Comfort Stones

I was on the phone with my dad last night. It was a long talk, it's been a rough week. You guys never believe me about February, but then it comes over and blows the house down.

Near the end of the chat he says, I'm going to ask you something. Promise not to be mad?

I declined the promise. That is the least fair of all the questions - you're on the defensive before you even know what's coming. I promised to try.

He asked, and it was a long question, the kind you have to clarify at the end, so I said, You want to know if I'm warm? Yes, he said. Comforting. He wanted to know if I could be comforting.

I wasn't mad. It's a weird thing to be asked, because we all assume that we are, we can be, when it counts. I assume that I am, and I can be. When it counts.

It was a fair question. I haven't had much opportunity to comfort my father; when the worst things happened, I was always far away.

There are levels of concern there, I can see that. Concern for me, concern for the people I love, who need comfort. And concern as a parent, did I set them up right, what did they take away.

We had been talking about people, but then we were talking about dogs. Our dogs define us, when we remember their lives, we're remembering our own. We remembered all the way back to the first dog, the one there when I was born. He said he had some guilt, how life got in the way of their bond, the one in the beginning, before the kids and the jobs and the school and... life.

That's not what it looks like from my perspective. I see a member of the family, who was loved, and nursed, and partnered for adventures, who grew with us, who was then loved more. So much that 25 years later, she is still loved, and cared for, and nursed, in the heart of someone she loved right back.

He said he wished he'd done better by her. I doubt that's what she wishes. I understand why people believe in things. It would be something to know these messages were getting through. It would be comforting.

We all think we could have done better, because we're cursed with remembering everything we've done wrong. We don't give each other enough credit for what we learn, the good we do in between the moments we're fucking up. I think dogs do - or they're just blessed with limited memory - and that's why we love them so much. We'll allow them to judge us by all the things we've done right. It's a gift we infrequently give ourselves.

I think I can only comfort in the abstract. So, it was a fair question.

I'll be coming back to this.

Mr. Jackson If You're Nasty

The summer before my 2L year, I walked into the New Orleans LSPCA a little after 4:00 in the afternoon, looking for a puppy.

My roommates were still gone, and would be until right before classes started in a few weeks. I was lonely. (I've never denied being emotionally impulsive.) Besides, I'd wanted a dog all last year anyway, I lived a five minute walk from school, in a big, wonderful house with a little backyard - it might never be a more perfect time for a puppy. And it didn't feel right, living in a house without a dog. I'd always had dogs, I was a dog person.

That's what I was looking for: a dog, some charming mutt of unknown provenance, a puppy that would grow into a hefty canine, one that would take up space in my car, on the couch, in my life. There had always been a dog. My parents adopted Onyx, their pointer/lab mix three years before I was born. She guarded me when I crawled around on my baby blanket, wouldn't let strangers too near without my parent's permission. Simon, the massive Rhodesian we adopted the summer before ninth grade, slept outside my mother's bedroom door nights my father was working in Boston, keeping an eye on all of us, on the street outside, from the top of the stairs. We had our own special thing, too - he protected the hell out of that house, but never blew up my spot when I snuck home late. That's what I was looking for.

But it's not what I found, those puppies were a mess, either sickly-looking, oddly-tempered, or like they'd grow up to be about purse-sized. No, no, no. That wouldn't do at all. So I turned around and started back. You can try again in a few weeks.

The puppies were at the back of the building, so I had to walk through a full row of the adult dogs to get to the door.  I kind of said hi to them all, but didn't pay them much mind - I wanted a puppy, someone I could know from their start. I was three-quarters of the way down the line of kennels when, on my left side, a stocky brown dog who'd been sitting patiently, stood up on his hind legs, and pounded the cage with his front paws. Not aggressively, just a 'Hey! Over here!' Then he sat back down, and looked at me.

He was adorable. Chocolate brown with a white streak down his chest, big liquid eyes, a face shaped like something between a heart and a square. He didn't bark, he didn't pace. He just looked at me. I read the card pinned to the cage. His name was Hershey, he was about a year old. He was a Staffordshire Bull Terrier mix. I'd never even heard of that before.

The staff starting coming out through the kennels - it was almost dinner, time for everyone to go. One woman saw me standing where I was and stopped. Her face lit up, slowly, almost cautious. 'He is a great dog,' she said. 'Great.' I nodded. 'We're closing now, but come back tomorrow, take him out.' I said I would, said goodbye to the dog, and left. I don't think I'd planned on coming back, but the next afternoon there I was.

I took him outside, and he was friendly and sweet and all, but kind of...aloof. He wasn't fawning all over me just because I happened to be there. It was cool to meet me, but let's all be reasonable. It was weird, but I kind of respected the hell out of that. And, let's be honest - there's nothing I love quite like an emotionally unavailable man.

The staff was thrilled. They were all in love with him. He'd been there for months, after being left in the parking lot with a chain around his neck. They'd put him in a children's camp program, brought him around as a breed ambassador dog. They could not figure out why no one had taken him home.

And that's the story of how I met the dog we now call Baylor Jackson, canine homie extraordinaire, the oldest soul I think I've ever encountered, and every single thing I was looking for the day I walked into that animal shelter. We had to spend too many months apart that next year, because I went a little crazy, and then nature went very crazy, but otherwise, we've been together ever since. I picked him up in Houston, after Katrina - a friend's aunt had taken him in, one of the greatest kindnesses I've ever experienced, for which I am eternally grateful. She fell in love with him too, of course. When I showed up that night he was fat as a pig, she'd been cooking him his own dinners, full plates of food. She gave me a gallon-bag of frozen turkey on our way out the door: 'he loves my turkey.' He sat on my lap the whole drive home. My legs lost feeling somewhere outside of Lake Charles, but I didn't care.

In the end, it didn't matter that we didn't know each other from the beginning. I'll never know what happened to him that first year. There are clues - he still has scars on his ears, and one on his head if you know where to look. He's not a big fan of tall men, and he hates it when people give daps. HATES it. There's something about knuckles-hitting-knuckles that upsets him deeply. So no, I don't know, exactly, but I have an idea. And it doesn't matter. The day we met was it's own kind of beginning, for both of us. You can start over anytime.

We made his birthday August 12 - exactly a month between my brother's and mine. Which means he will be ten this year. Ten. He's grown in a grizzled bit of old-man beard, but otherwise he's largely the same. People on the street regularly ask if he's a puppy, actually don't believe me when I tell them, which is hilarious to me, that would be the weirdest thing to lie about. And now, nine years down the line, I think about that puppy lesson all the time. You can have the grandest plans, you always think you know what's right for you. But you probably don't. There's probably someone who knows better than you. And it's okay to trust them.

Happy Birthday, Baylor Jackson. Thanks for picking me.

Make Your Dreams Come True

I have strange dreams. Strange enough that my father asked me to stop telling him about them, which seems like a waste of a perfectly good in-house therapist, but I get it. My subconscious can be a rather psychotic place, and it can't be entirely pleasant to know exactly how crazy your daughter is. So now I just write them all down in a notebook I keep next to my bed.

They've been really vivid lately, incredibly real. And very clear when I wake up, which is fairly common when I don't sleep in my own bed, but it's been happening regardless of where I find myself at the end of the night. Like, last night, where I fell asleep in my own bed watching 'Sons of Anarchy', with Baylor tucked into the crook behind my knees (he insists he can fit there). Overnight I dreamt about taking pictures of a multi-colored house in JP (a house that actually exists, albeit with a calmer palette) and coming home to read 'The Bippolo Seed', a collection of lost Dr. Seuss stories (that is real, and that I own). The only part of the book I read in the dream was the dedication, on the back cover page.

It was so real, that when I woke up, I checked the back of the book to see if that was, in fact, the actual dedication. Of course it wasn't, this book isn't dedicated to anyone, it's a posthumous collection of lost stories, silly faces, but I liked it so much, I wrote it in anyways. It went like this:

"This book is for Sandy and Paul, who love each other very much. Or would have, had they ever met. I knew Paul for years and years and years; everytime I saw him, I told him how much I loved how much he loved Sandy. Or would love, were they ever to meet. But then Sandy got sick. So they never met. But this is still for Sandy and Paul. Who love each other very much."

And it made me want to say: for anyone reading, now, or in the future, to anyone reading: I love you very much. If we haven't talked in years, if we talked yesterday, if we haven't met yet, if we'll never meet: I love you very much.

The Middle

I've told you about the beginning.

Now we're in the middle.

The middle is okay.

The middle is the part where you write new things. You re-write old things. You find new songs. You find new meaning in old songs. You see new people. Otis and Aretha have never been more relevant. You still drink too much and eat too little. You wear old, stolen shirts to walk the dog at 1:00 in the morning, asking him if he has too much energy to sleep. It's all you, though. You know.

The middle is when you have days you wake up smiling, so full of life even when it's raining, especially when it's raining. Your life is full of more love than you ever could have believed.

The middle is when you have days of sadness that knock you out so hard, you can barely leave your room.

The middle is when those sad days have you calling people you love, and they fill you in ways you couldn't have imagined. You call crying, you hang up smiling.

Maybe the middle is what it's all about. I have dozens of unfinished stories: perfect beginnings, heartbreaking endings, but they're empty because I've never figured out the middle.

The middle. The middle is the hardest part.

So a Girl Walks Onto a Beach...

That week I spent at my aunt and uncle's place on the beach this spring meant more than I realized at the time. But I guess that's true for everything lately.

I've been staying in Scituate since before I was born. It's where my mother was living when she met my father. It's where I learned I was hopeless at driving a boat. It's where my parents stayed when they were shuttling between PEI and Florida, those few magic years. It's the only place in the world where my brother and I have our heights measured along a wall, inside the closet door of one of the upstairs bedrooms. It's the last place I saw my aunt Clare. 

But this spring was the first time I'd ever stayed there alone. I have a tricky relationship with staying alone as is, even more so in a place infused with family, memories from every year of my life flooding around every corner. Not that I felt completely 'alone'...although 'haunted' is a bad word for what it was. More like someone else was there when I was not, checking in to make sure things were going alright, sitting up, keeping watch downstairs at night when I slept. Not in a creepy way. In a 'smoking cigarettes at the dining room table and contemplating the night' kind of way. I don't know. Irish voodoo. I also don't know why my ghosts smoke cigarettes, or why I find this comforting. Probably more voodoo. 

I didn't plan to be there by myself much. The week before my stay, my mother remembered that there would be no cable, no internet. That part of town would be half-empty, all those dark shuttered houses along the water. And me all by myself. I made contingency plans for sleepovers in Quincy, Boston, Groton; felt lucky to be welcome so many places. 

Though when I got there, the strangest thing happened: I liked it. I didn't want to be gone. I wanted to be there with the memories and the smells and the sounds. I wanted to be an adult in this childhood place, to have to remember to bring keys for doors that had never been locked to me, to come home in the dark to a place that has been lit for me for so long, that first night, I didn't even know where to find the switches. 

I thought I would be scared. I wasn't scared. 

The moon was moving towards full that week, and it rained most days. At night, I would zip myself into a pile of hoodies and walk Bay along the beach, me with my blue plastic Solo cup of boxed wine, feeling like the coolest mom in the world - 'Welcome to the end of the Earth and all its smells! You may have it all to yourself, puppydog'. The moon lit up the water and I could watch Bay run all the way to where the sand meets the rocks, becomes impassable, without losing sight of him. He'd wait for me to meet him out there, then we'd turn and walk back along the packed sand, him trotting a few paces ahead of me, stopping occasionally to root through small piles of rubbery seaweed with his nose. 

On one of our last mornings, the sun finally came out, but it was windy and the beach was still empty. I was wearing a heavy jacket I didn't need, but my leggings were too thin. I was convincing my body to call it a draw on this one, stop being so cold, when I was distracted by something lying in the sand a few feet ahead. (Distracted by Shiny Things, the Katie Neuner Story) It was a rock. Just a rock, sure, somewhat tear-shaped, small enough to fit inside my hand. But it was also a beautiful rock, the most beautiful rock: opaque, purely white, what magic clouds look like when you ride on them, I'm sure. It was, without a doubt, the specialest rock on that beach. It made me remember being a little girl, caring so much about seashells. So I picked it up, and put in my pocket. For good luck. I figured it had to be good luck. 

This was all a few months ago, but I've kept the rock with me, even transferring it from purse to purse, just to have it nearby. Good luck, you know. Every so often I want to show it to someone, but as soon as I'm halfway into it, I realize I'm a crazy lady pulling fucking rocks out of my purse and talking at people about them, and that's not a gun I need to jump. Also, it just never seemed as...special, as it did the moment I picked it up. I swear, when I saw it on that beach - it was like a magnet. 

I came across the rock again this morning, digging through my purse in search of...who knows, I always forget what I'm looking for as soon as I start. But there it was, the rock, and I took it out and turned it over in my hands. It's dingy, now, from being buried in the traumatic chaos of my purse for four months, covered in ink and pencil, gummy with spilled lip gloss, tiny flecks of tobacco rubbed into its sides. And I thought: I probably need to bring this rock back to the beach. 

It's not that this rock has lost its magic. It is not less special than that morning in April when I found it. It just wasn't supposed to leave. It was not intended to live in a dark sac of cloth, banged up against Altoid tins, rolling around and scratching up the ipod. A rock is not designed to conform to your life. It's a fucking rock. And it belongs somewhere. I guess it's our job to figure out how to live amongst the rocks, in between those places where they belong. 

There are lessons in here I haven't quite learned yet. 

On Heartbreak

I've been sitting on this one for a long time. I was actually mostly out of the woods by the time I wrote it - these emotions are so last season - but I didn't have the guts to post it, and then it felt like it had been too long...but the Olympics ended yesterday? And I am like, legitimately sad about it. Sad enough that it reminded me of this. I know - I care way too much about the Olympics. Anyway - people much smarter than me have said that to write well you have to write bravely. Consider this splitting the difference. (Note, DAD: this was a long time ago! I'm totally okay now! Promise! I just left it in the present tense for effect.)
....

For most of my life, I didn't really believe in heartbreak. People get upset when things are over, sure, but let's not blow it out of proportion with hyperbole and vaguely Victorian medicalesque nonsense. You're sad. Deal with it. (I'm sure most of you see where this is going.)

I'll admit now, I did have the tiniest feeling, deep down, that an experience that seemingly universal probably had some foundation in truth. It must have happened to someone, sometime, somewhere. I just thought it had to be huge. You cheated on me with your secretary after I had all your babies! I gave you my bone marrow! And my youth! You know. Like 'Waiting to Exhale'. Or that really sad Dixie Chicks song from their first album. Oh, don't pretend like you don't know the one I'm talking about.

I didn't realize how small it could be: I am not where you are. I love you, but. A dozen tiny truths. I guess it only takes one kind of heartbreak to recognize all the others.

I'm not so great with feelings. I would prefer we not talk about my own. Yours? Are healthy and valid and we can discuss them all day and all night. I want to hear the deepest darkest stuff that you've never told anyone. I want to tell you how beautiful and wonderful and human and okay it all is. Because it is. But me? No, really. You don't want to hear about any of that.

But here I am, with all these feelings, and I don't know where to put any of them. This would probably be better suited to a journal, but I try to be honest here; I might as well tell you what I've learned.

What I've learned: There are good things and bad things about heartbreak.

The Bad Things:

Crying. There is so much crying! Even in the morning, when everything should be fine! The day is fresh, bitches! But I'm randomly crying too hard to make eyeliner work and I NEED TO BRIGHTEN THESE WHITES UP, GODDAMNIT. Or everyone will think that I'm stoned. Which... I'm so sad, okay! No judging.

Insecurity. If I were better, everything else would be, too. Negative self-thought takes on a heightened, vicious intensity that I wish I didn't remember. Those, fun, constant reminders that I will never be pretty, skinny, funny, smart, clever, kind, whatever, whatever, whatever enough, and this is just one more example. Dear kk, you will never be enough, so sorry. Go ahead and cry some more.

Drinking. I was drinking a lot, kids. I like my grapes as it is, right, but this is a lot. As someone with an acute family history of alcoholism, I try to pay attention to the amount I drink, and when I drink, and where I drink, and, most importantly, why I drink. The why is pretty clear here. The good news is that I'm mostly drinking wine, at home, after work. One of the very few times I've appreciated my 9-to-5: I have to hold it together. If I were already living the bohemian writer's life of my dreams, I'd be spending all day in my gothic-monstrous bed, leaving only to replace the box of wine when the bladder's drained, or to stew myself in tears (and more wine) in my giant clawfoot bathtub, or to go outside and throw the fruit of my lemon tree against the wall. Fuck lemonade.

Stress and It's Hormonal By-Products. Look at this stress! Fantasy-Me is down in my garden throwing fucking lemons against a wall! I love lemons, what am I doing! Combine that with a stress-atrophied-appetite (a week of watermelon salad for dinner?), and you get...a period clocking in well over a week late. Oh yeah, THAT was fun.

Anger. I'm angry. And I hate it so much. I'm sure it's not unique to me, and I'm willing to bet it's a pretty common female thing: this deep, soul-core level of discomfort with being angry.  I would turn anger anywhere but out. Self-destruction is eminently appealing. It's actually my default mechanism.Which, brings me to:

The Good Things:

I Am So Much Better Than I Used To Be. I'm not quite wired correctly, and that default set to 'self-destruct' is the trickiest of my electrical misfirings. It goes a little something like this: get handed a disappointment, swallow every feeling, emotion, all the real things, pack those down. Now, go seek validation from people who don't care about you while poisoning yourself as quickly and thoroughly as possible. In the face of every decision, make the one that will, in the end, hurt you the most. Frame it like you're having fun, like you're happy, like this is what you want, because you're a 'free spirit*' who lives on their own terms! Ignore that everyone who knows more than three facts about you can see through that bullshit entirely. In fact, ignore those people, those ones who know you and actually give a shit about you. They're not going to be any help with this.

That didn't happen this time. This time...I talked about it. This time I stayed home and thought about it, about me, about life, about how so often the things we want, immediately, now, are not the things we most need, are not things we'd know how to handle if they were handed to us. This time I didn't run for strangers to tell me things I wanted to hear, I didn't black out to forget the things I didn't. And that may seem like old hat for those of you who've figured out how to process your emotions without wanting to tear your own skin off, but it's huge for me. So how'd I get here? I have no idea, really. But I try to remember the following:

Long Walks and Deep Breaths. I've mentioned this favorite trinket from Pops's Cabinet of Curiosities and Coping Methods. There is nothing you do not feel - if not better, at least more settled - about after a long walk. I rely on this to the point where I don't understand how anyone's able to think if they don't walk around, by themselves, for at least an hour a day. Seriously, get a dog, and just do this. (I suppose you don't need the dog, but it helps, trust me.)

Love...Kinda Fixes Everything. So, so fucking tragically cheesy, but it's true. I don't mean 'Romantic Love' because that noise is bullshit, clearly, but as Virginia Woolf said (oh yeah, I am going to quote V.Woolf in an essay with 'heartbreak' in the title. Vaginal checkmate!) "Love has a thousand shapes." So try them all on. Push aside the anger and the stress and the sad, and you are - I promise you - still capable of tremendous, limitless love. Apply that shit to everything like a balm. Love what you're going through, love what you're learning, love all the people who come into your life, and love them no less when they go away. And don't forget yourself. Even if you don't want to, because maybe part of you even likes wallowing in the shit, because you deserve that! It's your RIGHT to feel like a bag of run-over kiwi fruit: just the happiest, sunniest little treat until BAM, and it's pathetic, squishy guts are splattered all over the road. But if you just love everything instead, you realize...

It's All Going To Be Okay. Also! Cheese City up in here! This one should be printed on the bottom of a poster of a kitten hanging from a tree. Oh, that's 'Hang In There'. Either way, under the tree, the part of the poster you can't always see, is a field of wild flowers where the kitty can drop down and take a nap. Bonus points if they're poppies and the kitten gets a quick opium high for their troubles. That's what I mean, though! Like 'Ahh, fuck I'm falling out of this tree!!!! SHIT. HANG ON. FREAK OUT. Or, wait. Or -- how about I not dislocate my shoulder and just drop down here take a quick snooze in this expanse of brightly colored narcotic flower plants? Awesome.' So - just let go. 

It's all going to be okay, I promise. Somewhere there's a sunny field of sleeping kittens just waiting to give you cool drugs. Give them all hugs for me.

Loves, 
kk

And ps, go eat something. I promise a vague terror about suspected stowaways in your uterus is NOT going to make this shit better.


*I hate - hate hate hate - being called a 'free spirit'. It's dismissive. It's infantilizing. I know, nice person who is trying to give me a compliment, sort-of, that you don't mean insult here, but please, think of the tone of voice you use, what you're trying to convey when you refer to someone as a 'free-spirit' in conversation. Just because I don't care about owning a house or a car and I want to talk about your emotional health does not mean I'm a woodland sprite who lives in a magical forest in a quirked-out glitter dimension. I am a relatively wealth-poor person who lives in a city and thinks we're all just a little too divorced from our actual Selves. Some people probably don't mind at all. Just - avoid it, with me. Please. Thank you. 

Global Warning As a Madeleine

It's like, 65 degrees out right now. All the bars along Wisconsin have their storefronts and doors open. That new place, Mason Inn? I guess they have live music sometimes. I usually only see them setting up, but tonight when I was walking Baylor by, someone was seriously getting his trombone on. The door was wide open, and the wind was blowing, and it was warm, and the bouncer smiled at me, and Bay looked back at me like 'yo, this seems cool', and all of a sudden I was 24 years old, walking him down Magazine at midnight, asking the door guy at Balcony to keep an eye on him while I ran in to buy Camel Lights out of the vending machine.

It lasted all of five seconds, but I almost started crying right there on the sidewalk.

Sometimes I can't remember why I'm not back yet.

Great Balls of...Poop.

I was walking my dog through the park last weekend, and, halfway across the field, he stopped and took a poop. That is not strange, I realize.

After he was done, I took a plastic shopping bag out of my purse, did that thing where you make the bag like a glove and pick all the poop nuggets up out of the grass, and then turn the bag inside out so the poop is all contained inside and hope-hope-hope that you didn't get any on your hands, tied the gross little doo-doo package up, and carried it with us until we reached the trash can at the edge of the field. I realize: None of this is strange.

Except for the fact that it was. It was completely bizarre, foreign, alien. It was a tiny moment, the sort that's repeated all over the world a hundred times a second, it was not special. It is not important that I save all my plastic bags now, it is not globally relevant that I put some of those saved bags in my purse to take with me every time I take the dog out. It does not matter that I stopped to pick it up off the grass, the fact that I was the only human around to notice and still picked it all up does not make this a noteworthy event, save for this: It was huge.

It was - on a slightly different level- like the day I remembered, all on my own, that stores always stock the Q-Tips in the baby aisle, and so to avoid seething myself into an accidental brain hemorrhage, I should just look there first and bypass the cosmetics and bath aisles altogether, even though, yes, it makes SO MUCH SENSE to stock them in those places, as well.

Trivial as they might seem, those fell into the 'Watershed' category in my library of experiences. A few years ago, I would not have stopped to pick up shit when I could be reasonably sure that no one was there to judge me for my laziness, my lack of respect for shared public spaces, or my inability to get over the general ickiness factor of touching poop, even through a plastic bag. And, more importantly, I think, I don't pick up after my dog now because people will judge me if I behave otherwise. I do it because I'll be the one judging myself if I behave otherwise. Because people's kids play on that field, man, and how messed up of me is it to leave landmines of crap scattered across a field for a kid to step in, or slip on? People cut through that field on the way to the train station on the regular. Those people, many of them anyway, are going to work - work! Imagine what a terrible start to the day that would be! They'd smell like shit, and then the train would smell like shit, and then possibly their office if they hadn't realized they were the crap-carrier by that point...I could ruin the mornings of dozens of people I'll never even meet. Or, I could get the fuck over myself and pick up my dog's shit.

Growing Up is a sneaky little bastard, no? Attempt to cut him off at the pass, sure, knock yourself out. You'll run into him in the supermarket, Aisle 9, loading up on Q-Tips and Baby Powder. He's not so bad. Plus, they sell wine in the supermarket now! Take GU, go see what reds are on sale.