Does This Make Me Look

Many years ago, I went to a silent 10-day retreat, and when I wasn’t sitting on a cushion meditating (or at least trying/learning/actually sometimes doing), I was outside wandering the grounds of the Massachusetts location. It was wintertime and there was a little snow and some slippery bits up and down the walkable hills so I decided I’d find a walking stick to clomp around with. I found a great one and decided that at the end of each walk, I’d plant it in the ground for someone else to use and/or I’d remember where I’d stuck it for my next stroll. This action felt thrilling because apparently I needed something to do with my mind so…walking sticks. I also picked up a pine cone on my first trip outside that looked like it was embedded with diamonds (ice + solitude + some buzz in my head = everyday items appearing magical) and put it carefully in my pocket. Once back in my room, I placed the pine cone on the windowsill. The ice had melted so it now looked like an ordinary pine cone, but still, I felt happy to see it there. During the next day’s walk I picked up another one and put it on my windowsill next to the first. Rinse and repeat for two more days and there were four of those little puppies lined up in my room, except the first two were starting to crumble because, well, dry heat + time = disintegration. I pondered this (of course I did. everything was being pondered deeply). I felt sad that I’d taken these little objects out of their natural habitat and lined them up like trophies. What was the point of that? What was I trying to achieve here? Honestly, I don’t remember what I came up with but I did sweep all the pine cones into my coat and carried them back outside, then let them loose.

The other day on a morning walk, I passed a field of daisies. They made me happy so I picked a few to bring home and put in a vase. When I brought them eye level, I saw that there was a spider in a web on one and some other crawling critters on another. Oh, shit, I thought, these flowers are homes, like a little condo village that I’ve just plucked up and displaced. The Robert Moses of the neighborhood. So I dropped them and wandered away again thinking, What was that about? Why the need to take this stuff? Maybe for memories? Although it wasn’t like I was going to forget about the field of daisies or even the diamond-sparkly pine cone for that matter. Did I need to bring a piece of the outdoors in? Or perhaps it was just as simple as see it, want it.

It’s also, I suspect, the fact that I’m getting used to being surrounded by nature. In New York City, Trader Joe’s was the place for flowers and when I saw birds other than pigeons, I was flabbergasted. In Redlands, ditto the flowers from TJ’s although there were certainly hillsides covered in beautiful foliage. And there was also birdsong along with the random coyotes roaming about, which actually was sad because for sure somewhere close behind would be Animal Control. Up here though, I absolutely feel like a minority creature. Sure, there are other people in houses spaced a few football fields away although on my walks I rarely see any of them. What I do see are the turkeys (two big ones with their littles in the woods this morning. I suspect a turkey-type playdate), a doe and her spindly fawn crossing the road last night, Woodeen and her little chuck-pups in the backyard, and a new addition to the neigborhood: Roquelle the black bear.

Yep, an actual bear. She first turned up last Saturday in our front yard, spotted initially by the cats whose minds were so blown that they froze like statues with huge eyes that said quite clearly what-the-actual-fuck-is-that?, then D and I watched as she rounded the house and headed for the trashcans. (See clip below for that moment where D attempts a finger wag through the window and she looks at him over her shoulder with a “who are you?” regalness that’s hard to argue with.) Two days later she was up on our front porch maybe trying out the rocking chair? She’s an ambler and it seems from some cursory online NextDoor research that she’s a presence around these parts. I actually now take my walks with a can of bear spray in a holster just in case. It’s no exaggeration to say that my fashion stance has changed enormously. Where once I was rocking the pleather pants, shrunken jacket, chunky-heeled boots look, I now sport multi-pocket jeans, slightly tattered t-shirt, and Merrell mesh hiking boots, accessorized with a bear spray holster that I obviously never want to use.

It doesn’t make me nervous, this rolling, tumbling, living landscape, instead, it reminds me that I’ve never actually lived anywhere in my entire life where this much nature exists. So it’s a kind of awe along with a realization that I’m really just visiting. Or maybe cohabitating with fellow creatures who don’t even remotely need to speak the same language as me. A dose of mutual respect is my stance currently and I know I’m going to have some trouble when hunting season starts and I’m hearing the guns. That’s gonna suck.

So I’m currently working on leaving things where they lay or roam or hop or burrow or grow. Everyone’s busy with their thing and I don’t need to have a piece to be happy in the knowledge that they’re there.

Back next week with a load a’words. In the meantime:

I’m a city girl. Haven’t ever shared space with furry folx who don’t speak a language that can be fed into a translator app. When I was a kid in SoCal, we chose museums over zoos and hotel rooms over tents so my interactions with land that is grassy, rocky, unpopulated by humans is limited. I’m into the learning curve though. Outside my window, there is on a daily basis a furry something whose existence is completely alien from mine with the exception that we’re both sharing roughly the same living space. Last week during daily strolls a small fox (perhaps a pre-teen?) bolted across the road in front of me; a flock of chickens squawked, then kept pecking at the dirt as I walked by; and a cow side-eyed me as I passed its field of clover. When the dog for that particular farm, whose job it is to protect the place, began to shout “back-off” at me, that’s when I turned around for home.

Out our window currently, there’s plenty to see. A woodchuck who lives under the back shed and who we thought was a singleton, turns out to be a plural with a newly sprung family. We discovered this yesterday, when, while staring out from the kitchen there appeared the familiar rolly-polly furry we’d come to know foraging around in the backyard. Then, suddenly, there was another equal-sized furry followed by four tiny little furries. A goddamn family of adorableness. Woodine, Chuckie and their tiny snufflers moved across the back yard eating their vegetarian meals unaware that our entire household had sprung to attention. Desi and Lucille quivering at the window, D and I rapt above them. This went on for some minutes until our heartbeats returned to normal and we realized that was it, all we were going to see was them munching. I mean, we didn’t need circus tricks or anything, it was just a family out to eat. D & I went back to whatever it was we were doing, Lucille went back to her window box for an afternoon nap, Desi, on the other hand, stayed glued to the window perhaps plotting how to remove the screen to go introduce(?) himself.

Desi is a problem solver (or at least I think he is, or at least I’ve anthromorphized him enough to decide that to be true?) and so his attention is laser-like. It seems while appreciating this new living moment in front of his face, he also wants to keep eyes on it and figure it out/get closer. This morning a small deer was breakfasting out the bedroom window and as it moved toward the side of the house where no windows are, he couldn’t accept that. He kept darting back and forth from the original spot where said deer had appeared and over to the wall where there was only a barrier with some funky wallpaper perhaps thinking well, if i just give it a minute, a view will appear and i’ll be able to seeee. Naturally that didn’t happen and after a half-dozen relays back and forth, he sighed (I swear), settled back on the bed and returned his peepers to the yard. It wasn’t a total waste given a few minutes later a couple of chipmunks began to tumble around. But he didn’t seem as excited by them.

I can relate to this whole scenario (perhaps because I assigned all those emotions to him; thanks Desi). In my life, when I catch sight of something I want to know or understand, bloody-hell if I don’t want to keep eyes (inner/outer/all that) on it until I can either figure it out, own it, feel safe around it, let it go. Obviously I’ve decided I need to keep the thing in my sights before any of that can happen. One of the reasons I find the phrase “the call is coming from inside the house” so terrifying because where inside? WTF am I meant to actually do with that information? But not to get too horror-movie about it, I can also appreciate that the things we don’t know, can’t see nor control but are still quite aware of directly impact our lives. Control and a direct view aren’t really a thing most of the time.

Months ago I found out that my first novel (now called Alex in Wonderland), which I’d sent out to agents in the pre-pleistoPandemic times of 2017-ish and gotten some interest but no offers, then on a whim submitted to the Mslexia Novel Competition had been long-listed for some important consideration. Meaning that among thousands of entries, Alex had become one of a few dozen to get attention and be read by a small group of judges. I was also told to keep this information under wraps until the finalists and subsequent winner had been chosen. I got that information, became very excited, then lost the view. I kept running to the wall in my mind where there was no window to see what would happen next. Natually I made things up. One day I was the winner, the next I expected to see an email saying there’d been a mistake and, no, that long-list thing? They hadn’t meant it. The mind is a wicked place when it doesn’t offer the direct sightline you think you need. It makes all sorts of really not very useful stuff up.

Of course I could carry on not knowing what was happening with my novel. In fact, out the window a million other views were unfolding, lots of shiny objects for me to train my attention on even if at first I was looking beyond them, straining into the woods of my imagination to see if I could catch sight of what might be happening with that original obssession: my novel. I just found out that Alex hadn’t become a finalist, and while that was a disappointment, it was also extremely fine because it meant I was now free to send her back into the world to tell anyone I wanted that she’d been chosen in the first place. I looked out my window as she stepped back into view, her hair a little mussed, eyeliner smudged. She looked a little rough but yet smiling with a kind of readiness to take on the world. Honestly, though, her natural state is a bit mussed and smudged while willing to keep on until she gets what she wants. That is in fact why I love her. GIven I’d been staring at the wall so long trying to see what had become of her that once she came back into my sightline, I realized, it would be OK to let her go again so she can travel into other people’s views trusting whatever’s gonna happen just will. Maybe someone of an agent-y type will open up their shades and see her standing there and invite her in. In the meantime, there’s plenty of other views to keep my occupied and dreaming.

You can’t go fast around here on account of the lovely creatures that live in these climes. There are the deer, of course. There was the mama duck with her trailing family of ducklings crossing NY-23, the main road through Windham that also apparently connects almost every other town around here. There are the groundhogs and squirrels that dart hither&thither into the street, and the woodchuck who lives in our backyard. (Possibly woodchucks and groundhogs are the same thing? I could look it up but I’m not going to in this particular moment.) Lots of furry, feathered, and long-limbed cuties to keep an eye out for in order not to mess with their lives.

There is a deeper something tucked inside this slow-down necessity as well. A general vibe that I realize is personal. As mentioned in last(?) week’s post, taking walks used to be my opportunity to listen to podcasts, books, and musical acts such as Måneskin on my headphones but since the move, my walks have instead found me listening to trees, frogs, and birds. A random driver may come down the road to catch me holding my phone above my head so that the Merlin app can identify a bird up in a tree. I do get that I could literally just hold my phone normally at my side in order to record/identify the bird except that my habit of getting above the street noise is a habit. This act, whether literally or metaphorically, of thinking I need to get above things so that I can find peace or quiet is a thing woven in from a life lived in busy places where always being alert to what’s around that could mess with me is just part of the daily hee-haw. A friend just moved to a high-up floor with a beautiful view. The sense of peace and quiet appears palpable even as she lives in a really busy part of the city.

So that’s what I was used to: Need to climb up a little high so I can let down my guard. It’s not that I don’t have to be aware of my surroundings here. See mention of neighbor’s dog in last week’s post, not to mention that surprising or upsetting any of the life that lives among these trees could lead to scary moments, but as far as the cacophony of. a population, that is much different. It leaves a lot of wide-open spaces to view more wide-open spaces, which don’t require fast movement to make it across the street before a UPS truck smashes into me or a pedestrian breathes angrily down my neck.

To slow down. Sounds great. Is great. Also, honestly, terrifying. The mental wide-open spaces hold thoughts&feelings that have been on the margins due to me having to hurry across mental highways before being smashed by metaphorical vehicles filled with complicated things. My inner speed walker is very good at keeping inches ahead of that gnarly pack of judgmental grousers just at my heels. Suddenly, somewhere in between the frog’s calls from the pond down the road—sounds that are so funky and coo—are little chirps of Hey, there, human, there’s some sorrow&joy bubbling around. What say you relax and stay for a while? My intersection of thoughts may be busy but I’m not really in danger of being smashed out of existence by any load-bearing four-wheelers. It’s not lost on me how much I tend to overplan and overthink what might be the right moment and place to sink into my emotions as if I can control them rather than just jump in and let them carry me away like the river down the street carries off pretty much everything. Kind of like when my friend M and I went inner-tubing in Phoenicia decades ago and just floated willy-nilly away. That was fun but also kind of painful in the hoo-ya, ouch, pebbles, cold, but also wheee beautiful kind of way.

So now I have some wide open spaces to wander through, some different kind of silence to sink into, and yes, for sure I have things to do still that require showing up and sticking to a jobby-job schedule but the space around those commitments does not require a great amount of mental furniture: a good view will do and a desire to stay a bit quieter and move a little slower.

This last week, some firsts: Using a lawnmower, digging a hole, driving without streetlights, seeing a family of ducks cross a road, watching three deer munch on our grass. That’s just an amuse-bouche to set the table for what I know will lead to many courses of firsts. Realizing I’ve never lived in a place where grass required mowing was a realization. I grew into pre-teen-hood on a California culdesac in a house with a lot of tall trees, ivy, and a brick patio out front and moved with my mom into what would become a series of apartment buildings that would contain me all the way into adulthood where I moved from west coast to east coast, and back to the west coast. For five decades there I was cheek-to-cheek, wall-to-adjoining wall with other humans making up stories about who they were based on what I heard. Sometimes I heard more than I wanted to. Now I’m back to the east coast and the neighbors are the aforementioned deer, ducks, frogs, and birds. For sure there are other houses but they’re some amount of miles away.

I haven’t necessarily craved living in a stand-alone situation but now that I’m here, I like it. I also understand that there are responsibilities to keeping the place in good shape. Enter the gas-powered lawnmower that, once I learned the necessary push-down-on-the-lever pressure, I rolled up and down the sloped hills in front like a person getting their learner’s permit, which is to say slow and unsure to start, then picking up speed and dangling an arm holding a cigarette out the window. Well, no, not that last bit, but more that was my attitude toward the end of the roll. My challenge: keep to a solid pattern of up-down stripes rather than go willy-nilly tic-tac-toe style. I mean, I knew the tic-tac pattern was not correct but at some point maybe I got bored and spotted a dandelion that wanted running over that was out of my lane. This kind of distractication is always tempting for me. Sit down to write, stare out the window, realize I need to order bug spray. Order bug spray, begin to investigate biodegradable cat litter, think about composting, wander away from desk to stare out into the backyard that needs a going-over with the lawnmower. That describes the last hour and I’m sure is not unusual at all to many folx reading this right now (perhaps even themselves having been shiny-object distracted from this post). I think it’s why, when I understand how the dad moments are going currently, I get that when I remove myself from the house and the to-do list, and I walk around these new roads there is a silence that introduces an emotional weight I notice sloshing and settling around my heart area. It’s a serpentine thing (like my mowing technique) these emotions, yet I can still get there if I just pay some attention to where I am.

My go-to has always been to listen to podcasts, music, or books during walks and while my headphones have been with me, they’ve stayed off my ears while my device has only been used for this cool-ass bird-identifier app my friend W introduced me to. I now know there is such a winged thing as an ovenbird and a red-eyed Vireo (as opposed to the Warbling or Philadelphia or Black-whiskered Vireo). Those two bird breeds call&response like they’re the only ones with something to say. Who knows, maybe that’s true. Learning how to walk and listen to the leaves and birds also introduces an inner soundtrack that’s been more muted than turned up to eleven. I sense a subtle rattling, the shake of some inner dice that roll out snake eyes: one die poignant, one die buoyant. Some luck, that.

It’s all chance, isn’t it? Finding my way around the firsts and remembering, then maybe forgetting and figuring it out all over again. Some I like less (hole digging not my favorite, nor driving non-streetlight country roads at night), some more (mowing and seeing families of critters, discovering the walkable roads). I now know which ones not to take because there are dogs who are not happy to see me. I also know which ones are extremely worthy of hiking up for the views. I constantly feel my dad along for these walks and many other random moments. The grocery store visitation as I wheeled around the local Tops, felt a bang against my leg rounding an aisle, and looked down to realize there was a forgotten man’s cane hanging off the cart. A kind of tip-of-the-hat memory of when my dad would forget his in just that way at the local Stater Bros.

Everywhere I’m wandering, I’m seeing the new views and possibilities. Green, worthy of respect, and even overgrown. That last bit is literal since out the window I see it’s time for me to go perfect my lawnmowing expertise: firm grip, specific pattern.

Five days into our drive across the country, we crossed into Moline, Illinois, where my dad was born and grown for the first twenty-or-so years of his life. I’d been there once when I was a teenager for my grandmother’s funeral but all I remember about that trip was having a scary asthma attack in the summer-humid heat. This time, with my dad’s ashes riding shotgun next to me in the truck, I was more acutely aware of the place. The John Deere factory, which ran (still runs?) the town’s economy, the fields and fields and farms. Thinking about who he was back then, at the beginning, moved me, the force of it taking me a little by surprise. I could imagine him down the side streets, a little boy playing stickball with the local kids just as he’d described it. Summer afternoons, his scrappy self running around with his pals, in the fall and winter going to the local school, then in high school having to get the glasses that would keep him out of WWII, something he felt deeply guilty about. He wanted to go with his friends to fight. Instead, he worked with his dad supplying parts for the war effort, found his love for art and design, then made his own cross-country drive out to Los Angeles where he found his people, his home, his career.

Driving over the Rodman Avenue bridge, Dennis and I took my dad down to a pier overlooking the Mississippi River and sat down, then we let a bit of him drop into the water. Joining him with the fast current that would take him where the river flows and on from there, leaving Moline just like he did seventy-ish years earlier when he’d headed south with a pal to visit a friend going to college in Texas. Once there, my dad realized how amazing it was to feel hot sun in the winter and knew that’s what he wanted too, eventually deciding SoCal was the place for him. So he followed the river to the tip of Texas, then turned west toward the Pacific. The water guiding him both then and now.

I’ve been ambivalent about my dad’s ashes in that I haven’t really taken in the fact that they are the stuff of his body. The stuff of his soul, his personality, gnarled hands, and blue, blue eyes are the things I carry in my heart all of the time. So these ash bits feel abstract to me yet the the physical action of placing some in that water, in that town where he started, that felt very big, especially as we were putting more and more distance between the town where he ended, at least physically, and entered the place where he began.

As we’d driven out of Redlands, California, and crossed over state after state, I did feel a profound sense of leaving a place I felt I’d never see again. Specifically the Inland Empire, because as far as California goes of course I’ll still go there to see the people I love who live there. But this pinpoint place on the map existed for such a specific reason: my dad. And that was that. The really cool people who were his friends who I came to adore, they will always hold a huge part of my heart and they color the landscape of those memories. But the finality of leaving, that was something I’d never felt before. When I left Cali the first time for NY, heading off into my whole young future, I didn’t give a thought about whether I’d return, live there again, any of that. Why would I? When D&I left NY to go to Cali to be with my dad, there was a very large part of me that knew the East Coast held a sense of forever home. And now, I sit here back on the East Coast and am a bit agog.

I have a lot of thoughts on the beauty of nature outside the window, down the street, up the hill (lots of hills to walk and mountains to see in the distance). Also a lot of thoughts about what’s inside this house as we unpack and merge three different iterations of households. There’s what we brought with us cross-country from Cali, which contained both my dad’s and our place, then there’s the stuff we’d left here in storage four+ years ago. Every time I cut through the tape and the box comes open, there’s another surprise marker of history: the books I haven’t seen in years (hello, Sister Carrie, stuff of my master’s thesis); jeezuz-good-gawd, how have I ended up with so many shoes?, and then there are the two sets of drawers from Wayfair that I bought a year ago this month to go into my dad’s new space and to which I affixed little cards with “T-shirts,” “socks,” “hankies” to so he’d know where to find stuff. Those markers never took. He’d just stuff things wherever because, of course, the whole exercise in moving was just nuts. Completely discombobulating. Naturally, I get that acutely now that I’m doing it…again…and I have a sharpness of mind that he knew he didn’t, which was extra scary for him and for me. I have so much more to say about this process and no doubt will unspool it here over the next few weeks but what I’m coming to understand is that grief is the river that flows and flows. Filled with a lot of life, with currents of tears, with aching beauty, all constantly moving.

We’ve arrived. At some soon point (next post?), I’ll elaborate on the drive, etc. I have discovered this about myself: Six hours is about my sweet spot for piloting a car so the days of seven and eight-ers were knuckle-grippers. But, hey, we made it. Today will be photos mostly as I pull on my unpacking suit and begin that situation. Shout out to D who was failed on many fronts by truck mechanics and worker-bees who were hired to assist in the truck unpacking yesterday and never showed. He ended up doing it all himself with some assist from me. Another discovery: Manual labor is not my strong suit—specifically the moving of large furniture items. Really, that’s no surprise to anyone and I did what needed to be done and here we go into the putting together of this new place. Please to enjoy some photos:

We’re at it again, crossing the country back to the East Coast. This time with two little furries in tow. Day the first is closing out and, whew, what a day it’s been. Currently, I’m sitting in our pet- friendly Motel 6 off I-15, which was the interstate I was on for the bulk of the many hundreds of miles from Redlands. You may notice I’m using singular tense here. Yes, that is because Dennis is driving the rental truck with all our things (packed in like a crazy Jenga game) but he doesn’t happen to be here in the room with me at the moment. And why is that? Because somewhere in Nevada (a pretty toasty part of Nevada), a red light began flashing in the cab indicating some sort of engine emergency and he, wisely, pulled off the road to find out what was going on. (Me? I would have unwisely turned up whatever I was listening to and ignored it. I know. I know. This is bad and I really wouldn’t actually do that. I think.) Anyway, he called the truck people to send a mechanic while sending me on since I have the two furry felines in the back of the truck and gawd knows, we don’t want them in there any longer than necessary.

I’ll get back to the Dennis situation in a minute, but first let me explain with a visual prop the kind of spread our two cats are traveling in: The back of the truck was fitted with a shell and some all-purpose carpeting where on top is placed two cat beds, a random pillow, a water fountain/drinky thing, food, their cat box, and two plants (because sure, why not?). After some initial meowzing, they went quiet, which either meant they’d given up and fallen into a coma or they were just accepting it. At our first rest stop about an hour in, I checked on them and it seemed they were somewhere in between resigned and baffled but not at all suffering outwardly. This was obviously a relief.

So, Dennis: After calling the truck company, they sent out a mechanic although it took over two hours for said mechanic to reach him. Then they fixed it but (UPDATE) I just got a call from him that the truck crapped out again. So now he’s just past Las Vegas and waiting for ANOTHER mechanic. Holy sh**T. They think they know what it is and how to make it right but who knows if I’ll see him tonight. I do not care for Las Vegas. This may seem a misplaced frustration. More I don’t care for this rental truck company. Anyway. Apparently these are the adventures of cross-country journeys.

I have just finished a Subway sandwich after having taken a bath in the whirlpool tub that is actually a major focal point of this motel room (!?!?). I am attempting to breathe but until we get the whole band back together, I’m feeling a bit tense. By the time you read this, there will be an update, so **stay tuned.

This is the jumpsuit I wore today (I don’t do selfies very successfully and plus it was time for the whirlpool):

This is the welcoming Motel 6 maiden/gnome statue outside the establishment door:

This is the view outside the window here in Beaver, UT:

And here are the cats currently:

**Saturday late-breaking update: The map’s been altered to reflect the fact that after the truck broke down for a THIRD time an hour+ outside of Vegas (again with the Vegas), a tow truck came and took the truck and Dennis into LV so that today they can figure out what’s wrong. He spent the night there and what we’re hoping is that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas insofar as mechanical trouble is concerned but not when it comes to he or the vehicle having to stay in that city I refuse to name.

During our first day in this Redlands apartment, D&I discovered that one entire wall was not wired for electricity. Basically, there was no juice coming out of the outlets. The super called in a team and they fixed it but it made me wonder how the previous tenants had lived here with one-half of the space not available to power anything. Mind you, it’s possible the fritz happened after they’d moved the week previous, but still, I wondered.

I’m always curious about people’s interiors, design-wise, thought-wise, and otherwise. It’s why I became so obsessed with staring at all the vertical blinds hanging from folx windows that I mentioned in my post Wavy a couple of weeks ago that made me feel as if every apartment was a cookie-cutter version of the one next door, down the street, two blocks away. With ours, though, I was delighted by our outdoor space. Being a girl from the city, New York City specifically, outdoor apartment space had either been a fire escape or a shared garden. I’m not a great sharer, so would rarely indulge if other people were around. But the fire escape was 100% my jam, despite the fact that it was a fine-able offense to do much with the space but sit on it. But here in Redlands, the front and back patios were delightful (I mean, they’re still delightful) with California native plants growing wild in the front even though a gardening outfit comes weekly to keep that wildness cultivated, which means they occasionally whack something down and that makes me sad for a minute until the plant grows back in about three days.

Within the first few days, we were unpacked and figuring out where things went and what we needed to do. D had built an L-shaped desk in the office for us to both have work space. The edges were going to be painted red and my dad decided he would help with that after he’d also decided he would carry in some boxes from the moving Pod. I became terrified that we’d come all this way to hang out with him, only to then break him within the first week we were here. I mean, at 94 it didn’t seem like crawling under a desk, then crouching with a paintbrush to trim the underside of a desk seemed like a thing he would (or should) be doing. I didn’t even want to do it. But yet, while I dissuaded him from the box carrying, the trim painting happened. Right now, this is the last blog post I’ll write on the desk before it’s dismantled for the trip back east and I can glance over at where the Dean Spencer paintbrush landed. Lots of feelings currently.

In the backyard, a kiddie pool with a wood surround that D built in my dad’s driveway, went in during the first pandemic summer. We sat out in the back under the few available visible stars with some solar-powered lanterns we had at the time and appreciated how beautiful it was. We had formed a nice bubble my dad, Dennis, and I. We didn’t go into L.A. much (or at all during COVID) nor did we make any new friends in Redlands. It was just us three: My dad would come over for Silver Sneakers on our TV set, then we’d sit out back and eat donuts and drink coffee. We’d go to his place for meals and martinis on his porch and let Bluey the Jay yell at us (or my dad at him if he tried to steal a cracker or cheese from his plate). That all feels both yesterday and years ago.

As we strip this place back down to bare walls, I think about how the space will fill up again with new lives, the air vibrating with other types of conversations, different cooking smells, TVs tuned to other frequencies, the mailman dropping another person’s mail in the box. Will they sit and stare out the window at Winston and his three-legged dog doing their morning and evening walk, Billie&Barb trotting their yipping pups out three times a day, the backward-walking man who was so mad at Hillary but still stayed a Democrat, Pete in his big red truck on his way to a gig, Abuela and her rolly cart going to get groceries, the family across the street with only one car and many many people who all leave at 7.30 a.m. each weekday morning to get to where they need to be, the lovely little lady across the street whose daughter just moved in with her who knows everyone and does, in fact, give great hugs? Who knows? But yet folx will still stroll outside these windows and someone will see them.

In the new place back east, the view will be different. More rural, one woodchuck has already been spotted in the backyard and is perhaps part of a story the last tenant is telling to someone about what they remember from when they lived there. I’ll be sitting at this desk where my dad’s brushstrokes are just underneath me, staring out at new plants, birds, and what-have-you, reminded that whatever energy bounces between these Redlands walls as we leave here, I’ll be taking bundles of what I’ve gathered while here and taking it with me in my heart.

Yesterday as I pulled out a piece of furniture as one does while involved in a move, I found a little book that had fallen behind a chest of drawers. It was my dad’s baby book and I was surprised at how sparsely populated with words the thing was, as if my grandma (the guy-father-fellas didn’t seem to get involved in this sort of baby tracking) had been given the project of notating baby’s life and really had very little time or energy to do so. And who can blame her given that the actual birthing and raising of a baby takes every ounce of life/time/energy based on what I’ve observed. (And really, it seems unfair to expect a person to write down all the details of this little newbie as they attempt to help them get on with the living.) Though there was one page of this baby book that held a piece of information I found priceless. The one that tracks the dates a baby begins to move. Top of page: “Baby Creeps” then in beautiful Grandma Spencer cursive: “Dean never learned to creep.”

“Dean never learned to creep.” I’m aware that crawling and creeping were, in the 1920s, the same activity. Yet in today’s parlance, “creep” I think delivers a whole other meaning, conjuring up thoughts beyond the physical stage around when a baby crawls on their hands and knees as a primer for standing and walking. My mind went to the M-W verb version: 2 b) to go timidly or cautiously so as to escape notice and c) to enter or advance gradually so as to be almost unnoticed; with a scoop of noun on top: 5: an unpleasant or obnoxious person.

Indeed, my dad seemed far from a creeper in any of those contexts although 5 b) in the verb category: “to change shape permanently from prolonged stress or exposure to high temperatures” seems to speak to me of just what happens in life to everyone. The creep of time. But where that line took me in the way of my dad’s personality was where I landed. He was not a creeper around the edges of a situation. He was not in any way invisible in a crowd but was also not overly loud while inside one. He enjoyed other humans, could tell a joke, tip a glass in a room full of people, hold attention, but never seemed to be angling to be the center of it. He took up space but also could inhabit the edges while letting others be more visible. Would ask questions that I realize now often deflected attention from himself. Boy, do I recognize that move. Apparently learned at the knee of. I’ve no doubt that during his alone-time, he would circle, perchance creep, around thoughts and feelings that were his alone. Because we all do that, don’t we? This carcass (the “living, material, or physical body” of it) carries our secrets and dreams along with the mundane white noise–stuff of day to day.

I think about the ways I’ve crept (&continue to creep) around inside my life, sometimes feeling as if I’m staring up from below level, watching myself interact with this&that. Specifically, I’m remembering how my entire music biz career seemed to be calculating the ways I could creep in and out of a moment with an eye toward feeling out the situation’s safety. The act of journalism was a just-right place for me to apply that creep around the edges. It was the point of the job. To observe, to take note, to be objective. So, sure, that last point was rarely achieved, but the first two gave me what I considered a free pass from having to state my position. A thing that terrified me in that I’d get it wrong, then be cast out into a social wilderness for real, forever. Sure, I can see now how exhausting it was, that constant check to locate intuition around whether something or someone was safe versus the general just-go-for-it expectations of the business.

I’m less exhausted now by a long shot, primarily because the people in my life are ones I dearly want to be there so I don’t have to crouch low while deciding who I need to be in their presence. That’s not to say I don’t still come up against the occasional work project that exudes a vicious vibe that makes me want to exit immediately, but it helps to remember that even though I’m in the tent, the thing is not my circus—I’m a temporary visitor under its big top. I will step out the door on two feet when the thing is done, no need to creep.

But back in the day, when I had no perspective on time, career, desires, my actual self, the responsibility to stay low in order not to get emotionally whacked was crucial. A survival thing that not until so many years later have I realized I was constantly working to perfect. Sounds relentlessly dark but there were also many many good times and I did always find a place for solitude so I could set down the mask and settle into myself, even if that self was a kind of Cubist rendition of me. I recently had a conversation with a friend from that time whom I hadn’t seen in years&years&years. She described the first time she’d met me at a bar during a birthday celebration in NYC back in 1997. It was the day the SPIN court decision had come down against Bob Guccione Jr., my ex-boss at who’s trial I’d testified for the prosecution. The picture my friend painted of me was one I don’t remember being. I do remember being the girl with the long red hair wearing all black, but the woman talking about the case with certainty and confidence and a belief that all women deserved respect in the workplace and world? Her I don’t remember so much.

I was struggling at the intersection between what I thought I needed to be to work as a journalist in the music industry and the peace, quiet, spine-up-straight honesty I craved as a human being. At the time of meeting this friend, I was uncurling a bit given I’d just left the music industry and felt much more freedom about calling things as I saw them. I wasn’t shouting from the rafters though. Nor was I that much closer to honestly knowing what I needed emotionally in order to be whole. I still had years of hiding behind others before I’d get an inkling of how to proceed with setting my own boundaries and desires. But baby steps were happening for sure.

I still creep around the edges of my desires before plunging into them, though now, when emotionally surfing, I do it with an abiding trust that I’ll be held up. I know my people more fully now. I know myself better too. My dad taught me to observe and also, subtly without me realizing it, to appreciate what it means to creep inside oneself to find solitude when the crowd becomes too loud.