Daniel's poem about my mother

Rhythm

It’s a shock to see her like this:

Chair-bound. Blanket-wrapped.

Unable to turn to greet me,

To welcome me into her home.

My heart beats once –

A silence: something stricken –

Twice, and I step into view.

My mind races, back-

Pedaling, wildly grasping

Toward the past, the last

Time we met; the first time.

I can’t even remember the color

Of her hair then (now it’s orange,

Which is, I think, a change),

But I do remember her presence:

Strong. Serene.

Articulate and capable.

Serenity remains.

My heart’s in free fall

But she holds me still

With calm and smiling eyes

A very

Slowly,

Speaks.

Her tempo is a change.

Allegro ma non troppo,

The speed of Wilde and wit,

Has settled into a haunting

Largo,

And in shame I recognize it

As the speed, the speech

Of those whom I ignore,

Of those whom I dismiss

As babblers, fools

With nothing great to say

Because it takes

Me

Too much effort to listen.

I lose a word now and

Then, I respond cheerfully,

Honestly. She tells me of her frustrations.

Most have to do with social,

Not personal injustice,

Which is probably why

She is the top fundraiser for ALS statewide.

She chooses words carefully,

And doles them out, or gives them,

And if they take some unwrapping,

It is the least,

The very least,

That I can do.

Before long I am on my way,

Accelerating down the freeway

At 70 mph.

But before I go I see

A husband, supporter, helping her to stand,

A son, taking time to sit beside her,

A daughter, talking as fast as ever,

Talking with her mom exactly as before,

And some tupperware from the neighbors,

Full of watermelon.

The symphony continues:

Sweet, and slow.

Male Celebrity Crushes - Some Very Weird

My Top Ten Guy Crushes - Real, Fictional, and Historical

1) Fictional 1920's detective Albert Campion (created by Margery Allingham)




2) Gabriel Byrne


3) Toby Ziegler (played by Richard Schiff) from The West Wing



4) Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre (depicted here by Toby Stephens, from the recent smokin' hot Masterpiece Theatre version)




5) Sir Thomas More



6) Ciaran Hinds



7) Sydney's dad on Alias (played by Victor Garber)



8) Bobby Kennedy



9) Atticus Finch as played by Gregory Peck from the movie To Kill a Mockingbird



10) Robert Sean Leonard in all the late-80's-and-early-90's films of my childhood

My People #2 - Jordan

I met Jordan in 2000, when I was a freshman. He was friends with my then-friend Lyndsay, whose name should totally be pronounced "LIN-zee" but she made us call her "lin-ZAY". Boy was she embarrassed when her mom came to visit and accidentally called her by her real name, thus unveiling the deception. But anyway.

Lyndsay and I had made lunch plans and at the last minute she dragged along her friend Jordan, who she met through a guy named Max who was totally in love with her. Now that I look back on it, it's possible that all her comments about "You HAVE to meet my friend Jordan, you're totally going to LOVE HIM" may have indicated that she was trying to fix us up. That literally just occurred to me like a week ago and I've known him for 8 years. Anyway, we wandered around downtown Walla Walla and hit up some thrift shops, where Jordan won me over forever by purchasing a giant pair of 1970's ski goggles and wearing them the rest of the day. That was when the magic began. Other college memories include: endless lunches in the student union building where we would just sit there with Lyndsay and jointly make fun of her; a period of about a year and a half where we greeted each other with unbelievably filthy pick-up lines every time we saw each other; a 1:oo a.m. wedding of our sunglasses, where my sparkly white rhinestone cat-eye sunglasses married his black tinted sunglasses, and the salt and pepper shakers were the best man and maid of honor; getting drunk at lots of theater parties; and oh yeah, the part where he fell in love with and eventually married my best friend.

There's too much to say about Erin to fit here, so she gets a post of her own. But she's brilliant, and beautiful, and generous, and would give you the shirt off her back, and is one of the world's few genuinely good people. So naturally no guy on the planet is good enough for her, in my opinion. Except Jordan.

An interesting fact: so, Erin is my best friend, Jordan is her husband, and Matt is her husband's best friend. But in fact I met them in the reverse order. I was friends with Matt first, because he was dating a friend of mine from high school. Then a few months later I met Jordan, through Lyndsay. I actually met Erin last, because she's a year younger than me. The fact that we're all friends with each other means the four of us spend a lot of time together and have nominally formed a posse. Well, except that Erin and Jordan live in Indiana, and Matt and I live here. (Not together.)

When Jordan and Erin started dating, I had a good feeling about it right from the beginning. It's funny how you can love two people separately and not even realize until you start to see them in the same frame, how alike they are in so many ways. I was friends with Jordan, and I was friends with Erin, and until they met it never occurred to me how much they're two halves of the same person. That didn't stop me from noisily taking credit for introducing them, though.

In college my relationship with Jordan was primarily based on the following factors:

1) An increasing annoyance with Lyndsay's growing pretentiousness and stoner habits
2) A really inappropriate sense of humor
3) A love of really gay fruity cocktails and junk food
4) Sarcasm
5) Erin

After they got married and we were all living in Portland, and spending lots and lots of time together, it became less of a situational college friendship and more of a real relationship.

Then Jordan's dad killed himself. And everything changed.

Jordan's dad Merle had pretty much every health problem you can get by refusing to take care of yourself - heart problems, lung problems, diabetes, etc. He was also virtually bankrupt, and sporadically in trouble with the law. Jordan was the glue that held his family together, the oldest kid and the Man of the House. When he was in college at Boise State, his grandfather died, and his dad, who had been running the family business (a golf pro shop) shut down from the world. That was the beginning of the end, Jordan always said. From that point on it was just a matter of time. Merle called Jordan at school and told him he had to come home and run the family business. Jordan might have been like 19, no older than that. He didn't know how to run a business, and no one with their head on straight would have expected him to, but Merle demanded it, so Jordan did. And of course everything went all to hell, and for the rest of his life Jordan will carry the weight of having disappointed his father and ruined the family business, while his dad did nothing except slowly kill himself through like eight different means of self-destruction. It's all so Arthur Miller.

As long as I've known Jordan, he's had an almost flippant attitude towards the inevitable phone call that his dad's dropped dead of a heart attack, that he was driving drunk and crashed into a tree, that he went into a diabetic coma from OD'ing on crappy food. But when the call came that Merle had shot himself, no one was ready for that. Least of all Jordan and Erin, who were in the process of packing up their lives to move to Indiana and had to take four days they couldn't spare out of the packing week in order to fly home to Boise for the funeral.

It was Jordan's sister that found him. She lives at home with her baby, and had just come back from a walk and gone into the garage. She has to live with what she's seen, which is a burden that no 22-year-old should ever have to live with. And Jordan's mom, despite years of exhaustion and suffering from having to bail Merle out of scrape after scrape, was haunted by memories of the man he used to be and imagined that she felt ghosts in the house. But Jordan's the one I know. Jordan's the only one whose change I could see. You can't go through something like that and not be changed. You can't lose a parent in that violent, sudden, selfish way and not start to think, what makes a person do that? Is that in me? Is it hereditary? Is it part of human nature? How do you go from being the merry, loving, blustery dad of someone's childhood home videos to being someone who can carefully and meticulously assemble a device to shoot yourself in the head with a shotgun?

Erin called me to tell me the news. I was on the bus and she was cutting in and out. Her voice was calm by that point, having delivered the news so many times.


ERIN: Jordan [something something] killed himself.

CLAIRE: WHAT?!?!?!

ERIN: He shot himself. This morning. Sarah found him.

CLAIRE: I didn't know Sarah was in town.

ERIN: What?

CLAIRE: He shot himself?

ERIN: Yeah.

CLAIRE: Oh my God, I'm so sorry. Are you okay?

ERIN: Oh yeah. I'm fine.

CLAIRE: I can't believe it. I can't believe it. Seriously? He killed himself?

ERIN: Yeah. (This goes back and forth for about five minutes with us totally not on the same page and talking about two different things, in a way that would be funny if it was anything else we were talking about)

CLAIRE: Is he . . . there? With you? (Meaning, in my mind, is she standing in the same room as her husband's dead body and calmly talking to me on the phone)

ERIN: Yeah, he's right here, you want to talk to him? (Sudden horrible visual image, which I can still conjure up at a moment's notice, of Erin, basically numb from shock, holding her cell phone down to the mouth of a dead body, blank and numb like a crazy person)

CLAIRE: Erin! Erin, is Jordan - is he - are you sure he's dead?

ERIN: Wait, what? No, Jordan's DAD.

CLAIRE: What?

ERIN: Jordan's DAD killed himself. Jordan's fine.

CLAIRE: Oh, thank God. I mean, not - you know - obviously not "thank God" but -

ERIN: No, no, I know what you meant.

CLAIRE: Sorry.

ERIN: No, you're fine. In fact, actually, thank you, for reminding me of the only thing that could possibly have been worse.

JORDAN (in the background): What did she say?

ERIN (to Jordan): She thought I said YOU killed yourself, and she freaked out. (Muffled conversation, laughter. To me) Jordan says to tell you, thank you. That was the first he's laughed all day.



To this day, I have nightmares about that conversation . . . I remember the sick feeling in my stomach when I thought that Jordan's frustration and depression about moving, work, family stress, etc. had pushed him over the edge and how could we not have seen it and I should have called him more and what's Erin going to do now, she can't possibly move to Indiana by herself, and on and on and on, and the feeling of relief I found when I realized that I was wrong was like beyond anything I could have imagined. That was when I realized how much Jordan meant to me, that he wasn't just my best friend's husband or my friend that I swapped racist jokes with. He was my rock. And without him I would be a mess.

After that, things changed in our relationship. My mom was terminally ill, and his dad was dead, and we were the only two people we knew who had (or were going to) lose parents at our age. It's a shitty club, as we're both fond of saying, but it's good not to be the only one in it. Jordan's the only person I can cry in front of, the only person outside my family who I can talk to who Gets It, and underneath the bearded, Doritos-eating, wrestling-obsessed exterior is an extraordinarily sensitive person who watched me carefully at every moment when we went to my family's beach house for the first time after my mom died, observing my every move to make sure that I was okay. Jordan SEES me. People who haven't been through this, they don't ask. They don't want to know. They say, "Hey, how ya doing?" and tilt their heads sympathetically, and what they really want you to do is nod bravely and say, "I'm okay," and then immediately move on to a more comfortable topic. As a dedicated observer of social conventions, I usually do this. But it's restful not to have to all the time. Even with my best friends, I frequently give the expected answer. Wtih my family, I just plain don't want to talk about it - they're dealing with their own crap too. As Jordan would have said during our obnoxious pick-up line phase, "Well, here I am! What were your other two wishes?" Love that guy.

My People #1 - Teddy Freddy

This is the first installment of what I hope, if I can get my act together, will be a regularly recurring segment where I describe the people in my life.

I am starting small because I'm new at this.

Teddy Freddy is a stuffed blue bear. I have no idea what brand he is, as a hasty Google image search leads me to believe that I am the only person left in America with this specific bear. His tag says only "MADE EXPRESSLY FOR MERVYN'S. MADE IN KOREA" on one side, and "ALL NEW MATERIALS. SYNTHETIC FIBERS" on the other. He has a blue sweater with a row of black hearts on it. He's pretty much two-dimensional at this point, from 20 years of me sleeping with my head on him.

I got Teddy Freddy for my sixth birthday from my best friend Billy, who is still my best friend, and rest assured there will be a post on him later. But for right now, we're discussing the bear. When I was little I had hordes of stuffed animals, and over them all Teddy Freddy reigned supreme, the king of his domain in the giant furry pile of creatures that lived on my bed, heaped on top of piles of embroidered pillows made by my mother and grandmother. Lesser stuffed beings lived on the shelves, guarding my books. But Teddy Freddy had pride of place, his garish blue fur clashing hideously with my pink-and-green-and-white decor. I loved that bear. I slept with him every night, in the exact same way - on my left side, with my left arm bent at the elbow on top of the pillow, Teddy Freddy lying flat on top of my arm, and my head on top of Teddy Freddy.

When I was a kid, I slept with Teddy Freddy for comfort and reassurance. He was good with stuff like Fear of the Dark, Street Noises, and Possibility of a Spider. I took him with me to sleepovers and on vacations to share my hotel room bed. If I forgot him, I couldn't sleep. Then, as I got older, I needed the reassurance less, but it was still comforting and sentimental to have the bear my best friend gave me curled up under my head as I slept.

Here's the problem. I'm 26. I have spent two decades sleeping in exactly the same position. Now I can't possibly get rid of the bear. For one, no combination of pillows (I have tried them all) can exactly recreate the precise layering of mattress/pillow/arm/bear/head that is so conducive to sleep. If I rest my head directly on my arm, the skin gets sweaty and my forehead is too hard to lean on my arm in comfort. If I remove the bear and replace it with a pillow, it's way too soft and my head sinks into the pillow and then I feel smothered, and start to worry that maybe someone is trying to kill me in my sleep. If I try to swap out the bear for like a smaller, firmer, perhaps decorative or ornamental pillow, they're either too hard or too soft and I wake up with weird fabric patterns imprinted into my cheek.

So, you see the dilemma. In my own home, there's just me. Well, and my sister, but she doesn't care. So when I'm at home, the bear's a non-issue. But I do occasionally have to leave my house. At some point it becomes bizarre for a woman who is, let's just say closer to 30 than 20, to bring a smushed, ratty blue teddy bear with her on like a business trip. (I have never done this. But I have a sneaking suspicion it's why I can never sleep in hotel beds, no matter how comfortable.)

So, here are my options:

1) Hope that I naturally and quietly grow out of the bear.
2) Get married. Have the bear confiscated.
3) Get rid of the bear, then never be able to sleep properly again.
4) Continue sleeping with the bear because what the hell, it's no one else's damn business.
5) Try to slowly wean myself from the bear like I should have done when I was like nine.
6) Ignore the problem and hope it goes away (always a favorite).

Let me just say this, in favor of bear retention - this bear has been with me through some crazy shit. Teddy Freddy has lived on three continents and in four U.S. states. He is perfectly smooshed to the shape of my head in a way that I'm sure is a metaphor for something. He has stuck with me through thick and thin, ever since the day twenty years ago when he was given to me by another person who has stuck with me through thick and thin for twenty years. In all the intervening years of birthday parties, of all the thoughtful and wonderful gifts I've received from Billy (and the not-so-wonderful, since he definitely went through a phase where all he gave me were sweatshirts), nothing has ever topped the bear.

I feel I need to say, too, that Teddy Freddy is not like a subtle and soothing, baby-boy-clothing-colored blue. He's like Crayola blue. It is a color blue that matches nothing that I own. And speaking as a person who pays pretty close attention to things like color-coordinating my comforter with my decorative pillows, I think it puzzles people to have this glaring blue eyesore in the middle of a bed otherwise decorated in tasteful neutral tones. (Okay, leopard.) He's completely incongruous and slightly (though it kills me to say it) tacky. But I like to think that Teddy Freddy knows this and embraces it. "Hi, everyone!" his crazy-ass bright blue fur and matching sweater seem to say. "I am a color of blue not found anywhere in nature and I match nothing you own! You will always be able to locate me in a pile of toys or laundry and I am the only one of my kind!" I like to think he embraces his out-there-ness. Kind of like Billy, even back when he was six. He never cared that much what other people thought. It would never occur to him, like it constantly does to me, that people might possibly care that I still sleep with a bear, that the bear doesn't match my bedspread, that the color is loud, that it says something about my fear of change that I can't even like move the bear to a shelf, that I have to have this thing with me, right up against my skin and bearing the weight of my entire head or I cannot possibly fall asleep. Billy would shrug and say, "Who cares?" Which is probably what Teddy Freddy would say too. He is a highly unselfconscious bear and knows what he is about.