In which I get all Gratitudinal

I see a lot of Facebook posts in November about things people are grateful for. In the spirit of the season, but also as a reminder to myself of all the many blessings life has bestowed upon me, I'll compose a top ten list of my own.

It's important that I take stock of these things. As I mentioned in my last post, I've had my eyes opened for me a bit, in a good way, regarding the state of my life. John's statement to me was not an immediate epiphany, but I've been gradually internalizing it over the intervening weeks. I make a point now, every day, of enjoying my life.  If I'm sitting on the sofa drinking coffee in the morning, or walking the trail to the Museum or grocery shopping, I look around and I think "this is good." It has really enhanced my awareness of how very fortunate I am, and how, most importantly, undamaged I am. I am whole.

This past weekend Grayson and I had a visit from the ex's father and his wife. I hadn't seen them in three years. At first it seemed strange, and I expected it to be awkward; but after the initial few minutes it wasn't, really. And I was a little surprised at how comfortable I felt with them in the absence of the ex. I'd never spent time with them alone, and yet here I was chatting as if they were my family.  And I suppose in a way they are.  I considered them so for 10 years, it makes sense. I even realized how sad it had made me before when I thought they had simply written me off and taken up with the ex's babymomma as if I had never been there.

This is something I'm finding is simply not true. That whole feeling of having been set back, or having lost time. I've been on the path the whole time. I was never really set back. My direction was changed, and not in a very pleasant way.  But I've been making my life, step by step, all along. That seems so obvious and simple now, but it's like entering a bright clearing for me. Oh wow, there's a life here!

So, what am I grateful for?

• I'm grateful for my wonderful son, who daily makes me glad I live in the world. He is funny and kind and gentle and clever and loving. I see myself in him, and I see wonderful things that I could never dream of, as well.  He is wholly himself, and yet I feel so close to him, utterly at one sometimes. The fact of him in my life is a constant source of joy and amazement. I wonder all the time how this whole person was born literally of my flesh, grown inside my own body to enter the world unique. And boy, is he unique. I'm grateful for his Ministry of Silly Walks walks, his goofy dancing, his endless stories about things he saw on YouTube videos, and the sweetness of his soft hand in mine. He may wear the same size shoe as me now, and he's growing up too fast,  but I'm grateful for every scrap of little boy left to me, and grateful in advance for the gangly, geeky teenager he's likely to become soon. 

• I'm grateful for John, who tells me daily that he loves me, and shows me that he does in a thousand ways large and small. I'm grateful to him for loving me, genuinely, just the way I am; but also for being his sun-shiney self, a person who takes pleasure from little things and is unafraid to be who he is. Sometimes I am recalcitrant, and sometimes I retreat a bit, having learned to doubt love. But John always remains, like a large, lovable, and patient dog, waiting for me to stop being silly and come play with him. Never remonstrating with me, never exasperated. He is re-teaching me love by example. Hope he doesn't mind being compared to a dog. Dogs are the most honest and loving creatures on the planet.

• I'm grateful for my amazing parents, who are there for me in more ways than I could enumerate. My mom, whose advice is always spot on. My dad, who makes me laugh, loves me to the point of being almost annoying, and loves to talk with me. I feel my heart lighten whenever I'm with them. It will be good to spend time with them this holiday weekend. 

• I'm grateful for the beautiful state of Arkansas for being my new home. I love the trees and rocks and water. I love the Ozark spirit of acceptance and contentment I've found here in Bentonville. I'm grateful every day I drive along the forested highway, or look out my windows at work at the beautiful trees. I'm so very glad to be here.

• I'm grateful for the peace of mind I'm coming into now, and the fresh lease I have on life. I'm so glad to be coming out of a long dark period and finally experiencing and enjoying my life directly again. I feel as if an enormous weight has been lifted from me. I'm grateful to John for lifting the scales from my eyes. 

• I'm grateful to Alice Walton for founding the museum that brought me here and for her spirit of giving. I'm also grateful for the first-year bonus that allowed me to make ends meet for the first time since our vacation in August. Because of that generous gift, I may now be able to get back on my financial feet and start saving and paying off bills and such. It came at just the right time, and she didn't have to do that. I'm thankful.

• I'm grateful for a job that allows me to write for a living for the first time, and that allows me to learn new stuff. I'm also grateful that it has allowed me to slow down a bit and that I no longer have to be in charge of anything. It has taken some time, but I'm settling into this idea of not being in charge. It suits me, I think.

• I'm grateful to the few friends I cherish. I've never been one to make a lot of friends, and I think I abuse them a little, in that I'm not very good at staying in touch. I never remember anyone's birthday or anything like that. I'm grateful to them for being my friend, anyway, not writing me off, and always being willing to pick up wherever we left off. You know who you are.

• I'm grateful for my little house. I don't own it, but I'm fond of it. I found it fortuitously, and my landlords are good people.  Grayson loves it, it has a very nice back yard that blooms everywhere in the spring, and it's comfortable. I'm glad we live there.

• I'm really really grateful for the allergist who got Grayson started taking his shots. He feels so much better now, and can breathe through both sides of his nose at once and sleep with his mouth closed ... no small accomplishments.  I am grateful every time I see him doing one of those things.

• I'm grateful for the health and long lives of my dog family. That may seem sort of silly, but I love my  irls, and I am sometimes fearful that something will happen to them. It would break my heart to lose them unexpectedly, though I know eventually they will go to that big dog park in the sky. So I'm grateful that they are here and whole and healthy. i'm grateful for their happy, tail-wagging, face-slobbering greeting every day when I get home. I'm grateful to John for loving them as much as I do.

Now here are a few less profound things I'm grateful for

• I'm grateful that I don't live in the same state as my ex anymore and I never have to bump into him anywhere and rarely have to go to his house.
• I'm grateful for all the good books in the world, and I hope I get as much time as possible to read them.
• I'm ever so grateful for red wine. 
• I'm grateful that I'm old enough not to have to wear the latest ridiculous fashions, go to dance clubs, or watch reality TV.
• I'm grateful to Bob for reintroducing me to vinyl and to the joys of mid-century lounge music.
• I'm truly grateful to the voters of Benton county who passed the law allowing the sale of alcohol.  
• I'm grateful I realized that the pain in my hips was caused by wearing high heels.  Now I no longer have pain in my hips and I no longer have to wear high heels.  Bonus. 

That's all.  There are actually a shit-ton of other little gratitudes I could write down, but I'm boring even myself at this juncture, so I won't.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Post Traumatic Birth Disorder

So back in May, I mentioned here that the X's girlfriend was pregnant.  At the time this not-surprising fact just washed over me as a sort of theoretical thing.  Last weekend, however, it became all too real. She gave birth while my son was there for the weekend.

They were planning a home birth, which bothered me from the get-go.  I don't know that I'm opposed to home birth, per se.  But I did not like the idea of my boy being in the house where a baby was being born without benefit of anesthetic or modern hospital equipment and fully trained medical staff (yes, I know midwives are very capable, yes, women have been having babies for thousands of years.  But they and the babies have also been dying in labor for thousands of years, so that argument doesn't wash with me).  Grayson was all excited about the prospect of being present when his baby brother entered the world, but he has no idea what's involved.  It's all fun and games until the screaming starts.

I hoped that since he is only with his dad two weekends out of every month, chances were that I would get lucky and the baby would arrive when he wasn't there. No such luck.  He was there, alright, from 3 a.m. contractions to 3 p.m. rush to the hospital to access...oh, what was it I was talking about?  That's right, modern hospital equipment, anesthesia, and a professionally trained medical staff.  She delivered by C-section some hours later, but by that time my parents had come to collect my son and keep him with them until it was all over, for which I am unbelievably grateful.

However, the process was traumatic.  Not so much for him, but for me.  For 12 hours after they left for the hospital, I heard nothing. By 10:30 the next morning, I feared the worst and was trying to imagine how I would deal with breaking bad news to my boy.  I was calling every phone number I could think of, including the girlfriend's mother, leaving messages begging for information.

Of course, I realize that as the ex-wife, I'm low on the notification list, if I'm on it at all, which probably I'm not. But Grayson hadn't heard anything, either, and though he seemed unfazed by this, he didn't know all the potential ramifications.  (It also turned out that he had arranged it with his dad that if the baby was born after, say, ten p.m., said dad would not call immediately, but would wait until the morning to give G the news.  This bit they both failed, however, to impart to me or my family.)

The upshot is that my son now has a baby (half) brother named Truman.  G's thrilled beyond words.  And I'm happy for him.  He's wanted a baby brother since he was about five, and has always loved babies. He's of the perfect age to adore this child without any cause for jealousy or annoyance.  And this Truman kid just hit the jackpot of big brothers, though he doesn't know that yet.

What's weird about it, though, is that the baby is such a big deal in Grayson's life, but so separate from mine.  So far, far away from me. His existence is conversation with Grayson, photographs. Barely the brush of a butterfly's wing on my life.  And yet... so weighty.

Never before have I been so separate from my son. Always we have shared all the major parts of his life almost completely.  This, though, is utterly apart from our life together, and something I can't and, frankly, don't want to share, however ignoble or petty that may sound.

In truth, the baby's been the catalyst for all kinds of painful and disturbing feelings regarding my own chances of ever conceiving another child (slim to none) and my own track record in providing a baby brother or sister for my son (0 for 1).  And, regardless of whether or not I actually would like to have a second baby at this juncture in my life (I'm sure I don't, as the child would be only four when I turned fifty, and still under drinking age when I hit retirement)... it does cause a certain sense of loss and failure. A sense of chasing death into middle age. Intimations, as Mark Rothko said, of mortality.

Normally I don't feel old. I joke about it, but I don't really feel it.  Usually I feel as if I'm stuck just under some sort of glass ceiling of adulthood, as if I never quite graduated to Grown Up.  This baby, however,  ambushed me with the realization that I likely am too old for a baby, and that in truth, I probably don't even want one. Not really. What I want for my life is to get on to doing the next thing, not to go back and do the same thing over again.

So that made me think. What is the next thing?  John pointed out that far from being damaged or on hold, my life is actually pretty damned good, and I have to concur.  I have a lot going for me, despite all my bitterness and pissing and moaning about how unfair it all is.  Maybe I've been so busy looking back angrily at the path not taken that I have failed to fully appreciate the excitement of the path I'm actually on.  I've been thinking of my current life as some sort of detour, grousing about how "far behind" I am, and what it will take to some "get back" to some previous state.  To what, exactly, I now wonder?  Look around you, sweetheart, this is the way the path goes.  Instead of feeling like I've lost the trail somehow, I should be checking out the scenery.

I'm fairly thick.  No "personal growth" lesson I ever learn seems to come easily.  So I had a pretty rough weekend, with all of this washing over me and forcing me to sink or swim in my own anger and bitterness, to wrestle my inner pity-party into submission long enough to think and observe.

It has been a teachable moment. That much is certain.  I'm not sure yet what the lesson is.  But it certainly has my attention.

Homes

I rescued a turtle on the way to work yesterday morning.  Well... I think I rescued it.  Lets say it was walking toward the verge of a busy road and I picked it up and carried it across said busy road and into the field on the other side.  If the turtle meant to cross the road, then I quite possibly rescued it from a crushing fate.  If, however, it was just going for a stroll along the roadside, with every intention of returning whence it came soon... then I abducted it and stranded it in a faraway foreign place.

My experience with turtles on the move is that they tend to continue in a straight line in the direction they are headed. This time of year they all seem to get some dogged idea in their head that they must mogate... THIS way... and off they go. So my sense of the situation is that he/she/it would have continued directly into harms way without my valiant intervention.

That was my little bit of heroism for the day.

Now, talking about homes... I have been thinking a lot about homes lately.

After the debacle of my house-hunt this winter, I have tried not to think too much about buying a house.  Everything happens for a reason, right?  (Okay, I don't really believe that, but it's something of a comfort when you are handed a big disappointment)... so I'm probably meant to find the Perfect Home sometime Later.

However, last week my current landlord called to let me know that they are planning on selling the house I'm presently renting, and would I be interested in buying?

Well, yes and no.  Yes, if the price is right, it's a great little house.  But then if I was able to choose from several available houses, would I necessarily choose this one?  Maybe not. It has a terrific back yard full of mature trees, but it's a little small (no room for a pool or trampoline, really), and it would be nice to have a spacious second living area...

What is it about owning a home?  Why do I feel so driven to own one?  If I purchase the house I'm living in tonight, tomorrow will be exactly as it would have been otherwise. And yet there's something very appealing about the idea of owning it... or any house. I want to come home to something that is mine.  I want to be able to put my time, energy and sweat into it and turn it into the true home I feel I'm longing for.

In truth, I suppose my home is where my family is:  my boy, my dogs... I suppose, like the turtle, I carry my "home" with me.  I think what I'm hungry for is stability and family.  It's one of the things that I love about John. He feels permanent. He feels like family. That's a rare and wonderful thing. Family means you are loved just the way you are. Family means you can let it all hang out. Family means someone has your back, will work at your side, support you when you're down, celebrate with you and commiserate with you. Family means your safe and taken care of and, most importantly, you are never ever ever alone. I have so missed that feeling.

For nearly four years Grayson has been my family. Yes, I have parents and extended family who love and support me. But my core every-day family was just me and G. It felt like a tight little knot of love. It felt like we were protecting ourselves from the world and muddling by as best we could. We didn't let anyone else in.

Now John has strolled into our lives and we opened up for him like a flower.  It wasn't just me, it was Grayson, too.  He also seems to feel at home and comfortable in John's presence. We all snuggle in bed together on Sunday mornings when John stays over.

John's my Peter Pan, I guess.  Do you remember?  In Peter Pan, Mrs. Darling has a kiss in the corner of her mouth that Mr. Darling has tried and tried to get, ever since he met her, without success.

"Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner. 

 The way Mr. Darling won her was this: the many gentlemen who had been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her, and they all ran to her house to propose to her except Mr. Darling, who took a cab and nipped in first, and so he got her. He got all of her, except the innermost box and the kiss. He never knew about the box, and in time he gave up trying for the kiss."

But then at the end, when Peter brings Wendy home and flies away,  "He took Mrs. Darling's kiss with him. The kiss that had been for no one else, Peter took quite easily. Funny. But she seemed satisfied."

I think John got my kiss.
And that's what home is really about.

Life with Dogs

A website I follow, "Life with Dogs," sent out an all-call for freelance writers today and I threw my hat in the ring (along with 15,000 others, no doubt).  Here's what I sent. 

Grayson comforts Roxy.

Roxy is a 65-pound Labrador mix my son and I acquired three years ago as a foster dog. We accepted her sight unseen from a family who lost their home and had had a difficult time finding a foster placement for her. Very soon after taking her in, we came to know why.

If left outside, Roxy flings herself against the door, howling piteously and continuously until she is let in. She can eat six tennis balls in a day, after which she regurgitates the pieces onto the carpet. She compulsively chews holes in blankets, clothing, upholstery…anything made of fabric…and passes them through her digestive system to deposit in colorful piles in the yard. When anxious, which is most of the time, Roxy emits a persistent whine that is almost, but not quite, outside the range of human hearing. Roxy has an allergy which causes her hair to fall out and her skin to turn scrofulous. Roxy claws holes in window screens and devours whole dinners off the table in the blink of an eye.

Roxy is a handful.

Friends ask us: why do we keep her? Why not return her, or drop her off at the pound and be done?

But it is not that simple. The good dogs are easy to foster, easy to find homes for, easy to love. Roxy is maddening, but dogs like Roxy need someone to see past the neuroses to the good dog inside. She needs us. And we’re here. Holey blankets and all.   


Read how we got Roxy here.
Read some of our early frustrations with Roxy here.
Read more about Roxy's neuroses here.
And more here.
And a really sad bit here
Then you can laugh at how annoying she is here.

Wonderful Places

Last weekend Grayson, John and I took a short day-trip to Devil's Den to do a bit of walkabout. John tells me I can't call it hiking if there's a trail and you don't carry a backpack, or something like that. I consider it hiking if I'm outside walking in the woods for its own sake, but I suppose it's arguable that if John can do the entire trail in flip-flops it doesn't really count as "hiking."

Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable hour and a half's walking, with a fair amount of uphilling, so it counts in my book.

My point is that the location is pretty remarkable. It's an area full of crevices and crevice-caves. The ground has tipped and cracked open to create these wonderfully spooky cracks in the rocks. They breathe cold air and have a slightly sinister air.  No wonder the area is called Devil's Den. It does seem as if it was broken open by some monstrous creature.

I loved it. I wanted to crawl down in all the crevices and explore, but the caves are closed to help protect resident bats from White Nose Syndrome, and access to the crevices was restricted, as well. I'm too much of a rule follower to walk far past a sign that says "Closed" or "Do Not Enter."

It did spark the imagination, though, and make me think about how excited I would have been to have visited that place as a child. I loved caves from early childhood, and had books about caves. I had mental lists of the caves I wanted to visit, and dreamed of spelunking someday.  I was completely taken with the idea of these vast, dark spaces being carved out beneath our feet, and was in love with the photos of dripstone formations I saw in books.

The crevices at Devil's Den sort of reminded me of that childhood fascination. Made me wish I was a kid again and could spend the day roaming those rocks, living some complicated fantasy in my mind.

Grayson was not so taken with them. In fact, they creeped him out. The cool air coming out of the darkness sent him right back out into the light. I'd never get him into a truly wild cave, I think.  Maybe if I take him to a few commercial caves, he'll become less skittish.

I've only been in wild caves twice in my life.  Once when I was 16 and my mom and I visited Carlsbad, we took a little side trip to tour "New Cave," a wild cave up on a canyon wall not far from Carlsbad. It was a bit of a hike up the trail with the ranger, but the cave itself wasn't very challenging. There was just one area where we had to use a rope to help haul ourselves up over a slippery slope: an experience my mother has still not let me forget I put her through.

My next caving experience was much more of a contact sport. I had the privilege of going into a fairly large cave in northeast Oklahoma with Nick, a paleontologist friend of mine to look for bat fossils.  It was pretty wonderful.  I loved wearing the headlamp and exploring the tunnels. Nick showed me an old bear den, and took me into another part of the cave where there was a partial skeleton of a prehistoric cave bear, still lying where it had died some 10,000 years ago or more.  To get there, we had to pass through a very small crack for a good twenty feet or so.  The crack was so narrow that we had to crawl on our stomachs, sort of army-crawling / scrambling along as best we could. I had to clip my backpack to my shoe and drag it behind me, and in some places the ceiling was so low I had to turn my head to the side and squirm along blindly to get through.

I was pleased to get through this area without any notable sensation of panic or claustrophobia, but I wouldn't want to do it for much longer than we did. It was uncomfortable, for one thing, and I didn't like not knowing how far I'd have to keep going before I could get out.  I would certainly not want to enter a crack like that without knowing what was on the other side and being sure I could get upright again soon.

The bear skeleton was worth it, though. I had seen lots of fossils in the museum, of course. But I had never seen something still lying where it had lay for centuries. I imagine it's there still: lying in the damp and dark, with the minerals in the earth around it slowly transforming the bone to rock. It's an awesome feeling, difficult to describe.

All of that came back to me there in Devil's Den, as well as times I'd played among huge glacial boulders in an aspen grove in Colorado when I was six. There was that same sense of magic and mystery to the rock outcrops in Devil's Den:  a rocky bowl at the top of a hill called the Devil's Theatre, huge slabs of rock leaning against one another like an enormous stone house of cards or a tumbled Stonehenge. Awesome.

It's places like this that make me love my adopted home state. I'm enough of a prairie girl to always love the big skies and scrub forests of Oklahoma, but I find my true spiritual home amid forest, rocks and water. It always fills my heart with a great sense of wonder and peace, to walk among the trees. The forest has always been my church of choice, a sacred place for me. It's good to have it near me.

Vacation

Last summer, G and I were scheduled to take a week's vacation in Galveston. Turned out that I got hired by Crystal Bridges and had to move that week, and so our trip was cancelled.

It was an eventful summer. There were a lot of changes, and I felt bad that so much had been imposed on Grayson without his consent. It turns out that the move was a good one for both of us, and G has no regrets about leaving Oklahoma, but I still felt bad about the loss of our special trip together, so I swore to myself that I would make it up to him.  I reserved our rooms for this summer back in the fall.

Honestly, I think the trip is as much for me as for him -- or more so.  I recognize in my boy signs that he is growing up, skirting adolescence... and I sense that our time together is growing short. Of course, I'll always be his Mom, and of course he'll be living with me for many years ahead. But my boy will not be a little boy much longer. In truth, he's changing already. I wanted to take a special vacation together - just us - while he still thinks I'm the cat's pajamas and will still hold my hand and sit in my lap.

Granted, he's a bit big to be in my lap. But he still climbs in there every day, just to be held and to give and receive love in the way only a mom and her boy can do.

So it was important that this be the summer we take that vacation. In September my boy will be twelve, teetering on the edge of teenagerhood. Already he is taller than my shoulder. Next summer, on the cusp of thirteen... who knows?

So I maxed out a credit card and emptied our bank account and we went. 22 hours together in the car. Six days in Galveston on the top floor of a B class hotel on the beach with a tiny little balcony and a nice pool. It was glorious.

I knew I had done the right thing when we finally arrived at the long bridge that crosses to Galveston Island. Grayson was as excited as a squirrel, squealing in anticipation and peering out the windows for his first glimpse of ocean. And then there it was:  the warm bathwaters of the mighty Gulf of Mexico, stretched out before us like a promise we had waited a whole year to fulfill.


He hardly let me get our luggage carried in before he was rummaging for his bathing suit and hustling me out the door, down the steps and across the road to the beach.  And that moment, when his pale white feet hit the sand and the warm waves hit him... my heart leapt and my eyes filled with tears. I wanted this so much for my boy and me.

We dived into the waves and played in the surf. We bobbed on the swells out past the breakers and tiptoed out... further... further.... further... to see how far we could go out into the ocean before we couldn't touch bottom.  Turns out it's a long way.  The jetties that punctuate the beachline every few hundred yards serve to gather up the silt and keep the shipping channels clear, so there's a long reach of shallow sandy bottom. We could go far enough out that, even with my toes still touching, I was not comfortable going any further. I'm not afraid of the sea, but I have a keen sensation that it could positively care less about me, and I should watch my Ps and Qs in its presence.

The waves were warm. Too warm, in truth.  This late in the season, the Gulf feels like a warm cup of tea. But it was wonderful to feel the mighty lift and  pull of the ocean again and to taste the salt water and look out over that never ending horizon. Blue on blue on blue until it meets the sky.

We hadn't seen the ocean in four years, when we spent a day at Cocoa Beach in Florida as part of a family DisneyWorld trip back shortly before his dad and I were divorced.

I won't claim that there weren't moments of frustration during this trip.  I developed a bad toothache on day two and had to find a dentist in Galveston to look at it (he found nothing wrong and suggested ibuprofen, but at least he didn't charge me for the xray). And 22 hours in a car is a lot for anyone. But overall it was a joy. A delight. We visited two aquariums, two butterfly pavilions and the super cool new paleontology exhibits at the Houston Natural History museum, where we both geeked out in a big way.  We ate pizza and chips and cotton candy. We bought souvenirs and had strangers take our picture and we went to bed some nights with sand in our hair.

We went to the beach almost every day.  Grayson found two crabs and we saw two jellyfish. We watched the brown pelicans diving for fish and watched fish leaping out of the water to escape something from below. We got lost and had to find creative ways of getting back on track, during which we were chased by four farm dogs and saw two deer, a coyote, two turtles, a donkey and a flock of chickens on the roadside.

We ran across a wonderful old derelict drive-in movie theatre somewhere in southeastern Oklahoma along the Indian Highway (Home of Big foot), that I tried to find again on the way back, but never could.  Grayson said it was okay because we'd seen it and we had the pictures in our minds. And we do.

I don't care what it cost, it was one of the best times of my life.  I so loved spending time with my son, just finding things to be amazed by and enjoying the novelty of everything. I have lots of pictures, and lots more pictures in my mind of this wonderful six days of true summer vacation with my favorite person in the whole, wide, world.

Why I love the BBC

I was watching Masterpiece Mystery with Grayson last night and I realized one of the reasons I love the BBC. There were several women in the cast of this particular episode. And some of them who were playing adults over the age of 45 were actually adults over the age of 45.  And looked it. The women were grown-ups. The men were un-sexy. And yet the characters were still endearing, interesting and likeable.  Despite not being 22 and 15 pounds underweight.

American television is horrifying. Take, for example, the terrific BBC show "Being Human." The Americans tried to do a knock off and it was terrible.  I got through one episode. Not even one whole episode.  In the BBC version, the characters were all good looking enough, but they were also very real, warm, interesting, an dressed like people. In the American version, they were all Abercrombie and Fitch models who were too busy posing to be even a little bit interesting. I didn't believe they were actually human, much less vampires and werewolves pretending to be human.  A stop-motion film using mannequins would have been more convincing.

I'm ranting for a reason. I realized that when I watch BBC television, I feel better about myself. Why? Because I'm looking at images of interesting, real-looking 40-something women who don't look like super models. American TV is depressing. Even the actors who really ARE 400-something look like they're 25. Or they look like Darra Torres.  I know I'm supposed to cheer for Darra Torres because she's 45 or something and still has an unbelievably strong bod.  But statistically speaking, women like Darra Torres are as common as little green men. I'm tired of being told I should aspire to be like her.  Or like any of the super-thin, hard-faced women on television representing my generation.

The Brits have got it right, I think. Why not represent women the way we are?  Funny, smart, interesting, quirky, thin, fat, chunky, drooping about the jowls or boobs or whatever. The people in our lives love us for who we are, not what we look like. And isn't that what makes a good character?  Characters are not just empty suits with good cheekbones!

I say that though I have been doggedly hitting the gym, trying to lift my ass off the backs of my knees in time for our trip to Galveston. I don't really think I'm going to make any improvement in how I actually look in a bathing suit. I just wish I could feel better about it.  I just want to not walk along the beach thinking about the way I look. I want... I most sincerely want ...to not care.

There's a joke I heard years ago that I still think is funny.  "When I was twenty-five I worried about what everyone was thinking about me. When I was forty-five I didn't give a damn what anyone was thinking about me... and when I was sixty-five I realized noone was thinking about me anyway."  I'd like to truly get to that point where I don't give a damn. And yet when I look in the mirror (only when I really have to, mind you, like when I'm plucking my eyebrows or putting on makeup), the first thing I see is all the stuff that isn't quite in the same position it was five years ago. Things are, quite literally, heading south. My jawline has softened, I've got a spare chin. My triceps are just the sacks I used to keep my triceps in.

If there's any consolation, I find I care less and less about my ass. That used to be the big issue (pardon the double meaning) with me. What is my ass doing?  Now that I've developed a spare tire, my ass no longer has pride of place. Now I think "Dear god, what is going on with my stomach!"  I don't have time to worry about my ass, I've got jowls to think about!

Most days I just shrug my shoulders and think "fuck it." But I realize I can't keep doing that indefinitely. I do still have to engage in basic maintenance, or I will turn into Jabba the Hut. So I go to the gym. I huff and sweat through half the step aerobic workout and then drag myself off to let my heartrate return to a safe level while I do lunges and weight-machines. It's good for me. I may never be the tight twenty-something I once was (well, okay, semi-was), but at least I won't be a crooked old woman.

I'll be a strong, sassy, eccentric old woman, I hope. I hope I'm unrepentant, profane, irreverent, outspoken and peculiar old woman. I will certainly have earned the right by that time. And if I'm going to be all of those things, I need to care at least a little about what's going on with my body.  At least enough to keep it from going to hell.

Upbeat. Downbeat.

I've got an upbeat half and a downbeat half of this post.  I suppose I should start with the downbeat, to finish on a happier note.

Last night we had a terrific evening display of heat lightning. John and I sat on the back patio in the close, breathless summer night and watched the lightning flash across the sky. Each flash illuminated a different layer of clouds that seemed to swirl overhead in a great spiral. We hoped for rain, but of course none came. 

I dreamed dark dreams of conflict and frustration, and woke to John gently laying his hand on my shoulder to remind me that I needed to take him to work before 7.  Honestly, I was glad to get up, to escape the dreams, which left a sort of pall over my mind, though I couldn't remember them specifically.  Before I had quite shaken off the dreams, John told me about the theater shootings in Colorado last night.

We both just sat there on the patio, shaking our heads and looking up at the sky and the trees. So peaceful there. Full of sunlight and birdsong and the busy bossiness of Kobi strutting around the yard. It's hard to come to grips with something so violent and stupid and senseless.  Among the dead, a six year old child. Among the wounded, a three-month old baby.... I've been a bit somber all day.

Add to this the news I received earlier this week that a friend of mine's brother was killed by stray gunfire from a gang shooting. He was standing inside a Best Buy store in Tulsa, with his ten-year-old daughter.  The horror of that leaves me cold still.  What that poor little girl went through, and will carry with her for the rest of her life.  She was just a year younger than Grayson. It strangles me. There are no words for that grief.

On a happier note, however...


I've been much more content at work the past couple of weeks and I realized recently what the cause of that contentment was.  I've been learning things.

The past week I've been engaged in several writing projects that required research and/or interviews into areas hitherto unknown. I've researched several paintings for an article I was writing, and did background research on an artist, Max Ferguson, whom I later did an hour-long interview with by phone. He was in Israel, which was cool, and he gave a nice, friendly interview.  I get nervous when I do artist interviews. I'm always afraid I'm going to say something really stupid, since I'm no art historian or art expert of any kind. But I'm assiduous about my background research, I write down tons of questions in advance, and then I do my best to channel NPR's Terri Gross when the time comes to pick up the phone. Once we get started it's usually okay, but I still sweat through the whole thing.

A high point of this week for me was the privilege of shadowing a pair of conservators who have been visiting the museum all week to do some first aid on a few of the paintings in our collection. I've seen natural history conservation, of course, but I knew only a very little bit about art conservation, so it was interesting to  get to hang around and ask questions.  I got to see them work on a painting that was more than 200 years old, and saw them administer a number of treatments, from simple surface cleaning to in-painting of cracks and little bits of lost paint to more in-depth things like applying adhesives to secure paint that had come loose from its canvas.  All of it was incredibly focused, close, and repetitive work.  I don't know how either of them has any eyesight at all. But they were easy-paced and patient and the tedium of the tasks didn't seem to phase them at all.  It was a pleasure to engage them in conversation as they worked. I learned all kinds of things.

And that seems to be key.  I enjoy writing, of course. That's what I'm here for. But I think I get the greatest pleasure out of gathering information prior to the writing. I'm learning things. My brain sort of lights up. It's like the old Robert Louis Stevenson poem:  "The world is so full of a number of things. I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

On the Joys and Sorrows of Summer

I got a new haircut.  I love getting new haircuts. I wish I could grow my hair out and get a new cut every week. Sometimes I hate them, but mostly I'm pretty happy with a new style. I have a terrific hairdresser now in Bentonville.  She cuts my hair with a straight razor, and really does a great job.  This is a transitional cut, as I grow it out again.  I'm always either cutting it off or growing it out. I never stay with a style for very long. It's boring. 

Still getting used to the new glasses, too.  It gets a little easier, finding the sweet spot to look through for various distances, but it still irks me. I just want to look, not look for looking, if you know what I mean. 

I saw on the news that this entire region is in one of the worst droughts in history, complete with exploding hay bales in Oklahoma.  Frankly, in Oklahoma, drought is so much a way of life that we should really call every non-drought year a "rainy," But the news is troubling. It's hot.  Hot and dry. And unlikely to change any time soon. I also read that more people are beginning to believe in Global Warming due to the crazy weather patterns we've had this year, all over the world. Well, good.  If it gets people to listen to science, I'm behind it. 

Despite the brutal heat, I'm still a fan of summer. I love the lazy drone of cicadas on a summer afternoon, when it's hot enough that you're totally justified in lying still with a book in a cool room. I love hitting the surface of a cool pool on a blazing summer afternoon, or walking the spring-fed river with a cocktail in my hand. I love hearing the tree frogs at night, and I love fresh peppers and tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden. I'm less crazy about mowing in the heat, or moving (which we did last year in 110 degrees), or sitting outside in a dead calm, feeling like the sky is pressing down on you like a hot blanket (which we did on the fourth of July this year at the park, waiting for the fireworks to start: see photo below). 

Nevertheless, summer goes by too quickly for me. Already it is mid-July and I haven't done much of the stuff I wanted to do:  wanted to float the Buffalo River, seek out some great Arkansas waterfalls, cook out (no grill, sadly), camp... but the heat really puts a damper on any outdoor activity. Likely there won't be enough water in some of the rivers to make the waterfalls worth viewing, and doing anything outside without immediate access to cold water is not happening. 

Another thing that may not be happening is the week at Galveston that I was planning on with G.  There have been unexpected expenses that make it ill advisable to spend money on travel.  And yet I can't give up the idea. Soon, maybe as soon as next summer, my boy will be too adolescent to want to travel with his mom.  He'll be twelve in September, nearly thirteen by next summer... I really want to get this special time with him while there's still some little boy left. I will do everything in my power to make that trip happen. A few days of sea and sand will make up for a lot of other stuff we haven't been able to do. 

He's been gone so much. I suppose I should get used to it in the summers, so he can spend extended time with his dad.  I suppose I should be grateful that his dad wants to spend that kind of time with him. But I miss him, and I want to do special stuff with him in the summer... and I haven't really. He's been in day camps and classes and fun stuff like that when he's with his dad, but I haven't found anything similar for him here. I fear he's bored. 

On the other hand, I remember being bored in the summer, and I took no damage from it. I stayed up late watching old movies, spent hours at the pool or the library, watched a lot of bad TV (my mom and I got sucked into some dreadful 1970s soap opera one year when I was ten or eleven), and read and read and read. I still remember those lazy days fondly, so maybe it won't leave him emotionally scarred to be at home with the dogs, the computer and the TV for parts of the summer. 

I just learned that the Perseid meteor shower is August 11, a Saturday night, conveniently.  So I will plan for us to be out in the country somewhere that evening to take advantage of the dark Arkansas sky.  When the moon eclipsed last year, I woke Grayson up at 3 a.m. to come out and see it.  He was suitably impressed.  We've tried a few times to view meteor showers, but either we don't see any because we're in town, or else I fall asleep and miss the peak, or else I blow it off.  This year I mean to see it, just to add it to my list of Things I Did With My Kid this Summer. So I can say I did something. 

Here's what we've done so far:

River walking.  

This is on Sugar Creek in Bella Vista.  It's spring-fed and COLD. 

 Fireworks igniting and watching.  (The Bentonville fireworks show was excellent, despite the brutal heat.  We went with John and his sister Rian, and were well fortified with cocktails.)

First Friday on the Bentonville Downtown Square. Grayson loves the bungee jumper.  Last First Friday, however, one of the bungees stretched several feet unexpectedly and dropped him a bit.  Fortunately, I didn't see this, it probably would have given me a heart attack.  G was undamaged, and says it won't deter him from jumping again. 

We've also gone swimming, roller skating and seen movies. I guess it's not so bad. We find ways to keep ourselves entertained. 

This two weeks, of course, I'm living with John again.  It's a quiet joy to have him home with me. We don't do much besides cook and watch television and hang out. But it's so comfortable, and comforting to wake up with him and go to bed with him. I miss him when Grayson comes home.  So I guess I'm always missing someone!  

Typical.  Chronically disappointed. 

Pigeon.

I had an appointment with the optometrist lately who told me it was time for bifocals. I can't say I was surprised, as I have been using off-the-rack readers to read with when I was wearing my contact lenses for over a year now.  However, I was surprised because up to now I've felt like I could read fine when not wearing my lenses.  Apparently that's no longer the case. So I now have progressive, lineless bifocals.

I can't say I'm crazy about them.

I don't know if it's being obliged to wear glasses again after more than ten years in contact lenses, or the bifocals themselves that bother me. For one thing, judging from the pain in my skull, it appears the temples are wearing grooves in the bone at the back of my ears. I remember suffering an adjustment period to new glasses in the past, but this seems extreme. For another thing, though there is no line on my bifocals, there is a "sweet spot" for each range of vision, and it's not always right in front of your eyes. For reading, it's easy, because I'm looking down.  For distance vision it's relatively easy, because I look straight ahead. But it's that in-between range that has me bobbing my head up and down like one of those drinking birds. When I look at you I'm likely to make several small adjustments to my head, looking for that magic place where your face is actually in focus. It gives me something of the aspect of a nervous bird.  So much so that Grayson told me he was going to start introducing me as "My Mom... the pigeon."

One of my coworkers informed me he'd never seen me being so agreeable before, as I now constantly appear to be nodding my head. Ha freakin' ha ha. Very funny.

I assure myself that I'll get used to it. I'll learn to adjust automatically, and won't be bothered by the vaguely out-of-focus peripheral areas. I just have to stick with it.  But the jury remains decidedly out.

John loves the new glasses.  He's always said he likes me in glasses, but he also said that he would choose the blackest, ugliest frames for me if he had the choice, to repell any potential rivals.  Not that he has any, the dear man. So now I"m wondering, does he like me in glasses because he thinks I look good, or because I look bad? Or perhaps because he has some weird librarian fetish that has yet to reveal itself?  Unknown.

For myself, I'm not crazy about the look.  The frames seem to square my face off too much.  The technician who fitted me for them had a lot to say about my choice.  I tried on pair after pair and she'd just say "No.  Too big for your face." She seemed to know what she was talking about, so I listened to her. I also felt sort of rushed in my choice, and ended up taking the ones she said were "geek chic," but she thought I could "pull it off."  So I'm pulling. I'm not sure if it's coming off or not.

I suppose Geek Chic is apropos for someone who sits at a computer all day writing about art. But I'm not sure if I want to look the part all the time. I wish I still had contacts I could use for a little variety, but I can't afford both, so glasses it is.

I haven't written in a little while about being in love.  I thought, jeez, nobody really wants to keep hearing about that, I'll give it a rest. But I don't want anyone to think it's not still happening.


I've gotten better at it.  I'm able to walk and talk and go to work and more or less function in the world now, while still being in love. It helps that John has essentially moved in with me while my boy is with his dad in Oklahoma. Having him with me during pretty much all my non-work hours helps keep the obsession factor under control.


I was nervous about cohabiting with John. I haven't lived with a man since I was married and, well, you know how that turned out...


I've long had a theory, as stated here, that domesticity ruins a man... that they begin to take you for granted the moment you move in together, and you end up being the House Mother, handling all the cooking, cleaning and overall household management...and resenting it.  But maybe, just maybe, that's not always true.


John has these regular routines of tidying up, putting things away... which is way more than I can say for myself. I admit sometimes his buzzing about when I get home from work can make me a bit nervy. I'm generally a drop-on-the-sofa-with-a-glass-of-wine type person immediately upon arriving home.  Chores have to wait until I've got that first cocktail into me. However, John has had a surprisingly positive influence. I've been falling into the pattern:  taking a few minutes each day to clean things up a bit; putting things in the dishwasher instead of dropping them in the sink, that sort of thing.  I'm sure it will all go to hell the moment G gets home and John goes back to his apartment.  But it's working fine for now.


The dogs seem to have settled in with him, as well. Fortunately he doesn't have any problem sharing his sofa space or the bed with a dog or two:  Kobi, who habitually burrows under the covers to lie near our feet, and Roxy who sometimes climbs up and hogs most or all of the foot of the bed and eventually has to be shoved off.  Flower, fortunately, has chosen the chair as her bedtime spot.


Flower has also taken it upon herself to personally tend to John's shoes every day when he gets home from workt. When he walks in the door, he always takes off his shoes -- covered it kitchen grease from the restaurant -- and leaves them on a throw-rug so they don't get black grease all over the carpet.  Flower meets him at the door, and is sometimes licking his shoes before he can even get them off.  She then lies down and spends the next 10 to 15 minutes thoroughly and lovingly licking every bit of grease off of his shoes. This gave us a great deal of amusement until we left her unattended this week and she chewed a hole right through the sole of one of them.  Whoops.


Meanwhile, despite the cozy domesticity of shacking up with John, I'm beginning to go into deep withdrawal for my son. I knew this long separation would be hard, but the first couple of weeks were mitigated somewhat by having John around full-time. Then we drove to Oklahoma and I got to spend a few hours with G before we drove him to camp, and it was good to see him and talk to him, but in some ways it just made me miss him more.


I was completely unsure about having children when I got pregnant with Grayson. It was a sort of deliberate accident, and I remember being utterly terrified when I found out I was actually going to have a baby.  Babies were not my thing, and I didn't know how to talk to children. I spent the early months of my pregnancy being in a state of complete terror.


Then he was born and my heart turned completely inside out. I had no concept of the kind of love I was capable of feeling.  I was completely and totally bought and paid for. My sense of self, of love, of what is important in life, was irreversibly changed.  It frankly unnerved the ex. Later, when things started to go bad for us, he admitted that he essentially began his disconnection from me with the birth of our son.  I hear that's fairly common.


Anyway, my point being... my relationship with my boy continues to amaze and delight me. I love watching him grow up, I enjoy his humor and his company. I am more completely myself with him than I had ever been with anyone until recently when I met John.  And I realize that I feel a little hole in my heart when Grayson is not around. Even when I know he is happy and healthy at camp or with his dad or whatever, I am diminished by his absence. I'm sad. And when he's with me I feel complete, like all of me is there.


Now I begin to wonder if, when Grayson returns, I'll begin to feel John's absence that way. Well, we'll find out soon.  He's home again in three days. I can't wait!  I'm missing him so much.  I try to IM or Skype with him during the day, so we can communicate, and that helps. But there's no substitute for just having him home.  Where he belongs.


T minus three days and counting...

In Which I Realize My Limitations

I've had an epiphany.  A real Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus freakin' revelation.  You want to hear it?  Of course you do.

I am incredibly. Out of Shape.

Wow.  Really.  No, I'm not kidding.  It is absolutely true. I know this because I had a revelation.  It was yesterday. At the gym. In a step-aerobics class.

First of all, some backstory:
When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, I was a step-aerobic queen.  I went to a high-intensity class three times a week and I dominated it.  I raised my step to the highest setting, and I went hell-bent-for-leather the whole 55-minute class-period.  I was so hard-core that (bear with me, this was in the nineties, remember)  I even had a thong leotard.  Yeah, that's right.  A thong. (We wore bike shorts underneath, of course, but ... still ...what was I thinking??)

So, when I decided lately that I needed to get a bit more exercise, I chose the step class because I figured, with muscle memory and all, I'd be able to get my groove back fairly quickly.

Holy Mother of God!  Within 15 minutes, I was thoroughly winded. In 20 minutes my heart was revved up like Greased Lightning at the starting line and I was starting to lose coordination.  In 25 minutes I had to take a break, walk around a bit, get some water, try not to throw up.

It was, in all honesty, somewhat alarming.  I seriously thought I might be in danger of having a heart attack! I was modifying everything waaaaaay down and still breathing like a distempered work horse, my heart all cattawhampus in my chest and feeling light-headed and shaky. It concerns me that at age 45, my heart is already such a pussy.

So, that was my epiphany.  It's one thing to be out of shape, but it's quite another thing to realize that your heart is out of shape.  I realized if I keep on like I have been, I'm going to just continue to get weaker and weaker until I wind up a wizened old woman, curled up like a C and tottering about looking at the ground, wheezing.

So ... I've decided I must take evasive action.  I think if I keep going to this godawful class at least twice a week, I should be able to at least finish the workout, without stopping to put my heart back in my chest,  in about three weeks.  I'm determined to get to that point.  I should at least be able to get through the workout.  For the sake of my eleven-year-old son, I need to keep my heart alive for a few more years.

No thong leotard though.  I absolutely draw the line there.

In my book, summer doesn't officially begin until you've had your first close encounter with water. Thanks to an unusually warm spring, this year we got a jump on the season and were able to hit the river in mid May.  Actually, as of this posting, I've had two river encounters:  first a few weeks ago with Grayson, and again just last weekend with Grayson and John.

At the risk of flogging the subject, I'm still amazed at the amount of water being wantonly squandered and wasted by the natural landscape of Arkansas. No Oklahoma landscape would dare to be so profligate with water!  But here it's bubbling out of the ground and coursing through streambeds at every turn.

Case in point: this wonderful nameless creek, just ten minutes from our house. This is a wonderful little spring-fed waterway that meanders through south Bella Vista, emptying at last into Bella Vista lake. It's deep enough to swim in at several locations, and swift enough to knock you off your feet if you're not careful in others. It winds through a beautiful public park just as it approaches the lake, and it's easily accessable and nearby.  To me, it's practically the Riviera.

I mean, seriously, what more could you ask for?  Clear, cold, moving water, bright sunshine, a rocky beach, and a beautiful natural setting--all for free and within minutes of our house!  Add a red solo cup full of margarita and  Bam! You're in frickin' Cabo San Lucas!

So on Saturday we loaded up an ice chest full of snacks and drinks (Capris Sun for Grex, bloody Marys and margaritas for John and me, respectively), and spent the day river-walking.

I don't know what it is about rocks and water that makes me so happy, but it seemed to work on John and Grayson, as well.  We took a bunch of photos and John's pretty much grinning like an idiot in every one.  He had clearly been river-deprived for far too long.  It's just not good for the spirit to be away from moving water for an extended period of time, at least that's my philosophy. It was gratifying to see both my boys having fun.  we explored the creek, saw lots of crawdads and fish, one snake (well, the boys saw it, I missed it), and one frog, which we caught and released.

It was good to get some good outdoor summer fun time in with Grayson before he left, too.  I took him to his dad on Tuesday evening and he won't be home again until June 24.  That's nearly four weeks without him!  I've never gone so long before without my boy.

He won't mind. He has spent the past few days at Texoma with my folks, then he'll spend a week with his dad, then a week at camp, and then another week with his dad, who has signed him up for a filmmaking class and some sort of program at the zoo in Oklahoma City, so he'll be busy and content. It's me who will be lonely and pitiful by the end of the second week. I always think I'm going to do more with my grown-up time than I ever actually do, and as much as I complain about Grayson's constant high-volume Cartoon Network and spontaneous mess generation... it's awfully quiet without him.

Help is on the way, however.  John has essentially moved in with me for the interval. He arrived Wednesday night with a suitcase and a toothbrush, and we are conducting experiments in cohabitation.  It's been a long time since I've shared space with anyone besides Grayson, so this could be revelatory. For both of us, in fact.

It occurs to me that I have several strikes against me as a housemate.
1) I'm a slob
2) I'm lazy enough to not even care most of the time that I'm a slob
3) I'm not much of a cook or a meal planner and would gladly live on cereal and red wine
4) I have three dogs who like to sleep on the bed and bark in the middle of the night

And these are just the obvious ones. There's a whole realm of emotional and psychological strikes against me that we won't even mention.  We'll see if John can take it.

In which I am hugged by the third richest woman in the world

I got a hug from Alice Walton this weekend.  Here's how that happened:

I write for Crystal Bridges. The museum's founder, Alice Walton, was receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Arkansas, located in Fayetteville, just half an hour down the road from Our Fair City. Alice, who is not crazy about public speaking, needed a well-crafted commencement address.  Crystal Bridges has a writer.  See the circularity there, and how it all comes back to me?

So I wrote one.  Then it went the rounds of all the various sizes of dogs here at the museum, who did all kinds of things to my nice speech, some of them not that nice.  Then it went to Alice, who liked it, but wanted a couple of changes and wanted it to run at five minutes or under.  Back to me.

(Photo by the Univ. of Ark.)

This was my chance to cut out the stuff the big dogs had muddied up, and brush up my own stuff, which I did.  Back to Alice.  Brilliant!  She loved it!  I'm a genius!  Saturday morning she gave the address, and I happened to be walking out of the Museum as she was walking into the Museum at about noon immediately following.  She saw me and hugged me and said several people had come to her and told her it was the best commencement address they'd ever heard.  I have a witness who was there and can attest to the fact that Alice Walton hugged me.

Personally, I think the speech's popularity has a lot more to do with the fact that we cut it to under five minutes than what was actually said, but I'll take it.  I'm on radar now as a writer of fine repute.  I'm Speech Writer to the Stars.  I'll be writing for the President next. It's just a matter of time.

And now for something completely different...

If you ever needed encouragement, or proof that the Impossible can be done:  observe the mini, mighty hummingbird, whose flight has been something of an engineering mystery for many years (actually with new photography technologies, they've kind of got it figured out now, see here).  Yet it can nevertheless hover, zip around at ridiculous speeds, and even fly backwards and upside down for a quick getaway if necessary.  John and I had a nice time watching this little female hovering around the feeder right over our heads on Sunday afternoon, as we were relaxing on the deck.  She announced her arrival with the buzzing of her wings, and we'd get quiet and watch while she buzzed and sipped, and then darted away to rest on a twig nearby.  I'm hoping she has a nest in the yard somewhere.  That's got to be some kind of good luck, right?

Not that I think I've had any shortage of luck lately.  I won't push it.

This weekend was another lazy and indulgent one. When G-rex is out of town, John gets a two-day sleep-over and we laze about like broccoli. It's actually sort of astonishing how little we can accomplish in 36 hours. We did get to Eureka Springs this weekend, just to wander around, people watching and enjoying the town's unique hippy/biker/couples-in-orthopedic-shoes vibe. A little something for everyone. I'm proud that I managed to avoid buying anything non-consumable.

Following that one outing, however, we were pretty much content to sit in chairs on the back patio with our fingers interlaced... listening to music, sipping cocktails and alternately sitting in companionable silence or shooting the shit, trading stories from our pasts, telling jokes, laughing. I think that's the thing that makes me feel so certain about us.  We laugh all the time. We laugh at ourselves, at each other, at stuff that happens. We share laughs at stand-up comics on TV, at movie scenes and things people have said. We share a sense of humor. I can't overstate how important that is. There have been times when I've been sitting at work and remembered something John told me two weeks ago and it still makes me laugh out loud.  I'm sure my coworkers all think I'm nuts.

'Course, chances are they think that anyway.

When I picked up Grayson on Sunday, we swung by John and Rian's for a surprise.  Rian decided to give Grayson her mouse, Chesney.  They have bonded in the few times G has had the opportunity to play with him, and Rian says she doesn't spend much time with the little guy anymore. So they asked me to drop by on Sunday evening so she could make the presentation.

Grayson is thrilled. He was almost speechless when she handed him Chesney's cage, but he sang a little "Chesney" song all the way home, and held the cage in his lap. He told me this morning he couldn't sleep when he went to bed last night because he was keeping one eye open to watch Chesney in the tank across the room. When he went to bed he made a stop at Chesney's cage to say goodnight. It was a very thoughtful gift for a sweet, gentle kid with a big, open heart.  

I'm no longer surprised, but I'm always touched by G's gentleness. He handles that little mouse so tenderly, and takes such unadulterated joy in it  He has a kind and gentle soul, my boy. I love that in him and fear for him because of it. The world is tough for the gentle and kind, sometimes. Our hearts are so tender, and the Real World we encounter can be so oblivious. Yet I still believe that the Gentle, the Sensitive, and the Kind live something of a richer, more rewarding existence than those more calloused. I think there's a whole spectrum of experience that we can access, but which is completely unknown and unknowable to others.

It's worth it--I believe it's worth the hurt feelings and self doubt and the pure, unremitting heartache of a sensitive existence -- to see the world the way we do. There's love in a little mouse, joy in a hummingbird, humor in our own mistakes and mis-steps, and transcendence in a moment of silence, fingers interlaced, looking at the sky.