Throw Me a Lifeline

Last weekend, a friend invited me for a belated birthday dinner and gave me a belated present--my very own life jacket! She was trying to help me get over my last traumatic kayak outing in which I tipped over, went under and struggled to get to shore, kayak in tow, in a life jacket that came up over my head and obscured my vision like an XL shell on an XS turtle. As a nonswimmer, it was right up there on the horror scale with The Perfect Storm. So now I have my own life jacket, and I might actually get back on the water again. But the real lifesaver for me has been friendship itself -- a life preserver that has kept me afloat in the stormy times of my life and helped me tread water when I was becalmed, dull, confused or stuck in place. The friend who was thoughtful enough to help me get over my fear of water, the friend I meet for mutual creative inspiration every Tuesday night, the old friend who shares her life with me in long-distance calls, the friend who is my right hand man, my bookclub friends, my walking friend, my soul-sister friend, the friend who knows all my secrets, the friends at work who have become family, my blogger friends, the high school friends who pop up in my life when I least expect it, the friends who cycle in and out of my life and always leave me richer ... my lifejacket friends.

You Are Here

I love the big maps in airports and shopping centers that have a star with a caption reading YOU ARE HERE. There are so few times in my life when I am absolutely sure I'm where I should be, but when I stand in front of one of those signs, I can stop holding my breath, working my worry, fighting existential confusion. Because someone has given me a solid message I can hang onto for a change. Not a sappy affirmation, a mantra I'll forget or an ego stroke from the Universe. For a brief moment, I am grounded. Like the pilots who overshot their destination due to "a loss of situational awareness" (otherwise known as fucking up), I am often adrift in space and time. I go the grocery and forget what I came to buy. I carry on a phone conversation while my mind is still on the novel I'm reading about 18th century time travelers. I wander into the kitchen and wonder what I went there to get, and when I can't remember, I settle for ice cream. There are so few times when I am solidly HERE: listening deeply to the person talking to me; not listening to TV while I'm working on the computer; enjoying the required time-out of a red light. Instead I am usually sending my anxiety ahead to the office while I'm still in the process of driving there or hopping from one experience to another in a split screen world. Like everyone I know, I've spent a lot of time being lost in my own life, but there are moments when I wish I could pull up a mental map and realize I AM HERE and it's wonderful.

Fridaville Friday Night

Unfortunately, this is not where I've been spending the last week. No, I've been in my house for 5 DAYS AND NIGHTS battling some interplanetary virus that I swear was released when NASA drove a bus into the moon. While it was kicking my ass, I watched more bad TV than I imagined possible, ate weird food foraged from my kitchen (tomato soup with walnuts on the side), slept on the couch with all the lights on, and in the process, lost 3 pounds (!). All in all, an eventful week. Tonight I have a Z-Pak, Mucinex, codeine cough syrup, a frozen pizza and a People Magazine -- another rockin' Friday in AARPville. (Come to think of it, though, I've known some young Deadheads who would think a frozen pizza and hydrocodone cough syrup spelled P-A-R-T-Y.) But when I think what I could be doing on a Friday night if I weren't an invalid, I have to admit the alternatives aren't all that different:

1. Go to a downtown art opening where everyone is 350% hipper than I am. The men will be wearing porkpie hats, and the women will have on odd, velvet swagged dresses picked up for a song at vintage shops. The dresses will have a patina of Jazz Age authenticity that I mistake for dirt. I will know no one and will wander around with a steno pad pretending to take notes. The art students passing drinks will be dressed as famous paintings. I will probably spill red wine on the boy in Andy Warhol's soup can.

2. Move on to the bar near my office and pretend to be totally unaware of all the meat market men out past their expiration date, because I am oh so absorbed in writing deep thoughts in my journal and looking supercilious and literate. No one hits on me, and I pretend to be relieved.

3. Still at the bar, I check my watch repeatedly and surreptitiously call my gay husband and beg him to meet me at the bar and pretend we had a prearranged date to discuss...something or other. Since he just put a frozen pizza in the oven, it's a no-go. Leave a big tip because I want the bartender to like me.

4. Casually drop by a married couple's house at dinner time (married people generally have regular meal times) ostensibly to replace a lemon I once borrowed, planning to hang around til they're forced to invite me to dinner. Find they are leaving for a church oyster roast. They urge me to join them, but I am afraid of being burned as a witch.

5. Go home, put a frozen pizza in the oven, sip leftover cough syrup in a bottle I find in the bottom of my sock drawer while I wait for dinner to cook. Wait, sip, wait. Burn pizza, fall asleep on couch with lights on while I watch Dateline NBC. Dream I gain 3 pounds being force fed tomato soup.

Name Calling

I've been hearing about Croning ceremonies a lot recently (I guess I'm eligible now), and I just don't want to be one. Why do men celebrate their midlife crises by buying a sports car, but we're supposed to be rebirthed as wise women and revered elders, who just coincidentally are also invisible in this culture? Crones might be central figures in fairy tales, but for an archetype to have continuing mythic power, doesn't it have to be relevant to the way we live now?Otherwise we're just pretending to each other. If you're lucky enough to gain some power at that age like a Madeleine Albright or Hillary, it's usually at the price of being sexless. You put on your pantsuits and collect brooches and never give off a whiff of musk, just old lady lavender. But if you dare to speak truth to power or speak too loudly, the other side of cronedom is invoked--the hag, the witch, the malicious old woman. Not so men. The older and grayer, the sexier and more sought after. And they're certainly not chasing crones their own age. Maybe women who are involved in the Crone movement and menopause workshops hope to change the way our culture regards older women. I admire them for that, but I don't want to be a Crone any more than I want to be a Cougar. I hope as I age that I'll find more to me than I ever imagined, an identity that doesn't require either workshopping or bedhopping to discover.

Namaste

I have a hard time asking for help, because I don't want to be a bother or cause an inconvenience. I'd rather do things for myself so that I don't owe anyone or I'm not obligated. I don't think I became independent by choice. First my dad skipped out on my brothers and me, and then my mother checked out, making sure we had everything we needed to survive except for compliments, physical affection or laughs. Soon after, I found a boyfriend who was like my parents in the sense that I was just an extra in his drama. Add to that his penchant for beating me like a drum, and I stopped expecting much. Hoping, always hoping, but too proud and at the same time, too unworthy, to ask for help or favors unless I scrupulously paid them back. This week I've been sick with some sort of trash flu. Along with praying that I would someday be able to breathe through both nostrils again, I obsessed about tall glasses of cold fresh-squeezed orange juice. When I was blowing my nose or using the neti pot, I had visions of that OJ in a tall skinny glass etched with leaves that I use for Champagne. It symbolized wellness, sunlight, health, Vitamin C and Vitamin Hope. So I had to ask a friend to go to the grocery for me. An ordinary favor, not out of her way, and yet how embarrassed I was to need help. Today I ran out of soup and had to turn to another friend. Why was it so hard to ask for help from my loyal, tenderhearted friends? I could ask my therapist about this, but it seems pretty simple: In the process of being frozen out by my family, I gradually froze over. Old habits that once protected us can end up turning into strait jackets. I don't want that to happen to me, but I know it's easier to recognize patterns than it is to break them. I'm going to make a start by simply being grateful when my friend drops off the soup, instead of trying to figure out the cost of a can of soup with tax added in and apologizing over and over for putting him to all this trouble. I'll put my palms together, bow and say thank you. For teaching me to receive.

New Improved Me!

Can you keep a secret? I just had a facelift! I took some self-portraits with my new Canon Powershot SX10, and the result looked like a mug shot taken of Phil Spector on a really bad crazy psycho-killer day. My neck and jaw wrinkles are quickly morphing into crevices, attesting to my disregard of sunscreen and moisturizer back when I was young and immortal and sure I'd never start looking like my mother. Hahaha, silly me. So I simply blurred those neck wrinkles with the Enhance tool in iPhoto. Instead of 66, I think I easily look 63 now. And it entailed no side effects of blood, swelling, bruising or possible death that surgery might include. I'm so shallow that I always feel pissed when I look at all the bloggers who post wonderful pix of their gorgeous selves. (Are they secretly Enhancing, too?!) But I want to look at myself full on and not wish I were a younger, hipper, thinner version of myself who lives in Brooklyn. I want to Enhance my oddities instead of smoothing them out, Enhance the attention I pay to every passing day, Enhance my ability to love, Enhance my commitment to taking a spiritual journey on this planet. If only there were a Mac tool for all that.

Sunday Solitaire

When the marsh begins to change color in the fall and it's a chilly Sunday and there are candles flickering on the coffee table while I read and the wind shakes the porch chimes all day, I might get a little homesick. Not for a particular place so much as for things barely remembered, the whatever that's always just over the next hill or beyond a distant stand of trees. Maybe my soul is homesick, longing for something it can't name, something sensed but unseen. Sometimes when I'm meditating, a piece of music like Satie's Gymnopedie No 3 or Ayub Ogada's Kothbiro (which sounds like a vast lonely blue sky seen through a tall window) almost puts me in that place without a name. But then the timer chime sounds or I start wondering about what to have for dinner, and then I land back in my life with a gentle thud. Still me, still earthbound, still happy to be here. But always looking for home.