Well Lived, Well Loved: A Tribute

About a month ago, I walked into my grandparents’ apartment and handed my grandfather a plastic baggie from behind his armchair. He held it up to examine its contents: three thick, brown ponytails, each about fifteen inches long.

“You did it!” he congratulated me. I’d been threatening to cut off all my hair for the better part of a year. What I had learned from getting a tattoo is that the longer and more loudly you threaten to do something out of the ordinary, the more ordinary it is when you finally do it.

I came around to stand in front of my ultimate patriarch, and his eyebrows rose as he saw the broad swath of indigo blue I had dyed into what was left of my hair.

After a moment, he asked dryly, “What’d you do, fall on your head and bruise your hair?”

I’ve gotten quite a bit of positive reinforcement concerning my hair since I cut it, but his stamp of approval will always be my favorite.

Later that night, I was on the couch, trying not to get in anyone’s way. My parents, my aunt, and my grandmother were all exhausted, on edge, and trying to hide all of the above. When I came that night, I had brought a bouquet for my grandmother, and someone had put the flowers in a vase on the coffee table. Grandpa was sitting in his armchair across the room, coming in and out of awareness, when he suddenly caught my eye and nodded at the arrangement, which was dripping with lilacs.

“Nice flowers,” he said simply, and quirked a wry smile at me.

All I had to do was smile back.

It was an entire conversation in two words and two nearly identical grins.

In a way, those last two interactions—the hair and the flowers—were perfectly representative of our relationship: sarcastic, dry, understated, but always with an essential underpinning of love and approval. Our exchanges that night were so much more genuine than the constant, fearful refrain of my telling him I loved him, which I had been doing with more and more panic as he got sicker and sicker. He already knew that I loved him—of course he did.

And anyway, self-conscious sentimentalism just wasn’t his style.

I wish so badly that I could draw together some definitive statement, a coherent narrative, about what my grandfather’s life meant to me, but it all comes out in bits and pieces: ski lessons, angel food cake, shuffling cards, Ford Explorers, and the smell of mothballs. I think I’ve come to realize that the whole of his life in my life was so massive, so integral, that it’s difficult for me to wrap language around it.

But I wouldn’t be his granddaughter if I didn’t try.

Spending time with my family in the weeks after he died, I noticed that we all tried impersonating his voice and intonation, as though there simply wasn’t enough of him in the stories we were telling. We wanted to hear him, to be comforted by him, to keep the sound of him present in our lives. Over the weekend of his memorial service, one thread in the countless stories became clear: the events in our lives may have been separated by decades and continents—from stories beginning with “so there I was in Pago Pago” to Indiana canoe trips ending up in jail—but our experience of his immersive, unconditional, dryly hilarious love was constant.

What I began to understand intuitively a long time ago, but only articulated after he died, was how much that love said not about us, but about him.

Recently, I got a new phone, and my voicemails didn’t transfer over. Before they were lost in the ether, I managed to record onto my new phone the only one I wanted to save; the one I knew was there, but that I didn’t have the courage to listen to until recently. Grandpa was nearly deaf for my entire life, and in spite of a successful cochlear implant, he still didn’t spend a lot of time on the phone. As a result, he only called when he himself had something important to say. In this case, he had just learned about my GRE scores, and he was calling to congratulate me and to tell me that he was sure I would end up in Williamstown yet. At that point, Williams was still my first choice, and when I got the message, I wept with relief, because if he believed it, maybe I could let myself hope too.

Months later, he was honest to God equally as thrilled when I accepted an offer from Colorado.

What he wanted for me was not prestige. Prestige is inherently selfish, and there has never been a man in this world less selfish than my grandfather. What he wanted for me, what he wanted for all of us, was that we do everything we could do be the best version of ourselves: to be responsible, to be kind, to be honest, and to be happy. He was invested in nothing more than our integrity and our happiness. When I think about what that meant about his own integrity, his lack of ego, and the breadth of his love for all of us, it makes my chest truly, physically ache.

And that doesn’t even begin to cover the fact that he was the funniest, most charismatic old fart you ever met.

Every deck of cards, every ski lift, every voting ballot, every hiccup, every mint julep, and every piece of angel food cake I will ever encounter for the rest of my life will belong to him. He will be there every time I turn a card face down and smirk at the relative I have just beaten at gin, asking casually, “What's the name of the game?”  Every time I purse my lips and arch one eyebrow to show amusement or correct a bill for being less than I owe, I’ll be channeling him directly.

I’ll try to make him proud, at least a little bit every day, and I will miss him every day for the rest of my life.

I guess that’s just the name of the game.



In loving memory of
Jack Roberts
1923-2012

Manifesting My Destiny (or, 2,000 Miles to Graceland)

For several months I’ve had a very short, detailed fantasy on loop in my head:

I am standing outside of my building, having left my beloved apartment for the last time. I am wearing a Fraggle Rock t-shirt, beat to hell jean shorts, and my Tevas. My hair is about fourteen inches shorter than it is right now, and some of it is dyed dark blue. It is a nondescript day in August. I take one last look at my building, and then climb into a Subaru Forester, which is loaded with my absolute essentials: my favorite Modernist and fantasy books, a Brendan Willis original print, two African violets, one guitar, and a road bike. I turn on a meticulously crafted travel mix—starting with the excellent Alkaline Trio cover of the Muppets’ “Movin’ Right Along”—and shift into first gear.

Then I hit the road, going due west.

This fantasy was convenient even before I had decided on a graduate program, because most of the schools to which I had applied are located west of my current location. Exactly how far west varied by program, from a few hours by car to several hours by plane (or a few days by Subaru). Nevertheless, what I was focusing on in that fantasy wasn’t really where I was going, but simply that I was going: the visualized moment of taking the next step, of manifesting my destiny by going west.

And really, in this day and age, can you get closer to a covered wagon than a Subaru Forester?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

My decision to accept one particular offer didn’t end up happening overnight; it happened over an unseasonably warm, sunny day in Colorado. On visits to my other prospective campuses, one university had left me lukewarm and the other had given me hives. The Colorado campus gave me the warm tinglies—the emotional zap I had quietly given up on as having been a onetime occurrence with my undergraduate experience. The people in the program were laidback and friendly, the setting was beautiful, and the program itself was interdisciplinary and creative.

These empirical facts were also complemented by a veritable avalanche of signs from the benevolent universe: a puppy in the art history department corridor, the announcement of Colorado’s first Trader Joe’s opening near campus next year, and Peyton Manning’s signing with the Denver Broncos.

I felt like looking up at the sky and yelling, “THE AUDIENCE IS LISTENING!”

My bliss and relief were very nearly musical in proportion: had there been an overturned rowboat in my immediate vicinity, I would’ve tap-danced on it. We’re talking Rogers and Hammerstein happiness, here.

When I got back from Colorado, I mapped out the drive from Here to There. Looking at the sterile map that Google so helpfully provided, I was surprised at how straight the line was (well, mostly: think “kindergartener with a crayon” straight—a few deviations but generally correct). Another intriguing detail was that the trip itself clocked in at almost exactly 2,000 miles. Something about the roundness of the number appealed to me, as though it was meant for literature or song: walking two moons, walking a thousand miles to fall down at your door, having reason to believe we all will be received… this place was on its way to becoming my own personal Graceland.

Then something very unexpected happened: my application was accepted at the highly prestigious program, the one that had given me hives.

I’d like to say that I had the courage of my convictions, and that the decision I had made on that sunny day in Colorado stuck. I’d like to say it, but I can’t.

The short version is that, for about a week and a half, I indulged my inner coward.

Here’s the long version:

In my life, I have almost always prioritized the achievement of a goal over the quality of life on the path to achieve it. I realize now that this habit has been primarily a function of fear: it’s easier to think about unhappiness as part of getting to a future goal than to deal with it as an aspect of the present. Better to focus on the future, when the unhappiness will have somehow been justified in retrospect.

In a twisted way, this system has ended up working for me. After a miserable high school experience, I got into Dartmouth. After almost two unbearable years at my first job, I transferred within the university to my current job at the museum.

Missions accomplished… kind of.

This logic would lead me to believe that I should suck it up and commit to two lonely, hive-ridden years at the highly prestigious program, all towards the goal of getting my Dream Job. I would do what I had always done: I would draw another straight line between my goal and myself, and follow it no matter what.

So if I had such faith in that straight line, why did my shoulders feel two sizes too small? Why was I shaking out my hands to get rid of the quivering feeling? Why was I having a bloody anxiety attack just thinking about this supposedly sound decision?

It was a rough week and a half as I tried desperately to dig myself out, taking a good long time to realize that the seemingly impossible had happened:

I had finally learned some subtlety.

I had learned that my own experience could not be reduced to simple math; that in fact there was not a single, unidirectional line between point A and point B, and that success was not necessarily equivalent to travel on that line. (Hell, there isn’t even really a point A, or a point B for that matter.) I finally acknowledged that my misery in high school did not get me into Dartmouth; that the satisfaction I find in my current job does not make the damage of my old job disappear (I still dream in power-point and wake up in a cold sweat, irrationally fearful I did not print the right slides for a supervisor I haven’t worked for in two years). I slowly began to allow the possibility of new decisions to coexist peacefully with those that came before it; that by taking what I’ve learned and trying something different, I wasn’t simultaneously devaluing the decisions I had made up to that point.

All of these things came to me slowly. Naturally, it took a firm kick in the ass to push me back up to that ledge again and make the leap, and there is no one in this world that can kick my ass quite like my oldest sister.

“There is not one, single way to get where you want to go,” she said sharply on the phone, her exasperation finally getting the better of her patience. “Stop thinking about one, single dream job—what do you want to do?”

Reluctantly, I pulled my brain away from the specific title, position, and museum, and the idea that one graduate program could and would get me there.

“I want to jump up and down in front of art for the rest of my life,” I told her. “I want to design arts programming for middle schoolers and high schoolers, in a museum that has to do new, risky things because it can’t rest on its laurels and prestige. I want to be somewhere passionate and scrappy.”

“Okay.” She knew I was pulling back from the self-loathing, self-pitying hysteria and starting to think like an intelligent human being again. “Then be scrappy.”

At that point I realized, as my sister had intended, that in describing the things I wanted in a job, I had also described the things I had found in the program in Colorado. Then, to drive it home, she hit me where it hurts: directly targeting the place from which revelation emerges, the place where she knows I keep my truest truths.

She asked: “Where are your people?”

My people: my eccentric, eclectic, campfire-building, rock-climbing, banjo-playing, Teva-wearing brethren. The people I found in college and in whose company I finally, thankfully, started to become the person I secretly always wanted to be, whose upcoming incarnation will be a blue-haired Fraggle Rock fanatic in a Subaru. It’s the same person I envisioned heading west to graduate school to manifest a destiny I hadn’t been brave enough to imagine fully: the one where I have somehow found the faith to live in my own present and believe that there is more than one way to get to a goal, which itself is allowed to change.

“My people are in Colorado,” I said, finally letting myself make the right decision.

The relief and bliss returned almost immediately. I also realized with no small amount of irony that in moving away from a metaphorical straight line, I had invested in traveling a literal one: the one I had mapped, Here to There.

What I know, of course, is that the fantasy won’t play out exactly as I had imagined it (this is another one of those subtleties I’ve managed to pick up). I cannot at this time speak to the specific whereabouts of my Fraggle Rock t-shirt three months from now. When I leave, I’ll have to drive east first, to drop off my key, and chances are that I’ll swing about six hours out of my way to make a pilgrimage to Pizza King Pizza in Indiana. Such are the perils of planning, travel, destiny, decisions, and driving west in a fully-loaded Subaru.

Regardless of detours, though, I’m pretty sure that somehow I’ll end up in New Graceland right on time.

Adventures in Marketing

My dad has been in marketing for as long as I’ve been alive, and as a result, an odd fascination with advertising rubbed off on me at a very young age. I don’t remember my dad’s bringing his work home as something that took him away from me. Instead, as a special treat, when the marketing department would be interviewing new ad agencies, he would bring home the agencies’ demo tapes and ask me what I thought. I was completely smitten with one ad featuring the kid from Jerry Maguire engaged in an earnest conversation about marsupials, and equally horrified by one equating the distribution of Nintendo games in the suburbs to food packs in Africa. Dad agreed on both counts.

Many years into my marketing education, my dad gave me an interesting insight into the nature of the beast itself.

“The goal of marketing is to achieve trial,” he told me, as Brian Williams went on a commercial break one night. “After that, it’s up to the product people to make something that consumers will enjoy and buy again. But the exclusive purpose of marketing is to get the consumer to try it the first time.”

They are strange, self-aware moments in which I experience this phenomenon in action.

Take Apple for example. I think I was actually with my dad the first time I saw the TV ad for the Macbook Air: the manila envelope sitting innocuously in the clean, blank space with vaguely hipster music playing in the background. When the disembodied hand casually reached into the frame and pulled the impossibly slim and sleek laptop from the envelope, I very nearly went into convulsions. I’m a Dell woman myself, but in those few minutes, all reason abandoned me, and the only semi-coherent thought I had was along the lines of, “GIMME GIMME GIMME!”

My dad thought the entire process, from my eyes glazing over to full manifestation of consumerist frenzy, was hilarious. He would point out, though, that ultimately the marketing was not successful, because I never got to the essential trial phase. Nevertheless, any ad that can solicit rapturous effects like these cannot have been entirely off the mark.

What Apple was selling in that ad was not speed or endurance—it was beauty, pure and simple. As I convulsed, I was not concerned with the specs of the hard drive or the coverage of the warranty. Hopefully, if I ever got as far as purchasing, I would concern myself with those details, but what would get me to the store, credit card in hand, was that the thing was so damn pretty.

Armed with this understanding of advertising and how it does (or doesn’t) work, sometimes I eye myself in the mirror, faced with something of a dilemma.

The feminist side of my brain kicks into high gear at the very notion of thinking of myself as a commodity: something to market, to sell, to be consumed, purchased, or owned. I do not, in fact, think of myself as a commodity in the consumerist sense of the word. It's just that, for whatever reason, my brain seems to be hardwired to think in marketing terms: it’s the language by which I understand and conceptualize the phenomenon of desire, of wanting or trying to get someone else to want. I also do not think it is terribly surprising, or troubling, to want to be wanted.

How much, though, do I want to invest in my pursuit of being wanted? To put it another way, how much do I want to invest in (cringe) marketing?

Oddly enough, hair is a good example.

Though it is a non-descript brown, my hair is fairly thick, in good health, and falls midway down my back. However, the damn stuff has a distressing tendency never to stay put, so when it is down, I’m always pushing it back, smoothing it down, and generally fussing with it. Since I have absolutely no desire to deal with my hair constantly throughout the day, I simply circumvent the problem by wrapping it up in a tight twist and clamping it back. A few members of my family, who are female and of a slightly older generation, have actually mourned this in conversation with me: how it’s so lovely, and how I look so much softer with it down. One of them went so far as to tell me that I should leave it down, because men love women with long brown hair. Apparently it makes me look fertile.

Never mind a unique and challenging intellect, a wicked sense of humor, and quirky personality. No: men will be attracted to me because I look like I could really bear them some good, healthy children.

Oh dear God.

My horror was swift and righteous, not to mention loud. However, in all honesty, I think my horror was as loud as it was to cover up the fact that this particular comment had prodded a very troubling strain of insecurity, which I bury close to my spleen in the hope that nobody (not even me) will ever notice it. This unreasoning and embarrassing insecurity runs roughly along the lines of: What if my hair really is the best asset I have to attract a guy?

Like I said: unreasoning, embarrassing, and buried near my spleen.

Hypothetically, in the rare instance when my hair is down, if a man notices me in a bar, I do not think he would be musing to himself, “Wow, that girl looks fertile. I want to buy her a drink.” (At least, I fervently hope a guy would not think that, and if he would, that he would also exhibit other, easily identifiable red flags.) He may just like the way I look, which isn't a bad thing, and he may just be inspired enough to conquer the manifold fears and risks inherent in talking to an attractive stranger. This theoretical guy could potentially prove to have good taste in more important areas than looks, enjoying banter and obscure debates about the place of Fraggles in the Muppet spectrum. The thing he might like most about me at the end of our conversation could in fact be my big sexy brain, rather than my big sexy hair. But the question bothers me: was it the big sexy hair that got him to come over in the first place? Because if it was, my ‘marketing’ did in fact achieve ‘trial.’

By this point, my insecurities are wailing so keenly and my feminism yelling so loudly that the mental din is truly deafening.

My worry essentially comes down to this: if I value and invest uncharacteristic effort in beauty, towards the goal of being wanted, am I simultaneously devaluing everything else about myself?

There comes a point at which “uncharacteristic effort” becomes something a little more troubling. I could, in theory, teeter around on towering heels in tiny, sparkly items of clothing, adhering to some misogynistic fantasy of how an attractive woman should look (not to mention act). I could, but I never would: I'm in no danger of valuing that questionable desirability over who I actually am and the principles I have. I know who I am and who I am not: I don’t wear high heels, I don’t own party clothes, and I have no interest in pretending I do. Nevertheless, back in the gray area in which I perpetually find myself, I’m also a person who doesn’t wear her hair down. So when I spend the better part of an hour coiling my hair into unusual, Rapunzel resplendence, am I prioritizing desirability over reality? How do you determine which truth should be in advertising?

The truth is, I don’t know.

What I do know is that I’m probably over-thinking the entire issue.

I want to be wanted, but I also want to be wanted for who I am in reality (picky, right?). The reality is that I am a woman who wears heavy boots and likes terrible jokes, but also has a pretty good head of hair. And there might just be some discerning guy out there who likes all of those things, so maybe there’s a happy medium in and amongst all my episodes of angst.

To put the shoe on the other foot, I might muster up the courage to cross a bar and talk to a good-looking guy because, on some evolutionary level, his ability to grow a good beard speaks to his skills as a hunter/gatherer (or something). Still, if he’s unkind or idiotic, I have faith that my modern, reasoning brain will override my instinctual leanings and bail out.

But, if by some miracle, he too enjoys terrible jokes, or Battlestar Galactica, or any of the other wonderful, unanticipated weird characteristics that light up my brain and flip my stomach, I hope I would never be so shallow as to hold his having a good head of hair against him.

Luck and All

When I was a kid, I went through a period of fascination with, respectively, the stock market and the cartoon strip Hagar the Horrible. Regarding the latter, I was specifically enamored with Hagar’s pet duck, whose name was Qvack. My father and I had a lot of quality time in those years bonding over both stock prices (during a school stock market project, my hypothetical Starbucks shares went gangbusters) and a cartoon duck in a Viking helmet. When my dad came home at night, sometimes he would hand me the funny pages of the paper, and I knew immediately our favorite duck had made an appearance. At school during the day, I would pore over the stock pages, looking for my favorite symbols. I always felt especially cool because Starbucks was listed on the NASDAQ, so I had to know where to go looking for my numbers.

During that time, my dad offered me an enduring piece of advice: “Buy low, sell high.” It may have seemed kind of self-evident, but I took it to heart. As it turned out, that phrase would turn into a shorthand for us—we use it to summarize a conversation, which otherwise concludes with something we already knew but is worth reiterating.

For example, recently I’ve found myself calling him after I finish a chapter of my GRE review book. He will talk me down from my study-induced hysteria and pessimism, and he will end with general encouragement and restatement of his belief that I’m doing everything right.

“Mm,” I’ll grunt. “Buy low, sell high, right?”

To which he will always reply: “Qvack, qvack.”

And I will be vastly comforted.

Another classic piece of advice my dad has always given me is applicable to stock prices, standardized tests, and many additional subjects:

“If you ever have to choose between being good and being lucky, pick lucky.”

For a long time, I didn’t really understand what he meant; it was just one of those things my dad always says. I think it took me so long to understand because, at a certain level, this particular piece of wisdom was fundamentally antithetical to my long held (if misguided) belief that I could do my best to control the universe around me by covering all my bases—that I could effectively hedge the idea of luck. When I was trying to get into college, I was hyper-vigilant about my GPA and heaped on diverse extracurriculars. I was trying to model myself exactly on what I understood to be the perfect candidate, because perfect candidates got into their top colleges—right?

(Well…)

Did my good GPA and diverse extracurriculars help my admission? Of course.

Did those things guarantee my admission? Not by a long shot.

It wasn’t until many years after I got into college that I came to realize that my admission was not only a result of my being good, but also one of my being lucky.

In the years since my college admission and subsequent graduation, I’ve had to let the idea of luck—and with it, my lack of absolute control over the universe—into my thinking. It’s been a humbling process, though perhaps not as crushing as rigidly adhering to the belief that if you don’t get what you want, it’s because there’s something wrong with you, not because you’re subject to unfortunate circumstances. In my lost year of job applications, I took my continued unemployment as a personal failure, not as a function of a bum job market. The funny thing is that I never extrapolated that outward: I never believed that the high unemployment happening around me was a result of many people’s failures. I believed their challenges were largely due to bad luck and a crappy economy. In a masochistic, intensely self-centered way, though, I thought for some reason that I alone was exempt from the indifferent arbitrations of luck. Whatever happened, it was my fault.

Again, my acceptance of the existence of luck was humbling, but it ends up beating the heck out of the alternative.

Much of my adult life has been spent trying to find the middle-ground between accountability and acceptance of an uncontrollable universe. That sweet spot, I have discovered, is a moving target, but sometimes the path can be fairly clear. For instance, it would be patently stupid to forego studying before taking the GRE, banking on luck and a few years of nearly forgotten high school math. However, there is a point at which I could cross the line into an unhealthy level of preparation, during which time I could foresee becoming convinced that my maniacal studying would guarantee me a great score.

In essence, there are two ends of the spectrum: at either end, I am a mess, having bombed from either a dearth of preparation or a surfeit of it. Every day I try to remain in the middle, keeping equidistant from insouciance and hysteria, between absolute dependence on being either very good or very lucky.

Recently, I was fretting to a friend about a graduate program, which she had just completed and which I am borderline desperate to attend (because after all, I’m not taking the GREs for kicks—there yet is an whole batch of application challenges awaiting me). She brought my father’s advice into very sharp focus, addressing my seemingly understated proclamation that I wasn’t convinced I would get in. Fortunately, my friend knows that when I casually admit I’m “not convinced” of something, that in reality I mean I’m pretty damn sure it won’t happen. In this case, I was also pretty sure that the program would not only reject me, but also probably kick me in the shins, spit on my neck, and tell me these jeans make me look fat. (When I address potential injuries, I tend to go all in, just for the sake of emphasis.)

Decoding my hysteria and coming to the root of my fears, my marvelous friend, cool of head and great of heart, said to me, “No one can be convinced they'll get in—it’s a competitive program. But some people have to get in, so why not you?”

She went on to state her absolute faith in me and my application, but something about her theory—and her own spin on being good and lucky—eased my anxiety so instantly and immensely that it made my head spin. Hers is advice grounded in the realities of skill and luck, taking both into account, and managing somehow to be both realistic and optimistic. As it sunk in, I nearly wept with relief.

In studying, in stock markets, in love, in general: I seek to live in an optimistic reality, accepting both responsibility and the insane, arbitrary nature of the universe. Also, of course, accepting along the way some very good advice:

Why not you?

Pick lucky.

Buy low, sell high.

(Qvack, qvack.)



(To anyone who would like to take ownership of my GRE vocabulary flashcards after August 22, please feel free to contact me. Did you really think I’d use “insouciance” and “surfeit” if there wasn’t a secondary, exigent purpose?)

The Hiccup Moment

During the September of my senior year in college, I went on a very disastrous date. The guy turned out to be a dog-hating conservative. I am, under exigent circumstances, willing to negotiate on the political front. Barring the excuse of a previous traumatic experience, though, I really just can’t get behind not liking dogs. To put it bluntly: that just ain’t right.

From the upstairs Thai restaurant, we gratefully went our separate ways after the date, just as it started to rain. I was in no way prepared for the weather and took shelter on the old-fashioned porch of the local inn, already soaking wet. It was then that I noticed I had a voicemail from my dad.

My dad seldom calls me just to check in. I have always initiated check-ins, so unfortunately, when I get a voicemail from him, it’s not often good tidings. I listened to his voicemail under the awning of the porch: more bad news about my grandmother’s health. Her decline was becoming more rapid.

In that moment, already starting to shiver from the rain, I had a very sad and very simple epiphany: there was no more good news coming. There was none left to be had.

In retrospect, that moment was one of the turning points for me in what turned out to be the last month of my beloved grandmother’s life. I think that was the moment when I truly realized she wasn’t going to get better; that the quiet, quirky, intensely intelligent, and immensely loving woman whom I had adored for my entire life was, in some ways, already gone.

When, about a month after that, she did leave us, as sweetly and gently as she lived her life, I still felt like I would break in half from the grief. Nevertheless, that moment on the porch held a very important flash of clarity. It wasn’t welcome, but it was necessary.

I think, for better or worse, I had another one of those moments recently.

Two years ago this October, I got another one of those calls from my dad. His father, who with my grandmother is the heart of our whole family, had been diagnosed with colon cancer. The prognosis—a word that clanked dully in my head—was six months to a year, at the very best.

The bad thing about living alone is that no one is immediately there to pick you up off the floor when that’s where you suddenly find yourself, wailing. The good news about living alone is that you can sit there on the floor and wail just as much as you want: true, tearing, broken howls.

The fundamental difference in my thinking about the respective health of my mother’s mother and my father’s father goes back to my childhood. Grandma had had several heart attacks when I was still in my single digits. Grandpa had still beaten me down a ski slope into my late teens. Where I always remember her as having been frail, he was always robust. In a way, Grandma’s death had never been out of the realm of possibility. Grandpa’s mortality was, and in many ways still is, a completely foreign concept to me. It does not compute. It doesn’t work. As my sister told me once, we all figured he’d die in a freak ski accident at the age of a hundred and four.

So why, suddenly, were words like “prognosis” and “metastasized” being used in relation to him? Why was that okay? How did that possibly make sense?

I hate it when I can answer my own questions: that the reality of age and illness very rarely is okay, or makes sense, but that doesn’t stop it from happening anyway.

Over the succeeding months, which became a year, which became more than a year, something rather miraculous happened. The cancer responded well to treatment. While still difficult, his reaction to the chemo was not as debilitating as it could have been. He lost his hair and got horn-rimmed glasses, so that when people asked what was different about him, he could say, with the proverbial twinkle in his eye, “Oh! I got new glasses. That must be it.”

Grandpa, feisty and good-natured as ever he was, stayed himself.

And I, stubborn and afraid as ever I was, stayed very firmly in denial.

The realities have been seeping in more slowly than they would have, had the cancer been more aggressive or if he had not responded well to treatment. In that time, I have had to come to realize that while he is still himself, he is also dying. That idea still gives me pause, is still illogical in the greater context of the man I know and love. But it is also true.

Last week, I had one of the worst cases of hiccups I have ever had. It was one of those times where your chest is so tight that when you hiccup, you feel as though your whole diaphragm is about to spasm out through your mouth. The noise you make is not a demure little “hic” but more like a strangled “HURK.”

I could barely breathe, let alone speak, so I did the one thing I know to do: I called Grandpa.

One of his many legacies in our family is his incredible ability to cure the hiccups. You will tell him, gasping and squeaking, that you have the hiccups. He will level his eye on you in amusement and scoff, “No you don’t. Come on, give me one good hiccup.” And more often than not, you will do your damnedest to produce one hiccup as proof and fail utterly. He will grin knowingly, and you will be cured.

Unfortunately for me and my airways last week, his line was busy. As I continually dialed his number, heard the busy signal, hung up and tried again, hiccupping myself into oxygen deficiency, I had a very clear and quiet thought:

Who will cure my hiccups when Grandpa is gone?

If I had been thinking about his illness, I never would have gone near that thought, but my distracted brain brought it to the surface. After I recovered from both my hiccups and the shock of accepting that someday, probably sooner but hopefully later, Grandpa would be gone, I wondered if I would look back on that moment as one of the turning points, akin to my realization on the inn’s porch in the rain. I think that may be the moment when at least a small part of me stops fighting, stops being so scared and so angry, and acknowledges that somehow there will be a world without this person, whom I have spent my whole life loving.

The gratitude for a life, well-lived and well-loved, is an immense thing. Somehow, though, in my experience, the grief for a life lost is louder, at first. It is aggressive and must be ridden out, with the faith that ultimately what will be left is a quieter grief, which will heal, and a very large love, which will persevere.

A world without my grandfather is not one I would choose to live in, but eventually it’s a world I’ll have to live in. It will be a world where every day I think about how many of the pieces of who I am and how I live came from him. It will be a world where he lives in every moment of banter, every deck of cards, every mint julep, and countless other details.

And it will be a world where maybe someday I'll be able to level my eye on younger relatives in dry expectation and smile smugly when they are inexplicably and utterly unable to produce one good hiccup.

If you ask me, that's a pretty good legacy to uphold.

One Villain, Hold the Subtleties

Of all of the classical mythology I’ve had to absorb over the years, courtesy of a liberal arts education, the birth of Athena stuck with me most vividly. When I learned, however many years ago, that the goddess of wisdom sprang fully formed from her father’s head, I suddenly imagined Zeus’s skull opening as if on a hinge. Athena, necessarily in miniature but still formidable, steps out: fully armed and ready to go.

Sometimes I wonder who all would step out of my head, were a hinge to be installed.

There are, of course, the various incarnations of self, whom I tend to name by their age. Eight arrives, skinny and tan, with a neat bowl cut. Thirteen has greasy bangs, small eyebrows, and is holding a book of Robert Frost’s collected poetry. Fifteen has platinum skunk stripes in her hair and black liner completely encircling each eye, about an eighth of an inch deep. Nineteen’s hair is long, of natural shading, and she seems to have relaxed, if only a little, sitting astride our Trek mountain bike. Each of these imagined incarnations tends to have something to contribute to my emotional processes, to such a degree that my internal monologue becomes more of a chorus, and not a terribly harmonious one at that.

But my various selves are not the only ones in there.

In the new territory of an adult, romantic relationship, I have come to some remarkable conclusions, which have applications in other realms. For instance, I indulged an anxiety recently, and my brain immediately wove an enormous fight out of a single worry; an imaginary fight in which I filled in all of my sweetheart’s lines to the point of our seemingly inevitable break up. Then I stopped short. I had to think about it carefully, because the most obvious conclusions for me tend to be the most slippery: I wasn’t actually having an argument with him. I was having an argument with myself. His imagined voice was my voice. I couldn’t predict how we were going to grow together or apart, and it was patently unfair of me to suppose I could predict how he would react and respond. I love him because he is very much not me. All I could do was take things a day at a time, love thoroughly, and be thoughtful.

As I told her this, my therapist seemed very close to bursting into applause. Progress!

Twenty-seven, whom I have yet to become, has managed to take up ghostly residence in my mind as well. I can think of no one else to credit for the surprisingly mature thoughts that occasionally formulate from practically nothing. I have no idea what she looks like, but she’s very patient and encouraging. She’s the one who nudges me to apply my newly gained insight to other, murkier areas.

Like my sister.

If Athena stepped fully armed from her father’s head, I feel as though my oldest sister steps out of my head armed only with a certain facial expression she has. It’s enough, though, to send me screaming—towards her with a metaphorical battle axe, away from her towards any convenient cliff, or towards the nearest wall against which I can beat my head.

Her expression is one of intense rationality. It drives me absolutely insane.

The specter of my sister, the one I carry around in my head, isn’t actually my sister. It’s a composite version of her: her eighteen year old arrogance, her twenty-two year old cruelty, and her twenty-seven year old judgment. I have internalized her voice as my inner judge: she archly questions my motives and doesn’t ever seem to think that I’m good enough as I am, as if she’s waiting me out until I become more like her. For many years she did make me feel like that, but I have to wonder where the emotional trauma stops and the echoes just keep going out of habit. I don’t believe that the entirety of my self-doubt can be traced back to her voice; it’s just that her composite is the easiest and sometimes most historically accurate name to put on it.

The problem with a composite is that it lacks any and all subtleties. I remember one particular instance, when my sister and I were fighting bitterly on a ski vacation. It was the worst kind of fight: one born of misunderstanding, old wounds, and things said with poor choice of words at the wrong time. When our mother got mad at us for fighting, we turned on her in unison: bound together by our right to hate each other in peace. It may be deeply screwed up, but it’s one of those subtleties that I miss when my sister simply fills the role of “villain” in my mind.

It’s a funny thing to realize: that two people’s similarities can cause them almost as much damage as their differences. The combination of problematic similarities and differences, especially among family, I have observed to be uniquely cataclysmic. After a particularly severe blowout about eighteen months ago, our relationship has been hobbling back to health. We check in maybe quarterly: I tell her a synopsis of my goings on, and she tells me what she’s teaching and non-food items her dog has been eating. She is not the person who lives in my head. She is the person who lives in Michigan and who can do her own part—which I can’t predict—to mend our relationship.

It’s a tense process. I have to conquer a vintage, desperate need to have her like me, to make her laugh, and she probably has to think carefully about the things she says so that she doesn’t accidentally tread on an old wound she may or may not have given me.

It’s also very difficult to recast her in my head, so to speak. Can I have a relatively successful relationship with who she is now, if who she was then still plays the villain in my mind? Somehow I doubt it. When it comes down to it, though, maybe that’s the best we can do: to have a relationship with each other as we are now, mindful of the past but not dwelling in it. Another observation I made in plaintive tones, which made my therapist laugh, is painfully obvious: Adult relationships are hard.

But who knows? Maybe my Twenty-seven and her Thirty-seven will get it right even more than we do now. We'll have to ask them when we get there.

Fathers, Daughters, and our Alma Maters

Two summers ago, I emailed my dad asking for directions to our mutual alma mater. I didn’t need the detail Google maps would provide; I just wanted the numbers and directions of the highways. He wrote back fairly quickly with the appropriate highways—all pointing north—concluding his directions with the final instruction, “And straight on ’til morning.”

There’s a lot going on in those five words.

Yes, we all get the reference. My oldest sister’s critical outlook has had such an impact on me throughout my life that I seem to have internalized it to a certain extent, and I hear her snort derisively on occasion in my head. She might posit that our father’s reference is a fitting indicator that in some ways he never did grow up and that our college (which, I might add, she also attended) is a kind of persistent, boy-child fantasy. I might posit, in return, that she should shove it. (You can imagine how crowded and noisy it gets in my head.)

The sad part, which the more cynically-minded might ignore, is that, with the exception of Peter, all of the children eventually left Neverland and could never go back. Admittedly, I still head back every now and then to see friends or ski, but it’s not the same place I left. It belongs to a new group of students, and rightfully so. We all have to leave college and grow up. I myself did it with remarkably little composure on the drive home after graduation, sobbing my way across all of Vermont and most of central New York. But I did it.

In the months following graduation, I was nothing short of a damn mess. Truth be told, I had never really had a solid plan for my post-college years. It generally involved working in some museum in a ridiculously well-appointed office and looking like a million bucks. How exactly I would get to that office was a bit nebulous. As I applied for jobs, day after day, I came to reserve a particular well of hatred in my heart for the “well-meaning adult.” This adult loves to offer unsolicited advice based on his or her own long-passed trials and tribulations, and the only thing you take away from those one-sided conversations is that the process is a crapshoot and success depends in no small part on luck. In my more sullen moments, I even developed a theory about “new adult smell”: how new college grads have it, and established adults can’t resist it.

I don’t imagine I was very easy to live with in those months, since I pretty much hated everyone who had graduated college before 2007. Everyone, that is, except my dad.

I would call him about the job search, sloshing back and forth between depression and outright rage, and he would listen. It was not the sort of listening that implies exaggerated patience with a hysterical child, nor was it the sort of listening that patronizes, because the child is taking his or her woes entirely too seriously. He was listening because he knew what it was like. A few times in his professional life, corporate restructuring had ended up putting him on the job hunt too. So when I would spill out my insides, which were full of anxiety, self-loathing, and resentment, he would say, “I know.” And the really incredible part, the part that miraculously made my misery a little better, was that he really did know.

It was usually at that point in my conversations with him when I really would break down and confess one of the marrow-deep, truest causes of my unhappiness: I missed college. I missed excelling in classes and knowing exactly where I fit in the world in which I lived. I missed having the majority of my closest friends within a ten minute walk. I missed the breathtaking beauty of the place itself, and the innumerable quiet places I had found where I felt a skin-expanding contentment.

My dad knew, he understood. He missed it too.

It was a vast relief for me to know that I was not the only one in my family who had ached, and in some way still did ache, for school. I had been ashamed that I missed it so much, as if it were in some way juvenile; that missing Neverland in some way meant that I had never left it and truly grown up.

I’ve come to realize that nothing is that simple, not even my hard-ass oldest sister.

Was I perfectly, incandescently happy for every minute of the four years I was in college? Of course not. Was I, on average, happier in those four years than I was in the two that followed? God yes. Do I believe my greatest happiness is behind me? No, and recognizing that fact is important.

I took for granted as a child that people in the same family have the same set of values. As we grew up, the necessities of personality and experience divided us to a surprising degree. It is not a whole lot of fun to feel judged for your values, especially for something you ostensibly shared, and the defensiveness that results causes a positive feedback loop that can set relationships back by years. College seems an odd point of contention, but believe me, it’s not the only one. It’s just one of the most obvious. My sister and I come slowly to understanding, but we’re trying. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to experience the effortlessness of a shared core, from which the most complete and comforting empathy emerges.

I went back to school for homecoming with a few friends this year, and while we were in the car, one of my best friends asked me if I thought other people felt the same way about their colleges, if this weird, intense bond is unique to alumni of our school. I told her I didn’t know. I absolutely believe other people can love their schools in a way that outsiders can’t possibly understand, but I also think that this one, particular strain of love and loyalty is distinctly ours. In a weird way, it’s a gift my dad gave me, one that I found for myself, and something we share and understand about one another. We understand that our school didn’t just give us four good years; it also gave us pack mates for life. My dad’s best friends from his fraternity stood up at his wedding thirty-seven years ago. They were also in the pews at my sister’s wedding six months ago. Whenever and wherever my friends and I gather, it’s like coming home: boxed wine, ‘80s music, and all.

College isn’t the only thing we share, and it won’t be the only thing that holds us together, but I’m grateful for what started it all. I’m also grateful I know exactly where to find it:

Three highways to the north, and straight on ’til morning.

The Little Chowder that Could

I will admit fully and freely that, as a child, I very much took for granted that my mother is quite a brilliant chef. Not only were her recipes delicious and diverse (I don’t remember ever having the same thing twice in one week—a feat in itself), but everything always came out at exactly the same time. I didn’t realize the vast skill and planning this took until, when I was a teenager, she went out of town briefly and I tried to make my dad dinner. The chicken was burned on the outside, frozen in the middle, the peas were soggy, and I don’t even want to think about the rice. The only thing I could think to do was tearfully yell at my dad (who, good man that he is, took the unwarranted abuse with great grace) and then make tuna melts.

My continued culinary learning curve generally depended upon having a very patient dining companion—patient not only with the more or less edible product of my endeavors, but also with my hysterics throughout the cooking process. My roommate in Italy was one such companion. She would look on calmly as I perched on a footstool (the counters were remarkably high in our tiny kitchen), frantically trying to whisk a sauce into submission and yelling at the stubborn lumps. There was much rejoicing when I finally hit upon a successful recipe: Dijon and Balsamic vinegar marinated chicken. I also found out that one cannot go wrong with basil, tomatoes, and fresh mozzarella. Like I said, it was a learning curve.

Once I had mastered a few simple meals, I realized the next major step in my cooking career would be the mastery of our most sacred family recipes, the ones that invariably meant home. I knew that at some point, somewhere between my basic sustenance and my mother’s mastery, food became more than what you chew and swallow for nourishment. It became a ritual, a two-way comfort mechanism. There were things I could not take with me, like the way my house smells or the feel of the back-porch floorboards on my feet, but I could take the recipes with me and try to make a new home with them.

A week after starting my first job, I told my sister over the phone that I was completely lost. Having vast experience with being far from home for work, she told me that whenever she is settling into a new place, the first thing she does is make her steel-cut oatmeal. The food and the ritual of preparation are comforting in their familiarity, their predictability. She asked me what thing meant home to me.

“Meatloaf,” I sniffled into the phone.

“Then make meatloaf.”

So I did. The act of pouring, squishing, and patting was the same as it always had been, and the homesickness got a little better.

Months later, I made my first batch of pilaf in my new apartment. I had inherited my grandmother’s pots and pans, and making her recipe, the staple carbohydrate of my childhood, was a little unnerving. The recipe involves the very strict admonition NOT TO PEEK, and I waited with no small amount of anxiety without touching the lid. When the required time had passed and I uncovered the pan, I think I actually wept a little bit because it looked exactly right. It tasted even better.

Recently I undertook an even bigger task: my mom’s clam chowder. My sweetheart had told me he absolutely loved chowder, so in preparation for his visit, I gathered the requisite ingredients (did you know they sell bottled clam juice? Like, the juice of clams?) and got down to business. My mother was on-call that night, and was not surprised that when the phone rang (several times) it was me on the other end, screaming things like, “OH GOD, IS THE BACON SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE THAT?” (Incidentally, it is the bacon that makes the chowder.) Mom knew the recipe, and the unwritten modifications, by heart, and coached me through valiantly. Unfortunately for my nerves, the recipe doesn’t look like much until you add the final ingredient: the half and half.

But when I did, I swear it was like transubstantiation in a Dutch oven pot.

Where but a moment ago there had been a dubious-looking pile of glop, some miracle had occurred and I was staring into a pot of my mom’s clam chowder. When I tasted it, I actually whooped with joy and began dancing around my kitchen like an idiot. Next stop: Italian wedding soup.

Some of the more scientifically-minded people out there may point out that a recipe is a recipe for a reason: you follow the same instructions and you will get the same results. Not being scientifically-minded myself, I find that to be a precise load of hooey, because in the kitchens of my mother and my grandmothers, there was a lot more going on than just the combination of ingredients. Our lives happened in those kitchens. There were inevitably children of varying ages and dispositions tromping in and out, dogs underfoot, and probably three or more conversations happening simultaneously. “Well-tamed chaos” may seem like an oxymoron, but to me that’s the perfect description of home. And in the midst of that chaos, there was always incredible food.

So maybe that’s why I have a desperate need for my recipes to come out. If I can make something good from the chaos, then the chaos will have been worth it. My long-distance friends have become used to sudden screams and crashes of pots and pans over the phone—they know that just means I’m in the kitchen. I’m willing to be a mess, but from the mess, so help me God there had better emerge something meaningful. Extrapolate that outwards, and you get the idea.

I have learned the hard way that there is no point at which the universe presents you with a certificate of adulthood, ala the Wizard of Oz handing out hearts and diplomas and medals of valor. I make meaning in my life where I found meaning in my childhood: in cooking, in comforting, and in being a chaotic and social creature.

Fortunately, ‘tis the season for all of those things:

I am immensely proud of the fact that yesterday I picked up my first ever solo Christmas tree: a marvelously plump, six foot tall Balsam, which I have named Noël. And I mean I literally picked it up. And carried three city blocks in high-heeled boots to the T. When I got home, I immediately put on the two definitive (if odd-couple) Christmas albums of my childhood: Nat King Cole and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s respective carols. Shortly, my DVD of “White Christmas” will arrive via UPS.

And next week, I will make the traditional family Christmas cookies, because the whole shebang just wouldn’t be the same without them.

Cake-Stand Stories (or, The Chronicles of Naperville)

In the town where I grew up, there was a place called “Tasty Bakery.” It had a huge electric sign in the shape of a cartoon baker—imagine the Pillsbury Doughboy, maybe a few pounds lighter, with rosy cheeks. It’s nice to remember my town as it was: quiet, and full of family businesses. I guess when the Starbucks moved in, and the Eddie Bauer followed, the decline was really only a matter of time.

With my twenty-fifth birthday looming—and no, it doesn’t just approach, it decidedly looms—I had a sudden onset of nostalgia for Tasty Bakery, home of the best black and white cookies in the world, other cookies shaped as Chicago Bears helmets, and above all the raspberry chocolate birthday cake. Some of my first memories of home are from my older sisters’ birthdays: my mother would get the cake from the bakery and set it on a beautiful glass cake-stand. I think my love of single-use utensils originates with that stand; melon-ballers, garlic presses, and apple-corers have a special place in my heart because they are items that know their purpose. The cake itself was a two layer contraption of dense chocolate and raspberry filling. On top, around the circumference of the upper layer, were small nests of chocolate frosting and preserves. These, too, served a single purpose: they were where to place the candles.

I went looking for that bakery on the internet, hoping against hope that it hadn’t closed but simply moved. I was out of luck: the number, with my hometown area code, had been disconnected.

When we first moved there, my town was small: two lane roads and empty plots in our development. Storms would come over the prairie preserve across the street, turning the sky a bizarre and thrilling green, and then a thick, dark black. My friends and I would dig holes in the vacant lots and cover them with plywood as forts—afternoon kingdoms fed on goldfish crackers. There was one farmstand where we always bought our corn: a dozen-dozen ears. My dad and the daughters would gather on the back porch and shuck one hundred and forty-four ears of corn, which my father would then scrape, so my mother could freeze the corn-guts for sweet corn soufflé all winter long. My dad and his brother built me the biggest swing-set in the neighborhood with precut lumber; Chuck told my dad it was nuts to have it precut, and when it came together perfectly, my dad was nothing short of smug. I watched my sisters get ready for prom in the brightly lit mirrors in my parents’ bathroom—last minute hysterics over deodorant stains on black taffeta, followed by a deeply enviable entrance down our wrap-around flight of stairs into the foyer.

Sometimes I wonder how Laura Ingalls Wilder felt, writing out her childhood. I acknowledge that there is a very large difference between looking back at your childhood through the lens of industrialization as opposed to yuppification, but I still feel as though I’ve lost something. I view my childhood as something that is over, and therefore in some ways separate from my continuing relationships. I isolate people and places in memory, and in a way, put them in storage: the role they played in my childhood, and who they were then, remains static in the place where I keep my memories. In that space, my oldest sister, who now keeps her hair buzz-cut short, will always have blonde hair down to the middle of her back and wear her letterman’s jacket. My middle sister will always wear dark lipstick and oversized sweaters. My parents are perpetually forty, a time anomaly with which my mother takes no issue.

If one can extrapolate such a verb, I have in essence snow-globed my past—I’ve wrapped glass around the time between my first memories and roughly my twelfth birthday, and every now and then I look into the strange little world and see things that I miss, things that I wonder about. My relationship to my own history is a strange and complex beast, often taking on different incarnations. We necessarily live in our own timelines and tell ourselves stories to make sense of our own history—a post-modern, personalized myth-making, if you will. My favorite history professor in college said once that every generation invents its own past, and I think she’s right, though it’s not a one way street, as her syntax might indicate. As we invent our own pasts, we simultaneously draw on them to inform who we are. This is just one of many odd, tautological cycles I can’t quite seem to shake as I think about getting older. And all of this started because I wondered about a bakery I used to know.

I tell myself a story about my childhood: a snow-globe, a Laura-Ingalls-Wilderization of my history. Taken as simply a story, not as a living part of my own timeline—though it is both—maybe that story is one of those single-purpose objects I love; an emotional cake-stand: mostly useless, but lovely to have when you need it.

When my birthday loomed, then arrived, then passed with remarkable timeliness, I felt incredibly self-conscious, as if the universe were looking at me and saying, “Well? You’re twenty-five now. What do you have to say for yourself?”

I would say that I have some pretty good stories to tell, and that I’m sure it will be a riot to look back at the snow-globe I will inevitably create sometime in the future, and marvel at my sweet and ridiculous twenties.

Just One of Those Things

In high school, after a trying day, it was not uncommon for me to come home, dump my backpack beside the couch, and announce to my mother that I needed my gravy boat. She would nod sympathetically as I sat down on the carpet next to the lower shelves in our kitchen’s island. The gravy boat in question was a beautiful piece of fine china from Limoges in the Autumn Leaf pattern. It was permanently fastened to its dish and had painted gold details on the lip and handles. If the day had been particularly rough, I might even go so far as to pull out a flat soup dish or two. I very seldom needed to go as far as hauling out the teacups, but I knew they were there if I needed them.

Call it object therapy.

I read an article recently that said in terms of the money/happiness relationship, you get more of the latter if you spend more of the former on travel as opposed to material objects—the point being that experiences, rather than stuff, are more consistently likely to make you happy. Having recently entered the final month before a long awaited, self-funded trip to Spain, I was certainly encouraged. I also didn’t miss the fact that the real thing that makes us happy is interactions and relationships with other people: it makes a certain amount of sense that tromping through Barcelona in my beat-to-hell Tevas with one of my best friends will make me happier than buying several pairs of obscenely expensive, if lovely, shoes.

Nevertheless, I would make an argument for the occasional object. Stuff for the sake of stuff has always been something of a touchy issue for me—I realize its folly most of the time, but I have also been known to take joy in retail therapy (I recall in particular an instance with purple leather gloves—my motivations are sometimes unknown even to me). However, I do believe that material objects aren’t always equivalent to just stuff.

When I would sit with that gravy boat and be comforted, I think it’s safe to say I wasn’t only sitting with a gravy boat. I was sitting with my grandmother, with whom I shared a deep love of beautiful things made priceless by the history they carry. The Autumn Leaf china was her mother’s, whose story I learned over countless cups of tea—one of many histories that reinforce who I am even as I protect their memory: we guard each other. For most Christmases and birthdays, I would get a fruit compote or salad plate to fill out the set. My grandmother and I agreed that the gravy boat was the crown jewel of the lot, so almost without realizing it, I anchored years of love and comfort to it.

A few days after she died, just before I left for the airport to fly back to school, I swiped her last box of Tic Tacs from a basket on the kitchen counter because it was something to see, something to hold in my hand—a small signifier of a very large love, because she was not there anymore, and I needed something to hold.

I make the case for objects not as things, but as artifacts of experience. I grew up with the sense that I did not construct the things in my head in a ‘normal’ way; that my own mind could be called into question at any time, making my thoughts and memories somehow invalid. As a result, I came to assign very intense meaning to things—objects that I could hold out as proof of the things in my mind; undeniable evidence that something had been there, and it had been important. I came to realize later, of course, that there is no normal, that what I had learned was a doubted ‘idiosyncrasy’ could actually be interpreted just as easily as a unique ‘personality.’ My instinct to anchor, though, remained.

A few days ago, I was walking through an open air market with someone who makes me deliriously happy, which is always a good place to end the weekend. One of the things I love most intensely about him is his ability to make the things about which I am most self-conscious seem like the most natural things in the world, to make my quirks seem both normal and special. As we walked, we had been talking about our love of objects that contain memories and history. He had been looking that day for something glass to have in his apartment, and he turned to me and said, “Why don’t we buy something together, and have today be the memory for it?”

Were I to say something like that, I would instantly berate myself as cheesy and ridiculous, even if I did believe it whole-heartedly. Another thing I love about him is that he makes me feel that if I believe in something whole-heartedly, my believing in it is all the validation it needs.

We ended up picking a glass perfume bottle that, oddly enough, had scenery straight from our past painted right on it. He is taking the first shift in our joint custody arrangement, and he’ll bring it to me when he visits. It was a strange reversal for me, because for the first time an object didn’t simply anchor a memory for me: it was also proof of a possibility, and it was proof to someone else too.

I would always choose a person over an object, because even though I do love my things, I know the one is just a stand-in for the other. But it is comforting in a very real way to be able to hold my gravy boat and think of my grandmother, and to know that somewhere, it is entirely possible that someone is looking at a little glass bottle and really wishing I were there.

And really, if at the end of the day, you have some combination of comforting memories, beautiful things, and people to love, you could do a lot worse.

Soft Skill Structure

During my senior year of college, I took two sculpture classes. The first was to fill the studio requirement for my art history major. The second was born out of my complete unwillingness to be separated from the wood shop, welding studio, and plaster room. I took one day of early morning introductory French that term, realized the radial arm saw was a much better companion, and switched classes.

I think what I valued most about my time in the sculpture studio was how it used a completely different part of my brain from the rest of my school work. I could happily spend large chunks of time working on a single project without noticing that I hadn’t sat down or had a drink of water for several hours. It was a small class, and as a project deadline would loom closer, we would all end up in the studio at the same time at night, listening to oldies on the radio (the one station to which we could all agree). It was a parallel universe that smelled like saw dust and paint thinner: my happy place.

I never had any delusions of becoming a sculptor in the real sense; my commitment to the craft came more from enjoyment than driving passion. When it came down to it, I just loved working with my hands, and still do. I never wondered about the origins of that love until one of my own projects took me by surprise.

It wasn’t any wonder that my parallel sculpture universe was so comforting: the rest of my world had slowly yet surely started to gravitate towards graduation and job applications. My resume was suddenly important in a very real way. This wasn’t about a summer internship anymore: I was working towards a deadline of being an adult with a real job. When a sculpture didn’t turn out the way I wanted, worse came to worse I could always thwack it with a crowbar to see if that would help. That theory didn’t quite work on my job applications.

During my non-studio hours, my brain constantly ticked with what my resume skills were: what internships had I completed, what had I accomplished academically, what were my numbers? I never thought about how you can’t really put your best qualities on a resume, like loyalty and the ability to mix the perfect gin and tonic, and so in a way, I stopped appreciating my skills that I couldn’t include in a cover letter.

One night I started work on a project I had been tossing around: it would be a ladder, made of cloth and stuffing. It would be full scale, almost seven feet tall, but essentially like a stuffed animal: no structure within, just cotton. I was smug with my own pretensions, thinking this was a feminist work, commenting on the relegation of historically female creations to the “crafts” realm. The very fact I thought the words “feminist work” in relation to one of my own sculptures should have tipped me off that what I needed, in addition to several yards more fabric, was a swift kick in the ass.

Nevertheless, I began measuring my material and marking off where to cut, where to sew. Dragging a pencil across fabric, guided by the edge of a ruler, is a very specific sensation, and for me a very familiar one. My hands knew how to cut, where to draw, and how to piece. About the moment I became aware that I was following muscle memory was the moment the truth hit me like a crowbar to a misbehaving sculpture. This wasn’t a feminist work, something cold and academic.

This was about my grandmother.

My mother’s parents would visit us frequently when I was little, and the home I came back to when my grandmother was there was one of the warmest, safest places on earth. She would always have tea waiting, and she would read aloud to me, old English authors like E. Nesbit, Elizabeth Goudge, and Rudyard Kipling. When I, along with most other girls in my age group, fell into the American Girls craze, wardrobes appeared for my dolls: night gowns, ball gowns, capes, slippers, bonnets. She taught me to sew at a very early age. While she made the doll dresses on the sewing machine, quilts were different: all of her quilts were sewn by hand.

I use the gifts she gave me every day of my life, often without even realizing it. My friends in college benefitted from those gifts too: I was one of the only ones who knew how to mend a pair of blue jeans. One friend in particular developed a sixth sense for when I was cooking meatloaf in my apartment, and he would miraculously appear without fail about fifteen minutes before it would come out of the oven. I know how to hide a stitch, embroider over a stain, knead bread and scald milk. I can recite from memory “The Beginning of the Armadillo,” with all of her voice intonations, like a chant. I can trace my lineage back several generations, including anecdotes about distant ancestors.

And none of those things will ever go on a resume.

When my ladder was finished, it looked kind of like a floral stuffed octopus: a very large, soft heap on the cement floor. My professor wanted me to include some sort of internal skeleton, but I flatly refused (which I rarely, if ever, did). This wasn’t a sculpture project anymore: this was a conscious, purposeful homage to one of the most important people in my life, who now was gone. It would have been more efficient for Grandma to make her quilts on a sewing machine; it might have looked better if my sculpture had a skeleton. But that wasn’t really the point, was it?

I presented my project the Tuesday after the Sunday my grandfather followed my grandmother, and died in his sleep. He was a hard man, and the best thing he did with his life was to love her. I guess we all have skills that aren’t strictly marketable.

I miss my grandmother every day. The smell of tomato vines, the rattle of Tic Tacs, the feeling of scone dough, the smell of bergamot in Earl Gray tea, the panes on a quilt: she’s in every one of my senses. How do you construct a life? I have the suspicion that when it comes down to it, the most important things I do in my life, the things I teach my children and grandchildren, won’t be the things that went on my first resume. It seems like a misnomer to call them soft skills, because my grandmother’s “soft skills” build my insides. They’re the framework on which everything I can do and will do hangs, the marrow from which it grows.

And if I’m ever on my way to an interview and rip my suit, I can have a needle threaded and an invisible whip stitch in place in about five minutes flat.

It's the Same Old Song

For those of us of the more human looking persuasion (I am not a troll, nor am I Angelina Jolie), I think a very common occurrence, even a rite of passage, is wanting someone you can never have, someone who will never want you back. In my case, I’d observe whoever he was from afar, fully aware that reality and my own cowardice would never permit anything remotely resembling romance to spring up. Someone coined a phrase for it: “He’s out of my league.” Sometimes you see someone so breathtakingly and impossibly beautiful and wonderful, you doubt that he or she is even in the same sport.

In my experience, these people, often without their even knowing it, carry with them expectations and fantasies, which frequently have nothing to do with who they are. Sometimes, though, you love someone whom you do know, and if you are imaginative-minded like myself, you concoct all sorts of wonderful scenarios in which this person will come to his or her senses and miraculously, perfectly, find that he or she loves you back.

That kind of love is like a wound that doesn’t heal. In one of my favorite series of books, The Belgariad, they talk about how when a god is wounded, he’s wounded permanently. Humans were built to break and heal; gods were never meant to break, so they don’t have the capability to heal. Does that mean I have a godly wound, or that I just have many, many years of therapy ahead of me? Possibly both.

There’s another wrinkle though, as there usually is: this wound/love doesn’t have to be romantic in nature. In my case, my longest obsession, the person who will never want me back, is my sister.

I nursed this bleeder for many years, not even knowing what it was, until recently, when after yet another hurtful incident that left me feeling like a twelve-year-old at twenty-three, my brain out of sheer desperation gave me the answer. I wonder sometimes if you have to hit a critical mass of emotion before something becomes clear. In this case, it was the following: I am not good enough for her to want.

At least, I figure that’s her logic, deep down next to her bones where people’s ugly truth lies.

The irony is that some of the most wonderful people in the world (in my opinion) do need me, and love me, and see me for exactly who I am. But why do we place the most value on the thing we can never have? This is not to say that I don’t see what I have: I do, and I appreciate it more than my own grasp of language can express. The people I love build my insides, but that means, unfortunately, that part of my insides is always bleeding.

Part of me, a growing part of me, has grown so tired of the same emotions, playing over and over again within me. The Four Tops said it best: it's the same old song. After all, it’s the same old rejection. She has not ever noticed I grew into someone very much worth liking (if I do say so myself), so her rejection is the same rejection that it was ten years ago. And the self that can step away from that horrible, wonderful, sacred core of who you are in your family, the self that went away to college and found out that who I am is perfectly fine exactly the way she is: that self finds this same old rejection very tedious.

My brain has hit several critical masses lately, because another gem came to me when I was brushing my teeth in the middle of all this mess: If after nearly twenty-four years, I don’t have your good opinion, maybe it’s not worth having.

And yet, and yet… a crush on that beautiful person in the distance does not go away because you tell it to. My aching want to have my sister see me and like me and need me does not go away because I have become a whole person on my own. I believe we don’t leave our old selves behind: we absorb them. They’re in there somewhere. So I have twenty-two years worth of selves who want her, and one who is willing to walk away. I am having a hard time overcoming my own inertia.

Is it masochism? Is it that hope springs eternal? Are the two mutually exclusive? Maybe it is simply a part of a very human condition: loving someone you can’t have. Hopefully the selves I’m growing into will be stronger than the ones I have absorbed, because I don’t like to think that I have another twenty-two years to wait before being able to walk away.