Almost more than one year...

Next Wednesday will be St. Patrick's Day, exactly one year after the day when I -- wearing my green-striped scarf and shamrock socks -- walked out of my office "until after Easter break." I was gone for almost four months. Working from home became "WFH" and then "the new normal," and I eventually moved from the dining room table to the home office I'd been meaning to set up in the den. I had "work pajamas" and "sleep pajamas." I did laundry on my lunch breaks, threw random meals together in the crock pot, and pulled the cats out of the fireplace, the dishwasher, and the washing machine. Pulled all the weeds out of the front yard flowerbeds and finally did some landscaping. Pulled an orphaned (we thought) kitten out of the shed and her sisters out of the back yard six weeks later. 

I didn't start writing in my journal, and I didn't write here, either. I doomscrolled, shopped online, picked up curbside, and learned to navigate Zoom, WebEx, and Microsoft Teams. I accumulated a variety of masks and a new phone. I stared at the phone a lot (more doomscrolling), stared at the computer screen a lot, and eventually bought blue-light filtering glasses that I still forget to wear. I broke my driving glasses and thought that it wouldn't really matter, because I wasn't ever going very far. 

I went back to the office in July, amazed to find out that my air plant had survived four months of complete neglect. My feet ached from trying to wear "real shoes" after months of flip-flops and fuzzy socks. My heart ached from being alone in my office, still navigating WebEx and Zoom meetings, usually without video to save bandwidth since there were more of us in the same place even though we still couldn't see each other. I smuggled the kittens in, one at a time, to make things less lonely.

I got a job with the Census to fill my nights and weekends: counting people, counting steps and miles walked and stairs climbed in the 90-degree-heat and occasionally in the rain, and counting houses because I couldn't read the numbers very well in the dark with my broken glasses. I counted cases, tests, positivity rates, and deaths. I got tired of arguing about counting, not counting, and recounting. I counted myself lucky that I never got sick.

We had a Christmas tree with nothing breakable (because cats), so I pulled out the stack of cross-stitch ornaments that I made 20+ years ago from little kits that I bought in a clearance sale. We had 10 Christmas stockings (because cats, and also the dog). 

I thought I would start writing in my journal with the new year, but the cats knocked it off my shelf, and I couldn't find the pen that I had clipped to the front cover in anticipation of starting to fill the pages. I told myself that I should I write about what it felt like to be living in a time when every day is "unprecedented." Part of me feels sure that I will always remember whether I write about it or not. Part of me probably just wants to forget, and that's why I didn't write.

So why am I writing here and now? I've spent the past two days sending a bunch of work emails, alternating between drafting long, carefully-crafted, meticulously-edited messages and trading snarky one-liners with my boss. When he complimented my writing, I replied that I've always been better at expressing myself in that way, as it doesn't allow my mouth to get ahead of my brain. I commented that maybe I should go back to blogging. So here I am.

More Than One Week

I still haven't written in my new journal yet. But I'm back here, so maybe that's better.

Terrence McNally died today. For some reason, that news wrecked me more than anything else I've read so far about this crazy, heartbreaking disease and the mess it's making out of the world. I have amazing memories of seeing his plays, and it just seems so very wrong.

I wonder if someday I'm going to re-read this blog and have to Google Terrence McNally to remember how he died. Somehow, I don't think so. In fact, I hope I don't, because that will most likely mean that something more terrible came after this mess to erase everything that I'm thinking and feeling right now. I want this time to be a distant memory some day, but only because it got better and went away. Not because it was dwarfed by a lot of other disasters -- personal or global -- that make it seem insignificant.

I do not do well in the absence of deadlines and the presence of uncertainty. I'm having a hard time making "until further notice" work for me. At the moment, I am regretting every day in the past six months that I closed my office door to "block out distractions" and "get some work done." I would love right now to be distracted by someone other than myself and the sense of focus that I can't seem to find.

I also can't find a pork chop recipe that matches the particular combination of stuff in my refrigerator at the moment. I was looking for one when I remembered that I had started this post about two hours earlier (see above about my lack of focus). So now I'm wondering if you can substitute dried cherries for dried plums and trying to remember if the squash in the fridge is delicata or something else. I'm about to find out, I think.

More Than One Line

When I was traveling last month, I saw a book called "One Line a Day." The idea is that you write one line each day for five years, cycling through the book five times so that you're writing on the same page for the same date each year. I really liked the idea, but talked myself out of buying the book because -- let's face it -- I'm bad at journaling. I've tried diaries, notebooks, apps, and this poor neglected blog, and the result is always the same. Which is to say, there's never much of a result.

When I got back home, I still found myself thinking about the book. I've taken to looking at my "Memories" on Facebook, and I've realized that, more often than not, they're way more than five years old. As I post less and less, there's going to be more and more of my life that I don't get to revisit in that way. There are also a lot of days when I don't have anything to say that's going to be all that interesting to the other 600 people who get to see my posts.

I finally decided to buy the book and give it a try. And... it's still blank. Last night, I realized one big reason why: there's no possible way to sum up these days in just one line.

So I'm here again, at least today. There's a lot more that I want to say, and hopefully will say, because the world needs to remember these days. We need to remember all the ways that we were strong together, and how devastating the losses are, so that those memories will shape the way we handle our future together.

I never do this, but...

Here goes.

One summer of my teenage years, I worked as a baby-sitter/mother's helper for a family with two very young children. The older son was a toddler who was apparently not happy about his new role as "big brother." As he expressed his frustrations in the only way possible for someone whose command of the English language was limited to the words "Mommy!", "No!", and "Now!", his mother would often gently admonish him: "I love you, but I don't love what you're doing right now."

My take-away at that time: Unless you are his mother (and sometimes even when you are), a toddler who is hell-bent on throwing a temper tantrum does not care what you do or do not love about him or his behavior.

With the wisdom of many years, however, comes more lessons. First and foremost: expressing love is important, especially when you're also expressing contradictory emotions (frustration, disappointment, even anger). Secondly: expressing those contradictory emotions is just as important for building a loving relationship.

Real love can't be blind. You have to acknowledge the existence of flaws -- in a person, in a relationship, even in the country where you live -- and make a conscious effort to address them in a loving way. When you don't, you let resentment of those flaws build up inside you until they become all that you can see, and there's no love left to shape your response to them. "I love you, but I don't love what you're doing right now," becomes "I don't love what you're doing right now, or what you did last week, or that thing from three months ago that we never talked about, or that annoying habit you have that makes me crazy." Eventually, it just becomes "I don't love you."

Having meaningful communication and building lasting relationships means accepting that both parts of that sentence can be true, that it is entirely possible both to love (or at least to respect) a person, an idea, a value, or a nation AND to not love something that's happening at any given moment. It also means recognizing that love exists even when it's not spoken out loud, and even at times when other emotions are expressed.

I love my husband and my family even when they drive me crazy. I love my friends even when we don't agree. I love freedom of speech even when the ideas being expressed aren't ones that I like hearing. I love that people can find strength and comfort in their religious beliefs, but not the way that some people turn those beliefs into a platform for prejudice and passing judgement on others. I love being an American, and I respect the leaders and the citizens of our country, but that doesn't mean that I have to love everything that is said or done in the name of "Making America Great." Staying silent at this point in my life is no more of an option than letting a frustrated toddler eat M&M's for lunch would have been 25 years ago.

 "I love you, but I don't love what you're doing right now."

This is Forty

I turned 40 yesterday, so I guess that's a significant enough milestone to deserve a blog post. For a long time, I thought about starting a new blog. I'm never going to be the Yankee on Confederate Ridge Road, so it felt silly to keep writing the story of a person who would never exist. And yet, the person who started this blog somehow turned into me, so it seems equally silly to pretend that I'm suddenly someone new.

I'm married now, and a stepmother. I only have three cats, but we've added a dog. Same house, same job, same trusty Toyota Corolla. Some things don't change, but some things do. Time has added amazing things to my life, but has taken away people I dearly love. I have my days when I feel every bit of 40 -- and then some -- but then I get carded, or mistaken for a high school student, and I feel a little bit more spry.

So this is 40 (plus one day), and this is me. Bring it on, world.

The Seven-Year Itch

Yes, it's really been seven years since I started this blog. Back then, I had a different job and a different boyfriend. I lived in a different house in a different state, and I only had one cat. Seven years later, I've changed jobs and residences twice (but only one new employer and one new state). I've acquired three more cats and I've been through, um, a few relationships and a lot of dating. I've made some great friends. And I'm still driving the same trusty ol' Toyota Corolla, although I traded in the Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker for a Philadelphia Phillies one after they finally won the World Series.

In some ways, the past two years have been an emotional roller-coaster ride for me. In other ways, they've been the most stable years of my life, thanks to those great friends, my current job and residence, and the trusty old Corolla.

About ten months ago, I made a series of small decisions that I knew were meant to add up to one big choice. And that choice has led to a commitment that will require a lifetime of decisions -- some big and some small -- that are all steps along the road that you take to being part of something bigger than yourself.

I didn't exactly make a New Year's resolution to blog more, seeing as that's never really worked in any of the past six years. Right now, I'm actually working on some six-week resolutions. I wouldn't say that I've had stellar success so far, but I'm only two days in and I don't want to peak too early.

My boyfriend will be spending the next six weeks on a Navy base in Indiana. I'll be spending the same six weeks in a house that feels more empty without him than it did on the day that I first walked through it. To combat my loneliness, inevitable mourning over the impending end of football season, and annual case of the winter blahs, I've made myself a promise that I'm going to pack a year's worth of resolution-ing into the next six weeks. Let the games begin.

A year ago, I was convinced that the only thing missing in my life was the person with whom I wanted to share it. A year later, I'm realizing that the life I want to share needs some polishing around the edges. Finding the right person makes you want to be a better person, even though that right person loves you for who you are at this minute. And at every minute, even when you're having a bad hair day or wearing baggy sweatpants or being unnecessarily hysterical over a half-dead bug on the floor. 

I promised that this would never be a whiny blog, so I won't spend the next six weeks sniffling over how much I miss my boyfriend. And while I'm also not going to let it turn into an ooey-gooey (as my friend would say) blog about how wonderful it is to be in love, you might have to endure the occasional sappy story.

For right now, I'm going to start taking on the world one resolution at a time.

A Really Important Post

One of the problems with blogging as infrequently as I do is that I've started to feel like I should have something significant to say when I actually get around to writing.

I need to get over that. I've never been the "blow up and spill your guts in the heat of the moment" kind of person. I need quiet time to think and a little bit of space before I can react to things that happen in my life and in the world. By the time I manage to squeeze that in, everything I have to say feels like old news.

Yes, this blog post has been tumbling around in my head for over a week. It started out when I went to hear the speaker who addressed the freshman class at the college where I work. He had some really good advice, and I thought that I should share it with my baby cousin, who is about to start college as well.

I've always referred to my youngest cousin as "my baby cousin." Once she reached the age of about eight, I added the explanation, "I was already in college when she was born, so that's why she's my baby cousin." It seemed necessary somehow, especially when I started telling people about things like her getting braces and going to the senior prom.

I originally started this post as "Advice for My Baby Cousin As She Starts College." The first two lines were: "My baby cousin starts college next week. She is my baby cousin, of course, because I was in college when she was born." And then I stopped, thought about what that meant, and seriously considered dipping into the bottle of tequila that's been sitting beside my coffee table since the Grizzlies were giving me fits in the third round of the playoffs.

It's not that my baby cousin is the first child that I've watched grow up into adulthood. The children that I baby-sat for as a teenager are now hiring their own babysitters (hopefully they're paying them more than I made). The shy junior high student who volunteered in the theater where I worked when I first moved here just took her son to kindergarten for the first time. I've watched nine years' worth of seniors star in their final high school plays and go off to college. This shouldn't be new to me, but somehow it is.

So what advice do I have for my baby cousin? "Do as I say, not as I did." Get out of bed, go to class, ask questions, and don't be afraid to talk to the people who can help you. Coffee is your friend; cheap champagne is a powerful enemy.

College is important, but only because it prepares you for what comes next. It took me almost four years to figure that out when I was there. One night I had reached what I was sure was the end of my rope: standing on the front steps of my eating club, smoking a cigarette, realizing that there was no earthly way I was ever going to finish my senior thesis on time. Then it hit me: in two months, I'd be graduating (I hoped), and two months after that, no one but me would even remember what my senior thesis topic was. The single biggest concern in my life at that second wasn't going to matter at all by the end of the next summer. What would matter by then (although I didn't know it at the time) was figuring out how to survive my new job, adjusting to life in a new part of the country, and struggling to accept the fact that my grandmother wasn't going to live long enough to finally teach me to make spaghetti gravy when I came home for Christmas.

The other advice I have I'm going to steal from the guy who got me started on this idea. "Decide what you want to do, not what you want to be." It might sound fun to be a doctor or a lawyer or an actress, but if you don't want to do the work that those people do -- and not just the fun parts, but all of it -- then you're going to be miserable. And you don't have to figure it out in college. I certainly didn't, and I guess I turned out OK.