Home Improvements

Well, I'm still a little headachy and a little nauseous, but -- after a very slow and discombobulated day -- I managed to swim for half an hour this evening. Since I hadn't exercised since Saturday (skipping my Sunday workout may have been one of the causes of the Tuesday migraine), I feel as if I'm now getting back on track.

And just in time, since our new elliptical arrives tomorrow! Yay! I'm so looking forward to being able to work out at home without having to gather all my gym gear (although I'll still use the pool at the gym). Gary's looking forward to being able to work out at home when bad weather prevents hiking. We're both curious about how the cats will respond to the new intruder; I foresee initial alarm, especially when the thing's moving, but I'm sure they'll adjust.

On Monday, the guy who built our deck is coming over to fix a loose post. We're going to find out how much he'd charge to do the annual pressure washing and resealing.

Our shade canopy collapsed in a rainstorm last autumn and was wrecked beyond repair, so we're going to invest in a large custom retractable awning (with a manual crank, not one of the motorized ones, which brings the price down at least a little bit). This is a large chunk of change, but it's also a big improvement to our living space. We spend a lot of time out on the deck in warm weather -- I effectively move my office out there for at least part of the day, and we like to entertain there too -- and adequate shade's essential. (This is the driest, sunniest state in the country, and we're also at altitude, so UV protection is a real issue.)

The awning plus the elliptical add up to a lot of money when I'm about to a) have my pay cut and b) go onto two-thirds of the lower salary because of the sabbatical. But since I'm staying home during the sabbatical, home needs to be as pleasant and workable as we can make it, and I think these two items will really help.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow's the second anniversary of my father's death, and the first day back to work after Spring Break: not an especially auspicious combination! I've felt tired and sad all day, although I did swim for an hour this afternoon. My weight basically held steady on the cruise -- I ate too much chocolate, but I also ate lots of fish and fruit, and got a decent amount of exercise -- but I still need to work on shedding some of it.

I'll probably be too busy tomorrow to think much about Dad, but I'll still be glad when the day's over. We got home yesterday to find a lovely note from Fran, marking the anniversary and talking about how much she loved Dad. That meant a lot to me. It's good to know that someone else is aware of the date, too, and thinks about him. I'll call Fran tomorrow if I have time.

It snowed most of today, which didn't help my mood. I believe we expect nasty weather through mid-week. Yuck.

Good Day

This morning I met with my rector; we had a very pleasant chat, and he invited me to preach on Maundy Thursday and on May 29 (Memorial Day Weekend). I'm really looking forward to writing homilies again, and I'm honored to be preaching during Holy Week.

I ate my brown-bag lunch at church, raced to the gym and swam for thirty minutes, and then drove to the family shelter to teach my poetry class. I absolutely loved it. You can read about it on the UNR Poetry Project blog. The eight weeks of classes will culminate with a gallery show, probably at the university, and one of today's students has already given permission for her poem to be displayed (which makes me very happy, because it's a gorgeous piece of work).

It was incredibly moving to hear people in such tough circumstances express so much love for their families. As a side note, I was also very impressed with the physical plant; I'd been to the medical clinic downstairs to donate my father's meds after he died, but I'd never been inside the family shelter. It's clean and spacious, and seems very comfortable. Each family has its own room, and I loved looking at the kids' artwork posted on the doors.

When I got home, Gary and I decided to dash out to a store in Sparks that sells sports optics; we were hoping to get prescription snorkel masks. The store sells them, but they cost about $200 each, which is way too much money for an activity we indulge in once a year if we're lucky. So we're going to look for less expensive options. The cruise line supplies equipment, but we don't know if they'll have optical masks.

The store was fairly close to the fancy mall with the big sports store where I bought my wetsuit, so while we were in the neighborhood, we decided to go look at ellipticals. And, mirabile dictu, we found one! We hope to very soon be the proud owners of a Horizon Ex-59, which -- at its sale price of $599 -- was the second-least-expensive machine in the store. It seems really solid and smooth, though, and the online reviews we've seen have been good. We could have ordered a slightly older model, the Ex-57, from Amazon: less money, no tax. But after reading about people spending two or three hours assembling their machines, and winding up covered in grease, we've decided to spring for the tax, since if we buy from the store we'll get free delivery and installation, and they'll handle any necessary repairs. Right now the store only has the floor model in stock, but the sales guy is going to call me tomorrow about when they expect more in.

Of course, this is an even larger investment than the masks (and yes, I was conscious of the irony of embarking on this project right after a visit with homeless families), but we'll use it a lot more often. I hope to use it for at least a little while most mornings; I'll be able to work out in my PJs, which means I can give myself a serotonin boost on those mornings when crawling into clothing to crawl into the car to crawl to the gym is just too much effort. Gary dislikes most gym equipment but was very impressed with this, and he can use it when weather keeps him from hiking. So, yeah: big outlay, but I think the price is reasonable for what we'll be getting, and I think it will help with my health goals. My ultimate goal is to work up to using the elliptical half an hour in the morning and then swimming half an hour in the afternoon. That way, I'll get both weight-bearing exercise and the swimming I love, and I'll be able to rest between them. This may be too ambitious, of course, but if I could manage that even a few times a week, I'd be happy.

It was dark when we left the mall. I don't know Sparks very well, and I got lost. We wound up on a long highway without traffic lights. I couldn't see familiar city lights. I couldn't even tell which way we were driving. Finally I pulled up to a supermarket and told a lady there that we were lost. She laughed -- she's gotten lost there too, it turns out -- and offered to lead us back to town.

Talk about angels in disguise. I never would have found my way on my own; we weren't even close to my best foggy guess of our location. Thank you, lady in the silver Cadillac!

After that adventure, we'd have gotten home later than Gary likes to start cooking, so we went out for pizza, to the place that has gluten-free crust and soy cheese. It was very yummy. I'm very grateful to be able to eat pizza again.

Another Church Closure

I got to church today to find the doors locked; a sign said that today's 5 PM service is canceled, but didn't give a reason. Either somebody's sick -- I hope not! -- or everybody's staying home to watch the Superbowl. Football renders me comatose with boredom, but whomever dubbed it a secular religion was completely correct.

When I got home, Gary said, "It's you. Churches see you coming and close." When I let out a wail, he assured me he was only kidding. This closure's temporary, at least. Ironically, today's Gospel is the passage from Matthew about how a city on a hill can't be hidden. Well, it can if the gates are locked!

So I won't get communion this week, which always leaves me feeling out of sorts. On a happier note, however, today I walked for thirty minutes in the morning and swam for thirty minutes in the afternoon. This is my new strategy to try to get more exercise without wearing myself out completely, since two half-hour sessions are less tiring than a full hour at once. I don't know how often I'll be able to manage this schedule, but at least today demonstrated that it's possible.

Also, Google Docs has indeed kick-started my writing again. Yesterday I finished a draft of one new chapter; today I started another. They're not very good, but at least they're there.

Away We Go!

I taught my first two classes yesterday; I think they went well, and I'm looking forward to the semester.

On Tuesday, one of my grad students handed in her 193-page thesis and 19-page annotated bibliography, along with a portfolio that's forty pages or so. And yesterday, I received the sixty-plus essays resulting from the med-school class I taught last week (I graded twenty-two of those last night). So even though the students in my two undergrad classes haven't started handing in work yet, this weekend will actually be one of my heavier grading sprints; for various reasons, I'd like to have all this material read and evaluated by Monday, although that may well be overly optimistic. I'm kind of glad this is happening now, though, when I'm still in the flush of that beginning-of-the-semester burst of energy.

Today's open, so I'm trying to get a lot of work done. Tomorrow's so crammed with meetings that I can't even get to my lesson with Charlene; that's deferred until Saturday, when (with luck) I'll also get to the hospital.

I worked all morning doing class prep for Monday. After I finish this post, I'll go swimming. On the way home, I'm going to splurge and buy a new grade book, since I've been using my old one for nine years and it's gotten a bit grotty.

Heigh ho, heigh ho . . . .

January Column

Yesterday I swam for an hour (go, me). Checking my e-mail in the locker room after I got out of the pool, I found e-mail from John Shorb saying that this column had been posted.

Great timing!

My long swim, unfortunately, meant that I overslept this morning. Feh!

The Last Two Days

This week's the annual Reno Chamber Music Festival, a marathon event featuring nine concerts in four days. In the past, they've done seven concerts in four days. One year, Gary and I actually attended all seven, but this was sufficiently grueling that we've scaled back and now pick and choose concerts according to the performers. This year, we're attending five concerts. We went to two yesterday and two today, and we'll go to another tomorrow.

Unfortunately -- for us, anyway -- yesterday and today's concerts were held in a church way south of here. (Reno money has migrated south, and of course the festival organizers want lots of rich people to come, so it makes sense to have a venue in their neighborhood.) The church is about a mile from the fanciest mall in town, so Gary and I have made it a tradition, on two-concert days down south, to shop and eat between concerts.

During the first concert yesterday, it started to snow. By the time we left the church, it was really snowing. We drove to the mall and shopped. I got two comfy cotton-knit cardigans on sale at Orvis, and a pair of Isotoner gloves on sale at Dillards. Luckily, I was wearing my mother's down parka with the fake-fur-trimmed hood, so I could bundle up between shops. (It's an open-air mall, and it's huge.) Then we ate dinner at the brew-and-burger place there. Partly because I'd been wandering around in the snow for a while, I ate far too much: a large plate of fish and chips followed by a bizarre dessert, a pizza cookie type thing, basically a huge chocolate chip cookie served hot out of the oven in a small pan. We were supposed to split this concoction, but it was too sweet for Gary, so I ate most of it.

Then we got back in the car to go back to the church for the second concert. It wasn't snowing by then, but everything had frozen into the proverbial skating rink. We were approaching an intersection when an SUV lost control and barreled in front of us (missing us by a few feet) and up onto the curb. Jeepers.

My little Ford Escort isn't crazy about bad weather, and getting to the church would have been pretty nerve-wracking even without the SUV near-miss. By the time we got back, we'd decided to leave our car at the church overnight and get a ride home with a friend who has 4WD, not to mention a lot of experience driving in snow.

That plan worked out well. She dropped us off last night and picked us up at eleven this morning for today's two concerts at noon and seven. The roads had cleared overnight, so my car was fine to drive again. After the first concert, I dropped Gary at the mall so he could see a movie (the new True Grit, which he liked but thinks would have been too brutal for me; we've recently seen together, and both loved, Black Swan and The King's Speech). Because we had so much time before the second concert, I dashed back up north to my gym, where I swam for an hour to stretch out my back and burn off even a crumb of the cookie monster from last night.

There's a Japanese restaurant at the mall, so Gary and I reconvened there for dinner. He'd suggested either Italian or the brew place again, but I wanted something healthy, with a menu relatively devoid of dairy and gluten. We had a large but healthy dinner of miso soup, salad, edamame, and sushi. It hit the spot! Also, the restaurant served green tea flavored with brown rice, which sounds bizarre but is absolutely delicious. I know green tea is good for me, but it usually tastes like grass. This had a wonderful nutty flavor. I loved it so much that I used my BlackBerry's Amazon app, right there in the restaurant, to order some for home.

I knit through all four concerts. I'm well begun on Christmas knitting for next year! During intermissions, various people asked me what I was working on. I hope no one thinks it's rude to knit during concerts, but I can actually concentrate better when my hands are busy.

Most of the music, as usual, has been wonderful. Alas, neither Gary nor I enjoy the longest piece on today's program, Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. The story behind the composition is indeed stirring, but the composition itself just doesn't do anything I ask of music. (After the concert, Gary and I both found ourselves wondering how many people claim to like this piece simply because they think they should on humanitarian grounds.)

Tomorrow we're going to an afternoon concert -- this one will be at the university, blessedly close to home -- and then spending a quiet evening at home. We were invited to a friend's house, but it's a bit far. I like just staying home on New Year's, which is my least favorite holiday in most of its public forms, although our friend's party would have been fun if we'd had the energy to get there. After all those concerts, though, I'd rather stay in. The cats are starting to forget what we look like!

Jangle Bells

Readers please note: In this post, I express a number of minority, and perhaps heretical, opinions. If you disagree with me, that's fine, but please don't flame me for having a different take on things.

Okay, so: The last few days have been a bit stressful. Yesterday my sister called to talk to me about closing out Mom's estate before the end of the calendar year, which the lawyer had recommmended. I hadn't seen this coming, and although the procedures she outlined on the phone weren't that complicated, they sent me into a tizzy. I went totally into scarcity space: hyperventilating oh-my-god-I'm-gonna-starve-to-death-in-a-cardboard-box mode.

On the face of it, this makes no sense. Why would one feel a sudden surge of panic on learning that one's acquiring several thousand unexpected dollars? At the time, I couldn't analyze it past the point of recognizing that financial matters always send me into a cold sweat. To calm my nerves, I went to the gym and swam for an hour. That sort of worked, although the perky Christmas music in the lockerroom left me with the strong and un-Christian urge to take a flamethrower to Frosty the Snowman. (I heard two other women complaining about the music, so I wasn't alone in my reaction.)

After the swim, I managed to get more of a handle on why I'd gone off the deep end, so to speak. After this, there will be no more estate. This is really the end, finis, the last money I'll get from my mother, and it's coming at the darkest time of the year, and on the heels of a conversation Gary and I had with a financial advisor who told us that I have to work for at least another fifteen years; I'd hoped for only ten. (And yes, I know: at least I have a job! And I'm indeed grateful!)

Once I'd figured that out, I started organizing my Christmas packages to the East Coast. It always amazes me how long wrapping takes; I'd economized -- probably unwisely -- by packing the wrapped gifts in old boxes we had in the garage, which meant that I had to wrap the boxes in plain brown wrapping paper to cover old Amazon labels and so forth.

I thought I had enough brown wrapping paper. I did, sort of, but only if I covered each box in two or three pieces of the stuff, which led to lots of fun with packing tape -- our only roll was playing "let's hide the end so you can't find it!" -- especially since Bali and Figgy had gotten into my study and were prancing through boxes and wrapping paper, getting themselves stuck to the tape, and so forth. The upshot of this ridiculous situation was that I spent all night wrapping two frigging boxes and went to sleep in a really bad mood.

I woke up this morning, feeling only marginally less cranky, to find the promised e-mailed documents from the attorney. I printed them out, ran around getting stuff notarized and mailed (the post office lines were shorter than I expected, and the boxes should arrive next week), and dashed home for lunch. I called my sister to tell her that I'd mailed the legal stuff, and discovered that she'd just been in a minor car accident -- she'd skidded into another car in snow -- and was very shaken up, despite no damage to people and only minor damage to cars.

That conversation made me a few minutes late for my beloved annual mammogram, which I've been superstitiously nervous about because my mother's breast cancer was diagnosed the Christmas after her father died. (This was in 1987; obviously she survived it, although the cancer was far advanced even though the mammogram supposedly caught it early.) No one I know enjoys these procedures, anyway: a friend who refuses to undergo them says, "I'll let them do that to me when men start having annual cancer screenings in which their testicles are smashed between two plates."

I don't agree with this sentiment, but I sympathize. Even for modestly endowed women like me, mammograms hurt. Also, I recently taught Barbara Ehrenreich's scathing and brilliant Welcome to Cancerland to my freshman-comp class, so her critiques of breast-cancer culture were fresh in my mind. Ehrenreich is deeply alarmed by the consumerization of breast cancer, which normalizes it and helps transform it into a rite of passage rather than a huge injustice perpetrated upon women's bodies by environmental toxins. (My completely non-activist mother's first words, after her diagnosis, were, "Well, that's what I get for living in New Jersey all these years." Even she got the environmental connection.) Ehrenreich cites studies that call into serious question the efficacy both of current screening methods and current treatments, and points out that if people gave their money directly to cancer research -- rather than supporting runs, walks and rallies with large overhead costs, or buying pink-beribboned teddy bears, jewelry, etc. and so forth -- we might make more headway against the disease. She's especially withering on how the rhetoric of breast cancer, with its pink everything, infantilizes women. In short, she thinks women are being lulled into complacency, whereas anger at the situation might result in more effective action (think Act Up).

Ehrenreich dislikes the color pink. So do I. So does my friend who refuses to get mammograms, who was ecstatic when I told her about the Ehrenreich essay. She hadn't known that anyone else felt the same way.

So I was thinking about all of that while sitting in the very crowded waiting room. I waited over thirty minutes, and finally all of us in the outer waiting room were summoned into the inner waiting room, which was warmer and more comfortable. There we found a large bin of hideous pink plastic Christmas ornaments in shiny purple mesh gift bags. A beaming hospital employee invited each of us to take one home.

I saw pink. Channeling Ehrenreich, I said to the beaming hospital employee, "I have a question. Wouldn't the money that went into manufacturing these ornaments be better spent on actual cancer research?"

She didn't even blink. "Yes. Yes, it would." (Good for you, lady!)

I gave her a brief overview of Ehrenreich. A woman at the other end of the room looked interested and asked me some questions as she cradled her pink ornament. Everyone else ignored us. ("If we don't look at her, maybe she'll go away.")

The hospital employee told me about various hospital projects that do contribute directly to research. Good for them! She and the patient with the ornament decided, between them, that the point of the ornaments was to "give people hope." Hey, if a tacky plastic ornament gives them hope, good for them. I, personally, don't find Christmas trees festooned with kitschy reminders of serious illnesses profoundly hopeful, but we all know how weird I am.

Finally they called me in. I got squashed. The tech was very deft; everyone was very nice. This is the place I always go, because they're very deft and very nice, and the one time I got called back for further scrutiny of an "area of concern" (which turned out to be a shadow), the male doctor was immensely kind and spent much more time talking to me than the situation actually warranted. That interpersonal skill is worth dumptrucks of plastic ornaments.

I went from the mammo place to the gym, where I worked out for forty-five minutes on the elliptical, traveling 3.3 miles and burning 350 calories. I was very pleased with myself, but leaving the gym, I discovered the lobby festooned with pink and white balloons and "See Pink!" banners, as more and more people (including musicians with instrument cases) piled into the building. Some kind of breast-cancer fundraiser was underway. The club staff assured me the money would go to research, which makes me wonder if the refreshments and music were donated.

I blew my workout on three yummy cookies from the tables piled high with treats. I went home to find more treats from my sister: a box of chocolate-dipped fruit. Yum. Goodbye, workout.

At least, thank God, my sister's okay after her accident. And Gary and I will now have a slightly larger financial cushion during my sabbatical. And -- this is the really exciting news -- I just performed my first felted join in a knitting project, and am thoroughly enchanted. No ends to weave in! Yay!

Sick

I woke up at six this morning with a screaming sore throat; this is much the same thing that happened to me in Auburn, and it's probably also a function of allergies. I was at a dinner party the other night where I wasn't as careful about what I ate as I should have been, so I suspect I'm being clobbered by dairy, which always goes straight to my throat and sinuses. In Auburn I felt better after a few hours. This thing seems to be hanging on longer than that, although, luckily, there's no fever.

We had a lot of snow here today. That, plus my feeling cruddy, were a bad combination. My health club's pool opened today after a two-week overhaul, and I'd really been looking forward to swimming again. Weather and health both mitigated against that, but I knew that doing laps would help my back. So, possibly unwisely, I hauled myself into the car after lunch and drove down to the gym. My half-hour swim was indeed lovely, and the driving wasn't even too bad; the hardest part was getting back up our short-but-tilted driveway when I got home, even though Gary had shoveled.

Right now my head and throat feel awful again, but at least my back and the rest of my body feel better than they did before I swam (and I really do think my ailment's allergies, and not anything contagious, or I wouldn't have gotten in the pool). We'd been thinking of going to a concert tonight, but between icy roads and the fact that I once again feel like I've been hit by a truck, we're staying home. I have a huge stack of papers to grade and had planned to start on that today, but I don't think it's going to happen. I'm going to drink a pot of peppermint tea and then crawl into bed.

The story about Sunday's service at St. Stephen's doesn't seem to be in the paper yet, which disappoints me. My friend Mary loves her socks, though! And in Spanish news, I know how how to say those all-important phrases "How much does this cost?" and "Where's the bathroom?" Today's lesson was obsessed with beer. Since I don't drink alochol, I hope a future lesson will discuss coffee.

Everything's Better with Rocks

I had a surreal day. I woke up with back pain and then, browsing around my sitemeter, followed a referral link to a post about how one of my posts -- a happy post, mind you, and not even the one about our cruise -- had more or less sent the reader into a tailspin and ruined the rest of her day. This made me feel pretty cruddy, as you can probably imagine, even though it was competely unintentional on my part. Comments from two of her readers, trying to cheer her up by insulting me, didn't help.

Several times in my life, I've discovered that people I'd never even met were saying nasty things about me behind my back. (On one occasion, people were gossiping about me in Paris, where I've never even been, and the things they were saying about me were based on third-hand reports that weren't even true.) Because I'm not particularly famous, these experiences have given me much greater empathy for people like politicians and actors, who have to put up with this kind of anonymous hatred all the time. Because I don't, and therefore never expect it, it always throws me for a loop. Learning that people you don't even know think badly of you, and maybe even wish you ill, makes the whole world seem scarier, you know?

Note: My entire life, people have been telling me that I shouldn't care so much about things, and especially not about what other people think of me. A former therapist routinely gave me reproving looks and repeated the mantra, "What other people think of me is none of my business." If that works for her or her other clients, great. It doesn't work for me. Furthermore, I don't think it's true. We're social animals. We're designed to care what other people think of us. Science (TM) has discovered that the brain responds to social pain the same way it does to physical pain. Furthermore, repeated rejection can literally make people sick.

On a more immediate and practical level, being scolded for caring too much has never, not once in my life, succeeded in making me care less. It's just made me more unhappy, since being criticized for feeling too much feels, let's face it, like another form of rejection.

That's all an extended footnote to this morning's debacle. I found these particular slights especially baffling because I couldn't figure out how my happy post had triggered them. I'd expected the cruise post to draw more PoCo/Marxist ire than it did, but this one seemed innocent. On reflection, I realized that my happiness made the original reader feel worse in comparison, but how my being happy led the two commenters to conclude that I suffer from personality deficits was much more of a mystery. (Mind you, of course I suffer from some personality deficits, as all of us do; my friends love me anyway.) Had I said something horrible without realizing it?

Because I really don't wake up each morning determined to offend people, and because I couldn't figure out what was going on, I fretted about the situation for most of the morning, developing a migraine while running errands. Through all this, I was obsessively nice to people I encountered, handing out any compliment I could think of, on the theory that if you want to reduce the amount of pain in the world, saying nice things to people works better than saying nasty ones. I don't think my motives for doing this were especially noble, but I also don't think I hurt anyone in the process.

Well, the day got a little better. At my (joy oh joy) annual pelvic exam, my gynecologist was exquisitely kind about my grief issues and shared her own experience of losing her mother. Several friends I'd e-mailed about the blog mess wrote back and said they didn't think I'd done anything terrible. I managed to have some direct conversation both with the blogger and with one of the commenters, which helped clarify some of the issues. The charge of personality deficits came from a perceived breach of privacy, and perceived name-dropping, when I mentioned another writer's full name on the blog. Since promoting a very public figure's work doesn't breach her privacy, especially when her website includes her full name (yea, verily, even in the URL), and since I have an honest-to-goodness personal history with this individual, I was able to dismiss the charges in my own head, if not in my accuser's.

So I was already feeling better when the mail came.

The last time Gary and I were in San Francisco, we went to the beach with our friend Ellen, her two kids, her sister and her niece. Her niece is seven or eight, I think, a very sweet little girl. Her mom told her I like rocks, so she found a small, smooth pebble and gave it to me. I still carry it in my purse.

Today's mail brought a mysterious package, a flat padded envelope, oddly heavy, weighted with small objects that slid when I moved the envelope. When I opened it, I found a note from Ellen's sister. She and her daughter had gone to the beach and collected five rocks they thought I'd like. She apologized for the fact that it had taken a while for her to mail them.

I e-mailed a thank-you note via Ellen (I don't have her sister's address), thanking them effusively, and assuring them that the rocks had arrived at just the right moment. I can't tell you how much better they made me feel.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, and words may hurt me just as badly by igniting the pain pathways in my brain, but if you give me a pretty pebble, I'll feel loved forever. And five pebbles? Such riches!

So the world feels friendly again. I still have a smidgen of a headache, but I'll swim after dinner, which should help.

Postscript: I just heard from Commenter #2, who'd read the blog entry and the first comment, assumed that both the blogger and Commenter #1 were referring to unhelpful comments left on that blog by someone else (I'd never even visited the blog before this morning), and vented her own frustration.

Moral of this story: If you feel like assassinating someone's character, make sure you at least have the right target!

You Folks Rock!

Thanks so much for the supportive comments on my last post. I'm very rich in my friends, and don't think I don't know it!

Updates:

I was still kinda weepy when I got to my therapist's office. He listened, empathized, and -- after I gave him the briefest summary of Sunday's homily -- smiled and said, "The lesson here is that you have to have faith that someone out there will accept you even if other people judge you."

Good therapist.

After leaving his office, I drove out to Dale's gallery to pick up the cremains. Dale wasn't there, but I found a pretty little $10 pot and bought it (I'd have bought something bigger, but that was all the cash I had on me and I didn't have a check). I also left a note thanking him for his time in talking to me. So I hope he'll take all of that the right way. I don't bear the guy any ill will: he has to follow his instincts, and he sounded very upset this morning. Of course, so was I, but that's my issue, not his.

I don't know what I'm going to do with the cremains I retrieved from him. Nothing right away, probably. I need to go into turtle mode and withdraw into my shell for a while before I stick my neck out again. (Now you know why I like turtles so much!) At this point, I'm very wary about approaching anyone else in the Reno area. I'm just not up to cold calling right now.

On the other hand, if any of you know a potter, in Reno or elsewhere, who might be open to such a project -- and who won't charge an arm and a leg for including some cremains in clay to make a small piece -- please let me know. The problem with most of the outfits that advertise this service is that their prices are prohibitive, like everything else in the funeral industry. One of the things I really liked about Dale is that he wasn't going to increase his price based on including some unusual material in the clay. I'd have paid it if he did, but I was pleased and grateful when he said he doesn't do that.

In other Dad-related news, I went to the VA to try to get proof of his military service. The lady at the hospital information desk, when I explained why I was there (I wasn't sure where to go), said, "I'm so sorry about your Dad," a piece of kindness I sorely needed today. I love the VA!

However, they didn't have any formal proof of service. (You'd think the fact that he was a VA patient would be proof enough of military service, wouldn't you?) The clerk was energetic and helpful and gave me what little she had -- a piece of paper saying that Dad had served in WWII, without any specifics -- but said I should try to track down Dad's records at the other VAs where he's been treated. I can't even count them, and wouldn't know where to start. That's a piece of family archeaology I'm not at all sure I'm up to. Otherwise, my only option is the online request form I already filled out, which takes 4-6 weeks.

The Coast Guard chaplain indicated that he'd be pretty liberal about what constitutes proof of service, so I hope we'll still be able to get Dad scattered on his birthday. I also hope the chaplain doesn't have any ominous dreams between now and July 14.

Anyway, after all of that, I swam for fifty minutes, which left me feeling a little better. Now I have to try to get a bit of the book done before we settle down to watching Weeds, our current TV obsession.

My Mother's Day

Mother's Day was lovely. One of my favorite priests, my friend Sherry, decided weeks ago that we should have a healing service today, with special prayers and annointing offered to anyone who wanted them. That turned out to be a prescient decision: a longtime member of our congregation died two days ago, and her grieving family were there. Another parishioner has just had a recurrence of cancer; and I, of course, was feeling less jolly than I often do.

The service was personally meaningful to me for three reasons, seeming coincidences of the kind I've long since learned aren't really coincidence at all, especially at church. First, Sherry loves butterflies, and today I brought her something of my mother's, a small china box (part of Mom's extensive jewelry-storage collection) with butterflies on it. As it happened, today Sherry was wearing her beautiful ordination vestments, embroidered with large butterflies as a gift from the parish. So that was very fitting.

Secondly, one of the hymns we sang quoted the famous words from Luke 11:9, "Knock and the door shall be opened unto you." That reminded me how Mom raised her hand to knock at an invisible door before she died, just as my father had reached out to twist an invisible doorknob.

And third, Sherry preached on today's alternative Gospel, the healing story about the man to whom Jesus says, "Take up your mat and walk." I've heard the passage before, but had never noticed the detail of how long the man had been ill, and I wasn't sure I'd heard it right this morning. During the peace, I asked our deacon, "Hey, in the Gospel, has the guy been sick for twenty-eight years, or thirty-eight?"

"Thirty-eight."

My mother stopped drinking when she was thirty-eight, a miracle motivated largely by her love for me and my sister. How perfect is that?

After church, my friend Katharine and I went to the gym, where I swam for half an hour. Then we swung back home to pick up Gary before an expedition to Whole Foods. Katharine and I are both off wheat, and I'm also off dairy. Whole Foods is a mecca of gluten-free, dairy-free foods. It's not cheap, but for certain products, it's the best place in town. So I now have many yummy treats that won't wreak havoc with my digestion, although they may not do my waistline any good!

And tomorrow, I teach my last class. Hurrah!

Unexpected Upswing

I've been feeling much better since Tuesday. At some point, I suddenly realized that although I was sad, I wasn't scared or anxious. I'd always thought that after both of my parents died, I'd feel horribly alone. I don't. Instead -- and please don't take this the wrong way, because I loved both Mom and Dad very dearly, and I know they loved me too -- I feel about sixty thousand tons lighter.

I sat down to figure this out. It didn't take long. As long as I can remember, I've dreaded my parents' deaths; furthermore, I was deeply afraid that both of them would have horrible deaths. Mom had cancer twice, remember; Dad's father committed suicide before I was born, and Dad went through his own suicidal stretches, although none recently. Mom was expected to die in 1964 and Dad in 1977. Both of them had plenty of scares after those long-ago dates. I can't remember how many times, during one or another medical crisis, I've geared myself up and thought, "Okay, this is it."

Instead, they both died in their mid-eighties, relatively peacefully, with their pain controlled by hospice and with at least one loved one nearby. I'm not saying that chronic heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are fun ways to go, but they aren't the tragedies I'd always feared.

I don't have to dread their deaths anymore. I only realized what a deep, baseline condition this chronic terror was when it wasn't there anymore.

This change is huge. I'm now wondering how much of my previous depression was really anticipatory mourning for them (or possibly, as my therapist friend Wendy has suggested, complicated grief). I'm not saying I don't have my biochemical issues -- given my genes, it would be a miracle if I didn't -- but I now suspect that there was a lot more situational stuff affecting my moods than anyone ever realized.

And instead of dreading my own aging process, I'm now actively looking forward to it.

Gary and I have long needed new heating ducts in the house, and also a new deck (and then there are the floors and the need for interior paint, but those can wait a bit). We'd already decided to go ahead and have the ducts put in, since we won't have to help pay to have Mom in a nursing home. On Wednesday I decided that before the summer's over, I want us to get the new deck, too.

In September, I'll turn fifty. I want to throw myself a big birthday party out on the deck. I'll hire Charlene, my fiddle teacher, to play for a few hours, and I'll invite everybody I know.

I never do stuff like this. I think the last time I had an actual birthday party was when I was in my twenties, and that was organized by friends. I've never thrown myself one. But since my parents are no longer here to be happy I was born, well, other people can be happy instead.

Just looking forward to this makes me happy. I'm still sad, too, but I know both Mom and Dad would want me to be making plans and looking forward to things.

After a long conversation with Wendy, I've also decided to start getting off meds as soon as possible. I see my psychiatrist next on May 5. Meanwhile, I've made an appointment with a therapist for next week. I found this guy on the web, but his site appeals to me, and I talked to him on the phone for quite a while today. He's very sympathetic to the fact that medication can dampen creativity -- he says he's had a lot of clients with that issue -- and he has an arts background himself, as well as eleven years of counseling experience. He's a fellow progressive who does cool work I admire (therapy groups for women in jail, for instance), and he's also lost his second parent within the last year, so he knows that territory. He's not on my insurance, but nobody I'm interested in seeing is, so I'm just going to bite the bullet and pay full price. Because he's an LCSW rather than a PhD, he's more reasonable than some other folks. I love social workers. Social workers and librarians are the Secret Rulers of the Universe. And if it doesn't work out, well, I'll find somebody else.

So I've achieved movement on several fronts, although I'm still moving far too slowly on work matters. Wendy strongly urged me to get an extension on turning my grades in, but that would only prolong the agony.

Oh, and I went to an aquasize class today. I didn't even hit anyone on the head with my noodle this time, although I wasn't terribly graceful with it, either. At one point the instructor looked at me and said, laughing, "Well, that's not exactly what I was looking for, but you're doing something, so I'll take it."

That's kinda my approach to life right now. Any something is a good thing.

Physical Symptoms

I think Mom's death is hitting me harder physically than Dad's did (or maybe the combination of the two is taking its toll). I have the same inability to concentrate I did after Dad died, but now I have physical restlessness, too. You know how you feel when you have a fever and keep shifting your position because you just can't get comfortable, no matter how you arrange yourself? That's what this is like. I can't get settled in my own skin.

I'm sleeping okay, thank God. And I'm eating, but probably too much: I binged on an entire bag of Quaker Oats Kettle Corn rice snacks tonight (right after dinner, mind you: it was a sort of extended dessert). My weight definitely doesn't need this.

On the plus side, I did swim for forty minutes today. On the minus side, I'm having a lot of trouble getting work done; I squeaked through my classes yesterday, and pray to be a little better prepared tomorrow.

Yesterday I e-mailed my editor and agent to beg for an extension on the book deadline. I feel really awful doing this, given how late I delivered Shelter, but I haven't gotten any writing done since before I left for Philly, and any extra energy I have right now is going into grading.

Actually, that's not quite true: I have been practicing the fiddle, which feels concrete and immediate, but my brain isn't up to narrative at the moment. Narrative feels too abstract: or rather, narrative feels as if it requires me to construct the concrete out of the abstract, building a steam-engine locomotive out of air and water. The fiddle already exists, hanging right there on my wall. No alchemy required.

I'm sure none of that makes any sense. Grief carries well-known cognitive deficits. (My sister and I have taken great comfort in this. When I was back East, whenever one of us had a post-menopausal moment, we'd both chirp, "Cognitive deficits! Cognitive deficits!")

So, anyway, my editor and agent both responded with exasperated notes to the effect of, "Yes, of course you can have an extension! Why are you even worrying about the book? That shouldn't be your top priority right now!" My editor added a follow-up telling me to take care of myself.

They're good people.

I'm trying to take care of myself, but I don't think forty minutes of swimming cancel out an entire bag of Kettle Corn rice snacks. Although I had a sobbing fit while I was doing laps, so maybe that burned some extra calories.

I had the sobbing fit because it hit me that Mother's Day is right around the corner, and then it will be Mom's birthday, and Dad's birthday, and Christmas, and I won't have my parents for any of it.

Does anyone have any handy tricks for getting through the first Mother's Day after your mother has died?

Must go try to grade, so I'll be a little better prepared tomorrow. Does grading burn calories? Does grading burn more calories when you can't do the grading because you keep changing seats and positions every five minutes because you can't get comfortable?

Does whining burn calories?

Nertz.

Home

We got home around one this morning after a surprisingly pleasant trip. Because I'd booked my flights at the last minute, I'd originally been in a middle seat for the long Philly-San Francisco leg. I went up to a gate agent to make sure I'd be getting frequent-flyer points, since I didn't see my number anywhere on the ticket; when I explained why I'd booked in such haste, he got very quiet for a second and then said, "An aisle seat just opened up. Let me put you there."

Not only was it an aisle seat, but no one was next to me! As a result of all the room -- relatively speaking -- I got more grading done than I'd expected, since I could spread out a little. I'm still very behind, but I'm less behind than I was yesterday afternoon.

We arrived in San Francisco thirty-five minutes early (almost unheard-of for an East-West flight), and then learned that our Reno flight would be on the same plane, although we still had to get off and reboard. But it doesn't get much more convenient than that, and despite the Reno airport's perpetual baggage delays, we even retrieved our suitcases fairly quickly.

The cats are glad to have us home. Sleeping in our own bed again was blissful. Felicity Fiddle sounds about as good as she could after a week of no practice and no one home to fill the humidifier. It's a gorgeous day here: sunny and eighty degrees.

This morning, semi-miraculously, I woke up in time for church. It was nice to be back, but a lot of people didn't know about Mom, so the service felt a little surreal, too. When Dad died, everyone had been following the saga for months -- especially since he lived here -- and some church folks had even met him. At that time, we had a working parish listserv that gave me a way to keep everyone up to date. But Mom was across the country, and the listserv broke a while ago and has deliberately been kept out-of-order by our temporary rector, who felt that it was being used for back-channel conversation people should have been having at parish meetings. The clergy knew Mom had died last weekend, but there was no announcement, even though she was included in the Prayers of the People. I made an announcement today, just so everyone would know, but response was muted. Oh well. I wound up feeling a bit isolated, but I probably would have felt that way anyway, under the circumstances.

There were connections, though. One of the readings this morning was Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus, a text I always associate with Mom because Paul's feast day, January 25, was her AA anniversary. Also, throughout the service I'd been trying to chase down a quotation I vaguely remembered about no one being an orphan because God loves all of us. Lo and behold, our gradual hymn was "Allelujah, Sing to Jesus!" which includes the line, "Alleluia! not as orphans are we left in sorrow now." So that was pretty perfect.

After the service, I skipped out on a church business meeting (that kind of thing, important as it is, makes my teeth itch at the best of times, which this isn't) to go swimming. I'd gotten no exercise in Philly and was worried that my back might be on the verge of going out again. I felt much better after an hour of swimming.

Now I'm back home, staring at piles of grading I have to try to get done before tomorrow. (How much worse that situation would have been without the unexpected space on the plane!) I'll get the most important stuff done, I know. The rest may have to wait a while.

I'm trying to take very good care of myself, which means, among other things, not stressing about work if I can help it. I know people understand; I've gotten kind cards and e-mails from colleagues and students, and I'm grateful for everyone's sympathy. I have to say, though, that I'll be very glad when the semester's over!

Pressure? What pressure?

Two days ago, my friend Sharon came up with a brilliant solution to a nagging problem in the novel-so-far. This ties up all kinds of loose ends (even though I'm only halfway through the book) and also considerably deepens the characters' emotional turmoil.

As somebody once said, "Your job as a novelist is to find characters you love and torture them for several hundred pages." Yep.

My other two faithful readers, Gary and Jim, thoroughly approve of the change, but it will require a major revision of the first eight chapters, which I've already revised once. I'm going to go ahead and write the remaining seven chapters according to the new schema, and then go back and revise the whole thing.

Today I realized that to make the September 1 deadline for submitting the manuscript, I'll have to write four pages a day. That doesn't include the Alaska cruise, or a chunk of August when I want to take a class in Berkeley, but it's still a scary prospect, especially since I have to start now, in the thick of teaching.

I've been talking to my students about ritual as a way to get into writing space: tonight I devised my own pre-writing ritual, which involves a tape of ocean waves, a candle, a Tibetan singing bowl, a lucky beach rock I found on one of our San Francisco jaunts, and the smell of lavendar. Tonight, at least, it worked. I cranked out my four pages, although I don't know how good they are.

Wish me luck, please. We're talking about months of very consistent work here, a longer stretch than I've managed in the past; it will be an endurance event, and I'll need to keep up my strength, not to mention my faith in the abundance of narrative and my own story-telling ability.

I swam for an hour this afternoon, which I'm sure helped this evening's writing. I hope to walk tomorrow, weather permitting. Today's weather was ghastly, gloomy gray with unremitting snow flurries. But spring's coming, right?

Home

We're back after a smooth, swift journey aided by tail winds. We miss the ocean, but it's lovely to be back home with the cats, all of whom have been super-affectionate. And it's pretty warm here today, so the readjustment isn't as much of a shock as it could be.

I'm going to swim today -- sans turtles! -- to stretch out my back, which was giving me some trouble on Oahu. (The day we went to the Bishop Museum, I lay down on a bench to do some stretching exercises, since my back was on the verge of spasm, and was immediately visited by two concerned guards who wanted to know if I was okay.) Then, alas, I'll need to begin class prep for next week.

Spring Break's been lovely, but it's almost over.

Rainy Season

March is the rainy season in Hawai'i, and sure enough, it's been cloudy and on-and-off rainy the last two days. Yesterday we used our bus passes to go to the Bishop Museum, a natural-history museum with nice science exhibits for kids and a fabulous hall devoted to the history and anthropology of Hawai'i. I was very moved by the description of indigenous Hawai'ian spirituality, in which all things are alive and interconnected. (As usual, it's taken Western folks many moons indeed to begin to develop any of the same ideas.) The exhibits included video clips; there were three of interviews with a Hawai'ian fisherman who described, with stunning eloquence, the spiritual aspect of fishing. He called it "a wonderment of grace," the idea that the living ocean gives pieces of itself to feed the world.

We also went to a planetarium show about how the ancient Polynesians navigated by the stars and waves. Until recently, anthropologists assumed that the people who migrated from Tahiti hit Hawai'i only by accident. In tbe 1970s, though, a group called the Polynesian Voyaging Society built a traditional Hawai'ian canoe from modern materials and, using ancient wayfinding techniques (reading stars by night and wave patterns by day, without compasses or sextants) successfully sailed the vessel from Hawai'i to Tahiti and back. There have been other voyages since then; the website makes fascinating reading, especially in the sections describing daily life on the canoe, where more than a dozen people live and work in 400 square feet of space for weeks at a time.

The planetarium demonstration of wayfinding convinced me that I'd never be able to manage it! Fortunately, the Honolulu bus system is wondrously simple by comparison; we got back to the hotel with no trouble at all, and then -- to our delight -- found a superb Thai restaurant right around the corner. Pricy, but worth it!

Today we took the bus to the Honlulu Academy of Arts, a lovely art museum with a small but impressive collection of art ranging from medieval stained glass to Hawai'ian modernism to the European masters. There's an emphasis on Asian art -- Japanese, Chinese, and Korean -- with a special gallery devoted to several Islamic pieces from the estate of Doris Duke. Gary and I love Islamic art, but we decided that $25/head for a tour of Duke's estate, Shangri La, was a bit much. Maybe next time, since I suspect we'll be saving our pennies, if we have any left, to come back here.

A block from the museum there's a yarn store! In Hawai'i! But alas, my dreams of Hawai'ian made bamboo-and-pineapple yarn were unrealized: there's no yarn made in Hswai'i, and all they had was stuff I can get at home. I'm glad we looked, though.

In the afternoon we trekked down to our local snorkeling beach. Conditions weren't as good as yesterday: it was high tide and overcast, so the water was murkier -- and the currents stronger -- than the first time we were there. We still saw lots of fish, though! Tomorrow, weather permitting, we'll go to Hanauma Bay, where I devoutly hope to see turtles.

Tonight after dinner, again at the Thai restaurant, Gary came back to the hotel room to watch bad movies while I embarked on a shopping expedition to pick up various birthday and Christmas gifts. I did fairly well, although I nearly became lost in the maze of the International Marketplace. (When they say, "Get lost on a shopping safari," they aren't kidding!) It's a stressful setting where most of the vendors, almost all very energetic Asian women, expect you to bargain, and where they're always trying to get you to buy yet another item from their cart (where the wares are nearly identical to the next cart). I like what I bought, although I honestly can't say that the stuff isn't plastic instead of the bone or shell it's supposed to be. But I got quite a few gifts and only one item for myself (this trip; I got two things for myself there a few days ago). Gary said, "You're Christmas shopping in March?" But hey, no time like the present, and some of the pressure will be off come December.

So those are the latest updates. Wish us luck tomorrow, good weather and plentiful turtles!

Even More Critters!

Wow. Turns out there's a fabulous snorkeling beach about four blocks from our hotel. We didn't see turtles -- although the lifeguard says she's sometimes seen them there -- but we saw lots and lots of lots of fish: big fish, small fish, pale fish, bright fish, and one absolutely gorgeous yellow and orange and turquoise fish that's about the prettiest thing I've ever seen, but that I can't find on the fish ID card Snorkel Bob's gave us.

Gary said, "This is like swimming in an aquarium." Also, we got there early enough that for the first hour or so, we were the only people in the water. Amazing!

There were a few minor mishaps. I swam out pretty far, to the spot where the lifeguard said she'd seen turtles, and wound up being pulled several beaches down by a strong current. (Respect Mother Ocean!) And both of us got some scrapes and bruises, from coral and rocks, getting back into shore, as careful as we tried to be not to touch or damage anything. But now we know the best entrance and egress point, and also know not to swim out too far, so that's all very useful info.

Gary loves this as much as I do, which is great. He's the hiker in the family, and I'm the swimmer: I can't keep up with him when he hikes, and he finds most swimming venues too cold, and has no interest in swimming laps. But we've finally found a sport we can share. Yay!

We're now thinking of buying our own snorkel equipment -- the snorkels and Gary's mask, anyway; fins are heavy to transport and inexpensive to rent -- and of planning more snorkel vacations in the future. Yay, snorkeling!

Many Critters

Today we went to the zoo, where we saw many monkeys, birds, and turtles, along with giraffes, a rhinoceros, hippos, meerkats, and, most marvelously of all, two gorgeous cheetahs. When Gary saw them, he immediately announced that he wanted to take one home. I believe the airlines would balk at that, however, and I don't think the situation would be very safe for our beloved housecats.

No pix today, alas, because my BlackBerry was in the hotel room recharging while we were at the zoo.

Ogling the cheetahs, we met a young guy who's volunteered at the zoo for years. He has a degree in computer science, but his real love is wildlife conservation. He's working to save two endangered bird species in the Philippines. Very interesting fellow.

After spending several hours at the zoo, we hiked what felt like several hours to the nearest Snorkel Bob's. There's a dive shop close to our hotel (we're staying at the Hyatt, for those of you who were wondering), but they didn't have a corrective mask strong enough for Gary. The clerk there very kindly called SB's and learned that they did have strong corrective masks, so she drew us a map and sent us over there. It was quite a trek!

But we got a mask that works for Gary, and because I already have corrective goggles, I only needed a snorkel and flns. We hauled our gear bags back to the hotel, changed out of our sweaty clothing into swimsuits, reapplied thick layers of SPF 50 sunscreen (no tans here, but with any luck, no skin cancer either) and went down to the beach to test the equipment.

The conditions were pretty lousy today -- overcast skies, murky water -- and this section of Waikiki's notoriously poor for snorkling. Even so, we saw fish, as I have the previous two days. The most magical moments were finding ourselves in the middle of huge schools of bait fish, being surrounded by constellations of silvery bodies flashing and turning as one. Even the most ordinary fish make snorkeling an amazing experience. We can't wait to check out better snorkeling beaches, starting tomorrow!

On Monday we'll buy four-day bus pssses and start exploring places we can't get to on foot. Tomorrow we'll snorkel nearby and then walk to the Ala Moana Shopping Center, where we hope fo find more dining options -- we had delicious but expensive sushi tonight -- and where Gary hopes to find a cinema, since he's jonesing for a movie fix.

I'm so glad he likes snorkeling. He's the hiking guy and I'm the water woman (I joked today about how maybe I'm a selkie, since I'm more comfortable in water than on land), so I'm delighted that we've found a water activity he likes as much as I do.