Saturday, November 15, 2014

Heart of November

Okay, I'm back, having missed quite a chunk of NaNoWriMo or NaNoBlogMo or whatever it is. But it is still November, yes?

General impressions: We are heading toward winter. Snowflakes fell heavily all day yesterday outside the windows of the old house that is my office. It is dark at five o'clock. I know that that is what happens in November but somehow I was not quite prepared.

Today, though, there is that bright winter sun. I have been cleaning, and then I will go into the office for a few hours to catch up on some things, and then I will have dinner with friends. 

This month is a busy travel month for me. A conference in one Midwest city last week, and then on Wednesday I head out for another conference in a different Midwest city. Both cities are not that far away but require taking two planes from where I live, so travel becomes very tedious. I like going to conferences but it is also a lot of work and a lot of being on all the time. And then I come back to work and I am impossibly behind on everything. Thus my plan to spend some time at the office today.

Still, I am grateful, of course, for my job and the interesting and nice people I work with and the fact that I work with books. 

And so grateful to have a quiet day today, to catch up.

I wanted to get up super early today and get started on the big cleaning plans. But that's hard for me. I drifted back to sleep and had a dream about my father and my brother that was both comforting and sad, and so then I was kind of glad I had gone back to sleep, to experience that, and to have what I am feeling brought to the surface.

In the dream I was with my family at a beach, my whole extended family, it seemed like, my sister and my niece and nephew and their kids. And we were trying to take a family picture, with my father standing and holding my little nephew's hand, I think, but whenever I looked through the camera he was blurry and indistinct, kind of fading away. (My father died three years ago.) And then for a moment we were all distracted and then when we looked around my father was gone and we were worried because he was frail and old and couldn't walk very well. We thought maybe he had gone into the water, and I remember thinking, well, the water will support him, maybe he can swim even if he can't walk very well. So then we were in the water looking for him and calling out his name, kind of swimming or walking in the water, up and down parallel to the beach. Then the scene switched and I was in some sort of mall near the ocean, like a long series of interconnected stalls, almost like one of those covered markets like Redding Market in Philadelphia. I was walking through the hallway or the stalls and I was desperately calling out my father's name, his actual name, both first and last. Then sometimes I would switch to "Daddy." And then I heard, sort of behind a curtain, a familiar cough (which now I think sounded more like my brother, but in the dream I associated it with my father) and my father's voice said something like "Yeah" or "yes," very casually. I pulled aside the curtain and there were my father and my brother sitting companionably at a table in what seemed to be a diner. It seemed that my father had left the beach because he had gotten a phone call from my brother, who had just arrived from California and wanted to spend some time alone with my father before he saw the rest of us. In real life, my brother, who died a year and a half ago, had been confined to a wheelchair, without speech, for the last nine years, so to see him there, talking to my father, and looking like himself, his earlier self, was a gift. But I was so angry in the dream that they had made us all worry, I couldn't even think about being happy to see my brother. I said to my father, something like, "didn't you think???" and then I looked at my brother and it was a little harder to be angry at him, and I said, "didn't you think"? and he looked at me and kind of shook his head and there were tears in his eyes, and I felt like he was saying, "I'm dead and I've come back to visit, my powers to control things in this dream are limited, don't go away and don't be angry." But I said I had to go off and tell my sister and everyone else that my father was okay and maybe I'd see them later. 

And now I feel like, if only I had stayed. But of course the ending would always be the same.

Like I said, both comforting and sad.


posted by Sarah Sometimes at 11:38 AM 3 comments

Tuesday, November 04, 2014

Upstate Yoga

Here's a post for Day Three of Nanowrimo, barely under the wire (having missed Day Two).

Today I went to work, got quite a bit done for five or six hours, barely stopping for lunch, then went out at around 3:30 for a walk in the soft, gray November afternoon, which was not as cold as it looked from inside. 

Came back in, got some more done, then went to yoga at 7:00. Class was hard, and fun, and very, very crowded. Barely an inch between mats. I love this studio that I've been going to here in Upstate City, but I kind of wish it weren't so popular. 

At the beginning of class I was fretting about feeling too hemmed in but then I let go, as one does in yoga class, and just focused on the poses and the particular element  that our teacher was emphasizing. (It had to do with aligning one's head and neck in a certain way.)

When A., the teacher, mentioned the dreaded word "partner pose," I quailed and considered quickly exiting the room. I usually don't mind doing the partner poses once I'm in them, but lately I have not had the courage to get past that first moment of reluctance and shyness, especially when, as tonight, the person next to me is a guy. But, fortunately, my neighbor immediately found another guy to be his partner (we were supposed to choose people with a similar level of strength in our legs) and then I saw, from the row in front of me, that K., a woman whom I've gotten to know to say hello to in this class, and who is just a lovely and friendly and sort of twinkly person, was giving me the high sign (as my father would say). So then we did the little exercise together, which I am not even going to try to explain or describe, but it was fine doing it with her, and I felt grateful to her for reaching out. 

And then pretty soon we were winding down, lying still in the darkened room for shavasana, and class was over, and I felt peaceful as I went on my way. 

posted by Sarah Sometimes at 12:34 AM 2 comments

Saturday, November 01, 2014

A Halloween Story (not Scary)

Today is the first day of NaNoWriMo, and also of the month in which Thanksgiving occurs. So,  a good time to get back to writing here, and also to thinking about gratitude. I have no plans to write a novel, but perhaps I can at least share a few thoughts every day.

Gratitude, for starters.

Last night, Halloween, I had had plans to go to a recital with a friend but they fell through. Then I noticed, as I hadn't before, how windy and dreary and rainy the day was. I was feeling sorry for myself that I had no one to spend the evening with.

Then I rallied, more or less. I stayed at work a bit late, got some things done that I needed to, and then I went grocery shopping, which was urgently necessary and often gets pushed to the bottom of the list with my schedule of travel for work and other things going on.

As I was at the checkout line, my phone rang. It was Handyman Guy, my friend in the neighborhood who has helped me with innumerable tasks around my apartment: putting up curtain fixtures, putting the air conditioner in the window, taking it out when the season changes, hanging pictures, you name it. Only he doesn't live in the neighborhood anymore. He's around sometimes, to help the woman who lives a couple of houses down manage her dogs, but I don't see him too often, and I miss him. He's chatty and enthusiastic and has an opinion about everything.

I answered the phone (so reflexive to want to say "picked up the phone" but of course we don't do that anymore).

"Hey, what's up?" I asked.

"Are you giving out candy tonight?"

"Oh yeah," I said. "I'm at the grocery store, I was planning to buy a bag just in case, but I forgot. Are you at J.'s  house? Are you getting any kids there?" (J. is the neighbor with dogs.)

"Yeah," he said, "there's some. I didn't know what it would be like in my neighborhood, so I came here."

"Okay," I said, "Maybe I'll see you when I get back if you're still there."

The grocery clerk was still scanning my groceries, so I dashed over to the mostly denuded Halloween candy aisle and grabbed a few bags of whatever was left.

When I got back to my street, I saw that Handyman Guy and J. were hanging out on her front porch giving out candy to trick-or-treaters. I put away my groceries and went back out to join them, with my biggest pot (the one you boil the lasagna noodles in) full of candy.

J.'s front porch has no steps. This is because her ex-husband, as she later explained, designed it this way. "He wanted a front deck," she said, shrugging her shoulders. So when I got over there, she and Handyman Guy were up above me, almost as if they were on the deck of a ship, while I awkwardly leaned against the structure, my elbow at the level where they were standing.

"Do you want to come up?" Handyman Guy asked. "You can go through the house, or you can hop over."

J. seemed a little worried about how I would hop over, and whether the railing was strong enough, but Handyman Guy leaned over, and I grabbed his arm and took the big step up and then climbed over the railing. I had a flash of a childhood memory, climbing over fences in the housing development where I grew up. So that was nice, and then it was nice to be with the two of them, chatting and leaning over the railing to hand out candy to the sporadic groups of tiny ghouls and goblins and superheroes and witches that came by, mostly spilling out of the back seats of their parents' cars since the weather was so bad. I had my big pot of candy; Handyman Guy's candy was in a colander. We thought that was funny.

We examined the candy in my pot. "What are those, white chocolate bars?" J. asked. I looked closer. No, they were candy corn bars. I felt kinda sorry for the kids who were grabbing them, hoping for chocolate and ending up with this strange thing in the shape of a candy bar. But who knows, maybe they would prove to be a bit.

Every time a group came by, Handyman Guy would explain that they should get candy from both of us, since we were actually "two separate neighbors." He would also direct them to a house around the corner that had some elaborate set-up with strobe lights.

After a while there didn't seem to be any more kids coming, it was getting chillier, and I was feeling a bit sick from eating candy and not having had dinner yet. So I said my good-byes, and Handyman Guy helped me climb back down over the side of the ship.

I am grateful for nice neighbors, and for Handyman Guy's unexpected phone call that took me into a pleasurable evening with them that I did not expect to have. And for little kids dressed up in costumes.


posted by Sarah Sometimes at 11:58 AM 2 comments