Mother Nature specifically: tho much respect to her. It’s the stuff rising to the surface during emotive life saturation I’m more interested in.

In a literal sense, I have this way I arrange the books on my night table in order of how (I think) I’m going to read them. It gives me some sense of control as if I have all these stories to look forward to and I’ve arranged them in a way to take me on a specific adventure one after the other. Here’s why this arranging never works (altho I always have hope that THIS time, maybe): There are always new books being added to the pile, which as you can see from the photo above, is really incredibly tall at the moment. This is actually the largest the pile has been and I’m pretty sure I need to stop adding to it or someone might get injured. Yet, when I’m honest with myself, I know I won’t stop jenga-building the thing. For instance, a woman in my writing group just had her debut novel published in the U.K. (and in the U.S. March 7). Weyward by Emilia Hart. There’s been much buzz&chatter around it and for goooodddd reason! I remember reading some of the early writings from this novel back in 2020 when our Curtis Brown Creative course first came together and then watching as the novel took off into the stratosphere. And what rises up inside me from my own muddy place is a mix of inspiration (yes, despite mixed messages, it is possible to write a novel, find an agent, then a publisher, and have a book come out the other end without having to be born into the business), envy (I want that too), and frustration (I’m not working on my novel at all at the moment).

At any given moment I’m picking my way through that mud of seemingly contradictory emotions. Sometimes I give in to a sinkhole of stuff that is messy and I’m not wearing any emotional waders so I know I’ll be pulling myself out (cue: sucking noise and lost shoes) and then deciding whether to let the muck dry, wash it off, or take another plunge. Sometimes I choose to just mess around in the shallow bits of these emotions and watch what happens. Maybe I take a deep breath and keep going deeper. Maybe I forget to do that breathing part and find myself breathless with my heart beating out panic and a feeling of being lost. I do eventually find myself back on a stable shore of some sort and then carry on accordingly.

This week, I forgot to pay attention to how I was wading into life, which turned out to mean I wasn’t taking in enough sustaining air for my brain to function smoothly. Subtle things, but maybe not really. After a doctor’s appointment with my dad where I forgot to remember that medical folks, while certainly qualified to observe and recommend, are not 24-7 in the lives of the ones you love so, therefore, make large pronouncements often skewing toward big picture panic. And the doc’s pronouncements did set off a panic inside me around a checklist of stuff to do to keep my dad in tip-top shape. My 97-year-old dad who actually says he feels in tip-top shape and also that every day is a gift (Yep, he actually said that). With the exception of his cognitive slip&slides, he seems great to me as well. But on that Monday evening after our appointment, I hadn’t really regulated back to that way of thinking or paying attention and was carrying this panic that I wasn’t doing enough to keep him medically fit. I said out loud to Dennis, “I need help.” I wasn’t actually asking for help from him because he is tremendously present in the help department. I was more announcing how it would be so great to have help in a medical-aid-visiting kind of way. But because our effin’ health care system is so f&*kd up, those kinds of nurse visitation moments are not available unless my dad has just come home from the hospital or if you have enough dosh to hire someone independently. (I can’t even get started on the paperwork I’ve done and the denials we’ve gotten for state, city, county services. The kind of frustration that bubbles up when I think about it explodes my head and I’d like to keep that intact for the moment.) I said the words. “I need help.” And they hung there, then they took on some funny shapes and bounced around from guilt to frustration to pride. I felt them, said them, was glad to have expressed them when I normally would have kept all that on emotional lockdown.

The thing is, letting myself get swept away on that wave meant other things tumbled around as well. Things I think I’m normally riding on top of: a dentist appointment I completely missed, my therapy session that I was late to because I’d misremembered the start time. I made mistakes at work. I took on another project and started my teaching semester at NYU, two things that require time management and which, in that moment, sent me into a tailspin of heart-palpitating fear of failure. I thought I’m not this person who misses appointments. I’m always on time. Early even. Reliable. This hell-bent on presenting as solid and capable is obviously both exhausting and unrealistic. To be human. Translation: flawed and fine in often unequal measure. I can hear the people who know me and care (and even the ones I don’t) saying lighten up. Give yourself a break. I mean, I always say that to anyone I care about in response to these things as well. Yet also, I know I’m hardest on myself. And if I want to really dive into the muck of it, I also understand the big dose of ego that goes with wanting to present as all that. Ego, it can be helpful, yes, although what motivates it is certainly worthy of exploration. I’m not pretending I have the answers even as I get flashes of some sublime relaxation when I own my flaws and don’t work to cover or explain them. This is me right now. Often. The challenge: to let that feeling last longer than the millisecond it takes for the snow (yes snow that has now started in the time it took me to write this) that’s currently falling outside the window to hit the ground and melt.

Runnin’ down the road in the Rocket 88, Friday afternoon, dodging traffic on Redlands Blvd, my dad in the passenger seat, I was acutely aware of the one-hour-left window rapidly closing. Not a scene from the new (or any) Fast & Furious. The Rocket, a ’92 Honda Accord, will never, has never, can definitely not now ever go over 55 MPH without shaking like a rocket ship approaching lift-off. The name references that along with a dose of ironic. Keeping to 50, using my blinker to change lanes, I was only channeling my inner Vin Diesel in order to get us to the art supply store on time to buy a couple of frames so we could submit my dad’s collages in the Redlands Art Association’s Multi-Media Mini show. He’s been an active participant in this annual event for the last decade or so, getting in every year except maybe two and also scoring a couple of honorable mention prizes. We were prepared for this day: Weeks earlier, he’d picked out the collages he wanted to submit, we’d filled out the paperwork, and made the appointment with the gallery for the intake. Except it turned out, we had failed to dot an i or cross one of the t’s. How to frame the work. Wire hangers only (not the Mommie Dearest–movie sort but rather the picture wire, stretch-along-the-back sort). My dad’s current frames with the sawtooth, the hook, the easel stand, were all wrong. It said so clearly on the instructions. Picture wire only. Baaaahhhh.

Instructions. By day I’m a copy editor. I adore the job. Words words words. How they play, roll, generally sing and scream out what they want to say when joined together seamlessly with all their attendant and correct grammar and punctuation. That’s a thing I love to do. There’s an attention to detail you’d think would carry over into the reading of step-by-step, how-to, get-it-right instruction thingies (official word). Nope. I am not a girl who reads instructions. Shout out to Ikea. Yet I am a girl obsessed with preparation. You might think these functional qualities—preparations, instructions—would go hand in hand. In my case, you’d be wrong. Preparation for me comes from a whole other set of instincts (perchance neurosis? The need to not rock boats by always being prepared, that kind of thing). During my teaching days, I would do dry runs to schools when I had a residency coming up so I’d know exactly how long it would take in order to avoid stress. As a journalist, when I had an interview with a band, I was early about 98.8% of the time, which frankly was absurd because 98.9% of the time my interview subject was late. Usually very extremely late. If I’d read the instruction manual on being a music journalist (specifically rock’n’roll), I would have seen the many steps that lay out clearly how 2) clock time is not real-time, 3) it is extremely uncool to show up when expected, 4) always add on at the minimum 48 minutes to any arranged arrival time, 5) make an entrance by arriving very very late, 6) know that you are important enough that everyone will wait for you, 7) never apologize. The other important item included in the box of How To Be a Musician (all genres) is the Super-Ego-I’m-Worth-It activation switch, which when set to on means the person waiting will be thrilled beyond measure to see you.

So it was that I, an adjacent accessory to the rock musician, would find myself ridiculously early (read: on time) for most interviews, then sit solo in restaurants, hotel lobbies, conference rooms, green rooms, tiny backstage areas where people who were doing the good work of preparing for the show would step around me and get on with it. This was all before hand-held devices could keep me distracted so I would alternate between going over my notes while becoming increasingly nervous that my questions were not probing enough and fairly sure the interview subject(s) would never show up and I’d get fired for not getting the story and meeting my deadline. (I’ve been a master catastrophizer for, er, ever?) Once, waiting at a restaurant for the lead singer of a late-eighties metal band, I did a shot of tequila to calm my nerves, then maybe I did another or so. By the time he got there, the basic workings of my tape recorder had become a challenge. This was not a good look and while it would be great to tell you that I produced a fantastic gonzo-style rip-roaring piece filled with night-on-the-town, stream-of-consciousness tidbits, that would be a lie. The piece never ran. It’s possible I never even wrote it. I think I was surprised exactly once by a band who showed up at the appointed time: Alice in Chains. They would have been A#1 on my list of late-arrival, possible no-shows but instead, they were early (like legit early) to a restaurant in Seattle where I was interviewing them for a roundup of bands on the rise. They were at the tip of their rockstar iceberg, which would soon begin to melt as their singer slid into the excesses outlined in the rock manual’s fine print (may cause addiction, loneliness, mental health issues). (Side note: I consider myself lucky to have never been challenged in the way a fellow journalist was during an assignment to interview Prince at Paisley Park where he spent days waiting for the savant to call him into the studio, then when summoned, stepped into a room lit only by candles and given the instructions that no tape recorder or writing implements of any kind would be allowed.)

In the end, it seems clear that sometimes you just have to give up control. Move from one place to the next and accept what can get done within reason. Oh, and keep some humor around it to avoid explosions of la tête. Yet because I’ve been tempered in the fire of whatever it takes, whether from fear of failure or a we’ve come this far, can’t stop now mentality, when faced with the challenge of getting the right blasted frames for my dad’s artwork, We. Would. Get. It. Done.

Of course, if I’d read the instructions a bit better, we wouldn’t have been racing toward Joann’s craft supply store. Bless Joann’s for being there and also shout-out to the lovely fellow artist who witnessed my borderline breakdown at the gallery when we were told the frames were wrong and stepped up to tell me exactly where to go and how to make it right. I’m gonna be honest here: With my dad’s current cognitive state swinging him between “What are we doing now?” and “If I’d known we were doing this, I would have told you about the frames” along with, “Let’s forget it. I don’t need to be in this show” all piped in from the passenger seat, I felt as close to a Steve Martin, John Candy buddy flick as I might ever experience. Yet, I was determined to make this happen. We had an hour and after a couple of wrong turns (jeez.uz. mapping in Cali mini-malls is a challenge. Turn right, then left, then pivot to your upside down and do a backbend next to the Taco Bell). ANyhoo, I dashed into Joanns, found the frame section, learned more about the various backing choices than a girl might ever need to know. Discovered that there is in fact a shortage of the type I was looking for. Managed to find the last two in various sizes, grabbed some picture wire, paid, flew to the car, drove back to the gallery. Discovered one of the frames was TOOOOO BIIIIIG (it’s a mini show with strict size regulations), managed to frame the one that size-qualified, received wonderful support from the intake staff, and left with 15 minutes to spare to find my dad calm as could be in the car waiting, where he’d been tasked throughout the entire adventure with making sure no one attempted any funny business with the Rocket. “Is it martini time?” he asked. Yes, in fact, it was.

As we drove (slowly) around the corner to a red-booth, old-school joint where I’d hoped we’d find a quiet table in the dimly lit restaurant (spoiler alert: no), I didn’t have the heart to tell him only one of his pieces had been submitted due to frame-size issues. Instead, I wanted to let the relief that we’d accomplished one-half of the thing we’d set out to do resonate for a minute. And he wasn’t unappreciative. “Wow, you’ve been working your tail off,” he said as we settled into a table outside near a giant heat lamp and ordered drinks and dinner. Even by half, we’d made it: One piece in the art show, one table with a martini. Both things close enough to where we’d been aiming.

My dad reflected on the adrenaline events of the last little while. He actually had a gleam in his eyes. It was a day, he said, that he hadn’t expected. A zip in the fabric of his hours. Totally true and in reflection filled with our own version of the buddy adventure comedy: The Baron and the Rocket. Or Spencers on the Loose. Or maybe Frames, Hangs, and Automobiles: Adventures in the Art of (Not) Reading the Instructions.

The act of cleaning (the kind that involves kitchens, bathroom, bedroom, basically all living-area spaces) is a thing I do not enjoy. I will (and often do) choose anything, dental surgery, long walks around the neighborhood, cleaning out my online photo library, to avoid it. If it becomes absolutely unavoidable, I’ll write CLEAN in big letters on my calendar, rope in Dennis, find a good podcast or audiobook, dig out the apron from the bottom kitchen drawer, set my jaw and go to it. The last time I entered this state of mind was during the final January 6 Committee hearing, which was on December 19th and only lasted about an hour and twenty minutes. Too short for usual three hours+ it usually takes me if I’m rolling solo. This time I did have Dennis splitting the load but I’d already listened to the podcast I’d wanted to cue up (Bone Valley, highly recommend!!) and so tuned up Ezra Klein talking to Rick Rubin about his new book The Creative Act, which will be an amazing audio moment for long walks or, er, the next cleaning session.

Toward the end, as I was cleaning my least favorite appliance, the stove, my apron pocket got caught on the oven handle and as I moved, it began to rip. A flash of rage, something that, to be honest, had been flickering in me all afternoon, flared. I purposefully carried on pulling away so that the caught bit continued to rip until the pocket was no longer a pocket, more an air flap making the apron pretty useless. Once I’d stopped moving, a series of moments rippled through me: That felt great…for about one second; what is in me that made me do that?; greetings old friend, anger. A flush of recognition swirled with a heavy dose of heartbeat. These emotions are no surprise. I’ve tamped down my inner anger/rage plenty over the course of my life. Nowadays, recognizing it, I feel less shame or knee-jerk shove-back-in-emotional-closet and more acknowledgement. A kind of well-hello-here-you-are-again sensation. At that moment, in that last room of scrubbing, two hours in, I was angry because what I’d really wanted to do with those hours was write this blog. Of course that was made visible when the oven caught the apron and I tugged with destructive purpose. This anger obfuscation, while not a Spencer-only family trait by any means, is pretty foundational in my upbringing. (Lordy, self-exploration never ends.)

Just the day before I’d stepped inside my dad’s house to find the cords around the TV all at sixes-and-sevens. What happened here, I wondered. The thought had actually come out my mouth so my dad answered, “It’s broken again.” Translation: a button on the remote control had been pushed which had then thrown the whole system out of wack. This had happened many times before. I’d used my masking tape skills to make that remote an easier thing to use. But still…. (Side-note: I have discovered an entire cottage industry of accessories found online designed for elderly and other health-impaired folx that make life simpler. Amazing.) Being well-versed in the art of realigning the TV-remote with the cable, I looked around for the clicker (or bippy-box, what the thing’s now called in that house on Bryant St. OK, another diversion: How I notice that, as in the beginning of language-learning we use simple rhyme-y words for stuff we don’t yet know the names of, then at the end as words fade away and language-learning almost reverses itself, using those simple rhyme-y words come back into play.) Glancing around his living room, I spotted the remote in the corner. Upon retrieval, it became pretty clear that the thing had been tossed at a high enough velocity to render it useless. Broke&busted. I showed it to him and he wondered out loud: “What happened?,” then after a moment of silence and recognition, knowing he was bullshitting a bit, he said “Why do I do that?” by which we both knew he meant throw things. Of course I recognized it. The way frustration bubbles up, then over. The moment when things sail because there isn’t any pause to make room for another way to do it. To sort out the anger. The frustration that at 97, stuff is just more confusing. Harder to access. He’s absolutely aware that there are things that will take more than he wants to (or can) give in order to figure it all out. Honestly, when I have to tackle certain technology, I go into cold sweats. I, too, am stunned by how many buttons are on a TV/cable remote for no seemingly useful reason. I’m also the one who will ignore the Apple notifications that tell me it’s update time until I absolutely can’t look away anymore (I know, I know).

For him, though, stuff he’s done all his life as a single man (for over four decades now) challenges him in a way that dominoes into pitching stuff. Across rooms. Into corners. Onto floors. He’s aware enough to get that there are things he can’t access anymore—whether mentally or physically. And that’s a pain. Over the course of the afternoon, I also found both of the cordless phones out of their chargers and underneath various pieces of furniture. It was as if anything handheld with buttons had to be disappeared. The phones luckily lived to work another day. The TV remote was disposed into the device dustbin.

It’s not like we don’t discuss. When he says “I wish I could do more” and “I just get so mad,” then he’s all in on talking about it. There are also a good amount of shrugs signaling “Well, that happened” and he’s not gonna go there. I recognize the words and the shrugs. I do them myself even though I can’t speak to how for him time ticking may add another layer of exasperation to the equation. A few weeks ago, a couple of days after his birthday, when he said, “I really should vacuum this place” he quickly added “but I hate to clean and at my age every day is a gift so I don’t want to spend it doing something I don’t want to do.” Touché, sir. I join you in that. Every day a gift even though, for me, the hours inside some random (spaced very far apart) days include holding a sponge to wipe down the stove-oven unit (grrr). And yet, as Rick Rubin talked about in the Ezra interview, entering situations with an intention as to how it might (or how you would like it to) go is a wonderful way to move into moments with a modicum of awareness. Not in a magical thinking kind of way like, “I want this oven to clean itself” but maybe more “I’ll be happier once this thing is cleaned and I don’t have to feel a prick of annoyance every time I look at that dirty surface.” And as I listened to Rick Rubin say that very wise thing, I was pulling steadily away from the oven handle, watching the pocket rip off my apron, and feeling some rage-y bits bouncing around my insides. Funny that. Awareness. Sure I’ve got it. My dad’s got it. There it is. Start again.

(Post-Script of great importance: my writing partner/great friend and writer Judy Piercey, has her debut, The Fierce, just published. Amazing and click here to see.)

Just finished watching the adaptation of Fleishman Is in Trouble. The book is one of my favorites and I think Taffy Brodesser-Akner (author) did a fantastic job adapting it for the (small) screen. In 2019, when I first read it, what stood out had less to do with age and more to do with the kind of Rashōmon stories we all live: What we think we know about others, what we’re so often wrong about. How complicated relationships can be. Four-ish years later, something else caught my attention: Being in your forties sucks, or rather, wow, what a ball of confusion that decade can be what with the arc from beginnings (almost-new everything: relationships, possibilities, hope, curiosity) to a middle (just everything: subtle settling, a pinch in the expectation department, some sort of heartbreak), along with a door-crack into a future that alternates between ads for cruises along the Rhine holding sparkling wine and ladies complaining of the hot flashes and calcium needs (looking at you, menopause). Or maybe I’m just talking about myself here, but I doubt it.

My forties couldn’t have/wouldn’t have been such a cauldron of confusion without the Evel Knievel–ramp that was my thirties. On that birthday I’d been sat at a four-top with seven people in an East Village Indian restaurant with Pearl Jam and their publicist. No one but me knew it was my birthday, which suited me. The dinner was meant to be business but it was also a huge pleasure. The publicist was a pal because, save for two women who I’d known since college, most of my friends at the time were in the music business. When it came to female friends, those were primarily publicists and managers. (Side note: Any wonder women appeared the majority in these careers? The combining of mental acuity for the business with patient attention to being the caretakers who set up playdates, er, I mean interviews, press trips, tours, and also found lost passports, local support meetings, and doctors who made hotel calls impressed me more than I probably ever expressed.) On that night, turning thirty, I remember clearly feeling the thrill of where I was. Somewhere I had always dreamed of being both physically and emotionally: Sitting with a band I loved doing a job I felt would catapult me into forever happiness. My career path. One that felt like a diamond dropped into my lap for me to polish into a satisfying career crown. I had a plan on how to make it shine. To stand out from the guy-ville gang I wanted to be a part of while also cutting a little deeper into the heart of rock’n’roll by lowering myself slyly into the souls of musicians. I not only wanted to understand them bones&all but also bring them to a deeper understanding of themselves. I craved hearing at the end of an interview, “You! You have opened my eyes to myself and my art in a way no other interviewer ever has.” (See: relationships, possibilities, hope in first paragraph.) I wanted to combine the fierceness of music-writers, Julie Burchill and Caitlin Moran, who were over in the U.K. with a stateside sensibility that might have resembled therapy.

It didn’t really work out that way. I maybe should have just turned the therapy on myself because by the time I was exiting the music business bruised and confused about why the guys got to make the raw moves, then write about it (you know, the drinking, drugging, disappearing with a band only to surface days later with a juicy story) they were feted and given more assignments. When I went down similar paths (drinking, drugging, disappearing with a band only to surface days later with a juicy story), I got called into the editor-in-chief’s office and told I was irresponsible, called into the accountant’s office and grilled about why the hotel bill was so high, and just generally called suspect (in lieu of a more sexist term like slut) by my fellow male journalists for what exactly I’d done to get my story.

On my fortieth birthday, I sat at a table for ten across from my then-husband with mutual friends around me. He’d arranged this dinner and it was one I hadn’t wanted. More specifically hadn’t wanted it on that particular night. I had a hella early wake-up the following day to catch a couple of trains and a bus to a school in Queens where I’d lead a writing workshop for sixth graders, then head off to Brooklyn in the afternoon to do an after-school with some teenagers. A version of this schedule happened four days a week and at the time I ignored how draining it was. The over-emphasized me who’d walk into a classroom channeling my Shecky Green trying to make writing fun, telling stories to get them excited about characters and plots and stuff. I’d play music for writing warmups and when “Lose Yourself” was the choice they’d always want to know if I knew Eminem. No. I didn’t know Eminem. Often, this appeared to be disappointing and I’d feel like I’d lost them. That they might have been thinking, Well, what good are you then? Sometimes I was tempted to lie. Yeah, I know him. He’d want you to not throw things at each other or fidget so much. Probably though, I was reading way too much into their reactions. In fact, in my forties I did a strange dance of both paying way too much attention to the reactions of strangers and way too little to my own reaction to things. Like, why did I cry all the time? Where was that career path I’d been on? Had I wandered too far off it to ever get back? And what the hell was the career I wanted anyway? Music was not moving me anywhere anymore and my writing hand and heart felt paralyzed by the wizards of doubt.

I’d stuffed the chaos of my thirties into a tiny mind satchel and hoisted it onto the top shelf of an even smaller and darker mental closet, then stepped into the marriage chamber that I mistook for a safe room. From the beginning, if I’d listened to myself I would have known that it wasn’t that, couldn’t be that. Displacing inner exploration with amnesia I rolled along wondering How in hell did I get here? Sometimes quite specifically. Like when I was standing on the corner of 23rd and Park trying to get people to talk to me for a focus group, slipping inside an ATM vestibule when I thought I saw someone I knew from my music days. Being lectured when I didn’t come back with enough names on my clipboard who wanted to talk about the titillating wonders of Tide’s new stain-removal pen. I’d think righteously, Don’t you know who I’ve been? then realize, who cared. I didn’t even know who I was. But my forties also set me free. Once I finally paid attention to why I was crying all the time, went to therapy, got a divorce—even though I was blindsided by the request—something broke open and I began to find my way back.

Back to the city, an apartment of my own uptown, even a glimmer of love for music again through a movement class, the very same place I met a community of women who helped put me back together. I reached out to old friends. I thought about writing. I pretty much never used the word career, which actually felt fine.

On my fiftieth birthday, I sat on a couch in my apartment and stared out my big window at the tall trees in Forth Tryon park. I was talking on the phone to a man I’d recently met who was kind, sexy, funny, and curious. I’d come out the other end of my forties on the verge of bankruptcy but I’d found my way back to the world of words. Freelance copyediting for various magazines. It was a relief to enter other people’s stories and still indulge my love of wordsmithery. My heart might have been skitterish in that moment but it was because I was excited about possibilities: the man on the phone, the view out my window, the emotional grip loosening around my own expectations. I’d made it here and although waves of doubt around what I could do still tumbled me, I had a much clearer view of my horizon. In the decade of 50 I found my voice again in my words slowly coming back to the page, to my confidence, to my heart, where I let someone in. I paid attention less to what was expected and more to what was needed. I moved into menopause but didn’t mourn as much as notice what that transition meant. I also bought better moisturizer. I still struggled with money, which was primarily where my shame lived. And as the decade closed out, I was open to the move with Dennis, the man on the phone, that brought to California to be closer to my aging dad. While NYC still held (holds) the dreams that brought me my career and formed me, I began to understand that I it wasn’t the city that did it, but me. I did it. Still doing it.

On my sixtieth birthday, I sat at a table with Dennis and my 95-year-old dad. I’m still tumbled by the occasional terror but they are quite different from any preceding decade. More to do with the immediate moment than an abstract future. I also have a better way to talk to them, and have inner discussions on my options. I’m better at breathing, something I’ve been told in countless movement and yoga classes that I uniformly misunderstood. Uncertainty rides up on the regular along with an excellent sidekick of joy and forgiveness. Of self. Of others. And so it goes.

Nine years to seventy.

I don’t know if any of you do this, but when someone I don’t know walks through my space (think apartment), I start to see the surroundings through their eyes. We’ve got a new manager here at the apartment complex who’s been doing walkabouts to meet people. When she stepped into our place, she went into a kind of this-is-delightful-what-you’ve-done-with-the-place dance and I was pleased, yes, but I also started to view the things we’d done to personalize the cookie-cutter nature of this fine&dandy structure as if for the first time. Forgot that I actually live here. Who are these people who have big paintings on their wall (thank you, T.B.Ward)? They must be into, oh, I don’t know, art. Wow, that’s an antiquey-looking couch, and a well-worn leather chair, they must be into brocade fabrics, supple-soft leather, and stuff. Then I snapped out of it and remembered that, yes, of course, how we present is how we are received. Usually. There are times I’ve held on too tightly to the “One of these things is not like the other” mentality I brought to this Inland Empire from NYC. Mostly that’s just a bit of folly though. Dennis and I are not the only non-gun-owning, abortion-rights-supporting Democrats in the vicinity. Having flown our small-size Biden-Harris flag during the election, we didn’t get snarked at or any other such thing. I accept we all carry our clichés with us and my I’m-a-liberal-feminist-white-lady-of-a-certain-age-who-still-wears-funky-sneakers-and-has-blue-hair-ness slots me into a certain type. I’m OK with that. From one angle, I can see myself taking up all that space yet if I move slightly back, I have no idea who I might appear to be.

My dad’s 97th birthday was Tuesday. My people, this is completely WILD. While he’s the same jazz-loving, martini-drinking man I’ve always known him to be, when I look…really really look and sometimes just glance, I can see how he’s changed substantially. Particularly in the last ten-ish months. The sense of him: tremendously present while also startlingly diminished. But we forget. Make accommodations in increments for the changes. Big ones such as no more operating of motor vehicles but also subtler things like how an upset stomach might really affect him. To me it feels like so.much.more than just an upset stomach. This happened today and while he’s feeling much better now, my action-figure self hoisted on the special I-can-handle-it belt which is never far from hand and flew into let’s-do-this mode. What was the right thing to give him? What was the absolute wrong thing? In the end, they were just a series of decisions based on a conversation with him, experience, and light internet searching, He’s over the hump. By which I mean his stomach is settled, his eyes alert, his speech clear, although he is very tired. And we’re still getting to the place where he’s comfortable just taking a nap in front of me and would absolutely not go lay down until I got into the Rocket 88 and drove away. I figure this is because he wants to be seen is as my capable dad. He’s also never been comfortable showing any sort of need or injury. We’re cat people. Finding a dark place alone is quite preferable to a fuss. Yet still. I left and continue to think I shouldn’t have and am tempted to go back to check on him and will most likely call. Maybe twice.

He tells the story of himself and how he wants to be seen. Obviously so do I. So do we all, right? Whether the present or the past. When I say to myself, This is what’s happening right now, sometimes it’s followed by and once this moment is under control, I’ll have more time for [finishing the third draft of my novel, swimming regularly, taking long walks]. Sometimes the thought follows as such, This is what’s happening right now and so it will be for however long this moment lasts. Which is ultimately more realistic. I’m not at all annoyed with where my life is: I love copyediting, being in the home office, watching the cats be daft and adorable. Dennis back from the road. Him liking his current gig. Reading good books (currently Small World by Laura Zigman with Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra up next), etc. But also I’ve come to realize there are a few things I need help with.

The last time I did talk therapy was almost twenty years ago when my marriage was coming apart (although shockingly, I didn’t even realize it was happening and we didn’t talk about it) and I’d run screaming from the music industry (also, shockingly, the impetus for that was never discussed) and I was teaching workshops as a writer in residence at about a gazillion NYC public schools to make ends meet (we briefly discussed the stress around working with special-ed students and how I had no feckin’ idea how to really get through to any of them especially given that many teachers used writing as punishment, so there was that). We talked mostly about my relationship with my mom. And my dad. But mostly my mom. It was helpful. Then I ran out of money to be able to afford therapy and I packed up the tools she’d given me and carried on. The very shaky structure fell over many times, was rebuilt, roof caved in, patched it, and so on.

These days I still use some of the tools but I’m also a helluva lot more self-realized (thank you, meditation practice, reading, thinking, talking to very wonderful&helpful friends). But still. A little help is a lotta excellent. As many of you who know me or read this blog on the regular know, I’ve been involved in a frouple with Lisa, Deb, and Joseph, the Jungian therapists who deliver weekly This Jungian Life podcasts, for almost three years now. It’s a one-sided affair. They don’t know I exist, and yet they blow my mind with almost every episode. When I realized I needed some help managing my own moments around my dad, Dennis, getting older, accepting my day-to-day, and all of that, I decided to find a Jungian therapist I could call my own. So last Thursday I met D and started talking. And here was another instance when I had a glimpse of myself through someone else’s eyes. The first fifty minutes was the getting-to-know-you portion, or rather D getting to know me. I noticed some things in telling my story: I have a few that have been told so many times they’ve become like stones at the bottom of a riverbed, soft and smooth from the water’s constant attention. Identity markers (“I was the Rolling Stone intern who wouldn’t leave.” “I got the job as a writer at SPIN because the owner liked to steal people away from Rolling Stone.” Please to notice the self-deprecation and self-minimizing in both of those statements.) Watching D’s face as I waded deeper into my history—moving to NYC, becoming my music journalist best self—I felt she was processing these things as great accomplishments so I decided to stay in that moment. Then when D said as much out loud using her words, I didn’t fight it even as an aw-shucks-it-was-nothing knee-jerk tried to pinch me silly on the inside. I just held on. It shouldn’t be that hard, but sometimes it is. We carried on. I got teary talking about my mom (some things never change), then I told about the dream I’d had the night before and damn if the last ten minutes of our session didn’t light a few things up in my soul. How the subconscious can deliver a few well-placed scenarios during sleep that usually make zero sense to me when I wake up, then upon discussion with someone who thoughtfully thinks about these things and presents them back in a filled-with-possibilities way, can flip a switch of recognition is mind-blowing. Who knew that a blocked sink. Menstrual blood. A stranger’s bathroom and a decision to clean it all up could add up to an important set of questions and life narration is, to overuse a current favorite word, wild. (Last night I had a dream about escaping kittens, so, you know, that could be something.) So while I’m both excited and cautious about this work I’m setting off to do, it’s becoming ever clearer that there’s no time like the present.

A view in on myself as seen through the eyes of another and refocused back onto me. The long and winding. The riverbed of stories, rocks rubbed smooth, jagged edges snagging, coming up for air, tumbling back down. Why not?

Sometimes you get what you want but it doesn’t feel altogether good. Sometimes you get what you don’t want and, in the end, it turns out okay. This week’s theme. My dad’s birthday (97) is Tuesday and he’s decided not to renew his license. A wise man, wise move. We’d been going round and round on this topic for some weeks now, then last Sunday we made a list of the pros and cons and he decided Fine, I don’t really like driving anyway. We talked about how I would happily become his Jeeves and we’d go shopping and to Silver Sneakers (and all other places) together. “What if I’m eating breakfast and decide I want something I don’t have?” He asked. “You’ll call me and we’ll go get it,” I answered. “But what if I want it immediately and you’re busy?” His eyes flashed a little. “I don’t know what to tell you. You might have to wait?” I responded. “Or I could walk to the store,” he parried. “Sure,” I answered because sure, because right, because I knew he was saying that and both of us were aware he was just, er, saying that. Doing it would happen not-at-all.

So I took the keys, found the title, and cleaned out the glove compartment (side note: why is it called a glove compartment?). Inside I found the original 1992 manual with Tom Donnely’s name written inside. Tom was my dad’s oldest friend—he died a few months ago—and he’d given my dad the car for free back in 2008. He was a guy from back East who hated to drive but, go figure, he’d moved to Los Angeles in the 50s and, even though the city still had streetcars back then, he apparently felt he needed his own wheels. But as he got older, driving became a pain, so my dad took the train into LA’s Union Station, Tom drove to meet him and handed over the keys gratis. Then they probably went out and had steak and martinis. (Side note story: A few months ago, Dennis, my dad, and I were in Pasadena eating outside and he swept his arm toward Colorado Blvd and said, “Tom and another guy and I went up on the sidewalk around here after a night out.” This did not seem to chagrin him, rather it was just a thing that happened, and much like parents who never want to hear the stories of their kids’ brush-with-danger moments, I smiled tightly and said “huh. you guys were crazy.”) So I had a moment of weighted emotion sitting with the car’s history. The Rocket 88, as we’ve dubbed her. I still haven’t taken the golf clubs out of the trunk. Seeing those also reminds me of what has been and will not be again.

It’s not at all lost on my dad what this giving up means and there’s no way I’m going to jolly him out of the import, the life shift. But just like when Tom died, he’s processing these moments in his own way. He’ll bring it up. I’ll put my toe in. We might discuss. It’s been a few days now and we’re working toward a togetherness errand-running schedule and the like.

Wheels. The idea they exist for freedom and autonomy. Independence. I would say the American way but I don’t know enough about other places on this planet and their relationship to autos, etc. to say with certainty. My mom and dad both had 1965 Mustangs back in the day: hers white/blue interior, his black/white interior. I have great memories of riding around in both of them. She and I would head off to my grade school where she also taught, listening to KHJ pop radio. She’d sing along to “She’s Come Undone” by the Guess Who, which for some reason I thought was about a kangaroo, literally no idea why, and “Squeeze Box” by the Who, which seemed to be about an accordion. I’m sure all this confusion was helpful in my later music years. Not ever understanding exactly what Eddie Vedder, Kurt Cobain, or Chris Cornell were getting at and refusing to ask the most annoying question: “So, what’s that song about?” because I could just remember staring dumbly at the car’s radio and making up my own stories.

By the time I’d gotten my own set of wheels, I didn’t consider them either a gift or a curse. I sure as hell didn’t treat them well. The first car, a blue VW, I sold so I could travel to England. The second was a Toyota. I didn’t fully grasp car maintenance and a flaming rod flew out the bottom of that one on my way home to Huntington Beach from LA in some wee morning hours on the 605 freeway. That car had gotten me to my favorite 80s music stomps, the Lhasa Club small with great punk&otherwise bands, The Roxy, the Atomic Cafe in Little Tokyo where we’d go after the shows (click on this shortie for a great peek inside) but then I broke it. There followed an old station wagon with a cracked engine and another VW, silver, which was also ill-maintained with bad brakes that I failed to mention to my friend who borrowed it to go to the store and came back rightfully angry (sorry again for that, M!). A fleeting moment of driving delight rolling down Pacific Coast Highway, window down, arm crooked on the sill, cigarette dangling, something loud like “Pour Some Sugar on Me” blasting. Probably why I could never hear any of my cars telling me they needed a tune-up. Then I moved to NYC and happily gave up the need for wheels except for the bicycle kind.

I’ve never wrapped myself in car culture. I do enjoy another kind of on-the-highway, wheeled escape: motorcycles. Being a passenger on one. There I can grasp a kind of freedom. Hence Samantha, Dennis and my much-enjoyed Honda Stateline. Her spot out in front of our apartment promises easy jump-on and getaway moments, which California can be good for ten-ish months out of the year once atmospheric rivers roll through. Yesterday morning, as the sun was just coming up, one of our neighbors knocked on our door, pointed to the street, and said, “I think your motorcycle was stolen” and holy shit, where Samantha had been the night before all that was left was her cover bunched-up and discarded on the ground. A gut punch. And so began a day of police reports and insurance claims.

Wheels come, wheels go, I thought numbly as I got into the Rocket to go to my dad’s so we could shop together. Things take a while to sink in with me and while there are far more pressing and tragic things going on in the world, this theft truly stunned. It was painful and deserved some processing, which I was planning on doing once the shopping was done—not that anything ever works the way you plan. My dad wasn’t in the mood to shop, so we hung out for a bit, then I set off to do it solo. In the vegetable aisle of the local Stater’s my phone rang with the news that someone in our apartment complex had found Samantha a few streets over and I became that person who talks loudly into a cell phone while blocking the items you want to grab, in this case I paced in front of the forty varieties of lettuce being misted. Apologies to anyone trying to grab the Romaine. Dennis was eventually able to connect with the guy and found Samantha unhurt one street away. Not a scratch. She’d apparently been rolled away, a job that would take at least two people. Either it was a prank or a theft attempt that was given up on before completion. Crazy.

Now all the wheels are here. The Rocket out front, Samantha tucked in the carport, Trixie, the truck, close behind. I never figured I’d be that person commandeering a fleet and, honestly, Dennis is in charge of the T and the S. But still, a week of motor-centric gains and losses that kicked up emotional dirt. The dust may be clearing even though it’s not lost on me that the view will be different once everything settles. It always is. Am I ever ready?

We’ve had a lot of rain here in Cali. Maybe you’ve heard. An atmospheric river rolling through the sky bringing storm after storm up and down the coast. Then there are the sunsets during cloud breaks and those are pretty stunning (sunrises are nice too). Being someone who likes seasons, I mean I moved to NYC so I could enjoy outerwear ferCrissakes, I haven’t been mad about the groundhog’s day cycle of sun into clouds into rain into … etc. But I also haven’t experienced the drama of the areas in the state where flooding, mudsliding, power losing has been happening. Those folx are no-doubt feeling differently than I am as I wander around going gaga over the pretty colors in the sky.

And wander I do. Because my work schedule is on East Coast time, I’m done mid-afternoon so I can exit the apartment and walk around. This town (er, much of the country) isn’t really built for walking. Sure, Redlands has its share of great neighborhoods—cool Victorian, Craftsman, adobe-style houses, a beautiful park, a verdant cemetery, all uphill, which makes the views once you get there pretty great—but when I wander outside those locales, I’m walking along thoroughfares lined with car dealerships, tire & fix-it shops, or stretches of fast-food joints (so.many.fast.food.options). Sometimes I’m walking along a stretch where there are no sidewalks as if the city planners were just all “why waste the concrete?” I’m always listening to something and given most of you are probably aware of my aversion to music currently since I’ve written about that state of things fairly extensively of late, I’m either into a podcast or an audiobook. During my stroll yesterday I was listening to Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. Sheesh. His full-on focus that modern medicine, specifically as it is in the U.S., around end-of-life moments is clear-eyed and thought-provoking. (For those of you who haven’t yet thought about or committed to paper your end-of-life decisions, here’s a source myself, Dennis, my dad, and my mom used.)

Anyhoo, there I was walking around trying to find all the sidewalks, listening to the measures medical pros will often go to in order to prolong a life sometimes at the expense of the person involved. No doubt I was making crazy faces, which really, who cared given I was literally the only pedestrian for miles, and if the drivers noticed, they would have already thought I was eccentric for walking. The stories in this book are compelling with varying levels of tragic. These are firsthand accounts of people’s lives in all their pathos, hope, success, failure. The overriding point: that we as a people and as a society, whether medically trained or plebian inclined, do not really function well around mortality and the impending loss of it. Of course we don’t, or rather I’ll shift it back on me, of course I don’t given my exposure to end-of-life is not at all constant. Versions of death exist on a screen. In a book. I can feel the emotions around the loss if the story is done well. That’s it. When Dennis’s mom died of cancer, I could see how the loss rippled through him and his family. I could understand the choices she made to take control of where she wanted to be at the end of her life, which is precisely what Gawande’s book talks about. With modern medicine, there are now myriad ways and choices to keep a certain type of hope alive yet the conversations around the reality of what that means (months in a doctor’s eyes, years in the minds of most patients) are usually pretty skewed and often quite confusing. Back in the day, if you made it to eighty you were some kind of miracle. George Washington died of a cold, so did President Harrison (barely remember him as he was only in office for a month in 1811). Other presidents succumbed to various things that today would be cured by a short stint on antibiotics or in a hospital. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to prolong life, just observing that not talking about what life will look like after an intervention takes place can open up a pandora’s box of perpetual expectation and confusion. Also often fear and disappointment and/or anger.

So all of this while I negotiate conversations with my dad around where he’s at presently in living his life. Our current round&round is about driving. He’s incredibly close to handing over the car to me but it’s a lot of one mile forward, two clicks in reverse. It’s not lost on me that this decision goes much deeper than just having a big hunk of metal with an engine inside parked in your driveway. This is about autonomy. Giving up the automobile means acknowledging exactly what his capabilities are and where he is in his life. This choice would not be temporary. Once that car is gone, he will never own one again. Will never drive again. That is huge in selfhood and ego. But yet, for me, it’s about safety. On January 24th he’ll turn 97 and his license will expire. He could renew it. Yet given a few variables—the state of his memory, the physicality of getting in and out of the car, which appears to be more challenging of late—it seems a better moment would be to hand over the keys. We’ve talked about grocery shopping and doing errands together. I’m all for it! Think of the adventures! But again, his sense of autonomy adjacent to my safety worries. Last week at his local store, he hit another car as he pulled out of his parking space, knocking off a bit of plastic from the front headlight. The other driver claimed no damage and let the thing drop, but still, as I do, the thoughts of how much worse it could have been circle the drain in my brain endlessly. So have we reached the point where I become the decider? Dennis reminds me that the time comes when I have to step up and do what has to be done even though my dad might not like it. Other people tell me similar things about stuff that just needs to be done whether he’s into it or not. I exist in the gray area, which even as I write feels somewhat cowardly. Although I’ve gotten a helluva lot better at instilling the importance of his cane or the rolling of the trash bins down the driveway once a month in the face of his grumbling that he doesn’t like his cane and can still move the bins, I recognize my flee-from-conflict instinct. Of course not taking the lead will bring us right into a conflict of another kind. The type neither of us may have control over if something dire happens. My dad and I have had more hard conversations in the last year than at any point in our relationship but there are more in store. I look for the sidewalks that might border these big important issues where we can safely exist, him with autonomy and me with peace of mind. On the lookout for bravery, heading down that freeway of love (thanks, Aretha) in the slow lane. (Corniest metaphorical ending I think I’ve ever written. Um, sorry?)

I might just as well change the title of this weekly offering to “Control. What’s that?” It’s not lost on me that the topic is really the thread-theme that has spun through pretty much every entry I’ve written in the history of these weekly missives. Even the music memories are laced with the acknowledgment that at some point I’m either losing or never had control whether of the situation, the person, or even my own self. The actual title of this blog: Does This Make Me? started with something fairly specific. In June of 2019, I had the idea to wrap my writing around fashion. How I wanted to explore what it meant to be responsibly stylish, Style being something I’ve always loved, and the planet being a place I’ve also enjoyed. The reality of the latter coming the fuk apart while the former plays an outsized role in that demise motivated me to put my thoughts down. Exploring sites like GoodOnYou made it clear how conjoined style and environment are. And being a girl who, since high school, hasn’t been able to go past a thrift store without the pull of possibilities sucking me inside, I thought this would be a good fit for some writing. I did that for about a half-dozen posts, then in January 2020, Dennis and I packed up our NYC lives, got into our truck, and crossed the country to California where the Jumpsuits Across America posts subtly, then altogether, changed my focus. There was no lightbulb moment, I just let my attention shift.

More and more I realize how that kind of shift into a certain surrender can be like water running through my hand. Usually refreshing and sometimes frustrating. I see it. I feel it. Can even taste it and hear it, but I can’t hold it, control it, make it stay put unless I use a big bucket. Eventually, though, the stuff will evaporate.

More than not in the last week-ish, I’ve come to realize the futility of trying to even find a bucket. If I step back from the situation, take a breath and a longer view, I can usually find something to settle me down and stop trying to grasp at that shimmery thing representing control. I mean, sure, there are certain things I could do differently to bring about another outcome (I’m looking at you, palm plant in the back that I’ve neglected and probably killed) but when it comes to most sentient beings, my experience lately is around finding sanity through accepting there’s only so much to be done.

Take Desi, our boy cat, for instance. He’s going a bit mental lately. You might notice it from the look in his eye in the photo above. At any minute of every day you may find him on his hind legs scratching at every shiny surface on the wall—mirrors, photos, just generally hanging stuff. Apparently, he’s decided that if he can just get through this magic portal he’ll find some sort of kitty paradise on the other side where food is always and forever available. Because he is apparently STARVING. ALWAYS. and WHY DON’T YOU FEED ME. ALWAYS telegraphs the look in his eye. It’s not like he and I can talk about it. Perhaps he’s just going through his terrible twenty-one-month-old time, although as I remember owning previous cats, they are mostly insatiable for food always even though at some point they just find a favorite comfy spot on the couch or whatever and settle in, resigned. So I watch him. I use the handy spritzer bottle in order for him to know that unsettling things on the wall is no bueno. (Current situation: he’s managed to pull all the push-pins out of the wall, unseating the postcards that used to hang there while the girl cat, Lucille, attempts to dismantle the bottom of a chair in the living room.) Because I don’t want to always be running around the apartment shrieking NO, while squeezing the water bottle in some sort of trigger-finger madness, I wonder if this will ever change. I breathe. I spritz, and am now shrugging.

We could put them to work at my dad’s place where a mouse (a family of them?) has taken up residence and decided that avocados and bananas when left in a bowl on his counter are wonderful to gnaw on. OK, so this is a situation where some control can be levied. We put a plug-in sonic mouse repellent thingy in his kitchen directly over where the fruit bowl lives (we also put the bowl of fruit into the frig). He left out one banana just to see if the thingy in the wall worked. It didn’t. I imagine the mouse (&family?) did some version of shrug as they approached, then nibbled, on the banana. We will now explore steel wool to plug holes and possibly an exterminator. So, yes, there’s some control over that situation. But when it comes to other things in his life: renewing his driver’s license at the end of this month(!!!!), eating dinner (!!!!), over those things I have very little control beyond the sound of my own words delivered to him in conversation sometimes sternly, often jocularly. They may stick, possibly sway, but in the end, he’ll make the ultimate decision around all that: to drive or not to drive (actually the DMV may make the ultimate decision), to eat or not to eat. A cookie? A vegetable? I’m much better at accepting these outcomes than I used to be, say back in the olden days of August. I do still constantly come up with hacks and possible solutions to take care of any possible problems that may come up, but mostly they fall flat given the situation rarely unfolds the way I think it will.

And then there’s control over my own carcass, the still-living-ness of it. The thing I walk around and use every day. I currently have an unwanted mystery blemish hanging out on the end of my nose. It’s ugly and annoying and yes, luckily I have control over going to the derm and having them check it out, remove it, whatever. But I had no control over it appearing there in the first place one week after my regular derm appointment because of course. Sigh. And so it will go. With my nose and every other part of me outside and in. I’m lucky to be in a relationship where I’ve learned to say out loud the parts I used to keep quiet: namely moments that make me unhappy or uncomfortable between he and I. By taking control of my own voice, now we talk about these things. And while, no, I can’t control him or how he feels about this, that, or the other, I can get closer to understanding how his actions make me feel while he listens and more than not understands or at the very least discusses how we can be better. I also try to do that for him.

So while the dictionary definition of control can appear pretty clear cut, the action of it for me is that ever-shifting sand that leads into the ocean. I see the wave, can choose to ride it, fall into it, go through it. I know I’ll never control it. That oher C-word: chaos. Or perhaps compassion. Maybe just choosing.

One of the first New Year’s Eves I spent in NYC, mid-80s, I worked the coat check room for a private upstairs party at a fancy restaurant. I’d found I made more money checking coats during the winter months at this joint than I had as a waitress in the more funky East Village places where I’d slung plates. This was the era of high-rolling, avaricious Wall Street days and rapacious Odeon nights. Money and cocaine were everywhere. I rarely had either, though I wasn’t completely judgmental about those who had both. Sometimes, like on this NYEve night, standing in a tiny closet-size space, taking fancy people’s slightly damp outerwear, then handing them a slip of paper they were expected to hold onto somehow, a random so&so would palm me a little white envelope and invite me to knock some out, snort it up, and have some fun. Maybe it only happened once, who knows, but what I can recall is how much smaller my space felt and how distant I felt from the world at large in those moments. I was new to the city. I had a lot of things I wanted to happen around success in both career and love. Neither of those had materialized yet: I was six months away from graduating with a journalism degree, a month away from an internship at Rolling Stone, and two weeks out from discovering my boyfriend was cheating on me. All this made me anxious. Not helped probably by the slight headache I’m sure I had from being squished into a tiny space, grinding my teeth while a million perfumes and aftershaves rolled off the hanging scarves, furs, and tweeds fighting to take down my olfactories.

At the height of the party, someone needed something from their coat. The rack was literally bending, not remotely large enough to hold all the stuff it was expected to. I dived in to find said person’s whatever and, like The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe*, I was disappeared into an unexpected place. Darkness, weight, the sound of faraway voices, an inability to move. Rather than entering a place of magical creatures and princess people, I was buried under a thousand coats and scarves as the rack collapsed on top of me. I could hear the person who wanted their stuff yelling into the space, Hello? Hello? I struggled to get my head out of the mess so I could breathe. My life did not flash before my eyes. It was more hard buttons and zippers grazing my face. Finally, after clearing away a particularly heavy thing (a full-length fur perhaps?), I scrambled out and back to my post, disheveled but mostly intact. I might have thought this will make a funny story.

Thirty years ago to the day, I’d just gotten back from visiting my mom and her husband in Colorado. It had been tense. Mom-daughter relationships can be fraught and ours was. I’d just left SPIN and was working as a talent booker for The Jane Pratt show on Lifetime. I’d achieved a few things since my coat-check takedown years earlier: success as a music journalist being the main. I was still broke, still not in the kind of relationship I craved. But in the eyes of others and sometimes myself, I’d made it. Hobnobbing with rock stars, seeing my byline on the regular, living on my own in a downtown apartment.

Jane had decided that since I knew Pearl Jam and they were playing at the Academy Theatre in Times Square on that New Year’s Eve of ’92, that I should get tickets for her, myself, and a few of our workmates. So I did. Once we got through the barrier of police guarding the perimeter of Times Square and the voice in my head screaming What the hell am I doing here? had quieted and I’d stopped being grossed out by the group near us talking about wearing adult diapers as they waited to get into the Square to see the ball drop—because this is what you do when you’re about to be locked into a small space with no bathrooms—I was relieved to reach our front row, balcony seats inside the theater. As the lights dimmed and the shadows of the band reflected onstage—my hands-down, all-time favorite moment during shows, followed closely by the very first notes—I tried to let go and just be in the moment. This was an ongoing project (still is). As with most moments in my life at that time, I was worried. About who I was. What I was doing. Where my future was headed. Had I made the right move leaving SPIN? How would I handle the bill collectors leaving endless messages? Why in hell couldn’t I find a good happy relationship? I was emotional. Also pregnant, although I wouldn’t know that for a few weeks to come. All this would add to the rollercoaster beginning of my 1993. An abortion, which I kept a secret from almost everyone. Another job shift as Jane’s TV show was canceled. More bill collectors ringing the phone.

And the band played on. We did go backstage, yes. Fuzzy scenes of a bottle going around. Eddie Vedder balancing on a backstage folding chair, surfing it, daring it to snap closed and bring him tumbling down. All of us laughing as if broken limbs and delayed next shows might be funny. Drummer-at-the-time Dave Abbruzzese not putting on a shirt, even as we all left the theatre and faced January in New York weather. That’s about it on the specifics. Nothing salacious. A scramble to get out of Times Square, a subway ride home, sleep, 1993 began.

Three decades later. I think back to then and it seems like a different life. I do that a lot, feel how the different sections of my past feel like other distinct lives lived. I understand on a basic level how one moment has led to another. Can appreciate that who I am now is because of what I’ve gone through then to get me to now. I’m truly happy to have come to this place and have these stories. I recognize that the trees on this particular stretch of life are more mature. They can hold a rope swing pretty solidly and I can push above the branches and see a bit of the layout below without much fear of what the falling will be like. I mean, I know there will be falls, it’s just I’m slightly better about not fighting it. Stuff will break. Things have broken before and I’ve managed to live through it. Crawled out from underneath and made stories from the experience. I’ve taken in the view from the balcony and held secrets that people discovered anyway. None of it killed me. Some of it made me stronger. Mostly it just reminded me that what will be, will be so why not be in it as much as possible. I’m feeling good about that. Appreciating the view from the trees.

I hope you all find a view you like as 2023 wraps around us, deep pockets ready to fill!

• Now knowing this series was a bit of Christian propaganda makes me sad, yet in my youth, it was one of my favorites. The way insidious things work I suppose.

I’m a sucker for a certain magical mood this time of year. Maybe it’s the byproduct of Christmases as an only child and being showered, absolutely unequivocably showered, with gifts from a set of grandparents and mom and dad that started it. (For a visual, any of the two-ish minute clips attached in the below captions will prove the point.) Whether I believed in a man wearing a red suit breaking into my home and leaving all that booty didn’t matter. I mean, I believed that happened for a while until a certain age, then I got the news and I didn’t think that happened anymore but I don’t feel there was a scar left where that ho-ho-ho man had been. (Sidenote: This David Sedaris moment, him reading about the Dutch version of Santa, is effin’ priceless and a good smile.) Maybe it was the intrinsic belief that stuff just appeared. That was the magical bit. As a young’un I sat on plenty of santa laps and murmured my wish list, yet that wasn’t a memory I remember as being fun. I could say it was stressful but I’d just be making that up. It was probably just a thing I got excited about doing because that’s what you did at Christmas, went to see Santa so you’d get what you wanted since he was apparently in charge of all that. For sure I think the ability to suspend reality when you’re young is powerful because there may be all sorts of holes in the story around Santa, Jesus, the Easter Bunny, god, Yeti, unicorns (wait, not unicorns, those are real) but they exist apparently because they serve a purpose in the moment. Coming face to face with a rendition of that story thought felt jarring on a few levels. Maybe because of previously set expectations: the thing doesn’t look like you thought it would or now that you’re here and the moment is happening, it will pass, and then what’re you left with? A yearning for it to happen again or a whew, glad that’s over moment (or a combo plate).

I saw some of those complicated moments straight up the other night when I went to see the production of The Nutcracker that Dennis has been touring with. Before the show there was a photo area set up where the kids could get a photo taken with one of the ballerinas. The line was fairly long to stand with this sparkly magical creature and the fidgety jumpy me-next-ness was palpable until the moment the wee one needed to step onto the set, then, almost to a one, there would be a pause, a full stop, a kind of “ur, not sure about this” and they would hang back for a second, then give in, step up, get twirled by the dancer, then run away. There was one exception, as seen in the last photo above, where the young one refused to take the ballerina’s hand, which seemed to make the dancer quite sad. I found myself rooting for this young one decided to take the picture on her terms. No, I’m not gonna be twirled, I’m gonna stand over here where I feel safe. Again, making all that up around what was happening, but that’s how I saw it!

She seemed to be figuring out how to have her joy on her own terms. I was a big fan of that. I’m not suggesting there is really any control to be had over anything really, but this young one’s stance reminded me that there is maybe a way to have your joy, stay there for a minute, then exit stage left when you want. Did I know that when I was young, then lose it over time?

Given that currently the idea of diving into a big pool of joy and splashing fully in it for an extended amount of time, say longer than a few minutes, scares the beejesus out of me, I wonder when or why that happened. I cling to an emotional floatie that keeps me above the water as a nod to safety. Don’t want to drown even though I’m a fine swimmer. The element of whether the water will get drained and I’ll be exposed. Logically I can say So what? I can handle exposure. Who cares, let me have this moment of buoyancy for as long as I want it. Yes, logically I get that I’ll be able to deal with whatever happens. Emotionally not so much. So ingrained is the sense that if I give into joy for any length of time I’ll either be exposed as a fool for believing the water was great while everyone else knew it was toxic or that eventually, I’ll need to get out because now I’m just showing off by doing the backstroke while singing. And over time, over life experiences, this sand of doubt began to rub and chafe until I believed that no, best not to give in for too long, be on guard, be smart, and not get fooled. I know pearls grow in oysters from grains of sand. Sure. Just like I know rainbows are some combination of sunlight and atmosphere. Science, yet emotionally that feels about as esoteric as the magic of why a certain time of year can flood the system with joy. How that sense of lightness can happen at other times as well without having to be some breathless experiment in caution.

Looking at the home movie clips, I am charmed by the unabashed joy in all the things that were around me. Mostly presents. And dolls. So. Many. Dolls. All different sizes. Maybe some stand-ins for sisters. A few were actually tall enough.

I also recognized some furniture that my dad still owns: a side table still there to hold his martini, a rug currently rolled up in his closet. It was comforting to see those touchstones and also remember pieces like the needlepoint rocking chair sitting near the fireplace that was perfectly sized for me to climb into and make move. The house itself, which we drove by last year and, although it’s been painted and the trees grown over the last four decades, still spoke of happy holiday moments. The living room fireplace I lay in front of and devoured Little Women on my twelfth Christmas while falling firmly in love with long-form stories. The den where my Matchbox car track snaked around my eighth yuletide and the courtyard on my tenth Christmas where I learned to ride my bike around and around in circles, which is probably why I still tilt to the side on my current bike. All these clips brought home the cocoon of those times. Far from making me sad, watching these moments made me remember. I seemed like I enjoyed handing out the gifts. I clearly loved opening them.

I was reminded of my mom’s gamine haircut and shy-smile beauty. My dad’s handsomeness. My grandfather’s (dad’s dad) hair, how he had a lot of it even in his seventies, which no doubt made his son annoyed as he was losing his. That my grandmother (dad’s mom) had the best pair of cat-eye glasses in a non-ironic fashion. The slight startle of seeing my grandmother (mom’s mom), who was also very beautiful, showing up in a limited amount of these home movie clips. At the time I didn’t understand the complicated nature of her and my mom’s relationship and why she wasn’t around that much.

In each clip, I’m fully stepping into the joy. They’re short snatches of moments but if memory serves (so unreliable), the sense I have now around this season is very much formed by the goodness of what was back then. Very simple. People I loved were happy for me. Me happy to be with them. No false bottom was dropping out, and even when it did, when after the divorce things changed, my mom and dad still did the togetherness dance during the Santa holiday for my benefit. Until I was a teenager, at which point I split my time between them and was miserable. But I wasn’t miserable about the holiday per se, I was miserable because I was a teenager and that was my job. That period of time when misery is just a state of mind alongside extreme happiness, lust, agony, confusion, certitude. Extreme highs and lows—that things were SO GOOD, then they were SO BAD—maybe that filter remains in place. Like when you step into the frame and the glittering ballerina moment awaits, then you notice she’s maybe frowning or a safety pin is holding her tutu in place but you’re still happy to be there, then it’s over and you step out of the shot and it’s back to a life that may not be wearing a tiara. There’s still a snapshot memory or a quick home movie that flashes a reminder. And rather than it being like staring into the sun and going blind, the thing can be held and seen for what it is: some magic, a thing that can be real even if it’s not.

Here’s to all of us jumping in that joy pool to spend the days ahead in whatever ways make us happiest!

(One last thing, because I know books transport, a place I donated to this year and now monthly: Freedom Reads.)