Category: personal

Like most grandmothers, mine frowns on swearing. Every now and then one of her children will slip some vulgarity into the dinner conversation, sometimes just as an oversight, but often to see their mother’s reaction. The most classic, which lies somewhere between the two motivations, is a spill followed by an oath, then punctuated by an admonition so immediate and instinctual it can only come from a matriarch who has spent many years reprimanding her bright and mischievous six children. The sound goes something like this:

[crash]-shit–Jon!

Over a recent family dinner, though, my eldest aunt, in casual conversation, used a particular word referring to a human waste product, and did not receive the usual scolding. There was a brief pause as we all felt that something was not quite right, but were unable to identify exactly what it was.

“Mother has announced,” my aunt began, “that ‘shit’ is not a bad word because it’s not used to curse people. The only bad words are those used to curse people, like damn.” We raucously pondered this for several minutes, trying out different conversational uses, feeling the holes in her theory. Overall, though, this seemed like a good hypothesis — words are not bad in and of themselves, directing ill will at another person is. As the laughter died down, we realized that we needed proof. We needed to hear her say it. The racket to cheers of encouragement, then faded into a brief hush of anticipation as we all turned to her, fervent to hear her utter this one word.

And she did. It was fast and soft, slipping from her lips quickly. Her aging voice, though often laced with traces of a Long Island left forty years earlier, was now sweet with forbidden whimsy. As her audience roared with applause and laughter, she blushed a soft shade of pink below her brilliant white hair and dancing eyes.

We tried in vain to get her to expand her new vocabulary, preferably to include a word referring to copulation, but she was done. She’d demonstrated her belief in her theory, though, and that was enough. The proclamation had come down from our esteemed matriarch — use whatever words you choose, but choose them kindly.

There need to be more grandmothers like mine.

Happy Birthday!

If I remember correctly, and I usually do, it was three years ago today that I hopped in my car and started driving to California. At this moment, I was asleep in a Red Roof Inn in Joliet, IL, after having been turned down by a Motel 6 because I was under 21. I was so excited, for the whole trip, but especially on that first day. Only 8 hours on the road and I’d already been through two states I’d never seen before and a third I hadn’t visited since I was too young to remember.

Lying in that motel room I felt two dreams within my immediate grasp. I was driving cross-country, by myself, everything I owned in my car, as I had imagined I would since long before I could even drive. I was going to wake up in a town I’d never seen, in a world that had never seen me. I was going to drive, and at some point, I was going to arrive at the door of my second dream and I was going to create a new life.

But this night, three years ago — this was the beginning.

Although Isabel skirted us to the west as she raged her way north, we experienced some truly awe-inspiring winds. They weren’t the strongest I’ve seen, but the sheer fury of the clouds racing across the sky, the trees careening sideways with the gusts then springing back in the moments of calm, and the rush of air through my bedroom each time I opened a window to check the status of the storm felt just as passionate as the heaviest rains. Had it been raining with the same ferocity as the tempest, I would have been awake all night, either in reverence of the storm, or simply because of the noise of sheets of water pelting against the building. As it was, I spent one of the quietest nights I can remember. There were no neighbors drinking Corona on the hoods of their cars in the parking lot outside my window, there were no birds in the trees that dot the apartment complex, no traffic driving past — if there were any outside sounds, they were muffled completely by the wind, a white noise even gentler than the ocean, despite its intensity. Inside, the computer was off and unplugged and when I woke up even the fan was quiet, stilled when the power went out.

The lights had started flickering shortly before I went to bed last night, but the power was still on at 12:30, which is the last time I remember looking at the clock. When I woke up in my usual morning panic at 7:30 (the usual time), thinking, as always, that I was late for work, my fear was exacerbated when I saw that the usual red glow from my bedside table was missing. I instinctively reached for the light, then realized the futility of this a moment later. I’d sent my parents an email the night before, asking that they call me at 8:30 in case my alarm didn’t go off, but it hadn’t occurred to me that if the power did go off in the night it might still be off by the time I woke up and the phone I’d left by my bed was the cordless — which, of course, wouldn’t work without power. I sleepily fumbled for my cell phone, turned the ringer up, and set an alarm for 8:30, then tried to call work to check to see if we were even going to be open. Unfortunately, the call center was fully functional and I was expected to be at work as normal. I decided to go back to bed anyway, always desperate for any sleep I can get.

I didn’t sleep well, though, nervous that my phone’s alarm wasn’t going to go off, until finally at 8:20something I looked at the LED face and figured there was no way I’d fall asleep in the remaining few minutes, stopped worrying, and promptly fell sound asleep. Luckily, I woke up at 8:52, with 8 minutes until I needed to walk out the door, to the sound of the neighbor kids examining the damage outside. Normally I despise those kids as they frequently wake me up with their early morning noise, but this morning I was grateful.

The streets on the way to work were mostly empty of cars, but littered with debris as if, well, as if a hurricane had come through. It’s very quiet here, and most of the calls we’re receiving seem to be from the west coast where they have boring weather.

I love the hush that comes after a storm — manifested in so many ways. The air is calm and empty, all the animals are still in hiding, and, after a storm of even this magnitude, so are many of the people. It’s so peaceful I almost wonder if all we really need in the Middle East is a huge storm…

I had a dream on Thursday night that felt so real I wondered the next day if it had actually happened.

I dreamt that I was at work, working away as usual, when my supervisor called me over to her desk to show me a posting on our internal job page.

“Sweetie, I think they had you in mind when they wrote this,” she kept saying. And it seemed like they had. The job was my current employer’s equivalent of the job I had and loved during my last months in California. I have hoped for a similar opportunity since I’ve been home, and, thrilled to hear about this opening, I made a mental note to send in my resume as soon as I got home. If the dream continued beyond this point, I don’t remember it.

On Friday, though, I remembered the exchange with my supervisor and at first thought that it had happened the day before. After further thought, though, I realized that not only would it have been a very weird exchange to have, but, more importantly, I hadn’t worked the previous two days and so hadn’t spoken with anyone from work since Tuesday. I was disappointed but thought I’d take a moment to go ahead and check out the internal job postings for Harrisburg since I hadn’t in at least a couple of months.

There were two listings, one which had been open for nearly two months and I was clearly not qualified for, and one for “Local Operations Support” — which turned out to be exactly the job I’d dreamt about, posted the day before.

My chances of getting it are slim, but the sheer coincidence/magic of it has me hopeful, and only a bit weirded out. What made it seem even stranger was an experience I had just today (Saturday, that is — still today since I haven’t slept yet).

I was waiting to pull out of a gas station onto a very busy street early this evening when I saw in my side mirror a woman running toward my car, frantically waiving her arms. She was slightly weathered looking with a fake tan and too much hairspray, both of which were perfectly complemented by the floral tattoo on her upper arm. I couldn’t tell where she’d come from, but rolled down my window.

“You have a tire going flat! It’s this one, in the back here?” She pointed to the rear driver side tire, looking back at the driver of the car behind me for confirmation. “This one,” she restated, having received it. “You don’t want to go too far.”

Having just pumped gas while standing immediately next to the indicated tire, I figured it couldn’t be that bad and decided to start driving home anyway. There were no symptoms of a flat during the short drive and I carefully inspected both rear tires upon parking in front of my apartment building. I found only that the rear passenger side tire was slightly low, but not nearly low enough to inspire the kind of panic that had appeared in the woman’s voice — and it was the wrong side anyway. I shrugged it off and forgot about it in my rush to get ready to go out for the night.

On my way back home around 1:30 AM, though, while rounding a curve on 83, I felt a small pop, then began hearing a regular “thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack,” like playing cards in the spoke of a bicycle wheel but far more ominous. When I got home, sure enough, an enormous piece of metal had embedded itself in my rear driver side tire.

By the time I wake up tomorrow, wishing it were a dream, I’m sure the tire will be completely flat.

My ex-boyfriend had this *look* that he used to give me, sometimes during moments of intimacy, sometimes over coffee, sometimes just in the midst of day-to-day life. This *look* of his would psychokinetically brush the hair back from my face, then tenderly slide its fingers down my cheek, lingering in the hollow where my jaw met my neck. It smiled into me, his blue eyes soft and happy. It was the look that lent credence to his words in the beginning of our relationship when I didn’t know if he was serious about us and the one that later held me at night even when it felt like we’d lost our fire. I forgot about it when we broke up, completely enough that I didn’t even think to feel betrayed by it.

I saw him last night, for the first time in nearly a year. It was strange to see him, and a little awkward, but good. After the initial awkwardness we talked easily and laughed often, but towards the end of the evening, he commented that I’d given him some strange looks, surprised and quizzical, at odd moments. I’m not sure, since he didn’t point them out as they happened, but I think these may have been in response to seeing a certain *look* from him. It did surprise me, quite a bit. That was the “I love you” look, and while we are good friends these days, I know that’s not what was behind it last night. Seeing it shook something inside me, made unsteady a foundation that had been built years ago, the basis of our relationship and, therefore, how view our relationship now. I’m not sure how I should now interpret that look, but clearly my previous interpretation was wrong — and what does that mean about my ability to read people in general?

It will be months and months before I see him again, so I’m not planning on wasting a lot of brain power thinking about it, but it’s there, rolling around in my head, wondering…