Good-bye

I came home last night from six wonderful performances at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival only to be greeted with the news that my dad passed away last night. My mother called the house about ten minutes before I walked in.

I feel numb and can't quite wrap my head around the notion that my dad is gone. He'd been in the hospital since December 30 and was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer about two weeks ago. We knew that he didn't have much time. All we didn't know was if the cancer would take him, or if it was going to be the pneumonia that had loaded his lungs with fluid, or if his heart, artificially kept pumping by a defibrillator, would finally stop.

My mom told me that he went to sleep after Jeopardy (of course) and when the nurses checked in on him later, he was unresponsive. He went in his sleep, just as I had been hoping would happen. He was 72.

Out of the shadows

Earlier this week, I was talking to a friend who is also going through a divorce. Like us, she and her husband have not yet told their son, but unlike us, have told their parents. I have told my friends, while her husband has requested that they not tell anyone yet. They are using a mediator, and we will very soon start that process. It felt good to share with someone whose situation is very similar to my own. Toward the end of our chat, she said that she really admired how I was living my life in such an open manner. I've not hidden my pending divorce. I've quietly changed my FB status to "separated" and, of course, it is now a topic open for discussion here. I hadn't thought deliberately about living so openly, it's just what I've done. I take her words as a compliment and compliments always make me blush a little.

Her words have spun around in my head all week.n At the same time, I have assigned an essay to my seniors based on the This I Believe curriculum from NPR. I've completing the tasks right along side of them and I have discovered a theme for every step (forward and back) that I have taken in my life. That theme is struggling out of the shadows. I spent my high school years painfully shy. I wore huge shirts to hide my body and long bangs to hide my face. Why did I do this? I have some ideas, but I don't need to rehash all of that.

What I do want to do is to live comfortably in my own skin. This is me. This is my world. It's time for me to seize what I can, not violently, but through all of my senses and into every pore. If it's cold outside, why complain? Make some tea, grab a blanket and a book and enjoy. If my body hurts, it's time to take a rest. If it is not inconvenient or selfish, road trips will continue. This is not to say that I won't be irrational from time to time, but if I can keep that in check, I hope my soul will feel a little better.

The Big Move

About a month ago, I found a townhouse to rent. It has three bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, and a basement - all for only $850 a month. The owner has just finished putting in a new furnace and will put in new windows starting in January. It's not perfect, but it suits my needs and it's only five blocks from the house.

I'm not moving in right away, not fully anyway. I have no furniture, no dishes, no shelves - nothing. Plus, we still need to find a counselor who will help us ease Andrew into the new reality. It may seem like a waste of money, but I wanted to stay in the neighborhood, so I was going to jump on anything close by and decent.

Right now, I don't know how to proceed. Do I start with furniture? Perhaps a bed, so I can start sleeping there. Optimistically, I could have a little fun if I get a bedroom set. Perhaps I should get a couch, a sleeper sofa? That could fill two needs at once.

Perhaps I need to move those objects I don't use all the time and work on shelves in the basement. Andrew wouldn't notice those missing objects, as they are mostly hidden from view. How much should I lean on my friends to cross the border and help me? It's expensive to cross the border and I don't want to become a burden. Crap!

Perhaps I should just start moving all my books. Those are in the basement and also won't be missed. They'll sit in boxes for a while, but at least the place will look a little lived in.

Why is it that one answer to one problem only leads to millions of smaller questions without answers? That one was rhetorical.

An invitation

I've just started reading Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits. She is the photographer who is best known for this iconic Dust Bowl photograph.

She eventually settled into teaching and an assignment that she liked giving to her college students asked them to answer the question, "Where do I live?". According to the book, "she wanted to see an intimate relation between the photographer and the subject of her or his photography." Therefore, a picture of an apartment or house wasn't going to cut it for this assignment. I read that page several days ago and it has really stuck with me.

This is a year of tremendous transition for me and sometimes, I wonder how I got here and where I'm headed. I've decided to explore this question of "Where do I live" as a theme for this spot. Oh sure, there will be the usual rants about work and likely my newly minted single life. But, I've been searching for a theme and this will do nicely for this year. I'll share poems, scrapes of papers, and photographs that get at the essence of this question. I'd like to invite you to share your answer or answers and we'll collectively design a map of our lives. Here's my first answer, a poem I've been toying with in my head for weeks. Enjoy!


Whence

From smoke encased womb, I emerged,
Frightened of shadows, disappointment, and success.
Kept in a transparent box by parents who couldn't keep that uncle away.
Adult quarrels isolate more intensely.
Fighting siblings, now strangers.
Love, sex, love, sex,
Blindly unable to differentiate.
Self exile to the land of drive-thru coffee, doughnuts, and shinny.
Unconditional love of a child
welds steel to my veins ,
frees my voice.
Whence and destination.