Category Archives: Holidays

What I did on my summer vacation

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Hello, blog readers! I’m back from my “summer vacation”, otherwise known as Three Long Months When My Child Was Not in School and the Temperature Was over 100 Degrees Every Day. But now it’s September, my kid is at school, and the temperature has actually dropped to the 90s, which is shockingly refreshing…. or would be, if the town I live in were not surrounded by raging wildfires.

What’s more refreshing is having time to myself, time to actually move my thoughts around in my mind and move my body around in space without bumping into the ever present and ever busy and ever demanding Vivid Girl. Mamas who spend a lot of time with their children often share the experience of hearing themselves sound just like their own mothers; this summer brought me more of those moments than usual, but since I can’t generally get a word in edgewise I more often found myself thinking things my mother used to say. (As well as some things my mother, who as you know is very nice, would NEVER say!) When I could hear myself think, that is. Which I usually couldn’t. Which is one of the things my mother used to say. (Another thing she would say, when we would interrupt her conversations to ask her what she was talking about, was “Oh, we’re just talking about running away.” I have not actually said this one to my own child –yet– but I spent a lot of time this summer thinking it in a REALLY LOUD VOICE. So loud I could actually hear it.)

One of the main things I did this summer, in fact, was think about running away. This activity manifested in several forms:

daydreaming, of course

planning long and elaborate (and prohibitively expensive, unless you sit in coach, and who wants to try to get the Vivid Girl to sleep in coach?) trips on Amtrak

emailing people who live in cool climates and saying “Are you gonna be home next week? cause if I can snatch up some cheap last minute plane tickets we are coming to visit!”

obsessively checking for cheap last minute plane tickets

planning a road trip from Austin to Santa Fe with swim stops every two hours or so (first stop here, last stop here)

adding “Bend, Oregon” to my list of favorites on my weather app and checking the temperature there several times a day

I also actually managed a couple of minor escapes, even though I didn’t actually get out of my original climate zone. Mr. B, the Vivid Girl, and I drove up to visit my parents at their lake house for the Fourth of July. Mr. B had to be at work on the 5th so he came home but VG and I stayed a few extra days. We swam every day, which was fun but not exactly refreshing because the temperature of the lake was approximately 92 degrees. It was more like bathing, except that the water was murky and green and you had to take a shower right away to wash the swamp smell off of you. Still, it was fun, and the real bonus was that my parents’ lakehouse is in a part of Texas that actually got some rain this year so the Vivid Girl was able to set off all kinds of fireworks, which were banned in Austin because the last time it rained here was 2007.

We also got to sit out on the dock three nights in a row and watch huge displays of fireworks all around the lake.

We also did a bunch of crafty and seasonal stuff like using Sharpie markers to “tie dye” tank tops with firework designs.

And we made pretzel rod treats that are supposed to look like sparklers.

And it was really hot, and my parents have air conditioning and

satellite TV, so we watched a lot of TV (mainly commercials for the Regular Show: Yeah-uh!) and played a lot of Doodle Jump.

My mom and I also pulled out the old fiberglass canoe that played such a huge part in my childhood and took the Vivid Girl out for a little paddle in the pond.

That sounds so fun and wholesome in summary but here’s how it went in real time:

We went into garage to get lifejackets and paddles. The Vivid Girl has outgrown the kid-sized lifejacket my parents bought for the lakehouse, but the kid-sized lifejackets my sister and I used to wear were nowhere to be found. So VG had to wear a grown-up life vest, which went to her knees and made it very hard for her to move her legs. She complained about this quite a bit. Also the life vest smelled bad. She complained about that, too.

We pulled the canoe down to the pond but somehow managed to choose the muddiest place to try to put in and my mom and I both sunk to our knees in rich, black, stinky ooze. The Vivid Girl started to cry because she couldn’t lift her knee high enough to get into the canoe. My mom got out of the mud somehow but I had to lie on my stomach and crawl out, and the mud sucked one of my shoes off  (I was wearing my dad’s water shoes) so then we had to get a shovel and dig into the mud to rescue the shoe. The Vivid Girl sat on the bank and sobbed and narrated a story about how nothing ever goes right.

We moved the canoe over to a sandier part of the shore and all got in, and as we started paddling around the lake the Vivid Girl started screaming because there was a SPIDER in the CANOE and she is DEATHLY AFRAID of spiders. My mom and I used our paddles to try to flick the spider out of the canoe, all the while trying to use our (sadly lacking) core strength to keep the canoe balanced so we wouldn’t all go into the pond. Which was even greener, murkier, and warmer than the lake. With turtles.

By the time my mom magically disposed of the spider the Vivid Girl was practically hyperventilating and saying “I’ve gotta get out of here, I’ve gotta get out of here, I’ve gotta get out of here.” But since we had gone to so much effort to get ourselves into this situation we gamely paddled around the pond a few times. The Vivid Girl even pulled out her paddle, which was just her size, and did a few strokes. Then she announced, “I’m bored! Let’s go inside!” and we went inside and watched more TV.

Our next getaway was closer to home so it was just as hot but had some very cool aspects. My friends went out of town for a few days so the Vivid Girl and I went out to Lakeway to housesit and take care of their three whippets.

Their neighborhood has a little lake park with a rope swing, a boat launch, and some docks. We swam in the lake everyday, and here the water was clear and clean and cold because it comes in under the dam with a current that will carry you from the dock to the rope swing to the boat launch. And I could happily jump off the dock, float to the rope swing, watch the girl swing, float to the boat launch, climb out and start over all day long. But the girl decided she would rather play mermaid in the big rocks between the boat launch and the rope swing, and so she did that while I got some exercise by swimming against the current and getting nowhere, like I was in my own personal endless pool.

The rest of the time we sat in the air conditioned house with the hot and panting dogs and watched TV.

Mainly what I did this summer is watch TV, actually. Because not only did I watch a lot of TV with my child (we are now totally addicted to So You Think You Can Dance, and after you watch this video I think you might be too!), I also watched a lot of Netflix on my iPhone while I was lying in bed helping keep my child asleep in a strange bed. Here are the TV shows I have gotten totally caught up on in the last few months:

Mad Men

Party Down

Louie

Head Case

Wire in the Blood (though I recommend quitting when Hermione whats-her-name leaves the show)

Damages

Glee

Samantha Who?

And I’m currently watching American Pickers. I’m not saying I’m proud of all the TV I’ve watched; I’m just telling you what I did this summer.

Right before the Vivid Girl and I went to whippet-sit Mr. B had a minor medical procedure done, and at that time it seemed that his recovery was going to be quick and unremarkable.

By the time we got back from Lakeway, though, it became obvious that his recovery was going to be long, complicated, painful, and expensive. He developed an infection, for one thing. Then he developed a hematoma that somehow tricked his body into displaying many of the signs of an infection: body-wracking chills, fever, aches and pains, heat and swelling, lots of pain. We have some experience with infection from when I was in the hospital for two weeks with cellulitis, so we were freaking out and calling the doctor a lot. The doctor, and the on-call doctors I talked to when the regular doc wasn’t around, were very nonchalant and seemed content to call in prescriptions for antibiotics and tell us not to worry. Finally Mr. B actually saw the doctor and got some actual medical care and began to recover, and then I got an infection. And so we spent the rest of the summer obsessively washing our hands, our bodies, our bedding, and our doorknobs with hospital-grade cleaning products. And spending our vacation money on doctors’ bills. And air conditioning.

And when I got better I took the girl swimming as much as I could, because swimming is the only thing other than watching TV that we could really imagine doing after 70+ days of 100+ temperatures. One day when we swimming in some of the nice cool water coming into the lake from under the dam the Vivid Girl really surprised me by saying, “Remember when we went canoeing with grandma? That was really fun.”

“You think you might want to do it again sometime?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, “but next time let’s do it someplace cooler. Like Bend, Oregon.”

 

Come out, come out, whoever you are

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Today is National Coming Out Day. Okay, no, it’s gotten so late that actually yesterday was National Coming Out Day in the US. Today is National Coming Out Day in England, but of course in England today is already half over.
Which means it will soon be night, and that is when all the good parties happen. And when I was in college, the NCOD party was always one of the best of the year. I started college in 1988, which is the year National Coming Out Day was invented, and so I’m guessing that our small isolated liberal arts school was one of the first to make it an annual tradition.

Here are some of the things that made it great:
the music, because:
gay DJs + late 80s = FUN
the sense of community, because:
we were in college, and for many (most?) of us it was the first time we were in an environment where we could talk openly about sexuality. In some ways, celebrating LGBT sexual identity was a celebration of all sexual identities and the party was definitely a celebration of finally being in a place where we and our friends could just be who we were.
the free condoms, because:
They were donated by somebody’s grandmother, who wanted to keep all us kids safe from AIDS and other sexually transmitted problems, and who donated so many condoms that in the whole time I was there, we never ran out, despite the huge bowls of free condoms available EVERYWHERE at every party: on the bar, in the bathrooms, near the door so you could grab some on your way out.

Many of us came to our small college from small towns, where conformity was key to survival, and so there was a lot of coming out going on during those heady days of college. It was a relief, both to those coming out into a culture of acceptance and to their friends, who had often had friends in high school who were not able to ever really relax and be themselves or who may have been tormented for failing to completely hide themselves all the time.
I’ve told you a bit about my high school, and so it shouldn’t surprise you that it was not in any way gay-friendly. In fact, it was gay-unfriendly in some very peculiar ways. For example, in our school’s dress code it was against the rules for boys to wear earrings. This meant that all the boys who had pierced ears (no matter whether it was the right or the left) had to either remove their earrings before school or cover them with a folded-over band-aid. It was the 80s, and a lot of guys did have pierced ears… from drama clubbers to football players….so this was a rule that affected all kinds of boys, from all kinds of social groups.

On Halloween, though, some of the guys decided to wear earrings as part of their costumes, and here’s where things got weird. The vice-principals decided to inspect everyone’s Halloween costumes to make sure they were appropriate for school. The confiscated weapons, and “satanic” symbols, and…. pierced earrings from boys. Boys with clip-on earrings were okay, but pierced earrings were not.

I had lent my long gold Madonna-style cross earring to a friend for his costume and so I had to go to the office after school to ask for my earring back. The principal said he would return my earring on the condition that I never let a boy wear it again. I said, “You mean at school.” and he turned sort of red and spluttered, “yeah, sure, at school.” and gave me my earring back. I said, “You know, I have a question. How come you let the boys with clip-on earrings keep their earrings but you took the pierced earrings away?” And the principal said, “Well, boys are not allowed to have pierced ears at our school.” I pursued it by saying, “Sure, every other day, but if the earring is part of a Halloween costume why does it matter whether it’s a clip-on or pierced?” And he turned a bit darker and more spluttery and said, “well, I think you’ll find that the boys with pierced ears are a bit …. um… funny.” And I said, “Ohhhhh, you mean GAY. So, is it against the rules to be gay at this school?” and the principal turned on his heel and walked away.

And so it was very refreshing to be in a place where things like that didn’t happen, and where the most interesting gossip of the year followed the many developments in the Lesbian Love Octagon (because it went way beyond a triangle) that was disrupting the sophomore class that year.
And where once a year, in October, we could dance all night long to celebrate diversity, equality, freedom, respect, friendship, and love of all kinds.

One year I was on the planning committee for the NCOD party, and we decided to out everybody on campus, in the style of whoever that gay activist group was who were doing guerrilla outings at that time. Here’s what we did: we had a friend who worked in the registrar’s office, and she got us copies of everyone’s student ID photo. We blew them up and stamped the word “QUEER” over each person’s face. We weren’t saying that everyone was gay, though; we were just using that model of outing someone gay and applying it to every student at school, as a way to point out that each of us has some odd (or queer) characteristics and therefore we are all in this coming out thing together. Something like that.

We decorated the room with the pictures, and since there were about 400 students on campus it was a dramatic but not overwhelming display. But some students found out about it ahead of time and came to tell us that they wanted us to take their pictures down because they were not gay and they didn’t want us saying that they were. Of course, we explained that we were not literally saying that every student on campus was gay, just that we were each “queer” in our own ways. Two or three of the students thought about that and decided it would be okay if we would make it clear that we weren’t saying they were gay, so we photocopied the definition of “queer” from the dictionary and blew it up and made a bunch of copies and taped them all up all over the walls with the pictures and those two students were satisfied and left us alone.
But there was still one student who insisted that we take his picture down. When we explained that we weren’t calling him gay, just “queer” in some sense that was covered by the dictionary definition,  he denied being in any way queer. (Though we were all starting to think it was queer that he went to our school at all, since being as normal as he claimed to be put him pretty clearly outside the demographic of our tiny marching-to-its-own-drum college.)
Anyway, in the end we let him take his photo with the big QUEER across the front of it because he said he was going to get the assistant dean to come weigh in on the issue and we didn’t want to have an issue; we wanted to have a party.

Which we did, and it was awesome, and now all these years later I remember it and my lovely queer college friends every time this day rolls around.
And what’s queer to me at this point is how far life has brought me since college but how far we still have to go toward ensuring equal rights to boys and girls, and boys who like boys, and girls who like girls, and what’s also queer to me is how adamant some people still are about their silly little rules. When what we need is freedom, and equality, and Bronski Beat, and a big bowl of free condoms. And pierced earrings for anyone who wants them.

In the Bleak Midsummer

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What I am doing right now is making eggplant/yellow squash parmesan using veggies from our bountiful farm box. More about the farm box some other time, and more about the vegan/not vegan issues brought up by cooking for my family in general, and making eggplant/whatever parmesan for my family in particular. Right this very minute I am sitting down to see what kind of blog update will come out of me while I am waiting for the salt to draw any potential bitterness out of the eggplant. I am not salted, so hopefully what comes out of me will be some flavor other than bitter.

I’ll tell you right now, though: I’m not promising sweet.

It’s summer here, as it is in many places, though certainly not all. Summer means no school, which in the case of our very own Vivid Girl and her schoolmates, means three long months yearning for school. In the case of the dedicated and loving mamas of this Vivid Girl and her schoolmates, it means three long months of periodic fun, punctuated by guilt, tied up together with yearning for school. Mothering seems to have a lot of guilt built in, on one side of the equation or the other, and these days it seems to be the mamas who feel guilty (rather than the mamas making the children feel guilty, which was popular for a long time), and one of the things I find myself feeling guilty about is my inability to give my child the kind of summer I used to have. But during the school year, the guilt is so much lighter and smuggier because I know for sure that I am giving the Vivid Girl a school so much better and more life-affirming than the ones I had.
But right here, at the point of summer that is farthest from school, the guilt is at a max and the smugginess (though not the mugginess) is at a seasonal low.

To counterbalance that, and also to get myself out of the house and away from certain chores such as thinking of family-friendly ways to cook the vegetables in the farm box, I took the Vivid Girl to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.
Grandma and Grandpa live in what used to be a teeny-tiny rural town north of Dallas. To get to their house from Dallas, you drive north on the highway, drive east on a road that turns into a road with the same name as the town, and turn left at the little gas station/food mart/feed store. The sign on this store says:

Bait
Sandwiches

which is why I don’t go to that store. Also, my mom says it smells funny in there, though she allows that maybe that is because of the feed store aspect of the many conveniences offered by this store.

I am sure this store was much more convenient to the few people of the small town back when it was a small town, but now they have Walgreens, Petsmart, Target, and Jimmy Johns between them and the highway. Still, the bait sandwich business seems to be good, as the store is still there, unlike the junk store across the street that also used to mark the turn. Where I also never went, despite the fact that I love nothing more than shopping for junk, because I was never really sure whether it was actually a store, or just a house with a whole lot of stuff in the yard.

Anyway, turn left at Bait Sandwiches and turn left again and there you are. If you get to the lake, you’ve gone too far.

But even though I know how to drive to my parents’ house, I usually don’t actually drive there. Me and the Vivid Girl, we like to take the train. We get on the train in Austin, ride 6 hours or so to Dallas, with all stops in between, and then get on the MetroRail and take it as far north as it goes. Then we climb into the back of Grandpa’s pickup truck and he carries us the rest of the way. The Vivid Girl likes the train because she can walk around, do crafts, practice cup stacking in the lounge, and buy snacks.  When we travel in the car, she needs to do all these things too, but we usually aren’t getting any closer to our destination while she does them.

The Vivid Girl also loves the train because she gets a whole day of my completely undivided attention. If  only for this reason, the Vivid Girl would probably ride the train every day if she could.  All day every day. Though I am pretty sure that the quality of my attention is at its very best on Day 1, and might devolve into something quite unpleasant before we reached such a distant destination as Chicago or Los Angeles. Probably it would be best to just ride the same stretch of rail between Austin and Dallas, so we could be rescued and revived by the people who love us at either end. Even so, I’m pretty sure I would get tired of it way before the Vivid Girl would. Several days and a bottle of Xanax before, most likely.

One thing about going to Grandma’s house is that sometimes there are cousins there. This time there weren’t any, but Grandma took time off work to play with us and we had a good time anyway. Grandpa doesn’t go to work, but he doesn’t really play either, so we left him home to think of ways to cook the vegetables from the garden.

I’m running out of time because I have to go pick up the Vivid Girl and her schoolmate from Gardening Camp, which is very fun but not as fun as school, which also has a garden, though school doesn’t have a pink poodle and gardening camp does. The way to get through summer is to focus on such advantages. With Grandma, we went to an amusement park where the Vivid Girl rode her first roller coaster. It was a tiny little thing called The Little Dipper, I guess because of its size and its hilliness, but after riding it I think it should have been called the WhipperSnapper, because of its size and its ability to undo months of chiropractic work in such a short ride. Whip! Snap! Ouch! Ride over.

We also rode the bumper cars, which was super excellent fun because the park was so uncrowded that we were the only two cars running, and we could really zoom around the track and also smack into each other hilariously.

And now I must zoom around the track to get to camp pick up on time. The eggplant has been rinsed and dried and breaded and is in the fridge waiting to be fried. I don’t know how bitter it will be, or whether the rest of the day will be sweet, or whether I will end up fried as well. Ah, the joys of summer!


My Life with the Boy Scouts

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Maybe it’s because I was thinking about high school, and reunions, that has my mind wandering around in the past, or maybe it’s because in the summer my thoughts naturally turn to what summer is like for my daughter, the Vivid Girl, compared to what summer was like for me, Missy Diggs. Or maybe it’s because the summer solstice is my birthday, and this year it was a big milestoney one. Whatever the reason, I’m thinking about the way summers used to be.

I grew up in the Midwest, as I may have mentioned, in a time when no one had air conditioning. If you’re going to be hot anyway, you may as well be hot outside, so we spent most of our time outdoors, hanging out with kids from the neighborhood, riding bikes and climbing trees, and playing Gilligan’s Island under the mulberry tree that hung down over the canoe racks at the back of our yard. In the afternoon we’d bang in through the screen door to the kitchen to find our mother and beg for ice cream truck money or a ride to the pool. Our arms and faces were tanned, our knees were skinned, and the bottoms of our feet were tough as leather. At night, we’d be forced to go to bed well before the sun went down, and we’d lie there in the stifling twilight listening to the older kids playing tag and laughing. If our cousins were visiting, or if our parents had friends over for cards, we’d stay up late and catch lightning bugs in jars, putting the glowing jar on the porch while we played Bloody Murder in the dark, and then negotiating to be allowed to keep it on the dresser overnight if we promised to release the lightning bugs, outside, in the morning.

Most of our days followed this same drowsy pattern, punctuated by trips to the library or the grocery store, and summer dragged on forever. The big event of the summer would be our family vacation, which usually involved packing up the big red Chevy Blazer, tying the canoes to the top, and driving six hours to northern Wisconsin to live in a cabin in the woods at a Boy Scout camp. There were no boys in our family, just my sister and me, but my dad had gotten involved as a volunteer with the Boy Scouts, and that is how the Boy Scouts came to have such a strong influence on my childhood. We went to every Jamboree and every festival, and my sister and I knew pretty much every Eagle Scout around. In the summers, my dad would sign up to be the camp director at a small scout camp in Wisconsin, and the whole family would go with him, and that was our vacation.

At the camp, we lived in a cozy two bedroom cottage at the top of a hill overlooking a lake. The cottage had a big picture window with a hummingbird feeder hanging outside, and a stone fireplace with some Boy Scout motto carved into the mantle. Some summers we had the cottage all to ourselves, other years we would have one or two older scouts living with us while they worked at the camp as guides to the troops who would come in for a week at a time. My favorite of these boys, and the only one I really remember at all, was a tall brown-haired boy named Melroy. In fact, he has probably taken on characteristics from all the Boy Scouts I ever knew, but no matter how well those boys embodied the scouting life, none of them ever had the sparkle and personality of Melroy. (Ah, Melroy….sigh)

Even at the time I knew that other people, especially grown ups, saw Melroy as a gawky, goofy, kind of unfortunate-looking kid, but to me he was beautiful. I thought he looked just like Robby Benson, who –along with Jodie Foster– totally made me swoon. Plus, unlike many of the boys, who for some reason had very little interest in two little girls hanging out at Boy Scout camp, Melroy actually talked to us like we were people, and he taught us about the woods, and how to build a fire in the fireplace, and how to whistle through a blade of grass, and all kinds of Boy Scouty stuff like that.

And even when he wasn’t staying in the cabin with us, we would often see Melroy in Wisconsin because we would make trips up to the big council camp and he would be there. My sister and I would drink “bug juice” (that’s what the Boy Scouts call Kool-Aid, which even at the time I thought was juvenile) from dented aluminum pitchers and explore around the edges of the camp while my dad did whatever Boy Scout business he had to do at the camp. One year, a boy (it probably wasn’t really Melroy but in my memory it is;  in my memory it is always Melroy) was raising a litter of baby raccoons in a box and we got to pet them and feed them milk with a dropper. We also would go to the big camp for the Council Fire and the Order of the Arrow ceremony, where men dressed as Indian chiefs would paddle canoes across the dark lake to deliver silent and serious boys into the firelight for some kind of solemn initiation ceremony.

All very mysterious, and holy, and so different from Girl Scouts, which my sister and I were both in and which seemed to have a lot more to do with butter cookies, knee socks, and folk dancing than Boy Scouts ever did. I also went to Girl Scout camp for a week or two every summer, and while it was a really fun and in some cases even profound experience, nothing about it ever seemed to approach the level of priestly purpose that the Boy Scouts’ firelight ceremony had. (This, even though I had it on good authority that both our fire-building technique and our canoe-paddling method were superior by far. In fact, the worst thing my dad could say about a person in a canoe was that they “paddled like a Boy Scout.” Oh, the shame!)

Although the big council camp was a sleepaway camp with a big mess hall, a camp store, and little clusters of tents or dorms or whatever (we were never allowed to go to the part of the camp where the boys actually slept, or where they swam, either, now that I think about it), the camp where we stayed was basically just  a boat house and a dock, and the boys would come with their troops and leaders and paddle out across the water to camp sites on the lake, where they would stay for a whole week doing whatever boys do in the woods. (From what I saw of them, my best guess was that they were telling fart jokes and daring each other to eat disgusting things.) Unless someone was homesick or needed to go to the hospital, we wouldn’t see the boys after they arrived until it was time for them to check in their life jackets and paddles and go home. My sister and I would sometimes help with the checking-out and checking-in of equipment, especially if there were several troops arriving or leaving at the same time, but mostly we hung out in the cabin with our mom when the scouts were around. During the week, we would canoe, or fish, or inventory the supplies in the boat house, or carry all the dutch ovens and cast iron frying pans up the long hill to the house, where we would clean them, rub them with oil, and season them in the cabin’s oven. Then we would carry them all back down the hill, inventory them, and put them on their shelves, where they would wait for scouts to come and claim them. I complained bitterly about this chore at the time, but now that I see what a great workout it was, carrying cast iron dutch ovens up and down the hill, I wish I could pay someone to let me do it again.

During the week we would go fishing early in the morning, or late at night, and eat freshly caught fish for breakfast. We would sit out after dinner and watch the stars come out and listen to the loons. Twice we went with some scout (let’s call him  “Melroy”) to a nearby lake where we could hike in and see a pair of bald eagles in their nest. My sister and I canoed (and we did not paddle like Boy Scouts, thank you very much) and swam and fought and  played in the woods. There was no tv or radio, just cards and books and the lake and the big woods and us.

This went on for many years, until I was about twelve or so. One day I was wearing shorts and a tank top and hanging out around the boat house helping my dad get a newly arrived troop set up with canoes and paddles and dutch ovens and whatnot. I remember that one of the boys came over and talked to me, and asked if I wanted a piece of gum, which I gladly accepted.  Suddenly his scout leader appeared and barked at him to get in his canoe, and the whole troop paddled off across the lake and out of sight. Sometime that week my dad told me that it had been decided that I was “too old” to hang out at the boat house and interact with the scouts and that I would have to stay in the cabin whenever there were boys around.

So I was exiled, but empowered, and I hid in the cabin glowing like a firefly in a jar and peeking out the windows whenever male voices floated up from the boathouse. Suddenly I knew there was danger, and potential, in even the most casual encounter, and I hummed with anticipation for the day Melroy would come for dinner or to go searching for an eagle’s nest. But Melroy didn’t come that summer, and my family never went back, and as far as I remember I never saw Melroy again.

And then we moved to Texas, where the Vivid Girl now lives, and where summer days come with either a heat advisory or a tornado/hurricane/flood warning. We live in the air conditioning and all the neighborhood kids are off at magic camp, or yoga camp, or math camp. We occasionally see a few lightning bugs, but not enough to fill a jar. We do have a jar of change reserved for the ice cream truck, but we’re rarely home when it comes by and we can’t usually hear it anyway, because the windows are closed, the A/C is running, and the radio or tv is on. And so far, as far as I know, my daughter has not encountered her Melroy but I’m pretty sure he’s out there. That’s the thing about Melroy; he’s always out there somewhere.

Many thanks for the photo originally uploaded to Flickr by McMillan Memorial Library Portrait Gallery and protected under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License.

The Best Years of Your Life

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Halftime

You know how they say no two children ever grow up in exactly the same family? I think it also is true that no two teenagers ever go to exactly the same high school. And that goes a long way toward explaining how it is that my sister is currently traveling from Seattle, Washington to Small Town, Texas to attend her twenty year high school reunion while I am lounging around Austin in my pajamas, safe in the knowledge that my high school reunion committee doesn’t have my contact information, and would find a way to “misplace” it if they did. (Just like they did with all my Homecoming Queen votes back in the fall of 1987. Oh, yeah, little Miss Class President, I knew about that!)

Now, my sister is feeling a bit nervous about going to this reunion, as any normal person would, and she is wondering what she was thinking when she agreed to go.  She has been living in a beautiful blue island of liberalism and secular tolerance for quite a few years now, and it is safe to say that many of her former classmates are still swimming in the red red waters of their Bible belted hometown. But the reunion committee is headed by two of her best friends, by which I mean not just her best friends from high school but still her best friends now, because my sister is a loyal and friendly person who gets along with others and knows how to have a good time. I’ve made her promise to report anything crazy or scary that happens, but I’m pretty sure she’s going to have fun.

Now, I suppose it’s technically possible that I would find a way to have fun if I were to attend one of my high school reunions too (assuming I could find out when and where it was happening, that is). After all, I’m a woman who tried to make chemotherapy fun. And while I would definitely choose going back to high school over going through cancer treatment again (wait, is that right? hmmm, tough one. hopefully hypothetical), High School Reunion falls somewhere under Root Canal on my list of things I would like to do over my summer vacation. This is, of course, at least partly because my sister and I did not go to the same high school. Even though we did. oh, you know what I mean.

I started high school in the suburban Midwestern town where I grew up. It was a big school, academically competitive, crowded. I knew a bunch of the kids in my classes from junior high, but most of the kids I had gone to elementary school with had dispersed into different groups, and I only saw them in the band room or the cafeteria. Which was fine, cause I hadn’t really gotten through that whole 6th Grade Girls Are Mean thing very gracefully and I was grateful for a chance to reinvent myself and make a new start. And I was working on that, and it was hard (as it often seems to be) and then my family moved to Texas. And I thought, as have many before me, well, why not? If I’m going to recreate myself it might as well be in Texas.

Even though we had lived quite happily for many years on a dead-end street within easy walking distance of the library, the town hall, the elementary school, and the Tastee-Freeze, my parents decided to use the move to Texas to pursue some of their dreams as well, and this included Living Out in the Country and Having Land. At this time, in Texas, those things were very possible but did not usually come attached to what most people would call Good Schools. The first place my parents wanted to buy was basically a ranch on a lake and it sounded perfect until they decided to call the local school and make sure we girls would be able to go to school there and still get into college. The conversation went something like this:

My mother: So, my daughter is a freshman but she is taking Honors Geometry. Would she be able to do this at your school?

School representative: We have geometry.

My mother: Oh, okay. Good. Well, my daughter is taking French I and hopes to be able to take four years of French. Does your school offer that? (I know, French! What was I thinking? ah, les folies de la jeunesse!)

School representative: We-ell. Now, we did have a Spanish teacher, at one time. But she died.

So my parents let go of their lakefront dream and bought House2, which was still a respectable distance from town and still on a sizable piece of land. And which was on the bus route for the schools in the biggest town in the county, which also happened to be the only town that had a high school big enough to have both a Varsity and a Junior Varsity football team. Which, and let’s be honest, was basically the whole reason they had a high school at all.

But they did have a French teacher and a Spanish teacher (though we later discovered that these were actually the same person, a native Spanish speaker who really, really liked French food) and they later added a teacher of German, which is what my sister took when she got to high school. And that turned out to be a good choice, because when the Spanish/French teacher died the school got a new Spanish teacher but not a French teacher and there I was with only two years of language on my transcript and no desire, as a junior, to start over in Spanish with a bunch of freshmen.

Who were not at all like the freshmen I had gone to school with in the Midwest. No way. Those kids, maybe because it was a much more urban setting, knew how to fly under the radar. They played it cool and kept things quiet. They caused trouble, for sure: we had gangs, and teen pregnancies, and a “game” played in the hallways called Open Chest that actually sent several kids to the emergency room. These Texas kids, though, were a whole other deal. They were rowdy. They would get up and wander around during class, try on each others’ hats, throw things out the windows to their friends in the quad. In geometry we had an ancient teacher who every Friday would write out a quiz on an a transparency and leave it up on the overhead projector for the first part of class. Every other Friday this kid named Trey (half the boys were named Trey) would walk into class, pick up the spray bottle kept on the stand under the projector, and spray water right onto the quiz. The teacher would rise up out of her chair, flapping her arms in fury, and Trey would escape her grasp and run out into the hall laughing.

He was in my Trig class the next year, though, so I’m pretty sure he passed Geometry. Everyone passed Trig cause it was taught by one of the football coaches, though not the same one who taught World History. Football players passed everything.

If I could have attended high school in Texas as an anthropologist of some sort and not as an aching, lonely, bored, irritated teenage girl, things probably would have gone a bit better for me (though I’m still not too sure I’d be invited to the reunions!). However, I was wandering the halls looking for connection and meaning and damn if those things weren’t hard to find. When I was a junior the high school moved into a brand new building (we had been going to the same school that most of my classmates’ parents had gone to, and I think it was haunted by small town kids from an earlier, less college-bound, time), and my sister started school as a freshman. By then I had more or less branded myself as a Loner and an Outcast, though I still had some friends in less windy corners. Being an honors student helped. So did being in band.

My sister was in band, too, and she and I looked so completely different from each other and had such a common last name that no one ever suspected we were related. This was how it happened that when some older girls took her under their wing and told her what she needed to know about high school, they actually pointed me out and said, “See that girl over there? Stay away from her. She’s weird.” And my sister, bless her heart, said, “Oh, yeah, her. SHE’S MY SISTER!”

After which nobody really fucked with her, either. Though when the time came for the big “voted most likely” weird ceremony my senior year, my sister was nominated “Most Popular Girl” in her class. Another reason why I suspect she is going to have a pretty good time at her reunion this weekend. (I was nominated “Most Scholarly” but I didn’t win. Maybe if they had called the category “Most Eager to Get the Hell out of Here so she Can go to College and Have Some Fun” I would have had a better chance.)

It used to drive me crazy when grown-ups would go out of their way to tell me that my high school years were supposed to be the best years of my life. Literally, crazy. More sensitive but still grown up people would acknowledge that I would probably do better at college, especially outside the Bible belt. That did turn out to be the case, and I have been to several college reunions already (SO MUCH FUN) and you better believe I keep my contact info updated with the college alumni office, even though they mostly use it to ask me for money and not to invite me to parties. But I’m a grown-up myself now, and I can have my own parties pretty much any time I want to, which is why, as I always suspected they would be, these years right now are the best of my life so far, and I have every reason to expect that they are going to keep on getting better and better.

However, if they ever want to offer up a recount of those Homecoming Queen votes, I would still like my chance to ride around the football field in a golf cart wearing a tiara. And I probably wouldn’t even insist on wearing the outfit I had picked out for the event: my mom’s prom dress, torn longjohns, and green hightops. Though it might be fun to get a tattoo of a girl dressed like that to commemorate the event as one of the best days of my life.


Thanks for use of the photo, originally uploaded to Flickr by Mad African!: (Broken Sword and protected under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.

Vendela the Viking and other Swedish Tales

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Outdoor Academy of Sweden – Ice Hotel

I used to be the kind of person (if this is a kind of person) who didn’t really think much about Sweden.

That, however, was a long time ago.

I started to think seriously about Sweden the same day I tried sushi for the first time, when I was in college. The way it came about was this: I danced (and flirted) with a very charming young man at a waltz party. Then I asked this young man out on a date, after which he revealed that he was gay, but also that he wanted to go out with me anyway, but not on a date. Up to this point, there is nothing Swedish (or, actually, unusual, at least for me) about this story.  Because I had a car, I picked the guy up at his apartment (he lived alone, off-campus, which was one of the things that would have made him such an awesome boyfriend) and he gave me a little gift that he had made for me. It was like a card, sort of, in that it was made of cardstock and there was an outside part that had my name written on it in fancy letters filled in with colored pencil. The inside part, when slipped out, turned out to be Sweden. By which I mean, he had drawn a picture of Sweden on a piece of cardstock, and colored it in, and cut it out, and written the word “Sweden” on it. It was actually quite lovely, though really very puzzling. When I expressed surprise at being given the country of Sweden, he seemed puzzled that I would  be surprised and explained simply that I seemed like a Sweden sort of person to him. Then we went to dinner, and he tricked me into eating raw fish, which I was sure I would not like at all but which of course turned out to be one of the loveliest and most wonderful things you can eat.

Time passed and we were friends for a while and then he graduated and I took a year off, and I lost touch with him and with many other Scorpio boys both gay and straight. But I never stopped eating sushi. And because he was so right about me and sushi, I had to wonder whether he also knew something about me and Sweden.

But I was busy trying to be an adult and start a career and find love and all that stuff, so I didn’t think about Sweden too much or too often.

Until my parents moved to Ireland. They were going to be there for two years, and they were going to pay for a trip for me to come visit them and do some traveling and exploring around those parts. See, I had never been overseas but my sister had been to England on a college trip. And in our family, fairness is important and it means that no kid gets something that the other kid doesn’t, and so they owed me. I didn’t go visit them the first year they were there, because I was so busy with the career-starting and the love-finding and also the giant-puppy-training, which was not even part of the original plan. And then my dad’s company closed their Dublin office and my parents got sent home a year early and they still owed me a trip but they weren’t in Ireland for me to visit anymore.

So then I realized that I could go anywhere I wanted. And, for reasons that I can’t remember now, because this was a long time ago, I decided that I wanted to go to London. And also I wanted to go to the Ice Hotel.

The Ice Hotel is a hotel made entirely out of ice. It’s in Sweden, and it’s only in the winter. In the spring it melts and then in the winter they build it again. To get there, you take the train to Kiruna, which is north of the Arctic Circle, and then you travel by dog sled 15 km or so to the hotel.  When you get there, you get to drink hot lemonade or other drinks that you order at a bar made entirely out of ice, and you get to sit on chairs made of ice and sleep wrapped in furs on a bed made of ice.

If reading the last paragraph did not make you want to go to the Ice Hotel yourself, I don’t know what to say. I spent a lot of time reading about the Ice Hotel and thinking about the Ice Hotel and talking about the Ice Hotel. Ice Hotel Ice Hotel Ice Hotel.

Strangely, I couldn’t really find anybody who wanted to go to the Ice Hotel with me. So I decided to go on my own.

I was planning this trip in the summer, in Austin, and it is hot here in the summer, and that may be part of the reason why the Ice Hotel appealed to me so much. Also, I was born on the summer solstice, but I have always been a night owl, and so the idea of spending long hours of darkness in northern Sweden on the winter solstice had a definite appeal for me. Also, it was 1999 and the last full moon of the millennium was going to be on December 21, my half-birthday and the winter solstice. How could I resist? I booked my reservation at the Ice Hotel seven months in advance. For the rest of the trip, I decided to fly to London, spend a week hanging about there, then fly to Stockholm, spend a night, and take the train up to Kiruna the next day. It is a 12-hour train ride from Stockholm to Kiruna; the train leaves in the evening and arrives in Kiruna in the morning, although morning is a funny thing to think about in a place where the sun won’t even come up.

It was a perfect plan, and when the time came I embarked on my trip with a little bit of fear and a whole lot of enthusiasm. I had a great time in London, staying in the Holland Park youth hostel, singing Christmas carols at St. Martin in the Fields and then enjoying mulled wine and mince pies in the cafe located in the crypt. I bought a pair of Doc Martens in the shop at Covent Garden and then gave myself terrible blisters wearing my new boots and walking all over the city. Up and down the steps of the underground stations, in and out of parks and shops and museums and churches. I had no schedule and no commitments and so I just did what I wanted all day every day. It was lovely. I went to the movies and to the observatory at Greenwich, I searched out the street with all the Indian restaurants and spent long cozy hours reading in pubs. Looking back now, after six and half years of motherhood, I can’t even imagine having that much freedom and independence.

And then I flew to Stockholm. I had prepared myself for this part of the trip by taking a Swedish class at UT Informal Classes. The class was taught by a very cute and idiosyncratic young American woman who had been an exchange student in Sweden in high school and was currently the only PhD student in the Swedish program at UT. She told us that Swedes have a very high opinion of their own country and that they will often say that “Sweden is just like America, only better.” She explained that Swedes are more physical and less verbal than Americans; so, for example, if a Swedish person finds that your cart is in their way at the grocery store, they will not say, “Ahem, ahem, excuse me,” like we might. They will not even step over, move your cart out of the way, and then push their own cart through. Oh, no. They will take their cart and they will RAM your cart with it. They mean no offense. They are simply being Swedish.

Also, in Sweden, it is very important to be self-sufficient. Therefore, it is considered quite rude and insulting to offer help to people. For example, if you see a young mother with three small children, a dog, a stroller, and four grocery bags struggling to get on the bus, you might think it would be polite and friendly to offer her a hand. In Texas, you would be right. In Sweden, you would be oh so very wrong. Way out of line. Astonishingly rude.

Also, in Sweden they have vowels that we don’t have. I learned how to pronounce most of them, and I learned how to say please, and thank you, and a few other things like that. And I learned that in Sweden high school is conducted in English so in most cases I would not be called upon to use any Swedish at all, which was good, because Swedish is hard and that class was short.

When I got to Sweden I learned a few other things. For example, if you are allergic to the species of juniper that we here in Texas call cedar, you probably should not go to Sweden in the winter time. Cedar Fever hit me as soon as I got off the plane, though it was so bad and so unexpected that it took me a few days to figure out what it was. Also, it is not so easy to get a train ticket from Stockholm to Kiruna the week before Christmas. I never expected that there would be so many people traveling north of the Arctic Circle at that time of year! But when I went to the train station, all the trains were full. The girl at the ticket counter explained that she could sell me a ticket, but I would have to stand (all night!) and there would be nowhere to put my backpack, so I would have to hold it in my arms (all night!). I stood there, shocked, blinking my red allergic eyes and wiping my runny nose, and I stared at her for so long that she finally said, in her crisp clear English, “I don’t know what you want to do.” I wanted to go to the Ice Hotel, is what I wanted to do, so I left the train station and went back to my youth hostel, which was in an old prison and where I slept in one of the cells, and I called the airline to see if I could fly to Kiruna instead. And they said they would sell me a ticket, but it would cost more than my whole trip, which I simply could not afford.

And so I did not go to the Ice Hotel.

And I spent a couple of days crying in my prison cell and trying to figure out what to do and when the desk clerk told me that I had to leave the hostel because they were closing for the season I gave up. I came home early, and instead of celebrating the solstice at the Ice Hotel and spending a gloriously independent Christmas all by myself in Stockholm I spent the next few days curled up on my parents’ couch and playing with my giant puppy, who was very glad to see me, in a way that no Swedish person had been.

And I have never been back to Sweden. Though I have been to IKEA many times, and with much better results.

And now I have a Swedish car, who is a big white Volvo station wagon, and who is named Vendela, which means “wanderer” or “Vandal” or something like that. It’s a Swedish name. And my family is very very safe inside this wonderful car, and we drive her to the chiropractor and all around town, and when the Vivid Girl and I go wandering through parking lots looking for our lovely car we call out, “oh Ven-DEH-la!” until we find her, and this makes us happy.

And once again it is summer in Austin, which is hot, and which means that the Vivid Girl is not in school and instead has wanted to spend all her time with me and I was going crazy because she was even following me into the bathroom and she would follow me when I took two steps into the laundry room to toss a towel into the basket and she would get in between me and the fridge when I opened the freezer to get out some ice and then finally I found something that would keep her busy for a few minutes at a time so I could catch my breath and gather my thoughts: the Swedish Chef, on youtube.

And tonight I finally got a chance to write because when I came home from my new book group the Vivid Girl was already asleep, even though we are so very close to the longest day of the year. And the book that got me out of the house tonight? The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which is, of course, Swedish.

Sweden. There’s something about it. I’m just not sure what it is.

Tack så mycket for use of the photo from flickr, originally uploaded by VisitSweden and protected under a creative commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license.

“Happy Birthday” IS a victory song

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Regardless of what I may think about the American Cancer Society and other “big box” cancer organizations, (read this essay if you didn’t know there was anything to think about) I have found myself very pleased to see the big ACS billboard in town that says “‘Happy Birthday’ is a victory song,” especially as I noticed this sign a few days before my actual birthday. I am now 39, two years older than I was when I was diagnosed with stage IIIc IBC, and at that time I didn’t know if I’d be here now. Also, at that time things had been stripped down to their barest elements, and everything in the future was completely black and white: I’d either be alive, or dead (or, possibly, dying). I couldn’t imagine that I would be alive, still healing, energetic enough to take my daughter swimming several days a week but still needing a nap on the weekends. I couldn’t imagine that I would have the stamina and energy to swim for an hour in Barton Springs but not the immune system strength to protect from bacteria in the water. My diagnosis was a huge disruptive obstacle and I couldn’t see past it at all.

Now I’m older and hopefully wiser and definitely more psyched to be here than I ever thought possible. AT one point in the early stages of my treatment I ran into an aquaintance at the toy store, where we were both shopping for presents for the same birthday party. I didn’t know this woman well, but felt that I knew her well enough to answer somewhat honestly when she asked, in a meaningful way, how I was doing. I said that I was tired, that treatment was hard, that I didn’t have the energy to get through the day, but that other than that, I was doing pretty well. She said brightly, “But it’s gotta make you love life, right?”

Well.

I can say now that cancer diagnosis and cancer treatment did not so much make me love life. Sometimes I felt guilty abou that, especially when I was afraid that I might not have much life left and didn’t want to spend what time I had in misery and fear. But cancer SURVIVORSHIP, now that’s different. There are some things about my life as a cancer survivor that really suck, and some that are just nuisances, but YES, by golly, surviving cancer sure as heck makes me love life.

It makes me love life so much that it’s sometimes scary. Because there is still that shadow circling around…. or maybe it is a flock of shadows, because there are the more likely scenarios (recurrence being statistically quite likely) and then there are the things that are not cancer but that could still cause my untimely death…. some of these are related to my cancer and its treatment (infection, for example, or heart damage caused by chemotherapy) and some of them are the random unexpected things that could happen to any of us at almost any time, but that we usually manage not to think about much. Car accident, you know, or seemingly minor head injury…. blood clot to the lung,.. hanta virus….swine flu… whatever.

One of the things that the cancer experience has left me with is a tiny little case of PTSD. This is pretty common among cancer survivors and so it was fairly predictable, but still it was something I couldn’t imagine living with, back when my only concern was whether I would get to live at all. So far, for me, it has mostly just meant that I am more aware of those circling shadows than I’ve ever been before. Though it has also made me a more difficult patient (for the first time in my life I am afraid of needles) and made it impossible for me to drink bottled water or any kind of icy drink out of a styrofoam cup. At least those last two are potentially better for the environment!

It has also left me with a poor memory, a weakened immune system, and a permanently damaged lymphatic system that requires lots of daily maintenance. I hope to post soon with pictures of the various garments, machines, and accessories that are required to keep me from swelling up in a painful and disabling way. (Won’t that be nice for you all?)

But this is a post about my recent birthday, and how glad I am that I got to have a birthday, and how much I hope to have many many more. And how I hope to enjoy them in good health and good spirits, and how I enjoy once again having a future that (though I am aware I really can’t see it at all) I can once again imagine in color and texture and light.

It makes me want to jump up and march around to some kind of fight song or victory song. The Notre Dame Fight Song being the one I know best of all, it’s the one that comes to mind first. I can hear it now:

We never stumble, we never fall

We take chemo infusions of wood alcohol

We’re the young adult cancer survivors

And we want to have more birthdays!

Or something like that, anyway.

on thin ice

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We haven’t done it yet, but I’m hoping that this year we will manage to do some outdoor ice skating at the Whole Foods downtown. My current plan has us there on Christmas Eve (would be convenient as I have to pick up a certain something at Book People right across the street). Here are the details, from the Whole Foods Calendar site:

Friday, November 28th through Sunday January 11th

Fourth Annual Ice Skating on the Plaza

10:00 am – 9:00 pm $10.00 includes rentals

The Holiday Season is here!  Bring the family out to Whole Foods Market for Austin’s only outdoor ice skating rink.  $10 a ticket – includes skate rental and 50 minutes on the ice.  Tickets are available for purchase an hour before desired skating session.

40 people maximum capacity on ice (50 during private party)

To reserve a private party, please call 512-542-2225

Regular Hours 10am – 9 pm

Special Holiday Hours:

Dec 24th – 10 – 7
Dec 25th – closed
Dec 31st – 10 – 7
Jan 1st – 10 – 8

Speaking of luminarias

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One of our freezers is full of old coffee cans, which in turn are full of water (now ice). Mr. B has plans to make some robot face luminarias following this method:

http://www.diynetwork.com/diy/ca_crafts_projects/article/0,2041,DIY_13721_2269907,00.html

Poor guy, I don’t know when he will ever get a chance to make them! I just hope the cans of ice have a shorter stay in the freezer than Vivi’s placenta (five years and counting…..)!

Luminarias

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One of the things I loved about Christmas time when I lived in New Mexico was the lighting of the luminarias. I just found out that there is a luminaria trail here in Austin, for two nights only, and tonight is the second night.

I haven’t found much about it online, but here is a post from the Austinist three years ago.

If you live south or west, apparently there may be a similar event at the Wildflower Center: (from KVUE)

Luminations
Dec 13-14
Holiday celebration includes more than 3,000 luminarias, twinkly lights and torches in the winter gardens. Enjoy music, crafts and a special menu at the cafe. Hours are 6 to 9 p.m. Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, 4801 La Crosse Ave.
AUSTIN
Call for info: (512) 232-0100
www.wildflower.org