Category Archives: life

Anything but blue…

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Had a busy weekend, which included going with some friends to hear another friend perform.

I mentioned just the other night how many wonderful, talented people I’m privileged to know. Having a friend who’s won the Washington Blues Society’s Best of the Blues Electric Guitar Award twice in a row is just one of those examples. Hearing C.D., Chris, Don, and the two Mikes play a selection of blues and blues-adjacent music for a couple of hours would brighten anyone’s week. And I’m looking forward to the new album they’re looking to release around the end of the year.

I didn’t get a lot of writing done over the weekend, but I worked a lot on writing-adjacent things. My biggest accomplishment was dropping off a new issue of the Tai-Pan at the printer Friday. My second biggest was working on the issue after that (a good chunk is now in copy edit), organizing a bunch of in-progress stories, and otherwise participating in a work party with a few other editorial board members on Saturday. Just a few hours before we ran out to be band groupies together.

And then there was the journey to the year 1876 where we moved a little closer to the nuptials of “Atlas” O’Flaherty and Miss Prudence Earwig.

The weekend wasn’t all great news. After helping a couple friends earlier in the week diagnose significant computer problems, my husband found his main computer dead when he got home Friday night. Turned out to “only” being the failure of his primary boot drive, but it still took him most of the weekend to get his system restored, pulled data out of backups and off the failed drive, and so on.

So he didn’t come with us to the work party, nor dinner and music after.

And then late at night, we got rain, ending our dry streak that was only a few days from an all time record. We didn’t get a lot of rain. And the long range forecast has no rain coming up, but this bit was quite welcome. I love the way the world smells after a rain. The sunlight looks cleaner, somehow. And I love the rain.

Crying

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I was sitting in my usual seat at practice for the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Chorus. I was tenor section leader at the time, and we had just finished singing a song that I particularly loved. The conductor then said the name of another song, “What’ll I Do?” an Irving Berlin classic from back in the 1920s. I should have known what would happen.

We started singing. I always had a freaky good memory for music, so I always had songs memorized very early in the typical practice cycle, and would start memorizing the other harmony parts to keep my focus. Besides, my favorite choral professor in college had insisted that was the only way to learn.

So I was one of the few people in the chorus who was off book. Good thing, too. The first half of the first refrain is when it started:

What’ll I do
When you are far away
And I am blue
What’ll I do?

The song is about a lost love. And most of the lyrics refer to the loved one being with someone else, now. So it’s a break up song. I had not broken up recently.

But my first husband had died only weeks before.

And I started crying.

I kept singing. A part of me got very stubborn. I knew the music. This was rehearsal for an upcoming concert, one that was going to be dedicated to Ray, in fact (since he had been involved as a volunteer for years, specifically the music librarian the last year and a half before his death).

I wasn’t sobbing. I mostly managed to keep control of my breathing. But the tears were flowing and I couldn’t make them stop. I didn’t want to disrupt the rehearsal by standing up and walking out.

We reached the end of the song. And it was break time, anyway. The conductor told us to be back in 10. I tried to get away. But Adrienne grabbed me.

She had been a super volunteer with the chorus for years, as well. She and Ray had often working together at the back of the room on various things for the chorus while we sang.

She grabbed me. She kissed me, and then she let me finish fleeing the room.

I found out later that most of the folks sitting around me had not realized I was crying while we sang the song. As Mary 1 (we had two Marys singing tenor) told me, “I didn’t know until I saw Adrienne grab you, and saw the tears welling up in her eyes.”

I was standing around outside, cursing myself for having quit smoking just a year or so before—and seriously thinking of walking over to the group of smokers to bum a cigarette. But also knowing how angry Ray would be at me for starting up again on his account. He had never managed to quit, see. Even when his illness and the chemo started destroying lung tissue, he just couldn’t. He had been unbelievably proud of me for quitting. Knowing how disappointed he would be had been the only thing that kept me on the wagon for months after he died.

I pulled myself back together, walked back inside, and finished the second half of the rehearsal.

It’s a little early in the year for me to start getting melancholy about Ray. But only a little. His birthday was two days after mine. So as my birthday gets close, I keep thinking about him. I start being moody. And it doesn’t let up until November, when the anniversary of his death comes around.

I think about him at other times of the year, of course. I don’t always get weepy. Sometimes I smile, or even laugh. I remember it was a bit more than a year after he died when I realized that I would smile when remembering him about as often as I was sad.

But the September through November period is fraught. Ray was a little crazy about anniversaries. He would give me anniversary cards for things like our first date, the first time he made me breakfast, the first time I made him breakfast, the first time I bought him flowers, et cetera, et cetera. I could never remember all of those anniversaries. I knew our first date had been early in September, and when we had our commitment ceremony a few years later, it was on National Coming Out Day, in October, but all those other things blended together, for me.

Even though I don’t remember the exact date of those anniversaries, this time of year reminds me a lot of those firsts. And as we near November, it reminds me of a lot of our lasts (which at the time we didn’t know they were, of course).

It’s been fifteen years, but being awakened by any sound too close to that of a bookcase falling over still sends my heart into panicked super overdrive.

But crying is good. It reminds us that we were loved. That the loss hurts so much should also remind us that we had something precious enough to deserve being cried over. And it should remind us not to take what we have now for granted.

I have a lot of wonderful, talented, loving people in my life. I don’t deserve to have all this wonderfulness in my life. Thank you for letting me be a part of yours.

What a difference…

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Mother nature always finds new ways to amaze. Levees are holding in the face to Hurricane Isaac… holding, but the floods are just overtopping them.

Back in 1980, when Mt St Hellens erupted, I lived not far downstream. When the volcano started seriously rumbling, my Great Uncle tried to get my grandparents, Mom, my Aunt Silly, and all us kids to come live with him in California. He had actually started the process of buying a nearby house (he was fairly well off). He was convinced we were all in great danger.

Grandpa pointed out that Uncle Lyle lived in the Shasta Valley… In the shadow of a larger volcano that was part of the same mountain range. Since no one can see the future, we could be trading one natural disaster for a worse one.

It wasn’t until that eruption that I learned Mom, my sister, and I had been living in a flood plain for both the Cowlitz and Columbia rivers for at least four years. Decades before, dikes had been built along the rivers, and as sometimes swampy land dried out, people started building.

For the weeks and months after the eruption, seeing the water level of the Cowlitz sometimes within inches of overtopping the dike certainly made one think.

The difference between inconvenience and disaster is sometimes just a matter of inches or minutes. No matter how many precautions and contingency plans we’ve made, there’s always something that can be worse than we imagined. Or something we didn’t think of. Or simple a bit of bad timing.

Life is a gample. We should be grateful for the wins, learn lessons from the losses, and always be ready to lend a helping hand.

Doin’ the Macarena!

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My husband calls it “the pocket Macarena,” that routine many of us do when leaving home: check pockets to make sure we have keys, wallet, phone, et cetera.

My Going To Work Macarena involves checking for: badge/bus pass, wallet, phone, eyeglasses, headphones, backpack. I don’t have to check for my watch, because my arm just feels wrong if it isn’t there. Before I get to that, there’s the quick check of the backpack, to confirm it contains: lunch, iPad, work laptop, and keys. Continue reading Doin’ the Macarena! →

Memory landmarks

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Navigating one’s own memory can be tricky. My husband has been talking about replacing the small laser printer on the upper shelf of his desk for a while, and when he recently mentioned that the one he has is about 10 years old I scoffed. I bought him that as an upgrade “just a couple Christmases ago.” I was certain.

Nope. Because of the way he obsessively backs up device drivers, he could show me that the original drivers he installed for the computer were for Windows 98, second edition. “Remember, when you upgraded to Win 2000 shortly after, we had trouble getting drivers that would work.”

“Ah!” I said, “I knew that printer was before I switched back to Apple, but didn’t realized how much Before Mac it was!”

Before Mac and Since Mac is a fuzzy divider, because sometimes I put the line in May ’09, when I replaced my desktop computer with a MacPro tower, and other times I put it in Jan ’09, when for laptop use I stopped bouncing back and forth between my Sharp PC and my Mac Powerbook, and bought myself a Macbook.

A much more solid mental landmark is the Before Layoff and After Layoff. Of course, having been employed at the same company for more than 20 years (having survived 5 or so previous recessions), June 30, 2008 sticks out quite prominently.

The previous major landmark was half-fuzzy, and half so hard-and-bright-it-hurt: Before Ray Died, and After. The Before is very, very clear. The only reason there’s fuzz at all is I kind of, sort of, almost completely went to pieces for a few months after my first husband died. I remember things that happened during that time, but I’m really unclear on the precise order some of them happened in.

That’s why there’s some fuzziness on another landmark. Michael had known Ray and I for a couple years before Ray’s death, and Michael and I started dating about three months after Ray died… But it was still during that period when my memory is a bit shattered. Don’t get me wrong, I remember dating and falling in love, just don’t ask me which date happened when.

There are lots of other landmarks. Before Grandma Died, Before Grandpa Died, Before I Came Out and Divorced, Before My First Marriage, Before Seattle, Before Longview, Before My Folks Split Up… and so on.

Others are less about the physical world. I’ve already mentioned Before Mac, and at least implied Before Win2000 but there are a lot more. Before InDesign, for instance, and much earlier, Before PageMaker. Then there’s many different phases of During WordPerfect (since my workplace swtiched to it, away from it, back to it and away; during most of which time and long after WP was my preferred word processor for personal use). There’s Before I Gave In And Got A Cell Phone, there’s Before I Embraced Word Processors, or Before I Figured Out Orson Scott Card Was An Evil Bigot And That’s Why So Much of His Writing Bothered Me, or Before I Read Wyrd Sisters And Became A Pratchett Fanatic.

That latter, by the way, is right up there with Before Star Wars, Before I Knew Who Asimov Was, and Before I Knew Where Books Come From.

So, what are your landmarks?

Sleep, interrupted

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Two nights in a row I’ve woken up, wide awake, at about 3am. Night before last, it was a sudden realization of why a scene I had struggled writing the night before wasn’t working. Last night it was a bad dream in which a bunch of my closest friends were upset and crying, and somehow it was my fault.

Neither interruption is being conducive to my recovery from the awful cold. Continue reading Sleep, interrupted →

A round-up of mundania

life

Or what passes for mundania in my life.

The last few weekends our friend, Sky, came down to use my poster printer. After wasting several hours trying to figure out why the print quality was so bad, our friend Anthony, who was hanging out with us, showed Sky a dialog box on him computer to select print quality. A real Derpy moment for us all. Still, the posters are gorgeous.

Starting some time before that, Michael (my husband) had been asking what happened to the button maker. He wanted to use it for a project for an upcoming convention. I had vaguely remembered it being in the bedroom, but hadn’t been able to find it. Continue reading A round-up of mundania →

Old shoes

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I have a bad habit regarding old shoes. Though it’s really just another manifestation of my packrat tendencies.

I hang onto shoes after I replace them. I don’t intend to accumulate a bunch of unused pairs of shoes. My thinking is usually, “these still have some wear in them, and if my new shoes get damaged or something, I can use these temporarily.”

That would be fine if my next step was to toss the older pair that the now-old pair was bought to replace, but I don’t. One reason is that the old shoes tend to vanish into the closet or under the bed, and I slowly forget about them. So things will trundle on this way for long periods of time until (usually while cleaning out the closet or something similar) I discover a bunch of pairs of old shoes. It’s always a surprise just how many pairs there are in the stash.

But even the hanging onto one pair just in case is a bit silly. There are people who only own one pair of shoes at a time, but I’m not one of them. I try to keep one pair of very nice dress shoes for those rare occasions that one needs to dress up, and a pair of faux dress shoes for the office, a pair of sturdy shoes for those times one is digging in the garden, helping a friend move, et cetera, and a pair of casual, comfy shoes for just general running around. And since I was permanently placed on a no-carb diet by my doctors, I have a tendency to get flare-ups of gout every now and then, so I have a pair of sandal-like shoes that pass for regular shoes, but that I can actually get my feet into when one is badly swollen with gout.

So, in the event that a pair of shoes gets damaged or soaked or something, I have several other pairs of “current” shoes that I can wear until I replace the damaged ones, without resorting to any old pairs.

I know this, but convincing my inner packrat is hard. And when I pick up a new pair of shoes, it’s too easy to worry about getting rid of the old ones later. Which quickly turns into forgetting that they are even there, and so on.

Of course, I think the paltry three pairs of old shoes I discovered yesterday pales in comparison to how many old shoes of my husband’s are kicking around the bedroom, but that isn’t an excuse.

I need to toss the old ones. Then I won’t be standing in a glass house if I mention his. Right?

Don’t go near the water!

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When I was about 9 years old, my parents paid for swimming lessons. My dad did so under protest, because he had never had swimming lessons. Apparently when I was much younger he had tried, once, to teach me to swim the way he had learned: during a fishing trip he threw me into the creek.

I have no real recollection of this. I have had nightmares about drowning, and for the longest time I would have a bit of a panic if my face went underwater, but I don’t remember his attempt. I’m told That I just screamed and went under, sinking like a rock. And when he decided to pull me out, I struggled free and ran until I found someone to tell that my dad had tried to kill me.

So, some years later I had lessons. I learned how not to drown, but I didn’t like being in the water, so I never got good at it.

During the summer that I was taking those lessons, it seemed every conversation between adults near me was about whether swimming lessons were a good idea. There were people who agreed with my dad: if I couldn’t learn by being thrown in, I deserved to drown someday. Others thought maybe just a friend of the family or another relative should be able to do it without the expense. A few thought if you didn’t learn before a particular age, you never could. One particluar woman from our church, I recall, said it was okay for boys to take swimming lessons, but not girls, because “while they’re learning, some guy is going to take them out there and turn into an octopus.”

(I thought the image was hilarious, even after someone explained they were talking about sexual assault; come on, an inexperienced swimmer can pull a good swimmer trying to rescue them to a mutual death, you think someone fighting off a groper can do less?)

When another woman pointed out they could get lessons from a female teacher, and it would be better to know how to swim, in case they ever fell into the water somewhere, than not.

“I just stay away from the water, and so will my daughters!”

Which is very shortsighted, but then we approach many things about young people’s education that way, like abstinence-only sexual education. The latter is far more dangerous than not teaching kids how to swim. Statistics show that kids with abstinence-only sex ed are absolutely no less likely to have sex sooner than their parents think they ought, and far, far, far more likely to have unprotected sex when they do.

And don’t get me started on all the myths and misunderstandings about sex that plague people for decades into unhappy marriages!

Not teaching kids truthfully about sex is like not teaching them about healthy food. Yes, you need to pick age-appropriate levels of disclosure, but it is a natural part of life, and just as important to one’s health, mental and otherwise.

But, hey, If you want to stick with, “Just stay away!” I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

Too young to remember

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“You’re probably too young to remember…” was a phrase that sometimes I dreaded. Other times it signaled a bit of a history lesson I would find interesting.

I’m not entirely happy with how often I find myself using that line. It’s just a natural consequence of getting older. But that’s the problem. We’re not socialized to be happy about getting older.

I’ve known people who got quite radical and angry when they heard that phrase. “It’s nothing more than an ageist attempt to disempower me for being young!” Which sometimes it can be, but most of the time it is simply a literal statement of fact: you weren’t alive when such and such happened, so you have no personal memories of the event.

I read the phrase this morning on a few news blogs because the man who played the clown host of a morning children’s show that was popular in the 60s and 70s died last night.

I don’t have the excuse of being too young to remember the glory days of his show, but I don’t remember them. It was a show produced and seen only on a Seattle channel, and when I was young enough to be in the target age, I lived far, far away. So I’m just as detached as a bunch of much younger people about this. I can understand, in the abstract, how people feel, but I may never quite get it.

He never completely retired, continuing to make public appearances, raise money for charity, and so on, showing up in his patchwork painted limosine. By random chance earlier this year I nearly attended his final public appearance. I was buying salmon at the wild salmon market at fisherman’s terminal and confused that there was a giant crowd of people, and a bunch were wearing red clown noses. Then, as I was driving home, I passed his limo going the other way.

The memories of some experiences we have sometimes carry far more emotional weight and importance to us years after the fact than we expect them to. And that can be hard to explain to another person. When we describe it, even to us, it sounds silly. So he told some jokes and acted silly on screen. And you watched it every single morning when you were supposed to be getting ready for school. And?

But we all have experiences like that. It might be a family ritual, or a thing we used to do in church, or a favorite food at a chain restaurant.

In the abstract it is no big deal. But the human heart doesn’t live in the abstract.