On the Banks

Peace and All Goodness.

I realise this whole post is a bit more New Historicist/Reader Response/narrative theory meta-meta-meta-nerd than I usually get in this blog, but bear with me here. I’m trying to get at something that is not easy for me to express, or even to admit. 

Everything in this life is story. Maybe that’s odd coming from someone whose primary lens for viewing the world has always been poetry—especially since I tend to be more of a lyric poet than a narrative poet—but that is one true root that has been given me. We are the stories we tell. To each other, to ourselves, to the rivers and rocks and tree limbs. We are the stories we map in the stars at night, even when those stars are hidden from view and the hoot of the owl terrifies rather than reassures. The rivers themselves are stories.

The stories we tell ourselves are not always true ones. Honesty is often painful, especially in the dark, alone with ourselves and our worst fears and anxieties and memories. We remember how things should have been but weren’t. We get so caught up in what we think we wanted that we forget to be grateful for what is. We tell ourselves our version of the story so often we get confused between truth and fact. We forget that we can change our story, that maybe all good stories change over time.

Sometimes the best thing we can do is quietly hear the story out from someone else’s perspective. Just because right now, in this chapter, in this scene, we might be our own narrators, we forget we might be a part of someone else’s story—and it might be about something else entirely. And it might not be as scary as we thought. I was reminded again last night, while in the presence of beloved friends I don't see enough of, how much this becomes instinct over time, this forgetting to hear the stories of others. One of the most powerful things my friend Dan has ever said to me was this:

Stop being so afraid. We do so many awful things out of fear. It seems like most of our moral, ethical, and even religious tensions are bound to a need to control what we are afraid of or do not understand. To know this about ourselves might lead us to a different response, maybe even err on the side of love.

I don't think Dan knew just how close to the marrow he came when he said that. I think he was thinking about his own story, how it gets interwoven with the lives of others. I don't think he knew how much it was also my own story. Those aren't the words we use with each other most of the time. And I know he wasn't thinking of an internal picture of our skeletal structure, with a rotten broken heart and no lungs, barely breathing, concerned, confused, feathers launched like arrows through the dark to sprout directly from our fragile chests.

Stunned, but still breathing.

It might turn out that Emily Dickinson was right, that hope is the thing with feathers. It might turn out that what we thought over and over again was the hammering home of loss was actually a story about rebirth. It might be time for the story of us to change. It might even be that the story to which we thought we were doomed was no more than the prologue to the enduring myth of love. It may just be as simple and as inexplicable as that. Maybe our whole lives here are one big tangled love story.

Twenty Thousand Hearts

Monday morning, everyone started their week as if it were any other: most people went to work, others dropped their kids off at school, I overslept...so, the usual. I got word of Deb's collapse the way a lot of shitty news seems to spread lately--via Facebook. I've known this family since 1980. Joel and Lauri adopted my favourite of our first batch of kittens--and let's not even discuss how I felt when their mom insisted they change his name from Hot Rod Kanehl (one of my mom's favourite baseball players growing up) to the more innocuous,  dare I say even emasculating, Sunshine. We lost touch for a number of years when their parents divorced and their dad married Deb, but Joel and I reconnected when I moved back home after grad school (the first time). Joel was the first person I asked for when I woke up from my cancer surgery, since I'd already been wheeled past my dad who was pacing by the elevator, and that morning when we'd checked in, his dad was already parked in the chair in my hospital room. Remember when I got stranded in Denver (the first time) last winter when Ruby was dying and suddenly had no ride home from the airport at ridiculous o'clock p.m., and somebody's dad saw the Facebook post and drove all the way out to Newark past midnight even though he had to be at work at 5 the next morning? Yeah. That was Bob. They're that family. They always have been.

I knew they would bring Debby here to Doodlehem because we have the nearest Level One trauma facility and at that point they weren't sure what was happening to her or if she'd hit her head on the way down. I can hit the hospital in six minutes at a dead run; the only reason it took me twelve was because I detoured to Dunkin' Donuts to get Bob a cup of coffee the way I know he takes it: milk, sugar, from Dunkin' whenever possible, and in the largest size possible. The only other person waiting with Bob was the coworker who had performed CPR until the ambulance arrived. Joel was on his way up from Virginia and Bob's siblings hadn't gotten there yet either. I knew I was going in as the anchor, but I still wasn't really prepared to have to be Bob's. He had always been mine. Bob's a former Marine. He served in Vietnam. He also suffered a (non-military) traumatic amputation of his right arm when Joel was about a year old, the divorce from their mom, Deb's treatment for breast cancer the year before my own cancer, and his own bout with lung cancer surgery, and his courage and sense of humour never so much as wavered outwardly in the face of any of that. So I can't imagine the hell he must have been in for him to reach blindly for my hand the first minute we were alone and gasp out, I'm so damn scared.

By the time Joel arrived just after lunchtime they'd discovered that there had been an aneurysm that ruptured, causing a massive brain bleed, and they were trying to stabilize her for long enough between scans to find out if surgery would even be an option. Every update was worse news, and by Tuesday the decision was made to remove all life-sustaining measures and transfer Deb to palliative care. There's never any way to tell, but given the significant damage, no one was expecting her body to keep functioning longer than a few hours at maximum. Despite that, early Wednesday evening they transferred her to hospice care. Deb didn't take any shit from anybody, ever, and this was no exception. She was going to go in her own sweet time, and this wasn't it quite yet. Hospice told me later they hadn't expected her to live through the first night. Clearly they don't know our Debby.

Thursday, 12th September, was one of the most precious days of my life. Bob couldn't stand to be there anymore, and he had all manner of legal legwork to untangle and plans to start making. I had planned to stop in and sit until they returned, expecting them back any minute. One of Debby's work friends came by round supper time, and talked to her for a good hour--telling her all about Deb's favourite kids and what they'd done that day, and put sweet-smelling lotion on her hands and feet. We got a little bit to eat, but mostly we sat with her, and I listened. I'd never known Debby as well as I know the rest of her family; we probably hugged whenever we saw each other, but I felt uncomfortable touching her or holding her hand. Not because she was dying, but because it felt like an invasion of her privacy. I don't actually know whether she liked being touched, though as someone who worked for 30-something years with preschool-age kids, I can't imagine she wasn't at least comfortable with it. So part of me wondered what I was doing there. But mostly I felt someone needed to be there with her, someone she knew, in case any part of her was still there and needed us.  After Marie left, we sat some more. Sometimes I read to her out loud--from Edgar Huntly, because that's what I was in the middle of that day--but increasingly I just sat there as the unexpectedly fierce thunderstorm bent the trees outside nearly double and rain rolled down the French doors in sheets.

By ten o'clock I was done my book and needing to at least stop home long enough to feed my cats. But also, something was changing. Deb was starting to breathe differently, taking long gasps of breaths followed by shorter, ragged breaths, evening out, then starting again. I knew this was one of the last changes. It wasn't painful for me to hear, so much as worrisome. I knew she was being medicated to alleviate any anxiety she may have been feeling, and I knew her breathing patterns were simply her body trying to regulate oxygen flow to her brain as the pressure from the bleed increased and spread down towards her brain stem. I knew she was trying to let go. But I also knew--don't ask me how, since I really didn't know her this closely--that she was hanging on because I was there. I knew this was something that was between her and the God she loved so fiercely, and she wasn't going to do it with an audience. My being there was only going to prolong this.

I will not tell you what I said to her as I kissed her forehead goodbye. I will only tell you that two hours later, the spark that made her Debby was gone.

Come On Home to Me

I've been trying to write this post for six days.

I haven't thought of a single word that can begin to contain everything I mean. There are no words for the unexpected spiral into grief I should have seen coming from ten months out but still managed to hit me like a freight train when church bells woke me that morning. There are no words to convey the soaring relief bestowed on me like a blessing at the foot of the mountain a week later, relief I had prepared myself to never find, but was stubborn enough to go searching for anyway. Instead, every word has no meaning, has two meanings.

And, too, I couldn't help but think of Maura. Like her, I headed north without telling my family. Very few people knew of my plans. Coincidentally, my destination that first night was a friend's house in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Like Maura, my trip was spur of the moment, poorly planned, and more than likely ill-advised. Like Maura, I'd received a series of emotional shocks in the days leading up to my journey that had actually spurred it into action. (Also like Maura, these emotional shocks caused me to drive stupidly and get into a relatively minor accident at one point that weekend.) Some of this is conjecture; we don't know why Maura left or where she was ultimately headed. So early Friday morning as I drove north on I-93 into New Hampshire, rattled and upset to the point of tears, I couldn't help but think, this is the part where it all goes wrong. This is the part where they never see you again. This is the part where you can't come home.

My story ended differently. I will never know why. I will never be able to understand the reasons behind why I was met at the end of my drive with more love and mercy and forgiveness than I knew what to do with. More, certainly, than I deserved. More than I have words to describe, and more than it would be prudent to speak of. It could have been so much worse. Actually, I was expecting it to be much worse, and I don't understand why Maura's path ends where it does--with a blank on the map--and mine continues forward with the people who loved me, who love me still, despite everything that could have gone wrong and every mistake we'd already made. I only know that, even though I didn't deserve it any more than she did, doors and arms were opened to me, and I was allowed to see my home again.

Where your darkness hits the light, in the space where you stand against the tide

You will always be home to me, no matter where our paths take us.

Ticket for a Prayer Wheel (Part Two)

Oh dear. It seems the universe I inhabit is not particularly a tidy one. But at least it's entertaining.

I mention this because prayer wheels are supposed to to be soothing. Prayer wheels are those Tibetan things with a brass compartment and a wooden handle, often with a scroll containing a mantra inside the compartment. The idea, pretty basically, is you spin the prayer wheel round, and the motion itself, the revolution, is a prayer.

Apparently my personal prayer wheel? Is a merry-go-round. Or a ferris wheel. Something big, goofy, and garish, with lots of tacky flashing lights that is equal parts nauseating and exhilarating.

Which explains why I am suddenly, within the past 72 hours, in possession of an airline ticket to Denver for this weekend, to see these guys.

Disclaimer: I rarely actually see them from this angle. Usually I'm somewhere offstage, backstage, on a spot tower, or running around like a crazy person looking for an extra iPhone charger and more towels/water bottles/picks/gaff tape, which is what happens when you used to be a stagehand for a living. So I'll be impressed if I actually see their faces during the gig.

They probably won't be dressed like this, though....

Photo courtesy of Charlie Lowell.

....or this. But you never know, especially when Steve's around. 

Photo courtesy of Charlie Lowell.

Ok, I'm serious. And I am well aware that it is, to say the least, rather unorthodox to fly to Denver to visit friends who live in Nashville. Because, I mean, have you looked at a map, like, ever? Pennsylvania's not close to either of those things, but Nashville's a fair sight closer. Except when it's not. Which would be next weekend. Because last week, my actual flight to Nashville, which is for my spring marathon in April, got completely borked up. That's not to say I'm not flying to Nashville this April. It just explains what I was doing near Southwest Airlines when this ticket to Denver fell out of the sky and hit me over the head. For darn close to zero dollars and only a minimum of trying to convince Southwest Airlines that my name is actually Steve.

See what I mean? Ferris wheel. My version of spiritual growth is a fucking carnival ride.

The reason for this particular circumference of ridiculosity at this particular moment in time is that these guys have been the glue that has kept me together on more than one occasion in the past seventeen or eighteen years. I know I'm not alone in that, in a spiritual sense, but in my case it was also occasionally the literal sense. Not through their music, or their leadership, necessarily, but through their very personal compassion, their senses of humour (not to mention timing), and above all their cherished friendship. Individually and collectively, these men have opened their homes and hearts; shared their stories, their families, their coffee, and the contents of their bookshelves (this last of which I confess that I am sometimes bad about returning); gotten lost in King of Prussia Mall with me; nearly run me down with their Hammond B3; nearly left their accordions and laptops in my yard; been the recipient of knit gifts, Oktoberfest beer, pinot noir, and the occasional guitar-case emergency roadside repair (man, you can do anything with aircraft cable and a set of needle-nose pliers--just wait until you see what I bring you this weekend!); compared facial hair with me during Movember (fortunately he won); had marathon text message conversations with me while I'm trapped on the ninth floor of a hotel post-literal-marathon during a hurricane and going stir-crazy; prayed with me, for me, and over me; cried with me and for me when I'm grieving; had intense conversations about Thomas Tallis and Downton Abbey that last until four in the morning; pondered and poked holes in my dissertation topic; lovingly called me out when I'm being a right arsehole; and conspiracy-theorized about the possibility of a multi-state, multi-jurisdictional serial roadside toy bear mutilator or whether it was just a copycat....er, copybear....um, yeah, I can't really explain that last one either, but I swear it totally made sense two weeks ago when it happened.

So come Sunday morning before soundcheck there will undoubtedly be a good deal of this....

Photo courtesy of Stephen Mason.

Frankly, I have no idea who took this one, but it was
almost certainly not me. I don't even think I was there.

....and hopefully no additional arse-kicking for being a jerk. Because I've really sort of been a jerk lately. I guess you could say the Prayer Ferris Wheel is making me slightly motion sick, which is causing me to have to send rather more apologetic texts the next day/hour/whatever for Getting The Stupid On You Again than would be ideal in any given friendship. So I'm going two-thirds of the way across the country to say both thank you and I'm sorry.

Thank you for being my shelter, thank you for being rain in my desert. Thank you for teaching me how to forgive myself and love other people again. Thank you for being you. Thank you for growing that ridiculous moustache. Thank you for E-Team hugs and Earl Grey and sneaking me into sold out shows when you forgot to comp me and I forgot to ask. Thank you for not thinking I'm ridiculous when I come charging across the dew-wet cow pasture during the middle of your eight AM festival soundcheck, vault onto the stage, and squeeze the stuffing out of you. Thank you for tromping down the South Side Greenway with me in the middle of the night before bus call and loaning me your favourite new coat so I didn't freeze to death. 

I'm sorry I'm so weak. I'm sorry I'm so scared of being broken. I'm sorry for being frail. I'm sorry for so often trusting my fear more than I trust your kindness. I'm sorry for being a raging passive-aggressive wanker for most of last week (or, okay, most of last month) all over most of the forms of communication we have. I'm sorry I got so upset that one time that I almost threw up my cupcake and caused you to hate yourself for it. I'm sorry I lost touch with you for almost four years when it turns out two of us were going through awful divorces and we needed each other's shoulders the most and didn't know it. I'm glad we have them back. I'm sorry I'm being the hard part of your lesson right now, and more than anything I'm sorry I still don't fully trust that I haven't lost one of the most precious friendships I've ever had and that I have to get on an airplane and fly to fucking Denver to ask your forgiveness face to face because I don't yet believe that I'll actually have it. Because I should. I should know that. I should know it like the air I breathe and the ground under my feet. And I don't, and I'm sorry.

Because sometime on Sunday night or Monday morning, when all of the feast day celebrating is done, after the show is over and the fans have gone home, and after this happens....

Photo courtesy of Stephen Mason.

....one of us is going to get on a different flight home to a different state in a different time zone and go home to her books and her students and her little family of one, and it is either going to feel very much like it did driving through Western Kentucky last month, with my heart cracking open with possibilities like the stars over Elizabethtown, like a carnival ride in August when everything is weightless and free and lovely and real, or else it is just flat-out going to feel like this:

Photo courtesy of Jude Mason.

And I don't know that I could bear that.

Illumination (Part One)

So, my life got turned on its ear the first ten days of the new year. Because, you know, of course. Actually, I knew it was coming. I just didn't know what it would look like, how I would react to it, or what I was supposed to do with it.

I'm not talking about turning forty, though I did that earlier this winter too. I'm talking about whatever it is that's been rumbling about in the subtext of my life for about the past six months. Since maybe the beginning of October. I knew whatever it was, it was going to be big. And ultimately it will be for the good. It's just that--well, remember that part in CS Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Eustace tells Aslan he wants to be a little boy again, instead of the dragon he's turned into because he's been behaving like such a horrible excuse for a human being?

And remember how Aslan responds? Essentially, he says, "Okay, but first I'm going to have to take your skin off."

Yeah. It's been a bit like that.

So I started off the New Year with a much-anticipated trip to see some darling friends in Virginia, Nashville, Ohio, and various parts of PA (with a quick stop in West Virginia to change my tire in the middle of the night.....twice....) which was a mixed blessing. The bitter, with the sweet. One of those darling friends is fighting a losing battle with a brain tumour, and my trip to see her was to say goodbye. This post isn't about that. It's not my story to tell, and her husband will tell it in his own way as he is able. Nor is it about the way my heart fell out of my coffee cup in Green Hills Friday morning and into a glass of pinot noir later that evening, came to rest in the shelter of a Saturday afternoon kitchen in East Nasty and then poured out open across the Kentucky hills as I drove through the darkness outside Elizabethtown (yes, that one).

Nope, this is a post about a poem that happened when I got home, had to take down the Christmas tree, and realised I was wearing a dragon skin. And that I wasn't in charge of when it was coming off. Like Eustace, I could kick and scream, or I could lie down and take it.

Being me, there's been a lot of kicking and screaming. It's been grand, let me tell you. But anyway, with apparently way too much ado, here's the first of a series of poems that came out of that journey and its aftermath. There's not quite so much kicking and screaming in this one.

After the Epiphany

When we take the lights down, tangling our hope

for another winter, we are supposed to hold on to clarity,

onto the visions of yesterday. Instead there is the bleak

January sun, and the promise of hard freeze yet to come.

The trees we bustled indoors so recently—

their needles, still green, have fallen into drifts.

Some of us will not live out the season; others

cannot imagine the soft light of spring

ever coming. This year is perpetual winter for certain.

Sometimes the light breaks in all at once,

dazzling us into temporary blindness, and we

cannot see the ground for the stars in our eyes.

What Lies Between Us

That's the title of an old, old poem--a truly mediocre poem, in fact--about the Delaware river, someone's grandfather's silver puzzle rings, an old leather jacket, and a pewter tea pot. It wasn't ever really about those things, of course, but about the relationship that spawned them. Fifteen years later, so much more lies between us. So much more truth, and everything else, still lies between us.

What Still Lies (a fragment)

The months that pass when I don't hear from you,

except in the unspoken language of blues,
as I try to decipher the radio codes into a message
meant only for me, the words still unspoken after all this time.

The river at night. 

The memory of your body,

of mud on my knees from praying 

at the altar of you. 

A tangle of rings

and promises our bodies made

that denies everything else.

A puzzle we still cannot solve.

The Big Stupid

Pretty funny. The folks at Sunday Scribblings have done it again.

Only I'm not actually training for a marathon at the moment. Marine Corps training doesn't officially begin for me until July 1.

Nope, this time I went for the Big Stupid. That's right, I'm running an ultra.

For those of you not crazy enough to live in the world of endurance sports, an ultramarathon is anything over 26.2 miles. This particular race is the logical (if running at one time for more miles than the average commute can be called logical) next step up, a 50k. Which is, after all, "only" another five miles past marathon distance.

Yes, I know I've only been out of PT ten months. Yes, I know it's incredibly masochistic to run 31 miles. In July. In Texas. In the middle of the night. With a new moon so there's no natural light. But I was sort of talked into it by Nita, Jimmy, Zeus, and Gunz (none of whom, it bears mentioning, are actually running the damn thing this year except Zeus, despite their promises. Though Nita might actually be there for ground support, which is good since she lives down the road. I'd hate to have to kill one of my favourite people. On her birthday, no less. You'll notice I didn't tell anyone what age you were turning. You're welcome.) and cemented when I found a roundtrip flight to DFW for less than $240.

Somehow it hasn't yet occurred to me that this will be even harder than any of my marathons. I'm hoping the ignorance will keep me at my current level of insanity.

Also, I seem to recall once saying, "I will never do an ultra. Those people are fucking crazy." Guess it's time to book that room at the hat factory.

Do Not Adjust Your Monitor

This isn't going to be a very exciting post. It's just going to be a place-holder. Because I'm pooped. I'm not depressed. I'm quite happy, in fact, for the most part. I love my program, I love my department, I love love love my friends and my research and my home and my goofy kitties and most of my life. Except that whole can't get a date with a single guy thing.

I'm just fucking exhausted.

In the midst of all the exhaustion, I got a cold, which was also fun, but the bottom line is something is decidedly out of whack. That feeling that you get right after finals, when all you can do is sleep for about a day and a half? I feel like that about four days out of the week. Each of the last three weekends has lost at least one day to sleep. Today I slept until four-thirty. In the afternoon. And I'm about ready to go back to bed (it's twenty to ten). My beloved chiropractor (hi Lauren) has put me on an adrenal supplement, which has helped. That in itself is scary. That this is an improvement.

I'm also really irked because it was warm and sunny today, almost fifty degrees, and I woke up just as it was getting grey. It was running weather. And once again there I wasn't.  I have a race in a month. For which I haven't run more than three miles since....oh, November.

Last time we checked, my bloodwork was fine. I'm not experiencing any other thyroid symptoms. In fact, excepting the Martian Death Whooping Crane Plague last week (which everybody on campus had), I'm not experiencing any other symptoms at all, except excessive stupidity. But that may be all the Marxist theory I've been reading.

Speaking of which, guess what I have to go do. After I nap, maybe.

Unexpected Christmas Gift

Something odd happened a minute ago. I was bent over (in a position no one with a degenerative lower back condition should actually assume, but that's beside the point) adjusting the screws of my cast-iron Christmas tree stand before attempting that moment of truth: standing the sucker up both to see if it fits without lifting ceiling tiles and seeing if it will capsize under my own inability to measure straight (my floor is crooked. There's a lot of geometry involved in a crooked little woman standing a crooked little tree up in a crooked little house. But again I digress.)

I debated getting a tree this year because of the kitten. The kitten is a climber, and a leaper offer of things. Given his history with my houseplants, a tree in the house seemed like asking for trouble. But then I realised that this is my first Christmas in the new home, my first Christmas in my newly restored life. Since, you know, I've been in storage for the past five years at my parents' house, hibernating until the wings were fully mature. And I missed all of my Christmas decorations, since only a very few got unpacked, the essential ones that it couldn't be Christmas without. And that dammit I wanted a tree, even if it meant taping the cat to the bathtub for the next couple of weeks. Which, you know, might not be a bad idea anyway.

This is the first time I've put up a tree by myself in....a long time. Before this blog started. Before I met my husband. Before I had to worry about things like could I lift this box or reach to put this ornament on this branch without paying for it later in physical therapy. And while turning the brass screws on the stand, I realised that I'm less lonely doing this alone than I have been the past five years at my parents' house, helping them in the most precious of our Christmas traditions. Somehow, returning to those same rituals year after year by circumstance rather than choice made me curiously, painfully homesick, despite the fact that I still found joy in them, despite the fact that for so many years that had been home, especially at Christmas.

I realised that it's good to be home. Here. By myself. In my own little town of Bethlehem. It's good to be me. At long last, again. At the moment it would also be handy if the me that I am again were just a smidge taller, so I could reach the top without standing on a chair. But I'll take the me that is.

Guidance

Damn it, the girls at Sunday Scribblings have done it again. I thought I could get away with hiding this in the comments of someone else's blog, but....well, apparently not. So here's the preface: my beloved marathon-running friend Ruby has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, three weeks after dropping out of the Marine Corps Marathon at mile 18 because she couldn't see well enough to continue. They can't remove it. She'll die. They can't leave it in. She'll die. All they can do is "debulk" it (take some of it out), biopsy it for the presences of cancerous cells, and radiate the shit out of it. She can no longer see well enough to type, so she dictates blog posts to her husband, who types them out. And every single one of her blog posts begins and ends not with the litany of symptoms and fears and trials, but with how God is so good to her. In her most recent post, she gave her testimony--with, it must be noted, the caveat, "I hope this doesn't annoy or offend you, but it's my blog and I have a brain tumour, so naa neee naa neeee naa neeeee." God, I love Ruby. She's the only person I know who can make you laugh about something like that.

Anyway, at the conclusion of her post--which took her all day to write, typed one painstaking letter at a time on a hugely magnified, high-contrast screen so she could see what she was doing--she asked us to respond in the comments with our testimony. And, because she is Ruby, I did what I have never ever done. I committed this to print, and put it out there for the limited world to see, figuring only a very few people I know would ever see it, and because they're my running family, they love me unconditionally and would never give me shit about it.

And then Megg and Laini came along. Again.

So, here it is. This is the most naked and vulnerable thing I have ever written. Nothing's been changed. It's as real as I can make it. And it scares the ever-living hell out of me.

Philippians 2:12. I continue to work out my salvation with fear and trembling. This probably comes as a surprise. I talk a good game. But the road for me was never an easy one, and it still isn’t. I was raised Catholic, and Catholic the rest of my family remains (I’m the one responsible for those 37 praying nuns in Chicago, y’all. One of them’s my sister.) In my later high school and college years, I began a years-long struggle with what turned out to be major recurring depression–something that went undiagnosed until I was nearly 25 (whoops) and remain under treatment for, to one degree or another, to this day. I returned to the church my last semester in college, and though I didn’t realise it at the time, it saved my life. The Catholic Center at NYU was such a beacon in such a very, very dark winter that fifteen years later, I got married in the same stone building that had been my refuge, by the same priest who had in 1993 handed me a potato masher when I wandered into the Center in the middle of a Thanksgiving snowstorm contemplating suicide and said gently, “Oh good, you’re here. We need help in the soup kitchen.”

I graduated and moved to the Northwest. Depression came and went. I ached painfully for my church home, but was happy in Spokane in a way I had never been in New York. I got my master’s and came home (crying for Spokane the way I had once cried for the ugly church building on Washington Square South) and promptly started dating a nice, Southern Baptist boy. Oh, it was a match made in….I don’t know, the writers’ room of MadTV or something. But something happened. Actually, several somethings. One was that we started taking turns going to each other’s churches. I would bring him into the city (where the choir was thrilled to have a bass) and he would bring me to his church. Each of us had some culture shock at first. Depression, though, was lowering its wings around me. I was visiting my friend on the campus of Messiah College when I had my first–we don’t know what it is, whether it’s anxiety, or panic, or a flat-out suicidal breakdown. In any case, it wasn’t pretty. He drove me to Holy Spirit Hospital in Harrisburg, where they would have admitted me anyway given my body temperature and blood pressure, which were both alarmingly low, even if I hadn’t been in such mental disarray. I don’t talk about it much, and certainly not on the internet, but this wouldn’t be the last sojourn over the years to what my father insists on referring to as “Hotel Silly” (I myself prefer the phrase “hat factory”).

But something happened the first night, as I lay in my room, which was for the moment unoccupied by a roommate. I was alone in the room, and then….I wasn’t. I knew that the spirit of God was in the room with me. What’s more–and more peculiar–was that I knew the spirit of God was over in the corner, behind the door. At that point I started to second-guess what was happening, but then I figured, what the heck. I was already in the mental health wing, I might as well go with it. Suddenly, the spirit of God was not in the corner anymore. And I knew it was in me. And then, as I watched, my rib cage opened up like a gate, and an ivy plant spilled out from my chest. (Like I said, I figured I was already in the loony bin–what better place to have a hallucination of this sort, especially one that involves God as a plant?) For those of you who’ve seen my ankles, this is why my tattoo is of a tangled vine of ivy leaves.

When my friend came to visit me the next day, I asked him a favour. I asked him to bring me a New Testament. (Being Messiah College, he and his four suitemates fought over who was going to be the one to bring in their extra copy and witness to me!) I also, from a deep-seated habit, asked the nurse to arrange for the chaplain to bring me communion. I think the plant thing had me a little unnerved.

That fall, I asked to be baptised by full immersion. I had brought up the idea to my parents, who were for various reasons less than thrilled. It broke my heart. I had heard that men would have to leave their families to follow Jesus, but I never thought they meant me. My family already knew the Gospel. Didn’t they? On All Souls’ Day of 1997, in front of my friend’s congregation and without the knowledge or presence of my parents, I made my profession of faith and was baptized….again. My feeling at the time was that the Catholic sacrament of Confirmation happened too young, and under too much duress: I was in eighth grade, and my parents were the Confirmation class teachers. There was no way I wasn’t getting confirmed, even though in theory it’s the adult profession of faith made with full understanding. At 14? Not hardly.

Anyway, six months later I proceeded to get diagnosed with cancer. The treatment and recovery process was a whole different box of squeaky-toys, but the spring they found my tumour was one of the most peaceful times of my life. People at my new church prayed with and over me, prayed for healing, prayed for cures. When I prayed, I simply said “thank you.” I told them the truth–that it didn’t matter if I died. If I had just spent the last year of my life getting to know Jesus, that was cool with me. It was a heck of a way to go. Of course, since that was almost 13 years ago, that obviously isn’t how it went down, but I meant it at the time.

That’s where it should end. I found Christ, I kicked cancer’s butt and in the process started running. We’re good, right? It didn’t end there, of course. The church had a political implosion, they ousted the pastor, my deacon resigned and we found out he’d been having an affair with someone at his office. I shut down. Again. Add to that the return of major depression aggravated by “good heavens what have they done with my endocrine system?” and you have a whopping good time. I didn’t pray for something more interesting. I prayed for peace. For forgiveness–forgiveness for me, and for me to forgive God. I was angry. No, let me say that again. I was ANGRY. For a good number of years. I stopped going to church altogether. Worse, I stopped praying.

So here I am. In limbo. A weak candle flame, trying not to gutter out with every gust that comes along. A little lost, a little cynical, a little angry (still), a lot humbled, and yet….still….still, the coming of Advent, a little hopeful.

Curiosity Killed the FireCat (or, The Post That Goes Just About Nowhere)

My curiosity isn't the kind that electrocutes small children, or poisons household pets, or causes cartoon characters to turn into an animal-shaped pile of cinders. For some reason, I've never been the "what happens if I put the knife into the electrical outlet?" kind of curious, or the "gee, what's this green stuff taste like?" kind of curious, or even the "what happens if I pull this string, Allan?" kind of curious. (The answer to that last question, by the way, is apparently, "My shorts will fall off." I wasn't there at the time, but I heard the story for days afterward.)

No, mine is the kind of curious that sends one to grad school. Repeatedly. What's with all the little boats in Dante? Is rose a rose a rose? Why can't we, once and for all, decide how to spell the Wife of Bath's name? And for god's sake, will someone please smack Werther upside the head and give him an SSRI? For the good of all Europe? Seriously.

The alarming result of this particular strain of academic curiosity is that--oh God. I'm about to confess this out loud. On the Internet. Ok. The result of this is that I love writing papers.

There. I said it, ok? I love writing academic research papers. Call the ambulance on me, lock me up in an ivory tower, hit me in the face with a waffle iron, do whatever you want, but it's true. Except, mostly, what I like is the research part. I don't necessarily like sitting my arse on the chair and cobbling the pieces together (which is sometimes what it feels like, especially this past semester), but I love logging into JSTOR and following the thread of my ideas and seeing where it leads. This, despite the fact that more than once in the past several months I have typed in literary search parameters and gotten a certain article about White-Faced Capuchin monkeys. I am not making this up.

Presently, however, it has led me to the most frustrating dead end of my life. I've got all these fabulous ingredients, but they don't make soup. They make smoosh. I know it. Chaucer knows it. My cats know it. My rough draft knows it (and, as a result, is being more recalcitrant than usual). Worst of all, the professor knows it. The Scots-English word "fookt" does not even begin to describe my situation here. I am several pages into nowhere, and need to have been finished already by the time I meet the professor tomorrow to discuss possible solutions. This is due to a glitch in the matrix known as "I have a marathon to run out of town next weekend and am not due to return home until thirty seconds before this paper is actually due, and you can't give me an extension because immediately (as in, the four days type of immediately, so, super-immediately) after that is my qualifying exam, for which I still have 200 pages of reading."

Sorry. This isn't really a post about curiosity. This is really a post about sheer, unmitigated panic. But that's what I'm good for right now.

That, and lots and lots of coffee.

Danger Mouse

When I was younger, I wanted to live a life of adventure and danger (though I did not actually want to be an Air Force Ranger, contrary to the lyrics). I wanted to swash, and I wanted to buckle. Climb mountains, swing from vines, leap tall buildings in a single bound--you name it. At some point in my twenties, something vital about my life crystallised for me one night as I navigated my 1967 VW squareback down the back roads towards an apartment I dearly cherished.

No, I did not lose control and plummet into the icy waters of the canal. I didn't even slide into a tree (try to remember that in a VW, the engine is the back, leaving nothing between you and what you are about to hit but two thin layers of steel and....well, a lot of air. Oh--and the gas tank. Can we say "design flaw"?) If memory serves me, I simply looked at the gas gauge.

A word or two here about the instrument panels of air-cooled Volkswagens. They are deceptively plain. The average Volkswagen comes with two lights: a green one, which means there is a problem with the oil pressure and you should turn off the car immediately--even before steering it to the side of the road out of traffic. Since there is no cooling fluid in a VW, the oil is the only thing your engine has going for it in terms of not turning into one solid block of molten, frictionless, basically useless metal. A green light means trouble. A green light says YIKES. OUCH. HELP. DANGER. I've been lucky enough through several years of Volkswagen ownership (including a '65 split-windscreen bus of notorious instability) to never actually have to test the green light strategy.

The other light on a VW's dash panel is the red light. Generally speaking, the red light means "Um, excuse me, I don't mean to interrupt you, but there's something slightly amiss here." It doesn't really get more specific than that. It could mean you're not generating enough voltage. It could mean that somewhere in the spaghetti system of wiring, something is touching something else in an inappropriate manner. It could mean you've blown a fuse or six. It could also just mean your Volkswagen is bored and wants attention. The bus used to do that, going up the west side of mountains in Montana and Wyoming after dark. Any time I tried to push the speed above 45 mph, the light would come on. After several panicked stops to consult my Idiot Guide, I eventually discovered that when this happened nothing in particular was wrong with the bus. It was just its way of saying hello.

(This, incidentally, is why it takes a certain brand of crazy to own a pre-67 bus, and why my particular vehicle was christened the Kobiyashi Maru. Sometimes the only way to pass the test is to cheat. What is being judged here is simply your reaction to being doomed to failure. Mine was to buy a Honda.)

The gas gauge--which on the bus never worked at all, no matter how many times I repaired it--is in most other models not actually a gauge. It's more like a suggestion. Contrary to the manual, the "R" does not actually stand for raus, the German word for "empty." In actuality, it stands for "random." In the squareback, once the needle moved past 1/2, weird things began to happen. The needle would start to shimmy, fluctuating back and forth between R and 1/2 in ever widening arcs. Or, it wouldn't. It would sometimes sit at 1/2 for a good week before plummeting firmly to R. This was not the result of a faulty float in the gas tank. It was just what happened.

That night, chattering and tappeting my way south along the canal road, it occurred to me to wonder why I thought always being on the verge of running out of gas was an acceptable version of living on the edge. It wasn't that I had had to purchase a cell phone against my preference, because I was so likely to be stranded. It wasn't that many of my most frequent routes had limited cellular signal anyway because of a quirk known as geography. It wasn't even that, as a general rule, I carry my vagina with me while traveling and despite having been lucky so far it was only a matter of time until the person who stopped to render aid was a chain-saw wielding lunatic rapist who ate small children and microwaved kittens in his spare time. It was just that I was done living like this. The adventure was no longer fun. I wanted to get into a car and know I would eventually arrive at my destination. I wanted to be able to plan without adding three hours for unseen roadside activity involving my socket set. I wanted someone else to change my oil for a change.

Don't get me wrong. I still have the Volkswagen. During my disaster of a marriage, my husband frequently pressured me to sell it, arguing that we really needed the chunk of cash that was parked under a blue weatherproof cover in my parents' front yard, slowly oxidizing to itself. Even when I asked him by way of comparison why selling his motorcycle was never an option (knowing it was his parents' graduation gift to him when he finished culinary school and thus off-limits because of emotional attachment) he never quite got it. The last spring we were married we spent Easter weekend trying to get it back in running order, even if not driveable. It turned over happily, but even after hefty (and lung-clogging) doses of carb cleaner, it wouldn't stay running long enough to settle into its characteristic stuttering purr. But no matter. I still wasn't selling.

My husband ended up leaving me less than six weeks later. I guess his theory was, if you can't get it running in an afternoon, might as well pack up your tools and go look for another model. But not me. I know that someday, when I have the time, the money, and the emotional stability needed for such ventures, I'll clear off the square of Astroturf in the trunk hatch (don't ask), open the engine compartment, put on my striped Exxon work shirt that for reasons too convoluted to explain says JOEL on the pocket, lay out my tools, and begin a full resto. The difference next time is that I won't need it. Rather than being my daily driver, it will be my weekend excursion car. It will be fun. And by god the horn will work this time, whether or not I'm turning left.

But I will have another set of wheels, one chosen for practicality, reliability, sturdiness, and for god's sake its crash rating. I want this one to take me safely all the way home.

Stepping Out From the Page

...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes

(Don't worry. This isn't really going to be a post about Ulysses. It was just the first thing I thought of when I saw the prompt; furthermore, for my trouble I now have a Kate Bush song stuck in my head as well. Instead, this is going to be a post about some other, mostly unrelated, things.)

All writing comes from the place of Yes. All life comes from the place of Yes. My study this semester has been within the context of Yes or No--I'm doing readings on representations of the Holocaust, and on violence, visuality, and race. Questions have come up about whether or not to look, whether or not to speak, to acknowledge. And I am torn. Because to me, all life comes from the place of Yes. And yet, so many of my mistakes have also come from what seems like a Yes, that should have been a No. (I sort of have boundary issues.)

How can we measure? How can we speak? How can we look?

How can we bear to turn away?

This week I read Susan Sontag's essay "On Photography" and it made me viscerally angry in a way her other writing doesn't. Especially the part where she talks about photojournalists choosing a photo op over a life. It made me want to fling this in her face, the life of the greatest man I have known, a man who has chosen life, a man whose life is one big Yes, a man who has given his own life over and over again for the lives of those he photographs. It made me want to tell her to get up from behind the barricade of her own desk, her own death, and say Yes.

Right now I am waiting--here, I'm about to say this out loud for the first time in public--application decisions to three PhD programs (the fourth has a deadline in February). Right now my own future hangs in the balance of Yes or No. This has not made me a happy puppy. In fact, it's made me a very spastic puppy. For some reason, this past week has been particularly difficult, with the starting up of two new spring semesters and the waiting and a personal issue all bundling into one big fuzzy Maybe. I'm not liking it. It's resulted in tears almost daily, long sleepless nights, and--just yesterday--one half-full box of paperbacks launched in outraged frustration against the back wall of the storage facility where most of my belongings are (still) housed. Not my finest moment, though I was impressed with my upper body strength for a minute there.

It's made me realise how much of my life has been lived in the Maybe, in the interstices between Yes and No, how much I try to get away with foisting the decision on someone else. How not saying Yes is not the same as saying No. How much responsibility I try to avoid. We all try to avoid. How little I like feeling powerless. I wish this post had an uplifting ending, a kick at the end like Molly Bloom's Yes, but right now that apparently isn't my lesson. Because right now I am being asked to say Yes to the Maybe, and I am not liking it one bit.

How am I supposed to say Yes to something that is bigger than me? How can I measure? How can I speak? How can I look?

How can I bear to turn away?

Pop Quiz #2

Today's quiz will be in geography.

From: marketresearch@ets.org
Subject: ETS Invites You To Participate In A Focus Group Session in NEW DEHLI
Date: August 28, 2008 6:39:38 PM EDT
To: THEFIRECAT@xxxxxx.net
Reply-To: marketresearch@ets.org

Educational Testing Service is conducting a series of informal discussion groups with students around the world about their experience taking standardized tests for graduate admissions purposes.

A two-hour discussion group will be held in the NEW DEHLI area on September 23, 2008. Individuals selected to participate in the group will be paid at the conclusion of the session. Light refreshments will also be provided.

If you would like to participate, you must complete a brief, 10 minute survey. Since space for the discussion group is limited, we encourage you to complete the survey within 24 hours of receipt of this email. The survey can can be accessed by clicking on the following link:

[link removed]

If you cannot access the survey by clicking on the link, please copy the entire link and paste it directly into the address bar of your web browser.

Are they serious?? I can't even fly to the informal discussion group in 24 hours. The only way New Dehli is even remotely close to New Jersey is on an alphabetical list. And even then, New Hampshire, New Hanover, and arguably Newt Gingrich are between them, depending on how you file.

And these are the people who graded the test that will decide where I get my PhD. Shudder.

My Dream of You

(Following is an excerpt from an interview the Irish Independent did with the late Nuala O'Faolain, who died this month of cancer. Read the whole interview here. The title of this post is that of O'Faolain's second book. With thanks to Minnesota Matron.)

"The two things that keep me from the worst of self-pity are that everyone's done it so that ordinary people are as brave as I could ever be or as less brave as I could ever be.

The second thing that really matters to me is that in my time, which is mostly the 20th century, people have died horribly, billions of people have died horribly, in Auschwitz, in Darfur, or dying of starvation or dying multiply raped in the Congo or dying horribly like that.

I think look how comfortably I am dying, I have friends and family, I am in this wonderful country, I have money, there is nothing much wrong with me except dying.

When I think of how privileged I am. I had two brothers who died of drink and they died miserably and under- privileged and here I am as usual the lucky one in the family."

Think on that, on your sunny, breezy, glorious Memorial Day.

What a Crock

My poor mom thinks she's losing her mind. Any other time we might agree with her--she's a very good candidate--but this time, there's a reason.

All morning I have been struggling to retain my composure. This is quite a feat for me. I do not have the world's best poker face. I love being in on a secret, and letting people know that I'm in on it. Fortunately, my mom is (as mentioned above) often oblivious to the subtext in interactions. so I'm working this to my advantage.

Several weeks ago, my mom fell in love with a red kitchen compost crock. At the time, it wasn't an immediate issue, because our interim container is safely out on the screen porch. It is, in fact, the old diaper pail, which actually functions quite well when you think about it. The problem is it's on the screen porch, which shortly will become the primary gathering place for meals and other times. There won't be enough room for a diaper pail, let alone the inconvenience of a day's worth of decaying vegetation at someone's feet while they're eating.

This morning, my mom decided she was going to order said compost crock, and began to tear the kitchen apart for the catalogue. It has been driving her practically batshit that she can't find it. She's been down to the cellar recycling pile, she's been through each catalogue three times, to make sure it's not in there. She's on the verge of a major obsession.

My dad and I are watching this with a great deal of sidelong amusement and exploding-cheek faces over her crouched figure on the floor.  Because the catalogue has been up on my desk for three weeks; about ten minutes after my mom announced that she liked the red one best, I emailed my sister and offered to split the price for Mother's Day.

I really don't know how much more of this frantic catalogue-digging I can handle before I have pity on my poor mom. One thing's for certain: if she doesn't get sidetracked by something soon, when she opens her gift a few Sundays from now, it will be rendered utterly useless immediately, from her cracking it over the top of my stubborn head.

Brave and Crazy (and I Ain't Tellin Who Is Who)

If one of you is a cat, and the other of you is a person, there are certain rules.

One of these rules is, no matter how much you wish it to be otherwise, the one of you who is a person must, before retiring to another room for even just a moment, place some sort of protective covering over the bacon bits on the sideboard next to the spinach salad.  Because if you do not do this, the one of you who is a cat will shortly be discovered (by someone else, in this case) with his entire head brazenly in the salad bowl. You must either learn to "cover up, buttercup," or learn to go without bacon bits in your spinach salad.

This is just the way it is. No amount of yelling, scolding, training, or flat-out cussing is ever going to make it any different.

Overexposure

I went long on this because I really got stuck. Not because I couldn't come up with a response--no, quite the opposite. I got stuck because I had too many responses crowding the door to my brain, each trying to get through first and be picked up and held. As a result, this might end up being one of those "all over the damn place" posts.

My problem remains that two of the three men dearest to me in the world are professional photographers--my father, a fine art photographer after twenty-five years in the judicial branch, and my dearest friend and mentor, a photojournalist and filmmaker. One thing this means is that what gets saved from our house fire is not photographs but a metal case containing binders crammed with negative sleeves. That's just the way it is. The cats have legs, they can get out on their own.

Another thing it means is that often, the memories I have of people and events are dictated from a different perspective. We don't pose for photographs in my family. We go about our daily business, assured in the knowledge that we will one day find it magically recreated in the tiny squares of a contact sheet and wonder aloud why we didn't see the long snout of the 75mm lens crawling up into our faces at the time.

A third thing it means is that watching TV is a bitch. My dad will see things going on in the corner of the frame that those of us without secret x-ray vision would never notice. Robin has been known to yell "Focus!" at a perfectly normal screen, or criticize its headroom. Good God, man, it's baseball. Let the rest of us watch the World Series in peace, will ya? Not even CSI is safe. The other night, as Catherine Willows was documenting a crime scene, my dad winced as the flash went off three times in rapid succession: "That's the trouble with digital. People take three shots when all they need is one." Um, yeah dad, but this is about documenting evidence, not making things look pretty. It's not like it's going anywhere. The victim isn't going to get up any time soon and blow the composition.

I can't even call them digital cameras without getting yelled at. My dad refers to them--not arbitrarily--as computers with lenses. He's right, of course. That's really what they are. A digital image is not a photograph, since etymologically speaking a photograph is a picture made with light. There's no light involved in creating a digital image, just pixels. Nevertheless, this frequently causes another chorus of, "Yeah, whatever dad."

And don't even get him started on film vs. digital. He's got several dozen valid points, among them clarity, depth, control of your input (ever seen a digital camera with a "manual" shutter setting?) But sometimes digital is just so damned convenient. You can go to Africa and not have to check $2000 worth of overage in luggage. You can carry 14 gigs of memory a lot more easily than 60 rolls of film. (I know this. I've packed 60 rolls of film. They end up everywhere. In his shoes. In the first aid kit. Shirt pockets. Tucked between his shaving kit and his toothbrush. In his underwear, though not usually while he's wearing it.) But on the other hand, so many people go digital because they think you don't have to think. You just shoot. Manipulate later. It's art, some of it, but is it photography? How do you explain depth of field to someone who's never had to calculate it because the computer does it for them? How do you explain the tension of waiting for a shot, your fingers itching for the shutter but your brain overriding them because your eye knows the moment is not yet come? The magic of standing in a darkened closet, waiting for the image to swim up through the bath in pieces toward you?

This Space Intentionally Left Blank

Although I think a much shorter and more comprehensive list would be entitled "Things I Get," that was not this week's assignment. So here goes, in no particular order (sort of like my life):

Marshmallow fluff. I appreciate it, especially paired with peanut butter on Arnold's Country White bread. But I don't get it.

Giraffes. People are surprised by this one. They want to know about platypuses. Those make total sense to me: leftover parts smorgasbord. No, it's giraffes I struggle to understand. It's not the long neck; I can deal with that. Someone's got to eat all those yummy green leaves (and everyone has their own Slurpee machine--wait, wrong post). It's the fact that they have tremendously long black tongues. Yes, black. And no vocal cords. How cruel is that? To be given all that space, all that equipment--and nothing to say. And did I mention their tongues are black? Poor giraffes.

Why my refrigerator has a light, but not my freezer. Don't my waffles need to see, too?

Why Snickers bars have a label that cautions, "Warning. May contain nuts." Yes, and so might the marketing department.

Algebra. Nuff said.

Gary Snyder's poetry. Again, I like it. Just don't get it. Same for Medbh MGuckian, except for the part about liking it.

Why God in his infinite wisdom has seen to give us two kidneys and one bladder. And then put a uterus on top of mine. I realise that space is at a premium here, but come on. Two processing plants and one holding tank? Couldn't you have at least had a better overflow valve? If nothing else, couldn't you have made it a shorter trip to the bathroom at midnight?

Why are Peeps always stale, even the day after Easter?

Why do people insist on writing "This page intentionally left blank" on an odd-page of a manuscript? Don't they get it? What about something like, "This page intentionally left otherwise blank" or "This page would have been left blank, except I had to go fuck it up by printing something useless on it, thereby wasting another tree" or even "Hi mom" ?

Where all the light brown m+m's went. I miss the tan ones.

Note that nowhere on this list has been found "Why don't sheep shrink when it rains?" That would be because the lovely Mary O'Brien of Twist patiently explained this to me one evening over homemade gingerbread. I'd always assumed it was because it doesn't rain hot water, but Mary-O assures me it's the agitation in the washing process that felts wool, as much as anything in the temperature of the water. I'd theoretically have to follow them around in the pasture and "zhuzh" them one at a time if I wanted them to felt. Or perhaps I could find another way to agitate them, like sneaking up behind them and yelling "Lamb chops! Mutton! Haggis!!" That would likely be highly agitating to a sheep.

While You Were Out

I love sleep. Always been a big fan of it. Unlike my sisters, who when we were growing up would bargain for later and later bedtimes, I never had one. This always confused the babysitter greatly, but my parents' insistence that I had enough sense to go to bed when I got tired usually proved true. At least during my childhood, anyway.

Somewhere during high school, I developed a love/hate relationship with sleep. Stage crew ran late, to nine, ten, sometimes eleven o'clock (on a school night!) and I had to be up at six to get to school on time. Late nights was when things got interesting--when my friends got original, creative, and sometimes illegal bugs up their butts, our parents went to sleep, friendships were forged and romances ignited. And, of course, there was homework to be done. Theoretically. I subconsciously became afraid that if I fell asleep on someone's couch/floor/lap/diner booth, I would miss something. This was likely based in firm reality, as I have a long-reaching history of being the first one to fall asleep at slumber parties and midnight gatherings. (One group of friends scattered across the country has begun to keep a scrapbook of photos from our somewhat annual gatherings at people's homes; every last one of them features at least one shot of me, asleep on the floor, while conversation rages around me. Enough so that renaming this blog Floors I Have Slept On would not be entirely inaccurate, if somewhat ungrammatical.)

Still, I adore my sleep. For a while in my twenties, this combination made me the worst of all possible things: a late sleeper. Saturdays I could sometimes sleep until noon and still wake up only from guilt at knowing what time it was. I hated it. Somewhere inside me was a morning person, waiting to be released from this bizarre ritual. It didn't help that I dated a series of night owls and insomniacs, starting with my first serious boyfriend. Even my best friend, who loved to rise at the ungodly hour of 5:30 to walk the dog and listen to the BBC, was an insomniac and could often be found roaming the house at midnight. The one morning he slept until quarter past eight, I was afraid to go in and check on him because I thought he might have died during the night.

And then there was my husband, who fell into sleep like dropping off the edge of a cliff. I used to tease him that he had two speeds: fast, and off. He would stay awake for hours into the night, sometimes days at a time, but when sleep came, it would take him in the middle of sentences, sometimes in the middle of words. And Lord knows there was no waking the man. Getting him out of bed and functional enough to light a cigarette was a ritual as drawn-out as a Japanese tea ceremony.

He was an entertaining sleeper, too, with vivid dreams that sometimes involved him spouting out dialogue for all the anthropomorphic characters, and acrobatics that more than once left me with interesting bruises to explain to friends. Sleep for him was in intricate dance of elbows and gangly limbs thrown wide, long hair strewn wildly across all our pillows, humping up under the blankets like a turtle, and something we used to refer to simply as "The Leg." The Leg was something to see, all right, not only for its cranelike humour, but also for its sheer flexibility. There was, quite simply, nothing this man would not do in his semi-conscious search for ORSP. (Optimal Rest and Sleeping Position, if you have to ask.)

These days I sleep alone, tweaking my nocturnal schedule so I'll have time to myself in the mornings and the evenings after my parents retire. I'm reverting to my morning-person schedule, though I still resent the alarm those days it reminds me that I'm only up because I have obligations that aren't to myself. I'm not lonely when I wake curled on my side of the bed, usually with a couple of cats strewn about in positions of utter somnolence. It's the nights that get to me. I still lie awake in the dark, listening for the cadence of his breathing, thinking about impossible fish missions and those ridiculous involuntary twitches that used to overcome him and scare the crap out of me, and waiting for the return of The Leg.