When I lived in Kansas City, I was single.

This meant that I spent a great deal of my energy and mind space being frustrated and unhappy about my “alone”ness.

Like most young women (and men too, I guess), I really wanted to find someone special to connect with, to be with, so long as we both shall live.

And I did! YAY!

But before that time, I spent many Christmas times alone. Not the actual holiday itself, because on the that day I would head back to my parents’ house and hang out there.

But that time from Thanksgiving and the Plaza Lighting Ceremony to Christmas Eve … that was spent pretty much on my own.

This week, I’ve been nostalgic for Kansas City. I have so many great friends there. This is how I am remembering that time.

Even though I was “alone,” — a girl on her own in the big city — I had a family I created from people I met who loved me even though I wasn’t related to them at all.

Now that I have kids around here, I have lots and lots of things on my To Do List for this time of the years. LOTS.

So it is nice to reflect now and then on the “alone” days. I guess some days I even pine for them. But I also try to remind myself to not make them seem more wonderful than they actually were. Because I know I was pretty lonely back then too.

Now, I just want to remember them… the good, the sad, the beautiful.

The lights, the porches, the roommates, the parties, family visiting, the demanding customers I waited on, the smoky bars, the uncommitted men, and the house with two cats.

But most of all, the friends, the hugs, and the laughing.

–

This post is part of my BIG QUESTION December series “If Only in My Dreams.”

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I heard: “Big Sur is calling to me” and here’s what happened to me.

I immediately felt the grey, El Nino winter that that I spent in California, in 1999.

I was working in a restaurant in Kansas City at the time a place that was renovating. All the staff was given 6 weeks vacation, unpaid.

So I planned for it, saved up money the way that single people can do– just enough– and bought a one-way Amtrak ticket to San Francisco. I had a cousin to stay with. And a college friend. And my first-ever laptop.

In the weeks, I hung out in Berkeley, writing things that got saved in the hard drive of a laptop I don’t own anymore. Also on floppy disk. Once I  printed onto dot matrix at some point too. My feet froze in the Starbucks as I wrote.

It was a psychological break from work for me that I hadn’t ever taken before. I was free to wander around… in my writing and in the day.

Unfortunately, most days were drenching cold rain.

On the weekends, I found my way to be with my friends Mallie and Adrian. We drove north and stayed in cheap hotels. Walked barren beaches and watched dogs chase men in wetsuits into the surf. We argued and ate. She dropped me back in Berkeley again for the weekdays, to come and find me again on the weekend.

More writing at the library table, and wandering around San Francisco alone. Then the weekend again and roadtrip.

We meandered south, where we found the sun. We stopped in Santa Cruz and walked along a funny boardwalk and up onto the cliffs, watching the wild surfers below us.  We went on for miles on two-lane roads through old Western towns that are hidden like real fossils. Stopping at bar that was rough hewn and soaked in beer and pops up in my memory like a movie scene.

We kept going, by the artists’ caves packed into the trees along Highway 1, and the little surprise restaurants in the middle of nowhere, overflowing with people and paperbacks and coffee stains.

We found our way to Hearst Castle Road, and timed it so we could take the tour. Stared at the abandoned and gleaming bowling alleys like they they were diamond rings sitting on a can of tuna in the supermarket. The castle on top of the hill that people wanted to be haunted with fame and glory was just draped in fog and stony silence.

We wound our way back up the first highway. Stopped in Carmel for lunch and felt cheated by the  diamond choker vibe. A strangeness of glamour tarred the wildnerness.

Another weekend we went north again. Into the redwoods, walking without anyone else. Only the rain and dead leaf carpets. Trying to adjust our sense of proportion. And our sense of alone.

In between the weekends, to solidify the strangeness, my cousin introduced me to a red-headed boy. And the boy took me on a date. To dinner in North Beach, San Francisco. And then to that wonderful, narrow bookstore where the Beats lived.

The boy took me out again, and then surprised me by finding me beautiful.

In weak moments, the sun winced its way out from the clouds.

Otherwise, the rain poured down. We had to kiss in a doorway to stay dry.

After another week, I stared at Bridal Veil Falls at Yosemite, my nose frozen, but far enough from the coast to be in the sun. Wishing to be back in Berkeley, the way girls in love do.

Then the train and the goodbyes and the wishes to stay and promises to come. And photographs — traded — all before the cell phone era. And I don’t remember the train home, even though I took it there.

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Sunflower. Award winner. Fair favorite. Mostly dead now.

Nightclub by Billy Collins

You are so beautiful and I am a fool
to be in love with you
is a theme that keeps coming up
in songs and poems.
There seems to be no room for variation.
I have never heard anyone sing
I am so beautiful
and you are a fool to be in love with me,
even though this notion has surely
crossed the minds of women and men alike.
You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool
is another one you don’t hear.
Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful.
That one you will never hear, guaranteed.

For no particular reason this afternoon
I am listening to Johnny Hartman
whose dark voice can curl around
the concepts on love, beauty, and foolishness
like no one else’s can.
It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette
someone left burning on a baby grand piano
around three o’clock in the morning;
smoke that billows up into the bright lights
while out there in the darkness
some of the beautiful fools have gathered
around little tables to listen,
some with their eyes closed,
others leaning forward into the music
as if it were holding them up,
or twirling the loose ice in a glass,
slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream.

Yes, there is all this foolish beauty,
borne beyond midnight,
that has no desire to go home,
especially now when everyone in the room
is watching the large man with the tenor sax
that hangs from his neck like a golden fish.
He moves forward to the edge of the stage
and hands the instrument down to me
and nods that I should play.
So I put the mouthpiece to my lips
and blow into it with all my living breath.
We are all so foolish,
my long bebop solo begins by saying,
so damn foolish
we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

–

What is beautiful to you?

This post is From September’s BIG QUESTION series, asking: “What does America want?” Please feel free to answer at will, here, there and anywhere!

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August retreats.
It hands us back the year.

Summer isn’t truth, but it is
(as Harris Telemacher recites)
“What we wish were true.”

So many of us
Shove out this
Season of perspiration, lazily
Forgetting how it
Slows us
Beguiles us
Presses us to hold still
Find the windy spaces
With a friend
In the lustre of the
Earth as it
Rots away
Happily. On comes the
Harvest and the rush of
Putting it all away.

Yet one more hour won’t you
Come and sit with me
In the shade before it
Cools. Time is
Hot berries
Unwilling
Yet ready to burst.

—

Hey, be sure to come back tomorrow for the beginning of the “Big Question” series, asking “What does America Want?” — a series of post, ponderings, guest podcasts, and thoughts on one Big Question, in the month of September. See you…

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What does compassion mean?

This week is the veritable “hump day” of my online e-course I am doing. The course has been enlightening, inspiring and exhausting. We’ve addressed “curiosity” and then “honesty,” writing about the ideas in our lives and identifying them in concrete ways. The writing has been coming easily.

All of which makes me very, very angry.

That’s my go-to defense mechanism. Get angry, start ranting, deflect love, prove that people don’t really like me and I’m not worthy of attention, feel bad about all of that, sit in lonely funk, write about it angrily.

Stir, rinse, repeat.

“Our default wiring is to help… If we attend to the other person, we automatically empathize… we feel “with” automatically. The question is, why don’t we? ” — Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence

"mew"

Then, some wise woman will come along and say: “Don’t be so hard on yourself.” What does THAT mean?

Or some friend will say: “Sheesh. Lighten up. Take it easy. It was just a JOKE!” hahaha very funny!

And I get whipped around in the anxious frustration, again, about not being good enough at being able to be nice to myself, or to others, or to even just spotting a stupid joke.

Wow, it’s hard work being all this!

And Now for the Extended Metaphor

It’s the compassion of week 3 that’s got me all stirred up. Being kind. To myself. To others. Thinking about it! ARGH! Because it’s different that just being “kind.” But how? I have no idea. What does Compassion mean?

That’s why Compassion is terrifying!

It’s like a kitten, right?

Kittens are so cute and soft and cuddly. So you take one home, and you say: “I can do this!”

And at first it’s cute, but then you put it in its box so you can go to the bathroom or the bar, then it cries and whines all night, and then it pees all over your duvet, and then it hides in the wall.

Then just when you think it’s gone forever and it’s died in there (and yeah just when you think “that’s gross” and you are a worried about the smell, and you think you will get arrested, but you are maybe a teensy relieved?), it comes out and says:

“Mew.”

Compassion kitty, I don’t have any idea who you are or what to feed you.

 ”Compassionate action involves working with ourselves as much as working with others.
–Pema Chodron

 

No related posts.

Men don’t leave.
Skin flakes gather
On sheets
Cologne draped from
Unaired corners.
Men don’t leave.

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Blue plastic comb
Rosemary Spray
Bother the louse
And its tedium.
Glass-half full?
Long sessions
Together on a
Sun-warmed stoop
Hand in her hair.

Day 17, A River of Stones

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I agreed with myself that I would write a small stone for Fiona and Kaspa on their wedding day, which was June 18.

What with the whirlwhind of (fill in list of excuses here), the entire weekend disappeared somewhere.

I didn’t realize that I’d even forgotten until today, driving, I heard Mary Chapin Carpenter singing “Late For Your Life:

No one knows where they belong
The search just goes on and on and on
For every day that ends up wrong
Another one’s right
Call it chance or call it fate
Either one is cause to celebrate
Still the question begs why would you wait
And be late for your life

So here I stop to fulfill my promise.

Dear Fiona and Kaspa:

Peace and love on your wedding and the days that follow.

My to-do list keeps running through my mind as I look around on June 22nd for a small stone for two beautiful newlyweds.

So in honor of your fourth day of marriage, I skip this thought to you.

bullet points remind me

Of the thousand bits of

nothing to do today–

run my finger down this used envelope

and imagine your skin

waiting for me in evening’s dusk.

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I admit it. I have a serious Life-Crush on Tara.

It’s Ok. I am sure she doesn’t mind. I mean, after all, her business is to make people want to feel that gorgeous feeling of love… not just for her, but for ourselves.

There are just those certain kinds of people in the world, aren’t there? The ones in our lives who make us feel lovely.

They walk into the room, and all the self-consciousness, all the questions about who we are or who we SHOULD be just disappear.

In fact, what I like best about People I Love is how perfectly “out” of myself I feel. I turn toward the love between us, which shines like a beautiful ever-changing star wherever we go together.

That’s why I tweet, actually. I love to pop over to Twitter, just to get a glimpse of what the lightmakers are mumbling about today. What zen light is AmyOscar up to? Tara, have you had your coffee and your revelation yet today? Will ImtheQ ever find happiness or the perfect taco? What small stones have Fiona and Kaspalita skipped today?

I walk the line between what is healthy injection of light in my day, and what is distraction. But in those moments when I’ve forgotten myself and feel wonderful, I know I’m doing OK.

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Out of the blue, I got a call/voice mail from T. Mallie the other day.

It was one of those lovely long rambling messages in which she updated me on her job status and her life and her hairstyle and the general feelings of things on the Other Coast.

Last time I laid eyes on T. Mallie was in London. She was travelling just to travel — she’s an ace at that sort of thing — and made her way to see me, along with her son Daniel. We went to the Tate Modern together.  Adrian came along one day, too.

Mallie and I met way back in College. She’s the sort of friend who sticks with you, even when you hardly see each other anymore. The sort  of friend that pops up at odd times– just when you need a travel buddy or phone call. She arrived to meet me after I’d been 4 weeks lonely in Italy, for example.

There are some people we meet and they are our friends. They attach to our lives and become a part of who we know ourselves to be. We have stories, and they the main characters. Immediately you are thinking of a friend of yours in your life. I am too. I do not need to names my friends here: they know who they are.

Of course, there are some people we meet who are friends, too, but not quite the same. They help us through. They fill our time. They listen and give to us. But we aren’t going to be with them forever. That’s O.K. We are grateful for them too.

Anyway, it’s often hard to say which is which until after we walk away.

Yesterday, driving home from swimming, I was thinking about Marcy and Heather and Karin: these are my bookclub friends here. I think it’s my turn to schedule bookclub but, sigh, you know how life and vacations and family members and work and kids sort of shuffle time around.

Thinking of them, makes me think of my bookclub friends from London, too.

Hey girls, just wanted to tell you– it’s 5:30 a.m. And I’m sending you a message. Good morning.

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