A Different Kind of Crazy Dream OR Let's Call It a Short Story Because It's Not Quite A True Story

Ode to Kozy Shack, bathroom self-portrait, Copper Gate, 7-20-2007

You don’t have to be at all sure what you’re looking for in order to find it on the Flickr pages. I don’t really know what I am looking for when I find Pete, Carrie and Rabbit. It’s late, and I’m home, sitting in my bed with my computer on my lap. I want to go somewhere but it’s too late for that, so I am searching. I do this sometimes, after I’ve fussed with my own photos on my Flickr page, arranged them in sets and labeled them with the kinds of tags that someone else might find in a search of their own. Tonight I have photos of Susan in her new summer dress with baskets of fried food, in the new bar in the old neighborhood where I used to live when I was still cool. Well, still young at least.

I wander off into search terms and thumbnails. Seattle, Ballard, coffee shops, favorite bars… bored, bored, boring boring, photos of people I don’t know, cafes I wouldn’t go to… until I get to the skee ball shots, from the new bar where they have a wall full of old photos tacked up in fluttering layers, like peeling paint covering one whole side of the bar. They serve retro beers and baskets of sliders even though none of us who grew up here ate sliders as teenagers, or even knew what they were. The jukebox is filled with albums I don’t expect Pabst-drinkers in hoodies and dice tattoos to sing along to, Peggy Lee, Heart.

Not that you can see all that stuff in the photo that catches my eye. This photo is simple, just the skee balls lined up in their narrow chute, ready to be pitched at the target, the rough brick wall next to the game, and off in the upper left hand corner, the round circles labeled 10, 20, 30, like a paint-by-numbers sun. The other photos that come up when you search for that bar are mostly bad-flash snapshots, someone’s buddy all pasty with a face-full of booze, sticking out a tongue or hands all over the chick with her eyes half-closed. But the photos that turn out to be Pete’s aren’t like that. What Pete has posted are the skee ball close-ups, the chalk board with the score, titled “Ass Whupping”, and a photo called “Lunch Date,” - Pete and Carrie lit by the yellow of a little barrel-shaped table lamp behind them, Carrie in braids, Pete in beard, looking right into each other’s eyes and smiling the closed-lipped smile of the deeply satisfied.

Then there are the self-portraits. Bathrooms and elevators. A washed-out shot of Pete, wide-eyed, his flannel shirt matching the faded flower wallpaper of the bathroom in a lake house where a friend is house-sitting, Carrie straight-faced with a single braid, in front of a poster of puppies playing piano. There are sets of graffiti and found “faces”, in food, on hardware, made by rust and knots in wood and the way two windows flank a door. A set of the dog, Rabbit, labeled “dogsimus maxsimus. best. dog. ever.”, photos with flying ears, white belly, pink tongue on Pete’s soft-serve ice cream cone. Another set titled “Music”, subtitled “Music is the only redeemer.” There’s a blue-lit Chan Marshall dancing in a fringed dress, Joan Jett sweating and raw at the Marin County Fair, tracer-laden, flaming orange Willie Nelson.

Willie Nelson is where I stop at 1:13 AM. It's July 4th now, 2007 and I am giddy with the sight of the Jing Fong dim sum extravaganaza, Rabbit, “The Rabbit”, as they call her, in an elevator in Portland, brisket at Memphis Minnie’s in San Francisco, the set called “Pete is My Bitch” - Pete in a bib, in a monkey hat, in a hairnet, in latex gloves. I am giddy from the way Pete labels all the photos of Carrie and her braids with the tag “love”. So I stop at the Willie Fillmore, SF, 1.25.06 photo and click on the “Add Your Comment” box. Here’s what I write, the first time I stalk someone on the internet:

“Okay, see, here's the thing about Flickr. You put your little tags on things, and then people somehow find your photos, maybe by searching on skeeball or something, and sometimes these people are even in your own city, so then they want to look around at your photos and see where else you've been. And then turns out you've been to the Greenwood Space Supply place, and then you have all these photos in bathrooms, and at someone's lake house with crazy wallpaper, and you're looking for nutria, and then the person who has found all these photos starts to wonder "God, are there any three creatures on earth who have more fun than Pete, Carrie and Rabbit?" because surely that cannot be, and you start to wonder, do I know someone who knows these people? and you think about your own field trips, like you need to go see those eyes at the sculpture park, and maybe have some pancakes with lingonberries, but then you really really need to stop looking at these photos no matter how good and funny they are, because you are supposed to be packing to go see Willie at the Gorge tomorrow, and that's a pretty good field trip in itself. Thanks for all the entertainment. Love your photos.”

Then I read it again and maybe I feel a little embarrassed but still I add a second comment which says:

“Okay, I realize I have all the you's messed up, but that's what happens. That's what happens when you spend too much time looking at someone else's flickr photos.”

And I like it. I like what I wrote, and I like liking Pete and Carrie and Rabbit and secretly I think it’s kind of clever even though I’m considering never ever telling anyone that I’ve done this. Until Pete writes back seventeen minutes later and says:

“Wow. this is pretty much the best comment we've ever received on Flickr. Certainly from a stranger. Such lovely words...thanks. It's really so good to hear that all the great times that we're having come through in our pictures. Definitely jealous that you're going to spend the fourth with Willie, too. That guy's my hero. Should make for a wonderful celebration of independence, whatever that might mean to you. Thanks for the lovely words. Maybe Rabbit can meet the wolfhounds one of these days. Those dogs are beautiful, and have fantastic names. ~p + c + r”

And when I read this, it’s like someone has suddenly discovered that I have a beautiful singing voice, or the most lovely toes in the world, or the highest number of taste buds found on the tongue of a human anywhere ever in the history of the world. Mostly that last thing, though, because while that comment from Pete seems strangely spectacular to me, after I read it, I sit there at the computer and don’t really know what it was all about. What was I doing, with this search for the new bar in my old neighborhood, and what does it mean, what I found - people who it seems like I should know but don’t?

But then I just think "Pete is nice. Like I thought."

I leave my email inbox and go back to the main page for Kozy Shack AKA Pete, Carrie and Rabbit, and go to the album titled 3.4.6. There they are at their wedding, with Carrie wearing a red dress and deeper dimples than I’ve ever seen and there are hula hoops and the limbo and a tuba and cupcakes and musical chairs and Pete’s shirt comes untucked from dancing, and it seems like the only thing that’s missing for a lifetime of happiness is Rabbit the dog.

After the limbo, and Carrie tying Pete’s tie, and their wedding dance, and dances with relatives, I go back to my own page, where Pete has written a comment admiring Tintin the French bulldog puppy. I look at my photos of the wolfhounds, Rosebeast and Fenton and MaryEllen and baby Liam, and wonder what Rabbit’s life was like before she met Pete and Carrie. On my Flickr page, none of the dogs Pete has admired are mine. The wolfhounds are a two-day drive away, and will probably never ever meet Rabbit and suddenly I feel defeated and weird.

I turn off the computer and lie in bed wondering which of the wolfhounds’ names Pete liked. Rosebeast, MaryEllen the Supermodel, Fenton Johnson. The only one I named was Lovable Irresistable Adorable Me, the puppy we call “Liam”, for short.

I also wonder if I will ever meet Pete and Carrie, and I sort-of wonder if I want to, the same way I’m not always sure I want to bite into a piece of really good-looking cake because it might turn out to taste like food coloring or dye your tongue blue. I wonder if Carrie has already started to hate me, or if she’s wondering what I’m up to. But in my head I’m already writing them an email challenging them to skee ball, even though Carrie might hate me, because as long as I’ve gone this far, I might as well keep stalking, and anyway, they can always ignore the email. I fall asleep telling myself that might be better anyway, because I can’t even really play skee ball, and I don’t have a date to bring, and because even if I was the kind of girl who had a dog of her own, I would have no idea what to name him.

And Then There Was Pie For Breakfast!

OR: 35 Things That Made it Feel Like My Birthday This Year

OR: What Happens When You Make Me Steak For Dinner at 8:30 PM

OR: What I Write When It Is 1AM & I Am So Happy I Can't Sleep

Last night, the moon was so bright here, that when I turned out all the lights in the house, it startled me. You could see everything outside. The fence posts, the tall grass in the yard, the clothesline across the driveway, the hills behind the pasture. At midnight, I tried to go to sleep, but was thinking about so many things. Eventually, I sat up in bed with my computer on my lap and wrote two pages of my novel, two pages that I’ve been needing and that I feel sure I will keep.

I woke again in the morning to find the sky an even steady pink from the sunrise. I let MaryEllen out, and then slept again until 10:30.

It’s 1 AM now and I suppose I’ve been trying to sleep for an hour or so. This time, it’s not the book that’s keeping me awake. I’ve been thinking about blog entries. I have to admit, I do that a lot. Pam and Gary, and Pam’s friend Kelly, got here this afternoon, and we talked about blogging a little, and about reading blogs. Pam was saying that she just hates the thought of spending any more time in front of a computer than she already does, and I understand that, but of course it’s not at all the way I feel.

The truth is that I would prefer letters, if I could have them. Of course Pam wasn’t talking about wanting to spend less time with words, this is a woman who is absolutely gleeful at getting to bring books with her on her upcoming trip to Tasmania, it really is the computer piece of it that she means. But I love the computer, because it’s the little way that I’ve been able to seduce people into the world of letters. I know that some of you just look at the pictures, glance a little at what I’m going on about, and that’s okay, because we are still somehow here together, and if you read just one entry here that you like, that makes you think about or experience your own day a little differently, well, that makes me pretty happy. If you just look at the pictures, and see the first blue sky you’ve seen all day after 30 straight hours of rain, then we’ve accomplished something there too, then, haven’t we?

But I also know that some of the emails I get every day contain words that would never have been said if we only had letters, and they are words I’m glad to have, whatever I had to do to get them.

In college, as some of you know and have evidence of, I was a prolific letter writer. I still have more stationary than probably anyone you know, and I have a feeling that by the time I leave this place, I will be back in the habit of writing letters longhand, and will again be someone who can be counted on to reward most letters sent to me with a reply, probably on nice paper, probably saying at least one happy thing, after all, there is always “My dear friend, I got your letter” to say.

But I wasn’t thinking about letters when I got up to get my computer again tonight. I was thinking about blog entries, and about the blog entry that would accompany the photo of our dinner tonight. I always take pictures when Pam makes dinner. Her dinners are always worth taking photos of.

I thought the title would be “My Birthday Party Arrived Today”, because that was how it felt when these three people and the other Irish Wolfhound I like so much got here, bringing two pies and a box of truffles, and all of the good food that we ate for dinner. To tell the truth, I had second thoughts about writing that it once again felt like my birthday today, when it has felt so much like my birthday so many times in the past month. It didn’t seem fair to feel like it was my birthday at Tomales, and then again when I got all your lovely packages and emails and cards.

And thinking back on it, getting to take the road trip with Susan kind of felt like my birthday, but then, so did going to dinner with Kirsten before I left, and going to Stumbling Goat with Erin, Pam and Gena, and the baby shower I threw for Jenn felt like my own birthday party too, which is crazy, but not as crazy as you might think, since it turned out that the baby we were having the shower for was born on my birthday, and getting that email that told me that her baby boy was born on my 35th birthday made it feel like my birthday again too. And surely there has never been a day in my life that felt more like a birthday than the day I was in the delivery room with Kirstin and held Rhone in my arms for the first time.

I could go on about this particular November 3rd, because I have it on good authority that there are more packages in the mail, and I know for sure that there are leftover smashed potatoes and seven kinds of cheese for lunch and I have an email from Bobby to answer, and I finished my orange sweater tonight and can block it tomorrow and it will probably be ready to wear for real by the time it gets cold in the evening, and on top of all of that, Seneca Wallace has a win.

What I’m really trying to say is what I’m always trying to say on this blog. Every single time I write here I am trying to say I’m grateful for my life, and please don’t think that I don’t know I’ve got it good. I have to admit, I am grateful to the point of feeling a little guilty about it, of feeling like maybe I don’t deserve all this, and then I can’t help it, I want to point out that the year after my 34th birthday started with losing the man I loved in such a painful way, and that did not make this past year a good one.

But that doesn’t explain it, all this good luck and happiness, because even in that hard year, that same birthday that saw the end of that relationship saw the start of my time with my writing group, and that has changed so much about my life, including the fact that I am now writing to you from one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. And anyway, why do we so often want to buy our happiness with pain? Why do I? Why do I want to know if one outweighs the other, if I have broken even or am overdrawn? It shouldn’t work that way, especially since all the happiness doesn’t make that pain any less, and truth be told, I miss him still something fierce, even as I sit here so happy, writing about all the goods things that happened to me in the year since we’ve been apart.

Because I will certainly never doubt that I had happy moments as long as I have that blog entry with the ferris wheel, or the one where Ali told those ladies at Cascade Pizza that I’d be back next year, or the entry for the Summer We Were Single or the love letter after Nate’s visit. And there were a hell of a lot of things that didn’t even get their fair share of play on the blog, including knit nights with Regan and Alexis, and the night we celebrated at El Camino, not to mention the night Paul and I went there and I got to relive how much I loved having him as my work boyfriend back in the day, and then there’s book club which we have to do again when I get back, and red wine and lamp skewers at Portalis with some of those ladies, and there was Gary’s workshop with Dana, and the whole 4th of July weekend, not just the cowboys and clogs, but the dinner outside at a long table set with candles and with more loving family than I ever thought we’d get to have.

And maybe it just always feels like my birthday when I am with someone I love, who may also happen to love me, like those great times with my mom up in LaConner, going to the Skagit River Poetry festival, knitting and watching Pirates of the Caribbean, and there were good times with dad too, eating his homemade chicken noodle soup and hearing him talk about how cute we were when we were little, and last December there was that day at Peanut Butter and Ella’s with Candice and Amber, when I really needed the girlfriend love and really got it, and same thing with Lillian the night we went for gelato and walked around with me saying “I hate everyone” and both of us laughing because I so clearly love her, and drinks with Camille and Kristin were so good even though we were having drinks at that place that sort-of smelled like bleach, for god’s sake!

And who can say if it was a better gift for me or for Dawn that I got to be there for her beautiful wedding this year, and this summer there was that afternoon eating fudgesicles and sitting by Lake Washington with Kere, and there was Bumbershoot with Jeth, where we went to Flatstock, which he loves as much as Nate and I do, and where we saw that deer that I really want to put in my book, and I know I talked on the blog about going to Rat City Roller Girls with Dakota and Clay and Jenn and Chris, but oh the Roller Derby, and if I’m being honest, I have to admit that even though the whole love thing didn’t work out, that lost weekend in Portland over Christmas break really was great, and there are just so many other days when I was totally content being with the person I was with, like drinks at Sambar with Darren and while we are on the subject of birthdays, even Andy’s birthday party at Sambar (no, this blog is not sponsored by Sambar) with Caitlin felt like my birthday because I was with Caitlin, who I love, and everyone knows I love those baristas almost as much as I love a birthday.

So what I’m really really trying to say, is that if you write a blog, you are definitely going to have more fun. Okay, maybe it’s just that you notice it so much more when you think about writing it. My mom sent me a quote recently, someone saying that writers write in order to live their lives twice, and that’s not a bad idea. I do know that one of the great pleasures of this year has been doing this blog with you, Ali, and hearing from friends who confess to me that they read it, or even just check the pictures. I’m so glad we started this, and can’t wait for the next 228 posts bring. That, and…

...wow, I could not be more grateful for all the people who made the last year good for me. I hope you’ll all let me return the favor next year. That way no one (and by no one I mean me) will have to worry about being overdrawn.

XOXO
Heather.

Halloween at the Ranch

For Halloween at the ranch, MaryEllen and Rose dressed up as Irish Wolfhounds, who, the night before, had dressed up as two pairs of shining eyes, loping down the driveway to meet me, and their tongues dressed up as tongues ready to reclaim me as their own, as part of the ranch again.

What I dressed up as was an almost-35-year-old who had not bathed for 3 days, and who has developed a fondness for boiling water in the kettle on the wood stove, which was dressed up as a wood stove that allowed itself to be filled with fire by a woman who had previously almost never started a fire by herself on the first try. I also dressed up as someone 5'4" who wears the same pair of jeans almost every day and just came back from one of the best weeks of her life that did not include a lover, and who has written every day since and will write every day after.

My computer dressed up as a laptop that got left behind in Denver at the Cherry Creek Four Points Sheraton and that refused to return until $10.76+$49.85 had changed hands, and two days had passed, until the FedEx man miraculously pulled his truck up in my driveway and handed it over, after I signed my name on line 6.

The dining room table dressed up as my work space, complete with writing notebook and fountain pen, but no computer, and later in the day, for it's second costume, it dressed up as the resting place for all manner of happy things, like Hershey's kisses, which had dressed up as a package from Regan, which also included a puzzle, and a little bird dish from Elvis, which was dressed up as the place where the Hershey's kisses live now.

And on Halloween at the ranch, my hands dressed up as the spookiest thing, the thing that gives you a fright and leaves you delighted at the same time, like the reveal at the end of the Sixth Sense - five fingers full of words, including a little finger smeared with the shadows of writing, and then my hand refused to take off that costume and is wearing it still.

The Crazy Rambling Truth Comes Out

I came home from my road trip to Durango with so many thoughts about blog posts.

For example, there’s the one about the actual time spent in Durango. Its title is “Turns Out Groceries Aren’t a Staple After All” and this photo accompanies it.

That post is about how I found the yarn store in Durango (surprise!) and how much I love to visit yarn stores when I travel, because you always end up talking to people there. The woman who I believe owned the Durango yarn store (called, wait for it... Yarn!) told me about someone she met in Seattle in a yarn store, and how that woman told her that she lived in Durango in the 70s, in a tee-pee. "Yup, that's about right for Durango in the 70s!" said the Yarn owner.

Then that post would go on to tell you about how I went and wandered down Main Street, because of course Durango is the kind of town that has a Main Street that really is the main street. I found egg cups, so they will live at the ranch now and everyone will be able to enjoy soft-boiled eggs here. Found the book store and bought "Home Ground", the new book that Barry Lopez edited. (Oh, I just picked it up to look at, and got sucked in! I can't wait to read more) It's a kind of glossary of terms for the American Landscape, written by various authors who have ties to the places and terms they write about. I think Amber recommended it to me, and it's perfect for my life right now.

Then the post starts to get a little hazy, because I want to write about my acquisitive nature, how I think it's funny that I got so excited about "stocking up" on things I have plenty of already, and how I meant to get to the grocery store and ran out of time because I was looking at the bubble bath too long.

But then I also want to write about the other thoughts that were starting to happen in my head around the time I stepped foot in the bookstore. How I asked the man at the counter where he thought the best coffee was, how he said "Well, ask three different people, you'll probably get three different opinions. Some people like Magpies, some people think Durango Coffee Company is the best. I always go to the Bean, cause it's right across the street, and I know the owner, and I think they're just as good as the others." and how I looked around this big bookstore, which I thought resembled Elliott Bay Books, with all that rough wood, and good displays, tables and tables of pretty hard-cover books, and thought "I could live in Durango".

Whew, that's a lot of reading - here, you need a photo.

Or maybe a photo from the yarn store wasn't what you were hoping for...

So I'm thinking that, but also some other things are coming up when I hit my next stop, the CD store (no surprise there). The guy at the counter, who has a beard and maybe some piercings, or at least gives the impression of being the sort of 20-something who has piercings, says "Hey." and kinda seems like in spite of looking all tough, he couldn't exaclty get up the courage to look at me, and oh by the way he's got that judgemental CD-store-guy aura going too, and I say "Hey, how are you." and then without meaning to, sort-of turn away so that it's obvious I don't really want to know, but I really would be curious to know, so then I feel like a jerk. Just a little.

Which, of course, gets me thinking about interacting with people. Mostly about how much I like it. And I think about that as I walk through the CD store, and again when the guy doesn't really do much better looking at me when I go up to the counter to buy my CDs, and then he gets into an animated thing with a wiry grey-haired woman in Tevas who is looking for something she heard about on NPR, and I just really like that, I like hearing what they say to each other.

So I'm thinking all that, about little interactions, and how I'm always noticing the temperature between people, and how interesting that is to me, when I go across the street to "the Bean", which is really named "The Steaming Bean". There are a few people milling around the counter the way people do at coffee shops, so you can't really tell if they've ordered, or haven't, or what they are doing, but behind the counter is this young girl, and she has this teenage way of looking at you with her chin tilted down, out from underneath these bangs that her mom probably wishes she would cut, and she looks at me and asks what I'd like, so I order.

And I truly apologize that I don't have a photo for you here.

The Bean is my last stop in Durango and I'm leaving a little later than I meant to be, since I don't want to do Wolf Creek Pass in the dark, but still I get sucked in to this teeny girl who's making the coffee. She's got to be a good 3 inches shorter than me, and her hair is this really fine blond hair that she has dyed black underneath, and she's got the whole black-and-white-striped shirt/hoody/grommeted belt look going and then this guy walks up, and you can see that they know each other, he's a tall kid, like, Andy and Bobby tall, and he's wearing one of those shirts that young guys wear when they are going out to Red Door, you know, the button-up kind, untucked, with some kind of pattern on it that makes you think of sheets, stripes or something, and the shirt is a little rumpled, like the hair.

So the barista girl, with her little glances and her quiet voice, says something to him that he doesn't really hear, and so then the interaction goes like this, with tall kid starting:

What did you say?
I said How are you doing?
Oh! I thought you said something else. I'm Grrreat!

And then tall kid slams his hand down on the books he has set on the glass countertop, so that the girl jumps and drops something, and he startles himself even, and pulls his hand back towards his chest and says “Oh shit, did I do that?” and she goes to pick whatever it is up and mumbles "No, it's okay." and you know for sure that he likes her, and that he probably picked those books out as carefully as he picked the shirt, and you're not sure, but somehow, somehow you think she probably likes him too. Maybe it's the way she gave him a little shy embarrassed smile when she had to repeat herself, or the fact that she sort-of tugged at her shirt a little more while he was standing there.

But you are probably thinking at this point, "And Heather is telling me about this, Why?"

Which means you need another photo.

Such pretty pretty trees

But there is a reason, and it's this: I loved them. I loved these two, doing their awkward teenage love dance. And I loved the guy in the CD store, and the yarn store women, and I loved the guy who told me to go to the Bean and the teenager who sold me bubble bath.

But as much as I love them, there are people I love EVEN MORE in the world, and the striped shirt and the tall kid and the big bubbles in my latte made me think of Andy and Bobby (duh) and the girl behind the counter made me think of Josie, and Josie being 16 when I first met her, and that made me think of Kristin, and so did the quote that was painted on the wall in the bathroom at the coffee shop, cause where else did we go that had quotes on the wall? I don't know, it seemed a little like Rimsky's in Portland, which also makes me think of Amber, who I was already thinking of because of that book I bought, and the bubble bath made me think of Susan, and the CSNY CD I bought made me think of all my old regulars at the bar where I worked in NY, and there was some yarn that I thought might make something good for my mom, and really it goes on and on...

... so that's what is happening in my head as I get in my car. I love thinking about all these people. And there are so many more people I love thinking about. I'm also thinking about my sister and her husband, since I just wrote that post about him, then I'm thinking "I hope Shack doesn't read the Shack post and hate it". And I feel compelled here, dear reader, to give you a picture, because I know this is an awful lot of words to read and I can't believe you are still here reading them...

So so beautiful, but not as beautiful as all the people I love so so much.

Anyway,I hit the road and the CD that's on is Jets to Brazil, "Four Cornered Night" which makes me think of Rob, that cute bartender who came to karaoke with us the night of my sister's rehearsal dinner, and how he called me from NY for months after that any time he had a bad day, and what all of this adds up to is really how much I love people. To what an absolutely insanely ridiculous degree I love them.

Maybe that's an obvious statement. Maybe that's something that no one who reads this blog is really going to be surprised by. And yet, it surprised me. Like, fully-clothed body thrown into cold ocean Surprised me.

I don't know that I can capture this, exactly, but some of it had to do with realizing that someone else in my position, they would get their energy from the trees, from the gorgeous sweeping views, from Nature. For lots of people, those things are very restorative. And I've always felt a little, just a little, bad that I'm not more of an outdoorsy girl, being from the Pacific NW and all. I like the outdoors, don't get me wrong. But we all know I am not going to be the one to pack up the tent and make sure we get out there. I get what it's all about, it's just not what drives me.

Even the pretty river view, not what drives me.

Duh, the people thing, that's what drives me. They are like trees to me (this is what I'm thinking as I drive through the kind of scenery that makes you ooh and aah and stop the car to try and take photos of what a photo will never capture), every person is as beautiful as a tree, and then that's a silly thing to think, so I think "Good post title - 'Why People Are Like Trees'" because it's just so dumb.

Then the Jets to Brazil song "All Things Good and Nice" comes on and it's over the TOP how perfect that song is, because it's totally funny and just balls-out sappy. I hate to use that phrase, but it belongs here. The first line is "I love my mother". Seriously.

Anyway, this all has me so so very happy, pleased with the world in this insanely profound way, like I know what it's all about for me, even though yes, it is totally obvious and maybe doesn't sound that profound unless you've driven more than 200 miles all by yourself that day... SO when Kristin sends me this email this morning that just happens to talk about everything I've been thinking about the last 24 hours, including: “it's funny to watch how you are handling isolation- so far, and even before you left, as if in anticipation, you've written these blogs about people, where you seem to be trying to conjure them up with so many words.”, I laugh. Of course. Of course that's what I do. That's what my whole LIFE does.

And when I tell Pam about Kristin's comment on the phone, she laughs too, but she's laughing because actually I have only had one night here at the ranch when there wasn't someone else here. "You probably feel lke you haven't had a moment's peace!" she says.

So, I know I sound like a nut, and if you are still reading, really, please, you have to tell me that you read this because I will just love you so much more forever and ever because it truly is too much to ask, for you to get through all this rambling, just to hear me say:

I AM A PEOPLE PERSON.

...and dogs are people too.

Oh, it's so awful, such an awful thing to say you are, it just sounds like a floral jumper or something. It reminds me of how when I was a teenager and used to panhandle downtown, I really wanted to look all tough, and I pierced my ears myself a bunch of times and wore all the black eyeliner, but people, I had chubby cheeks. I did not look tough. I looked like a chipmunk. Eventually, I had to let the tough thing go (but I am tough, yo!) and accept that if anything, I was cute. Not intimidating or mysterious or exotic or whatever. Cute. Like now, I have to accept that I am a people person. This is why I crave art and music, why I am fascinated by strangers and can do more phone interviews in a week than almost anyone you know, and why no one will ever take me up on the bet where I say "What will you give me if I go talk to that guy over there?". And in fact, it's even why I sometimes have those days, and some of you have gotten this phone call (Kirsten, Erin!), where I say "I hate EVERYONE!".

Which makes it a good time for a photo break.

The road back to the ranch

Please understand, none of this means that I don't like being here by myself, or that I am not looking forward to the next few months. I do really like being alone (it means I have more uninterrupted time to think about people and how much I love them, right?).

So. There you go, that's what I've realized the first week on the ranch, when I was really not so very isolated or by myself.

And if I haven't said it recently, I especially love you. You, who actually read this far, I do. Or you wouldn't have my blog address. Or I wouldn't want to write this insanely long post that only you will read.

XOXO
H

P.S. I hope you went out tonight and then came home and just for kicks looked at the blog because it seems like this post would be a lot better if you were a little tipsy. Most of you. With one exception. You know who you are.

That thing that sometimes happens when I just let some thoughts show up on the page

Hi there.

I think this might be the first ever Malcolm sisters together photo... no, wait, there was the hungover in our pajamas photo back in July, so this isn't really the first photo of us together on this blog. It's too bad the blog doesn't have a photo album feature so that those of you who find the text a bit slow can just click on pretty pictures.

I was browsing through photos for the blog today, and kept coming back to anything that was taken in NY of course. One thing I always say about 9/11 is that I knew my sister who lives in NY was okay, because the Towers were hit just after 9, and I wasn't really sure she even got out of bed that early. It's a joke, but seriously, it was sort-of nice to think that you were probably just leaving the apartment, even though it makes me sad to think of you and Eugene looking down those long avenues to where all the smoke was coming from, and to think about the police barricades that blocked off lower Manhattan, stopping just 2 blocks from where we used to live, with you on the inside and so many of the firefighters from the station we walked by every day never making it back up there again.

This photo was from the NY visit with Elvis. I guess it was spring of 2004. Not a visit I remember with a lot of fondness, not, of course because you weren't great company, Allison, but it certainly wasn't my finest moment, nor the finest moment of my traveling companion. I'm not sure I had ever stomped up to a bar to flip my boyfriend off before. I know I haven't done it since, and I'm pretty damn sure I won't be doing it again.

But since it's just you and me here, I have to say, if he didn't deserve it then, he sure did later. The problem with him though, was that 15 minutes later, he was in a taxi eating a falafel that was so spicy it was making him cry, and whine like a baby, which was pretty funny considering how he looked in those days, and when I said "Why don't you stop eating it then?", he said "I'm not going to let this falafel lick me!" and we both laughed, and one of our favorite recurring jokes was born.

Laughter through tears, my favorite emotion - isn't that what you always say, Mom?

Except, of course, that I prefer to cry because I'm laughing so hard, not laugh in spite of crying so hard. I bet mom also prefers the laughing too. Unless she's at a movie. She likes those tear-jerkers. Or used to.

What does all of this have to do with 9/11? Well.

Well.

Just grief is all. Life is sort-of full of unresolved grief, isn't it? Thinks that there is no fix for, that we don't have much choice but to feel sad about. 5 years ago seems so long ago, and just yesterday at the same time.

I'm glad that a lot has happened in the last 5 years. At the same time, in some ways, I'm still orbiting around the same places. When I heard about the Twin Towers falling, I was standing in Caffe Lladro, at the bottom of Queen Anne Hill, on my way to work at a biotech company, in HR.

This morning found me standing in Caffe Fiorre, on top of Queen Anne, on my way to work at a different biotech company, still in HR. The coffee shop is nicer, the coffee is better, if more expensive, and as I've said here before, the baristas are my favorite baristas ever. I think the biotech company is more promising too.

So, those things are sort-of the same, but back in 2001, I was living in the house I owned in Ballard with Karl, and that seems like a very long time and a different life ago. I find it a little comforting that it was so close in time - I like the idea that 5 years down the road might make certain aspects of this time seem so far away, while keeping lots of the good things the same.

Anyway, the grief is still there. I hear the 9/11 stuff, and as much as what it all turned into irks me, it still makes me cry, I think about the city I lived in, the one that still keeps you, and it is easy to tear up. I was there the first time the towers were bombed, probably more than 10 years ago, and I remember the people streaming out of the buildings with their mouths and noses balck with soot from breathing the air in a building that was on fire. What I thought of in 2001 was all those people not coming out. That's all, just not coming out.

There isn't a fix for that kind of grief. There isn't a fix for losing someone you love, no matter what you lose them too, whether it's a plane through a building, or alcoholism, or one of the diseases these biotech companies are trying to cure, or just plain old incompatibility.

I don't like that part of living. I don't like it, but what I know 5 years later is that, like it or not, I can live with it. And there's something to be said for that, and for the fact that even after several of those unresolvable losses, on any given day, I am usually just as happy getting up in the morning and starting the day with a visit to a Seattle coffee shop as I was on any given day 5 years ago. And if 5 years down the road, I can still say something like what I'm saying today, that's good enough for me.

Love you Ali, and I'm glad you're here.

What NY is to you, Pamfas is to me

This post has been a long time coming. I'm in the midst of my third week back since I went to the town with the pseudonym, to see the ranch where I'll live for October and November. About every other night, I sit down and chip away at an entry, but it never seems to get done. So tonight I'm just going to sit here until it does.

People keep asking me how the trip was and all I ever seem to say is “It was beautiful/great/I loved it.” All of which are true, but seem so weak in comparison with what the experience was, and I feel a little guilty everytime I see the little sad look on the face of whoever I say this to. It's like they are saying to me "You went all the way to Colorado and all I get is this crummy slogan?"

When someone asks me how the actual writing workshop was, then I branch out and say “It was really helpful”. And it was. But again... that isn't much of a keepsake either.

There's a thought I keep having, which I think of as a symptom that might lead to some diagnosis of whatever keeps me from being able to breathe life into a description of my trip.

What I keep thinking about the trip is this - the photos are so gorgeous they look photoshopped.

Think about that for a moment. I could have described the sky as being the color of the kind of swimming pool that’s always the perfect temperature, or the color of the way you feel at sea level after you’ve been living at high altitude for a while.

But in my head, the description of the landscape is “photoshopped”.

There are other symptoms.

Like, how while I was there I would find myself sighing, and that sigh would be coincident with the thought “I’m so happy”, but thenfollowing thought would be “I’m probably sighing because I’m not getting enough oxygen”.

Then there was the fact that I had some sleepless nights. And some weird dreams. Like the dream where the town with the pseudonym was a big carnival for the weekend, and I went into town and got plastered (even though we know I only get plastered at the Loggerodeo) and danced with someone else’s husband (another thing I'm unlikely to do) and paid the price in town the next morning when I found myself shunned in that way that only a small community can shun you. Thoroughly, seemingly irreparably.

There was also the dream where there were horses almost drowning in the river. Big powerful horses that I seemed to have spooked somehow, horses which nearly trampled me as they clambered up the river bank.

You don’t have to tell me what the dreams meant. I know, or I know as much as I need to.

Karl used to say I was better in the bad times. I never could disagree with that. In a way, I'm sorry that I was a better bridesmaid to the friend whose wedding I cancelled than I was to my sister, who glowed, and danced all night, and is still gloating over the groom she snagged. But sorry or not, I think I was better in the worst case.

The good times, sometimes they leave me sleepless, unsettled, dreaming about all the things I could lose, now that I have so much of what I want. All the symptoms, what they really tell you, ironically, is just how good a good time I had.

But the photos? They aren’t photoshopped. I’m not even a good photographer. It’s just that beautiful there. And even though I had some sleepless nights and my vision went all fuzzy and white around the edges at the top of our long hike, and I fumed over some slights I’ve suffered in the past few weeks, and wished that I could forget the things from my Seattle life that were troubling me, it was still that beautiful. Any time I doubt that, I see the photos and they prove it.

And no matter what my anxieties are or were, the fact remains that I spent a week eating incredible meals made for us by Pam herself – that gorgeous lamb, polenta with wild mushrooms picked that day on our hike, Thai shrimp curry, a fantastic salad with nearly every meal, homemade ice cream and lots and lots of cheese.

The food was enough art and pleasure for a week in itself, but of course, still there was more. We read writing so powerful that it left some of us sitting on the couch with tears streaming down our faces. We also read some damn funny things, and laughed out loud, and added to the list of running jokes that we’ve got going. We hiked and took naps and drew animal cards and thought about dreams and metaphor and love and Jazz and writing and writing and writing.

Add to all of that the fact that I haven't even started to tell you how much I love the women in this group. I love them a million little knit stitches worth, because they are writing things that are clever and poignant and ruthless and beautiful, and they are generous with their praise and brave with their criticism and I am so grateful for that. And when I tell you that they are a credit to the woman who leads them, I am saying a lot, because there is no superlative strong enough to express our gratitude for the way in which she is so smart. Towards the end of the workshopping, Tami said, with great passion and a hint of frustration, "Pam is so fucking smart!" and we all lost ourselves to laughter at that point, because it is so so true, and it certainly captures the feeling I have, that any attempts to articulate how great she is will only ever leave me frustrated.

But maybe a way to say a little part of it is that Pam is smart in a way that is Good, in a way that helps us all be better writers, and gives us room to be ourselves.

So, it was a dream week, but a dream week in the most complex sense. It was strange and surreal, beyond anything I could have imagined for myself a year or two ago, full of anxiety and joy and deep satisfaction and the spiritual peace you sometimes have after the kind of dream that helps you resolve something you've been worrying over for weeks.

Do you know the kind of dream I mean? The kind of dream that transforms you, that makes you feel like there's a real world inside dreams, that makes you believe that some dreams are experiences that really happen to you, rather than just the sets of images that flit through your sleeping self most nights, without leaving a mark on your memory.

See the truck in the photo above? That truck is exactly the kind of vintage, impossibly blue, photogenic truck that I dream of when I dream of a ranch life. But someone lost the keys to it, so now, it just sits in the driveway. And of course, I like that fact. It keeps it all from being too perfect, too photoshopped, too cliche.

I can have the dream, but only if I bring my own wheels. For someone like me, there's something comforting about that.

Especially when the wheels come attached to an almost-new, turbo-charged, all-wheel-drive sport wagon named Mo.

Wait wait wait!

I'm still trying to catch up to the Continental email from a few days ago. Luckily, the picture I was thinking I would post is actually in the same vein as your baby post today.

Check it out - Manitoba, subject of the Page Six link from the other day, and his son, Minitoba (aka Jake, a fighter's name, of course).

So, the Continental is going under? Well, in the 90s that was definitely the East Village bar that, in my opinion, had the bleakest aura. It was a bit better when Todd Youth was there, bartending or keeping an eye on the door, wearing his white creepers and seeming like he was the kind of guy who would keep an eye out for you, which he did for me one night when the frat guys got a little too close for his comfort. But generally, it was a railroad flat of a bar, dark and grimy, and the kind of place you would only go right when the band was going on, never before, never just to drink. Unless you were broke and someone was slipping you freebies.

I used to go in to the Continental to bring the bar manager cat food. He was Pauly's roommate, and a mess of a guy, barely coherent most of the time, even though somehow people knew he was smart, or used to be. He kept a kitten at the apartment for a while, and it was pitifully small, so I would bring these cans of cat food for him, since I didn't trust this guy to feed the cat. Then one day the cat was gone. I never knew what happened to it. Pauly refused to pet the cat, or like it because he said "It's just going to be gone soon anyway." And he was right.

The best thing that I can say about that particular bar manager is that he led to one of my favorite NY stories - the time I walked through Pauly's living room at 2AM and much to my surprise found Joey Ramone parked on the couch.

But your post, and the link to Page Six, and some other recent events in my life, have left me thinking about Richard, who I hope will not sue me for posting this. If anyone was going to sue me for posting about them, it would probably be Richard, since if we were having a "Heather's Most Famous Ex-Boyfriend" contest, he would win, hands-down. Dictators? Manitoba's? And I guess recently, sometimes, MC5. In 2004, when the lead singer for Guided By Voices asked the crowd at Bowery Ballroom who the last good NYC Mayor was, the answer he liked was "Handsome Dick Manitoba!"

But Richard didn't start out famous to me, even though he'd been famous to the East Village for decades. When I met him, he was one of the downstairs bartenders at 2A. Richard was the guy who made Whiskey Sours from scratch, such good, good Whiskey Sours. So, it's ironic that I've always sort-of thought of him as the guy who saved me from the Betty.

Richard came along at a time when I was spending too much time on bar stools, drinking too much whiskey, and failing to toughen up even though I was frequenting some places that really called for that. I think hanging out with all the tough guys only made me more tender by contrast. Before Richard, I loved Pauly, who had reached a point in his life where he thought it made sense to be the kind of guy who smoked even in the shower. Then there was Darren, who said "I never argue. I never argue, because I'll only argue when I'm right, and if I'm right, the argument's over" and meant it.

So Richard, it turned out, was a relief. He was a bartender, but a sober bartender, and in general, irrepressibly good humored, even when he had every reason not to be. He was kind and paid attention, and loved good food and wrestling. Pro-wrestling, people. And he was the only person who I EVER saw have the pull with Rizzo to get in to Green Door free (and he was plus at least two, since I know you were with us, Ali).

Some things I remember:
- Most of the time when he saw me come in to the bar, he would say "Heather WEIN-traub!", a reference to Mean Streets. He loved Scorcese.
- One night we were going out, and I wore something a little more bare than was my habit, and he looked at me and said "Are you trying to get me into a fight?"
- Eating at the old Odessa, where he knew all the waitresses, before they renovated it and made it so damn bright you could have done surgery in there
- He used to work the door at Niagara (which was called something else in those days) and I thought he looked cute all bundled up in his leather jacket with a hoody AND a hat.

So, even though he wasn't famous to me, I loved Richard, and I still feel some gratitude to him for showing me that the East Village could be a different kind of place. One where a sober bartender could also be a punk-rock, bar-owning, east-village-ruling celebrity, the kind who cares about being loyal to his friends and is good to his girl. But the guy I loved was always much more Richard than Handsome Dick Manitoba.

In spite of that, I would be lying if I didn't admit that it was fun when Jason (who still holds the title of the man with the most astounding record collection I have ever seen) said to me "You realize you are dating a punk-rock legend, don't you?"

I didn't really at the time, but it sure seems a whole lot more clear now. To me he was a good guy who helped make it clear to me that maybe it was time for me to change what I had been thinking of as my New York Ways. And I did.

Hey, Ali, how could you forget The Ex-Husbands? But that's a whole other story...

XOXO HM

The Summer We Were Single

It's been a good summer here in Seattle. It's been a hot summer, the kind of hot where there's a rush on fans, and your windows are always propped open but still your apartment is hot, and you give up on trying not to be sweaty all the time and you sit on your couch in your underwear reading and eating popsicles and looking forward to the sun going down because it's too hot to go outside.

I'm a heat wimp, I'll admit. I'm a wimp about a lot of things, actually. I'm a wimp about being too cold, and in the Thai restaurant when they ask you how many stars, I always say "No stars, I'm a spice wimp." I am a wimp about answering the door for the pizza delivery guy. I don't know what it is about that, but I'd rather pay for the whole pizza than have to answer the door myself.

There are also a lot of things I am not wimpy about though. I'm not wimpy about twelve hour days at work, or about telling people things they don't want to hear, when I know they need to hear those things anyway. I am not a wimpy bridesmaid, or a wimpy HR professional, or a wimpy daughter. There are a lot of reasons why I might have let certain relationships go on too long, but being wimpy when it comes to ending things is not one of them.

Some people are wimpy about being single (no, I'm not talking about any of you, so stop thinking that). I am not. We have had a good summer of being single, Susan and I. Most weekends, we spend one or two mornings at Caffe Fiorre. I knit, Susan plays with the computer sometimes, and we talk about god knows what. I get raisin toast, Susan gets rosemary. Neither of us take jam. We look at all the dads who are there with their grubby little rosy-cheeked toddlers, and make jokes about how they might look all cute and ideal on the outside, but really at home, there is a mom who is sick of all their cuteness, and has kicked them out, saying "Get the hell out of my house for the day and take your devil spawn with you!".

Later on in the afternoon, maybe I go to the library, and then maybe in the evening we watch tivoed episodes of Project Runway while I do my laundry at her house. Sometimes we walk to the market by her house, and get a six-pack of Skinny Dip or a pack of ice cream sandwhiches and some kind of hydrating beverage. We talk about how the guy at the register would be cute if he didn't have those things in his ears, and then we walk back to her place through the playground at the school by her house, stepping over the big chalk drawing of a puppy on the way.

Most of these days, it's just a day, no big deal, we kind of coast through it. They are easy days. We can do what we want, and I might say that I'm going to go clear out my storage space or do my dishes, but probably I don't, and who cares anyway?

This is going to be the summer my apartment was messy. The summer I was lazy. The summer I rode around in Natalie with the top down, wondering why she was pulling to the left until the tire went all the way flat a block before the winery where I was going to see Pink Martini. The summer I wore out my Jack Rogers sandals while I knit 6 pairs of socks. The summer Kristine taught me how to pick up stitches along an edge, and weave neat seams for the baby sweaters for Dakota and Jenn. It will be the first summer someone had a baby at the Planter for 4th of July, and the last summer there was only one. The summer I always carried a notebook around with me, and sometimes wrote in it, and every once in a while dragged out my half-broken $35 laptop and typed something up, the summer my apartment was covered in piles of printed copies of bits of the novel, different versions of the pages, pages with comments in turquoise or purple pen from Barb, or sections with Lesley's carefully typed-up comments, or the chapters Pam sent back with her comments written diagonally across the back. The comments that I wouldn't let myself read until I was ready to fire up the computer and really dive in to the revisions, the comments that ended on the second page with something that delighted me, something like "And, I want you to ride my horse when you're here, if you want."

It will be the summer where the cute boys were Darren and Nate and Bobby and Andy and Henry, Quentin and Gary and Logan and the guys who unload the wine at Central Market in Mill Creek and sometimes, Doug.

Most of all, this will be the summer I spent with Susan. The Summer We Were Single.

What I End Up Writing When I Should Be Writing For a Manuscript Submission

I should have taken a picture of Nate’s shoes. Or of just the frayed button placket on the shirt he was wearing.

Nate is the kind of guy who, if you try to take a picture of him, stops doing whatever he was doing that made you want to take a picture in the first place. He’ll turn his head, or straighten up to face the camera, maybe try a smile, like he doesn’t know what you want to see through the camera lens, or what you were seeing before you lifted the viewfinder to your eye.

So, I think of these little visual details, and I imagine I could have gotten more intimate pictures of him through those things than I got when I took a picture of him directly. If I had trained a camera on his shoe, he woud have just let me take the picture. Maybe he would have laughed, or asked me what was doing. I can’t say for sure, though, he’s a mystery to me.

I, on the other hand, am no mystery when I’m around Nate. I go all talkative, almost as talkative as I was on Friday night with my girlfriends and a mojito.

Still, “when I’m around Nate” is a funny thing to say about a person who I hadn’t seen in a year until Saturday, and who I hadn’t spent much time with at all before that. It’s a phrase that conjures up some kind of intimacy that wouldn’t seem to make sense for the kind of minor characters Nate and I are in each other’s lives. But there are some funny things about intimacy – like how a few hours spent looking at someone’s button placket can create it, or how you can feel it with someone who is a mystery to you, someone you know you do not know. It happens when you let that person feel familiar to you anyway.

On Saturday, Nate rang the intercom to my apartment at 5:17 PM (according to my phone), and at 10:23 PM, I was back in my apartment on my own, checking the messages my phone had collected while I was out.

It felt like a long five hours, and I mean that in the best way. It was an adventurous 5 hours.

We started with coffee at Fiorre. Now, I know what you all are starting to think about me and that place, but he asked for coffee, he talked about how Seattle has such good coffee, all he wants to do is drink coffee when he’s here. Anyway, I like being in love with Fiorre. Summer is for being in love. Being in love and leaving the house with your hair wet and wearing sandals with your jeans and bikini tops under t-shirts, and summer is for eating outside, even if there are bees.

All of which I did on Saturday.

So, after Fiorre, we had dinner at Agua Verde, or rather, at the park next to Agua Verde, with the bees, where Nate saw a guy he doesn’t really know from Vancouver, and they talked about taking bike rides, and I looked at the guy’s old school brown sneakers, which he was wearing on a bike that had those tiny pedals that are meant for you to clip into. The five or ten minutes the guy was there and then especially the moment he rode his bike away felt like a scene from the movie “Slacker”.

But anyway, after all that, Nate said “Should we go to Seattle Center or wherever it is with the rides?” the way a boyfriend you’ve lived with for a while would say “Sh’we go to the grocery store?”, without even bothering to finish saying the word “should” at the beginning of the sentence. Only I was a whole lot happier than I would have been if he was suggesting we go to the grocery store. He knew I wanted to go on the rides because I sent him a text message the night before that, through some technological fluke, was delivered to him at 4AM.

We just watched the rides for a while before we finally got on one. The problem with watching the rides at Seattle Center is that only about half of them are being ridden at any given time. The attendant for the Orbiter sat in one of the ride’s grimy cars like he was grounded, kicking his legs out in front of him and slouching. There was a thorough purity to his boredom that I had not seen since high school trigonometry class. It was like he was sitting in a trig class that didn’t have a single hot chick worth lifting an eyelid for.

I loved it. Because sometimes summer is also for boredom.

After Nate and I actually rode the Orbiter, though, its attendant’s boredom seemed almost perverse. Here, right over his head, is one of the most intense kinesthetic experiences you can have on this earth. Or at least that’s how I felt about it when I tried to walk afterwards. Now, I know that it is not the most intense amusement park ride, and that people jump out of planes etc. But really, on any given day most of us are doing fairly ordinary things with our bodies. We get from here to there, maybe we get the heart rate up a little, exercising or what have you.

The Orbiter is just a different kind of reality from all that. The Orbiter reminds you that physics is no joke. It reminds you that gravity is mostly gentle with us earthlings, that centrifugal force does not have to handle us so tenderly, and yet, mostly, it does.

There was more to the evening than the Orbiter. There was an anemic attempt at skee ball, a game of dayglo air hockey that Nate won handily, and there was Nate looking for a kid to give our extra ride tickets.

Towards the end, we went up in the Space Needle. It’s different now, crowded, with the whole ground floor around the base turned into a donut of a gift shop, and just before you get in the elevator, they try to take your picture in front of a phony Seattle skyline, like you were at the prom. Still, I find the observation deck of the Space Needle an utterly satisfying place to be and I wished we could have stayed there long enough to really get bored.

One lasting effect of the night is that I have an annual pass to the Needle again, so next time it gets too hot on Queen Anne Hill, I say we all pile in the elevator and sit on the benches up top for a good long time. The old bar that made you feel like you were in an airport is gone, and while I mourn the loss of it, there’s a concession stand now, and I’m thinking maybe we can get some ice cream there instead.

Because of course, summer is for ice cream, and for going somewhere to look at the view, and for being in love with more of the world than usual, including cute boys wearing navy blue suede sneakers and $5 mirrored sunglasses. The kind of sunglasses that you try to see past your own reflection into, and sometimes can. But the sunglasses remind you that the boy with the brown eyes behind them is really seeking only a conversational mathematical intimacy that you can’t offer him. Still, I’m the kind of girl who can sympathize, and who knows how to love a guy just a little bit less than the amount that would make his girlfriend start to mind.

And that’s what I did on Saturday.

I Brake for Ferris Wheels

Saturday morning I met Susan at the coffee shop and we drank our iced lattes. They were made by Andy, who was hungover, and that was funny because he was still all clean-looking and tall, but looking carefully, you could see that his eyes were just a little bit red - usually they are very bright and clear. I don't think he appreciated my noticing that.
Eventually I wandered home and pulled together my knitting and other amusements, put on a summer dress and zipped up north to the company picnic in Snohomish. I did have a nice time, and I ate popsicles and watermelon and took my shoes off and walked in the grass and found out that one of our VPs somehow found our blog!!! (Hi I.G.!)
After the picnic (and I'm sad to report that there was no piglet show because apparently the piglets got out of their pen and the eagles who nest in a tree near the Farm swooped down and had some tender bacon for breakfast one morning) I pulled out my Lynyrd Skynyrd box set and got Natalie back on those country roads. One of the country roads took us by Klahaya days outside of Snohomish, and what Klahaya days seemed to mean was a travelling carnival with funnel cakes and a ring toss where you could win a bowl of goldfish, and carnies the color of a leather handbag for whom a cigarette was really a kind of 11th finger.

When I saw the ferris wheel featured above, I had to stop. This is the kind of girl I am, the kind of girl I make a conscious effort to be. I will stop to ride the ferris wheel, even if I have to do it all by myself. Actually, in some ways it's more amusing to stop and ride the ferris wheel all by yourself.

But I didn't end up riding the ferris wheel all by myself. Turns out, if you don't weight the ferris wheel appropriately "you can try to stop the thing, but it'll just keep on going. even if you put it in reverse, it'll keep right on going forward". At least, that's what the guy running it told us. I wasn't going to challenge him on this. So he put me in a car with a long-haired grizzly dude and his little son, who had spectacles and seemed a little tentative about it all. I took their photo together up at the top and he gave me the thumbs-up sign.

On the way down, the little boy said "My eyeballs don't feel too good."
"Your eyeballs?"
"Yeah, my eyeballs feel like they're gonna barf!"

And that, my friends, is going in the book for sure.

I picked a Winner!

Anyone who has ever spent time at a racetrack knows that Thoroughbreds are horses built for speed - their light frames and long elegant limbs, just a part of the evidence. Horse people also know them for their sensitive and spirited natures, and those of us lucky to have known a good one will tell you that we also love them for their big hearts and willing dispositions.

If Bobby were a Thoroughbred, his name would be Here Comes Trouble.

On Sunday he ran the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation race for the Seattle Genetics team. Now, maybe this race was a dropdown for him, but he didn't sulk, in spite of the fact that he led the field by a minute at the end.

If Bobby were a Thoroughbred, he'd be a 5 year old - too old for the Derby, still young enough to love speed as much as any 3 year old, still too young to safely be called bomb-proof. He may even be a little green still, but he has the kind of big brown eyes that would make a person call a good horse an old soul. Some horses are charmers, and Bobby would be one of those. You'd have to watch your ginger snaps.

If Bobby were a middle school heart-throb, he'd be a friendlier Ryan, messy brown hair and all, and his partner in crime at the coffee shop, Andy, would be a pretty 8th-grade Pete. They'd rule the school, without ever making you feel like maybe they knew it just a little too well.

If Bobby were a summer song, he wouldn't be the song you played at sunset. He might be the song the Mountain Dew people wished they had thought of for that commercial where every face has the bloom of youth and everyone is jumping off a wooden dock in to a warm summer lake with all the exuberance their perfect bodies can muster. Or maybe he would be the song you pick to start a long road trip, the one that takes you through city after city of people you can't wait to see.

Several times a week, he's the first person I smile at all day, and that gives a guy a special place in my heart. Then, when he raced and won on our behalf? Well... then I knew he deserved a love letter on the blog.

He topped it all off when he bought my latte today. He didn't have to do that. But that's a Thoroughbred for you.