Category: Things I Can

Career, Things I Can

29. Things I Can Fix: A Technical Glitch

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Because I trudged out of the office late on Friday with at least 7 hours of work stuffed into my backpack
Because my son and I were both so wrecked at the start of our weekend, all we could do was pick and gripe at each other until 20 feet at least separated us during our evening walk
Because on Saturday morning, I was crying before I’d even gotten out of bed
Because the relentless pressure from work hadn’t abated during the night
Because my kiddo and I have outings already on the schedule for this sunny spring weekend
Because the week ahead at work is a vise grip on my mood
Because a roomful of PhDs can’t screw in a lightbulb
Because Sunday afternoon is not only my last shot at getting all the work done for Monday, it’s also my only shot at sharing this one weekend with my only boy
Because even though my 9-year-old laptop finally decided to glitch out on the VPN program that allows me to work from home

there is no way
no way on this green and fragrant earth
I am taking my son with me to the office
to hack through the ever-thickening tangle of tasks.

Because life is too
other than this,
too mine.

Because this computer is still a machine after all
an engine
a cotton gin
with codes and circuits that may be labyrinthine but they are also decipherable
fixable.

Because I demand my weekend back.
My sleep.
My body.
Because despite the persistent phantom grip of performance on the back of my neck

these ribs this brain this family

these two days
belong to me.

So I run
outside under thawing sun and whipping wind.

I don safety goggles and drill holes in plastic buckets and turn black soil and drop in tiny rosemary seeds.

And then
after my son falls asleep, I come here
to this ancient, groaning, overheating machine and look and look and look
through security settings, Norton and Spybot
without a map
or a Rosetta stone for these codes, no
I read Cervantes at bedtime and dance to The Knife by candlelight.
But lyrics are no use now.
The only thing is to dig deep
and say
I can solve this
I will solve this
control panel, google, cut here to paste there, reboot, download,
adjust settings, override

Until
Your remote session has been established. For security purposes, please close this browser window.

Tomorrow, I will sit here next to snow pea tendrils crawling toward the light,
the dog splayed out and baring her pearly pink belly to the southern sun,
my kiddo secreted away in his Blanket Palace reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid
and I’ll work.
I’ll work on my Sunday
which may be a sin or it may simply be
what’s needed.
But because I fixed what was broken,
it’s my Sunday
to work as I see fit.

Brain, Career, Things I Can

28. Things I Can Carry Through: This, to its End

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Gaslight /ˈɡaslīt/
verb
Alternative: “ambient abuse.”

1. A form of sophisticated psychological manipulation intended to cause a victim to question her own sanity
2. Withholding factual information from, or providing false information to, a victim, having the gradual effect of making her anxious, confused, and doubtful of her memory and perception

The President has advisors and a staff of dozens to function as his external brain. The rest of us are stuck with this measly glob of gray matter. That, and whatever spreadsheets and task-apps we’ve managed to cobble together.

On the hostile shores of the 9-hour day, another question lands. Another and another. Almost none need a simple response. Almost all demand contortions of reason and planning that border on the gymnastic. The terrain is littered with the debris of the unfinished.  Continue reading “28. Things I Can Carry Through: This, to its End” →

Children, Things I Can

27. Things I Can Provide: Light, Touch

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Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity.

– Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

His dad opens the door and leads me in. I step out of my shoes and climb the stairs. In the bathroom, our son is tucked into a lumpy cloud of pillows and blankets. His eyelids are tinged green. “Hi mom.” It’s his Eeyore voice. He takes his time peeling himself from the heap. Leaning his body into mine, Bug wraps his arms around my middle. He sighs.

“I’m sorry you’re feeling yucky,” I say. His hair is stuck to his temples and neck. I stroke his skin and for once, he doesn’t stop me. He pulls back and looks at me with eyes far too big. He tells me he was sweating and then shivering, and that he sort of slept while watching a Harry Potter movie.

“Do you want to go to your other house and maybe make a nest on the bathroom floor there?”

“No,” he says. He gets all the way up now and presses into my arms again.

“Maybe just go home and read together?”

“Okay.”

He plods out of the bathroom and down the stairs. Tee collects the backpack, the uneaten lunch, the unfinished homework. We step out together into a startling shaft of afternoon sun. When did spring decide to come out of hibernation? My desk at work is angled away from the window. An awakening can stroll all the way to its fullness and recede again without my notice. If I remember to resurface when I clock out, I might catch the last of its halo disappearing into the horizon.

The air fringing the sidewalk is so light and gentle it makes my chest throb. Only so many days like these ever happen in a season. In a chapter. In a lifetime. This is one of the truths that resolves into view at the rate of decades. The reward for a long life is the biting grasp of life’s brevity.

At home, the dog yips and babbles as we tumble inside. “Let’s open the balcony door,” I tell Bug. “We can put the blankets there. Right where you can be in the sun.”

Bug shrugs. “Okay,” he says. “Can I have tea?”

After walking Noodle, I dig around for the King Arthur picture book. Bug and I settle into cushions and pull a blanket around us. Leaning into my body, he alternates between sparkly water and hot tea. At our feet, the dog sprawls out under the current of evening air that cools my son’s fevered skin.

 

Living in the Moment, Things I Can

26. Things I Can Ignore: Contrails

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Way up there, a tiny plane skates across the early spring blue. Here, the bus wheezes up to a stop sign, waits its turn, then groans on. The sun has hours yet to make its languid descent into rooftops and half-clothed branches.

Scuffs streak the plexiglass. The eyes are trained to peer right through.

What would it be like to see only this in here? Only what’s behind? I still have hopes of Corsica. Each year another scar cuts across the frame. The edges blur. It’s clear enough, though, for today: Maybe almond trees, maybe the Pillars of Hercules. Or Galapagos. The Badlands at the very least.

It was just now, or near enough to now, that I pressed through a scouring wind to summit Mt. Snowdon in Wales and cooled my blistered feet in Llyn Ffynnon-y-gwas. Such a thing could happen again. Those engines up there could carry me to the source of the next pool where my toes touch bottom as fish nibble down to live skin.

Another renewal.

It’s not impossible.

Or if I choose to walk lightly, I could use my own traction. Starting on this very bus, I could cast off on a winding route to the borderlands where the last of the wildcats hush their flanks against night.

The sky is a door. I am 41 and just came from the gym where I pulled 70 pounds and crunched 100 times on an incline bench.

Now my pooch who narrowly missed her date with a Chinese abbatoir flies like a formula one race car across the dog park that backs against the freeway. She turns fast enough to send mulch and dirt blasting into the sound wall. I shed my jacket and hurl the ball, my arm getting looser now with each lengthening day.

Now I sit in solitude at a dim table at the Indian restaurant. I taste it all: the whang of the cilantro leaf, the spring of my jaw against cubes of cheese, the smoke that lingers in papered boils on the flatbread. Tabla music patters against the sizzle and clank of the kitchen.

Now I bend to this page and rub the dull lamp until it glows.

Everything here is here. Everything here is forward.

What luxury, this illusion.

How fleeting.

The texts ping in, one, then six or seven more. All day in bursts, each sounding a claxon. She is in the ER. She is prepping for surgery. She’s in the OR. She’s in recovery. Her hip is fractured. Her hip is mending.

If she makes it through the next three months, she’ll turn 95 in July.

What must it be to come up out of the fog of anesthesia into the even more stifling smog of dementia? To see only through scuffed glass, to see only the scars? No forward. Not even a here, really. The machines that didn’t exist in your lifetime then did, now they buzz across a silent blue you can’t see. Now they carry other people away into pockets of the world you’ll never know.

If you’ve even lost the comfort of memory, what then? Where do your eyes alight?

I am 41 and grip hard to delusion. This blank page is an open window. That sunlit frame holds no pane. I can step right through and cast my line up against gravity, snag that jet and let it ferry me into another fable, one waiting just for me.

I ignore the microscopic particles, the wind and all it carries, strafing the body of this vehicle. I pretend the light falls through unimpeded. Against the mounting evidence, I claim this day and this endless tomorrow.
 

Family, Home, Things I Can

24. Things I Can Cherish: This Home

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Bug builds a nest by the sliding glass door. A foam mattress from his old bunk bed serves as a wall. He hauls in a heap of blankets and a camp chair. “Dogs and kids only,” he tells me. He fits a bag of soil into the nook by the wall to block the entrance.

Nestled in under a table, he listens to an audio book whose plot I can’t follow. Islands, magic, a group of children, danger. Noodle is splayed out in the sun next to him on an old Oklahoma Sooners blanket.

I replace the busted bike tire and air up the tube. One load of laundry whirls in the dryer while another hangs in the sunlight on a rack in my bedroom. The pots and pans are done, but the breakfast dishes haven’t made their way into the dishwasher yet. That’s Bug’s job. He can tackle it later.

The tea kettle gurgles. I pour steaming water over tea bags. Decaffeinated black tea for Bug, Bengal Spice for me. I dig through the recycling for the two old egg cartons. The packets of new seeds are waiting. Perennials this time.

Bug acknowledges neither the milky tea I slip into his clubhouse nor the the basket of pencils and markers. He pretends not to notice when I sneak off with the sack of soil.

Splayed on the kitchen floor, I rip the tops off the cartons and use a sharpie to mark the sides. Thyme, rosemary, lavender, sage. Each tiny seed falls into an almost invisible divot in the dirt. Dormant, they nestle in under a thin blanket of soil. I soak each pocket with a soft drizzle from the sink sprayer. The cartons sag until I fit them into their inverted lids.

The sunlight slices a long triangle into the table by the sliding door. I step up on a chair and stretch over the mattress wall. A swath of Bug’s blonde head peeks out from under the table. He’s leaning back in the camp chair using a marker to draw a battle scene with towers and little people dropping rocks on their enemies. He’s painted his fingernails purple. Noodle’s eyes twitch towards me but she only sighs and closes them again.

I slide the seeds into the sun next to the snap peas and spinach, their first threads already climbing towards the light.
 

Friends, Things I Can

23. Things I Can Circle: The Square

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She was single when I met her. We danced with the drag queens at the gay bar that used to be north of town. We cut pictures of beaches out of magazines to make vision boards. We ate blueberries at the omelet restaurant on a sunny winter morning and carved pumpkins in a neighbor’s back yard the next fall. One New Year’s eve, we stood in a circle and dropped in one word we’d like to invite into our lives. The next, we hooted and played as the ball dropped.

We’ve never done any of these things alone together. She lives in one of the outer rings orbiting around me. I suspect I orbit a little further out from her. She’s just so much more connected, so much more vibrant. She has a bright smile and and slaps her leg before adjusting her glasses when she laughs. We always greet each other with a hug.

We are friends through friends, spurred by proximity and the bountiful event-planning of our more social girlfriends.

Her tight circle, the close-in one, is well-populated. This seems to be the case for many women I know. I tend to float around out on the edges of knots of friends, going on hikes alone and showing up at the contra dance or zumba class after months of absence. This friend is more like my sister, who has always been so good at weaving elaborate social ties. Mine are individual threads. They are strong in their way, but not braided together — Grace and Mina and Loki are all my girls, but Grace and Mina and Loki don’t know each other.

I know I bring on this drifty distance by my choice to savor solitude. As a result, I never have any expectation that the circle I inhabit is close to the center. When I find myself in intimate connection, I recognize it as a rare and fleeting gift.

This girlfriend? We’ve known each other four years now. She’s getting married in May. Her fella also has a big smile. He’s funny in that after-a-beat way. They have a kick together. They cook, they travel, they have big families in the area, all part of an even bigger community of loved ones. When she talks about her wedding planning, she sparkles even as she rolls her eyes at the wackiness of it all. They are mapping out the celebration of the life they’re building together. In little slivers of conversation between improv games or Mary Kay samples, she shares a detail and a giggle with me.

Even as single and solitary as I am, their fun doesn’t make me ache. They are lovely in their goofiness, and she is clearly having a delightful time in the world she now inhabits with her fella. Truth is, strong friendship ties and a caring intimate relationship are two things I’d like to cultivate in my life. It’s nice to see two folks sharing their hope and good thinking. It reminds me that a person patches a vision together — like anything else — one stitch at a time.

This is acceptance. It is so very grown up.

Then I open the mailbox.

And there’s the invitation.

Equanimity, meet Glee.

Completely, joyously unexpected. With all the other people they keep near, it never even occurred to me that I’d make the cut. Invitation lists are impossible. Family is always first, and the rest of the guests must be limited to the dearest ones. I remember how much it stung when Tee and I looked closely at our rings of friends to determine who we could and couldn’t afford to include.

Somehow, this girlfriend decided I could be a part of their celebration.

I’m not sure what I did right, but I want to do more of it. I feel so totally lucky, loved, and excited. It’s not just an invitation to a wedding. It’s as if she’s slipped into the envelope this tiny golden key and said, “Here. Welcome to the circle. Come in when you’re ready.” It’s up to me to step over the threshold and take my place in the waiting warmth of the friends already right here in my life.

I circle the square on the calendar. May 24. Between now and then, two full pages filled with squares.

Every one, a day waiting for me to draw myself in.

Every one, a chance to be the friend she’s inviting me to be.

Career, Things I Can

22. Things I Can Glimpse: The Cathedral

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To be deep in the overwhelm requires not just doing too many things in one 24-hour period but doing so many different kinds of things that they all blend into each other and a day has no sense of distinct phases. Researchers call it “contaminated time.”

– Hanna Rosin, “You’re Not as Busy as you Say you Are” at Slate.com

I click send on a project that’s consumed most of the morning. Before a sense of pride dares peek up out of the foxhole, another directive slams down from above. In an email, a whole group of colleagues receives word that I will provide them with a collection of updated materials by Monday. I’ve been copied in on this but not otherwise warned. At least seven major deadlines are breathing down my neck, and they all come between now and the start of next week.

Aside from those concrete projects, the inbox is spilling over, three people are waiting for replies to pressing questions, and a series of delicate emails is in the queue. These will undoubtedly trigger frustrated comments and several more rounds of correspondence.

Numb to every bit of it, the only approach is to keep moving. I open the folders and start to plow through the documents.

Then I stop.

What happened to what I just finished? All that work, and that’s it?

Click, then gallop on?

We rush from one demand to the next, never giving ourselves time to pause when one task is complete. Many of us don’t celebrate our significant achievements, let alone our everyday ones. We may mark milestones when large public hoorays are called for — retirement party, anyone? — but in our headlong race forever forward, we fail to keep our eyes open for smaller signposts of success.Hell, this year my birthday came and went all but unacknowledged. It stings if I think about it, but who has time for thinking?

So this time, I stop. Only for a moment, I turn and walk over to my office window. The one small project I completed this morning took quite a bit of creative effort. It was, in fact, a noteworthy application of skills I’ve grown over 4-1/2 years at this job. A small smile warms me. I whisper to my quiet self that I just whipped out a bit of handiwork I couldn’t have conceived of in 2010. That is really something.

Across the hazy March sky and the greening city below, my gaze dips and lifts. The National Cathedral stands on the horizon as it always does. The scaffolding is off the towers. The branches of its neighboring trees are still bare. A little light scratches across the rooftops and then disappears.

Just one small slice of pride.

This is my gift. Overdue, but so very welcome.

Change, Outdoors, Things I Can

21. Things I Can Unravel: Equanimity

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We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to loosen and untie.

– Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table

The sun rides in on the back of a fierce wind. Even though the equinox is just days from now, this taste of spring will slip away again tomorrow. Thank goodness. Winter is much safer.

The inevitability of change is worrisome. Buds unfurl and something in us pushes open. That something undoubtedly lacks the social grace to wait for an invitation. Who knows what will shatter? What will bruise? All of this is in the service of “growth.” What seems so lovely when talking garden metaphors is brutal when ripping old scar tissue to realign poorly set bones. It’s all a matter of location and scope, and so much is out of our hands.

I step out onto the scoured mud of the battlefield. The gusts whip through my hair. They bend the dog’s leash into a bow that moans like a cello string. I did not expect this violence in the air. We walk anyway, all 5 1/2 miles of swamp and field, in the last of winter’s glare. The dog leaps after grasshoppers, burying her nose in crackling grass.

With every step into relentless headwinds, I make my plans, rehearse my lines, catalog the tasks undone. Each thought is a scrap of debris stuck to the walls of my skull. Eventually, I remember to let the rushing air scrub the hull clean. I have to remember this over and over again.

The dog trots ahead, snuffles in damp leaves, falls back, prances up onto a berm. With one a paw raised, she surveys the thrashing field, alert for predator or prey in the brush. Down in the low wet, peepers sing and sing.

The sun creeps across the celestial equator. Under the vast and rippled blue, I walk blind into the next churning eddy. My skin thrills at the prying insistence of those gusts. Light snakes in under collar, hairline, wrist.

I am not ready for what’s coming.

I stride towards it anyway.

I gulp it down.

I howl back in its face.

Mindfulness, Poetry, Things I Can

20. Things I Can Close: My Eyes

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Snake Oils:

Fret about it
Complain about it
Excavate the underlying cause
Make another promise
this one, really
Mop the house
Dial the number
Detail the feeling
Eat
Facebook
Sidestep the feeling
Itemize the failings
File the taxes
Register for classes
Rearrange the closet
Rewrite the resume
Revise the story
Make soup
Start sourdough
Start seeds
Regret the follies
Rehearse the maybes
Cry
Run
Gaze up
Stroke the dog
Squeeze the kid
Write on a blog
Disappear into
Page
Body
Voice
Breath
(No
Not even breath).

It may take months
trying every tincture
to ease a tired
so deep it
leaches marrow from bone,
thins tissue
to husk
shedding away from the once wet
core,
years even
to absorb
the stripped bare
lesson.

It is the single
remaining
vial
the message a fortune
as maddening
and true now as it was
in infancy
as it always only ever was.

The only cure for exhaustion
is unbroken silent eight-hour potion-free
rooted deep held in night’s
annihilating arms
sleep.