My Heart Still Looks Like This

On my way to have drinks tonight with a friend whose significant other left her flat, I wondered why our hearts just keep splitting open like green wood even though we're supposedly dry tinder now. For my own part, even though I have recently had a bone density test, EKG, shingles vaccine, pneumonia shot, flu shot, colonoscopy and long-term care insurance discussions, I am still the same 16 year old girl who lay awake every night with my heart pounding over the possibility of love standing underneath my bedroom window wearing a khaki windbreaker and a scar on the side of his face. And I hope I always will be.

Return to Sender

Daily Om tells me to grow my soul. Daily Bite tells me how to save the planet. Daily Candy incites me to buy, buy, buy. Daily Kabbalah Tuneup warns me to ward off negative thoughts. The Daily Beast keeps me up to date on celebrities and politics in a shouting sort of way. To round off the morning, The Writer's Almanac sends me a poem a day, and Notes from the Universe sends a daily "personal" message geared just to me--and their other 150,000 other subscribers. Inspirational, environmental or just plain eye candy -- I'm not sure all of these daily messages add that much to my life. In fact, sometimes it feels like I'm being pecked to death by virtual ducks. In Ted Mooney's 1981 novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets, some of the characters would drop in their tracks, stricken by a malady called "information sickness," in which the collection of information led to an insatiable hunger for yet more information. I believe the symptoms included bleeding from the ears. When I open my email, I understand how that could happen. And it doesn't help just to delete the messages unread -- their very arrival makes me feel like I'm behind in my homework before I even start my day. So I'm going to have to decide if my world will be rocked if I unsubscribe and try to take care of my own soul, be my own cheerleader, find my own Amazing Finds, start writing my own little poems again and remember to put out the recycling every other week without benefit of a digital elbow in the ribs. It might be like pushing off into uncharted territory since I barely remember life before the Daily Nag, but I'm sure it will leave a little more of the daily silence that ideas need in order to take root.

The Farmer's Daughter

I'm trying to reduce my carbon footprint by buying locally grown produce. I grew up eating tomatoes my grandfather grew, rhubarb from the backyard, corn fresh from the farm, cucumbers straight off the vine. When I left for the big city, supermarkets became my farm, and I got used to apples from New Zealand or edamame from China. Now we've come full circle, and I subscribe to a local farm co-op that delivers a bag of fresh vegetables every week. Unfortunately, my life with vegetables resembles the "I Love Lucy" episode in the candy factory. I'm cooking as fast as I can, but I just can't keep up with the supply. Toward the end of the week, I get frantic and start throwing everything into a massive stir fry just to use it up. Not to mention that I often don't recognize what comes in my bag. Napa Cabbage? Never heard of it in Kentucky. Those chiles -- are they mild or hot? Evidently they're hot, because I rubbed my nose after handling and chopping them, and now it's on fire. Really--my nose has gone to Hell! Can you hear me scream from there? I know it's important to go green, but (please don't despise me!) I hate LED lights (the twinkle lights on my porch are magical), those curly light bulbs (you can't dim or 3-way them), pleather shoes (don't take my Fryes away), reading the paper online (I want ink on my fingers) and stainless steel water bottles (I feel like I'm using a WWI canteen). It's like going green means being on a perpetual diet -- yeah, it's good for you, but so is Pete Seeger and sometimes I want a little rock and roll. But if I have to be on a green diet, I would love to see big business voluntarily reduce their carbon footprint or Japan give up slaughtering whales or Massey Coal just say no to mountaintop removal in Appalachia. But no, we little people press on -- composting in our backyards, recycling our magazines, eating grass-fed beef or going vegan, while the biggest offenders on the planet continue their greedy, grasping way of life and our elected officials take money from their lobbyists. How about a peaceful, powerful revolution?

Rain, Rain, Come Again

Our weather recently has been a combination of fierce showers, drifting smoky clouds, a promise of peach sunsets and glimpses of Tiffany-box blue sky in between -- all in the space of a day. Living in a place that doesn't have dramatic seasonal changes, I love this kind of meteorological drama. Wild weather shakes me out of my predictable routine, my comfortable rut. I like dashing through downpours, carrying my orange umbrella or wearing my silver raincoat that makes me look like a Space Woman. It reminds me of being a kid and playing outside in the rain, of not having completed that alienation between self and nature that takes makes us as grownups impatient with traffic jams during snowstorms, power outages caused by lightning, the inconvenience of getting our hair wet. Watching the rain clean the streets and sidewalks, gush out of gutters, drip from the eaves, bless the bamboo trees in my backyard makes me feel like I've had an old-fashioned baptism of immersion. One that washes away the accumulated grime and grit of dailiness and adultiness, that makes me feel like a green girl again.

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.