tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77828496338374509202023-11-02T05:18:57.055-07:00poopoomamaLiz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.comBlogger203125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-67218605563659623782021-10-08T12:59:00.004-07:002021-10-08T12:59:22.569-07:00Bargain Basement<p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">I upcycle cashmere. I thrift it used or, better, clients give it to me in exchange for a credit.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">They buy a multi-hued handmade poncho with their old sweaters.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">Or fingerless gloves, or scarves, or hats (for a critical time, even pussy hats).</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">This was an outgrowth of my greed for the sumptuous textile and my inability to pay full price for it. Years ago, in my thrift store travels, I started finding cashmere sweaters.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">Occasionally, I’d luck out and they’d be in good condition.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">Usually, they had holes or stains or pills.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">But I’d run my fingers over that downy luxury and think, “Couldn’t I do something with this?”</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">And so a (cottage) industry was born.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">I’m gifted at making something out of nothing.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Just about every place I’ve ever lived has been an underwhelming box (some super underwhelming - complete with rats, termites, scorpions, used needles AND used condoms).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve cleaned that box, painted that box, and filled that box with accumulated furnishings, most of which I either inherited (probably too fancy a word for taking what no one else wanted) or found at a flea market or bought at IKEA (or sometimes IKEA via craigslist - used IKEA, people) or straight-up pulled from the street.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The result is<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>magical, every time.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It ends up looking like a million bucks and it costs approximately seventy-five cents.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">My parents were raised in the depression and thrift was a daily part of my childhood.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Sometimes that went so far as my mother not buying quite enough meat for dinner (this from the wife of a Marin doctor - old habits die hard).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I was raised to be conscious of resources (“Turn out the light when you leave the room!” “Why are you standing there with the refrigerator open?” “Who turned the heat up past 65?” “Wait, how much did that dress cost?”). I still live in fear of over-spending (though I often do).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Even with savings in the bank (and twenty years of paying my mortgage on time) I often wonder idly about foreclosure.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">Of course, our relationships to money are emotional - and often about much more than a number in an account.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Money represents, at least for me, ease, but more importantly, safety. Somewhere in my psyche I believe that if I have enough money I am immune to harm.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Not true, of course - I know a lot of monetarily wealthy folks who struggle emotionally as much as I do if not more. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But it feels true, at least to me.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">There are times when I take what I can get, for money or love - a difficult client with a tantalizing project, a charming rogue of a boyfriend with a habit of disappearing, a friend who talks much more than they listen.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And I do this because, on some level, I don’t believe I can do better or that I deserve to.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ll take the discount rack, the dusty estate sale, the dude who’s maybe a little mean.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Because I can’t afford more.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">I love working within limitations.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My favorite project is one where there isn’t a lot to spend, where re-use is essential, where there’s a tight frame.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>That’s when we get creative.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But there’s a line between thrift and the feeling of not having enough.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Thrift is a captivating puzzle.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Want is a soul-destroyer. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">I was a latch-key kid growing up in a remote mountain neighborhood.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>When I did get the chance to be with friends, or really anyone, I was so grateful. But that meant that I’d put up with just about anything to be in the warmth of human company; sketchy unsupervised hijinx, questionable adults, bullies.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I enjoy my time alone now, and I can be with people I love pretty much whenever I want, but that stray dog gratitude is still in me, it still translates.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I know what’s it’s like to be alone in the cold and I figure I have to be on my best behavior to keep that from happening.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">I make do with scraps.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Yes, sometimes those scraps are cashmere, sometimes they’re the frumpy house on the beautiful block, sometimes they’re men who are intelligent, handsome, successful (and explosive).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>White girl scraps, for sure, but scraps all the same. I take what my peers don’t want or can’t envision being good.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And if I can, I make whatever it is great.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">But I have this image of myself as a small girl, maybe four or five, huddled under the dining table (which I still had until very recently).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My family is eating above me and I’m waiting for bits to drop down, morsels that will be my dinner.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>To be clear, nothing like that ever happened.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But I can see it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And I can feel it.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">I’d rather live from a place of wealth, of abundance.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It doesn’t have to be monetary (though I wouldn’t argue). I’d like to walk through my world believing that I have enough, that I am enough, that I’m safe.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’d like to stop building beautiful cakes out of crumbs.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I don’t want to sacrifice my talent for bargain-hunting, for repurposing, for rebuilding.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But I would like to stop selling myself short.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Wheeling and dealing in the real world?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Excellent.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Striking an emotional bargain?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There never was such a thing.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ll take the second-hand cashmere, the vintage jeans, even the free couch.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But the rest, the difficult people, the fraught situations, the fear, I’ll leave by the side of the road.</span></p>Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-1192575612784540372021-10-02T11:52:00.001-07:002021-10-02T11:52:34.126-07:00Mars in Cancer<p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">Mae and Lana are super into astrology.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>They know their charts backwards and forwards (including “chart rulers” and other exotic aspects I’d never heard of).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>They’ve also been educating me on mine.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">My sun sign is Cancer, which the kids say makes for a good mother (nurturing, gentle) but a generally soggy person.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I could possibly tend towards passive aggression (wow, ok, I guess - if you say so,) hypersensitivity and a tendency to feel things deeply - ALL THE TIME.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I spend a great deal of time thinking about my emotions and the emotions of those around me, for better or worse.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Lana occasionally pats me on the arm and says “Poor little Cancer mommy”.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">I have Sagittarius rising, which would speak for my flirtatiousness (they accuse me, correctly, of flirting with everyone and everything; cats, babies, husbands, wives, all the beings), my outward confidence (today I’m wearing pink cheetah print jeans) and my love of center stage (who wants to take a selfie??).</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">My Mercury (the planet of communication and intellect) is in Gemini.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m academically inclined, love word play and maybe have the tendency to gossip.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>That explains my love of school (hand raised high in every class I ever took at any age, I can’t help myself), the kindle that travels with me everywhere (including from room to room), my great appreciation of words and putting them together (evidenced here) and, okay, yes, sometimes I do speak freely of my community when with a trusted friend (a most political definition of gossip).</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">Adorably, all three of us have our moons in Aquarius.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This means that our private selves are observant, detached, happy in quiet.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>So lounging on a sofa together with books (or silent phones) is a happy equation for us.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We’ve thought about getting matching tattoos memorializing this planet placement but can’t quite figure out the image (we did consider a couch but maybe it’s not the most attractive visual for all eternity).</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">The really bad news is that my Mars is also in Cancer.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Mars is the planet of aggression.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s conflict, ambition, how you show up in a fight.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I show up like a Cancer; wobbly and passive and emotional.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m a lover, not a fighter.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">Conflict is, in daily life, one of my greatest struggles.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I lavishly skirt it and when I’m forced to face it, I’m profoundly afraid.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m often convinced of my opponent’s argument and forget my own.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My voice shakes when I try to speak my truth in the chill of hostility.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m a crab without it’s shell, one giant soft target.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>A fight makes me want to barf - literally, as the kids say.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">It also means that being an actress was a predictably difficult position for me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Walk in a room on a daily basis and convince a group of (usually uninterested) strangers of my talent?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And get turned down at least nine times out of ten?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m not built for it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I spent my entire twenties nauseous.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">It means that new client meetings are often daunting for me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Believing in my own ideas and worth, being a warrior, doesn’t come naturally.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Once we’re friendly and cozy and in the process of design, I’m good.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But breaking the ice, showing up as someone that a stranger would want to trust with a project, requires an internal shove (go get ‘em, tiger - no really, GO).</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">The last number of years I’ve been working on standing my ground without apology, serene and unmovable as a redwood tree (or at least that’s the image my therapist and I landed on).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve been trying to move through the world with less fear, spend less time appeasing difficult characters in an effort at defanging.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I breathe deep and try to remember that, really, there’s not a lot that can harm me in this later stage of adulthood, at least not in the way my child heart believes.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">For the most part, I’m standing stronger.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But every once in a while, conflict will surface like a dorsal fin from the ocean’s placid surface.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve surrounded myself with kind and loving people in my personal life; if trouble arises there it’s resolved with care by all parties; no sharks to be seen. The only battles that do feel worth attempting are those that involve the welfare of my children.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I need to protect my work and my income, I need to show up fiercely to advocate for what I feel is right for the kids if they need that help.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And if that battle is with someone less than kind, though I may show a brave face, internally it’s 7.5 on the Richter scale.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Everything in me wants to throw up my hands in surrender and say, “You win, just please, please, go away”.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But, when I’m fighting for the kids and our livelihood, I swallow hard and face the enemy.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">It’s the hardest thing I do, in a sea of challenges (attempting to parent wisely and compassionately, captaining my own business(es), managing the household and it’s often tight budget).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s the time I most lean on my friends, the time I most miss being partnered.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It feels lonely and terrifying and often futile.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>No matter how hard I try to reinvent myself, my basic wiring is what it is.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My Mars is in Cancer.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m never going to be good at fighting - it’s always gonna scare the shit out of me.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">Thankfully, at the end of my day slaying dragons, I return to the treehouse on the hill.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I put together dinner and sit on the couch with those gorgeous kids and the beloved street dog, munching and chatting and watching old seasons of Survivor; the crab finally deep inside the safety of it’s protective shell.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And so so happily, I put my phone on do not disturb.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Go away, scary old world.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">Oh, also?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My Venus is in Leo.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Die-hard romantic.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Damn it.</span></p>Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-5882731369744904442021-03-09T11:40:00.008-08:002021-03-09T14:51:42.231-08:00Ramona the Brave<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">f you’ve seen any of my social media posts in the last few months, then you know I got a dog.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Mae says my Instagram feed should simply be called the Ramona Fan-page.</span></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">Ramona came to us at four months as a stray from Zihuatanejo.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She had been rescued, rehabilitated and spayed by Surfers for Strays, a non-profit operated by gringos (if you’re looking for a dog, I don’t have enough good things to say about them).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>They put her on a plane with a friend of the organization (a twenty-something surfer coincidentally traveling to the Bay Area) who delivered her to us at a gas station in San Rafael on a cold November night.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>While we had contingency plans if she somehow wasn't a fit, it was love at first sight.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She is the star of our household, patiently enduring our ongoing vows of adoration.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">Though the adoption of this particular puppy happened quickly, I had grappled with my desire for a dog for over a year.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Historically, I have jumped into relationships, pregnancies, real estate purchases; I can make quick gut decisions.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This commitment was long contemplated.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">I have a complicated history with dogs.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>When I was eleven, I lost Adam, a young German Shepherd that was my most trusted companion in a time when I felt very alone. The situation that resulted in his death was complex and very dark; it was a central expression of what was profoundly not right in my family.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I loved Adam desperately but with his death I closed the book on dogs.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I couldn’t even look at them without feeling heartbreak.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I told myself I wasn’t a dog person.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">When I was twenty-two, my live-in boyfriend, Mark, wanted to get a dog.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I had great reservations.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But when we visited a litter of golden retriever puppies deep in the sprawl of the San Diego suburbs, when a particular girl puppy with pink nail polish on one of her claws (to identify her as the only female left for adoption) kept tumbling into my lap and gazing into my eyes with such naked devotion, I cautiously agreed.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In the weeks that followed, my self-concept about my non-dogness shattered, quite painfully.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>With the rush of love for her, I once again felt the loss of Adam.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My heart was pried open by the fuzzy crimped fur on her ears.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">That dog, Ellie (full name Eliante, named after a Moliere character I played that year), became one of the great loves of my life.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She was my baby before babies.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Already eager to please, Mark trained her impeccably.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It was like she could read our minds.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>When we later separated, we shared custody of Ellie, which was probably as much a testament to our deep friendship as our love for the dog.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">A year before my marriage ended, we got a puppy.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Sunny was adorable and hilarious.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She also had a wire or two crossed.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She was reactive; she was actually kicked out of the Humane Society training class because she couldn’t stop barking at the other dogs.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Given the opportunity, any opportunity, she would book it at high speed.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She was delightful and she was a handful.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>As the marriage disintegrated, she became a point of contention, an emblem of all I was doing wrong.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In the following chaotic first year of separation, her high needs and the needs of the kids were in competition.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Ultimately, sadly, the situation became unsafe for her (for reasons I won’t share) and I tearfully found her a new home.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">Again, it was clear I wasn’t a dog person.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I couldn’t train a dog.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I wasn’t responsible enough for dog ownership.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Ellie had been a fluke, trained by someone who knew what they were doing.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Really, wasn’t I cat person?</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">Post divorce, slowly, I stabilized, we stabilized.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There were some tumultuous years, years I’m so glad to see the back of, but in some ways, we’ve emerged into the light.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The girls have found solid ground under their feet.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>So have I.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We’ve built a place of safety in our house in the trees.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>About a year ago, I again starting thinking about the steady sweet energy of a dog.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">Our neighborhood borders open space.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We hike daily - together or separately.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Increasingly, as I wandered the trails I contemplated a companion, a non-verbal friend with whom to witness this daily shock of beauty.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>As my work shifted with COVID, the shop closed and much of my design work happening remotely or at least episodically, a dog felt more possible.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">I hemmed, I hawed.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Some days (the calm, quiet ones) it seemed like the best idea ever, some days (when the chaos of solo parenting descended) the worst.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>At some point, on one of those peaceful days, Mae extracted a commitment.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">“Mom, you keep talking about it but are we actually going to do it?”</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">“I…don’t know.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I want to - and it worries me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>What if it’s overwhelming?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>What if we can’t give the dog what it needs?”</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">“Mom, it’s a dog.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>You’ve done harder stuff.”</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">All the weight that surrounded the idea of DOG for me, all the heaviness, lifted a bit.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve done way harder stuff.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And done it well.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Maybe I could do this, too.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">And so, Ramona.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Mae pledged that she’d train her, that she’d walk her.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She hasn’t done much of either.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>To her credit, she says that the way Ramona and I are attached at the hip, there’s not a lot of room.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Ramona, in early puppyhood, scared from her time on the street, would only walk if I was with her.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She’s getting braver (Ramona the Brave), more used to the idea that she’s safe.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But from early on, she was clearly a Mama’s girl.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">And I, much to my surprise and delight, have trained her.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She sits, she stays, she comes when called, she walks the trails off-leash.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m not the expert that Mark was but I’m doing a fine job.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>As is she.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">And so, twice a day, we’re up in the wild, encountering woodpeckers and hawks and deer and even the occasional bob cat or coyote (“Ramona, COME!”).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She sleeps in her crate under my elevated bed, her snores a comfort in the middle of the night.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>When the kids fly, and they will soon, I will still have a baby at home.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I, not a great believer in insurance, got major medical for her because I know I would pay anything to ensure her health and well-being.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">When I’m with her, which is almost always, I feel the ghost of long ago Adam, the sweetness of Ellie, the loopy delight of Sunny.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My heart is wide open, the deeply buried dog part of it fully engaged.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Ramona is brave, it’s true.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But I, in loving her, have some courage of my own.</span></p>Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-27293920393162521742020-06-11T18:12:00.001-07:002020-06-11T18:12:10.656-07:00Bye Bye Shop<div class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); 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<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">A week or so ago, I closed my shop for good.</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">There was some unnecessary landlord nonsense that forced my hand, but even without that I couldn't see the path through COVID.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Retail, especially in a small town, is a tenuous prospect on the best of days.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I used to joke that if it was anything but 72 degrees in an excellent economy, every star aligned, sales would likely be shit.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Right now it’s anything but 72 degrees.</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">These times are so strange.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>While the impending demise of my shop has been hard to contemplate, I’ve simultaneously had brilliant online sales.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>So while an institution of my life is ending (the shop being a finicky and charming fourth child), I’m also enjoying my new rhythm of making and sewing in my home workshop, cobbled together from the detritus of the shop.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m diving into the intricacies of online marketing, I’m refining my virtual store.</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">I just sat here on my deck in the late spring breeze, breathing in, breathing out.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I lit some sage (I am in Northern California, after all) and I cycled through the moments of high and low that happened in those four walls.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Building it in a week, on the run from a failed business partnership.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>All the strings of lights I hung over the years, all the wooden signs painted and tapped into the walls, all the death-defying ladder feats near the skyscraper ceiling.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The garments made standing at my desk., sewing and watching the town go by.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My children roaming through at different ages, in different phases.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The after-hours kisses, the room lit only by fairy lights.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The happy hours, raucous Friday five o’clocks.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The customers: the unexpected kindnesses, the occasional uneasy encounters, the acquaintances that deepened into friendships.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The parades, the street parties, my beautiful town delighting in it’s quirks. Day in, day out, for four years, that was my second home, often my sanctuary.</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">This is a time of great change.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>People are dying, businesses are going under, revolutions of every kind are in bloom.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve had my own personal great change, my own loss, my own revolution - small in global scale but large in my daily life.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Lately, sometimes I feel like I’m falling and sometimes I feel like I’m flying.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Whatever it is, I’m up in the air.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We will land somewhere - I'm so curious to see where.</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">RIP, shop.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I loved you.</span></div>
Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-83605659523671457372020-04-08T13:25:00.001-07:002020-04-08T13:25:21.852-07:00Quarantinuary<div class="p1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">April 8, 2020</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">I had to just look up the date.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Is it March?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>April?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Quarantinuary? Coronember?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The days blend together.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m in a never-ending present.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In my house.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>With my kids.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Doing the same thing every day.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Cooking, applying for loans, sewing masks.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And repeat.</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">I’ve started making courtesy masks.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In my previous life, I constructed other garments - ponchos, dresses, depending on the season.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Now a corner of my kitchen has been devoted to production of just one item.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My waiting list, after a single post on social media, is daunting.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m sewing as fast as I can.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My bedroom bureau is the shipping department.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Envelopes, stamps, a food scale.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Not anything I ever imagined two months ago but here we are.</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">It’s quiet, this life.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And it’s stressful.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Working with the government to try to get the rent covered on my shop.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Educating myself on the differences between the PPP and the EIDL.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Waiting to hear back from unemployment like one might await a hummingbird to alight on one’s nose.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Reading the news.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Worrying about people, small p and big P.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Trying to imagine what the next twelve to eighteen months will hold, wondering how to navigate it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>All from within the confines of my house, my favorite, most comforting place.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>While in my pajamas. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">I know that most every cogent being on this planet is having a very weird time.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We’re all in our own envelope of quandary.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The specifics might vary from person to person but everyone is affected and everyone, on some level, is afraid.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Strangely, possibly sadistically, it’s helpful for me to remember that.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m in the vacuum of my own thoughts and worries, with little social interaction to distract or diffuse.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s easy to get lost and overwhelmed.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s easy to lose hope.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>If I can remember that everyone I love, everyone I know, everyone I DON’T know, is struggling, too, I don’t feel so alone.</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">I just listened to the novelist George Saunders read an email to his creative writing students.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He advised them to write about their experience through this time, to do so with an open heart, because we’re going to need to process this and sometimes it’s the artists that help do that.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>So I’m writing to you, dear reader, with an open heart.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>That open heart is scared.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And daring to hope.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And grieving for what was.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And wondering, with awe, what will be, after this virus has had it’s way with us.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m reaching for you, from this quiet of quarantine. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> Hope you're doing ok.</span></span></div>
Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-66332636544013337122020-03-31T17:19:00.002-07:002020-03-31T17:19:53.416-07:00The Howl
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<span class="s1">At eight p.m. in Marin County people howl.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">In Italy they sing, in England they applaud.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Here, we howl.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Last night I went out a little early.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I wanted to hear how it started.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And sure enough, just before eight, a lonely yip.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Silence.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Again the yip.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Then an answering call from above us, a long low wail.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And presently Mae and I added our voices (Lana is an infrequent howler).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We favor a classic yowl - any wolf would be proud. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">Soon the dogs join in.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Then the turkeys.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Occasionally the coyotes.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And Mae and I start gobbling because we find it hilarious.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And then eventually we start mimicking our neighbor below us, who on summer evenings calls her cat with a long melodic “Leeeeeeeeeeeeoooooo”.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She fancies herself a singer - we’re also privy to her voice lessons.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Mae and I call “Leeeeeeeeeoooooo” and then giggle at our meanness.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Then usually, the howl is petering out and we return to our puzzle and our audiobook.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The howl, as far as I know, started in Mill Valley.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I think it was rationalized as a tribute to healthcare workers - I believe that’s the reasoning behind the Italian singing and the English clapping.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But I’ll say this.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>As grateful as I am to the people working the front lines of this war, those risking their own health and the health of their loved ones, working long and harrowing hours, I do not howl for them.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I howl because I miss people and that communal exercise connects me to them.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Strangers, not the friends that I reach out to via text or phone.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Connection with strangers has been put on hold through this crisis. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">I howl because I’ve been caged all day.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve been good all day.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve stoppered my fear (about my health, my people’s health, my shuttered business).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve kept myself away from almost everything that makes my life - my friends, my boyfriend, my shop, even the pleasure of chatting with acquaintances at grocery stores.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve done that for the sake of others.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>For my own safety and that of my kids, yes, though I’m not so worried about the virus getting us.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m more worried about the virus getting other people THROUGH us.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve kept a lid on it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve behaved.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And come eight o’clock, I’m ready to unleash a bit of my contained wildness.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And I do so at the top of my lungs.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">We’re living in such strange times.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But nature hates a vacuum.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Into the abyss of the mundanity of sheltering in place, of quarantining, is sucked new rhythms, new joys.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The long hike with teenagers in the middle of a Tuesday.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The lentil soup made mid-morning because we eat at weird times.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The streaming barre class, squinting at my laptop to make out the images of my friends deep plies.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The six o’clock happy hour with my boyfriend, six feet apart on the deck, rain or shine.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">There is joy here.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There’s fear.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There’s despair.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There’s loneliness.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There’s loss.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But there’s also, come eight o’clock, a long and loving howl rising up through the trees, many voices raised in solidarity.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We’re here.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We’re alive. Ah-woooooooooo.</span></div>
Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-23902622052391925252020-03-21T10:53:00.002-07:002020-03-21T10:53:37.060-07:00Treasure
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<span class="s1">March 21, 2020</span></div>
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<span class="s1">When I was a little person, I remember my mom talking a lot about the Golden Rule.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>At first, the idea of gold really grabbed me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I imagined a cavern of treasure; gold blocks and precious stones piled as far as the eye could see.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Then as I got older I got a firmer grip on the idea.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>If there was one ethic my mother lived by it was that.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">There’s nothing that touches me more than strangers being kind to each other.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>When there’s no personal gain, being willing to help or just to sympathize or even just to smile at someone you don’t know, who you don’t love (at least specifically), this has always seemed to me to be the grandest gift.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Right now, all across the world, we are giving that gift to each other.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We’re doing it by staying home.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We’re doing it by temporarily shuttering our businesses, by forgoing income (voluntarily or involuntarily), by sequestering ourselves from the people we love, by being lonely and isolated and worried.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Even if you’re just sitting on your couch, this is hard work.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Not hospital-hard, not fighting-for-your-life hard, but hard.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">We are staying home so that the person we don’t know - the cancer patient, the octogenarian, the boy with cystic fibrosis - doesn’t die, at least not from this virus.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And an enormous amount of people - the majority of those asked - are doing it with good will.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This, more than my own worries of the survival of my small business, of how I’ll pay my mortgage, of how I’ll support my kids, this makes me cry.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Because it’s beautiful.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The virtual happy hours, the virtual cooking classes, art classes, songs sung, just even the texts flying back and forth - “How are you holding up?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>How are you feeling?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I miss you.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I love you.” - is heart-stoppingly beautiful.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I have to believe - really I have to or I’ll sink below saving - that, for the most part, we operate out of love, out of connection.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Our humanity wins over our selfishness, our ego, our fear.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">There is treasure, it turns out, in the Golden Rule.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>That treasure is love.</span></div>
<br />Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-22893456349968995172020-03-19T19:48:00.000-07:002020-03-19T19:48:31.283-07:00Day to Day
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<span class="s1">March 19, 2020</span></div>
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<span class="s1">We have become a society of three.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Me, Mae (newly 18) and Lana (newly 16).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Their brother, Mihiretu (13), is at school in the remote reaches of Southern Utah.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>On a zoom session with him this morning, I tried to describe what his friends here are up to. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">“So, Ellis?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Honey, Ellis is alone with his parents.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>All day every day.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He has hours of online homework.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He can go outside but he can’t interact with anyone.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He is not having fun.”</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Grumbles from Mihiretu, who, on principle, is jealous of anyone at home.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Then a long description of the kayak trip two days ago when all the boys ended up covered in mud, complete with war stripes on their faces.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Mihiretu loves to win.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Especially when it comes to Ellis.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">It was harder to explain why this virus is such a big deal. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">“More people have died from the flu,” Mihiretu said, clearly parroting what he’s been hearing at school.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">“So far, yes,” I said.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>“But the tricky thing is that no one has gotten this before.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s brand new.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>So over time, it might be more dangerous than the flu.”</span></div>
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<span class="s1">“But only old people die from it,” he said.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">“It’s more than old people, honey.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Healthy kids do well.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m not worried about you and your sisters.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But for everyone else it’s harder to predict.”</span></div>
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<span class="s1">“Fine,” he said.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>“But I still don’t see why it’s such a big deal.”</span></div>
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<span class="s1">This, from what I’m hearing from my parent friends, is common with kids.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>They don’t feel the danger but they sure feel the sudden lack of friends and fun.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My girls, so far, have taken this seriously.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Maybe because I’ve had symptoms.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Probably because I’ve had symptoms.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Today they made me temporarily renounce my boyfriend.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">“He’s out in the world,” they insisted.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>“He can’t see us and see other people.”</span></div>
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<span class="s1">He barely sees other people.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But he does go to the store when he needs to.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The girls and I have completely quarantined ourselves.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We don’t want to be responsible for any spread.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And because there’s the distinct possibility that we’re infected (the girls have had an odd symptom or two, as slim as their years) that feels reasonable.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The girls like Jamie.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>They appreciate his company.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I think particularly now that we have none.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But they are feeling their civic duty deeply.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And wear it surprisingly cheerfully.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The big set piece of our day has been a mid-morning hike.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We are lucky to be able to walk 100 yards and step onto a trail system that goes all the way to the ocean.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Every day has been a different route.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I don’t know if it’s the quieting of our busyness and the narrowing of our daily society but outside seems especially vibrant right now.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Nature seems loud.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Yes, it’s the first day of spring.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Everything is waking up.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But there is also less human sound.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Less cars driving around, no saws.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">We walk fast, we three.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I didn’t raise dawdlers.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But we have all the time in the world to walk these days.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Our walk is the big event.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>So maybe we take that narrow trail off to the left.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Maybe we stop and watch the hummingbird high in the oak, who is also in a rare state of stillness.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">We come home and go our separate ways for awhile - eating, bathing, working.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The afternoon stretches.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The boy cat has taken to joining me in bed around 2:00, expecting a nap.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>A nap that, because I am fighting off the plague, seems appropriate.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Evening finds us in our favorite place - on the couch watching TV.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We pondered a shared tattoo awhile back.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Something small on the same spot on each person’s ankle.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But what would it be, we wondered.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>A couch?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>An old-fashioned TV with bunny ears?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Because those are some of our fondest commonalities. "God, that's sad," we laughed at the time. Sad, and not sad.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Eventually, towards nine, things devolve.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The girls are on top of each other in one way or another.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Physically, “affection” that often veers towards minor violence.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Or just on each other’s case.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Or mine.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>So I call it a night.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>They protest.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I insist. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">And then the house is quiet.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And I’m in bed with my book (I’m currently re-reading Station Eleven, about a virus that takes out 99% of the population, which I am finding strangely comforting).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And then, the best part, sleep and dreams and escape from the coronavirus update page on the New York Times website.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">And then the next day we do it again.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>When I think too far ahead, when I contemplate doing this until April 7th as has been mandated (and, let’s be real, probably longer) I get a little panicky.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But for now, beat by beat, hour by hour, I’m going to work on being present.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>With my kids.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>With myself.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>With the boy cat at 2:00pm.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>With that hummingbird high in the oak.</span></div>
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Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-25410625556978743012020-03-18T09:55:00.002-07:002020-03-18T09:55:56.189-07:00Presuming
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<span class="s1">March 18, 2020</span></div>
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<span class="s1">A little over two weeks ago I was on a flight from Palm Springs to San Francisco.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Because Palm Springs is a small airport, the plane was also petite, maybe seating a hundred people in all. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">The flight attendant was gregarious.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She noisily put the mike down in the middle of her safety instructions, rolling her eyes, mumbling loud enough for the audio to pick up “No one is even looking at me, forget it”.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She was dry and obnoxious and I found myself liking her.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Towards the end of the flight, she suddenly appeared next to me offering her hand to shake.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Surprised, I took it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>“I’m thanking every person for flying with us today,” she said.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She reached across me and shook the hand of the eighty-year-old man beside me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Then she continued towards the front, accosting every passenger.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I looked at my hand.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I knew that I had now effectively touched every person behind me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I was in row C.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Don’t touch your face, I reminded myself again and again as we circled SFO.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But I did touch my book.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And my phone.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And eventually I forgot and itched my nose.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>As soon as I got off the plane I found a bathroom and washed my hands.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Exactly a week later I was hit with a strange headache in the middle of the afternoon.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m a headache expert; I grew up with migraines, if I’m at all dehydrated I feel it in my head first.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But this headache was different than any I’d ever had - sudden onset, a warping pain on and off.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And within an hour I felt a tightness in my chest.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Not trouble breathing, per say, just a constriction.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I didn’t have a fever but I was cold.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The next day was Monday, my day off.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I still felt strange and so I got in bed for most of the day, mostly just for fun.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I read and napped and by Tuesday morning I felt fine.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I generally have a kick-ass immune system - a day in bed usually cures me of just about anything.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I continued with my week, a week that was unusual because of the encroaching virus. I was focused on my shop and when and if I was going to have to temporarily close and how I was going to weather the loss of income.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Business, because of the strange times, was very slow, so I was mostly alone.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And every once in a while I’d feel the whisper of a scratchy throat, the tremor of chest restriction, the quick bloom of a headache. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">By Friday afternoon I had closed the shop and mostly sequestered myself to my family.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>By Monday a shelter in place order had been called.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Early Monday morning I woke up to a resurging scratchiness and constriction in my throat, tight lungs, actually coughing.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And in that wee hour frame of mind I thought, shit, this is corona. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">I’ve done a ton of reading on this virus.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I know that typically patients take a turn for the worse in the second week.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Suddenly I wondered if this was my second week.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>If this resurgence of mild symptoms, symptoms that had gone virtually completely underground for the last number of days, could be my worsening.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I wasn’t worried about getting terribly sick.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’d weathered whatever this was up to this point.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>So well I hadn’t believed myself to be ill.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But I was worried about my community.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The people to whom I could have possibly spread the virus and the fear that it was far more prevalent - and sneaky - then we had thought.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The symptoms had mostly ebbed by the morning.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I felt strange again in the afternoon and got in bed and napped.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Then I felt mostly fine again.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I called a doctor friend yesterday morning, Tuesday, a friend who has been on the front lines of the epidemic in Marin.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I said, hey, should I get tested?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m not worried about me so much but more for virus-tracking.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She listened to my symptoms.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She said, I think you have it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> Those are the</span> symptoms I’m seeing in adults.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And, scarily, I’m seeing it a lot.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There are very few tests.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Heavily quarantine yourself and your family.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We can test you when tests are widely available - but at that point it will be to see if you’re immune.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">And so I wait.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>With everyone else I wait.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>For it to get worse.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>For it to get better.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Not my own state of health, that I’m pretty confident about.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>For the health of our community, small and large.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This virus can be very quiet.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And I think for many people, most, it will be mild or even entirely invisible.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But for some, the elderly, the immunosuppressed, it will be fatal.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I can’t help but feel that this will change the landscape of our lives.</span></div>
<br />Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-14969206972449648032020-03-16T22:07:00.000-07:002020-03-17T08:26:24.919-07:00It's the End of the World as We Know It<style type="text/css">
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<span class="s1">March 16, 2020</span></div>
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<span class="s1">A couple weeks ago (weeks that feel like decades), Toni Morrison came to me in a dream.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She told me to write a novel.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">In the dream, she was a friend of a friend.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She knew, somehow, that I write, that I have written, that I studied such a thing.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She asked me, off-handedly, casually, if I thought I could write a novel.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I paused, fumbled, possibly hiccuped, said that, well, I have written longer connected vignettes (certainly stated as a question).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She laughed.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I said, you’ve heard that one before, huh.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I had that dream on March 3rd, a lifetime ago.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>A time when my life seemed fairly predictable; tending shop, tending children, paying the mortgage and the rent, making my way.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Today is March 16th and we are in a different reality.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We are sheltering in place by county order, hiding from a fast-moving pandemic.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My shop is closed indefinitely.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My kids are out of school for the next month at least.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My only physical contact are those terrific (and occasionally terrifying) teenagers and my (thank god, thank god, thank god, I got my shit together enough to calm down and have a) boyfriend.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Everyone else is six feet away at very minimum, a wave and a nod as we walk on opposite sides of the street, maybe holding our breath.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Every day has broken new ground.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The stock market hit a record low today, again, for the third time this week.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Beyond kind Facebook friends buying gift cards for my store, I have no income.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We’ve cancelled every doctor’s appointment, every commitment, large and small.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My refrigerator and pantry hold more food than they every have.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My gas tank is full.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m a little low on toilet paper.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m contemplating building raised vegetable beds on my roof.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I don’t know if I can write a novel, Toni Morrison, but my very favorite fiction is dystopian.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve read The Stand maybe twenty times - I just read it again after hearing the first reports out of China in December.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Station Eleven is something of a bible, also read many times.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The Road I could handle only once.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Perhaps, Toni, I’m writing a dystopian novel that is instead a memoir, a genre for which, as a writer, I seem to have some affinity.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">In my dream, Toni Morrison said that every time I say my name I shouldn’t just say Liz.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I should say my name is Liz Lavoie and I am a writer.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">My name is Liz Lavoie and I am a writer.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And I’m living in some weird fucking times.</span></div>
<br />Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-18830538938279181732019-06-15T17:15:00.003-07:002019-06-16T14:31:41.179-07:00Feral<style type="text/css">
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<span class="s1">A friend, newly divorced, recently described his state as “feral”.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">I, ladies and gentlemen, am feral.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I once was as domesticated as one can be but I’ve been out in the wild for a number of years now and I’m a savage beast.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Like an escaped house-cat long on it’s own, I have vague memories of food appearing without me hunting it, warmth in the winter, cool in the summer, comfort.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>At first it was terrifying here in the wilderness, but over time, I’ve come to like night prowling, fighting for territory, yowling at the moon.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I’ve grown tattered but I’ve also turned scrappy.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I make the most of the sustenance I find.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I care for my young in whatever way I can.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I protect them fiercely but they, too, are scrappy.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>They’ve had to be.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">And while I often fondly remember the warm house I once slept in, I’m afraid to go back.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>That particular house is gone but if offered another indoor opportunity, I have trouble imagining taking it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Because once you’re inside, they might not let you back out.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Even for an evening.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">And so I roam.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I hunt.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I howl.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I gather scars, there’s not an ounce of fat on me (metaphorically speaking).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But I am deeply, unquestionably alive.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I gaze at that fat, fluffy cat sleeping in the window and I’m baffled.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Sure, a nap in luxury would be nice, but don’t you want to smell the jasmine on the night air, saunter alone through the dark woodland, pounce, claw, leap?</span></div>
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<span class="s1">It may very well be that I allow myself to be tamed again one day.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s entirely possible that I’ll be tempted inside by the soft contours of a quilt-laden couch, a bowl of warm milk.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ll entertain human touch.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I don’t think, however, with all these years outside, I’ll ever be that staid creature I once was.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ll always be a little wily, a little skittish, a little hard to pin down, firmly aware that I might land in the cold again. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">There’s a Rumi quote I painted on old wood.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It hung by my bed in those early post-split days.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It reads:</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Forget safety</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Live where you fear to</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Destroy your reputation</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Be notorious.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Check, check, check and check.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">If on a moonlit night, you hear a yowl echoing through the silence and you wonder if it’s a cry of pain or pleasure, don’t worry, it’s just me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And it’s both.</span></div>
Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-45853482234344809022019-06-13T12:00:00.003-07:002019-06-13T12:11:17.947-07:00Love Letter<style type="text/css">
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<span class="s1">Last weekend was the annual Fairfax Festival.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s a town tradition going back decades.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There’s a parade (my favorite hour of the year), vendors and lots of live music.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The town shuts down to traffic and fills up with people, locals and tourists alike. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">I’ve lived in this town now for eighteen years.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The festival has had different meanings for me in different stages.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The first festival I attended, I was a newlywed, a freshly minted home-owner, a graduate student.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The next year I sported three-month-old Mae in a Baby Bjorn.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The following years were parade-only; let the kids catch the candy thrown by the firefighters and then head home to avoid the press of the drunken crowd.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Eventually, I opened my store in town which meant a big weekend of sales and strategic avoidance of in-shop puking.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Somehow, I have never spent much time watching live music during the festival.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This is weird.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I love this town and I love live music.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I think I’ve always been responsible for children during the festival, which has squashed any impulse to join the revelers.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Between the shop and the kids, I’ve been laden with responsibility, exhausted by day’s end and happy to retreat home.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">On Saturday, I got to the shop early to set up before the parade.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Then I watched as the streets closed and the crowd descended; tie-dye everywhere, sweaty toddlers chasing spooked dogs, parents chasing toddlers, the beer already flowing by ten.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The parade is a mash-up of cub scouts and drag queens, the town council and the ska band, a pre-school octopus float and a rolling Burning Man church.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It is people I know by sight, people I know intimately, both in the parade and in the crowd.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It is pure joy.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There’s a saying about Fairfax: it’s Mayberry on acid.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The parade is the living example of that.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The day was crowded with customers and friends (and friends who are customers and customers who are friends).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Sales were through the roof; a number of my new handmade dresses sailed out the door.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It was wholly satisfying.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">At five, as the crowd got louder and sloppier, I closed my doors and strolled down to the green to watch my friends’ band.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>As I stood in the shade of the redwoods in the swaying crowd, cradling my metal cup of shitty chardonnay (my very favorite), minorly lusting after the lead singer (isn’t that required?), the breeze cutting the heat, alone but surrounded by friends and acquaintances, I felt a familiar, ancient opening.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I felt in love.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>With this town, with these people, with this life.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And I knew that simply standing here, alone, free, wouldn’t have been possible pre-divorce.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It hasn’t been an easy transformation going from suburban, married, stay-at-home mother of three to designer, shop-owner, singleton, pursuer of pleasure and truth.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But, standing there, whole, unencumbered by expectation or convention, breathing in the pot smoke of a hundred joints, the evening wide open ahead of me, all that effort, all that pain, felt worth it.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The local photographer, Stephanie Mohan, who has documented me and mine since the kids were babies, has published a gorgeous book of portraits.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s called “Faces of Fairfax” and it features town institutions: the coffee-roaster, the mayor, the lady who seems to work at every shop, the beautiful bartender couple with their exquisite baby, the old, the young, the makers, the dancers, the freaks.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And, on page twelve, is me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m wearing a red hat and red lipstick, a purple faux fur coat.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And I’m smiling so wide. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">I love this town.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I love this town.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m sorry, did you not hear me?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I love this town.</span></div>
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Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-374623366082346562019-04-13T15:43:00.001-07:002019-04-13T15:43:49.585-07:00Kitty and Dummy
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<span class="s1">We’ve got a couple cats.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>You know, because they’re so useful.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Panya is the girl cat.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Panya means “rat” in Swahili.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We got her during the Infestation.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We had hopes she’d be a deterrent.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She’s a torty, otherwise a regular American shorthair.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Her fur is a little greasy, as Lana would be quick to point out.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We don’t call her Panya.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We call her Kitty.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Dill is the boy cat.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He is good-looking; he’s got a rich grey coat, an oversized schnoz.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He’s maybe not the brightest but really what constitutes a smart cat?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Party tricks?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We mostly call him Dill.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I sometimes call him Mister.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I try not to call him Dummy.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The cats were, of course, lobbied hard for by the children of the house.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But once they each grew out of their kitten stage, kids and cats pretty much ignored each other.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>That left me, the feeder, the poop collector, the nighttime snuggler. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">Dill, since he’s passed his two-year mark, has become affectionate.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He used to be too interested in what was going on outside, in terrorizing Kitty (he still does that some, jerk), in napping just out of petting distance.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But lately, when I bring my coffee back to bed in the morning, he climbs in with me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Once I’m settled, coffee on handy self-made shelf, pillows propped behind me, covers pulled back up, he plops himself on my lap.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>“Plop” is perhaps not quite the right verb.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s more like he’s a baseball player sliding into home.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Or a gymnast sticking a landing.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s pretty un-catlike - I don’t think he’s fully learned yet what it is to be a feline.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Dill is satisfying to pet, both because of his silken fur and also because of his ferocious purr.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Kitty doesn’t purr.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She’s so sweet - she spends a lot of time on my lap - but, as much as I hate to admit it, it’s less satisfying to pet a cat that doesn’t purr.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Sometimes when I’m petting a dog, I’m like, why isn’t it purring?</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Kitty, poor girl, has resting bitch face.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Mae is convinced Kitty hates her.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I keep telling her no, it’s just her face.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>“But look at the way she’s looking at me!” she’ll yell, pointing at the cat as Kitty’s ears go back in alarm.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This morning Mae said Kitty looked sad - like all her kittens had been killed.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She took a picture and showed me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It was the exact same Kitty expression as always.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The downside of Dill’s new-found affection is that he’s possessive of me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Kitty generally sleeps on my shoulder, Dill at my feet.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Usually though, lately anyway, around 3:00 am Dill will decide he needs more body heat.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He attacks Kitty (who, again, is on my shoulder).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>They have a brief fight (on my shoulder) in which he bites and she hisses and I yell “god damn it” and push them both off me and Kitty runs for the couch and then finally Dill settles against my back.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Bully.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And then I, at 3:05 am, start thinking about how this dynamic is emblematic of the culture at large, men bullying women, la la la, and I’m wide awake.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Kitty likes to claw the couch.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She also an expert huntress.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She likes to bring live lizards, mice and birds into the house - gifts for me that I then have to capture and return outside or sometimes to the wildlife rescue.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s delightful.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Dill, when he doesn’t eat enough wet cat food, gets crystals in his urine and pees on the couch.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Or on my bed.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It hasn’t happened for awhile (he gets a lot of wet food now) but it doesn’t really recommend him.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Sinking into the couch at the end of the day and getting a sharp whiff of cat urine can make me feel desperate like almost nothing else.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">He also tends to get into fights.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He’ll come in for dinner with clumps of fur missing.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Sometimes I hear him yowling and hissing with one cat or another in the canyon below our house.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Dummy.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">They are a pain in the ass, really, these cats.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But when I stop to dissect it, I guess I must love them.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I mean, you know.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I spend a lot of my downtime with a cat on my lap.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Or on my shoulder.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I sort of chose them, in the way you allow a choice your children want.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I don’t adore them with the passion I had for my cat in my twenties.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But I didn’t have kids then.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Now I have so many creatures to feed and house and adore.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The cats are for sure at the bottom of the totem pole.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But on nights when the kids are with their dad, the rain pelting the skylight above my bed, I’m happy for their warmth, their purring and non-purring.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We have an understanding.</span></div>
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Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-90811199894111047472019-04-06T15:36:00.000-07:002019-04-06T15:36:29.765-07:00The Nine O'Clock Battle
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<span class="s1">Generally, I go to sleep early.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My favorite sport in summer is to crawl into a bed bathed in the golden hues of sunset.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I like going to bed early because a) I like being in bed under any circumstances and b) I like to sleep for up to eleven hours at a stretch.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The only way to get that kind of slumber and also make a living is to go to bed early, at least in my experience.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I have a rule for my phone-bearing children (Mae and Lana) that on school nights they must relinquish their devices by nine p.m.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Mae is johnny-on-the-spot, usually turning hers in early.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Lana, however, in true Lana fashion, stages a silent protest to what she sees as an idiotic practice.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Every night I have to bribe and cajole and threaten.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And every night her phone is late. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">The marriage of my early bedtime and the nine o’clock rule is not a happy one.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Sometimes I, straining to keep my eyes on my kindle, text the girls that I’m falling asleep but to please turn their phones in at nine.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This text always includes a plea specifically for Lana which comprises some reasoning, some begging and some stern talking-to.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>More often than not, I might wake up an hour into my slumber at 9:30, say, probably to the sound of Lana banging the bathroom door shut or the girls yelling at each other in Mae’s room (“Lana, get out of my room!” - I should make a bumper sticker).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>More than likely, Mae’s phone is carefully plugged in and stowed at my bedside.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Lana’s is elsewhere.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">And so I turn my phone back on (my pleasure in turning it to airplane mode when I get into bed is almost as keen as my pleasure in sleeping).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I text Lana, perhaps in all caps.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I might also voice a bellow, depending on my mood.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The phone is promptly delivered (she can smell when I mean it).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And I return to my kindle for another twenty minutes to calm my nervous system before a return to sleep is possible.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Last night, Friday, Lana was allowed to keep her phone.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Mae is on a school trip to London (yes she’s in public school but it’s Marin County, home of fancy).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I fell asleep at 10, after having a text exchange with a friend who couldn’t believe I was “up past my bedtime”.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>That is the usual response I get to texts I send after nine.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My neighbor friends also get very concerned if my car isn’t in the driveway by 10:30.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Josie, who lives directly across from me, judges her sleep health on the delta between when my bedroom light winks off and she turns off her own.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Last night, I was deeply asleep, dreaming about my friend who turns fifty today, when in my dream I heard a teenager loudly laughing.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>A very familiar teenager.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Eyes now open wide, I found my phone.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>12:58 a.m. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">I texted Lana to stop yelling and go to sleep.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>That we would talk about this ridiculous transgression in the morning.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Fucking kid.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Then I opened my kindle, steaming.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The next morning, I woke to a text from Mae.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>“Sorry, Mom, Lana was talking to me.”</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Which changed everything.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The very worst thing as a parent is when your kids fight with each other.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The very best thing is when they get along.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Lana laughing at one a.m. to whatever Mae was saying from her London midmorning, that makes me the opposite of mad.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Fucking kids.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Somehow they always win.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>At least Lana does.</span></div>
Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-42089073621796534762019-04-05T15:02:00.002-07:002019-04-05T15:02:11.842-07:00In Defense of Teenagers
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<span class="s1">People are afraid of teenagers.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Probably because they remember cruelty they either inflicted or was inflicted upon them in adolescence.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Maybe because they remember their vast discomfort and awkwardness and don’t want to return to it, even just in proximity.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I, too, was afraid of these years back when my kids were babies.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The thought of these sweet crazy people being out of my safe grasp in a few short years was daunting.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Teenagers get a bad rap, I’m here to say. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We are ourselves at any age.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>These tall people that now live in my house are the very same people I spoon-fed, carefully dressed, monitored closely as they careened down the slide.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And just as they are the same essential entities, my friends that I knew when I was in high school are still just the same people.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We are more mature, supposedly, but we still spend a remarkable amount of time discussing clothes and boys and pot (for instance).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Megan at 14 and Megan at 49 are the very same Megan; glamorous, strong-opinioned and goofy.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Evany?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>As sharp-witted, as acerbic, as on the front edge of what’s cool at 14 as she is today.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m as romantic, as brainy, as covertly nerdy now as then.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We contemplated our lives with as much weight and wonder then as we do now.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We were trying hard to make sense of the big mysteries, then as now.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We were learning, we were growing, then as now.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And we were wise, then as now.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">And so it follows that my teenage daughters (Mihiretu has one more year before he hits his teens) not only are as familiar as they were to me in infancy, they’re also who they’ll be through out their life.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The baby lives in them but so does the grown-up.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I get along suspiciously well with teenagers. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Not only my girls, but also their friends.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s easy for me to downshift into teenage talk, to take the formality down to quiet. Part of it is because I am aware of the adult they are almost - I respect them as much as I would a new middle-aged friend.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Part of it is because my inner teenager is alive and well.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s not hard to imagine we’re the same age, at least internally.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It was a minute ago I was 15.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">It seems to me that I had far less grace and ease as an adolescent then my daughters do.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But maybe the worst part of being a teenager is how weird it feels to be you - bridging childhood and adulthood, unsure what to do or who to be.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Maybe that’s what we adults are so afraid of.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Because it never goes away, that wierdness, that newness, that uncertainty.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We just get better at covering it up.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Teenagers are brave.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>They don’t have a choice about it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>They have to be to pass from childhood to adulthood.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But they march forward anyway, maybe hunched, perhaps side-eyed, but undaunted.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And if they can do it?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>If they can face the world and walk out into it?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Well, then, the rest of us can, too.</span></div>
Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-26082300071359304282019-04-04T13:15:00.002-07:002019-04-04T13:33:36.732-07:00The Road Ahead<style type="text/css">
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<span class="s1">For my birthday, my oldest friend gifted me a reading with a Vedic astrologist.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Casey, it should be said, would point out that she’s my age, give or take.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She’s not elderly, we’ve just known each other since babyhood.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Anyway, ancient Casey gave me a reading.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Vedic astrology differs from western astrology in that it operates from a different calendar.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m sure it differs in other ways too but I’m a layperson so bear with me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The astrologer inputs your birth date, birth time, and birth location which results in something like a life map.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>How things might be going for you in any particular time in your life, in any particular category.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The reading itself was over the phone.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My astrologer, Prasannan, had a vague mid-Atlantic accent.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>His origins, really everything about him, remain a mystery to me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He was soft-spoken, even-keeled, the perfect foil for rocket Liz.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">He calmly informed me that I’m in a seven-year period in which almost every area of my life is difficult.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This was not news to me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>That period started about a year before the breakdown of my marriage.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The ensuing years have featured divorce, the sometimes harrowing building of a business, a couple of my kids hitting times of peril, medical crises (related to kid peril - and paid for out-of-pocket), two moves, an almost-impossible real estate deal, a major house fix-up comprising leaky roofs, rat and termite infestations, sewer lateral replacements, oh and, the cherry on top of the proverbial cake, an impossible love life. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I have so many gifts, so much good luck, and I’ve spent the last six and a half years pushing boulders uphill.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">This period, he said, is the most challenging of my life.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I would hope so.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">But, he said, so mellow, everything is about to change.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In December 2019 most if not all barriers will fall.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I will have business success, financial ease and - wait for it - love.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I might be moving.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Things would be very good for me in Florida, according to him.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I was like, “Yeah?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Anywhere else?”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The entire Eastern seaboard, Fiji, Hawaii.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But really, he said, Florida is very strong for you.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">So I’m not fucking moving to Florida.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Cashmere sales alone would nix that idea.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Same, I suppose for Fiji and Hawaii, though those are more appealing.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>My aversion to reptiles and Donald Trump is too strong for Florida.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Six weeks ago or so I had a major coming to Jesus.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>One night at 3am, wracked with anxiety, I realized that there has been a recurring idea circling my mind for awhile now.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s a whisper that goes like this: I’m only going to get older and sadder and fatter and uglier.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>A long winding-down until finally I die.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Ok, what a drama queen but there’s some truth in there.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m am for sure going to get older.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ll probably get uglier.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’d be very fortunate if I didn’t get fatter once menopause hits.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But do I have to get sadder?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Is it all downhill from here?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m 48 years old.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This might be my midway mark through life.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>That seems like a long decline.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">This night, this 3am, I realized I’m not doing so well.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I have a deal with my psychiatrist.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We meet every six months for twenty minutes to check in around meds - they haven’t changed much in years.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But if I hit the skids, I’m under strict instruction to call him immediately.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There in my bed, staring into the dark, that whisper in my ear, I pledged to call him in the morning.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I also promised myself that I’d find a therapist.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I’m a great believer in therapy.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve had periods of my life where I’ve been in for awhile (for three years after my dad died, another spate when my mom got sick, another when she died).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I haven’t been in therapy, however, beyond dreaded family therapy, since my mom’s death in 2011.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve been riding this rough wave of the last number of years without counsel.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Well, that seems stupid, you might be saying.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Yes, stupid, but the last years have also been terrifying financially as I’ve solo-mommed it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve felt I couldn’t afford therapy,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>What I came to that 3am was that I couldn’t not afford it.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I’m efficient.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I was in my psychiatrist’s office by Monday, getting a boost on my anti-depressant prescription.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>By Tuesday I had a therapist in place, one that would indulge me with a sliding scale.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’ve been feeling better.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The drugs help and the therapy is fascinating.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Already, after a few sessions, there are areas of my life that feel much clearer.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Dark corners illuminated by the light of day.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">This morning, pondering my almost empty bank account, I wondered.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>What if this is the bottom?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>What if things got easier?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>What if I found my feet financially post-medical-crisis (I’m still paying off tens of thousands in unreimbursed medical bills).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>What if my house reached a stasis of repair?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>What if some beautiful (available) man walked into my life to keep me company?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>What if my kids continued on their current positive course towards adulthood?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>What if my business grew beyond my dreams?</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Come December, if you come looking for me at the shop and the lovely person working the register tells you I’ve gone off to Florida with Tim, maybe you shouldn’t be surprised.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We don’t know what’s ahead do we?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But that doesn’t mean it’s awful.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Florida or no.</span></div>
<br />Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-62079084417589140122019-04-03T15:23:00.000-07:002019-04-03T15:37:46.757-07:00Tim<style type="text/css">
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<span class="s1">At some point, my sister-wife Josie and I decided the future love of my life is named Tim.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There was some miscommunication over text, some autocorrect situation, long-forgotten, that resulted in this prediction.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Tim is the best.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Tim can really do no wrong.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We love Tim.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Almost as much as he loves me.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Recently, my friend/sisters Evany and Megan and I had a long text discussion about Tim.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>According to Megan, he’s uber-rich yet humble, five to ten years older than I am, and loves my kids.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And he’s bald, “like Mr. Clean bald”.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I agreed, bald as a cue ball but so sweet.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And Megan said, no no no, you don’t like sweet.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I argued for the tiniest hint of sweet - it was approved.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Tim is mostly umami.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Tim is 6’4”, he can build a house with his hands out of reclaimed wood, he has successful grown kids that adore him, or maybe teenagers since I love teenagers and I would make an excellent step-mom-friend.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He has a couple flaws (I mean we are realistic, people, WE ARE NOT LIVING IN A FANTASY) - he’s slightly hard of hearing and can’t see without his (very cute) glasses.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He’s funny.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He reads.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He has a functional penis.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He doesn’t let me pay for anything.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">He has dimples, good taste and can cook.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He argues well - respectfully, open-heartedly.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He loves my friends (not difficult).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He’s athletic but not obsessive.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He surfs.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Sometimes he surfs with Marco and Tony, Evany and Megan’s husbands.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He has a wood-burning fireplace that he uses on a regular basis (but never on spare-the-air days).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He also has a beach house (what can I say, Tim is amazing).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We’ll get married (at the beach house) after ten years of dating and I’ll wear Megan’s vintage white Halston jumpsuit.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">He can be named anything, we decided, but we will call him Tim.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I thought he was an architect but Megan said no.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Architects make no money, are “arrogant as fucks” AND are often alcoholics (what architect did Megan wrong?).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I added he’s also not in marketing or brand development or advertising (what marketing guy did me wrong?).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Finally we came to the conclusion that he’s semi-retired from finance and now does pro-bono work for the poor.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>A foundation that educates underprivileged architects (if there is such a thing, Megan says there is). <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">At first we thought that he travels a lot for work and fun and he takes me with him.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But then we realized that I travel a lot for work and fun and I take him with me.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Tim finds me utterly adorable.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Especially without make-up, in overalls, with my hair sticking up.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">So then Evany said, “I wonder what Tim’s friends are saying about you right now?”</span></div>
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<span class="s1">She’s 5’8” and knows how to use power tools.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>They think my name is Sara but that’s fine, they can call me Sara.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Ok, maybe Tim isn’t rich, isn’t 6’4”, doesn’t support poverty-stricken architects. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But what if he does exist?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>What if he’s out there right now at this minute?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Wandering around, putting one foot in front of the other, pondering the nature of romantic love, fucking discouraged.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Unaware that Sara is just around the corner.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Sara and Tim.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>That’s going to be one fun wedding.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Sandy but fun.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Though somebody needs to tell those drunk underprivileged architects to stop making toasts.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Because Megan and Evany and Josie have something to say.</span></div>
Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-9962125879826355492018-07-11T15:45:00.003-07:002018-07-11T15:51:42.105-07:00The Family Couch<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">When my marriage broke up, I was the one to move out of the familial home. Ben loved the house more than I did, I had spent years setting up functional systems there, I figured it’d be easier for me, fresh from housewifedom, to make another home elsewhere. I left all the furniture there, much of which was my parents, because I didn’t want to leave gaping holes. I wanted home to stay as consistent as possible for the kids. And so, on a very limited budget, I set out to furnish my divorce pad, a sweet little (extraordinarily expensive) rental cottage down the road from Ben’s place.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">My first purchase, the piece on which I built the rest of the vibe, was a buttery leather sky-blue sectional, found on a craigslist for a relative song. It was an exceptional couch. I knew when I bought it that it would hold me nicely while I snuggled my kids, while I mourned my marriage, and most importantly, while I watched reality TV.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It performed it’s tasks magnificently and four high-mile years later, after being brutalized by pets and kids, food and drink, after enduring more than one make-out session so gamely, my so-handsome, so-dense young male cat (his official name is Dill but we call him Dummy), started using it as a litter box. Turns out he had a urinary tract issue which was eventually remedied. The couch, however, finally, was toast.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And so I fell back to my forever second choice, the couches I grew up with. They are teak-framed, purchased by my parents in Europe in the fifties, elegant, spare, and wholly uncomfortable. They occupied our austere, high-ceilinged, freezing living room growing up. We rarely sat on them. And they have followed me ever since. I don’t love them, sometimes I hate them, but they are family and I can’t get rid of them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We struggled through months of cramped TV-viewing, the couches groaning and twitching beneath us, the wool cushions scratching our skin, the teak digging into our backs. “Please, Mom,” the kids begged. “Please get a new couch.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We’ve had a medical crisis in our family over the last year or two. The person in question is now doing well, great even. But, truth be told, I’m fifty thousand dollars in debt. Insurance should be reimbursing us for what we paid out of pocket, I should be made whole eventually. But this is America and our healthcare system is corrupt and broken, if I may be so blunt. We are a year into battle with our insurance company. We’ve hired insurance consultants (to more great expense). I’m so mad I can barely think about it, not only for me and my family but for every person in this country that has struggled with medical costs. It’s unfair, it’s uncivilized, it’s outrageous.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And so, a new couch. There is no money for such a luxury. But I started trolling craigslist anyway, because, if nothing else, it’s fun. I worked my usual craigslist recipe: figure out brands I like, plug those names into the search to winnow down the endless possibilities. I pored over apartment therapy, read all their couch surveys (napability quotient!) and, lo and behold, I found an excellent candidate: a Joybird couch in coral, down the street from my house, bought for $1800 a year ago, now for sale for $500. How I was going to come up with the $500, I wasn’t sure, but I went to look.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The owner, Annie, was lovely. We have kids the same age, going to the same schools. “Listen,” she said, as she led me through the house to the spare bedroom, “I found a stain on the couch, I feel bad charging you for it at all. Really, you’d be doing me a favor if you just hauled it away.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I rounded the corner and beheld my new love. She is gorgeous, perfect, made for us, a study in proportion and grace. I suddenly saw the next number of years, this last decade with my kids at home, unfold in splendor.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I ended up giving my new friend, Annie, a two hundred dollar gift card to my store. My neighbors helped me retrieve and install the couch. Then we sat on it and drank gin and tonics, a proper christening. My new beauty sits kitty-corner to the smaller of my parent’s couches, which I am slip-covering in used denim. They seem quite well-suited to each other, tranquil in compatibility.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I don’t have cash right now but I’m pretty sure I’m rich. In community, in karma, in resourcefulness, in seating options.</span></div>
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Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-42170107576384178272018-06-23T10:36:00.002-07:002018-06-23T10:36:12.514-07:00Birthday<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">It was my birthday yesterday. We probably all have baggage around birthdays. At some point in my childhood, probably my tenth birthday, I made a decision. After a day of being largely ignored, I went with my parents to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, where my visiting uncle (who I barely knew) proceeded to dominate the conversation and eat all the food. My parents, Depression-era kids, didn’t order more - the very fact of dining in a restaurant felt like an absurd enough expense. Back home, I was gifted with a brass candle-stick. I cried myself to sleep, my belly empty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the scope of bad birthdays, this is nothing. I realize that. But something cemented in me that day. The idea that birthdays are important. And that it was up to me to honor my own. The rest of my birthdays have been a parade of self-thrown parties, self-bought gifts, announcements to near-strangers that “It’s my birthday!”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I kicked off my birthday a week ago with a celebration with one group of friends, my party girls, my playmates. We ended up at one of the bars in town and young bartenders and bouncers (secretly prompted by my very good people) dutifully sidled up and whispered birthday greetings. Last night I went out with a different group, which included some of my very oldest pals, people who know my very essence, who have seen me in all my incarnations, who know how far I’ve come. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In between those two evenings, on Tuesday, my friend died. She had been sick for a few years with a rare and aggressive form of cancer. She died on her forty-ninth birthday, leaving behind two small kids. She was lovely, she was fierce, she lived each day deeply, even before she was fighting for her life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When my dad was dying, of his own awful cancer, when I was barely an adult, I realized that the death process and the birth process are similar. Death and birth are the same doorway, from where and to where we can only imagine. These two events are similarly mysterious, similarly mystical. I had a feeling my friend was going to die on her birthday. She was (it’s so hard to use the past tense) connected to those invisible threads above us. I thought she’d find the same doorway out that she came in through.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This week, like all weeks, has been full, has been beautiful. I have celebrated myself, I have recognized again how very fortunate I am to live in this place, in this body, with these people. I am remembering that I better live this life fiercely, freely, deeply. I better take every ride I can, love with a wide open heart, sit deeply in the gift of the everyday. We are lucky, so very lucky, to be alive.</span></div>
Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-8721612844716219062018-04-22T13:40:00.001-07:002018-04-22T13:40:22.283-07:00Have Teenager, Will Travel; the Bali Diaries<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">March 31, 2018</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’m sitting on a lounger (I’m lounging on a lounger?) overlooking an infinity pool which itself is overlooking a sloping watermelon plantation. Pink orchids peek out between palm fronds. A fourteen-year-old blonde beauty slowly paddles through the water. She happens to be my child. I’m drinking a cold Bintang beer. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lana and I are in Bali. We arrived yesterday after over twenty-four hours of relatively hassle-free travel (no lost luggage, no missed flights, and hallelujah, no forgotten antidepressants). We are here for just over two weeks. My excuse to all concerned (Lana, her dad, her school, Uncle Sam) is that we’re here to shop for the shop. There will definitely be some shopping, some sourcing for future shopping. But even more importantly to my work (and my life at large), there will be travel, which in and of itself will spawn perspective and inspiration. Already today, on our long walk to village and beach, Lana and I devised a new summer line of garments constructed from up-cycled linen. We also meditated some on my relationship with her step-mother - where we can bridge gaps, the things that she and I have in common (love of whole foods and cooking, adoration for Lana and her siblings, apparently the same taste in men). This, for me, is the essential by-product of travel; a new view of the old scene, fresh solutions for stale problems.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">While still back home, we booked only these first two nights of accommodation. The rest of the trip is open. We will follow our fancy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We’ve never been to Asia. This is our first trip to the developing world since Ethiopia eight years ago. Already it’s an adjustment to avoid drinking the water from the tap. The river of overloaded scooters streaming pellmell on the wrong side of the road is discombobulating. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For now, we are ensconced in an elegant villa, our only plan for luxury, a prescribed antidote for jet-lag. Soon we will head out in search of natural beauty, beach shacks, volcano villages, and hopefully less white people. But, for now, this is quite delightful. And $120 a night.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">April 1, 2018</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I was telling Lana yesterday that traveling with her is like traveling with a clone of myself. Beyond the fact that I raised her, imbuing in her plastic brain my values, my preferences, my tastes (and yes, I’m well aware that even at this late date she could reject all those), beyond all that, we are similarly wired. She, like me, like my mother, is fastidious. We Balger(my mom)-Lavoie(me)-Caprons(Lana) like to plan. We like to read our Lonely Planet cover to cover and chat about all the possibilities. We like to know when we’ll eat and when we’ll sleep. We’re detail oriented.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lana said, “Oh my god, you would have so much fun with a clone of yourself. You’d talk for hours.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“‘Let’s read!’’ I suggested joyfully.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“‘Let’s take a walk!’” said Lana</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“‘Let’s drink wine!’”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“‘Let’s go to sleep!’”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This girl knows me well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">April 2, 2018</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’m sure I’ve reported this here before but my father’s favorite toast at weddings (and, as I remember, he toasted at EVERY wedding he attended - this apple does not fall far from that tree) was “Don’t expect too much.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He was, in fact, quoting my mother’s father, a man who emigrated from Romania in 1915 and ended up widowed, working as a laborer and feeding his family from his garden through the Depression. He had reason not to expect too much.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When Lana and I envisioned our sojourn to SouthEast Asia, we imagined cultural immersion - beaches, yes, the dollar going far, yes, but also burial ceremonies, home-stays with Balinese families living off the land (I know, I know). What we’ve found instead, at least so far, is tourism, and worse, tourists. This place seems geared towards sucking money out of Westerners. And you know, God speed, we Westerners have a lot of money to suck. But culture, beyond delicious food served in humble warangs, beyond translating the dollar to the rupiah, beyond the echoing call to prayer (at least on Muslim Lombok) we have not yet found it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Yesterday we journeyed from Southern Bali to a small island off Lombok, called Gili Air. The trip involved not one but two hour-long taxi rides visiting not one but two ports in search of a boat to the Gili islands. Once found, we waited for the boat for an hour past it’s departure time (marginal cultural experience) before traveling two hours over water to Gili Air. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We hoped it would be quieter, more pure. Instead we found ourselves dragging our roller bags through the sand, rejecting every suggestion Lonely Planet had for accommodations, dodging sunburned drunk whities before, in desperation, landing on an over-priced “traditional” “rice barn” “bungalow” that was mosquito-infested and reeked of mildew. It was a sad day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Today, finally blessed with wifi for the first time since our plane landed, we perused airbnb. After touring three excellent options (at least compared to our landing pad last night) we happened upon a beautiful spa with accommodation. For the next two nights, we’re paying $100 for an exquisite villa with a private pool. Tourism isn’t so hateful at the moment. It’s not “real Bali” but is there a “real Bali”?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">April 7, 2018</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Since last we talked (you/me, journal/Liz), Lana and I have travelled to neighboring Gili Meno (smaller, mellower than Gili Air but still, sadly, a tourist mecca). We spent two nights at a yoga “retreat” (open-air bungalows centered around a yoga stage in the middle of the jungle - my flip-flop broke in the sucking mud). We were pretty much the only visitors but once out on the (crazy-beautiful, white-sand) beach overlooking the turquoise water (cry me a river) we were far from alone. We entertained a constant stream of young men peddling sarongs and jewelry, swam in a sea of Australian-accented English, paid too much for vegetarian curry and instant Nescafe (Lombok coffee being the color, consistency, and flavor of mud, in my humble opinion).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Last night we had a come-to-Jesus. Lana, exhausted by harassment (poor tall blonde nubile thing), turned off by yet another culture trying constantly to sell her something, cried Uncle.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We’ve been wrestling with where to go next. Farther East into unexplored Indonesia? Hop a plan to Vietnam, Thailand or Cambodia? Last night, we decided to come back to Bali. Give it one more shot before bailing via air to somewhere less spoiled by the West.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Buoyed by action, we boarded a ferry for Bali, upon disembarking negotiated a taxi for Sideman (pronounced “Seed-a-man” - Lana: “Let’s go see da man”) and after an hour of inevitable scooter-slaloming, arrived at a hotel overlooking mountains, rice paddies, cows and quiet. We are possibly the only guests. It’s cooler here - maybe eighty degrees instead of one hundred. Our room is open to the wind and air, which for the first time since our arrival in Indonesia is doable without air conditioning.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The man who greeted us at reception, Gede, is sweet and open - all the attributes we’ve heard about the Balinese people. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I sit on our balcony, the clothes I just hand-washed dripping over the railing, giant black ants trundling peacefully over them. Swallows bank and dip for bugs in the breeze above, huge ebony wasps tranquilly buzz the bougainvillea that climbs the balcony. The teenager is below in the hot tub, watching a show on her phone, plugged into wifi and stupid American television for the first time in a long time - safe, unharrassed. A glass of my very favorite Indonesian (probably Spanish) chardonnay is at hand, cows are lowing, someone is plonking away on an instrument somewhere above us on the hill. I am clean from the shower, not yet sweating, sore from yesterday’s yoga class, blisters on my feel treated with iodine and band-aids (or dare I say “foot plasters”). People, I am happy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">April 8, 2018</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lana hasn’t been feeling well today. She was up in the middle of the night with a headache, feeling hot. We had a late breakfast, a walk through the village hunting fabric (Sideman has many weavers) and then I brought the wilting girl back to the bungalow. We kept our 3:00 tandem, facial appointments (I haven’t had a facial since I was in my twenties but for fourteen dollars how could I say no?) but then cancelled our trip to the night market (crazy yummy street food, apparently). We’ll do it tomorrow if she’s feeling better. Tonight we’ll have dinner in our room and watch a movie. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This trip is about experiencing Indonesia, yes, but even more it’s about being with my girl - squeezing the juice from these last moments of cozy childhood.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">April 9, 2018</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When we were in Ethiopia, Megan (life-long friend/sister/travel-adoption-support) dubbed five-year-old Lana the Pokey Puppy. Never has there been a more accurate moniker.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’ve waited for Lana all her life. I waited for her to be born (almost two weeks overdue, thank you very much), I waited for her to stop crying (colic!), I waited for her to nurse (always reluctant, she quit for good at ten months). When she was three, I waited cumulative hours for her to put on her shoes. We once had a two hour standoff parked in front of an Inverness boathouse because she refused to dress her bare legs before entering the outdoor birthday party (it was January and forty-five degrees) which was only resolved when she agreed to sit on my lap under a blanket for the entire event (which she did, placidly, both of us marooned amidst trampoline-hopping kids and dancing adults).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She does not like to be rushed. When anxious about time, she slows down. I have learned to be gentle in my prodding, to give her miles of lead-time before a transition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Today, while Lana lingered over a breakfast of pineapple and toast, I said, “If I had a dollar for every time I said ‘Lana, you ready?’, I would be a very rich woman.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If I had an additional dollar for every time she asked me to wait, usually while walking in hot sun or, alternately, pouring rain, I would be Bill Gates wealthy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She slows me down, this kid. Maybe that’s why she was sent to me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">April 11, 2018</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Yesterday was nuts in every way. We’re here in Ubud, Bali’s cultural center. It’s like a mini Asian NYC; a million shops, a zillion restaurants, prices running the gamut, packed with people, traffic moving like a honking river at flood stage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We landed in Ubud and while we loved the town, our airbnb stunk, literally. We Balger-Lavoie-Caprons are sensitive to smell. After some searching, we landed on a pension housed in an ancient building. We dragged our suitcases through the packed streets (“Taxi?” the local men asked, “Taxi?” - clearly knowing us to be insane white people who desperately needed some assistance).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The new place was, while quaint, dysfunctional. Lights weren’t working, mosquitos were swarming in the closed room, breakfast was inedible. And so began our day-long quest for a decent place to stay. Between a visit to Monkey Forest (starring crazed monkeys roaming free, thoroughly irritated with people, alternately charming and alarming) and a three hour, fifteen course lunch at the fanciest restaurant in Bali (exquisite and all for $80 a head), we searched. We walked, in the wet heat, for hours, chasing down leads from Lonely Planet, from airbnb, from friendly waiters, but none would do. We’re picky, it’s true, but somehow Ubud wasn’t forthcoming with something even moderately acceptable. Finally we found an efficiency hotel far from city center with cartoon monkeys on the walls. It’s colorful and moderately fun, the beds are good, the lines are clean and it has a rooftop deck. Sold, finally sold.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And so I stowed Lana in the air-conditioned room with her phone and blessed wifi, climbed on the back of the bellman’s scooter and rode, in a skirt, sans helmet, through the sea of zooming motor-bikes and taxis to retrieve our suitcases from the previous night’s hotel. I’m normally a person who prefers to move slowly (in terms of physical speed, certainly not in the emotional/romantic/business/real-estate realm - there I can’t move fast enough). I have a healthy fear of motor vehicles, insisting Ben never ride a motorcycle while he was married to me (poor man), but when I found myself speeding through the warm air, on the back of a bike for the first time in almost thirty years, I was delighted. The dangerous freedom of mopeds.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">April 14, 2018</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The day after the last entry, Bali Belly struck hard.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hungry for dinner late in the evening after our long and beautiful luncheon, we ventured just two doors down from our hotel to an unknown sushi restaurant. Mistake number one. Mistake number two: we ordered glasses of water. “Filtered, yeah?” I asked the waitress. We have come to feel tremendous guilt over our bottled water consumption (empty plastic bottles littered virtually everywhere we gaze). For the most part in more urban settings, restaurants will offer filtered water by the glass. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lana took a gulp of her water, grimaced and said, “Um, Mom?” </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I then took a sip from my glass (why? WHY???). It was almost hot and tasted of sewer. The waiter, when pressed, admitted it wasn’t filtered but claimed it to to be “clear”. As opposed to brown, I suppose.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">By noon the next day, cramps had set in. Days later we still need to have a bathroom close at hand.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">After two more days in Ubud, we were done, the energy of the city, at first so appealing, had finally exhausted us. With four more days until we boarded the airplane for home, we decided to head to Nusa Penida, a neighboring island lauded for being less inundated with tourists. On the boat over, we were befriended (“picked up” might be more accurate) by Tony, a middle-aged Balinese man I continually wanted to call Davy because that name made about as much sense. Tony/Davy sold us on hiring him as our guide on Penida. You need wheels there (big island, low population, sparse far-flung villages) and I’ve never piloted a scooter (and, even if I had, the roads are notoriously rough). I figured Tony/Davy was sent by the Hindu gods.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Tony/Davy drove us to a few different accommodations before we settled on the best of them, which was marginal at best. That night, after killing endless oversized black ants and having three Indonesians in our room attempting to fix our tepid AC, the voices from the adjoining room began.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">At first we thought we were listening to one half of a phone conversation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“I can’t believe you,” a young American woman brayed. “You’re a fucking cheater and a fucking liar.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lana set up camp next to the slatted door that connected the rooms and was there for the next few hours, rapt. I put a pillow over my head only to be awoken at 3am and again at six to the woman’s outrage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lana filled me in over a breakfast of mud-like coffee and stinky papaya.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“She’s pregnant,” Lana said. “She found out last night that her boyfriend’s been cheating on her.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The boyfriend was in the room, it turns out, just quiet in his shame. Lana reported that as the evening wore on, the woman discovered that he was not only sleeping with one other woman but three. Lana was listening to the story unfold in real time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“It’s so weird,” she said. “This big moment in these people’s lives and I was the only witness.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We meditated for a moment on that poor baby, born into chaos.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">After breakfast we packed our bags, putting the hotel firmly in Tony/Davy’s rearview mirror. Tired of searching for accommodation, of making everything up on the fly, bellies sore, we texted our first airbnb hosts. We would take the one o’clock boat back to the mainland, and return to that lovely villa.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Tony/Davy was not pleased with this turn of events. He drove us quickly, jerkily, on dirt roads to see beaches. While beautiful, the Indian Ocean on that particular day was disturbed, not safe for swimming. We were grateful to bid Tony/Davy farewell. He pressed his business card into my hand. “No throw in the rubbish!” he instructed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We are now back at Juan and Geoff’s (a Colombian/Australian couple with exquisite taste). The compound is absurdly beautiful. This morning, roused by Bali Belly, I encountered a small black snake on my way out of the bathroom. My muffled “eep!” was enough to send it slithering into the bedroom where it hid for two hours until the two house-men (I refuse to say boys) removed it. I’m out-of-my-mind afraid of snakes. I spent those two hours peering fearfully at the floor from the relative safety of my bed. Lana found the whole situation hilarious.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">By ten, I was getting my first motor bike lesson. Match, another Australian, a friend our hosts, was my teacher. Never a braver or more patient instructor have I met. He spent an hour with me and by the end I was driving in traffic with him on the back, dodging dogs and children, potholes, trucks and endless mopeds. All on the wrong side of the road. I only crashed once, into the smallest of rivers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">April 22, 2018</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We are home, newly in love with the cool air and the public garbage cans.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the last days of our trip, a French ex-pat lounging on Juan and Geoff’s lawn asked, with French directness/derision, “So do you love Bali or do you hate it?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The question was a dare, one that I dodged. “Love it!” I squawked.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Mmm,” she said, stretching her brown bare legs in front of her, “You’d be surprised. Some people, they don’t like the traffic and the garbage. It is too busy for them here.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">“Ha!” I laughed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I didn’t hate Bali but it was not as easy to love as I imagined. At some moments, it felt like everything that’s wrong with the world. Gazing at the heaps of plastic trash, gagging on exhaust, nauseous from the water, I would think, this is what we’re doing to our earth, to ourselves, Westerners more than anyone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But here’s the real benefit of travel. Lana and I are freshly amazed at the loveliness of home. Our beds, our cats, the hills flushed with green, the sunlight dancing off the long, shifting grass. We have renewed passion for our friends, these complicated quirky sweethearts that we’ve surrounded ourselves with. My shop, which did great business in my absence, staffed by some of those gorgeous amigos, is, I’m remembering, not only my source of material sustenance but also creative. I have brand new energy to bring to it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And Lana and I, after weeks on end together, each other’s sole company, are as close as we were when she was an infant and we’d spend hours staring into each other’s eyes. It looks different now, her nestled next to me on the couch, texting her friends. It’s a teenage version of mother-daughter intimacy but the connection is heartily present.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Bali was not our ideal destination, it turns out. But it’s really not the destination, right? It’s the journey.</span></div>
Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-16860969249916477662018-02-12T14:49:00.002-08:002018-02-12T14:49:48.996-08:00Believing<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Last time I wrote here, I described my romantic type. He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s ambitious, but he’s also grumpy, critical and maybe a little mean. I wrote about how a man like that, given the man that was my father, is my fate, at least in this lifetime.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">You know when you say something out loud, you voice a belief, and then the very fact of it being in the air makes you hear it, makes you step back and consider it? I’ve been thinking about my own beliefs lately, particularly the limiting ones. And wondering if they’re true or if they have to be.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Back in September, I took a look at my beliefs about my body. Old belief: the fifteen post-divorce pounds aren’t going anywhere - losing weight is hard and my life is hard enough, I love my wine, peri-menopause, etc, etc. Then, one day, I braved the scale, caught my breath in horror, and downloaded a calorie-counting app. My goal: two pounds a week. In reality, it’s been much slower than that. But here, months later, I’ve lost that fifteen and am still going. I’m fit (lots of exercise to earn the wine) and getting dressed in the morning is fun again. The negative loop of “you can’t” has turned into “you can, you will, you did”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Another belief: I’m never going to meet anyone online. Internet dating is demoralizing, time-consuming, and ultimately fruitless (never mind that I’ve met men I’ve had relationships with in that milieu). I’m not going to meet anyone online and I’m certainly not going to meet anyone by chance here in the married suburbs. There are no men for me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A few weeks ago, I downloaded Tinder and Bumble (again). But this time, I decided that I’d be generous with my right swipes, and I’d meet just about anyone in person - taking the internet out of it as quickly as possible. I’ve met, in person, seven men in that time. My rule with myself is that if there’s anything interesting about them, I’ll see them again. So far, so interesting. They have been remarkably intelligent, accomplished and attractive.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The final frontier of negative belief: my type. What if I changed my type? What if instead of chasing a man that was hard to please, I allowed a kind one to come to me? What if I chose someone open, someone warm? Someone that was ready to meet me in the middle?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And so, the primary characteristic I’ve been searching for in this new round of dating is kindness, emotional availability. I’ve had some mis-steps already, for sure. It’s hard to know what kind looks like when it’s unfamiliar. Someone might self-report kindness and maturity hopefully but mistakenly. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’m in new territory, I’m uncomfortable. In the process of interviewing potential partners, I’ve gleaned a daily admirer. We “met” on Bumble but he lives here in town. He has visited my shop every day for two weeks, always with an offering. The first day was flowers, the second a giant lollipop, the third still-warm home-baked butter cookies (and they didn’t even have rufies in them). Every day he has brought something. Every day he’s told me, in one way or another, he’s smitten. He’s probably not my guy but he’s definitely my newest friend. I’ve accepted these gifts (actual and metaphorical) with as much grace as I can muster - receiving presents, particularly from men, is hard for me. I’ve sat in this delightful discomfort, an exercise in having an open heart.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Because here’s the hardest belief to break. Let’s say I do choose wisely, I do choose someone who can love me. I’m going to have to be brave enough to let him. I’m going to have to share some space in my dusty, spider-webbed heart, light a fire where it’s been quiet and cold. Maybe I can figure out how to do that this lifetime, I won’t have to wait for the next. I almost believe it.</span></div>
Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-83775148731470487932017-12-12T11:25:00.002-08:002017-12-13T10:25:50.706-08:00Crushing<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">I like someone. A man. I like a man. Or at least, you know, I think I do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Crushing on someone is one of my favorite feelings, particularly in the time before anything really happens. Liking someone is the best. It’s kind of the moment I live for. But, of course, with it comes all kinds of other, less fun, feelings.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The first bucket of un-fun is the what-will-happen morass. Part of what makes a crush delicious is it’s uncertainty. But the list of possibilities of how this couldn’t work are long (is he into me, am I into him, is he ready for something, am I ready, are the logistics right, are we compatible - macro and micro, world-view, coffee preferences, sex).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The second bucket is the misery of coming right back up against my own stuff. Am I worthy of this person - or any person? I’m not pretty enough, not skinny enough, not successful enough, not nonchalant enough, not perfect. If he doesn’t choose me then, yes, right, every fear confirmed. The very same internal roller coaster I’ve been on since I liked my first boy when I was four (though one would hope I wasn’t obsessed with being skinny at that age).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The third bucket is how all the ways that he is right for me could also be wrong. What is my thing for critical men? (I know what it is, it’s name is Paul Lavoie). I love them difficult, hard to please, slightly grumpy (because if I can win that person, clearly I’m lovable). This man is exactly my type, a type that has been problematic in the past. Wouldn’t be nice if I liked some sunny, warm, adoring, bouquet-bearing man? Maybe next lifetime.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Liking someone is lovely. But it’s a whole lot easier to not like someone, to move through the world satisfied by small pleasures; the sun on my back, steaming hojicha in an chipped teacup, a meandering novel. When I like someone, I am vulnerable. I am feeling bigger stuff. I’m trying, once again, to navigate my old patterns around love, some of which I understand intellectually, but all of which I feel somatically and seem to be the realest even at the height of it’s absurdity. It's so messy, the moment-to-moment with another person. So many mis-steps, sometimes so hard to hear the sane inner voice (versus the insane one - she's in there, too). </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When I talk to him, I light up. When he laughs at my jokes, I know myself to be hilarious. When he listens to my insights, I know myself to be brilliant. When he complements me, I know myself to be beautiful. All that feels elementally good. But that good feeling hinges on his approval, his involvement, his presence, none of which is guaranteed. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Moving through the world with an open heart is painful, that pumping organ ripe for injury. But probably the only way to be alive; vulnerable, awake, rolling with the punches. I’d rather be brave than bored. I’d rather test my mettle, my capacity, my vitality then live in safety.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 11px;">As for this thing, with this man, it’ll either fade back into the woodwork or end in a box of Kleenex (break-up or funeral). I’m hoping for Kleenex, because that will mean I cared, that will mean I lived. Regardless, this sensation, this moment, this delicious liking, I’m gonna call myself lucky to have it. Better sorry than safe.</span>Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-27615176931803776332017-10-21T12:35:00.000-07:002017-10-21T12:35:07.618-07:00Sell By Date<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">A few weeks ago, I resumed online shopping for men. It’s not my favorite - is it anyone’s? - but there aren’t a whole lot of single men here in the suburbs. Pretty much everyone is married - and so HAPPY, you guys.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">My latest insecurity (there are a million but this one’s new) is that I’m now less attractive because of my age. Not how age is affecting my face or body - they’re actually holding up quite well. Simply my age. I have a feeling I’m not falling into men’s search criteria anymore, because I’m 47.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When I was in the midst of my divorce, a lawyer I consulted told me that as long as I snagged a new husband in the following couple years, I could be financially sound. He said that I was running up against the age limit but I was pretty so it was possible. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’ve had moments of panic lately. Men are no longer interested in me (despite hourly in-person input to the contrary). I’ll be alone the rest of my life, one of those old ladies that gave up on romance years and years ago - because, it’s implied, romance had given up on her.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that all of the above is true. That I have exited the window of statistical attractiveness. That I won’t find someone who I feel is my equal - because my equals aren’t looking for me. That I grow old alone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Long ago, when that lawyer suggested I get on the man-hunt and fast, I had a moment of desperation. Yes, better land a husband post-haste. And then I remembered that I never want to marry again. Not because I don’t believe in partnership but because I don’t understand why I would - I’m not having any more children and I want to be financially independent forever and always. Back then, I was still unsure that I could earn a living. Turns out I can.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And now, when I think about not being with a dude, when I get past the not-enoughness that I feel, the not-being-chosen, I remember about dudes. They’re great, or they can be, but they also drive me crazy (in good ways and bad) and I love being alone. Often, in a dating situation, I’m waiting until we’re apart so I can reclaim my space.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So, you guys, worst case scenario, I continue living this beautiful life that I’ve built; running my business, raising my kids, hanging out with my friends, living to the fullest in gorgeous geography. None of that depends on my beauty, or on my age, or on a dude.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Maybe I will be one of those eccentric single elderly ladies. But I bet you I’ll be having fun.</span></div>
Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-56110594089125337572017-09-21T12:50:00.001-07:002017-09-21T12:50:25.484-07:00Outlander<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’ve been watching Outlander lately. For the uninitiated, it’s a series based on a novel. Essentially feminist porn, with all the psychological and emotional backstory that we women need to make the sex sing (ok, maybe not all women but certainly me). There’s time-travel (which is the reason I don’t have tattoos, just in case I ever get the opportunity), loads of Scottish accents (be still my heart), and an extremely hunky, deep-feeling Scottish laird (more beefcake than I usually go for but I would NOT kick him out of bed for eating crackers). The entire series (and the novels it’s based on) is from a female gaze. And so the heroine is brunette instead of blond, she is whip-smart and mouthy, sometimes she is appropriately unwashed and uncoiffed. Rape lurks, because, for us ladies, it does. She often saves herself, though sometimes she can’t. Because sometimes we can’t.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I was binging last night, under a quilt, stitching cashmere, cats curled against me, glass of wine nearby. Claire, our heroine, told Jamie, our beefcake, the whole truth about her time-travel, about her other husband in her other time. She risked his love by fully revealing herself. And suddenly I was gushing tears.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What touched me was that when she told him her story, unvarnished and unabridged, he listened, quietly, compassionately, for hours. And when she was finally spent, she had the great luxury of being understood. And that, I realized, more than romance, more than sex, is what I miss. Having a partner to listen to every word, to love me even with all my mistakes, all my mis-steps, to help me carry the load of my story. I imagined what it’d be like to tell someone everything that’s happened since Mihiretu’s adoption, every twist and turn, every heartbreak, and to have that person, that man (because God help me I can’t talk myself out of being straight), hear it all, feel it all with me, for me, just as I would do for him, with his story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I have such beautiful friends. They carry parts of my story, some more parts than others. But I’m not talking about friendship. I’m talking about a love relationship, a partnership, a last-person-you-talk-to-at-night, first-person-you-talk-to-in-the-morning, a one-stop-shop, someone you are naked with, in every sense. Because, as you know because you carry your own story, it’s a lot to hold alone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">An outlander is someone who stands outside society, a foreigner, a stranger. I think we all have our outlander moments. And I think we all want to come in out of the cold, to be home. Sometimes that home resides, at least partially, in another person. I’ve been an outlander, these last years, there’s no doubt. Sometimes I like it. Sometimes I want to belong. I want someone to understand my foreign tongue, to make sense of it, because they love me.</span></div>
Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7782849633837450920.post-79157214084939632922017-09-15T13:03:00.002-07:002017-09-15T13:03:44.322-07:00Sleepyhead<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">My greatest luxury is sleep. I’ll take it over facials, five star dining, diamonds. It’s really convenient that it’s free.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">During my waking hours, I’m all action and efficiency, a multi-task master. I rarely sit. On the rare occasion I do, let’s say some tv with the kids in the evening, I have a sewing project on hand. But, come 9pm on most nights, I’m in bed, happily curled up with my Kindle, deep in a novel. Soon enough, it’s lights out and the adventure begins.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I generally sleep for nine to ten hours at a time, which allows for a lot of REM. Consequently, my dream world rivals my daylight hours. I feel like a deep-sea diver, plunging to the very bottom of the ocean, spending hours slowing examining treasures, turning them over in my hand, my hair floating up and behind me like a mermaid, bubbles blowing past my face. I like that world just as much as I like this one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Because my subconscious has all kinds of time to work through what’s pressing, I often end up with some screwy dreams at the end of the night. Hillary and Bill trying to persuade me to back her for another run, Michelle mad at me - again! - for flirting with Barack, Bruce Springsteen serenading me onstage ala Courtney Cox with a specially-penned song. Last night, for instance, my friend Josie was wondering if I wanted her bed - she was getting a new one. I debated, it sloped from head to foot (which Josie said would be good for my sinuses), but then remembered my own beautiful bed and said no way, Josie (ho-say).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I built my bed a year ago. It sits in the strange alcove off the living-room that I call my bedroom. With some IKEA shelving units, plywood and ingenuity, I built the bed high off the floor, cornered just at window height. Most seasons, I sleep with that big window wide open to the canyon below, the sounds and smells of the night drifting in on the breeze. It’s almost as good as a screened-in porch. I hear raccoons chirping, deer crashing through the brush, cats yowling, coyotes howling, one night I swear I heard a mountain lion right below me, chasing a yelping deer, the big cat growling, roaring, it’s voice deep and loud like an earthquake.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The bed holds me perfectly but for awhile last year when I was dating a man who was also a giant, who was anxious about sleeping on the outer edge for fear of falling to the floor and so was tucked in by the window on the less fortified part of the structure, I would wake at 3am sloping towards him, concerned about my engineering.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The other night I got in bed, the first cool night of the fall, and rejoiced in the good sleeping weather. A chilled room and a pile of quilts, plus a couple of cats as furry personal heaters, what’s better? It’s my favorite moment of the day, when the kids are stowed, the work put away, my teeth brushed, face clean of make-up, I’m the truest version of myself. No matter how catastrophic the day, how terrifying my worries, it is a reliable moment of comfort, of home.</span></div>
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Liz Lavoiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00337830173764565499noreply@blogger.com0