Fish on Land

Chapter Deux Beginning Again

There’s no accounting for absences, so instead I’m writing with fever and avoiding any explanations to cover my tracks. It’s most definitely Fall in the Bay Area and I’m loving it – for the first time EVER. I’m actually ready for the cooler weather and a departure from sunburnt grass and sweaty underarms. Is it a sign of relinquishing my Los Angeles roots that I no longer miss the year round warmth of SoCal? Every year here I have a panic freak out about keeping warm. I pile the bed with enough blankets to suffocate us and I start to pull out all my sweaters and jackets and tights and boots and wooly scarves. It’s quite funny to see my husband sleeping in, one stray foot sticking out from all the covers, his head buried in the blankets and our dog lovingly licking that bare protruding foot. Ah yes, Fall is where it’s at for me.

Happy Birthday To Me

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. - T.S. Eliot

I appreciate...

unexpectedly warm days when the sun warms my skin
my sweet spoiled dog
seeing in color
pineapple
my asthma medicine
Peet’s coffee
great timing
Netflix
surviving loss
dark chocolate
seeing the bay every day
having both a book and street education
perfect songs on my ipod for my walks
matinees
seafood
smiling at a stranger and seeing them smile back
falling asleep next to my husband
Home

Bowling

We went bowling on Saturday night with another couple who we really like and don’t see enough. Walking into the bowling alley, it was a wave of familiarity. I spent a lot of time as a pre-teen in bowling alleys. Every Sunday night, in fact. All of us, my ever-pregnant mom and my stepdad and me and sometimes my brother James, would pile into the car and head over for 6:00-9:00 pm Blue Chip Bowling. I had a crush on the awkward restaurant cashier, whose family, I was convinced, owned the place. He was really dorky but so nice and polite. My stepdad would walk in with his 6-pack under arm, tossing the empties into the trash. He liked to drink one or two on the drive over. We’d get our shoes and choose our bowling balls and drop all our crap on the bench BEHIND the lane. I was a runt and had trouble getting enough strength behind my rolls. I studied hard all those hours sitting on the bench, watching people drink and smoke and bowl and tell crude jokes.

This last Saturday was just like that again. I walked in and felt right at home. We got our shoes and picked out balls and settled in at the sleepy corner of the place. The lane that shared our semi-circle of space consisted of a gaggle of kids between the ages of 4 – 13. There were no adults. They bowled with the bumper lane up, so that they would never have a gutter ball. They were so quiet, and they didn’t have anyone to show them how to bowl. They watched us intently. When I put my hand on the air vent, the older of the girls asked, “Is that for luck?” I said, “Yeah, it’s for luck and for when my hand feels sticky.”

As they prepared to leave, the youngest girl of the bunch, she must have been 4 years old, with pink plastic clips holding her delicate corn rows and a shy smile, ran over and hugged me. Her skinny little arms outstretched and wrapped around my seated waist. I reached down and hugged her. As she pulled back, I didn’t want to let her go. She was so pure and loving and beautiful, as she stepped away she looked embarrassed. I was overwhelmed and flattered that she chose me to run up to and hug. On our way home, I kept asking my husband, “That little girl was so sweet. She just came up and hugged me. Why do you think she hugged me?” He was taken with her too. “The little pancakey, she was sweet and her face was very pretty. She must have felt safe with you."

The Incredible Shrinking Woman

I hate myself. It’s not just a Sunday feeling, but it definitely rings loud and clear on these intoxicatingly warm and drowsy Sunday afternoons. I want to disappear, I want to shrink, like Lily Tomlin in The Incredible Shrinking Woman. I am bending, like a rotting tree, from the weight of this bottomless grief and I want to be translucent and invisible.

I hate myself when I climb out of the shower and the water rivulets running down my face are met with the steady salty stream already present. I hate myself because my Mom is incompetent. I hate that, despite my complete understanding of this, I entrusted her with my brother Russell’s safety. I should have known better. I don’t know exactly what I would have done differently. My mom is someone who should never have been a mother. Her children used as tools to make men stay, to trap them to her. Her lack of care for her kids placed me, at the age of 11, in a house with a violent drunk who had octopus hands. Her hate for herself made it continue for 7 years, until I left at 18. I was gone many years before that. My mom was the last person to talk to my brother Russell, before he left and was murdered. He's been gone for 6 months exactly today. I am physically ill and shrink from the pain, I can’t eat and the hugs from my husband remind me that I’m hollow.

I live in two worlds. The one where I go to work and get things done. The one where I meet deadlines and argue with people about design decisions. The one where I see friends and seem maybe even happy. The other world encroaches, like a timid cockroach, when I am home and when I sleep. When I stare at the shadows, the ceiling, the wall and find no relief. I cry every day. The thinner I become, the better, it means that my hate is creating change and that I might shrink enough not to feel anymore and be done with this.

Write Away

Writing is sacred to me, there’s little that’s more powerful than the written word. Stories, both true and imagined, are how we form our identity and come to an understanding of this earth. There’s truth in the shortest sentence, if it comes from your genuine self. It survives whispers and thoughts and becomes immortalized on the page. I am, as I’ve mentioned before, writing less than usual and less than I like. Many things are out of my control, I feel. Sometimes it’s my mood and sometimes it’s my work load that prevents me from writing. I blame no one. I wish I was inspired.

Earlier this week, after a morning appointment, I was walking down a busy street in Berkeley. A young and seriously out of shape guy with a floppy mop of hair walked out of his 3 story apartment building across the street and took a few steps. He hurled a black pair of tennis shoes up in the air, watching as they caught the telephone wire. They lurched as one shoe fell faster than the other and bobbed as the wire gave a little from the weight of the tied laces. He stared at them for a moment and then started walking back in. He turned around as he walked, to see if anyone was watching and stared at me. I stared back. With a nonchalant but clumsy air, he walked back in to his complex. I looked back at the hanging shoes and noticed that next to the newly hung black pair, there was also a hopeful pair of white tennis shoes dangling about a foot closer to the building.

A few weeks ago, after dinner, we were driving with some friends. One of them asked what it means when shoes are dangling from a telephone wire. I mentioned that I had always heard that it meant you could buy drugs on or near the corner. Someone else said that it meant that someone had died recently. Maybe it means both.

Highs and Lows

The last few weeks have been more unusual than ever. Yeah, hard to believe, right? We decided to seriously investigate becoming home owners. This year we will get annihilated on taxes. Both Charis and I are working professionally and full-time. So we met with a recommended agent and looked at some property that matched our criteria. We definitely wanted an income property, preferably a duplex. In my casual research over the last few years, I believed a duplex to be the best bet for us economically and as a way to get into property management. So…. we’re soon going to be the proud owners of a duplex! We found something that truly matches our specs and that we can afford. There have been inspections and reports and revised offer letters and many many phone calls over the last 2 weeks. We literally made the offer the day that we were flying to LA for another hearing. We close on the property in about a week. The month of May will be full of moving and planning and renting out the vacant unit. In all respects, I have a very strong and positive gut feeling about this. It’s the right step for us and I'm very excited. 

On the other end of the spectrum is a looming trial and numerous delays in the prosecution of my brother’s murderer. The judge finally lost patience with the public defender and is granting no further delays. The preliminary is set to start next Thursday. The prosecuting attorney has remained calm and always intelligent, explaining everything to us and making herself available when I catch her by phone at her desk. She works extremely hard and, in my eyes, will make a strong case for the maximum penalty. There is plenty of evidence, brutal and painful evidence. My heart is still broken and I still cry regularly. My family is still immersed in pain. The details surrounding the case have come slowly and when I see the murderer in court, I want to kill him. I can’t breath, my hands clench and I forget to blink as I stare at  him with burning eyes. Lately, I’ve felt that Russell’s energy is with me less. It’s freaking me out, I want to feel him near me always. My grief is more unpredictable now. Suddenly, I feel sick to my stomach and have to lie down and then a numb depression sets over me. I toss on the couch and feel restless. It lasts for a day and then passes. It returns again just as suddenly. It’s not the bitter sharp agony of before, it’s a dull throbbing bruised feeling. Trying to pinpoint the thoughts that bring it on makes me feel sicker, my mind wants to understand so that it protects itself from those thoughts, but there’s no hiding.

Write It Already

In the last month, I started writing for a music website. With the intention of maintaining my web journal and keeping up on my reviews for the website, I have done neither. I’m falling behind miserably. There is a lot going on in my life now, and I’m not complaining, but if I slip on something a little, suddenly I’m behind a week. Is that how life is supposed to be? The weeks literally melting into months. My decision to write for the website was a big one. It means responsibility and a commitment to producing written work. It’s on a par with making myself go back to school: deadlines, rewrites, a discerning audience. And why would I do that? Well that, my friends, is what you’d call undeniable love. I love music and I love writing. I’ve never trusted myself enough to combine them, despite believing in my heart that I could do it well. I was held back by fear of embarrassment and (da, da, da, dum) failure. I can’t pinpoint exactly why I decided to take the plunge now. Perhaps the grief and trauma of the last few months gave me some perspective on what to really sweat in this life. Perhaps I’m just getting to the age that I don’t care what anyone thinks. Just as with bad events, good events in life have a lot to do with timing. My friend David, author of the fantastic Stickboy PrettySure comic strip, had the sense to tell me about the website and encourage me to check it out. Thanks Nono, you’re my N.Y. guardian angel.

Check out the website I'm writing for at Caught in the Carousel and do yourself a favor and visit Stickboy too.

Dedicated

I feel like I’m in the movie Office Space. I’ve been completely distracted and basically depressed at work since my brother’s death and this week I found out that I’m getting a promotion!? Too weird. I’m happy and all that, I know that I can do the work and I’ve negotiated a nice arrangement, but way wacko how it happened. It’s not like I let things slip or missed deadlines, I just didn’t expect it. In my discussions with the CEO, the word “dedicated” came up. Such a promising word. Is it really acceptable to discuss “dedication” in the realm of a friggin’ web products company? It seemed so hoaky to talk about how dedicated I am to the work, as if we’re saving lives or trees or contributing to history or providing valuable research. Ugh. You see that I’m a bit jaded, but I swig the tainted Kool-Aid and smile.

Yesterday helped me remember some important things. I attended the retirement party of a good friend whom I met while I worked at LBL (Lawrence Berkeley Lab) while I was in school. I worked at LBL for 5 years while I finished my B.A and then while I got my Master’s. She worked there for 33 years! “The Lab” is a magical place, another world with long hallways and curious experiments around every corner. 3:00 p.m. was Tea Time, always. Everyone would socialize, eat cookies and have tea and coffee. My boss, a joint scientist at the lab and professor on campus, became a sort of mentor to me. He provided advice on everything from investments and relationships to laptops and chocolate. He was a great source of wisdom and frustration for me over the years. He was at the retirement party and gave a nice brief speech. He’s busy again after years of slowly decreasing funding and grants. He received the Nobel Prize last year and has begun an insane circuit of travel and fundraising for a research institute that he plans to start with his award money on campus. When I walked into the reception, he spotted me right away and came over and gave me a hug. He was as happy to see me as I was to see him. Apparently, I hold the distinguished record of outlasting all his other assistants and seemingly being the only one that got him under control. He can be very bossy and overbearing. I guess he needed me as much as I needed the job, when I was a freaked-out and poor student. It was good to remember those old days, so that I could see how far I’ve come.

Blocked

I haven’t been able to write anything. What can I say? I can talk about the trips that I’ve been making to LA to be with my family each week. Mostly, these are emotional events that leave me exhausted. I climb into bed when I return. I’ve been talking to the district attorney in charge of prosecuting the accused young man in my brother’s murder. There’s a hearing this coming Tuesday. I’ll be there. I wrote a letter, a kind of statement of grief, for the judge. My mom wrote one too. It wretched my heart to read her letter. She described calling to my brother Russell in the early morning hours when she knew that he was lying somewhere dead, his spirit drifting and confused, her “big baby boy” as she used to call him.

Our family is fond of nicknames. Russell’s nickname was Bubba, often shortened to Bub, or Bubba Dooz, when I was being affectionate. It was a nickname that he had as a toddler, and he used to say, standing in his puffy diaper with his bow legs, “I’m Bubba!” and smile a crooked grin as he danced alternating from one leg to the other. I was surprised how many of his current friends also called him Bubba. It’s a funny name that stuck, that he liked, that suited him.   

I am trying to focus on the living, my family, the ones who are here now suffering. I’m doing a dance of sorts. I can focus on work when I’m at work, but if my phone rings and it’s my mom, I always answer. Sometimes she has a very specific question about something the DA told me. A point that Mom wants to clarify. Other times she’s upset because she begins to imagine his last few moments, or the last time she saw him, 2 hours before he was killed. He was itching to go out, to a party across the street from my mom’s. He asked her permission to go and she confirmed that it was right across the street and advised him not to drink and be home before too long. From that party across the street, he jumped in a car with 3 other friends and they headed to the second party, where within minutes of arriving, he would die.   

I can focus on dates and hearings and letters. I can cry when I see his picture or when I wake up in the morning and it’s simply another day and he’s still gone. I can get details and attend the trial and stare at the 21 year-old boy who violently took Russell's life. I can be angry that he went to the party, that his friends ran, that the average person would look at him and think that he was a gang member, that he lived in a neighborhood where a backyard house party could kill him, that I couldn’t protect him. He slipped through my fingers. My gentle, sweet brother, we’ll dance like we were supposed to on your 21st birthday the next time we meet, I promise.

Merry Planning

This is the first end-of-year in a long time where I feel truly inspired and genuinely optimistic about the new year. Some years, I’ve felt so beaten up about the year past, that I went limping into the new year. Other years, I thrust myself into a long, long list of achieveables, like an inventory checklist. I have a strong sense of what steps I will take, and I do hope to get a lot accomplished in 2007. That’s a given. It’s a list of manageable and life-changing things that will take place slowly and realistically. I’m letting myself feel good about where I am now. That’s hard to do. I’m much better at looking forward than being self-congratulatory. Yoga is helping me there.

So what all happened this year? I spent another year married to my life partner and best friend. We moved. I started working for a new company with a significant promotion, and based on my recent review, I’m kicking booty at it. I traveled to Cyprus for the second time. I decided to write again, using this blog as a creative outlet for my writing. I, with the help of my friend Dhea, discovered yoga. I decided to take music lessons and learn an instrument. I also decided to obtain a real estate salesperson license. I decided to get out of debt absolutely and completely. Charis and I jointly decided that we want to take small weekend trips around the U.S. to see more of the country that we live in. A lot of decisions, I know, but they are fairly well set now. Once I commit to doing something, I make it happen. Some other ideas that I might hold off on until 2008 are: putting on a 1-night a week club in the East Bay, writing a book, traveling even more. Lots of planning is going on now, I feel like a think tank or incubator. I’m definitely in a do and create mode. I’m avoiding the ghost of depression, not much can bring me down now (knocking noise on my wooden desk).