The Grocery Stories

Since cutting my hair (which I'm still not thrilled with) and becoming brain damaged (STILL not thrilled by that either) I haven't been hit on often. At all. That I know of. It used to be an annoying and inexplicable fact of my curious existence. Even when I was with Huck, they wouldn't hit on me specifically, but they would catch Huck's eye and nod. I wondered if Huck had some secret gay life until Huck explained to me that this was man-code for acknowledging another man's ability to catch a great fish from this great sea.

As explored before, this whole thing bewilders me.  Growing up, I was not "the cute one."  My little sister was and people fawned over her with abandon, at times not even acknowledging my existence.  And she took advantage of the attention, teasing me about how much cuter she was than I. To make matters worse, my mother gave me hair cuts I didn't want.  I cried all night when I got them.  She loved her "bi-level" (AKA Mullette) and longed to spread the joy, telling me I needed a bi-level too because my face was too long, my forehead too big and for some reason, to balance out all this ugliness, I had to get ugly hair cuts too. And on top of that, I had a teeter-totter accident which triggered my mouth to make extra teeth... er... an extra TOOTH, that perched in the middle of my mouth, a giant crack across it. I required multiple surgeries and years of braces to work it all out. In the mean time the kids called me "Saber-tooth Sara," occasionally breaking up the monotony with "Snaggle-tooth."  And I didn't mind.  Because that's all I saw in the mirror too. In addition, many of my clothes were hand-me-downs from the neighbor girl of a totally different coloring.  I looked horrible in those clothes, but they were clothes and my mother always insisted that "life is not a fashion show!" and I had to wear them no matter how they made me feel. Although, it turns out that life is just a little bit of a fashion show, actually. I have always hated looking at photos of myself as a child because they slip me back in to these well-worn neural pathways: that ugly hair, that ugly tooth, those ugly clothes, ugly me.  I have layers and layers, a veritable lasagna, of ugly-girl issues and being hit on has always been bewildering.

10: Trying so hard to feel pretty in my neighbor's annoying clothes

Biologically/evolutionarily, most girls want to be pretty. Fight it as we may, it's a normal fact of being human. Our culture gives us the standards (and we pray those standards are attainable, not near-death experiences), but the desire to meet those standards is standard issue human genetics. And there's also something about pretty that can't be ordinary.  I don't know why.  I don't have this all figured out. I can counter this base desire to be pretty with my good feminist ideals, but pretty is pretty primitive. Nota Bene: 1) pretty is not the most important thing in a person 2) pretty is still unavoidably important to most humans and it's okay to want it. I have read ridiculous essays about how you should never tell girls they're pretty.  We can spin this as religious (vanity!) or mid-guided feminism, but it's all the same thing and it's not going to get the results you want.  It will just leave a girl subject to the vagaries of the beauty industry and the first moron who calls her pretty.  We don't need to emphasize pretty, note it first and foremost, but to ignore it altogether is to pretend away millions of years of evolution.

As a younger child, I was stung by my supposed lack of cute-ness, but my longing to be pretty was on the back burner and did not find a place in my ineffectual, fervent prayers.  My mid-night pinings as a child were 1) to be wise as Solomon and 2) to have red hair (it's now black and gray). In my preteens, pretty would find it's way into my prayers, but those prayers shifted from the non-red-hair-granting dude upstairs, to the more real seeming moon beams that shimmered down through my sky-light on to my bed in my short attic room.  I felt ashamed and shallow for my vain prayers of vanity, but now I understand, I was a biological being, wondering how I would fulfill my biological destiny.

8: Just ignore the tooth and playground hair and tell me I'm pretty in my favorite dress

Instead of being hit on, the only time a stranger has approached me since my head injury was to get in my face at the grocery store and call me "confused and retarded."  I could see his point. This is a snap shot of me grocery shopping in those days, about a year ago: sunglasses (to keep out the glare from the bright overhead lights), earplugs (to keep out the fuzzy music and annoying announcements), a loosely fitted baseball cap pulled down over my eyes (to keep all of the unnecessary packaging and signage from overwhelming me), and moving slowly to avoid the zooming sensation that having no peripheral vision produces when you move.  But I couldn't ever move as slowly as I wanted to because there was always a time limit on how long I could be in a store.  I tried to rationalize his comment, which unfortunately made it through my foam earplugs, saying he was probably talking to himself, or that it was just like being hit on with someone breaking in to your private world to tell you want they think of you, as if you needed to know.  But it really wasn't like being hit on very much. I could tell because this comment stung my eyes like onions and the words punched me in my stomach. Someone checking me out or saying hello never did that.

This is just one of the many reasons I don't really like people any more. In theory, people are amazing.  But the reality is iffy. I mean, there are some that I like because I trust them, but strangers, man, fuck strangers.  I have no idea what I'm going to get from them. And my mind is not fast enough on it's feet to handle the wide variety of possible interactions. I also don't feel like explaining myself any more, which can increase awkwardness.  I look normal, why don't I act normal? It's actually none of your business. I used to blurt out to people that I'd had a head injury and didn't understand things anymore. I can engage with people pretty normally now, with people that I know.  But with people I don't know, or people I know I can't trust, I still talk very slowly and can get lost in my own sentence. The impulse to explain myself is still there, but suppressed under some amount of resignation and cynicism. There was a time I wanted to explain; I hoped that people would be better if they knew there was medical reason why my IQ points all seemed to be scattered like bowling pins. But I've come to realize that if you're an asshole, you're just an asshole, facts aren't really something that will transform you into being the good person I hoped you were.

At one store, the staff has to ask the customers what we're up to today.  It's the new "how are you."  So a while ago, I worked really hard to sort out the question and finally I responded honestly: "I don't know."  I keep a list in my car and a pile of sticky notes on the dashboard.  Each note has the time and place I need to be written in sharpie.  When I get there, I discard the top note so that when I get back in the car I see the next place I am supposed to be and when.  Without these devices that I organize the night before, I can get pretty lost. Although I am getting much better and can actually go without the sticky notes some days. But back then, I was not better and without looking at my cheat sheets, I really had no idea what I was up to. And just as I was leaving, I suddenly remembered, in my own head, all by myself, where I was going next, so I blurted it out, "Neuro-psychology!!!"  "What's that?" the cashier laughed.  "I have a head injury!" Oh goody! I was remembering everything! And in a grocery store with lights and noise! What a success! "I go to learn how to interact with people. She explains people to me and tells me why they do things! And how I can think better!" By the look on that cashiers face I realized that this is not something you yell about excitedly at the grocery store. But then she wanted to know everything: how I got hit, would I ever get better, will I ever work again. It was kind of weird and confusing and she was a little judgmental, with a dose of "Well, you look fine to me!" (Here I thought she was a cashier, but she's actually an expert both in medicine and me! You would not believe how many medical experts are peppered about disguised as cashiers and middle school teachers and office managers. Some days, I just want to draw a fake scar on my head so I don't have to explain or endure the 20 questions, I'll-be-the-judge-of-that-myself, and well-you-look-fine-to-me ignorant ridiculousness).  There's a nice way to say this, actually: Coyote's Dentist, "Wow. I never would have guessed. You look great."

I am definitely better than that now.  And also I would not bother to dig in my head for personal information for a format question from a cashier. But I am also not quite up to "flirty repartee" levels of human interaction. And that is where this little discourse brings us.

7: Lucky Seven, freckled with love

I was digging in the bulk peanuts at our local natural food grocery which shares the same name as my husband. Also in this aisle was a man facing the other direction, looking at the wine.  He had this salt and pepper hair, like a younger Richard Gere and he was wearing a very expensive looking cashmere overcoat and suit.  I mean, I actually don't know a thing about expensive suits and over coats, but to my untrained po-dunk-city eye it looked exquisitely expensive, nicer than anything I've ever seen in person.  I couldn't bring myself to look him over the rest of the way, I was so overwhelmed my the beauty of his hair (am I old enough to be checking out men with gray streaked hair?! wonders the woman with gray-streaked hair) and his suit.  Now, I have heard that this wealth is attractive to women and I have thought myself above all of this evolutionary non-sense.  I had talked myself out of the idea that pretty mattered to me and I was fairly convinced that I had out-evolved my species into being a sapiosexual, turned on by intelligence alone. It's not that money-ed men are completely foreign to me; I'd once dated a man who owned personal jets and had bodyguards, but that was all secondary to his adorable Ghandi look and sweet disposition. But there were not even words at this here store, just the look of money. I am apparently not that evolved. Surprised and confused by myself, I returned to my task of scooping out peanuts for pad thai.

But then the cashmere coat said "hi."  And there was no one else around, so I guessed it was either me, or his bluetooth. So, without really looking him in the eye, I cocked my head in his direction and said "hi."  I actually have no idea what he looked like, really.  I couldn't look him fully in the face because I had the distinct feeling that he was so beautiful that I would burst in to flames if I actually looked him in the face, like he was God. For all I really know, he may have been a wall-eyed, chinless salamander. But I couldn't risk exploding into to flames, not in the grocery store.
And I hoped that little "hi" would satisfy him and end this exchange because I noticed that I was wearing clothes completely unworthy of a cashmere overcoat. I was wearing jeans that seriously needed a belt ("Oh, that was it." Huck said later).  I was wearing a slouchy, very old (but still quite serviceable) red bamboo hoodie, unzipped.  And beneath that, the piece de resistance, a garish purple tee-shirt with a giant white unicorn on it and advice of dubitable merit: "Always be yourself, unless you can be a unicorn, then always be a unicorn." Blue got if for me for Christmas.  Also, I had the feeling that I was breaking out, right at that moment.("I don't see a thing," Huck said later.)

9: Unicorns FOREVER, Baby!

So then the beautiful suit leans in and says, "No, I mean hiiii."  And I could understand nothing about this moment. This stranger was not being an asshole. But just what was this man, this money-ed alpha-male doing? He just thought he'd dress up in the fanciest suit Spokane has ever seen, head out to the store, pick up a $62 bottle of wine (I noticed) and a unicorn-festooned, pimply-faced, married floozy from the health food store?  Or was he looking to get high, and thought I looked like a likely supplier? Did he know me, but had just forgotten my name (that actually happened once... I was worried I was being hit on, but it turns out some guy I'd known in India with was just trying to get my attention but couldn't remember my name)? Or was he really just being nice? Did he maybe need directions somewhere? Or was he actually letting me know he thought I, lowly little me, was... pretty?

So, carefully avoiding eye contact with the god, I groaned loudly. And ran.

What the hell is wrong with me? Discuss.

Kidding, Please don't.

I'm addressing this with trained professionals. If this little silly episode has one thing to show me, it's that I want to re-open myself up to goodness. In order to do that, I feel I need to be able to weather the bumps of general human interaction too. And I'm not sure I'm there yet. But with each positive interaction, I want to open up a little more to the world.

Around this time, some childhood photos surfaced... one's I've never seen before, ones without any standard neural pathways. And for the first time, I saw myself through my own eyes, unclouded by the opinions of the adults of my childhood.  I saw myself without comparison to my little sister, as others always had. I saw the little girl in those photos and she was gorgeous, eyes full of dreams and mischief and life.  Beautiful. Shame on the grown-ups for not having noticed. I'm not going to follow in their footsteps, step in line with their narratives. I wanted to reach through time, and chub that cherub's cheeks and tell her, yes, you are as beautiful as a person can be. She always has been and she always will be, forever, and nothing anyone ever said changes that.  And I like to say that nothing anyone says in any grocery store can add or subtract to the truth. But that "hi" really did help and that "retarded" really did hurt.  So lets say that I strive for a solid sense of inner beauty that's untouchable by this volatile world. That child, me, I am beautiful. And by beautiful I mean beautiful and loveable and worthy of all the good things life has. I feel ridiculous going on about my inner child, but it feels true, and it seems that the best way to dispose of that lasagna of ugly-girl issues and disability vulnerability is to go back in time, inside me. That precious child is still here. And she deserves
to know the truth.

Chillin' at Bloedell with the Cool Kids

The Purse-uit of Happiness

When I told Huck that most women have multiple purses he went all agape at me.

"It's TRUE!" I insisted.
"Well, how would that even work?!" He asked, as if I'd just described a foursome involving a house plant and a license plate, "Isn't that sort of unnecessarily complicated?"
"I don't know. I imagine they dump the contents from one bag to another and sally forth."
"But why?"
"I DON'T KNOW!"

My purses tend toward the small side, just big enough to keep my wallet from making my pants pockets look too manly and my phone from butt-dialing (although my phone has been known to cheek dial while I'm talking. Apparently a rather large smile or my cry-face can dial in someone else to the conversation, which is always what you want when you are bawling hysterically. In that moment what you want is to hear the voice of an aunt you haven't seen in a decade to suddenly interrupt your wailing on your husband's cell-shoulder with "What? Who is this? What's going on?")  I usually also try to have room for lip balm, ear plugs, head ache drugs, pens, and an impossibly small pad of paper that makes me record my thoughts-on-the-go in such abbreviated fashion as to be rendered meaningless, and/or haiku-ish: river, flow, mountains, spring, melt, time, new, always.  However, with my current appointment-heavy, waiting-room lifestyle, I find I need to bring many more amusements with me.  I tire of reading in the waiting room magazines about the Sydney Olympics and Martha Stewart's 2009 Thanksgiving feast. Facebook is great for a few small-print moments of palm-sized amusement.  But I need more: water and snacks, my big full-thought-ready journal and my books (now that I can read pretty well again).  I need several for any mood that might strike: poetry (Billy Collins Horoscopes for the Dead), spirituality (Pema Chodron's The Wisdom of No Escape because I can't escape my head injury), sudoku (in pen! for a higher stakes drama experience) and my current love which I want to marry and make babies with: Just Kids by Patti Smith.  So I've been stuffing my wallet in to a tight-squeeze purse and then dumping that in with my runaway's satchel of provisions and favorite things in a giant reusable grocery-store-branded bag.  And finally I thought: why not a real, honest-to-gosh woman-size purse?

I don't love purses the way most women seem to. They all look the same to me  (except once, I found myself accidentally on the front lines of a fad with a thrilling knock-off giraffe print purse that fancy strangers on the streets of San Francisco commented on).  Generally, I'm not keen on spending money on generic looking things. Wait. Nope. That's not true.  Last year, everyone was obliged to check out my awesome new tires which still give me a little kick every time I get in my car and I'm 100% certain they look like every other tire, except tractor, bicycle, and lawn mower.  But it's really about the performance, grip, and low road noise rather than looks with that foursome. 

To cut down on the high cost relative to the low benefit that makes up my purse ownership, I've checked out the offerings at thrift stores, but used purses apparently give me the creeps.  I can buy a great variety of used items but lingerie, socks, gloves, hats and purses, anything with a terminal insert factor, are all out of the question.  I want these things, especially purses, to be virgin.

Time for a real purse

purse-free or die

Coyote and I ended up at the mall recently and I took the opportunity to peruse the women's purse section at JCPenney, a store that I actually like (Joe Fresh and A.N.A. lines specifically) despite it's stodgy history as being the source of the most embarrassing underwear my mother every bought me as a child (as a young teen I'd specifically requested Garfield bikini briefs, as a freaked out mom of a young teen, my mother specifically heard only "Garfield belly-button covering briefs" which were ridiculous, specifically ridicule-us at slumber parties and in locker rooms).

Coyote was not happy about this wrong turn of events into the women's purse section and soon began to complain of physical ailments, chief among them: "Mom, some thing seems to be wrong with my throat."  "Hmmm?" I intoned as I shuffled around the uninspiring shelves and racks.  "I'm not gagging."  Yes, it was a problem for him that he was in the women's purse section AND he wasn't gagging.

(I inexplicably and habitually seem to describe the purse section as "women's". I have yet to see a "man's" purse section, which would make the women's purse section actually the gender neutral purse section, right?) 

I found a fine, large "hobo bag" (I looked up the terms for purses! And that is one of the weirder ones and, realistically, out of your usual hobo price range. Curiously there are no bags labeled "tramp bags", "bum bags" or even "runaway satchels"!) that settled on my shoulder like it belonged there, squatters rights and all.  And it was turquoise, which has been my color of choice lately.  I tried to sway my family to go 50's turqouise on the trim of our house, but I was out voted. They all staunchly stuck with the classic dark green, "for literary considerations," Huck said. And by that he meant Green Gables which is not even his native religion, but he was required to convert for marriage.  But I got my consolation prize: the two dining room archways. And now this purse.

The purse was too expensive for me.  If I specify the price here, I'll worry that half of my dear readers would be like: holy shit, that's WAY TOO much for a purse.  And the other half would be like: OMG, that's so embarassing, are you sure it wasn't used? Did someone throw up in it?  But those fears are irrational.  What would really happen is that half the people I know would be like: whatev's, I love you just the way you are, purse or no purse.  And the other half would be like: criticize, criticize, criticize (I don't actually know what we're talking about!) Criticize. Cricticize.

Girls and their purses: sheesh! My card from 1978

I returned later, coupon in hand, to find two left.  One was stuffed full of clothes that look like they had a close encounter with the pilfering kind.  And even that was too much prior use for my comfort.  But when the other had a production flaw, I plugged my nose and bought the tainted one, the one with the sullied reputation. And I'm inordinately happy with it. And Huck bought me a shiny turquoise necklace to match. Apparently "turquoise" is a love language.

Little Miss Adventure

To celebrate Huck's new job, which is in every possible way a profoundly better fit for him than his old one, we decided to stay at the Davenport, Spokane's stay-cation of choice. The newer building, the Tower, as it's called, is done in a safari style with taxidermied and bronze statues of African animals, complex stained-glass ceilings and walls, ornate chandeliers and a crap-ton of jungle prints.  It is a pretty stunning set up that seems a little imperial/colonial, like, if the hotel had it's druthers the whole place would be staffed with scrawny little black boys you'd call "boy." Spokane doesn't have a real connection to African themes but what it does have is a long and rich history of classism that's unusual for the Northwest. It's an old, old railroad and mining money town run by just a few families. So the African theme is a little suspect here, but beautifully executed nonetheless.

My friend, it's been so long since I saw you

The ironic thing about that 10th floor room was that it looked directly in to Huck's old office.  He was able to point out each desk, name the framed awards, and label the binders on the book shelf. 

I could've stay-cationed alone. I needed break from my life but being alone wasn't appealing to me, especially since half the crap I need a break from is my own brain, so I opted for a few hours instead of the whole shebang. All I did in my hour or two alone was watch TV, which was pretty overwhelming.  For those, like me, who live under rocks, you should know that TV shows now have multiple things going on: quotes and votes and little e-paperdolls roaming around the bottom of the screen. I am not able to handle that much stuff and I can't filter it out. I did not enjoy my time alone.

Huck and I left the kids watching the Olympics (the thing you miss when you don't have regular TV) and we trotted over to our gluten-friendly favorite, the Wild Sage. It was full but quietly humming, which meant that I could handle it. Eating out didn't used to be much of a treat since what we did at home was once better than anything we'd find out in the world. This meal was a true treat, especially in comparison to what's been going on during the head injury era ("Lots and lots of frozen pizza" - Blue.  Oh god, I hope it's been cooked...).

1:30 am the fire alarms in the hotel all went off.  And they beeped and beeped and beeped. And announced and announced and announced that we all had to evacuate the hotel.  I kinda wished the recorded announcement would have been more like the elevator.  The Tower elevator announces in a sultry and breathy voice "Going Dooown." Huck said the "on you" is implied.  I joked later that the announcement should have been like that: "I've having an eeemergencyyyy, nooooow."  Huck responded in the elevator voice, "It's so hotttt in here!"

As you may remember, I was involved in a hotel fire nearly 20 years ago.  I worked graveyard at an old old hotel in Petersburg, Alaska.  I'm not wanting to detail the whole night, but I was brave, actually, and did what I needed to do, which in the early part involved an utterly failed attempt to vacuum soot off a wedding cake where I ended up punching it full of nozzle prints.  I also evacuated all the guests which involved crawling along the top floor beneath several feet of thick, billowing black smoke, dimming lights, trying to find the one last guest who, it turned out was staying at her lover's house, just using the hotel bill as a cover.  The building collapsed, took other buildings with it. And I was left with some PTSD which has made me behave is some funny ways over the years, including but not limited to running out of an apartment naked because I awoke to the smell of smoke which turned out to be a neighbor's cigarette and nothing more, checking smoke detectors in every hotel I stayed in for years, foolishly running in to a burning building and dragging a man out, among other hilarious forms of fear.

Scandia House, December 16, 1994

As you can imagine, I was fully triggered. The idea that the place could actually be on fire was very real to me in a way that I'm not sure anyone else was experiencing as they joked and jostled in the fast moving hoard in the stairwell. I tried not to think about the fact that if I collapsed from fear, my children would be panicked and I would probably be trampled by the drunk girls giggling and stumbling down behind us. I focused more on the fact that this part of the hotel had been built in 2007, had all current fire-prevention standards, the stairwell was un-burnable cement. Around floor 4 there was intense smoke smell, but that was more cigar than anything else.  Out in 20 degrees, we waited, finally heading over to the old building's ornate lobby for warmth and chairs. Being only 10 minutes from home, we discussed just returning.  But, my god, a queen size bed at the Davenport instead of the full size at home... I just couldn't walk away from that.

We all worked hard to calm our racing hearts and eventually fell asleep in the Davenport Tower at 3:30 AM.

Yellow Willow at home at Slavin Reserve

The pool was big draw for this stay-cation.  Spokane has no indoor public pools, which I find odd.  I've lived in smaller towns with more pool (Pullman, Hello!).  The last time I'd swam was in July and I was very nervous and uncomfortable with the way the water messed with my non-existent equilibrium.  So I delicately, slowly entered.  And I felt fine, if a little cold, and I began doing laps, without the somersaults at the walls, of course. I worked hard, to the limit of my ability.  I swam fast.  I felt incredible, powerful, great in my body. It was all muscle memory (from that one year on swim team during which I was a disaster, ignored by the coach because my build is more skier/cowgirl (solid saddle padding with high trot-tolerance up top.  Seriously, at the dude ranch where I worked we were almost all built the same) than a shouldery swimmer until one day I swam a heat that so embarrassed our team that he finally taught me how to move and I finally began to improve) propelling me joyfully through the water, and my mind was happily bored. I recently tried Tai Chi and although I love the Qi Gong movements associated with it, it's over-all too complex for my mind right now.  The swimming was simple and I could do it and I felt like I could do it.  And then the kids and I played "water-bending wars." And I felt happy and amazing.

Left to right: T-Bone's ass, My ass filling the saddle, T-Bone (a goofy horse), Home Ranch, CO 1998

Huck, sidelined without his suit, got all emotional noting that I could never have done that even a few months ago. I'm getting better. It's all getting better.  And it wasn't even the end of February.

Buoyed by my success, I set a goal.  I would hike Slavin Reserve's (the spot with my favorite yellow willows and my heart aches with missing them) two miles of uneven terrain in June. I used to back pack for days on end, sometimes with a baby on my back. I SHOULD be able to do it right?  I might even join a gym with a pool! So, I enthusiastically leaned in to life.  I donned a pedometer.  The first day I did 3500 steps.  The second day 4500.  I even cross country skied (with 20 years of muscle memory) out my front door for 20 minutes. I'd skipped skiing all last winter because at this time last year my big challenge was to sit outside, upright, for 10 minutes a day.  And then... that pedometer... I'm not a competitive person. Except with myself. I ramped it up to 6500 foot steps.  And then... well let's let the pedometer tell the tale: 2000 steps. I crashed hard, so hard, into a downward spiral of exhaustion, migraine, anxiety and sleeplessness. My reset button, Cranial Sacral Therapy, got sick and had to cancel. For more than a week, on into March, I hit my head against rock bottom, day after day.  I was too out of it to be depressed.  But depressing it was.

Me in my world map jacket, 3rd from L, Ski Class, Copper River Basin, Alaska, Jan 1994

The lag time between when I can first do something and when I can consistently and routinely do that thing (like walk 1/2 mile, or swim a few laps) is something like 6 months.  The first rush of success is so thrilling and I think: I CAN DO THIS NOW!! I am AMAZING! I am BETTER! and then I can't, and I tumble back down that Sisyphus hill, crashing at the bottom.  Before this, my self-discipline and self-restraint had been a boon; my goal-orientation was a marketable skill (poorly marketed, I admit).  But this has tested it all again and again. My hobby, my goal? It must be this One thing only: healing.  And that path has a mind of it's own.  My self-restraint is applied to not having any other goals as I restrain a self  --that I barely recognize now-- to not having any other goals before Me. It's torture and it looks and feels like the exact opposite of what it is.  Laying around all day is "restraint"?! Yes, yes it is. Pacing. I learned it a year ago in speech therapy and it looks like I have to relearn it again.  Pacing. Again and again I circle back to this spot: healing is my goal, and it can only be approached as an un-goal.  Pacing. Again and again.

I took this photo: the horses let out after a long day's work of pacing themselves for the ranch guests

So, I finally took some heavy hitter pain medication and I don't know if it was the morphine-based medication or the fact that I didn't have a crushing headache, but I spent one fabulous day laying in bed, smiling, totally useless but in the best possible way, too relaxed and happy to be useful. I tried to journal, but my mind was pretty convinced that it was fine if you got most of the letters in a word, and those letters didn't need to be in any particular order for it to be, in essence, that word. I mean, I wkon tahw I nmea.  And that is way better than being too much in pain to be useful.  (Apparently, I just want to be a useful engine for Sir Topham Hatt.)  And there were no rebound headaches.  It stopped the spiral. Sleep and peace returned to me.  And then I got my Cranial Sacral Therapy and I feel a lot better.  But the pedometer is going back in my top drawer again, along with my children's baby teeth and the hat Blue sewed me when she was five, and my swim suit.

But somehow, this whole episode from fire alarms to morphine-ettes was the perfect Sarajoy-sized adventure. I am satisfied. For now.

Interior Redesign

I thought maybe I could trick myself out of this mushy spot by spreading the Benjamin Moore color  fan deck on the bathroom floor.  My bathroom is painted an entirely unflattering pastel celery that has no idea what it means to be pastel (hint: soft and complimentary).  I was worried that I looked like an 85 year old smoker/tanner/drinker and I told my friend; she thought I was nuts.  Then she visited my loo and came out of there laughing: It's the color in your bathroom! I've never looked that horrible in my life.  And also, the paint is wearing thin and chipping.  I used to have a bunch of ideas that would look adorable and flattering with the bold checkered floor tiles, but I had no money nor time, nor energy to do it these last 15 months. Maybe now was the time.  So I spread the out the fat fan deck of Benjamin Moores like a smug dealer, house always wins.  This would do it, wouldn't it? This would make me want something.  This would make me the way I was.  This would lure me out of where ever I've gone.  It was supposed to be color-yer-house porn, meant to titillate and excite me in to being me again.

I walked by it for days, stepped over it, around it.  I felt nothing. And eventually I put it away in my top drawer again, along with my ancient and long ignored marijuana pipe and the vibrator I no longer use.

How could this happen? I've always loved house colors.  It was the number one draw of home-ownership for me: no more beige, cream, and white!  I grew up in beige and cream.  As my mother explained it to my very frustrated little self: you don't want to pick too bold a color or you'll get sick of it, so you pick an inoffensive standard like beige or cream.  And so the house was a flurry of beige and cream and wood paneling, aside from the gold flowered kitchen floor linoleum and the avocado counter tops, of course.

I longed to do lots of things to that old house.  I would tape pieces of paper together and draw redesigns of the house with turrets and bay windows, specifying the colors of each room and picking out the furnishings from the JCPenney catalog.  I was really really in to houses and colors.  And the only way I could understand my mother's take on color was this: she felt it was better to start out bored to tears rather than go through the painful process of becoming bored to tears. Her idea of inoffensive colors was my idea of totally offensive. Maybe I don't have the boldest schemes or the feistiest matches, but what I like makes me feel rich and buttery in my soul. 

My head injury has made colors even more intense.  They illicit outsized emotional responses: weeping at the blue, ecstasy with fushia.  Colors, like drugs.  It was one of the first things I noticed.

Our burgundy dining room needed repainting around the time of my head injury and we were discussing a change. And then I got bonked, bonked, and bonked.  And the dining room became a very harsh place for me, the contrast with the white was too intense, the color was too overpowering.  And the whole thing needed to go, fast.  I picked up peach from the hardware store and by the time I got to the check out, I realized this would be my last trip out of my house for a while.  The harsh lights, echoing announcements, standing up... I couldn't do it any more.  I came home and settled in to my bathrobe for the next year.  For the next few weeks I painted my dining room, 5 minutes a day.  I really could not handle the red.  Huck came home from his out of town work, shook his head at my pathetic attempts and finished it off for me.

Now that I can handle most of the colors life throws at me, the urgency is gone.  And now that I could probably paint for 15-20 minutes at a go, I just don't give a shit.  Something I've loved since childhood and I don't care about it any more.

And you know what else is missing?  I don't care about my garden.  I can't bring myself to even pop open a seed catalog. I gardened a little last year, but I now view that as my body executing my brain's final wishes after it died, like fingernails and hair growing after death.  The only things calling to me are flowers. And raspberries.

It seems I could now actually be happy in what was once my worst nightmare: a beige yard-less apartment.

Manito Greenhouse

This all looks suspiciously like depression, doesn't it?  It's February and every thing sucks, so maybe it could be.  But you could give me all the anti-depressants in the world and it wouldn't make me ABLE to do any of these things in any way that wasn't totally pathetic. Or has my personality changed that much? In which case, all the anti-depressants in the world won't make me love these things I no longer love. Is my brain protecting me from unrealistic goals? to prevent desire burn-out?

Blue wanted to go to see a Steam-Punk Tempest production and Huck encouraged me to go with her (he ended up going and happily so).  But I couldn't see myself in 2.5 hours of Shakespeare.
What the worse the could happen? He said.  He wants to see me alive again, loving Shakespeare again.
I'll get exhausted is what will happen.
So you get tired. You come home. You sleep.
But no, it's not just "tired."  It's bone-crushing exhaustion.  It's panic-inducing, kill-me-now, exhaustion.  And it's always staring me in the face.  Yes, yes, I could do that, go there, try this. And then I could also dive in to a giant pool stuffed full of exhaustion-pirhanas who will tear at me, ripping flesh from my bones and I'll be devoured alive by toothy, tearing exhaustion.

And it's non-negotiable.  It's not like I can do a little of that or this, if I REALLY wanted to. I can a little more now, but the cut off point is still non-negotiable. I don't even get to negotiate with it. It seems difficult for some to understand, so let me explain: Imagine you love running marathons and your friends like running marathons with you.  And then one day you crush your leg and you can't run marathons anymore and half the people in your life get that.  But the other half are like: But you promised you would run this one with me! Why can't you just do half of it?  Maybe you could walk it? You could if you really wanted to!  You just don't like me and your being a stubborn jerk! And you say: Listen, maybe I could walk on my shattered leg for a few yards, but it won't ever get better if I keep doing that.  And some people, some parts of my own shattered brain even, will just never understand this.  

And the limitation is always there.  And it bores me and annoys me and upsets me and stifles me so that I no longer know who I am, or what I want because after every activity known to man gets pushed through the exhaustion strainer, the only thing I get in my applesauce is a few 15 minutes of chores that should've been done a year ago.  This isn't life.  This isn't living. But it IS. That's the maddening part.  This IS my life.  It's not able-bodied good ol' American Road Trip Livin' It Up life.  No,this is it's shadow, it's evil twin, it secret smegma-filled underbelly-button.  This is the barren desert of life. I suppose I have a bee in my bonnet about this because I recently read that "It's so easy to be only half-alive."  And I don't know what they meant, but I know that's what my life seems; even as I am daily living at the edge of my capacity.

I thought if you lost something, something else had to come in to replace it. Those are the rules, right? But I've just got nothing.  The chrysalis of my head injury wrapped tight around me.  My little caterpillar self is totally dissolved and at this point the molecules need to pull themselves together and get going on the next thing, the butterfly or the moth or, hell, even a redo of the wrinkly wave of a caterpillar would be fine.  But this, this painfully conscious goo of me, what the hell?  Forget the inside of my house, the inside of ME needs interior decorating.  Where are the pretty colors inside me?  Where is the place that CAN feel buttery and rich? 

I'm tired of talking about it. And you're tire of reading about it. I'm impatient.  And I feel crappy about that too.  But then, I hear someone complain about having a killer head cold for 10 days and I feel bad for them.  That stinks; 10 DAYS!  So... maybe I can feel a little less angsty about my feelings at 15 months of having a bad head. It would drive anyone nuts, right?

And there's something else here.  There's some peace about not having a million desires pulling at me, not having the painting, the gardening, the cows, the storytelling, the canning, the herbs and all of those passions pulling at me.  I came across my to-do list from a month before my head injury and it's basically completely insane.  No one could accomplish all of that in 10 years, much less the one day I had given it.  And there's some quietness, some companionable solitude here: there's not much but what it is, is simple and sweetly peaceful, when I let it.  It's a desert, not a rich teaming jungle.  It's a desert and each grain of sand becomes something here, a jewel traveling across the land, reshaping it.  The grains of sand I do have, the things I do love, sparkle in my hand and feel less ordinary than they would in some place with more fascinating distractions. I am in a place without competing demands.  I am in a place where what matters, earth and sky, are all I see. For now, perhaps my life can be beautiful in its two-toned simplicity, beige and blue. The desert is part of the living earth too.  Life is there too. It's just not so obvious; it has its own peculiar ways and rhythms.  But all the nature shows are clear: life is here too, and you can find it if you learn how to look for it. Man, oh man, I sure hope so.

And as I think about it this way, things settle within.  I don't have to be the old me. I don't have to be anything at all. I can let myself go, the kite untethered to what was, to history, to time. What's fun and "living" to the people around me, isn't going to be my fun, my living, but my definition of this will be just as real. Their colors are not mine; their rich and buttery is not my rich and buttery. Maybe it looks dull to you, but this simplicity, the more I think about it, has become, must become evermore, gorgeous to me. As household maintenance, the bathroom should be repainted but it doesn't have to be a passion project.  It can just be whatever it is.