Closing The Book

It is an impulse decision to turn right instead of left. Left would have taken me to Whole Foods, but right took me to Little Portion, now Hope Academy, I correct myself, but I don’t care. It will always be Little Portion to me. I had dropped my charge off at school, and decided that I would go to Whole Foods. Normally, I go straight from one job to the next, but I had received an early morning text message informing me that my second “shift”, as it were, was now free. I needed eggs, and Whole Foods sells the cashew drink I like at a fraction of the price that Wild By Nature does. From school, Whole Foods was also not substantially out of the way.

It has been well over a year since I’d driven out to what used to be Little Portion Friary. I could never forget the way. It is the location for so many important events in my life, and its closure and new identity as Hope Academy is something that I don’t know I’ll ever resolve. I was on a good stretch of Nicholl’s Road, and traffic was moving. I’d gotten the email about this weeks’ bread offerings a few days before, and though a person with celiac receiving emails about glutenous bread is either ironic or masochistic, I can’t bring myself to unsubscribe. Friday is bread day. In my pre-celiac life, when I spent semesters and summer camp sessions subsisting solely on Friary Bread, I made many pilgrimages to the bakery at Little Portion, depositing my money in the box and picking whichever loaves I thought had the most raisins, and breathing deeply. The whole downstairs of the Friary always smelled like bread, and it was as comforting to me as the scent of my mother’s old Chiropractic books. I don’t have cash, but I remember that there is a bank on the way, and the details with which I recollect this surprise me. I stop, get cash, get back on 347, and once again, drown in my thoughts of Little Portion.

I first went to Little Portion as a child with my mother, and when I came back to the church in college, Little Portion became a second home. I attended Daily Offices and Eucharist there because I didn’t want to be in my dorm room alone after the Southampton students were sent back to West Campus, twenty minutes from Little Portion. I spent my days off from Camp DeWolfe during the summer there. I found out that I had been accepted to grad school late one night in the library after the Brothers had gone to bed. I lost and found so many callings there, and it was there that Mom and I went after we found out that I didn’t have leukemia, when we wondered what my future would look like with lupus and not going back to Hawai’i. I pictured my wedding being held there, on the labyrinth, and when Little Portion ceased to exist as I had always known it, and when my Godmother died, I had no idea how to contemplate marriage. I didn’t, and don’t, want too much in terms of a wedding. I’d rather have a good party than something formal that everyone leaves from still hungry. But I wanted it at Little Portion. That can’t happen now.

I am wearing my sunglasses, but it is a bright, hot day, and I have a headache forming and re-forming behind my eyes. Proof that I am stressed, run down, and trying not to cry, no matter what I may tell myself. There are many cars in the parking lot, and workmen at the foot of the driveway laying down asphalt patches. I am surprised, though it is 10 AM, a few hours after bread has gone on sale, by how many cars there are. Anxiety radiates off me in waves, and I am glad that I am here alone as much as I hate that I am alone. I will only have to deal with my emotions, but I am not sure that I can handle them alone. I wish, not for the first time, that my ESC boss lived closer to New York. His gift for always getting me to cry–despite my disdain for crying and my insistence that I will be fine–might help me to handle the internal war being waged between my brain, my heart, and my stomach. I go into the bakery, breathe deeply out of habit, but the door has been open, and the smell of the bread has dissipated into the open air. Cinnamon Raisin, Olive Oil Rosemary, and Cranberry Sunflower. I debate getting a loaf of Cranberry, but who am I kidding? To come and not stock up on Cinnamon Raisin is akin to blasphemy, or heresy. Maybe both. I answer an older woman’s questions about the loaves, and what to do with her money, and prepare to bag my loaf when a young man, a resident of the house, comes in to say, “I was coming to bag those for you. We bag them after lunch; they’re really fresh.” I don’t mind bagging my own loaves. “Fresh is good!” I tell him.

I bag my loaves, taking pictures of the racks of fresh bread, with only a few empty spaces where loaves used to be. The labels are different. A former Brother, a friend of mine then, had written the labels when the Brothers still lived there. I had wondered about that on the way. There are men everywhere, and when I am rearranging the contents of my front seat to make room for the loaves, a few of them are debating whether the gas container that says ‘Mixed’ is really mixed. They are preparing to do yard work, and I remember all of the debates that ensued about that very subject in Hawai’i.

I don’t understand it, but everything is different. I don’t explore the grounds, but I see dumpsters in the back where I used to park, honestly that was the only visual difference. The house doesn’t look different. It might even look better. There seem to be more flowers than there had been in some time. I had gone expecting that it would hurt to see and feel “my” Little Portion so different. But when I got there, I didn’t feel like I belonged anymore. This wasn’t the place that was my home away from home for so long. It was something new, something different. We have both changed, Little Portion and I. We have found new lives and new meanings, and though I will likely mourn what I lost forever, I must also rejoice to see Little Portion so alive.

This is a book that I can close. Going felt like a release, though not one easily made or accepted, it was a necessary one.

I drive to Whole Foods, and remember Sunday afternoon lunches there after Church in Little Portion’s chapel. I buy juices, a salad, and sit lost in thought as I eat. When I go to my car to drive home, I open the door and expect the scent of the sun-warmed bread to fill my senses, but it doesn’t. I drive home. I don’t know what I was looking for from this impromptu pilgrimage, and I don’t know if I found it, but with what I did find… I don’t know that I need to make another.

Taking Stock

My doctor was afraid to ask if “that’s all” when I described the roller coaster the last four years have been. It’s enough to make me feel that my head and my heart might explode when I list it: I went to Kenya, I dated someone I expected I’d marry; we broke up. I finished grad school, I went to Hawai’i, came home with lupus and a very near miss on cancer. I spent 6 months in treatment; the second 6 months I would have spent in Hawaii had it all gone according to plan. I got out of treatment, our house flooded and we lost so much. My sister sustained a devastating injury and went on home school, our mom got hurt. I adopted my dog and we got 2 kittens. My spiritual home and safe place—Little Portion—announced they were closing, my beloved godmother died entirely unexpectedly. I spent all day trying to figure out how to tell my mother that her best friend and the godmother to her daughters was dead. I did most of the notifications for our church.  Little Portion did close.  The first Christmas after the closure and the death of my godmother, the only person I wanted to talk to was gone and the only place I wanted to be no longer existed.  I don’t have words to express two such unfathomable losses occurring in less than 6 months’ time.  I was in shock for months, and when I finally cried, I nearly drowned in the shower.

I didn’t know what I’d do when I came back from Hawai’i and went into treatment. I didn’t know how I’d get through treatment.  My body remembers every trauma my mind wants to forget, and even now, I am not allowed to forget.  I don’t know how to navigate a world in which I will get married and have children who will not know my father and my godmother.  Who will not learn to ask, “Are you being goofy?” to determine whether or not an adult is being serious, and who will not then collapse into laughter with my godmother, and who will learn complex math and teach it to their grandfather, wondering if he is pretending that they are smarter than he is as I did when I was a child.  I always anticipated that my father would not live to see me grown–the odds were astronomical–but there was always a hope I might be proven wrong.  My father wasn’t the sort of person one expected to die.  But I could not see a world in which my Aunt Mary would not see my wedding, and meet my children. The weekend after she died, I kept thinking about sitting in the diner with her when I was 16, her telling me that when I got married, I could wear her ring, which was her mother’s ring before her, and that it would be my something old. I kept imagining that day, whenever it may come, and trying to picture my mom and my friends helping me to get ready, but all I saw was the empty space she wouldn’t occupy.

It has never moved beyond surreal that I will marry someone who has never met my father. It is unfathomable that I will marry someone who has not received my godmother’s seal of approval. I didn’t have the kind of relationship with my father that the other girls had with theirs, but for the good, the bad, the indifferent, he is my father. Nothing changes that.  And I desperately want his approval.

I never saw most of what has come to pass coming, and I’m not sure if that’s a blessing or a curse.  I am learning how to live in a world that I could not picture before I found myself inhabiting it.  I do not want to live in this particular world, with no Little Portion, with no Aunt Mary, with lupus complicating things and constantly wondering in the back of my mind if what I’ve found now with my body is too good to be true.  In the meantime, I am contemplating the universe and redecorating my room, un-boxing books and wall decorations with knives in my heart along the way.  The gifts she bought me when I was confirmed in one box, a photo collage from my first trip to see her in Utah in another; cards from two years working at summer camp, along with my dreams of being a missionary in a third.  This life isn’t the one I’d envisioned for myself, but it’s the one I have.  And I am trying to make peace with that.

 

 

The Return

• I posted an essay on summer camp (with a bit of an announcement contained therein) over on tumblr this morning. Have a read if you wish!

Outback Steakhouse

Whenever we go to see my grandparents, we go out to eat. My family is highly motivated by food, and also seeing them while we’re all eating eliminates some of the awkward silences known to most families as we clumsily move from topic to topic.

Because of my celiac, I am incredibly limited in where I can eat safely, because a lot of restaurants have gluten free or allergen menus and allergen statements, but a lot of places have food that is rife with cross contamination. Because I am so sensitive to gluten, even the smallest amount of cross contamination can be a big problem for me, so this means that we generally go to the same few places over and over. But the issue with us going out isn’t only my celiac: my mom and sister are vegetarian, and my sister is a very picky eater.

One time when we were going to see my grandparents, we decided to go to Outback Steakhouse after discovering that they have a gluten free menu. We’ve been a few times since, and recently, we discovered that their dessert, Thunder From Down Under is gluten free. My sister ordered one and our waiter asked if we wanted 3 spoons, and I said no, and he said that it’s all gluten free, and that there are no regular flour brownies. We got three spoons. I had about 3 spoonfuls before I had to stop so the richness and wonderfulness of it didn’t make me sick. Any restaurant where I can get a steak and a lobster tail or a steak and shrimp is good with me, especially if I can also get a loaded baked potato or garlic mashed potatoes. And throwing the dessert into consideration means that Outback is basically my new favorite place.

And I have never gotten sick there. This is a huge win. My sister’s favorite restaurant for a long time was Applebee’s (it might still be). We go there from time to time, and I am not opposed to eating there, but it’s entirely hit or miss in terms of cross contamination, and my getting sick. We always tell them that I have a severe gluten problem, and please to make sure that nothing else touches my food, but flour is something that goes airborne remarkably well, plus if a chief puts a burger on a bun using his spatula and that spatula touches the bun and then touches my steak, it could be a problem for me.

When I was a kid, the Fosters beer commercial was my favorite. I like Australian accents, and some of the idioms that come out of the mouths of Aussies. I think they’re funny. While Applebee’s is more of a hometown bar and grill, Outback feels like more of a restaurant somehow, and the one closest to me is now serving Dr. Pepper, which has always been my favorite soda. (I am perpetually trying to remove soda from my diet, but sometimes it is the only thing that works, and I don’t believe in the complete depravation of something that you really like, because that isn’t healthy.) So that’s something else that Outback has going for it.

I can’t wait to go back to Outback (and also to eat my leftovers). If you have food restrictions, how do you cope with them when you go out to eat? What are your favorite places to eat?

The Vicar of Dibley

If I cut my teeth on Star Trek, I learned to speak (and sass) on British comedies and mysteries. Mom and my Grandpa are total Anglophiles, and anything British is a must-watch. To this day, if someone is speaking with a British accent, it sounds entirely normal, and I have to think about the person or character’s country of origin because it doesn’t stand out to me. (I also have to make a very conscious effort not to reply in a British accent…)

The Vicar of Dibley is a show that I’ve seen many times, because in addition to being a British comedy starring the wonderful Dawn French, it’s about an Anglican Vicar in a small town in rural England, who is the town’s first experience with female ordination. It’s hilarious, and it’s a show that’s featured heavily in mine and Mom’s quote repertoire.

One of our favorite episodes to quote is The Christmas Special, in which, to celebrate Gerry’s tenth anniversary at Dibley, the villagers hold a hymn-writing contest, and perform the best of the new Christmas hymns at the Midnight Mass. The winning hymn was written by a parishioner who wanted to approach Christmas in a way that is original, and wrote about the labor and delivery of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

I cannot encourage you enough to go and watch this episode. It is so funny.

The Vicar Of Dibley is available for streaming on Netflix, and I have re-watched the series many times there, though I must note that there are some missing episodes, including the pilot. We also own the DVDs, which are a great way of (binge) watching all of the episodes and specials.

The Year I Was Diagnosed With Lupus – Role Reboot

The Year I Was Diagnosed With Lupus – Role Reboot.

 

The Year I Was Diagnosed With Lupus, my essay published by Role Reboot.

I was 23, and a newly minted Master of Fine Arts, when I left my family in New York to join the Creation Care program at Camp Mokule’ia in Waialua, O’ahu, Hawai’i. Creation Care was an 11-month-long program, and one of a number of faith-based internships run by the Episcopal Service Corps. The program was everything I’d wanted, and though I was terrified to leave my family for such a long period of time, I tried to remain focused on the fact that I would be living in a tropical paradise for 48 weeks…

Continue reading my essay over on Role Reboot!

Mother’s Day

This Mother’s Day is a bittersweet one for sure.

It is the first Mother’s Day since I adopted my beloved little fur baby Zoey Makana, and it is also the first since the untimely death of my beloved Godmother, my Aunt Mary.

Perhaps in an attempt to keep things normal, and definitely in an attempt to fully life because one never knows when the last of anything will be, we had my grandparents over like we normally do. My sister cooked, which left me on cleanup duty, which is not my preference, but which I will do.

My Uncle gave me a Mother’s Day card from my Zoey Makana girl, which was funny and sweet, and which I loved, but yesterday, when I was picking out cards, I didn’t have to buy one for Aunt Mary. Grandmother and Godmother are usually quite close, and though I loved receiving a Mother’s Day card as a (dog) Mama, the absence of the Godmother’s card and the Godmother’s phone call weighed heavily on my heart and mind. As soon as the grandparents left, I kept thinking, ‘It’s time to call Aunt Mary.’ I don’t quite know when that feeling will go away, as I know that my mom keeps wanting to call my Great Grandmother, even now, 22 years after her death.

Zoey had a great day; she got to eat breakfast, got treats of bread (one of her absolute favorite treats; poor girl, adopted by a celiac), Whimzees bones, dental bones, chicken training treats, peanut butter, and organic turkey, as well as her normal dinner. Plus, she had extra humans to love and to be loved by (and to bark at whenever they went to the bathroom).

My grandmother loves how calm Zoey is, and how, even though we have 5 animals in the house, they all get along, and how, for the most part, the animals are the calmest members of the house. My mom had a dog when she was in college, but my grandmother is *not* an animal person by any stretch of the imagination, but when she’s at our house, she’ll pet whichever animal happens to be closest. I am so glad that we have some of the best (rescue) animals known to woman-kind living in our house! Zoey is only ever anything that might be mistaken for aggressive in the pursuit of more love, and sometimes treats, or protection of her Mama against a perceived threat, and our cats will sit happily for as long as you’ll rub them.

I think, in the presence of an unimaginable loss, the best thing that you can do is continue to live. At least, I used to. Now, I think that the best thing that you can do is continue to love, to not let yourself close your heart off and to become cold or bitter. Part of me wonders if, when I told my Godmother that I’d adopted this fantastic dog, she felt like she could let go and that I’d be okay. Part of me, of course, wonders if Zo could ever be my salvation from anything, except, of course, she already has been my salvation in my turbulent life with lupus and all of the other things that life has thrown at me these past two years.

I don’t know how to be okay without my Godmother, but I know that I have to be; that if I can’t be okay and if I can’t continue to love and to be happy and to find beauty in this world, that she will have taught me nothing, which is unacceptable. But I don’t mind telling you that Mother’s Day without her was so damn difficult. So if you’ve suffered on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day like I have, my heart is with you. It’s not easy to build a life for yourself without the people that you care deeply about, or without people from whom you are estranged.

I hope that you, and I, find peace.

Walks in the Woods

Zoey Makana and I recently had a milestone: 5 months since I adopted her officially and brought her home. She, like the rest of us, has been through a lot lately. I had a terrible fall and injured myself badly while I was running with her, and though the fall wasn’t her fault at all and though she did everything right once I fell, she felt guilty. Prior to that, as you know, we were dealing with the sudden and unexpected death of my beloved Godmother. Zoey knew that there were things wrong, but not what, and was very concerned, and emotionally worn out. I’ve begun to suspect, based on her reactions, that in her last home, anything that went wrong was taken out on her. I don’t believe that she was ever physically abused, but I do think that she was yelled at on a regular basis. She’s never quite sure whether or not she’s going to be punished.

She has come such a long way in the five months that I’ve had her. She is very sweet, smart, and eager to please, which is very helpful when it comes to training her, though she knows her own mind, and sometimes isn’t obedient because it doesn’t suit her, which while it may frustrate the trainer is quite endearing to her independent Mama. She knows how to communicate her wants and needs, and isn’t shy about them. I will never forget her first night home, when I turned back my covers and she climbed under them and laid with her head on my pillow. I wanted her to sleep near my bed, but not actually in it, and she just looked at me with a look that said, “This person is an idiot, she doesn’t know that beds are for sleeping.” I decided not to fight, and in my bed she has remained these last five months. She is the first to groan each morning when my alarm goes off, and she will cuddle in close to me, or on top of me, to prevent me from getting out of bed. I’ve watched her grow more and more confident and assertive, less likely to cower when the cat that she’s afraid of walks into the room, and more likely to spread out and take up space. I’ve also loved watching her claim our house as her territory. Any time someone rings the doorbell or comes in, she barks like mad. Even a person making a u-turn in our driveway or even coming onto our street to visit a neighbor draws a loud Zoey alert. Sometimes animals that have been abandoned have lingering attachment issues, which I am sure can sometimes lead to second and third abandonments, but my girl knows that she and I belong together. She’s protective of me when we are out on walks, or even visiting with friends.

Yesterday afternoon, we went on a walk in one of our normal spots, an abandoned woods property next to my house. We weren’t in a rush, for once, for Zoey to do the business and then rush back into the house, because it was a Sunday afternoon, and because we were out on an extra walk to make Zoey happy, and to allow my mom to eat her lunch with one less mooching animal. I decided not to worry about dodging the sun, another important reason that I like to keep Zoey’s walks short, and to just enjoy being outside and to enjoy Zoey sniffing all the grasses and flowers, and going where she wanted to go instead of where I wanted her to go. Zoey saw a butterfly, and at first I thought she might bark at it or try to eat it, but she didn’t. She decided that she wanted to follow it. She didn’t try to chase it, or get ahead of it, she just went where it led her, and so we followed it wherever it flew for a minute or so. It’s hard to tell how long is was or wasn’t, because it was just a magical moment, one that I knew I would have ruined if I’d tried to photograph it, so I didn’t even try, though it would have been a great photograph. The sunlight was just perfect, and it was finally feeling like it might be a real spring soon, and we just wandered in the trail of this butterfly. And I thought that maybe everything wasn’t nearly as fucked up as I felt it was, and maybe there is still beauty and magic yet to be found.

I hope you find magic today, my dear readers.

A Small Update

At this time last week, I was finishing up my notification phone calls.

After I told my mom that my Godmother had died, I called my Godfather back and asked if he wanted me to do the notifications for the church people that have kept in touch with my Godmother and who love her and shouldn’t hear the news through the grapevine. He said yes, so Friday night, after informing my mom and my sister, I started calling people. Some I had to leave messages for, and they called me back the next day. The rector of my church announced it at our three weekend masses, and remembered her in the Eucharist.

I am still having such a hard time fathoming that she is gone. I am comforted by the fact that she is no longer in pain from her chronic illnesses, and that she is with God, but of course that doesn’t change the fact that her loved ones miss her and want her here.

On another note: my life continues to be crazy busy, and my lupus symptoms, while not as severe as they were a year ago, continue to plague me. My Raynaud’s is still quite bothersome, and brain fog, exhaustion, and sleep disturbances continue to be near-constant companions. This makes writing incredibly difficult, and though there is nothing I’d like more than to write and also to edit my nearly-finished book, many days it’s so far out of the question that it’s in another country. I am hoping that, as summer approaches, my life will calm down substantially, and I’ll be able to return to being an artist, but as this week has taught us once again, nothing is ever certain.