Reunion
I just want to say: she’s home, after a month away (and no communication flowing in this direction, although I made sure to write her a letter once a week, not to try to guilt her into replying, but because I got a kick out of crafting updates on lined paper in black pen, and having them hand-delivered by friends who were driving to pick up/drop off their own kids at the same camp). (Side note 1: Writing letters should be revived as a far superior, more personal, funnier means of communicating than email or text, but realistically, it only happened because she didn’t take her cellphone. Side note 2: Imagine a month without your cellphone … would that be paradise or hell?).
Anyway, I missed her. I realize this is but a taste of the stage that is coming, of greater separation from my children and their lives; but I really missed her. The house never got around to feeling quite right. Even when her absence wasn’t front of mind, it always felt like something was missing, or lost, or misplaced. (Side note 3: Do parents get used to this? Side note 4: I don’t really want to get used to it …)
So having her home is a tiny piece of bliss.
xo, Carrie
I want to scream, not write
Erase, and try again. Erase, and try again.
I sit down at my desk to try to write, wanting to scream. Maybe that’s the problem. I want to scream, not write. I want to rant, not write. I want to tweet my rage, not write.
On Friday, my dad and daughter and I drove to Princeton, New Jersey for the funeral of my dad’s uncle, my grandma’s younger brother, who passed away in June at the age of 93. He and his wife had been married for 68 years (makes our 20 sound like a drop in the bucket!). The drive was long, but Dad brought lots of snacks, and we enjoyed the conversation and the scenery. Friday night, rather late, we had dinner in downtown Princeton at a Turkish restaurant, a feast that included a surprise delivery to our table of fresh-baked pitas, which we dipped in house-made hot sauce. We were tired, but we were happy. Flora and I stayed up late watching Friends. On Saturday morning, we breakfasted at the hotel with Grandma and her younger sister and her sister’s husband (who live in Argentina), and my aunt and uncle, who’d all travelled together from Indiana. It was fun. Grandma took one look at me, and sent me back to my room for a sweater (she was sure I’d be chilled due to the A/C), and then led the way, and organized the seating, which should tell you something about her character. She’s 97! I wanted to shout to the room in general, because, honestly, no one would ever guess it.
We dressed up, went to the memorial service and interment, sang, prayed, heard beautiful music. Met relatives. Visited.
Went back to the hotel to change before more family time that afternoon. Turned on the TV. News of a shooting underway in El Paso, Texas. Turned off TV. Pushed news out of mind. Changed, drove to a quiet tree-lined street near downtown Princeton, the home of one of my dad’s cousins. Feasted on a magnificent spread of appetizers. Went for a walk with Flora. Met more relatives. Visited. Listened to grandma and her sister and sister-in-law tell stories. Laughed. Feasted on a magnificent Argentine meal prepared by my dad’s cousins. Argentine music on the stereo. Red wine. Grandma having to be forcibly stopped from helping with the dishes.
Back at the hotel, Flora and Dad and I visited with Grandma in her hotel room. I returned the earrings I’d borrowed from Grandma. It was Grandma who asked whether we’d heard about the shooting. “He’s evil,” she said. She meant Trump. If you knew my Grandma, you’d know that word was not one she would use lightly. The ferocity of her emotion surprised me, even if I was feeling the same.
Flora and I spent the rest of the evening goofing off, wandering the hotel, making ourselves tea, tried to stay up late again to watch Friends, but fell asleep instead.
When my alarm sounded at 7AM, I turned on the news, using my CBC radio app — news from Canada. “Almost thirty people killed in less than 24 hours in mass shootings in the United States …” I thought more people had died of their wounds in El Paso, but no — there had been a second shooting overnight, this time in Dayton, Ohio, a city not an hour from where I grew up. The shooter was killed by police within the first minute that he opened fire, but he still killed at least 9 people; this is the scale of damage that can be done with an assault weapon, and in a world where anything made any sense, it would be evidence to silence the “good guy with a gun” theory forever.
In the breakfast area of the hotel, the news of both shootings played on the large-screen TV. The hotel’s guests were visibly disturbed. The feeling in the room was something unlike anything I’d felt before. It wasn’t shock. It was bewilderment, horror, shame. This keeps happening. This is not an anomaly. This is the new normal. How can this be?
Nevertheless, we had a fun, sociable breakfast with Grandma and everyone else. Briefly, though I don’t think we wanted to go there, the conversation tilted to the causes of this violence. White supremacy. Gun culture. Trump. Racism. White evangelicals — how could they support Trump? But even within our group there was no unity on the solutions. Maybe there are too many solutions, rather then too few?
After our goodbyes, we packed up for the long drive. About half an hour north of Princeton, we drove past Bedminster. It was only later that evening, at home, when I was scouring news sites for opinions and information, that I saw Trump had given his statement (paltry, weak, vague) at his estate in Bedminster, New Jersey. I said, “We drove right by that monster this morning!” And then I thought, good grief, that word rolled out of my mouth unprompted. Do I actually believe he’s a monster? If I call him a monster, what does that make me? And I felt as if rage and hatred was a hole down which I did not want to spiral. Yet I couldn’t turn off the news. I kept scrolling and scrolling, looking for some kind of answer to questions I couldn’t even form. I stayed up till my phone battery was almost dead, at which point, I left my phone downstairs because I knew if I brought it up to bed, I’d never sleep. Would the shootings have affected me in the same way if I hadn’t been in the States when they’d happened? If I hadn’t felt that collective bewilderment in the breakfast area of a Hampton Inn on Highway 1 near Princeton, New Jersey?
This can’t be healthy — and by this, I mean this obsession with the news, in particular this news (though I’ve also been obsessed, this summer, with news of climate change and melting ice, and the murderers, teenagers, crossing Canada, who haven’t been seen for two weeks, whose motives seem linked with the nihilist beliefs of these American shooters). Should I turn it off? Hide my phone? Do I struggle to turn it off because I’m addicted to the feelings of rage and horror this news incites in me?
I feel a need to respond, and not with tweets or rants. To protest. To be an activist. To try to change the way things are. To work to make a better world. To identify possible change and bulldoze toward it. But I also feel very very tired. Overwhelmed. Bewildered. It’s too much. Enough. Do something!
But what? What narratives am I creating? Isn’t it my job to respond with narrative? A narrative is purposeful and directed, but the news confuses me. A confused mind cannot create narrative. Somehow, I have to un-confuse my mind, and also my spirit.
xo, Carrie
Things that can’t be seen
There are things that can’t be seen, but can be smelled. There are things that can’t be seen, but can be heard. There are things that can’t be seen, but can be felt.
Of things that can’t be seen, but can be smelled, I give you this: the place beside the porch where, last night, when cornered and harassed by our clearly not-that-bright dog, a skunk sprayed said dog and surrounding area. I don’t blame the skunk. In a way, I don’t blame the dog either. There’s no one and nothing to blame. It’s just that this is not the text a person wants to receive from her son, while driving back-country roads at around 11:30PM, returning home from a late out-of-town soccer game which one has spent standing, soaked to the skin, in intermittent pelting rain, beside a soccer field: I think Rose got skunked.
Yes, the evidence would have it. (Luckily for you, dear reader, this is not a scratch-and-sniff post.)
Of things that can’t be seen, but can be heard, I give you this: our refrigerator, roaring like a jet engine, despite having been “repaired” yesterday morning. We await the return of the repairman, who tightened the compressor and gave us a 90-day guarantee. I’m wearing ear plugs. They’re not working. The jet engine that now resides inside our refrigerator persists. (Click on photo below to play video of fridge-as-jet-engine.)
Of things that can’t be seen, only felt, I give you this (not pictured, naturally): the inside of my brain and body, exhausted from lack of sleep. It’s been hot, and I love love love the heat, but our house hasn’t been cooling down at night, and our sleep, even before the skunk and the fridge, has been restless. And so, I give you my stuporous mind. I give you my determined aching limbs, which rise every morning and run through the park, because they are certain, as am I, that the day will be better having done so, and worse having not done so.
I give you this: it’s smelly, noisy, sticky, messy in here; house and mind.
But this too, I give to you, and it’s no small thing, this thing that can’t be seen, only known: twenty years ago today, I got married, and twenty years later, we’re still married. There’s no way to see exactly what that means, but it’s plenty to live off of. It’s carried us through all the things. It’s carrying us even now.
xo, Carrie
Something to console you
Not every day is a good day.
There are days when you will feel lesser than your usual self. Days when you will wonder what this darkness is you’re carrying and whether you’ll have the patience and the courage to dig into it, and maybe unearth it, learn from it.
You will feel like you have nothing to offer. Yet you will go on offering, as if pulling scarves from your sleeve, rabbits from your hat.
You will wonder at the raw stupidity of your own ambition. You will be infuriated by your flurries of self-delusion. Who did you think you were?
You’ll go for a run, trying to run out your misery, like it could be wrung from you like sweat. You won’t know who to blame. You’ll be all out of scapegoats, so you’ll turn on yourself and say, You, it was you all along, you and your inflated imagination.
And you won’t know what to say in return.
You’ll forget how to be kind to yourself. The mirror will show you failure and worse — self-pity. You’ll feel sick with nerves. Worthless. Empty, vacuous.
You’ll wonder: Is this depression?
You’ll wish you’d never started down this road. If you could go back in time — ah, but you’ll know. You’ll know that even if you could go back in time, you wouldn’t be able to tell yourself not to try, not to imagine, not to do the work. You’ll know this is part of the cycle, part of the deal. You’ll know it actually doesn’t matter how good or bad you are at this thing you’ve chosen to do, and that’s the trouble, that you’re going to keep doing this, this thing, for the rest of your life, and there’s nothing else for it.
You’ll need to pick yourself up, scrape yourself off, and pull yourself together. You can’t diagnose yourself. You can only write about it. Writing is what you’ve got. Even if, today, it means nothing to you.
Even if this is one of those days, one of those anxious, splintering days.
Tomorrow it might mean something again.
And if it doesn’t, wait till the next day. And the next day. You’re imagining an enormous crater where your dreams used to be, but even at the very bottom of that crater, you’ll poke around and find something to entertain you, console you, and keep you alive.
I promise.
xo, Carrie
Where do you flourish?
For the past six months, I’ve been working on a 24-hour cartooning blitz once a month. The idea is that you draw a cartoon every (waking) hour over a 24-hour period. These cartoons are samples from my most recent blitz, which happened to be yesterday. I purposely chose a day in July when I’d be hanging out with my siblings. I’m hoping, over the year, to cover a representative sampling of the people, experiences, and events that thread their way in and out of my every day life.
I don’t know what this project will be at the end of making it … but I don’t question its value. How could I? Reflecting on and recording the every day essentially form the basis of most of the projects I undertake, including this blog.
Another project on which I’m currently working is a collection of stories based on events in my own every day life. At first, it began as a stylistic experiment — trying to record, faithfully, minutely, the vicissitudes of emotion and sensory experience in which we are immersed as we make our way through each day. But the project changed over time, and it’s become a place to experiment, instead, with the short story form. I play with structure. I play with character. I slip through time. I play, essentially.
Several of the stories from the collection have been published recently or will be published soon, and I’m seeking and receiving feedback from my teeny-tiny writing group on them, too. Again, I don’t know what will happen to these stories when I’m finished working on them … but working on them, reading them, thinking about them brings me deep satisfaction, which is all I ask of my projects. Making things is where the magic happens. Making things, and learning by making, and experimenting, and feeling frustrated, and getting exciting, inspired, surprising myself, refining, revising, trying again — all of this brings me joy.
This is where I flourish. (Where do you flourish?)
xo, Carrie