Velvet Verbosity

It was the first week of April and I was busy.  Busy with a flooded basement, a job, two teenagers, and the what-nots of life.   On this particular evening, I was going up and down the basement stairs dumping buckets of water I had sucked up with the shop-vac.  I noticed I had an unusual pain in my right thigh, the kind of pain that made me think, “that’s weird, did I pull a muscle or something”, but not the kind of pain that stopped me from what I was doing.  That night I had a fitful sleep interrupted by the itching and pain in my right thigh, but I was too exhausted and never conscious enough to sit up and investigate.  I wouldn’t find the tick until the next morning when I was getting dressed and my hand brushed against the little parasite attached to the back of my thigh as I distractedly scratched at the itchy area.

Let me interrupt this story to tell you what torture is.  Torture is knowing that something is attached to you that doesn’t belong there and having to put your pants on OVER that parasitic something and DRIVE to the pharmacy with that thing STILL attached underneath your clothing to buy tweezers and tea tree oil and then STAND IN LINE behind all the elderlies who are the only people at the pharmacy at such an early hour.  Yes, if you want to make me confess to any crime then just HINT at making me repeat this scenario.  No way in hell I would make it through intact a second time round.

I applied the tea tree oil, waited several secons, and then pulled the tick off without too much event.  I placed the tick on a tissue and carefully inspected it, not unlike a new mother, counting legs and ensuring all parts were there and in order.  Once satisfied, I wrapped it up in the tissue and put the tissue in a Ziploc.

My whole right leg was sore from just below the knee up to my upper thigh.  The back of my leg was on fire and punctuated visually by a sizable fiery red circle surrounding where the tick had been.  I couldn’t help wonder at how something so tiny could wreak such havoc on an organism thousands of times its size.  I also couldn’t help being petrified.  It was terrifyingly clear that my body was reacting in a big way to a very small invasion.

I was later sufficiently calmed down by a talk with someone who had experience with Lyme, so I flushed the tick and went on with my day.  And the next day, and the day after that I went on with life, by which time the swelling in my leg had diminished.  I mostly forgot about the tick bite until a few days later when I came down with a fever out of the blue and with virtually no other symptoms except a weird fatigue that was more like weakness than tiredness.  I also had a bit of a sore neck, and a sore throat.  I was burning up, and by coincidence had lunch with a friend and his brother. The brother had been diagnosed with Lyme two years prior and spent a long, expensive and exhausting battle fighting his Lyme.  He told me I needed to go to the doc stat, and he made no apologies for being harsh with me in his recommendations.

I didn’t have a doctor of my own since I hadn’t needed one in years and I was starting to feel so sick I decided to go to the ER.  The doctor I saw didn’t feel a Lyme test would show anything conclusive since it was so early, but the symptoms were sufficient enough that he wanted to put me on antibiotics.  He prescribed two weeks of Doxycycline.  Over the next few days before the antibiotic kicked in I woud spike sudden fevers that left me extremely weak.  Then the antibiotic seemed to start taking effect…

…to be continued…

With love,

Yes, I said a bad word. In the title even! Sue me. It’s 4:00 a.m. and I’m not amused. There was a time in my life when I was oddly proud of being a “night owl”, but those days are gone and I’m ready to call it what it is. Insomnia. When I was at Smith, insomnia came in handy for all those papers I waited til the last minute to write. Back then it was ok to show up for my first class in yoga pants and a t-shirt sporting 5 lb bags under each eye. It helped that I spent hours planning my class schedule around my sleep schedule as much as around my degree requirements. This meant that once I booted the kids out the front door to catch the school bus, I could go back to sleep for an hour or two before I had to roll out of bed, throw on shoes, and head to class.

Now? Now I have a teenager that I have to wake up two hours earlier for, just so I can lean up against her door trying to catch snippets of sleep in between banging on her door and responding to her muffles with, “Alba, it’s not hard, just drag yourself out of that bed before I do.” I’m such a liar. It IS hard to drag yourself out of bed in the morning when saddled with my genes, and no way I’m dragging her out of bed for real because I’M TOO TIRED.

Now? Now I’m supposed to be at work at a normal work time. In theory. Truth is, I plan my career around my sleep schedule the same way I used to plan my classes around it. My dream job has nothing to do with pay scale, benefits, or wanting to be part of a dynamic team. My dream job offers “flexibility”, aka the possibility of sleeping during daylight hours while everyone else is working because during normal sleeping hours, I’m laying in bed wide awake.

Now? Now I’m getting really tired of the insomnia game. I want to sleep like regular folk. I want to wake up at a decent hour like regular folk. I don’t want the only people I can call up when I’m awake to be halfway across the world because apparently my brain thinks I live in a different time zone.

And you know what’s responsible for this whole mess? My suprachiasmatic nucleus, that’s what. If any one of you can figure out how to reset my clock, I’ll let you use that term at cocktail parties. It’s fun to say and people will think you’re totally smart. You can thank me later.

I just heard that Paul Newman died of cancer yesterday.  I’m not much of a Hollywood fan, but Paul Newman had infiltrated my psyche in other ways.   All those foods.  Seriously, I almost felt like I knew him.  After all, he smiled at me in the grocery store, rode around town with me in my car, and hung out in my kitchen on numerous occasions.

RIP Paul Newman, spaghetti has never been the same since I met you.

I turned 38 over the weekend.  Some part of me wanted to be offended by this event, wanted to be worried and panicked and sorry for myself.  That part was a tiny part implanted in me by the culture that celebrates only youth.  I tried to embrace it, tried a couple of times to look wounded when I had to tell people my new age, tried to gasp at the prospect, but my heart wasn’t in it.  Truth is, I feel like, so what?  I can still shake it like nobody’s business, my memory falters here and there but I can juggle more things in my brain than the average bear, and sure there’s some wrinkles coming on, but I’m not going to stand in front of a mirror stressing about how my dating pool is evaporating.  Dating is overrated anyway.  My soul-mate, when I meet him again, is going to think my wrinkles are painfully adorable.

I pull up to the intersection where the bike path suddenly disappears.  Out of the shade and the quiet the path dumps out on a four lane trafficked road lined with strip malls, fast food joints, and gas stations.  A gaggle of cyclists wait with me at the light for the cross signal.  The father asks me, “So where the heck is the bike trail from here?”.  I eye his family.  The seven year old just barely off her training wheels with her pink glitter sport bike.  The 10 year old on a wide three wheeled bike that seems fit for an 80 year old.  I wonder how she’s going to get it through the narrow dirt path I’ll have to show them.  How she’ll get it over the train tracks and down the wooden pallets.  The mother who, contrary to Gary Larson cartoons, does not want to take directions from someone else thank you very much.  The 12 year old who blends into the background with her normal bike.

“You can follow me”, I say.   They don’t follow me, they surround me like a cloud and we swarm across the busy intersection, and into the parking lot.  They fan out on either side of me in migration pattern.  We part after the tracks.

The sun beams down and I’m flying, ripping through air.  A cat sits watching me approach and when I call out to her she blinks yellow eyes at me in greeting, lifting her nose as I pass.

Under the bridge a young man naps, a handkerchief tucked into the back pocket of his jeans, his bike tucked in next to him like a lover.  I stop a little way on to adjust my seat and passing cyclists call out in the code of the trail, “you ok?”; “Tools?”, “Need anything?”.  I smile and wave them on.

Yesterday at work, a little ant crawled into my keyboard. One of those tiny sugar ants that you can’t despise until there are hundreds of them crawling over a drop of juice on the counter.

I waited for him to come out, but he never did, and now as I type I wonder what letter is beating down on his tiny little corpse.

I received this email tonight (along with another 30 or so impersonal emails):

Kindly be informed that Late Engr. Lukas Jonas Würth made you a beneficiary
(bequested USD$20,100,000.00) in his WILL. Reply to this email:
barr.adamuk@______.com for estate execution. Legal partner take note.

Signed: K. A. Adam (Esq.)

I barely glanced at it before deleting it. There was a time when I would have first felt a surge of excitement. The gears in my brain would have been set into motion looking for connections, some way that this inheritance could possibly be true. Back then I still would have dismissed it after a few minutes of analyzing, but I long for that part of me that had the ability to believe it might be possible. That part of me that still believed in fairy tale endings. That part of me that believed in the goodness of the world. That part of me that believed the future was wide open and pliable to my wishes and demands. That part of me that saw adventure around the next corner. That part of me that believed in soul mates and real life heroes. If only I were still that younger, more naive version of myself.

Sometimes life throws you a curve ball, and if you’re not ready you it shoots right past you leaving you empty handed. It stinks, but you can catch the next one with some practice.

Sometimes life throws you a fast ball and the inexperienced has to dodge or be hit while the experienced can catch it but may walk away with a bruise.

Sometimes life becomes a pitching machine gone haywire and no amount experience will avoid hits and misses in rapid succession.

Sometimes life throws the ball when you thought the game was over and turned your back.

The last few weeks have brought a series of escalating revelations, good and bad, and I feel like I’m standing on the catcher’s mound without pads, without a glove, and a dazed sheen in my eyes. I had to call a time out even though the pitcher still wants to throw. I’ve had to walk away and go sit in the dugout while the game plays on. I don’t know when I’ll be ready to play again, or if I even want to play the same game by the same rules. I don’t know if I like the players. All I do know is that time outs are good for adults sometimes too.

I miss libraries. There are few times in my life that I miss, probably because there have been many hard times, but I loved when my children were young and I stayed home with them. I love the term, “stay at home mom”, as though “mom” needs any sort of qualifier. During those years that I “stayed at home”, I and my two children did little staying home. We did a lot of biking, walking, park visiting, people visiting, exploration of the world, and lots and lots of library visits. We were library junkies. Or rather, I was a library junkie and I dragged my kids along to get my fix.

Even though I was a young mother, and quite adamant before having children that I would NEVER have children, I found motherhood almost entirely blissful. Particularly all those hours when it was just the three of us, wandering around our life in a seemingly close to perfect symbiosis. Each day stretched out before us with infinite potential. I don’t judge it, but I’ve never understood parents who put their children in front of the television and walk away for hours at a time. I suppose it’s so they can keep the house clean. But for what? In the end, what real purpose will that have served? You bet our dishes were going to wait when there were probably caterpillars turning into butterflies right outside our door and right that very second. Life was all around us, and I didn’t want to miss a second of living through the eyes of my children as they discovered it. I was so in love with them.

So tonight, when I walked into a public library for the first time in three years, I was washed over with that melancholy nostalgia we feel when life hasn’t gone as we thought it would and we are suddenly reminded of a time that was full of blind hope. Back then, I was so sure that by sharing the world with my children that it was all going to turn out well for them, if not downright perfect. I would feel confident and satisfied as I tucked them each under one arm and read story after story out loud, complete with animated character voices. Everything, back then, was going to be alright. All those days at the library, curled in corners and chairs and beanbags and nooks reading was all the evidence I needed that life was kind and good.

As I walked through the children’s section of the library looking for my, now teenaged, son who was supposed to be there somewhere for community service to make amends for some trouble he got tangled up in, I couldn’t escape those waves of bittersweet sadness and longing. How did everything go wrong? How could it have? Why wasn’t I strong enough for my children, to keep them forever safe, forever in my lap with a book, forever ok?

When I found him finally, I wanted to be happy and carefree and beam that mother-love smile onto his face, but instead my face crumpled into haggard worry and I berated him for being late, for taking chances he shouldn’t, for making me worry, and for not being responsible. Who is this other mother that keeps eclipsing the mother I was and still want to be? How could I know then to let the dishes go, but now I lecture and nag and obsess and worry? How could I know then to not interfere with the unfolding of these two little sentient beings, but now I’ve let the hammer of cultural pressure knock me into senselessness as I hear that other mother tell them what they’ve got to be? How could I have so much grace, patience, strength and compassion back then, and now be reduced to tears, or yelling, or pleading, at the drop of a hat or a forgotten chore?

I’m going back to the library tomorrow, and every day after that until I find her again. The mother I was and still want to be. I know she’s there somewhere.

In 1999 I read a small passage that would both dramatically and subtly forever alter my life’s path. In a small class at a local community college, I opened a textbook on World Religions and stared The Four Noble Truths in the face. They are, according to that text, as follows:

1. All life is suffering
2. The origin of suffering
3. The possibility of cessation of suffering
4. The eight-fold path - the “way out”

That is my translation as I remember it. I won’t expand on the meanings of those truths here because you didn’t come here for a lesson in my religion. You came here for a story. If you want to know more about the Four Noble Truths, I can point you in the direction of some very good books, or you can just use trusty old Google.

When I read the first Noble Truth, “all life is suffering”, I had what many would call an “enlightenment” experience. Reading those words, I felt all confusion instantly fall away and I was left with a clear “360 degree” mind. I felt like I could see the interrelatedness of everything past, present, and future. Yet to try to look at any one thing meant I would lose the clarity. It was so swift, so complete, and so…fleeting. For the first time in my life, I felt I had read something true. Truly true. Indisputable, clear, swift and complete. It was freeing, and joyful to read that “all life is suffering”.

“Strange,” you might think. How could such grim, damning words be translated into an experience of joy and freedom? At the moment I read the phrase, I couldn’t have possibly articulated why. Now I can try. It seems that questioning the meaning of our existence has been the curse of human consciousness, and what we seek in that meaning is comfort. We want to know that there is a reason for our being here; both the large “our” and the individual “our”. In short, we want to know that our suffering has some point. We also want to find comfort in thinking there is a reward for that suffering. The rewards we seek are the meaning we seek. The rewards we seek are joy, pleasure, and a final resting spot where there is no more suffering.

Thus, many of humanity’s great philosophies and religions gave us rules of what kind of suffering we ought to endure, and how, and then carefully laid out what our rewards would be in the here and now, and in the after life. I had struggled with all of these traditions, yet was never able to exactly pinpoint the illusions I couldn’t align to. To read that “all life is suffering” was freeing to me. It meant that I didn’t need to escape anything. I didn’t need to try anything. There was no judgement, no reason for judgement, and no “one” to judge. Life just simply was. Life was suffering, and the source of that suffering was that we were always trying to find a way out of that suffering.

It wasn’t grim to me. It was joyful. It seemed that I could suddenly see, and hear, and feel, and smell, and touch, and experience everything fully. I didn’t need a storyline. I didn’t need a reason. I didn’t need to interpret and determine whether my experience was something I wanted or didn’t want. It just was what it was. I had found the way out of suffering by just being.

That was then, this is now, and if you’re interested, I’ll tell you some more stories about my journey on the Buddhist path.